Club Troppo

In a fairly desultory post, Helen ‘Skepticlawyer’ Dale presents the right wing de rigueur view that the United Nations is a waste of space dominated by corrupt third world regimes and should be abolished.  Her pretext is the imminent establishment of a new UN agency for women’s rights which is to include those noteworthy feminist champions Iran and Saudi Arabia.

One could make similar points about the (now superseded) UN Commission on Human Rights, whose membership just prior to its abolition included paragons of civil liberties like Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka and Russia.  Even its ostensibly reformed replacement body the Human Rights Council includes China, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Cuba!!!

Nevertheless, although I have some sympathy for Helen’s views, on balance I think those of UK academic Bill Bowring expounded in the (always worth browsing) openDemocracy are rather more nuanced and preferable:

(Continued)

From Troppo’s guest blogger Neal Lawson (OK I nicked his post and reproduced it here).

It is so depressingly inevitable. Obama, like Clinton, Blair and Brown before him, like in Rudd in Australia, like the Swedish social democrats, like every example of centre-left government the world over – we seem incapable of building a progressive and sustainable movement for change.

Sure Obama can recover from the mid-term disaster. He can find his feet, stabilize and win in 2012 against a Tea Party infused Republican candidate. But he can never waste such promise and momentum again because he will never have such momentum again. His second term if it happens may well do good things but it won’t be coherent, systematic and its unlikely to lead to another Democratic President, House and Senate that will continue the process of building a more progressive world.

OK I know I’m personalizing it around Obama. One person cannot take the blame but a leader can decide to build a movement and be a leader or be a lone operator working from their own cabal. Obama and his amazing election supporter base could have built something enduring and deep, the kind of countervailing cultural and political forces the right is so good at mobilizing.

But as I understand it there was a conscious decision to turn off the life support system on the Movement for Change to kick the ladder away and focus on governing from the centre. Just like all the other centre-left ‘leaders’ it became an elite and technocratic project. As such it was doomed to disappoint.

Instead Obama should have made an intellectual construct out of his hope mantra. He should have fixed on a frame like the Good Society and made it real. With a vision you can inspire a movement. The movement then becomes the vision. Opportunities then open up rather than get closed down. People will break down walls for hope, security and the kind of freedom that a deep version of democracy can give them because it gives them back control over their anxious and exhausting lives.

Once we have a more seductive vision of the Good Society than Consumer Society then there is the impetus to build the alternative political economy and the new social state that will support it.

The definition of an idiot is someone who does the same thing again and again but expects a different outcome. When will the centre-left learn and stop being idiots?

HT Three Quarks, I enjoyed this wander around the James Bond genre. How can we take such pleasure from such bad movies. It’s a mystery. I liked the essay and don’t dismiss the author’s principal explanation which is Freudian fantasy for boys. But I’m in the demographic he’s writing for – someone who grew up with Bond and the Beatles, so nostalgia is also part of it.

Once I was in some regional town for several nights – not sure what I was doing there – but I went to a James Bond double each night. I came to love the formula. The previous job gets finished up at the beginning of the movie (though this feature emerged later, enabling a big action sequence to begin the movie), bond is given the assignment, part thriller part mystery.  He then wanders right into the wolf’s lair. Usually he goes and talks with the most meglomaniacal baddie in the world, has a game of golf or poker with them. Then he wanders into their lair, sneaks around. Somehow no-one shoots him and with a barely maintained straight face starts pulling apart the machinery which, until he wanders into the lair was destined for world domination. I never much went for the sex which somehow isn’t sexy.  It was this beguiling and beautiful fantasy world.

Anyway, I wonder what other Troppodillians make of Bond. Oh and the best Bond? Well there’s no question.  You’re looking at him just up to your left.

Here’s this week’s Missing Link Friday.

One for the country

Don’t stop at two, says Mark Richardson. "to have stable population growth you need a large percentage of couples to have 3 children to make up for those having none. Limiting families to 2 children won’t work."

At Oz Conservative, Richardson argues that unless Australians can keep fertility above replacement rate, the business and open borders lobbies will force us to accept more foreigners. Quelle horreur!

The Idea of Home‘s Alison Sampson planned on stopping after two. But she just couldn’t shake off the idea of having one more:

I had such clear visions, such beautiful images when I sat with the idea. I saw a group of children running up the stairs into the sky, colourful skirts swirling and voices laughing; I saw loving arms extended towards me, and a baby lying between us, and knew that to enter into the presence of love was to pick the baby up.

But there’s always something that falls between the idea and the reality, and in Alison’s case, it was a fistful of poo. She begins a recent post with this: "Yesterday morning began when a toddler came crying into my room, holding a moist and squishy turd in her hand …"

Clearly parenthood isn’t all colourful skirts swirling and voices laughing:

I’ve been exhausted lately, tired and flat and sick of the kids and life at home. I feel like I had one child too many. I’m more than ready for them all to be out of the house six hours a day while I do other things. I’m tired of watching ‘ballet concerts’ and puppet shows and tired of picking up the mess or corralling them into doing it. I’m fed up with their squabbling, and the two year old’s tantrums, and hearing her shout ‘no’ every minute of the day. I’m tired of being the adult, understanding and mature; and I’m tired of failing to be the adult, of losing my temper or just shutting the kids out. I’m sick of being patient, of tricking a two year old into keeping her shoes on or sitting in a car seat. I just want to slap her.

(Continued)

This is an EconTalk interview by Russ Roberts, with links to relevant readings.

You can download to listen or you can read  the dialogue, which is a bit hard because you have to work out who is talking (maybe not hard if you pay attention, but you can’t tell at a glance).

The blurb “Roberts challenges some of Quiggin’s claims and wonders whether proposed alternatives might do even worse than the policies Quiggin is criticizing. Much of the conversation focuses on the role of government in the financial sector and how that might be improved going forward.”

JQ. “Of course, we’ve never had a pure system of market liberalism but equally my remaining Communist friends tell me we’ve never had pure Communism. No doubt both are correct.”

But which would you choose to move towards?

Final comment from JQ: “But after 30 years when we’ve largely tried to explain away, we have to recognize that having a large government is likely to produce a more stable outcome than the kind of minimum state idea.”

Does he  think we  have been moving towards the minimum state over the last 30 years?

AT the peak of the recent housing boom, subprime mortgage companies were loaning $600 billion per year to homebuyers with poor credit histories. In The Political Economy of the Subprime Mortgage Credit Expansion (NBER Working Paper No.16107), co-authors Atif Mian, Amir Sufi, and Francesco Trebbi explore the links between the rapid growth of the subprime industry and Congressional politics and policy. Focusing on the period between 2002 and 2007, they document a sharp increase in campaign contributions and lobbying activity by the mortgage industry. Using data from the Center for Responsive Politics, the researchers find that the industry’s campaign contributions increased somewhat between 1998 and 2002. But they began to accelerate rapidly in 2002, and rose by 80 percent between 2002 and 2006. Moreover, the study finds that these contributions were t argeted to members of Congress whose districts included a large fraction of subprime borrowers.

More here.

Here is a story about the internet working the way tech utopians think it should. Technology is as good or as bad as the social conditions of which it is a part, but this is one of the good stories. It can be read either as a perfect example of self interest working well in the aggregate, or less cynically as a kind of altruism when there may not be a payoff.

Some years ago I subscribed to a Firefox addon called Xmarks (which used to be Foxmarks). This program syncs bookmarks not just to the cloud but to other computers, cross platform. Kind of useful, but for me it soon dropped into the background like teapots or car keys; used frequently but not very front of consciousness.
I was surprised therefore to get an email from the company a couple of months ago. Sorrowfully, it informed me that the service would be discontinued as from January next year. Could I move to one of a number of competitor alternatives as they were shutting down the whole service?   (Continued)

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the private use of all illicit drugs, including heroin, cannabis, and cocaine. As long as a person is not found in possession of more than 10 days’ worth of any of these drugs, use and possession is no longer a criminal offense. The main point of the new policy was to focus more on dissuasion, make it easier for addicted users to seek help, reduce the flow of funds to criminal gangs, and to reduce the burden of drug enforcement upon the criminal justice system.

How did they do? Politically speaking the scheme has been a success in that Portuguese politicians, including the current prime minister Socrates, have been bragging about their role in the introduction of this policy. What about the effects on usage and crime? I can do no better than to copy the conclusions of a recent paper on the issue by Hughes and Stevens, two UNSW based Australian researchers:

In the Portuguese case, the statistical indicators and key informant interviews that we have reviewed suggest that since decriminalization in July 2001, the following changes have occurred:

* small increases in reported illicit drug use amongst adults;
* reduced illicit drug use among problematic drug users and adolescents, at least since 2003;
* reduced burden of drug offenders on the criminal justice system;
* increased uptake of drug treatment;
* reduction in opiate-related deaths and infectious diseases;
* increases in the amounts of drugs seized by the authorities;
* reductions in the retail prices of drugs.

Perhaps worth copying here in Australia?