Sweden after the Swedish Model

Dennis Prager has had a Liberal (Liberty seeking) member of parliament and a professor of economics from Sweden on his show today. Mauricio Rojas fled Chile after the fall of Allende and made his way to the socialist paradise. He is however not a socialist (equity seeking) today. A member of the Swedish Liberal Party, he is also a senior advisor at a free market think tank, Timbro. He has written a book, Sweden after the Swedish Model. The book can be downloaded from a link at this site. He argues that the Swedish Model, Folkhemmet (folk + home), was an adaptation to rapid industrialization. However, once the process was compete, the growing costs of the system was a burden which threatened Sweden significantly. The resolution to this crisis was to shift from socialism to liberalism.

As I have discussed on this blog, Germany is confronting the same problem, but has proved so far unwilling to facing up to real change. It may prove that the intigration of East Germany will delay this shift by a generation.

More Against the Appeasers

I seem to be collecting links to articles and arguments against those who embrace the "its our fault" theory of terrorism. Here is another fine contribution to my collection. Tony Parkinson writes in the Australian paper The Age.

The "Left-Wing Professor" as Bi-Polar Intellectual

Catching up on my Austin Bay, I find an analysis of a problem I've mentioned recently that really seems to hit the mark. My last several posts include two on academics who seem to wander out of their element and get lost. But Bay discusses Juan Cole who has some grounding in the field. Bay offers a different kind of analysis and I wonder to what extent it applies more broadly. He writes:

"Cole exemplifies the 'left-wing professor' as bi-polar intellectual. When he’s at the professorial pole, he’s a knowledgeable person. Cole understands tribal relationships in Iraq and has a detailed feel for Middle Eastern history. When his “left wing” pole takes control he’s a reactionary defeatist and a sad, antiquated ideologue. His utterly wrong, knee-jerk post about Jenin and 9/11 could be forgiven with a genuine retraction and an apology –yes, everyone makes mistakes– and Cole appears to have issued a “sort of” retraction. However, Cole’s call for “oppo research” on Kramer (really a call for mass personal attacks) is uncivil and inexcuseable. Let’s add intellectually dishonest– and a sure sign of intellectual defeat."

Point of explanation, Cole seems to have argued that the attackresponse1 were in responce to the Jenin incident, despite the fact that Jenin took place at the end of March, 2002. When called on it by Kramer, he called for an investigation of Kramer.

My operating theory up to now has been that academics are accustomed to being the smartest person in the room, and have just assumed that they were qualified to discuss policy, strategy, and the root causes of any conflict regardless of academic specialty. The case of Cole as discussed by Bay offers an alternative theory and it may well apply to others as well.

Bay on the purpose of Terrorism

Austin Bay has a nice piece in the Washington Times on terrorism as a means of warfare. It also includes a good analysis of the motives behind Al Qaeda's use thereof. Its a nice antidote to the "its our fault" crowd.

Speaking of Austin Bay, the current post on his blog about property rights in Africa is also very good.

Its Always Our Fault!

Hugh Hewitt links to an excellent piece by Gerard Baker which demonstrates how effective the "its our fault" argument is, because it lacks any conditions under which it cannot be used. Its important to distinguish the "its out fault" argument from those which acknowledge that American or Western policies have resulted in specific counter-policies. The "its our fault" arguements arise because those who make them are so hostile to the polcies made that they agree with the motivation of the terrorists, if not their means. No doubt those who make such arguments would prefer a world where the Salafi jihadists would engage in dramatic street theater and Imperialism would die away and everyone would live in a utopian enviroment where it would become obvious that the Salafi jihad is really just a social-democratic movement. That's why so many in the "its our fault" camp make such an effort to ignore evidence that the Salafi jihadists are not motivated by the same things that motivate them. The "its our fault" really wants to believe that terrorism is caused by an anti-imperialism and will melt away when the mean old imperialists tend only to their domestic people with social justice, &c, &c, &c.

The Ten Commandments as a Fetish

Very interesting post on the fetishization of a text.

C18-L and Bastile Day

Whereas the interdisciplinary eighteenth century academic mailing list was surly on the 4th, they are downright pleasant on the 14th. Comments do not tend to dismissal, criticism, or irony-seeking, but reflect the best places to be and see the festivities. Warming to the French Revolution seems to me to require a greater effort than the American, given its radicalism and the measures required to defend this radicalism, one must conclude that this change of tone reflects either a radical politics or an anti-Americanism.

I should perhaps also remark on the comments made after the London bombings of the 7th. Academics have a tendency to be educated amatures when they wander outside of their chosen field. Within their field they know the literature, the perspectives and approaches of approaching their topic, and are aware of where the pitfall lay in interpretation and understanding their subject. Suffice it to say that literary scholars (in theory interdisciplinary, in practice literary) are not prepared to perform a serious analysis of the causes of terrorism or the motives of terrorists. The do not know the literature, are unaware of the debates between the perspectives on the subject, and are unaware of the difficulties peculiar to the topic. As such, they are vulnerable to any argument they are disposed to agree with, and perhaps worse, misinterpreting an argument to match their dispositions being entirely unaware of points and evidence proposed even within a peice to the contrary of the argument desired by the amature.

Certainly amatures can have interesting things to say about a subject. General John Abizaid might well have some interesting observations on character in Austen, theme in Defoe, or the popular reception of Addison. But whether he knows what he's talking about or is off the mark is hard to determine unless you know more about the subject than he does. Somehow when it comes to contemporary politics, none of this is thought to apply. Articles are cited (and misinterpreted) and opinions offered without regard for the normal scholarly concerns with expertice.

Worse Than Watergate !?

Chuck Schumer can be seen here with a visual aid at a press conference with the title "Worse than Watergate." Granted the phrase has its origin with Chris Matthews, but who ever has the bad sense to use this phrase demonstrates a stunning ignorance of history. Schumer's venality deminishes the Senate and trivializes what Philip Agee did and leaks of this kind. For Rove to give background on who it was who arranged to sent Wilson to Africa (Wilson claimed it was Cheney, one in a series of truth-challenged statements) and identify someone who was introduced at cocktail parties as a CIA official and who drove to Langely is so trivial that a comparison to using the "plumbers" for any purpose is like comparing the casualties of Iraq to those of Vietnam as if there were some kind of parity.

The WSJ has the real deal here.

Bad News for Liberalism

Daniel Drezner has a link to a TNR article which contends (in the terminology of this blog) that socialists (equity seekers) and conservatives (traditional order seekers) are squeezing out liberals (liberty seekers) as socialists and conservatives, now in greater numbers (thanks to gerrymandering) forge alliances across the populist (William Jennings Bryan) axis, aka the illiberal axis. More and more, I think, the parties will view conservatives or socialists as their base, and attempt to woo liberals over to their side, rather than the more traditional sense that Republicans were a hybrid liberal-conservative party while the Democrats were a liberal-socialist party. Liberals may find more and more that thay lay outside either party. If the country really is more liberal than it is not (its founding is quintessentially liberal) then one of two things will eventually happen. Either a third party will rise up and replace one of the parties, or one of the parties will lurch back toward the liberal pole and establish electoral dominance until the other party does likewise.

Big weekend

My weekend starts in about 30 minutes, much adjusted from my normal schedule, but a wedding and reunion activities await. I will be spending several days at the Lake of the Ozarks, so I will link to Lileks' site and the 1972 add campaign for the area. Some of the sites advertised are the same, most have changed. The giant cat eyed fang-fish are still menacing hapless fishermen.

Hitchens hits the mark again

Christopher Hitchens is right on in his latest "Fighting Words." I seem to remember posting on these lines sometime after the occupation set in and this spring, but I don't recall when nor does searching my site yield much (but my site search doesn't find things I know are on there, like my previous post).

In any event, too much force protection is counter productive. As I though I had written, the purpose of the military is to carry out the political will of the country, and this requires taking risks and sacrifice. See what Hitch has to say.

Academics and the 4th

C18-L, an academic e-mailing list which deals with the eighteenth century in an interdisciplinary fashion has been the site of some very particular kinds of 4th of July messages. Using their search page and the keyword "American", one can get a sense of what at least some academics think of America. Contributions begin with Frederick Douglas', "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?" Continues to a Johnson quote, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes." And then from Johnson's Life of Milton, "It has been observed that they who most loudly clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it." Finally a swipe at Athenian democracy. One listmember did offer this, "Better a flawed liberty than none at all." So one can conclude that the cause of liberty is not entirely foriegn to academics who claim a special interest in the eighteenth century.

These people presume to "teach" young men and women.

Kuhn as esoteric teacher of secrets

I've been seeing Kuhn and his paradigm shift popping up in educational writing a lot recently. I haven't seen it this much since the business gurus got a hold of it in the mid-ninties. Both of them got Kuhn so wrong (or so simplistically a child could have professed the same conclusions) I strongly suspect these education and business experts have never actually read Kuhn.

Here are two examples:
Constructivism, Education, Science, and Technology in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, V. 29(3), Fall 2003
Bersin's essay in the San Diego Union Tribune.

In the first example, Moses A. Boudourides makes a case of special pleading for constructivism, but like so much on constructivism, really just states the commonplace and imagines it to be profound. The author invokes Kuhn in order to invoke the profound by association. Khun is rejecting the positivist view of science, but Boudourides performs a bait and switch and substitutes realism for his bogeyman. Unfortunatly, his constructivism is just a re-statement of the realist critique of positivism. Indeed, if you go to the Radical Academy (a realist archive, resource, and encyclopedia) and search the terms constructivist or constructivism, neither result gets a hit. Realists pay no attention to constructivists, because constructivists have little if anything to say that realists haven't already said. Yet, realists are attacked, though their mouthes are stuffed with positivism. Such authors and perhaps constructivists of all kinds, must attack realism because it deflects the observation that constructivists are just putting the old wine of the realist epistomology into the new ontological bottles with out improving them at all. Indeed seperation of some realist ideas from the rest of the body of realism does a harm, and the attacks on realism as a philosophy is dishonest. What is a choice irony in Boudourides' article is his favorable mentions of real positivists like Wittgenstein. Obviously the constructivists have no idea who their friends and enemies are, nor do they understand Khun. So Boudourides takes Khun's attack on the positive view of science, and re-states it, with the help of positivists, as an attack on realism, when in fact Khun is making a realist argument. A nice little piece by George Hein, the Constructivist Museum, makes a similar mistake, attacking the name of realism, but desribing the ideas of idealism. Indeed, he cites Plato. Hein goes on to confuse Lockean empiricism with a radical deviation, Watsonian behaviorism, but all of this leads me to no greater conclusion than the constructivists don't know their history of ideas. (Or more precisely, they know one fact very well, that in the middle ages there was a notion called realism which is contrasted to nominalism, which holds that when I say green I am refering to a real greenness that exists without objects, perception, or observers, that it is a Platonic Form. But finding people who will argue for Platonic Forms and will argue for medieval philosophical realism, in contrast to most other uses of the term realism to refer to Aristotle's philosphy, and those which are derived from it, expand on it, or otherwise based upon it. Bait and switch!)

The second example, Bersin's essay in the Union-Tribune, seems to suggest that it was Khun who recognized that Copernicus introduced a new way of understanding the heavens, but that would need to be reconciled with De Revolutionibus being placed on the index of forbidden books in 1616 as a result of Galileo's additional argument for the heliocentric theory. Modern science often teaches its own history only in terms of what older scientists got right, rather than what their complete work was. Modern science points to Copernicus' heliocentricism but ignores his continued reliance on epicycles (which last until Kepler can replace them with the ellipse). This is what Kuhn was talking about. The revolution of Copernicus (and how convienient that Kuhn wrote a book specifically treating this subject, beyond his more familiar Structure of Scientific Revolutions with all its talk of paradigm shifts) was not just a shift from geo-centric to helio-centric, but of aristotelian concern with the primacy of observation (does the theory describe the observations) with a neo-platonic concern with aesthetics of symmetry (is the theory elegant), with the fact that the theory overthrown was very well established, so much so that churchmen failed to distinguish Ptolemy from Christian doctrine, Ptolemy being taught to them by the Church in university. Further, the old theory made sence with the classical physics of the day. If the earth is the center of the universe because "earth" is the heaviest of the four elements and has "fallen" to its location, we can now explain why objects fall when released. If the earth is a mere planet which is in motion around a larger object, why do objects fall at all? [Summon Newton, please.] What Kuhn did, indeed the heart of his achievement was not to take notice of the fact that Copernicus had a new theory. That's not only wrong, but so simple minded that everyone knew it then, and children know it now. What Kuhn tells us is that each one of these supporting ideas which are a part of Ptolemaic geo-centricism, the growing unwieldliness of matching the theory to the observations amd the accumulation of epicylces upon epicylces upon epicycles to "save the appearances", requiring, Ockham-like a less complicated theory. He generalizes to say that when science starts having to "save the appearances" by making the theory cumbersome, you have a problem. What happened with Copernicus was that the new theory suddenly through into doubt other theories (why do things fall) which had not been otherwise in need of new theories. That's why its a revolution. No one thing is changed, a whole boat-load of things are ultimatly changed.

I'm a bit on a rail against Kuhn simplifiers and misinterpreters, so I may be a bit hard on old Bersin. As an introduction to a piece on education, Khun is fine, it is the summary of his argument that rubs me the wrong way. Of course just how applicable Kuhn is depends on just how revolutionary Bersin wants to be. Is he changing one thing that's already obvious to experts inside the profession? [Bersin was an outsider when he became superintendent.] Siegfried Engelmann certainly thinks so. (link here, scroll down past the Bersin article). My own sense is that Bersin, who was U.S. attorney of the Southern District of California until 1998, absorbed the earlier Kuhnophilia when it ran through the business world as the latest fad. As such, Bersin might well have been accustomed only to the most superficial interpretation of Kuhn.

Does Bersin call for changes not just from geo-centrism to helio-centrism, but further ground his challenge in terms of all the supporting changes in ideas do that his "revolution" isn't superficial, but creates change all over the system at many, many key points? Bersin challenges a species of superficial change, what GE's Jack Welch called "superficial congeniality." If what Bersin means by this is that education must abandon its faddishness, and focus on maximizing productivity (which I take to mean annual yearly progress) does it therefore follow that we just speak about the priority of productivity and ask of "every program [...] and every reform: does it improve student achievement?" Or does he propose (or will the logic of this thinking produce) radical changes in education which will break the many monopolies which strangle student performance and effective teaching? Will there be competing educational philosophies appealing to parents in an eviroment of real choice, in which the state and the collaition of teacher's colleges and professional organizations will give up their monopolies (or be forced to do so) in the name of student achievment?

I understand other kinds of reforms could be implimented, but his invocation of "harnessing self-interest" is so Smithian, being the formula of the invisible hand, and his mention of "flexibility, competition, incentives, effeciency, and innovation" also spells a regard for capitalism and markets that suggests at least the direction of reform I have proposed.

But so much of the essay sounds like the kind of bussiness Kuhnism which is just empty. I also find so much to disagree with in his analysis. For example, he says that faddism is the paradigm of the schools, but I would contend there is a system of competing, rival paradigms of which none has dominance, so that like some European multi-party parliament, no one can govern without the approval of other factions. This is why every school mission statement sounds like its got something for everyone. A little rigor, a dash self-esteem, a teaspoon of existential development, and sound hard discipline, except when it might injure someone's self-esteem, and so on. Bersin fails to understand that our system "is immune to harnessing self-interest" because our system matured in the 1930's when "self-interest" meant 1929 and the market crash, and technocratic solutions run by a brain trust (read: party apparchniks) would apply the princples of George Counts and his latter day incarnations like Alfie Kohn. Some of what Bersin says suggests he has too much bought into this kind of thinking to imagine he is really prepared for a genuine paradigm shift. I end up expecting what I would expect from those business reformers who spouted Kuhn a decade ago, little if anything. Certainly no revolution. We'll see what happens as Bersin takes over as California's state secretary of education.

Fighting Poverty in Africa

There are plenty of good intentions out there, but I don't expect much in the way of results, no matter what is spent. We've been trying various strategies for improving things in Africa for a long time, but without the desired success. We finally seem to be at a tipping point regarding South American economic growth and prosperity, but there are many more advantages to work with there. I'm certainly willing to try new things, make a big push, and so forth, but I also would hope those who support African assistance would understand that some will be skeptical and might want to allocate resources elsewhere given the track record of aid to Africa.

Computer Fixed

My main computer had gradually gotten eaten up by spyware. I had run some anti-spyware programs, and that stopped pop-ups and some other problems, but Explorer and Outlook were a mess and didn't run properly. My brother, who had clued me in to the earlier spyware clean-up tools told me Microsoft is running a spyware beta, and he's been running it. I tried it and Outlook and IE run like a champ again. Danke Bruder! Its payback for the excellent drain clearing advice I gave him two weeks ago.

Why not a loyal opposition?

Jay Rosen has some interesting thoughts about an exchange between Alan Feuer's alter-ego "T.R." (this reporter) and Bob Franken of CNN. Feuer's book is a remembered tale, not hard journalism. As such, Franken says the story is not wholly accurate, but mostly. He clarifies. The details can be found on Rosen's J-School blog, Press Think. Rosen discusses the skepticism of journalists and the Franken quote (in clarification) that "When I’m reporting, I am a citizen of the world."

I will make several observations from the perspective of my salon: skepticism doesn't mean sustained disbelief in the face of contrary evidence, and the press needs to learn the theory of the loyal opposition.

Journalists seem to frequently mistake skepticism for incredulity. Putting aside philosophical skepticism (which argues that we cannot know anything reliably) journalists seem to argue for a professional skepticism. The most common of these is scienticfic scepticism, which holds that ideas should be regarded as false until subjected to the scientific method, generally by reproducable results. Of course any discipline with a method of seperating truth from falsehood can argue a professional skepticism. Historians have a method for interpreting documents to seperate the true from the false (we might say the reliable from the unreliable, but we agreed to put philosophical skepticism aside). Such a method must be a critical method capable of satisfying skepticism by revealing what is. (Let's also put aside academic skepticism, and acknowledge any work will be open to criticism because the consultation of this or that source will better nuance any work.) Much of journalism seems to proceed without any critical method at all. Some of it consists of reportage, some of punditry, and some retelling of the spin of some interested party. Reportage is fine for the local fire at the lumber mill. Started at 2:50 AM, firemen at the scene at 3:14, three alarm, such and such vehicles present, time spent fighting the fire, any specicial techniques or devices, and so on. Punditry is naught but opinion, sometimes learned, sometimes not. Its never news, its always commentary. Acting as the outlet for someone's spin is just substituting someone else's opinion for your own (or finding someone else to voice your opinion for you.)

One of the criticisms of balanced reporting is that it often relies on nothing more sophisticated than the principles of reportage, tell both sides. Typically this tells us next to nothing. Is either side credible? Can either statement be falsified? If both statements appear true, how can they be reconciled? Suppose one wants to cover the Debra Burlingame criticism of the International Freedom Center at the WTC site. Like most contraversies, its a conflict of values and world-views. We might begin by testing to verify that both sides have a verifiable set of facts, or when discussing each other, have the same set of facts. Once we have that established, we are left with two different sets of values and world-views. One side, the Freedom Center consultants, argue that 9-11 was caused by injustice, and that the cause of injustice is earlier injustice, because as descreibed in Uncle Tom's Cabin, injustice harms both the perpetrator and the victim of injustice. One of the great arguments of the abolitionists was that slavery turns good people into cruel masters by the corruption of power over other people. Critics argue that responsibility need not be so diffuse as this. A specific event has specific as well as general causes. I am assuming that this second argument is the more common and needs less explanation. It sees a proper memorial as focusing just on the WTC events and its immediate causes, and these other, broader causes belong elsewhere or nowhere. Rather than just giving both sides a money quote and calling yourself done, or worse yet, depicting one side as sensible and rational and the other side as crazed lunatics, is terribly unsatisfying, because it explains little or nothing.

As a historian, I assume everyone is rational, until they prove otherwise. So when I see some action that strikes me as odd, my first instinct is to understand what set of ideas the person has organized to result in such a view of things. As such arguments always (or nearly so) come down to a set of assumptions and a method of organizing those assumptions. Thus I have a method that forces me to judge everyone to be sensible people until the prove otherwise (such as "my neighbor's dog told me to kill blondes and their boyfriends.") I don't have to agree with them, only understand that with a certain set of assumptions, their conclusions are reasonable. For example, I contend that farming is difficult on mountainsides because of erosion. If someone believes that the mountain has a spirit, and the spirit kills the crops, its a reasonable explanation of the effects based on an assumed cause (animism). If such a person asks the river spirit for permission to cross the river, they have a world-view that leads to a rational approach to such problems as where to farm and how to avoid drowning. Again, I have my own solutions to these problems which are based on an alternate set of assumptions. This is the difference between "I'm right and you're a reasonable person who is in error," and "What are you, an idiot?"

If journalists are going to be able to cover people in such a way that they recognize themselves rather than the MSM characature of who they are supposed to be, they need a reliable method of discovering what is and what is not. When I was in grad school, we had a required six hours of historiography. In one of the two semesters was an MA student in the J-school who was impressed at how much we spent thinking about our method, various sub-methods, and analyzing and criticizing them. Questions of how we selected good interpretations and good method from those that were poor or mis-applied were important to us as professionals in training. Other contacts I have had with people in J-schools or as practicing journalists confirm this sense that journalists lack a method and don't give it much thought. They offer some good reasons why such a thing is missing, and its hard to argue with the speed of the news cycle in short-circuting any in depth analysis. My own suspition is that if a method were in place it would not slow down the news nearly as fast as it would take veteran journalists to stop and begin applying a method now. Learning would slow things down. Apllication of an already learned method would have a much smaller effect.

Loyal Opposition will have to wait.

Just How Liberal is the EU?

Gerald Braunberger tries to make the case that the EU is not all regulation, but includes a liberal (free markets, less government) componant as well. I'm dubious. Its true that there is a free market principle at work in regards to eliminating barriers to trade between polities, but liberalism seems to end there, and give way to socialism afterwards.

News Outlets Gets Job Numbers Backwards

KTLA's website is typical in reporting in a larger font that only seventy-eight thousand jobs were added in May, and in a smaller font that the unemployment rate is down to 5.1%. As the unemployment rate slips, it simply must get harder and harder to keep the job creation numbers up. This seems to go unmentioned no matter where I see or hear this news reported. Part of the problem is that no one knows where structural unemployment lay, and so we can't tell whether job creation slips because were are approaching structural unemployment, or because of poor economic performance. Putting the news in the organization "job creation low" and "unemployment rate very low" ends up being at the very least a dubious misreading. Try this headline: "Unemployment lowest since September 2001, job creation slows."

Can the rich, famous save Social Security?

So asks USA Today. What fame has to do with it, I cannon guess, except to say that USA Today headline writers assume fame and wealth are coincident. The plan discussed by Dennis Cauchon, who has 982 hits coupled with "social security" at Google, suggesting he's their man on the subject.

The plan discussed proposes that the payroll tax cap be removed and that benefits be capped. Such a tax raises $100 billion dollars a year (according to USA Today, CATO offers a figure of $541 billion over five years which throws in productivity growth and inflation which reflect a higher burden in the later years) but would probably only extend the life of the program's solvency by less than seven years. This is because, an economics professor I had often said, there are more of us on Main Street than there are on Wall Street. The demographic problem is huge, a shift from 3 workers per retiree to 2 workers. Taxing the very wealthy won't fix the problem, just dent it.

My own program to reform social security includes removing the payroll cap, but is also part of a full privatization plan which means that only the employer side of the tax is collected, and is used to pay the transition costs. [My plan is to privatize personal accounts fully, invest the trust fund surplus in the stock market (rather than T-bills where it is now), and removing the cap on the payroll tax.]

The problem with the proposal in USA Today, which the piece clearly acknowledges, is that collecting this $100 billion without paying any benefit in return risks turning the program into a welfare benefit, along with the stigma which the pension/insurance model was supposed to avoid. The article quotes the socialist Economic Policy Institute's Micheal Ettinger in opposition to this plan. It may at first, strike one to question why the socialist would oppose such an obvious income redistribution program, but as EPI writing makes clear, they are aware that anti-poverty programs that get stigmatized, get cut. In America, income redistribution must provide handsome benefits to the middle class. The same is true in Europe, which is also saddled with generous middle-class benefits. Everyone pays, everyone gets, that is the mantra of the modern socialist.

Indeed, its hard to see where support from such a proposal could come from. Advocates for the proposal mentioned claim they cannot find a base of support.