Wednesday, June 30, 2004
The personal prejudices of Daniel Davies Over at Crooked Timber, dsquared has some issues with my recommendation of William W. Lewis' The Power of Productivity . You should read his post in full, but -- since this deals in part with management consultants -- here's the bullet-point executive summary version:
I share Davies' leeriness with regard to management consultants. Some years ago I had to review former McKinsey consultant Kenichi Ohmae's The End of the Nation State and was appalled by the sloppiness of the argument. More horrifying were the footnotes -- Ohmae cited something written by himself 93% of the time. Management consultants also tend to use the method of comparison to analyze the secrets of business success (i.e., looking at world-class firms to identify the commonalities as the recipe for success) when in fact the method of difference would prove more reliable (i.e., looking at successes and failures and identifying what the successes had in common that was not present among the failures). Now, Davies appears to have extrapolated the tropes common to management consultants onto the Lewis book without, like, having read any of the book. I shared Davies' bias, and was wary about seeing typical management consultant mistakes in the analysis, but all I can say is that The Power of Productivity was a pleasant exception -- hence the recommendation. It's also worth pointing out -- and my apologies if I didn't do so in the previous post -- that the analysis in the book is not at the firm level so much as the sectoral level. Furthermore, the sectors he looks at are reasonably important to the macroeconomy. For example, in retail, the key thesis for Lewis is not just Wal-Mart increasing retail productivity, but the market response to Wal-Mart increasing productivity. The following comes from p. 92-96:
I'm not going to go into depth on Daniel's last assertion, as his commenters are taking him to task on it. I am struck, however, that he seems to assume it's a lifestyle choice question -- that the introduction of Wal-Marts threatens the joys of shopping for sophisticates. This neglects the millions of Americans who cannot afford the high street stores but now have the opportunity to purchase cheaper and more varied goods courtesy of the big box stores and their enhanced productivity. For Davies, the deadweight loss of eliminating these transactions appears worth paying to preserve high streets. I don't think it's quite such an either/or choice, but I'm intrigued by the revealed preference. UPDATE: A few additional thoughts: 1) Even in this post, I'm not sure I've adequately spelled out the fact that in contrast to much of the management consultant literature, Lewis does have a compelling theory to guide his argument -- simply put, the value of competition in goods markets has been undervalued relative to labor and/or capital markets. This is a big reason why markets that directly interact with consumers -- retail and housing -- explain both the growing produictivity gap and GDP per capita gap between the U.S. and most other OECD countries. 2) Both Davies and Brad DeLong state that the productivity numbers might be misleading because it masks costs that are passed onto the consumer via the reduction of "ancillary (but valuable) services." This is a fair point -- and one that Lewis addresses in comparing retail productivity in the U.S. and Europe. The thing is, contrary to assumption, it's European retailers that have sacrificed many of these ancillary services, due in no small part to minimum wage laws. From p. 44-5 of The Power of Productivity:
3) Davies wants to attribute productivity gains ascribed to the market response to Wal-Mart to ""the general diffusion of technological improvement". It's far from clear to me that's this is an either/or proposition. As dsquared is undoubtedly aware, it's not just technology per se that increases productivity, it's how firms and markets reorganize themselves to fully exploit that technology that increases productivity. The diffusion of Wal-Mart's organizational innovations to the rest of the retail sector -- spurred by market competition -- is key here. 4) Finally, Daniel's suggestion that big box stores locate where they do because of supply and not demand considerations omits any mention of zoning/land use restrictions that prevent stores like Wal-Mart from locating themselves closer to urban customers. Click here, here, here, and here for my posts about Wal-Mart's efforts to open up stores within Chicago's city limits. And, as always, be sure to check out Always Low Prices, a blog devoted to the best and worst of Wal-Mart. All this said, I do hope that Daniel takes the opportunity to peruse The Power of Productivity, and I look forward to further debate on this stimulating (to me) topic. The Supreme Court's international influences "Should foreign or international legal decisions ever be considered relevant to United States Supreme Court rulings?" That's the question over at Legal Affairs magazine. Vicki Jackson is enthusiastic about the proposition. Richard Posner is not so enthusiastic about it. Go read both and them post your own thoughts. July's books of the month If the United States can transfer sovereignty to Iraq a few days ahead of schedule, then I can recommend July's books in June. Both books this month fall under the nebulous category of comparative political economy -- but they were really interesting to me. The first book is The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability by William W. Lewis. Lewis was the founding director of the McKinsey Global Institute, and the book largely consists of what Lewis learned in analyzing the performance of various sectors in key economies of the world. You can read a brief precis of what he found by clicking here. A few excerpts stand out in particular:
Virginia Postrel is curently reading Power of Productivity and is also a big fan -- which counts as a big endorsement to me. The Power of Productivity suffers from some of the same flaws endemic to management consultants (Kenichi Ohmae, Daniel Yergin, etc.) when they write big books. A lot of points are repeated and repeated and repeated yet again. And what's the deal with management consultants and their abhorrence of footnotes? Lewis also fails to appreciate the lagged effect of technological innovations, so I strongly suspect he's underestimating the long-term effect of the information revolution. This is small beer, however. Lewis gets the big picture of what causes economic prosperity by painting a pointillist picture of why different sectors in different economies have such variable levels of productivity, and how policy decisions can affect these levels. After reading this book, I have a much greater appreciation for the importance of the retail sector as a driver of affluence. To get a sense of the impact that improved productivity in the retail sector has on the aggregate economy, click here for the McKinsey Global Institute paper that forms the basis of Lewis' conclusions. His key point is worth repeating:
The general interest book looks more closely at the one significant economy that Lewis did not analyze -- China. Elizabeth Economy's The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future examines the environmental externalities of China's current economic growth. She cites one figure estimating that the environmental side effects of China's factories exact a toll equal to 8-12% of China's GDP. Just as interesting is Economy' portrayal of the political lay of the land in China. First, China's central government has much less control over provincial and local leaders than is commonly believed. Second, because of its weakness, the Chinese government is counting on Chinese civil society to assist in the ratcheting up of environmental protection. This sounds very odd, as Economy correctly observes that the environmental movement was a harbinger of democratization in other post-Communist societies. The Really Big Question over the next two decades is whether China's leaders can effectively control the behavior of Chinese environmental NGOs -- or vice versa. Go check both of them out. [Er, doesn't the second book suggest that the first book's emphasis on how to make countries rich overlook environmental costs?--ed. Au contraire, my good editor. Lewis is concerned with increasing productivity, which comes from increasing outputs relative to inputs. Furthermore, most of the improvements in productivity can be garnered in services, which generate much less pollution than manufacturing.] Tuesday, June 29, 2004
The large residual of political skill Man, is the left half of the blogosphere going to town on Richard Gephardt. Guest-posting last week at Talking Points Memo, both Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis say that picking Gephardt would be a mistake. Belle Waring is even less enthusiastic:
Waring links to this post from Fafblog, which provides the most honest assessment I've ever read about Richard Gephardt's political magnetism:
So who do these people prefer? If you read Judis, Teixeira, and Waring, it's John Edwards. Here's the thing, though -- just how different is Edwards from Gephardt? On policy positions, both of them lean strongly protectionist, and both of them voted in favor of the war in Iraq. Both of them championed the down-and-outers during their primary campaigns. Edwards is from the South and Gephardt is from the Midwest, but I'm betting the reason Gephardt is still in play is because Kerry thinks that the Midwest will be the key battleground, while the South doesn't matter. If one were to choose based on political experience, even Edwards would have to concede that Gephardt's twenty years in DC outranks John Edwards' single term in the Senate. So is there a difference? As one of those still on the fence, yeah, in my mind there's a difference. If Kerry picks Gephardt, there's no chance in hell I'm pulling the donkey lever. If he picks Edwards... I dunno. When I see Richard Gephardt on television, all I can think of is, "idiotic protectionist." When I see John Edwards on television, I think, "Hmmm... seems like an OK guy, maybe he's not as much of a protectionist as I suspect." Why is this? Policy is not the only thing that matters in making political choices. There is such a thing as political skill. For example, the most important gift in campaigning is the ability to say something a voter disagrees with while making that voter think you're still a good guy. Reagan had it. Clinton had it. Edwards has it. Gephardt doesn't have it. UPDATE: Thanks to Howard Kurtz for serving up an approving link to this post. Allawi, Zarqawi, and the Iraqi man on the street Thanassis Cambanis files an illuminating man-on-the-streets story from Baghdad for the Boston Globe. The good parts version:
One can draw three oh-so-tentative conclusions from this kind of report:
UPDATE Joe Katzman has a round-up of Iraqi blogger reactions at Winds of Change. Monsieur Chirac, quel est votre problème? The transatlantic relationship is one of those topics that provokes a lot of furrowed brows and tony conferences. I've been invited to my fair share over the past year, and the core question that inevitably pops up is, "How much of the transatlantic rift is due to clashes of style and how much is due to clashes of interests?' The hip answer to give is the latter. According to this narrative, the important date in the relationship was not 9/11 but 11/9 -- the date the Berlin Wall fell, and the Cold War glue that held the U.S. and Europe together disintegrated. That was the date when NATO jumped the shark. Me, I'm not so trendy, and think that the clash of styles is pretty important. Part of this is due to George W. Bush. You could not have asked central casting for a better epitome of everything about the United States that Europe loathes -- Texas, conservatism, directness, religious devotion, and a lack of facility with most European languages -- including English. That said, a very healthy dollop of the current clash of styles is due to Gerhard Schroeder and Jacques Chirac. The former appalled his foreign policy establishment by making Iraq the centerpiece of his re-election campaign, and by adopting a position that was more unilateralist than the United States. Mention Schroeder's campaign behavior to European foreign policy experts, and they tend to look down and shuffle their feet. However, the real piece of work on the European continent is Jacques Chirac. His latest exhibit of pique comes in response to the official NATO statement on Iraq -- which is broadly supportive but pretty bland. This, however, was too much for Chirac to stomach -- according to Judy Dempsey's account in the Financial Times:
This sort of behavior does nothing but weaken NATO -- something that Chirac did in spades last year. If the French president really had a problem with the language of the statement, he shouldn't have agreed to it -- which would have been better than his current course of action, which is erratic in the extreme. Glenn Reynolds has more on Chirac's obstinacy -- including this tidbit from the Observer:
The Bush administration has contributed its fair share to the lack of transatlantic comity -- but powerful Europeans are behaving even worse. UPDATE: Greg Djerejian has further thoughts on just what NATO will do in Iraq. Monday, June 28, 2004
Open Gitmo thread Feel free to comment on the implications of today's Supreme Court ruling on the Guantanamo detainees here. Before commenting, it might behoove you to check out:
I haven't processed much of this yet, but so far Stuart Benjamin's point about formalism vs. pragmatism and Eugene Volokh's point about liberal and conservative iconoclasts on the court seem the most interesting to me. Open sovereignty thread Feel free to comment on the surprise decision to transfer Iraqi sovereignty two days early -- the Washington Post and the Economist have some nice background. Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia With all the debate about the 9/11 Commission's finding regarding Iraq's dormant relationship with Al Qaeda, anothe finding has been ignored -- the relationship (or lack thereof) between Al Qaeda and the House of Saud. I discuss this in my latest Tech Central Station essay, "About That Commission Report..." Go check it out. UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds kindly links to my essay but has the following cavil:
On the second point -- it's tough to prove a negative statement. If I had been writing the report, that's exactly how I'd have phrased that finding. It's true that some evidence could surface that elements of the Saudi government bankrolled Al Qaeda -- just like some evidence could emerge linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11. On the first point, a lot of the criticism directed at the 9/11 commission staff report was that it was, well, a staff report, but had the imprantur of the 9/11 Commission. William Safire wrote last week (link via Jeff Jarvis):
I haven't paid too much attention to the "runaway staff" allegation, so I can't comment on it one way or the other. I can say that claims that the interim report was a partisan hit job would have to explain the fact that Philip Zelikow was a co-author of Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft with current National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice -- a book that remains the definitive account of how Germany was reunified, by the way. Zelikow might not be everyone's cup of tea, but he's a meticulous scholar, and I do trust his rendition of the facts. Sunday, June 27, 2004
The big test for David Petraeus Dexter Filkins has a front-pager in today's New York Times on the challenges facing Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus (about whom I've blogged here, here, and here) in reconstituting Iraq's security forces. The highlights:
Developing.... UPDATE: Petraeus and Hashemi might want to peruse Michael Ware's essay in Time about the make-up of the Iraqi insurgency. The opening graf:
Read the whole thing. ANOTHER UPDATE: Edward Cody's Washington Post front-pager today encapsulates the battle currently being waged in Iraq between the forces of nationalism and the forces of Islamic radicalism:
What the f@#% is in Dick Cheney's coffee? The Vice President has not been the epitome of good manners in recent days. There's the use of the f-word to Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont on the Senate floor. Then there's the complete lack of contrition about the use of that word in that place in a Friday interview on Fox News. Here's his explanation:
So, Cheney's beef is that Leahy doubted Cheney's integrity publicly and then tried to play nicey-nice in the Senate floor. Three thoughts on Cheney's little tamptrum: 1) While I understand getting upset when someone questions your integrity, there are better ways of responding than the admittedly economical "f--- you." 2) Hey, Mr. Vice President, you say that an elected official exhibited one demeanor in public and another in private? Welcome to politics. You've been in this business for how long? 3) While this was bad, Ron Reagan describes behavior by Cheney in today's New York Times Magazine that seems far, far worse to me:
Friday, June 25, 2004
Give Iyad Allawi -- and the Bush administration -- their due Last month I blogged about the designation of Iyad Allawi as the Iraqi president until January of next year, and the extent to which the U.S. did not want to be seen as puppetmaster. Other Iraq watchers were skeptical of the new government's ability to command legitimacy -- at the time, Spencer Ackerman wrote, "Any interim prime minister would surely face the accusation of being an occupation stooge. With Allawi, the charge is likely to have serious currency." Well, it looks like Allawi was underestimated. The Washington Post's Robin Wright reports that Iraqis do perceive the new government as legitimate (link via Robert Tagorda):
Hey, this and banking reform -- two in a row for the CPA! There's one reason why Allawi is likely to be able to sustain this popularity -- he has a built-in scapegoat for his biggest headache, which is the security situation. If problems continue in that area, all he has to do is publicly harangue the Americans. What will be particularly interesting is whether the new government and security forces' legitimacy gives them greater access to informants who will rat out insurgents. The new government's popularity might go south in the future -- but this is certainly good news as June 30th approaches. Developing.... Trading up to some informative links Want to know more about American attitudes towards outsourcing and trade? I'll make you a trade -- I'll write, you read [This kind of thinking explains your decision to go into academia for the money--ed.] Outsourcing info: The Bureau of Labor Statistics survey about offshore outsourcing and employment came out earlier this month -- but note the caveats in this post. I addressed the guesstimates made by management consultants in my Foreign Affairs essay, "The Outsourcing Bogeyman." The preliminary results of the Colorado inquiry on IT jobs and outsourcing comes from this Rocky Mountain News op-ed by one of the principal investigators. The Detroit study can be found at the Detroit Regional Chamber's Mackinac Policy Conference web site. I blogged about both in this guest-post for GlennReynolds.com at MSNBC. On the costs that states are now facing from protectionist measures -- click here for California, and here for Kansas. Finally, I blogged about the the E-Loan experiment on consumer behavior here and here. Polling data: In an interesting coincidence, the Employment Law Alliance poll about outsourcing and the Associated Press poll about outsourcing were conducted within a week of each other; I blogged about both of these polls last month. You can read about the change in public opinion about trade between 1999 and 2004 by reading this Peronet Despeignes story in USA Today from February of this year. Ron Fournier wrote the Associated Press story about the poll showing Americans believe the economy has lost jobs in the past six months. As for older polling data, Kenneth Scheve's Globalization and the Perceptions of American Workers has a nice review of public attitudes towards all facets of economic globalization in the 1990s. The data about the 1950's comes from I.M. Destler's 1986 book American Trade Politics: System Under Stress. The data on Bush's polling numbers in late 2002 and now can be seen in this Washington Post graph (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan). Kerry and outsourcing: John Kerry's tax proposal can be found at his campaign website -- here's a link to the press release as well. My initial reactions to it can be read here and here. My assertion that the proposal would not have the desired effect on unemployment comes from this Institute for International Economics policy brief by Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Paul Grieco. Trade politics: An excellent primer on the role that ideas play in the crafting of American foreign economic policy can be found in Judith Goldstein's Ideas, Interests, and American Trade Policy [Full disclosure: Goldstein was one of my professors when I was a graduate student at Stanford]. Robert Rubin's observations about the state of American trade politics can be found in his engaging memoir In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington (co-authored with Jacob Weisberg) . The point about praising imports can be found on page 394. Robert Zoellick's op-ed can be found in the digital archives of the New York Times for a fee -- or the USTR web site for free. Finally, on the current state of play for the Doha round, see this post from earlier this month, as well as Jeffrey Schott's excellent backgrounder for the Institute of International Economics. [Ahem, didn't you promise to take a break on the outsourcing stuff?--ed. That was almost two weeks ago!! In blog years, that's quite a stretch.] UPDATE: Brad DeLong has some trenchant criticisms of this essay over at Semi-Daily Journal. My major beef is with his last point:
The thing is, I'm pretty sure that neither John Kerry nor George W. Bush will embrace the merits of free trade with the same enthusiasm of President Clinton. Neither Kerry's rhetoric nor his policy proposals to date make me particularly sanguine about his future foreign economic policies. The state of play on trade My latest TNR Online essay is up -- this one is about why, even with the outsourcing furor dying down, we're not likely to see any groundswell of support for trade liberalization. Go check it out. Footnote link will follow shortly. UPDATE: Here it is. Actual financial reform in Iraq I've been pretty hard on the CPA as of late, so it's only fair to highlight an area where they played a clearly positive role. The Economist reports on the state of reform in the banking sector:
Of course, that last paragraph is kind of important -- and that goes back to the CPA's mistakes. Bill Powell and Aparism Ghosh are the latest to dissect Paul Bremer's errors in Time. Thursday, June 24, 2004
Arnold Schwarzenegger likes it rough Charlie LeDuff and John M. Broder write a pretty favorable story about the governor from California in today's New York Times (link via Andrew Sullivan). Two points stood out:
Philip Carter weighs in Philip Carter manages to meld together the theme of my last two posts -- troop levels and the crisis in Sudan. On the first question, Carter has a Slate piece criticizing pretty much everyone inside the Beltway for using fuzzy math on the question of optimal troop levels. The highlights:
In a follow-up blog post, Carter ties the debate about troop levels into the case of Sudan. Go check it all out.
400 villages destroyed in Sudan Things are getting very bad in Sudan, as Edith Lederer reports for the Associated Press:
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
I'll say it again -- it's good to have more troops Over the past year one of my constant refrains about Iraq is that the administration had failed to put sufficient numbers of troops to deal with the occupation phase of the campaign. This argument inevitably triggered comments from readers saying that more troops would have minimal effect on peacebuilding while increasing the number of inviting targets for insurgents. I would urge those skeptics to read Rowan Scarborough's account in the Washington Times about how the U.S. army effectively destroyed Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi militia. The highlights:
Only time will tell if Sadr has been truly defanged -- and it's worth pointing out that his armed resistance appears to have caused a steady increase in public support for him. Still, Sadr's decision to try to attain power through legal rather than extralegal means seems a pretty powerful argument for the virtues of more troops.
Thank you, Fareed Zakaria The New Republic has a special issue this week devoted to the question of "Were We Wrong?" -- ruminations, defenses, or mea culpas by supporters of Gulf War II in the wake of the past year's events. Contributors include John McCain, Kenneth Pollack, Fouad Ajami, Anne Applebaum, Thomas Friedman, Joseph Biden, and Paul Berman. As someone who's engaging in a similar cognitive exercise, Fareed Zakaria's contribution is the one that most closely approximates my own position. I may differ with Zakaria on big-think international relations questions, but he is right on target in his dissection of the ins and outs of Iraq. The highlights:
Read the whole essay. UPDATE: One of my commentors mentions David Corn's critique of the TNR issue -- here's a link. The commentor goes on to ask:
I blogged an awful lot about Iraq prior to the war, so I don't have the time to completely fulfill this task. However, perusing the posts in which I recall making a substantive argument -- here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here -- I'm still feeling reasonably secure. Readers should feel free to disagree. Going medieval on AFI The American Film Institute has cannily raised its public profile through a series of television tributes and the releases of myriad "top 100" lists. Their latest -- which suggests they're running out of ideas -- is "100 Years... 100 Songs.." As a courtesy to readers of danieldrezner.com --- or burden, take your pick -- the following is a reprint of my interior monologue as I was perusing the list:
If you'll all excuse me, I have to go cut someone's ear off -- well, that or alert Roger L. Simon to the crimes committed on this list. While I'm away, readers are hereby invited to submit other glaring omissions (or glaring inclusions) from AFI's list. Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Respect Eugene Volokh's authority!! Kudos to Eugene Volokh for his latest coups:
Cass, Jacob, myself -- Eugene has now managed to have 10% of the poli sci faculty at the University of Chicago blog for him. Barack Obama's lucky star Last month Noam Scheiber penned a lengthy but fascinating cover story in The New Republic on the rise of Illinois State Senator Barack Obama (he's also a senior lecturer at the U of C's law school). Obama is currently the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in this state. Scheiber's essay was about how Obama, an African-American, was able to surmount the tricky hurdles that a minority candidate can face in a statewide campaign. While Scheiber stressed Obama's considerable talents as a politician, he also acknowledged that Obama had been the recipient of some good fortune as well on the way to winning the nomination: "Obama ran into a bit of luck. The media turned up evidence that [erstwhile frontrunner Blair] Hull's ex-wife had sought a restraining order against him, and Hull's campaign, which had built a ten-point lead, imploded after the candidate essentially admitted to having abused her." It now appears that Obama has once again received a huge dollop of fortuna -- again from the divorce courts. Obama's Republican opponent Jack Ryan may experience some political difficulties sustaining his campaign after the unsealing and partial release of records from Ryan's divorce from Jeri Ryan -- yes, the same Jeri Ryan who's starred in Boston Public and Star Trek: Voyager. [I'm still hazy -- who is this again?--ed. Inserting shameless photo here:]
John Chase and Liam Ford report the sordid details in the Chicago Tribune:
Click here to read Jeri Ryan's statement responding to the story. Obama wisely told the Tribune that "Obviously Mr. Ryan and his supporters will be discussing this and I don't think that's my role." There's no mention of it on his campaign blog as well. Now it's hardly Obama's fault that he has political idiots for opponents -- and it's to his credit that he hasn't perpetrated anything as stupid in his personal or professional career. And it's worth pointing out that the latest poll (conducted last week) had Obama ahead of Ryan by eleven points -- so it's not like he really needed this to happen. Still, politicians of every stripe must be burning with envy, marveling at Obama's run of good luck. Readers are invited to submit other politicians who have similarly benefited from this kind of self-destructive behavior by opponents during a campaign. UPDATE: Over at Tapped, Nick Confessore frets that this may hurt Obama:
ANOTHER UPDATE: Mark Buehner posts a comment that reflects my thoughts on the matter:
Indeed. Lou Dobbs is a big fat hypocrite If I wasn't busy trying to get tenure and all that, I'd be sorely tempted to write a quickie paperback with that title. Never mind Dobbs' tendentious reporting about outsourcing -- now he's got bigger ethical quandries. Back in March, James Glassman pointed out in Tech Central Station that Dobbs was praising companies like Boeing and Washington Mutual as worthy stocks in his eponymous investment letter -- even though he was bashing these very same companies for offshore outsourcing on his CNN show, Lou Dobbs Tonight. Last week, Zachary Roth at CJR's Campaign Desk followed up on this tendency of Dobbs to say one thing to his viewers and another thing to readers of his investment letter:
Read both Glassman and Roth. We here at danieldrezner.com are appalled -- there are actually people out there who would pay $398 a year for Lou Dobbs' investment advice?! To be fair, however, Glassman does point out in another column that on his TV show, Dobbs is the perfect anti-predictor when it comes to investment decisions. Amazingly, Dobbs is proving to be somewhat two-faced in his response to the Campaign Desk post. In a follow-up post, Roth writes, "When we contacted him, Dobbs was unrepentant, saying that he didn't see a problem with using one hand to reprimand companies for outsourcing, while using the other to promote the same firms." However, when the Wall Street Journal came a callin', Dobbs changed his tune:
Lou, Lou, Lou -- it's never the original scandal that brings you down -- it's the cover-up to the scandal. I'll give Roth the final word of this post:
Monday, June 21, 2004
Strong stuff Spencer Ackerman, filling in for Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, scores an interview with the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism. The author -- let's call him Mr. A -- believes both Afghanistan and Iraq to be complete disasters in both policymaking and the application of military force. While this no doubt warms the cockles of those who oppose the Bush administration, Mr. A's policy prescriptions are likely to scare the ever-living crap out of those same critics. A sample:
Needless to say, this provoked Matthew Yglesias to write an epithet I was thinking after reading that passage. Kevin Drum is similarly rattled -- and Drum follows up with an e-mail missive from Ackerman confirming that what I just quoted was not taken out of context. The following is from Mr. A's interview with Ackerman:
This kind of rhetoric makes even the most "out there" neoconservative -- except perhaps for Jim Woolsey -- look like a peacenik by comparison. Even the most imperial-sounding neocons don't talk about "a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure." I think this kind of thinking is nuts -- forget whether it would actually work in the Middle East and consider the collateral damage such actions would create in every other region of the globe. If you want an actual alliance -- not mere rhetoric, but actual alliances, coordination of territorial defense, and actual balancing -- of every other significant power in the globe arrayed against the United States, well, Mr. A's strategy is the way to go. Don't worry about soft power if this strategy is implemented -- worry about whether the U.S. government would have sufficient hard power resources to simultaneously ward off threats from China, Russia, India, Japan, North and South Korea, France, and Great Britain while simultaneously imposing martial law in this country following the insurrection that such a strategy would undoubtedly inspire. The golden age of cartoons? Justin Peters makes a strong case in the Washington Monthly that we are currently experiencing a golden age of animation, beginning with Cartoon Network's Adult Swim:
Read the whole thing -- indeed, my only criticism of the article is that it failed to mention the renaissance in high-quality superhero cartoons -- X-Men, Batman, Superman, Justice League, and the awesome Batman Beyond. However, Peters does give appropriate props to Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law, a surreal 15 minutes of genre-busting. My personal favorite -- and the only successful Sopranos parody I've seen -- is when Harvey defends suspected mobster Fred Flinstone. Best line -- "You're dead to me, Barney!! [Actually, the best line is "Ewwww, Gleep juice!'--ed. Well, yes, but understanding why that line is funny requires a knowledge of bad Saturday morning cartoons that the sophisticated readers of danieldrezner.com should never admit to possessing.] The blogging of the convention The Associated Press reports that the Democrats will offer media credentials to "a handful of bloggers" at this year's convention in Boston. Andrew Sullivan is unimpressed at the opportunity:
Andrew is largely correct -- the conventions because of their effect on the television audience. That said, I don't think this is an either/or kind of situation. I'm happy some bloggers will be inside the tent, as it were -- mostly because I'm betting that they'll be able to provide the kind of "local color" that can seem blasé to the veteran journalist. Bloggers also shouldn't care about whether such anecdotes offend the sensitivities of the powerful and the privileged. Plus, bloggers can also report on an issue that mainstream journalists would be reluctant to cover --how mainstream journalists behave at these shindigs. Incidentally, I got a call last week from a Washington Post writer asking me if I'd be attending. I patiently explained that my wife is not keen for me to go to Boston and/or New York on our own dime just because the political parties might let me through the front door. Karl Rove's nightmare come true A huge component of the Bush re-election strategy is the overwhelming support the president receives from white evangelicals -- both its leadership and rank and file. If, for some reason, this group were to grow either disaffected or less politically active, states that were previously thought of as Republican locks would suddenly be in play. Which is why Karl Rove can't be too happy about Larry B. Stammer's article in the Los Angeles Times about a new white paper on political action that's coming from the National Association of Evangelicals:
Read the whole piece -- there's a quote at the end from a former NAE president saying, "I think short term it probably won't have a lot of impact. In the long term it will have a fairly significant impact." This is probably true -- but I can't help think the symbolism and the timing of the document will have some short-term impact -- not so much from converting Republican voters into Democrats, but rather reducing voter turnout. Competence gets rewarded in Iraq Despite the management screw-ups that have taken place in Iraq, there are a few silver linings. I linked to one of them -- dealing with Iraq's economic future -- in my last post. Another one comes from Lieutenant General David Petraeus -- the former commander of the 101st Airborne who was in charge of Mosul for ten months. I've blogged about him before here and here -- he clearly seemed to "get it" when it came to the postwar occupation. In a nice example of competence rewarded, Vivienne Walt reports in Time that Petraeus was asked by President Bush to "assess" the Iraqi security forces back in April. Given their perfomance, the General has taken a hands-on approach:
Petraeus' effect can already be felt in this plan to scale back Iraqi Interior Ministry forces by 30,000. [Why is that number being reduced?--ed. Fewer trained personnel is better than a lot of untrained personnel.] Unlike last year's disastrous dismissal of the Iraqi military, this reduction is being accomplished through generous severance payments. Sunday, June 20, 2004
Ugly CPA autopsies Last month I posted about the ideological litmus tests that were applied in hiring for the Coalitional Provisional Authority. I said at the end that, "This is a story crying out for further investigation." Today the Washington Post (link via Matthew Yglesias) and Chicago Tribune both have front-page stories focusing on the CPA -- and this issue comes up in both articles. In the Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran paints an ugly picture of poor planning and inadequate resources. As for recruitment, Chandrasekaran observes:
In the Tribune, Andrew Zajac focuses more closely on the recruitment of CPA personnel. Again, not a pretty picture:
Read both pieces. It's still worth keeping in mind that despite these missteps, the situation in Iraq is still not hopeless. Go check out this Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder on the Iraqi economy, compiled by Esther Pan. The final paragraph:
Saturday, June 19, 2004
Who's buying T-bills? Why are they buying T-bills?
One of the concerns that Niall Ferguson raised in Colossus: The Price of America's Empire about the long-term financial strength of the United States was the huge amount of U.S. government debt that Asian central banks were purchasing. Daniel Gross has more details about this phenomenon in Slate:
Gross goes on to observe that central banks are purchasing a rotten investment -- T-bills currently have low rate of returns and are denominated in a currency that has been slowly losing its value compared to the euro or other major currencies. Tyler Cowen offers seven possible explanations. My vote is for a mixture of reasons three, four, and six -- mostly three ("China and Japan want to keep the value of the yuan and yen low, as part of a mercantilist export-promotion strategy.") There is another possible explanation, but I don't seriously believe it. As Gary Shilling points out in Forbes in an essay downplaying foreign ownership of U.S. government securities, the moment Chinese capital markets are liberalized, the Chinese central bank won't be the only Chinese actor interested in greenbacks:
So, one possibility is that the Chinese central bank is buying Treasuries in advance of capital market liberalization. But that would be such a complex undertaking -- given the fragility of the state-owned Chinese banking system -- that I can't think that's what's going on. With that possibility unlikely, what I find so interesting is the parallel between what Asian central banks are doing now and what Japanese private investors did back in the late 1980's -- make lousy investments in overpriced assets. I don't think there's any correlation between the two phenomenon -- private investors and central banks are like apples and oranges.
Friday, June 18, 2004
What sustains the barriers to globalization in the Middle East? Marcus Noland and Howard Pack have written a must-read policy brief for the Institute for International Economics on why the Middle East appears to be suffering from relative economic stagnation. They lay out the challenge in stark terms:
The authors dismiss the simple argument that Islam retards receptivity to capitalism. Rather, Noland and Pack's key finding is that "public attitudes toward foreigners and globalization" more generally is the greatest barrier to foreign investment. Their operationalization of this kind of attitude is most intriguing:
From this finding, the authors return somewhat gloomily to the role of Islam and conclude:
Read the whole brief. I'm not feeling the love from Russia CNN International reports that the Russia Federation warned the United States about Iraqi plans for terrorism against the United States:
I wouldn't want to speculate on the quality of Russian intelligence, but that last sentence provokes a question to President Putin -- why didn't the information change your mind about the war? You have intel saying that one sovereign state is planning to commit acts of aggression against another sovereign state in violation of the laws of war. If that's not a justification for preventive action, what is? Does John Kerry have moles in his campaign? Mickey Kaus, June 17, 2004:
Jim VandeHei and Lois Romano, "Kerry's Search: In Depth, In Secret." The Washington Post, June 18, 2004:
My very own cabinet reshuffle Brad DeLong has been urging "grown-up Republicans" for the past year to force Bush and Cheney's resignations. In latest post on this theme, DeLong expresses his half-serious wish that "the presidential succession passes to Colin Powell." Now, besides the fact that Brad's theories of political science rest on shaky ground, and besides the fact that the only time I can think of either party forcing a sitting president not to run again was Johnson in 1968 (and even then it wasn't "grown-up Democrats" doing the pushing), I'm a bit puzzled by DeLong's embrace of Colin Powell. Maybe Powell is a moderate Republican, but that doesn't seem to have made him a particularly good Secretary of State. As the New York Times and Washington Post pointed out last year in their autopsies of the diplomatic run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and as I highlighted in this post, the Secretary of State did not exert a lot of diplomatic effort. This is from the Times account:
A secretary of State who dislikes travel -- my kind of diplomat. However, Brad's post did get me to thinking about Bush's foreign policy team and my own qualms with their performance. Tenet and Negroponte have recently left their positions. Rumsfeld should resign. Powell is lackluster. Fairly or unfairly, Ashcroft as Attorney General has been an automatic campaign contribution machine for Democrats. Foreign policy professionals are thoroughly disenchanted with the current team. Since Bush and Cheney themselves aren't going anywhere, I've got an idea -- how about a cabinet overhaul now instead of November!! Of course, this presents an exciting but challenging task -- picking a new foreign affairs cabinet that meets the following criteria:
With those criteria in mind -- and do bear in mind that this is a blog post, so it's not like I've thought every detail of this out -- what's my new cabinet look like? Secretary of Defense -- John McCain. It's worth remembering that back in 2000, John McCain was the preferred candidate for a lot of prominent neocons. Here's a way to snuff out all that Kerry-McCain mumbo-jumbo and make McCain's star quality work for the Republicans. Plus, he knows a thing or two about defense matters. Attorney General -- John Danforth. This position is a lightning rod for social conservatives -- but no one could doubt Danforth's adherence to conservative values or his sense of duty. Danforth commands respect on both sides of the aisle for his Senatorial record as well as his recent efforts to end the civil war in Sudan. This pick would please conservatives and not piss off moderates at the same time -- not an easy task. Director of Central Intelligence -- Brent Scowcroft. Let's face it, the intelligence community is a mess right now -- what's needed is a technocrat's technoract, someone who can clean house while commanding the respect of intelligence professionals. Scowcroft has experience in just about every policy position in Washington, and currently chairs the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. [Why would he leave a lucrative consulting group to go to take a position lower than NSC advisor?--ed. Er, a sense of duty.] Secretary of State -- Kenneth Dam. Dam was Deputy Secretary of State under George Shultz and Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under Paul O'Neill. To my knowledge, no one in DC has ever said a bad word about him. I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's got sufficient experience for the job. National Security Advisor -- Bob Blackwill. By all accounts, Blackwill is the Republican version of Richard Holbrooke -- an arrogant SOB who gets the job done. The NSC advisor needs to be someone who can be an honest broker in the policy process, unafraid of large egos, and able to be candid with the president. Blackwill's perfect for the job -- besides, as Lawrence Kaplan points out, Blackwill seems to be evolving into a shadow NSC advisor anyway. Treasury Secretary -- Robert Zoellick. In the spirit of keeping one current Bush appointee, promote this guy and finally have a Treasury chief that understands there's an international component of the job. Secretary of Homeland Security -- Rudoplh Guliani. If you think the intelligence community has problems, consider this monstrosity of a department for a second. This job is much tougher than DCI -- at least the CIA has some sense of esprit de cotps. DHS is a conglomeration of smaller agencies that have been discarded by other departments. What's needed here is a centralizer, someone who can meld an awkward organizational chart into something resembling a functional bureaucracy. I think Guliani fits that mold. United Nations Ambassador -- Robert Kagan. This is always an awkward slot, because it usually goes to someone who lost out in the Secretary of State/NSC Advisor Sweepstakes. Plus, the UN ambassador needs to be someone who can play nicely with other countries, but still accepts the original neoconservative principle that the U.N. is a bastion of anti-Americanism and general silliness. Alas, Daniel Patrick Moynihan is neither Republican nor alive. But Kagan comes the closest to embodying those principles. Seems like a nice mix of responsible realists and responsible neoconservatives to me. Someone get me David Broder's private line to float this trial balloon! Readers are hereby encouraged to submit alternative candidates -- provided they meet the criteria listed above. Thursday, June 17, 2004
Eugene Volokh triggers a gay civil war Well, not really. Eugene's original quotation of Marilyn Zielinski's theory about what it takes for a man to be sexy was quite interesting:
This has inspired two very different responses from two different gay men. First, Andrew Sullivan weighs in:
For a somewhat different take, Eugene follows up his original post with the following reprint of Geoffrey Murry's Queer Eye view:
The one thing I'm sure of is that Sullivan and Murry should probably not date each other. We here at danieldrezner.com welcome any and all contributions to this pressing debate, regardless of sexual preference. Should Rummy resign, part III Last month I posted here and here on why Donald Rumsfeld should resign. I'll just cut and paste this Eric Schmitt/Thom Shanker story in the New York Times for why I stand by that belief:
UPDATE: This Reuters story doesn't comfort me much either:
Sorry, that last answer doesn't cut it for me. Suggest a guest-blogger for danieldrezner.com!! Josh Marshall is taking a vacation, but not before dropping a coy reference to a journalistic venture "that I and several colleagues have been working on a story that, if and when it comes to fruition --- and I’m confident it shall --- should shuffle the tectonic plates under that capital city where I normally hang my hat." More intriguingly, Marshall will be having a guest blogger at Talking Points Memo [UPDATE: Marshall made a fine choice in TNR's Spencer Ackerman.] Which got me to thinking that even though I often fill in as a guest-blogger for the Higher Beings of the Blogosphere, I haven't had a guest blogger here at danieldrezner.com -- with the singular and laudatory exception of my wife. Due to some impending events that will become public in due course, I may need the services of a guest-blogger or two in the coming months. I've thought on occasion about who could be able to fulfill my mandate of "politics, economics, globalization, academia, pop culture... all from an untenured perspective"? All too often I draw a blank. Sooooo..... readers are hereby invited to submit suggestions -- from the blogosphere or the scholarly community -- as possible short-term substitutes (for those shy academics in the audience who are interested but would rather not post that fact on the blog, contact me directly). It's not easy keeping up with the Oxbloggers I see that Josh Chafetz has published his first essay in the New York Times Book Review this past Sunday. David Adesnik's praise to the contrary, we here at danieldrezner.com often feel powerless in the wake of the Oxbloggers' relentless stream of publications. It's not just their ability to publish in so many tony outlets -- it's the fact that they're more than a decade younger than me and publishing in so many tony outlets. Just who do these young whippersnappers think they are, writing such high-quality copy on such a regular basis? [Is it because they haven't completed a Ph.D. yet and therefore haven't had their writing skills crushed into a sticky paste?--ed. From an epistemological standpoint, that's a nonfalsifiable hypothesis and lacks any counterfactual analysis. Thank you for proving my point--ed.] But today the advantage is mine. My review of Niall Ferguson's Colossus: The Price of America's Empire is on page D7 of today's Wall Street Journal. You can see the online version by clicking here. Here's the part of the book that I found most interesting:
The ball's in your court, Oxblog... oh yes, the ball is most definitely in your court. [Ummm... didn't Adesnik and Chafetz already publish something in the Wall Street Journal?--ed. Arrggh!! I'd have a greater sense of self-esteem if it wasn't for those meddling kids!!] Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Are successful blogs correlated with successful campaigns? Back in the winter when Dean crashed and burned in Iowa, I asked:
Now, the reason I asked this was obvious -- most people associated campaign blogs with Dean, and if Dean flamed out, surely that meant that having the most successful blog around didn't mean all that much even in primary campaigns. The unstated assumption behind my question was that Blog for America was actually the most successful campaign blog out there. Even though campaign blogs are different from other kinds of blogs, and even though I had criticized its content in another venue, I certainly believed it to be the most professional. However, I may have been in error. [Again--ed.] Gene Koprowski, UPI's telecomminications reporter, reports on an interesting study about campaigns and blogs:
Now, a few caveats -- first, I can't find a press release or an executive summary of this study on the Empirix web site (see below for an update). Second, the difference between Dean's 98% effectiveness and Kerry's 100% effectiveness is not huge. Third, Edwards outperformed Dean in the primary campaign even though his blog was only half as effective. Still, this is the first (report of a) study I've seen in which Kerry's blog comes out on top by any metric. By the way, if you read the entire UPI report, you'll find a mention of danieldrezner.com -- clearly, Greg Wythe was not the only person impressed with my ability to fold in a Kristin Davis reference to a post about Sarbanes-Oxley. UPDATE: Drezner gets results from UPI and Empirix! After an e-mail query, the good people at Empirix were nice enough to send me their study, which was done at the behest of Baseline magazine -- though it doesn't appear to have been cited in their December 2003 package on campaign blogs. But for those who care, their study was conducted from "October 31, 2003 at 1:00pm Eastern through November 7, 2003 at 1:00pm Eastern." It looks quite proper. Someone's been in the ivory tower too long I've haven't been following the scandals involving the University of Colorado at Boulder's football program too carefully. What I have read about it is at a welcome distance. As someone who used to teach there, I can't say I'm particularly shocked by the catalogued behavior. The tendency of CU-Boulder university officials to say idiotic things hasn't helped matters. One of the triggers for the mess was when coach Gary Barnett, in responding to questions about the alleged rape of female placekicker Katie Hnida by a teammate, called Hnida an "awful" player who "couldn't kick the ball through the uprights." Barnett was suspended pending an investigation, and later reinstated. Alas, CU-Boulder's president, Elizabeth Hoffman, seems determined to follow Barnett's ability to put one's foot in one's mouth. From the KUSA (NBC's affiliate station in Denver) web site:
You can see the relevant portion of the transcript by clicking here. Now Hoffman is etymologically correct -- at least according to this site, "the word wasn't always considered derogatory, even though it is today." (Click here for more than you would ever want to know about this word.) And in further defense of Hoffman, here's a statement released by a university spokeswoman:
Unfortunately for Hoffman, this is one of those questions for which common sense suggests the obvious answer -- no matter how adversarial the situation. Responding as she did makes her seem way too detached from the real world. There's realism and then there's realism I liked the way Lawrence Kaplan starts his cover story in The New Republic (subscription required) on the resurgence of realism in American foreign policy circles:
It gets better from there:
Kaplan makes some good points -- but I have two moderate carps with the piece: 1) Not everyone who opposes the administration is a realist. The Committee that Kaplan fronts the piece with is entitled "The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy." Semantic as this may sound, "realistic" is not the same thing as "realist." A quick glance at the coalition's statement of principles reveals that what binds this coalition together is an opposition to American empire -- but that can come from several sources. For example -- as I argued a few months ago in TNR Online -- realists dislike the neocon enthusiasm for nation-building, whereas liberal institutionalists dislike the neocon disdain for multilateralism. While realists and liberal institutionalists might disagree with neoconservatives on empire-building, they don't agree on a lot of other dimensions of policy. The list of signatories paints a similar picture -- while there are a large number of true-blue realists on the list, there are also people, like Charles Kupchan, who would not fit that label (though, admittedly, most of the other people on that list are realists). Kaplan doesn't help matters by labeling G. John Ikenberry in the essay as a "prominent realist." No offense against John -- who's a fine scholar and a star in the discipline -- but that ain't right. If you read Ikenberry's principal work, After Victory, it's clear that he's quite the fan of multilateral institutions as a binding mechanism on hegemonic powers. This is hardly a controversial position to adopt in the gamut of international relations theory -- but it flatly contradicts all varieties of realism. As someone in the same department as "today's premier realist," John J. Mearsheimer, let me put it this way: I've served with realists (on committees). I know realists. Realists are friends of mine -- and John Ikenberry is no realist. Kaplan's confusion of "realistic/pragmatic" with "realist" reveals a small but telling weakness among some neoconservatives -- their tendency to lump all of their intellectual adversaries into the same undifferentiated box. It is only through appreciating the nuances of alternative points of view that one can hone one's own arguments and policy proposals -- and I don't think a lot of neocons do this all that much. Which brings me to a related point: 2) Kaplan wants to absolve the neocons of all blame: Kaplan's essay rightly excoriates administration realists (read: Rumsfeld) for failing to follow through on nation-building. And it is certainly true that some neocons (Kagan, Kristol, Pollack) wanted the U.S. to be large and in charge in Iraq. However, Kaplan is way too quick to dismiss the errors of the neocons who were actually in power. It was not just Rumsfeld that believed we could do nation-building on the cheap -- it was Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle as well. Perle in particular thought that it would be easy to topple the Baathist regime and hand the keys of government to Chalabi. Kaplan seems to adopt a similar position in his TNR essay when he scolds the Chalabi raid. Kaplan is correct to point out the faulty assumptions made by administration realists in the post-war administration of Iraq. But he is incorrect not to say that many of those assumptions were generated by the neocons. Who's the biggest budget-cutter of them all? Brad DeLong rises to the bait and blasts the AEI report I linked to in my last post -- not for inaccuracies, but for sins of omission:
If I were Brad, I'd bring out these numbers as well -- and I think he has half a point. In examining a president's record of fiscal probity, it's not enough to look at whether department budgets were cut -- the magnitude of the cuts matter as well. However, the point of the AEI report was to examine the efforts by presidents to cut government spending, not government spending as a percentage of GDP. A big reason Clinton does so well in Brad's figures is not because of Clinton's containment of government growth (the numerator) but because of the economic boom of the 90's (the denominator). Clearly, Clinton had some role to play in the latter as well -- but to go back to Pearlstein's WaPo article:
For example, if you go to Brad's post on the Cinton administration's fiscal legacy, his "rough numbers" for how America's fiscal situation improved during the nineties give about 64% of the credit to events beyond Clinton's control (the end of the Cold War, Bush I's 1990 budget deal, the information age boom). The Clinton team gets credit for most of the rest of the improvement -- which sounds about right to me. [You just put that last WaPo quote in there to see if Brad goes medieval on Pearlstein, didn't you?--ed. I have no idea what you're talking about.] UPDATE: Be sure to read Tyler Cowen's response to DeLong as well. Cowen makes a point that covers this blog as well: "is writing, and there is linking. A link does not itself constitute a specifically inferable opinion on what is being linked to." Comparing Reagan with Bush & Kerry Tyler Cowen and Virginia Postrel both have posts up on how Reagan affected the size of government. Tyler links to this AEI report that lists the number of department and agency budgets that each president tried to cut during their term:
Sigh. Be sure to check out Postrel's post as well. [So this is the last straw, right? Now you're ready to jump on the Kerry bandwagon, right?--ed. It's not like Kerry is closer to inheriting Reagan's mantle. Henry Farrell's observations at a Kerry fundraiser don't fill me with a lot of confidence:
Steven Pearlstein is not exactly thrilled with Kerry's rhetoric in the pages of the Washington Post:
Not exactly a replica of Regan's opimism, eh?] Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Tim Berners-Lee finally makes a buck Victoria Shannon has a nice story in the International Herald Tribune about how the inventor of the World Wide Web is finally reaping some rewards from his marvelous invention:
Read the rest of the article to find out why. We here at danieldrezner.com salute Mr. Berners-Lee for finally making a profit off of the Internet. Who's going to the moon? Victoria Griffith reports in the Financial Times that NASA proper won't be responding to President Bush's call for a manned mission to the moon or Mars anytime soon. That doesn't mean it won't happen:
It would have helped if I had actually read the Chatham House rules Some of you may have noted that I deleted a Sunday post about my impressions after attending a Council on Foreign Relations meeting. The reason is that I completely blanked on one aspect of the Chatham House Rule:
While I was quite scrupulous about the first parts of the rule, I was in flagrant violation of the highlighted segment. My profound apologies to all for the error. The ironies of President Lula The Economist examines the effects of Brazil's increasingly assertive foreign policy. The results may surprise you:
Read the whole thing -- there's a disturbing bit at the end about Brazil's nuclear program. Monday, June 14, 2004
The effect of Sarbanes-Oxley The Hackett Group has an interesting finding on the effect of Sarbanes-Oxley -- you know, the corporate governance bill passed in the wake of the 2002 corporate scandals. The results are pretty interesting. [How interesting can that be?--ed. Definitely less interesting than speculation about possible future roles for Kristin Davis, but more interesing than your average post about corporate governance.] Where was I? Oh, yes, here's a summary of the findings:
While perusing the Hackett web site, I came across another Hackett study on the outsourcing (both onshore and offshore) of finance operations:
The door decorations of North American professors James M. Lang has a droll dissection of why professors decorate their office doors the way they do in the Chronicle of Higher Education. My personal favorite:
Alas, the only mention of my discipline is not exactly a favorable one:
[What about your door?--ed. Compared with most of my colleagues, I have a relatively flamboyant office door. Three Onion headlines (my favorite: "Intensive Five-Year Study Finds Five Years a Long-Ass Time"), two drawings by Sam, two New Yorker cartoons, and one Weekly World News headline. My favorite door hangings, however, are culled from Vivian Scott Hixson's He Looks Too Happy to Be an Assistant Professor, a must-have collection of cartoons for academics. Front and slightly off-center on my door is a cartoon showing one graduate student whacking another with his briefcase, while two students comment on this in the foreground. The caption reads, "None of that wishy-washy relativism in this seminar!"] Sunday, June 13, 2004
I promise this is my last outsourcing post for a while With the BLS report, I suspect I'll have little need to post on offshore outsourcing for some time -- no doubt inspiring a sense of relief among regular readers. However, before I get off my outsourcing high horse, it's worth noting that the phenomenon is not limited to the for-profit sector -- now the Catholic Church is getting in on the act. Saritha Rai has the details in the New York Times:
Thanks to alert danieldrezner.com reader R.S. for the link. Friday, June 11, 2004
Video lives forever Faithful readers of danieldrezner.com may remember that around three months ago, I did an interview on tape for ABC World News Tonight on Kerry's tax proposal and offshore outsourcing in general. At the time, I wrote:
In the end, ABC cut my interview. However, I have been informed by close friends that part of my interview was aired tonight on World News Tonight -- nearly three months later. Why? Probably to follow up on the BLS data -- but I still need to read the transcript. [UPDATE: I was finally able to watch the segment on the web by accessing this page, but you have to (temporarily) subscribe to RealOne to see it. The story was on the BLS report. All I say is, "People are panicking a lot over a very, very small part of the job picture." But I look way smart saying it.] While it's nice to get the airtime, it is somewhat unsettling to think that ABC will be playing bits and pieces of that interview if outsourcing should crop up again on World News Tonight. When I related this anecdote to someone way above my policymaking pay grade, they nodded sagely and said, "Always go live -- avoid taped interviews, because then you're at the mercy of the producer and the reporter." So now I know. And you do too. Blogging and partisanship My last guest post is up at GlennReynolds.com. It's on whether blogging improves or degrades the quality of political argumentation across the political aisle. I remain cautiously optimistic. Go check it out. Same network, different worlds CNN's Chris Isidore provides the most in-depth coverage of the BLS report showing that offshore outsourcing is responsible for a piddling number of lost jobs. Among other things, he has the only story I've seen that actually quotes anyone from the BLS. Isidore's story provides a lovely contrast with to how fellow CNN employee Lou Dobbs ran with the same information on his show. Let's compare and contrast!
Read the whole thing -- Isidore does a good job of explaining the caveats to the BLS numbers, as well as giving critics an opportunity to make their points. Here's how Dobbs treated the same information:
To be fair, Dobbs and Sylvester did not out-and-out lie in their version of events. They just left out We here at danieldrezner.com salute Lou Dobbs for his unique ability to slant data that flatly contradicts his hypothesis -- as well as CNN's other reportage. Way to go Lou!! For other treatments of this story, check out Paul Blustein in the Washington Post, as well as the New York Times and Financial Times. The Washington Post also has a nice round-up of other press treatments. Thursday, June 10, 2004
The BLS weighs in on offshoring One of the problems with the outsourcing debate is that the estimates about job losses due to offshoring are mostly coming from management consultants, who appear to be basing those numbers on some really shoddy guesstimates. Official data collection from the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn't sem to directly address this phenomenon. My back-of-the-envelope calculations from the BLS Mass Layoff data suggested that the number of people laid off due to offshoring was around and about 3% of total layoffs. Starting this calendar year, however, the BLS decided to ask employers whether offshore outsourcing -- or onshore subcontracting that led to offshore outsourcing -- was the reason for the mass layoff. Data for the first quarter are now available for extended mass layoffs -- and it turns out that my 3% estimate was incorrect. This is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics press release:
So, to conclude -- the percentage of jobs lost due to mass layoffs -- in turn due to offshore outsourcing -- as a percentage of total jobs lost through mass layoffs was not 3% -- it was a whopping 1.9%. If you drop out seasonal employment, the figure rises to 2.5%. So my back of the envelope calculations from a few months ago are an exaggeration. My apologies. The caveats -- this data does not cover two other kinds of job loss via outsourcing -- 1) Those let go due to ousourcing when fewer than 50 people were let go; and 2) Those jobs created de novo overeas that may have been created in the U.S. instead were it not for the outsourcing phenomenom. At the same time, this data also does not cover two kids of job gains via outsourcing -- 1) Those jobs created via insourcing, when a foreign firm hires U.S. workers; and 2) Those jobs created via the budgetary savings reaped from outsourcing. The bottom line -- offshore outsourcing is responsible for a piddling number of lost jobs. I'll be commenting on these figures this evening for Nightly Business Report on PBS. Check your local listings!! UPDATE: Here's how Reuters plays the story:
Only trouble is, the headline says "OUTSOURCING CAUSES 9% OF U.S. LAYOFFS" -- which is true but includes onshore as well as offshore outsourcing. Gotta run Blogging will be light the next couple of days, as I'll be attending/presenting at the Council on Foreign Relations National Meeting. I'm bringing the wi-fi, but this meeting is an all-day affair, and blogging is not an accepted social practice at CFR meetings.... yet. Last year, Howell Raines resigned while I was en route -- I wonder if something big will happen this time around..... Wednesday, June 9, 2004
Matt Stoller, tendentious liberal Matt Stoller has a post over at Blogging of the President entitled, "Daniel Drezner, The Mediocre Reasonable Conservative." I'm going to reprint the bulk of it here so no one can claim anything was taken out of context:
Wow -- how to respond: 1) Yep, it's true -- I was clearly defending "the anti-semitic attacks on George Soros" when I said in the post Matt linked to that I thought Tony Blankley excelled at "saying unbelievably stupid things," or when I said "Blankley is clearly an ass. As a Jew, I find that last bolded sentence repugnant" or when I approvingly linked to Eugene Volokh's post on why Blankley's statement was anti-Semitic. It's a good thing Matt wasn't selective in how he quoted the post, or someone might have gotten the wrong impression. 2) As for the charge that I've neglected Iraq as difficulties have mounted -- once again I'll plead guilty to Stoller's charge. I've only discussed the mistakes made in Iraq here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here over the past six weeks. 3) Stoller has a fair point in stating that "calling a serious thinker on international politics a 'loon' without evidence is tantamount to intellectual cheating." Of course, I think have a fair point in saying that Soros is not a serious thinker on international politics. Part of the reason I didn't go further into thoughts on Soros is that they're going to appear in another venue. However, if Stoller wants some evidence, here's a brief snippet from my forthcoming review of The Bubble of American Diplomacy:
4) Finally, for someone who gets outraged at offensive and anti-Semitic rhetoric (a truly bold position), I'm not sure whether it's rhetorically useful for Stoller to say I'm "cowardly" or compare me with "the business elite who dealt with Hitler." After reading that latter point in particular, my first reaction was, "gee, Matt Stoller is an anti-Semitic schmuck." My second reaction is the title of this post. Stoller would probably label this post as "defensive" -- because it is. I have no qualms labeling his original his post as "dishonest." UPDATE: Stoller has another post up on this, as well as this comment to this post. Shorter Stoller:
My short responses: 1) Don't worry Matt -- I won't be devoting much time or effort to your prose in the future. 2) For the record, George Soros is clearly not insane, and I apologize if I gave that impression (thouh I don't think I did). He's accomplished many great things as a philanthropist. But even he describes his political views as "rabid." When they're not that, they're banal. If Stoller wants to take Soros seriously, fine -- that's his waste of time. 3) Oh, please -- an empire that sent in fewer troops than was necessary? An administration that now seems hell-bent on getting out of the country? Where's your evidence for empire? Reflecting on Reagan My latest guest post on Glenn Reynolds' MSNBC blog is up -- and surprise, surprise, it's about Reagan's legacy. Go check it out. My selfish reason for supporting gay marriage From a purely selfish perspective, I shouldn't give a rat's ass one way or the other about the ability of gay Americans to get married. I'm not gay; I wasn't prevented from getting hitched. I think the argument that gay marriage undercuts the institution is hogwash, so whether it's legal shouldn't matter to me. I would derive some empathetic pleasure from seeing gay friends getting married, but that hasn't happened yet, so no effect there. There are many excellent reasons to support it, but none of them would appear to affect me directly. However, The Onion reminds me of one personal incentive to support gay marriage with their fake news story, "Gay Couple Feels Pressured to Marry.":
The ability to ask my gay friends and colleagues when they're planning to get hitched and watch them squirm with discomfort answering the question -- that's going to be enjoyable. Public opinion about offshore outsourcing A while back, I blogged here and here about how American consumer behavior seems generally unaffected by the spectre of outsourcing -- i.e., Americans make choices based more on price than origin of production. To be fair, some people do not think this way -- click here for a few examples courtesy of Newsweek. Beyond anecdotal evidence, however, what do Americans now think about outsourcing? And do these feelings affect their behavior? Two recent polls -- one by the Employment Law Alliance ("the world’s largest independent network of labor and employment attorneys") and one by Ipsos (for the Associated Press) suggest some commonalities and cleavages on the issue. On the one hand, the polls largely confirm that most Americans are mercantilists at heart. The Ipsos poll shows that 69% of Americans believe that outsourcing hurts the country -- and only 17% think it helps the economy. 58% of respondents in the ELA poll believe that companies outsourcing work that could be done by Americans to offshore contractors should be penalized by the US government. At the same time, the ELA poll shows that 46% of Americans believe that offshoring has been exaggerated by the media. Still, it would be hard not to conclude that most Americans think offshore outsourcing is a bad thing. So how does this affect actual consumer behavior? Here the answer changes. On the one hand, the Ipsos poll shows that when asked to choose between a product made in the USA and a similar one made elsewhere, 93% of Americans say that they'd buy the American product. However, if the foreign good is cheaper, that percentage falls to 54%. Furthermore, a slight plurality (38% to 35%) do not check product labels so as to "buy American." The AP story by Will Lester goes on to suggest a generational divide in the economic reaction -- with younger folks more sanguine:
As the story concludes, "Fresh concerns about U.S. jobs being shipped overseas are not being turned into renewed public sentiment to buy American." So, to sum up -- Americans do not like offshore outsourcing as a phenomenon -- but over time, and increasing number of them are happy to reap the benefits of it as consumers. This is really the biggest intellectual divide on the outsourcing issue -- whether one thinks the most important effect of offshoring is on employment or on consumption. Most Americans say the former but do not act on it. The data I've seen suggest that outsourcing's effect on employment is negligible -- and the effect on consumption is a positive one. Just what is Ralph Peters smoking? The Reagan tributes continue apace (mine will be up shortly). The immediacy of his passing, combined with the fact that the last time president who served two full terms died was thirty-five years ago, means there's going to be a bit of rhetorical overkill. For an example, consider Ralph Peters' New York Post column (link via James Joyner). The column does an excellent job of describing how the morale and training within the ranks of the military improved dramatically under Reagan. But it also contains this bit of comparison between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan:
Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but to me Peters' implication was that Reagan's predecessor did not mean it when saluting the Marine guards. Now, like Virginia Postrel, the stark contrasts between Carter and Reagan is the reason why I registered as a Republican at age 18. But Peters goes too far here. Jimmy Carter was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and served for seven years as an officer in the Navy. His service was in the nuclear-submarine program under Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, a man known for having some pretty high standards. As James Joyner points out, "[Carter] presided over many of the changes that would lead to the fielding of terrific new equipment in the early 1980s." Was Carter a failure as a president? Good God, yes. But I have no doubt that To be fair to Peters, I may be jumping on poor phrasing rather than Peters' actual intent. But there it is. UPDATE: Thanks to William Kaminsky for linking to this New York Times story on presidential salutes -- turns out that Reagan was the first president to return a military salute. [So, like, this trashes your Carter argument, right?--ed. Only if you relegate every other President before Reagan -- including Washington, Madison, Lincoln, TR, FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower -- into the same category as Carter.] Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Chavez referendum update A brief follow-up to my last post on efforts to recall Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The New York Times reports that a referendum date has been set in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez:
So, hurdle one -- canceling the referendum via a technicality or legal delay -- has been cleared. However, the BBC reports that Chavez will not be taking this challenge lying down: "He has already begun campaigning, warning voters of the consequences of an opposition victory." More cost savings from protectionism It seems that California is not the only state that is coming to grips with the costs that come from outlawing offshore outsourcing. The AP's Allen Breed reports that in the wake of efforts to block the offshore outsourcing of government contracts, some state legislatures don't like the pricey hangover:
How IT salaries are affected by outsourcing The Boston Globe's Diane E. Lewis reports on the effect that offshore outsourcing is having on IT salaries:
Read the whole article -- and you can download the executive summary of the META group report by clicking here (registration required). Given that 2000 was the peak of dot.com hysteria, the salary rebound is pretty impressive. UPDATE: This elaboration on salary structure comes from page 11 of the executive summary:
As for the magnitude of offshoring (from page 16):
Monday, June 7, 2004
A very important post about.... Jennifer Lopez
I have no doubt that hundreds of tabloid writers and millions of Americans are salivating over Jennifer Lopez's third marriage -- this time to Latin crooner Marc Anthony. [There are other reasons millions of Americans might salivate over J. Lo--ed. You know my preferences when it comes to Latino film stars.] Far be it for danieldrezner.com to deny Americans their God-given right to mock celebrities. However, since I've been defending American celebrities as of late, let me stick up for J. Lo's recent nuptials. Consider the following: 1) J. Lo's moving up the talent chain. This Bill Zwecker column in the Chicago Sun Times nicely encapsulates J Lo's romantic history:
There is an encouraging trend here. With each successive relationship, J. Lo's beau seems to have an increasing amount of talent -- which presumably raises the level of mutual respect between Miss Lopez and her significant other. One can easily make the claim that Anthony is the best singer of the lot, but one could also say he's the best actor of the lot -- Anthony's 2) "Marcifer" have a lot in common. Turns out J. Lo and Anthony have known each other and been friends for more than a decade. Furthermore, as the Sun-Times story notes:
Maybe these two crazy kids have a future together. 3) Compare J. Lo with some of her peers. Consider the recent statements of some other women who aspire to achieve celebrity status in more than one artistic realm. The Associated Press reports the following about singer/actor/dancer Janet Jackson:
Okaaaaayyyyyy....... Meanwhile, here's the latest on fashion designer/model/actress Paris Hilton, according to MSNBC's Kat Giantis:
4) J. Lo's marriage has already lasted longer than Britney Spears'. By celebrity standards, Miss Lopez seems to have her head screwed on reasonably straight. We here at danieldrezner.com wish the newlywed couple the best of luck! UPDATE: Kat Giantis has further details on the wedding itself, plus the following:
When protectionists flunk reading comprehension Hey, I'm moving up in the world -- my New York Times review of Jagdish Bhagwati's In Defense of Globalization is the topic of an Alan Tonelson essay at the leading protectionist web site, americaneconomicalert.org. I think Tonelson is trying to be light-hearted in his post, but his effort is worthy of a mild fisking. Tonelson's essay is indented and italicized-- my response is not:
We here at danieldrezner.com would have more confidence that globalization opponents know what’s best for typical Americans – and their counterparts around the world – if they even occasionally displayed the dimmest understanding of basic economics. But dreaming up self-serving, wildly off-base caricatures is so much easier than studying and learning.
Tonelson must not have have actually read the rest of the review, which was sufficiently critical of whether Professor Bhagwati actually rose to that challenge to prompt an response from Bhagwati.
Actually, what I was saying that there was a need for an economist to use the language of the average Joe. That requires two things -- a good economist and a good writer. The passages Tonelson cites are the background I provided (as any competent reviewer should) about Bhagwati's bona fides as a good economist. If Alan had read just a teensy bit further down that paragraph, he would have seen that I also said: "Born in India, educated in Britain and now an American citizen, he can claim to understand all points of view. He has won multiple prizes for excellence in economic writing." (emphasis added)
Yeah, nesting in the heart of America’s political establishment (Washington, DC) as "a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry Educational Foundation" displays a much greater common touch.
Sigh. Again, if Tonelson had actually bothered to read the review, he would have noticed that the paragraph before the one he quoted contained the following: "Public opinion polls repeatedly show Americans to be wary about globalization. The problem is not that economists are starting to doubt their own arguments -- the problem is that the rest of society neither understands nor believes them. Between statistical evidence showing that trade is good for the economy and tangible anecdotes of sweatshops and job losses, most citizens trust the anecdotes." Oh, and about the Americans facing "weakened job security"? Funny thing about that assertion. As Brink Lindsey pointed out a few months ago, the aggregate number of jobs destroyed in the U.S. economy fell by 9.6% between 2001 and 2002 (from 35.4 million to 32 million). Tonelson gets a C- in wit and an F in reading comprehension. [So let's see -- Bhagwati didn't like your review, and the protectionists didn't like your review. Does anyone like your review?--ed. Chester thought it had many fine points.] I've outsourced my latest outsourcing post Practicing what I preach, instead of posting my latest mini-essay on offshore outsourcing here at danieldrezner.com, I've outsourced it to... GlennReynolds.com. Regular readers will recognize some of the material, but there's a lot of new stuff as well! Go check it out. Saturday, June 5, 2004
Now Wal-Mart is selling cheap gas!! Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution has a post showing that Minnesota and Maryland have enacted minimum price laws for gasoline, and are enforcing them against gas stations that are charging too low a price per gallon or are offering free coffee with gasoline as an inducement. In the case of Minnesota, many of the gas stations are attached to Wal-Marts. This got the attention of Brad DeLong, who agrees with Tabarrok. Brad has an excellent rebuttal to claims that Wal-Mart-type organizations merely undercut prices to create exploitable monopolies for the future, a la Microsoft:
Readers familiar with danieldrezner.com's position on Wal-Mart will chuckle at the last paragraph in DeLong's post:
Let me hear you say, "Amen!" What do Tony Blankley, George Soros, and Mahathir Mohammed have in common? They all excel at saying unbelievably stupid things. Let's start with Mohammed and Blankley -- both of them blame Soros for the Asian Financial Crisis. About Mahathir's anti-Semitism, click here and here. Blankley's statement is the new one. He said the following on the June 3rd Hannity & Colmes:
Mark Kleiman says this demonstrates "how much of the [Republican] campaign [against Soros] was based on simple anti-Semitism." Indeed, Vincent Morris of the New York Post reports that in a Republican National Comittee memo e-mailed to congressional staffers, "Republican lawmakers are encouraged to use 'floor speeches' and other opportunities to blast Soros, who has given millions of dollars to various groups to help defeat President Bush." (link via the Poor Man). OK, let's try to referee this: 1) Blankley is clearly an ass. As a Jew, I find that last bolded sentence repugnant. So I'll just nod my head at what Eugene Volokh said:
2) Kleiman's larger assertion rests on extremely shaky foundations -- it would be like blaming the entire Democratic party for anything idiotic Michael Moore said about the Bush administration. Furthermore, as Stephen Bainbridge points out, there's some evidence to support Blankley's claim that Soros accused the Jews of fomenting anti-Semitism. I have very mixed feelings on Soros. The man is and was a first-rate philanthropist. That, said, having read The Bubble of American Diplomacy, I've concluded that Soros is a political loon of the first order. It is ridiculously easy to attack George Soros without ever discussing his religion. 3) Finally, while Blankely was, to repeat, clearly way out of bounds, the Republican decision to go on the offensive against Soros is perfectly legit. He's dedicated large sums of money to attacking the Bush administration. According to the Post story, "Soros has said in interviews that he has concluded that ousting Bush is the most important thing he can do with his life." The trigger for the Hannity & Colmes discussion was Soros' statement comparing the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to the 9/11 attacks. In Bubble of American Diplomacy, Soros admits that he's become "quite rabid" in his political views. He's entered the political arena -- which means he's opened himself to political attacks. I can feel my chin growing already My pathetic quest to become the Jay Leno of the blogosphere continues [Leno? LENO??!! You mean Letterman, right?--ed. No, I mean Jay Leno's guest host phase. However, Bryan Curtis argues in Slate that even Letterman is trying to be Leno now.] I've guest-posted at the Volokh Conspiracy and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. And now, just to confirm the rumors, I'm taking over Glenn Reynolds' MSNBC blog for this week. [So who's next?--ed. Look into the computer screen, Mickey Kaus. You're getting very sleepy. Very sleepy indeed......] Open Reagan thread Readers are invited to comment on what they believe will be the most significant aspect of Reagan's legacy. UPDATE: Chicago residents, you'll get my take on Reagan on ABC7 News Sunday Morning at aroung 9:00 AM. A retraction Jack Shafer has a Slate piece pointing out that while the New York Times and 60 Minutes have issued retractions for stories about Iraqi WMD programs that leaned too heavily on Iraqi defectors provided by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, other media outlets have not been as forthcoming:
The good folks that put a fresh copy of danieldrezner.com on your computer screen every day have no fear of admitting error -- mostly because we're so used to screwing up. So, let me apologize/retract this April 21, 2003 post about Iraqi WMD that relied too heavily on reporting by the New York Times' Judith Miller -- who, as it turned out, relied way too heavily on Chalabi and his defectors. The story I linked to in that post was one of the stories the Times has since retracted. Sorry. Friday, June 4, 2004
A real triumph for outsourcing opponents Not often, but every once in a while, opponents of outsourcing manage to implement policy designed to thwart the subcontracting of tasks overseas. We here at danieldrezner.com feel that they should be congratulated for these efforts, as well as the transparently obvious economic benefits that such policy measures bring to our great country. So let's hear it for the state of California's anti-outsourcing procurement rules, which are having quite an effect on the state's efforts to rebuild the Bay Bridge. Jean-Paul Renaud of the Los Angeles Times reports:
$400 million? It's a good thing the state of California doesn't face a budget crunch or anything! Way to stop outsourcing!! Thanks to alert danieldrezner.com reader C.W. for the tip. UPDATE: Thanks to alert danieldrezner.com commentor gw, who points out that the Buy American Act is a federal law. One wonders, however, how the cost differential of 25% was determined as meeting the "unreasonable cost" standard. ANOTHER UPDATE: gw strikes again!! Here's the relevant link for an explanation of how Buy America affects steel. And here's a link to Michael Cabanatuan's San Francisco Chronicle story about the bridge, which has further details:
However, it appears that even California officials were temporarily confused by the provisions of the Buy America act:
Many thanks to gw for doing the cyberwork on this story. Venezuela update That Hugo Chavez and his Castro-lite policies sure are popular in Venezuala -- oh, wait, here's an interesting story by Andy Webb-Vidal of the Financial Times:
Voice of America reports that Chavez sain in a televised address that, "he is ready to face a recall referendum." Chavez's supporters might not be, according to the FT:
Be sure to check out this news analysis by Richard Brand of the Miami Herald as well. Chavez has been counted out before, so the successful petition drive hardly ensures his removal. Still, this is an encouraging sign. Economic news to cheer about The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released its May jobs report:
More than a million new jobs have been added to payrolls since the start of the calendar year. Here's a link to the BLS breakdown by job category. Funny thing -- in the service sectors thought to be most vulnerable to offshore outsourcing (financial activities, professional and business services) the number of payroll jobs are currently at their highest levels for the past 52 weeks. Thursday, June 3, 2004
June's books of the month The general interest book for June is David Brooks' latest work of comic sociology On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. [Hey, didn't Michael Kinsley pan it in the New York Times Book Review?--ed. It's true, every conservative's favorite liberal panned the book penned by every liberal's favorite conservative. However, much of this was due to Kinsley's overreliance on Sasha Issenberg's critique of Brooks in Philadelphia magazine. Noam Scheiber effectively deconstructed Issenberg's essay a few weeks ago:
Plus, Brooks takes great pains in On Paradise Drive to stress his reliance on the University of Michigan's prestigious Institute for Social Research for much of his data.] The book is chock full of observations regarding the shopping, working, traveling, and child-rearing habits of affluent Americans. However, the key theme in On Paradise Drive is that Frederick Jackson Turner's famous thesis that the closing of the American frontier was a signal moment in American history is a load of bollocks. The reason is that for Americans, the frontier is the future. America is a unique country because Americans live in the future -- while many in the world are rooted in the past. Brooks gets at this through his usual mix of trenchant observation and witty verbiage. The best compliment I can pay the book is the following -- after spending the past few years wading through tome after tome trying to get at America's unique place in the world, On Paradise Drive actually gets it. The international relations book is inspired by Greg Djerejian's complaint about the dearth of big ideas. The demand for theories to explain post-9/11 state of world politics is high -- so it might be a good idea to look at the man behind the successful Cold War strategy of containment. That would be George Kennan's American Diplomacy: 1900-1950. This collection of Kennan lectures includes his famous Foreign Affairs essay "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," which where containment was first articulated as a doctrine.* What's striking in looking over Kennan again is that much of his analysis was predicated on what we in the IR biz refer to as a "second image" theory. That is to say, Kennan's theory of Soviet behavior was rooted in a explanation of Soviet domestic politics rather than an analysis of the international distribution of power. Kennan had it easy, however -- all he had to do was explain the domestic politics of one country. Whoever comes up with the big idea this time around may need to explain the domestic politics of an entire region -- the Middle East. Go check both of them out. *OK, Kennan's 1946 Long Telegram was the first articulation -- but "Sources" was the public version of the Long Telegram. The comparative advantage of American celebrities Most American celebrities will do whatever they can to stay in the media spotlight. In recent years, this has meant participating in reality TV shows, either of their own making (Jessica Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith) or of others (Celebrity Mole, Celebrity Fear Factor, Celebrity Boxing, The Simple Life, etc.). On a regular basis, social critics bemoan the manifest craving of fame that engulfs the United States and its celebrity tabloid culture. And it's undeniably true that there's much to be mocked. But in defense of American celebrities, they're willing to go to great lengths to stay in the limelight. Unlike, apparently, those from the country of Colombia, according to the Dan Molinski of the Associated Press:
Could you picture someone like Kathy Griffin begging off a celebrity show because of mosquitoes? Hell no! So raise your glass to American celebrities -- the indefatigable cockroaches of the mediasphere! Open Tenet thread CIA director George Tenet has resigned. The New York Times' David Strout reports on the unusual nature of the White House announcement:
NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez considers (but dismisses) anti-Bush political motivations. Readers are invited to speculate on the causes and implications of Tenet's departure. My quick answers are a) the devastating portrayal of Tenet in Woodward's Plan of Attack, and b) nothing significant.
Outsourcing and insourcing the friendly skies The Washington Post's Sara Kehaulani Goo has a story on how the outsourcing phenomenon is affecting aircraft maintenance. Turns out to be a two-way street:
The article also highlights a genuinely worrisome regulatory gap, however: "For example, airline maintenance workers in other countries do not have to undergo mandatory drug and alcohol testing or criminal background checks as they do in the United States." If I'm a terrorist wishing to strike fear into American travelers, this is an obvious loophole to exploit. To be fair, the Transportation Safety Administration is planning on promulgating regulations this month to deal with this loophole -- I just hope they're implemented soon. UPDATE: If you're interested in the topic, be sure to check out the Discovery Channel's "The Other Side of Outsourcing" this evening -- it's a documentary of Tom Friedman's trip to Bangalore. 10:00 PM, ET. A new challenger for Judith Butler's mantle For some reason, I found myself clicking around the more obscure parts of the blogosphere late one night when I stumbled upon Chun the Unavoidable, a self-described "committed egalitarian" who allows that even uninformed Americans "can vote, marry, and even procreate here in America, and I see no compelling reason to change this right away." Chun had discovered Sissy Willis' blog, an irrefutable example of "a genuine working-class Bush supporter." Chun, who's quite the leftist, was unclear about how to respond to what -- to him -- was an absurd political position for a good prole to adopt. Before I quote from Chun's conflicted response to Sissy, let's take a brief detour into the fascinating world of bad academic writing. The journal Philosophy and Literature sponsors an annual bad writing contest, which is usually won by an academic. For example, Judith Butler famously won the 1998 prize by penning this memorable sentence:
Why this aside? Because this paragraph of Chun's response to the tangible existence of Sissy Willis should be a nominee for the 2004 bad writing award:
Somewhere, Judith Butler is feeling this vague sense on unease, wondering whether she still remains the densest prose stylist of them all. Be sure to read Sissy's response to Chun. UPDATE: several commenters have suggested that Chun consciously obfuscates his prose in an effort to punk unsuspecting bloggers. That had actually occurred to me, but is pretty much irrelevant. I know few people who could consciously write a paragraph that dense, and I hang around with a lot of high-falutin' academic types (readers are invited to try and compose something that dense). So, a hat tip to Chun for consciously or unconsciously possessing the ability to compose such dreck. Wednesday, June 2, 2004
The Onion takes on outsourcing Thank God The Onion didn't write this before my Foreign Affairs piece. It's shorter, funnier, and (particularly the last point) hits home. Woo-hoo! I'm typing this in DC -- here for a board meeting of the Center for Global Development's Ranking the Rich program. Trips like this used to mean that blogging was out - but not any longer. I'm the proud new owner of a Dell Latitude X300 with wifi capabilities. So, I'm typing this post out at the Starbucks on DuPont Circle [Which Starbucks at DuPont Circle?--ed. The one next door to KramerBooks.] My reaction to this is pretty much identical to my reaction when I installed Blacklist -- it's awesome, baby!! Thanks to one Jacob Levy for helping me figure out the whole wi-fi deal. Does U.S. foreign policy suffer from an ideas deficit? Greg Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch seems to think the answer is yes:
In the past three years, there have actually been a fair number of big-think books from very disparate points of view out there on grand strategy -- John Mearsheimer, Michael Mandelbaum, Charles Kupchan, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Kagan, Joseph Nye, John Lewis Gaddis, countless others. My readers are invited to suggest which article/book they think most closely approximates the Kennan mantle. Responding to the feminist critique Trish Wilson -- guest blogging at Feministe -- is disturbed by my survey of media and blogs:
I posted a brief comment to her blog about why I hired Amanda ("[S]he was one of the best students in an undergraduate class I had previously taught. She was assigned tasks that any undergraduate RA would have been assigned. Gender was not a factor in the division of labor.") UPDATE: click here for Butler's response to Wilson. Here is Wilson's response:
Another female blogger echoes this sentiment:
Another blogger who goes by Pinko Feminist Hellcat concurred: "Men simply don't see us. And when we talk about anything besides politics, we are 'journalers'." A few thoughts: 1) Hell yes, the survey is flawed. All surveys are flawed. I was quite blunt in outlining the flaws in the post, so I'm not sure where Wilson thinks I'm saying this is the perfect source of data. 2) Disturbingly, the only other time I blogged about gender and blogs in the past was... er... about three months ago. 3) Wilson has a valid point in saying that "the same small number of top tier bloggers get[ting] the usual publicity." This was one of the core hypotheses underlying the paper Henry Farrell and I are co-authoring -- in terms of both links and traffic, blogs display a power law distribution (See Clay Shirky for the data to support this assertion). As a result, the top blogs absorb the lion's share of attention. The media survey supports this conjecture. This means is that it's tough for anyone to crack the top tier of blogs -- regardless of gender. 4) Wilson seems to think the results are skewed because there is a narrow definition of "political" blogs. Here's the thing, though -- my survey didn't ask for the respondent's favorite political blogs -- just their favorite ones. Maybe the respondents have an equally narrow definition of politics, but it was not conditioned by the survey question. 5) The feminist critique did make me wonder if there was any significant difference in the female responses in contrast to the overall response. So I went back to the data to see if there was any appreciable difference in response by gender. Here are the top 10 favorite blogs of the women who responded:
There are a few changes -- Kaus disappears entirely, and Sullivan falls from first to second - but names on this list look awfully familiar. 6) Finally, Wilson seems to be confusing normative and positive analysis. In her post, she's simultaneously upset about two facts: a) feminist blogs are being ignored by the mainstream media; b) I posted survey results suggesting that feminist blogs are being ignored by the mainstream media. I can understand her normative disapproval with the first point (though I respectfully disagree with the extent and source of the problem). I'm a bit flummoxed by her reaction to the second point, which is intended to describe the way the world is, not the way it ought to be. Don't blame the messenger. To be fair, UPDATE: Just for the record, my take on the tenor of most of the comments to this post is akin to Ezra: "I've never seen a bunch of commentors so totally destroy their argument by embodying that which they're denying." Doha update Guy de Jonquières provides a mildly encouraging update in the Financial Times on the state of Doha round talks:
That said, it looks like any deal will be modest in its achievments:
Tuesday, June 1, 2004
How do young women react to political scandals? Back in February I blogged about the rumors of John Kerry having an affair, the possible impact on his presidential campaign. Although I was somewhat ambivalent about whether it was a bloggable topic, and I quickly posted the subsequent flat-out denials by all involved, I still feel a sense of queasiness about the whole episode. So in fairness, here's a link to Alexandra Polier's New York cover story on being at the eye of the media storm, and her subsequent efforts to find out how she got sucked into it. The key graf:
Read the whole thing. David Frum and Matt Drudge come off as appropriately contrite. Wesley Clark spinmeister Chris Lehane and The Sun’s Brian Flynn come off as officious sleazebags. Noam Scheiber and Mickey Kaus have further thoughts on Polier's Kerry experience (links via Glenn Reynolds) There's an interesting Cutler is a bit younger than Polier, but not by much. They're both attractive young women who have plugged themselves into the worlds of politics and the media. They both became the center of media attention. They have both capitalized to some extent on their media notoriety. However, Cutler's reaction to the whole brouhaha has been much more... enthusiastic than Polier, according to the Washington Post's Richard Leiby:
So as I said, there's an interesting Readers are hereby invited to do so. UPDATE: A few of the commenters misread a poor word choice of mine. I was not trying to equate Polier's behavior with Cutler. It was the similarity of their positions, contrasted with the divergence in their behavior, that I find so interesting. Sorry for the confusion. ANOTHER UPDATE: James Joyner is probably correct in his analysis:
I'd amend #3 to include "people accused of having sex with powerful people." |
Politics, economics, globalization, academia, pop culture... all from a
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