Persimmons

Photo: Eva de Guzman

Income Inequality in OECD Countries Is Growing

The gap between rich and poor has grown in more than three-quarters of OECD countries over the past two decades, according to a new OECD report.

OECD’s Growing Unequal? finds that the economic growth of recent decades has benefitted the rich more than the poor. In some countries, such as Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway and the United States, the gap also increased between the rich and the middle-class.

Countries with a wide distribution of income tend to have more widespread income poverty. Also, social mobility is lower in countries with high inequality, such as Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, and higher in the Nordic countries where income is distributed more evenly.

Launching the report in Paris, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría warned of the dangers posed by inequality and the need for governments to tackle it. “Growing inequality is divisive. It polarises societies, it divides regions within countries, and it carves up the world between rich and poor. Greater income inequality stifles upward mobility between generations, making it harder for talented and hard-working people to get the rewards they deserve. Ignoring increasing inequality is not an option.”...

Atlas of Hidden Water

Awesome. BLDGBLOG:

An "atlas of hidden water" has been created to reveal where the world's freshwater aquifers really lie. "The hope," New Scientist reports, "is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world."
This prospective hydro-geopolitical legislation currently includes a "draft Convention on transboundary aquifers."

"What the UNESCO map reveals," New Scientist adds, "is just how many aquifers cross international borders. So far, the organisation has identified 273 trans-boundary aquifers: 68 in the Americas, 38 in Africa, 155 in Eastern and Western Europe and 12 in Asia." One of these is the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, whose waters are nearly a million years old.
According – somewhat oddly – to the International Atomic Energy Agency:

The ancient system’s massive reserves, estimated at 375,000 cu km of water (equivalent to about 500 years of Nile River discharge), are confined deep inside the earth’s underground chambers – staggered, tiered, and pooled beneath the sands of the Sahara Desert, oasis settlements, wadis (dry riverbeds that contain water only during times of heavy rain), small villages, towns, and large cities.

Spreading the Wealth

If we were more of a high-falutin' elitist culture, we might reflect more on the expressions we're so quick to deride. Daniel Little asks,

...why would any middle- or low-income American object to the principle that the most affluent should assume slightly more of the burden? Is it that they imagine (fictionally) that this is where they will wind up eventually, and they won’t want the bigger tax burden when they get there? Do they give credence to the trickle-down theory that got this whole slide towards greater income inequality going in the first place in 1980? Plainly most people are deeply offended by the excesses of executive compensation that are now so visible; is that an impulse towards socialism? Or is it simply that they’re alienated by the label that is being thrown at this fairly ordinary tax proposal — which certainly gives a lot of credence to the irrational power of negative image marketing?

UPDATE:

From McClatchy:
UPDATE 2:
Hertzberg:

...For decades, ["socialism"] served mainly as a cudgel with which conservative Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson of socialism for advocating guaranteed health care for the aged and the poor, the implication was that Medicare and Medicaid would presage a Soviet America. Now that Communism has been defunct for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of socialism no longer packs its old punch. “At least in Europe, the socialist leaders who so admire my opponent are upfront about their objectives,” McCain said the other day—thereby suggesting that the dystopia he abhors is not some North Korean-style totalitarian ant heap but, rather, the gentle social democracies across the Atlantic, where, in return for higher taxes and without any diminution of civil liberty, people buy themselves excellent public education, anxiety-free health care, and decent public transportation.

The Republican argument of the moment seems to be that the difference between capitalism and socialism corresponds to the difference between a top marginal income-tax rate of 35 per cent and a top marginal income-tax rate of 39.6 per cent.

Slothful

Hitchens...

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

On Torture

The book, On Torture, was published this week by Johns Hopkins University Press. It is, collectively, an attempt to recast the misleading "torture debate" of the past several years and understand torture in its broader meanings, means and ends, official depictions, institutionalization, and implications. Please take a look. I think, now, we need to focus on accountability. But we have to have the problem framed correctly from the outset. The previous "torture debate" doesn't do this. I hope and believe that this book does.

Here's the Amazon link.

African Fishing Crisis

Photo: Candace Feit for The New York Times. Fishermen in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau.

A crisis mirrored the world over. More on this later. And earlier.

Many scientists agree. A vast flotilla of industrial trawlers from the European Union, China, Russia and elsewhere, together with an abundance of local boats, have so thoroughly scoured northwest Africa’s ocean floor that major fish populations are collapsing.

That has crippled coastal economies and added to the surge of illegal migrants who brave the high seas in wooden pirogues hoping to reach Europe. While reasons for immigration are as varied as fish species, Europe’s lure has clearly intensified as northwest Africa’s fish population has dwindled.

Uganda Powder Flask

Restoration

Not to be underestimated (and you know I've gone on ad nausaeum about international legitimacy...).

In recent years, we have increasingly perceived ourselves as a tolerant people, willing to think anew about the prejudices of the past. Much of the economic dynamism of the country—the vibrancy we cherish—comes not just from the fact of this openness but from our psychic investment in it. Even when the government lets us down badly, as it has in the recent past, we think of ourselves as a good and decent people. Misguided, perhaps, and easily fooled. But good. Even Arabs who hate the U.S. government under either party always insist that they like the American people.

So what happens if we wake up the day after the election to find that the nation has rejected an exceptionally intelligent, thoughtful, and eloquent candidate in a year when 80 percent of voters think we’re on the wrong track? To what would we attribute Obama’s defeat? The inescapable conclusion would be that, no, America is not ready for a black president after all.

Out, damn’d spot! The stain of America’s original sin would spread further yet, pushing us into a past we had hoped to transcend. The normal pain of one party losing an election would be intensified enormously by the pain of history. Republicans (who barely tolerate McCain) wouldn’t cheer much; they would know in their hearts that the party of Lincoln had completed its metamorphosis into the party of cynicism.

Need and Healthcare

Smart lad, that Ezra. It's a discursive ethical debate with a cast of unscrupulous players, not a free market of perfect information.

Health care is a sector where consumers are told what they need. Markets need information, and the folks with the information are the doctors. Health care, in other words, is a mediated market. If you want the "market" to work better, you need to focus on the folks who actually make it work. The problem is not in what consumers "want," but what they are told they need.

Powell and Pluralism

Colin Powell, after endorsing Obama, said what has needed to be said.

Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, "He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

(Photo from here, via The Field).

The Colombian Connection

Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker regarding the rather odd obsession with Colombia by John McCain during the last debate:

As you may remember, this is not a new obsession for McCain. Puzzlingly, the first thing he did after he clinched the Republican nomination, at the beginning of July, was to get on a plane and go to…Colombia. Or maybe not so puzzlingly. In the second paragraph of the New York Times story previewing the trip, Larry Rohter wrote:

Since 1998, the lobbying firm headed until recently by Charlie Black, one of Mr. McCain’s closest confidants, has earned more than $1.8 million representing the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, the leading foreign producer of gas and oil in Colombia. The lobbying firm, BKSH & Associates, has also represented Colombian textile and apparel manufacturers and a former foreign minister and presidential candidate who is also a prominent businesswoman.

The Times went on to note that human rights groups have accused Occidental of complicity in the killing of peasants and labor leaders believed (erroneously, in the case of the labor leaders) to be affiliated with guerrilla groups.

The week before McCain left for Colombia, Carl H. Linder, Jr., who made billions as the C.E.O. of Chiquita Brands International, hosted a fundraiser for McCain at his home in Cincinnati, Ohio. It raised $2 million—a lot of money, though not much compared to the $25 million fine Chiquita paid for paying, under Linder’s leadership, more millions to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a bloodthirsty paramilitary group which the State Department officially classified as a terrorist organization. But, as Nico Pitney pointed out at the time in a well-documented report at the Huffington Post, Chiquita was an equal-opportunity terror funder in Colombia: it also made payments to leftist guerrilla groups, including the notorious FARC. Nothing to do with ideology, of course. Just a routine business expense.

Besides Black, at least four other McCain staffers or major fundraisers, including the campaign’s finance director and a former national finance chairman, have earned tidy sums lobbying for the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.

But John McCain is an honorable man. Therefore, it is inconceivable that any of these “associations,” to use one of his favorite words, had anything to do with the Republican nominee’s extraordinary solicitude for the Colombia trade pact, let alone the way he rolled his eyes when Obama spoke of the murder of Colombian labor leaders.

Chinese Bayberry

Chuckle

Friends and foes have called Cuba many things - a progressive beacon, a quixotic underdog, an oppressive tyranny - but no one has called it lucky, until now.

Mother nature, it emerged this week, appears to have blessed the island with enough oil reserves to vault it into the ranks of energy powers. The government announced there may be more than 20bn barrels of recoverable oil in offshore fields in Cuba's share of the Gulf of Mexico, more than twice the previous estimate.

If confirmed, it puts Cuba's reserves on par with those of the US and into the world's top 20. Drilling is expected to start next year by Cuba's state oil company Cubapetroleo, or Cupet.

Palin as Parmenides

Nonsensical (via Sullivan):

Palin didn't need Greek columns. People react to her because they believe she represents what the Greeks established.

There's very little way in which this makes sense unless this means that Palin is a fan of aristocratic government and general disdain for democracy, the view of Plato and Aristotle, or maybe the elite, male-run, property-owning, slave-society democracy of Athens. Socrates' preferred communistic "city of pigs." Or maybe είδος, the Forms? Or the τέλος of φύσις? How about The One?

It's "elitist" to point out the incoherence, of course, because it involves knowing at least something about something. So, let's assume these generic "people" believe something random about the Greeks which Palin supposedly represents and leave it at its utterly meaningless that.

Tough Times in the Czech Republic for Kundera

Milan Kundera in a park in Prague in 1973 during a rare visit to what was then Czechoslovakia.

(Agence France-Presse)

Interesting news this week regarding an article published in the Czech Republic that Milan Kundera denounced a Western intelligence agent to the Czech police in 1950. Kundera has always had a mixed reputation in Czechoslovakia - since he has lived in France for over 30 years, is now a French citizen, and usually writes in French. Discussion ensues over a historical accounting that's not yet, and may never be, fully developed.

Back to Mill

We've been discussing John Stuart Mill's On Liberty recently in one of the grad seminars I teach. This led me to happen upon this recent essay on Mill by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker in the form of a review of Richard Reeves' new book, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand. It's a good essay, a rather sweeping biographical piece with some focus on Mill's love, Harriet Taylor, and Mill's feminism. A quick snippet:

The mature Mill is a stable thinker but not a systematic one. He recognizes the existence of half-truths alongside near-truths, and of “almost so”s right by “yes, nearly”s. “Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites,” he once wrote. “Even progress, which ought to superadd, for the most part only substitutes, one partial and incomplete truth for another.”

How Keynes Might Help Regarding the Financial Meltdown

Take it or leave it, but this is a good discussion of Keynes in light of the financial crisis.

What was wrong was the theory. The price level is not a leading, but a lagging, indicator. Asset bubbles can coexist with a stable price level, even while the rest of the economy is starting to slide into depression. And this, in essence, is what Keynes believed was happening in the late 1920s. Money, he argued, was being switched from production to speculation. The rich were getting very much richer, while the incomes of the rest were stagnating. "Profit inflation," fueled by collateralized debt, went together with an "income deflation." Share prices were being driven up to dizzying heights even as farmers were finding it harder to service agricultural mortgages. Every financial crash is different in detail -- today's started in the banking system, not the stock market -- but the anatomy of all is surprisingly similar: A speculative frenzy, triggered by some technical innovation such as mortgage-backed securities, that collapses when reality -- in the form of more sober valuations -- kicks in.

No one has bettered Keynes in his understanding of the psychology of financial markets. "Most . . . of our decisions to do something positive . . . can only be taken as a result of animal spirits . . . If animal spirits are dimmed . . . enterprise will fade and die" is one famous remark. "Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done" is another. Professional investment, he wrote, is like "a game of Snap, of Old Maid, of Musical Chairs," whose object is to pass on the Old Maid -- the toxic debt -- to one's neighbor before the music stops. What makes the game toxic is not greed, which is universal, but uncertainty masquerading as certainty.

"The outstanding fact is the extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made," Keynes wrote in his great book "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money" in 1936. We disguise this uncertainty from ourselves by assuming that the future will be like the past, that existing opinion correctly sums up future prospects, and by copying what everyone else is doing. But any view of the future based on "so flimsy a foundation" is liable to "sudden and violent changes. The practice of calmness and immobility, of certainty and security suddenly breaks down. New fears and hopes will, without warning, take charge of human conduct . . . the market will be subject to waves of optimistic and pessimistic sentiment, which are unreasoning yet in a sense legitimate where no solid basis exists for a reasonable calculation." Keynes accused economics of being itself "one of these pretty, polite techniques which tries to deal with the present by abstracting from the fact that we know very little about the future."

The "Morality of Immigration"

An interesting exchange on the ethics of immigration... The original essay by Mathias Risse appeared in Ethics and International Affairs (Spring 2008), reproduced here at the Carnegie Council's site. Responses to the original paper follow here. Here's a selected, and partial, beginning framework for the discussion:

Questions about immigration fundamentally challenge those who see themselves in the liberal camp. One hallmark of the liberal state is that it takes individual attitudes in many areas of life as given and rules them out only if they threaten the functionality of the state. When confronted with immigration, a liberal state may choose to develop a systematic approach, and thus come up with a view of what kind of people it wants to include or exclude, or it may choose not to develop such an approach. In the first case the liberal state passes judgment on people in terms of their fitness for membership. Any criterion used for inclusion also reflects a judgment on those who already live in the country, and will bring about change that is beneficial for some citizens and detrimental for others. In the second case the liberal state has to live with the consequences of whatever alternative approach it develops.

Things become yet more complicated if one sees immigration in a global context. Immigration can plausibly be regarded as one way of satisfying duties toward the global poor—duties that many political leaders and citizens, as well as most contemporary philosophers, would acknowledge, at least in some form. Immigration—permanent or temporary—can serve this function partly because it allows some people access to greener pastures, and partly because of the remittances sent back by immigrants to their countries of origin. Once we think of immigration in a global context, we are led to ask more fundamental questions—namely, why it would be acceptable in the first place (especially to those thus excluded) that we draw an imaginary line in the dust or adopt the course of a river and think of that as a border. As Rousseau famously remarks at the opening of Part II of his Second Discourse on Inequality, "The first person who, having fenced off a lot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society." Is it only because of such simplicity that states are accepted? Such thoughts leave us wondering about the legitimacy of a system of states per se.

Anathema to Democracy

McClatchy runs a good piece on ACORN and the violence that the McCain campaign is clearly stirring regarding the bogus voter fraud issue. The latter is not a point of dispute at all - the issue is bogus and the McCain camp and its surrogates repeatedly instigate. And, despite the efforts of some in the media to suggest otherwise, there is no moral equivalence here between the McCain and Obama campaigns. I wish the national media would quit treating it as such. This is clear instigation to violence and that is the limit of free speech. These people are anathema to democracy:

• Attempted voter purges and the fraudulent ACORN attacks (and allied Bush administration corruption). (See also here).
  
• Ongoing explicit and implicit accusations of treason.
• The utter lack of transparency. (And we already know about the propaganda and lack of accountability over the past eight years).
• Anti-intellectualism.
• Willful ignorance.
• Suggestions that some parts of the US are "pro-American", whatever that means (and, by implication, that others are not). Given that Palin is suggesting that anyone with views on the left is anti-American, she lacks a basic understanding of the foundations of democracy: the reality and importance of a pluralism of values.
  
• Ongoing corruption.
• The language and threats of violence they're helping to propagate (we might even call it "hate speech"). (See also here). (And more).
  
• Repeated racist political advertisements from GOP operations.
• And even the surrender of their own representational responsibilities to conservative thought.

These aren't accidents. This is a collective, ongoing effort by the GOP and McCain campaign. So, bereft of ideas in response to the many problems we face, the McCain campaign has obviously gone negative. This is a typical political response for the losing candidate. But this particular one passed the threshold of decency some time ago, quickly passed by the level of vigorous democratic debate, and has now entered the realm of a general assault on pluralistic democracy. It seems hyperbolic to say it - and I'm surprised and dismayed to find myself saying it, despite the shakiness of US democracy in the past - but I think we're at the point where we need to be very careful to defend democracy itself. This vote is an extremely important one.