How did Europe come to dominate the world by 1914?

In two words, war and taxes:

Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe, establishing colonies and spreading their influence across every inhabited continent. This was not inevitable. In fact, for decades, historians, social scientists, and biologists have wondered: Why and how did Europe rise to the top, even when societies in Asia and the Middle East were far more advanced?

So far, satisfactory answers have been elusive. But this question is of the utmost importance given that Europe’s power determined everything from who ran the slave trade to who grew rich or remained mired in poverty. . . .

Mostly, it derived from the incentives that political leaders faced in Europe—incentives that drove them not just to make war, but also to spend huge sums on it. Yes, the European monarchs built palaces, but even the huge Chateau at Versailles cost King Louis XIV less than two percent of his tax revenue. The rest went to fighting wars. He and the other kings in Europe had been raised since childhood to pursue glory on the battlefield, yet they bore none of the costs involved—not even the risk of losing their thrones after a defeat. Leaders elsewhere faced radically different incentives, which kept many of them militarily weak. In China, for example, emperors were encouraged to keep taxes low and to attend to people’s livelihoods rather than to pursue the sort of military glory that obsessed European kings.

For this and a variety of other reasons, leaders outside of Europe could not match Europe’s innovations in warfare innovation. The huge sums of money showered on fighting in Europe gave military leaders the flexibility to buy new weapons and battleships and try out new tactics, fortifications, and methods of supply. In the process, they learned from their mistakes and improved their technologies. And because European countries were small and geographically close, they could easily learn from their rivals’ errors and copy their improvements. . . .

Europe’s ability to tax was no small achievement. China could not raise equivalent tax revenues, even in the nineteenth century. And countries in sub-Saharan Africa today still lack the basic capacity to tax, which keeps them from providing security and other basic public goods to their citizens.

Europe had yet another advantage as well: its entrepreneurs were free to use gunpowder technology to mount expeditions of conquest, colonization, and militarized trade. Although they usually needed official permission to launch a voyage, entrepreneurs were often encouraged by authorities eager to find riches abroad. And they had no trouble acquiring weapons or finding battle-hardened veterans to train military novices who joined their undertakings. By the seventeenth century, such private expeditions had spawned gigantic enterprises that raised huge sums on Europe’s burgeoning capital markets to finance ventures abroad, enterprises such as the Dutch East India Company, which was not only a private arm of Dutch foreign policy, but also the first business to issue tradable shares of stock.

A final difference between Europe and the rest of the world lies in political history. From 221 B.C. onward, China, more often than not, was unified in a large empire. The Chinese empire soon developed a centralized bureaucracy that drew local elites into government service and gave them a stake in the empire’s survival. The rewards of government service helped hold the empire together, and as long as the empire was strong and unified, other East Asian powers hesitated to attack it. This meant that China had little incentive to seek out new enemies or opportunities.

Western Europe, by contrast, experienced no such lasting unification after the collapse of the Roman Empire. What it endured instead were centuries of warfare by bands of warriors whose leaders resembled modern-day warlords. The incessant fighting groomed leaders who were victorious in war. The conflict also generated enduring enmities between leaders and their followers, enmities that eventually hardened into lasting political borders. It was such ill will—and not Europe’s physical geography—that kept any single leader from ever uniting Western Europe in the sort of durable empire that prevailed for centuries in China. In the long run, the winners in Western Europe were the military leaders who learned how to impose heavy taxes to fund their fighting, and as a result, Europe ended up with kings who spent pharaonic sums on warfare and who had, in the words of Machiavelli, “no object, thought, or profession but war.”

Without a single-minded focus on war and the extraordinary ability to tax, there may never have been any European empires. The wars and the taxes lavished on them gave the Europeans an enormous lead in military technology. This enabled their conquests, and allowed them to keep native populations under control without stationing large numbers of European troops abroad. Without such advantages, the Europeans might have grown rich anyway—and perhaps even industrialized early—but they would not have dominated the world in 1914.

Happy Columbus Day!

"No-brainers" to make the world a better place

The Economist explains:

“THE lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history. And their lives will improve more than anyone else’s.” So predict Bill and Melinda Gates in their annual letter, published on January 22nd. The wealthy philanthropists expect the rate of infant mortality to halve by 2030, from one child in 20 dying before turning five to one in 40. They also forecast the eradication of polio and perhaps three other deadly diseases. Improvements in agriculture will mean that Africa will be able to feed itself. Financial security will improve as the 2 billion people who do not have a bank account start storing money and making payments using mobile phones. And affordable online courses will open up huge educational opportunities for poor people, especially girls.

Yet the letter has surprisingly little to say about the United Nations initiative that is intended to bring such predictions to fruition: the “Sustainable Development Goals” to be agreed by world leaders at the UN General Assembly in September. . . .

One of the loudest voices calling for greater focus is Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish economist, who has launched the Post-2015 Consensus, an effort to draw up a shortish list of goals and targets the benefits of which, if achieved, would far outweigh the costs. This is a souped-up version of the Copenhagen Consensus he has run for the past decade, bringing together leading economists to calculate the cheapest ways to improve the state of the world.

Mr Lomborg has commissioned some 60 teams of economists, plus representatives from the UN, NGOs and business, to review the proposed targets to work out which would generate the most bang for the buck (he rates less than a tenth of them “phenomenal” value for money). . . . A panel of three Nobel Prize-winning economists will then write an overview of the work and make recommendations for how best to spend the $2.5 trillion in international development assistance Mr Lomborg expects over the years to 2030.

Some of the results are surprising. For instance, a recent paper by Bjorn Larsen looked at ways to reduce deaths from air pollution, which currently kills around 7m people a year. It found that shifting 1.4 billion people from traditional cooking methods to stoves with outdoor vents could save half a million lives a year and generate an economic benefit to the world of $10 for every $1 spent. Using higher-tech smoke-free stoves would bring an even bigger reduction in deaths. Yet the cost would be much higher, so the benefit would be only $2 per dollar spent.

Perhaps more surprising, the most beneficial measure Mr Lomborg’s teams evaluated was lowering barriers to trade, which achieves far more per dollar spent than any other option (see chart). Completing the treaty currently under negotiation at the World Trade Organisation, for example, would bring developing countries $3,426 for every dollar spent. A free-trade deal encompassing China, Japan, South Korea and the ASEAN countries would be worth $3,438 per dollar spent.

Most poverty-reduction measures are more expensive than cutting tariffs, but many are still well worth it. Providing contraception and other reproductive-health services to all who want them would cost $3.6 billion a year, according to Mr Lomborg’s researchers, yet generate annual benefits of $432 billion, $120 per dollar spent. Increasing the nursery school enrolment rate in sub-Saharan Africa to 59% from its current 18% would generate benefits of $33 per dollar spent. Reducing by 40% the number of children whose growth is stunted by malnutrition would be worth $45 per dollar spent; reducing deaths from tuberculosis $43. Increasing mobile broadband penetration from 32% of the world’s population to 90% by 2030 would deliver benefits of $17 per dollar spent. Stopping tax evasion in sub-Saharan Africa (where it currently costs 20 governments around 10% of GDP a year) would also pay off handsomely, at $49 per dollar spent. Increasing by 20% the worldwide availability of work visas would generate benefits of $15 per dollar.

"The Berlin Wall Fell, but Communism Didn’t"

That's the headline of this WSJ article:

"In January 1973, a young mother named Ingrid hid with her infant son in a crate in the back of a truck crossing from East to West. When the child began to cry at the East Berlin checkpoint, a desperate Ingrid covered his mouth with her hand, not realizing the child had an infection and couldn’t breathe through his nose. She made her way to freedom, but in the process suffocated her 15-month-old son. . . .

1.5 billion people still live under communism. Political prisoners continue to be rounded up, gulags still exist, millions are being starved, and untold numbers are being torn from families and friends simply because of their opposition to a totalitarian state.

As important as the fall of the Berlin Wall was, it was not the end of what John F. Kennedy called the “long, twilight struggle” against a sinister ideology. By looking at the population statistics of several nations we can estimate that 1.5 billion people still live under communism. Political prisoners continue to be rounded up, gulags still exist, millions are being starved, and untold numbers are being torn from families and friends simply because of their opposition to a totalitarian state.

Today, Communist regimes continue to brutalize and repress the hapless men, women and children unlucky enough to be born in the wrong country.

In China, thousands of Hong Kong protesters recently took to the streets demanding the right to elect their chief executive in open and honest elections. This democratic movement—the most important protests in China since the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and massacre 25 years ago—was met with tear gas and pepper spray from a regime that does not tolerate dissent or criticism. The Communist Party routinely censors, beats and jails dissidents, and through the barbaric one-child policy has caused some 400 million abortions, according to statements by a Chinese official in 2011.

In Vietnam, every morning the unelected Communist government blasts state-sponsored propaganda over loud speakers across Hanoi, like a scene out of George Orwell ’s “1984.”

In Laos, where the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party tolerates no other political parties, the government owns all the media, restricts religious freedom, denies property rights, jails dissidents and tortures prisoners.

In Cuba, a moribund Communist junta maintains a chokehold on the island nation. Arbitrary arrests, beatings, intimidation and total media control are among the tools of the current regime, which has never owned up to its bloody past.

The Stalinesque abuses of North Korea are among the most shocking. As South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye recently told the United Nations, “This year marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the Korean Peninsula remains stifled by a wall of division.” On both sides of that wall—a 400-mile-long, 61-year-old demilitarized zone—are people with the same history, language and often family.

But whereas the capitalist South is free and prosperous, the Communist North is a prison of torture and starvation run by a family of dictators at war with freedom of religion, freedom of movement and freedom of thought."

What's going on in Turkey?

Listen to my friend Ben Wikler interview an activist/radio host in Turkey, Omer Madra, about the uprising going on there right now. (This is a live radio show, starting at 3:00 p.m. Eastern, which will still be available online after it airs.)

The Political Compass ideology quiz

You can take the quiz here to find out where they place you on economic and social issues.

Based on my scores, I seem to be a moderate libertarian.

Libertarianism is often seen as an extreme ideology, so is "moderate libertarian" an oxymoron? Not according to Tyler Cowen. Writing in 2007, he said that libertarian policies have increased America's economic growth, but added:

The more wealth we have, the more government we can afford. Furthermore, the better government operates, the more government people will demand. That is the fundamental paradox of libertarianism. Many initial victories bring later defeats.

I am not so worried about this paradox of libertarianism. Overall libertarians should embrace these developments. We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don’t have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal.

In short, libertarianism has the seeds of its own destruction.

As with all these kinds of quizzes, I take issue with the premise of some of the questions. The first one is whether you agree with this statement:

If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.

This seems designed to prompt you to think in zero-sum terms about benefitting either "trans-national corporations" or "humanity." I wish there had been an option that would have allowed me to take the position that globalization should benefit both trans-national corporations and humanity at the same time. But the quiz nudges you toward answering that "humanity" should take precedence over "corporations." (The quiz writers should read the section in chapter 1 of Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies about the "zero-sum fallacy" and the chapter on free trade in Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist.)

Also, the quiz results are supposedly about your political views, but several of the social questions don't refer to any role of government. For instance, you could believe that discipline is the most important value to instill in children, and that society has gone too far in allowing people to express sexuality in public (which the quiz would count as "authoritarian" positions), while taking a libertarian position that government should stay out of these issues. You can have a moral objection to the painted nude woman in Times Square the other day without thinking the police should have arrested her. The quiz is supposed to test whether you do have authoritarian political views, but the quiz seems to make an authoritarian assumption that you'll want the government to enforce your morals.

What's so great about primitive societies?

Not as much as some would have you believe, according to that article about the Jarawa people of the Andaman Islands (to the east of India) (via):

A recent full-page advertisement in a glossy magazine showed a picture of a smiling woman from the Jarawa tribe in the Andaman Islands off the coast of India. The accompanying text read, "No war, no poverty, no drug abuse, no corruption, no pollution, no overpopulation, no prisons -- and we call them primitive?" Their 55,000-year, isolated, self-sufficient and sustainable existence is at threat, the ad suggested. Luckily, Survival International "is helping the Jarawa protect their land and defend their lives." . . .

The glorification of the Jarawa and in general of tribal life, with its supposed freedom from violence, poverty, drugs, crime, and overpopulation, is part of a dangerous denial of the huge benefits that modernity has brought to the vast mass of humanity. It is easy to get emotional about a supposedly idyllic Stone Age existence when we're staring at elegant photographs on a computer screen while sipping our Starbucks chai latte. But if we decided to actually return to the lifestyle of uncontacted peoples, the vast majority of the planet would die off from starvation, and those who remained would face nasty, brutish, and short lives. Romanticizing that lifestyle provides no insights into how we can better run a planet of 7 billion people on a sustainable basis -- and does little to illuminate the challenges and needs of tribal people themselves. . . .

[The Jarawa's] current limbo of semi-engagement may be the worst possible place to be. It exposes them to disease and violence without proximity to vaccines, hospitals, or real security. Yes, the record of paternalist integration is grim, but it is difficult to make the case that the record of paternalist exclusion and glorification is better.

I'm reminded of this old column by Jonah Goldberg:

The simple truth is that everyone thinks that much of the Third World is a write-off. Many conservatives just don’t care. And, many Leftists — especially when it comes to South America — think that saying we should “preserve unique cultures” is somehow different than saying “keep these people in poverty.” . . .

Now, I’m a conservative. I like the past. I love tradition. In fact I want to conserve these things, hence the word conservatism. Conservatives are opposed to the bleaching of culture or the erasure of history. Conservatism, the saying goes, is dedicated to the wisdom of the ancients. But that wisdom believes in progress, determined by reason and tempered by tradition. That’s why none of us believes white people would be better off living like Vikings, Goths, or Huns. Why should we think that Africans or Indians should?

I was just in Italy. Now, anybody who has spent five minutes in Italy knows that it is a very — oh gosh what’s that word? — right: Italian country. The food, the language, the traditions, the very air itself is Italian. If you can be an Italian with a cell phone, a full set of teeth and an apartment, why can’t the same hold true for Zulus? Is there something about being a Zulu that’s antithetical to being modern? (I know there are plenty of Zulus with cellphones and the like already, but the point is that I think many liberals find this disappointing).

By the way, if you read that whole Jonah Goldberg column, you'll see how bizarrely incoherent some columns were in the days before blogging gave everyone an outlet for their random thoughts.

The more we eat the protein-rich non-grain quinoa, the less Bolivians eat it ... or drink it.

I love quinoa. It's as useful as rice, but much more nutritious. Here's my own rough recipe for quinoa with carrots and parsnips, which I often make. And just glancing through the first link, I'd like to try the butternut squash and black bean wrap, quinoa primavera,  quinoa burgers, acorn stuffed with quinoa . . .

But the New York Times reports:

[D]emand for quinoa (pronounced KEE-no-ah) is soaring in rich countries, as American and European consumers discover the “lost crop” of the Incas. The surge has helped raise farmers’ incomes here in one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries. But there has been a notable trade-off: Fewer Bolivians can now afford it, hastening their embrace of cheaper, processed foods and raising fears of malnutrition in a country that has long struggled with it. . . .

While malnutrition on a national level has fallen over the past few years thanks to aggressive social welfare programs, . . . studies showed that chronic malnutrition in children had climbed in quinoa-growing areas . . . in recent years. . . .

“I adore quinoa, but I can’t afford it anymore,” said Micaela Huanca, 50, a street vendor in El Alto, a city of slums above the capital, La Paz. “I look at it in the markets and walk away.” . . .

At supermarkets here, a 1,000-gram bag of quinoa, just over two pounds, costs the equivalent of $4.85, compared with $1.20 for a bag of noodles the same weight and $1 for a bag of white rice. . . .

This is disturbing. A few things, though:

1. Bolivians are already working on solutions:

President [Evo] Morales said this month that he planned to make more than $10 million in loans available to organic quinoa producers, and health officials are incorporating the plant into a packet of foods supplied to thousands of pregnant and nursing women each month.

2. The Times is clearly fascinated by talking about how rich countries' voracious (albeit healthy) appetite is hurting Bolivians. This skews the reporting. Oh, the Times does mention that we're also enriching Bolivians farmers by buying so much quinoa. But this point just gets a sentence or two; it isn't amplified with statistics or anecdotes or color photographs. The observation that rich countries are helping a poor country by buying its exports doesn't make for a fascinating New York Times article.

3. Buried 15 paragraphs into the piece, we discover that the reporters aren't just talking about Bolivians choosing to use white rice or noodles instead of quinoa when they cook dinner. The article says that "changing food preferences" might "play a role." How so? Well, a government official explains:

"[I]f you give the kids toasted quinoa flour, they don’t want it; they want white bread . . . . If you give them boiled water, sugar and quinoa flour mixed into a drink, they prefer Coca-Cola."

So, kids prefer drinking Coke to drinking quinoa! I'm not sure anything would have stopped that from happening in the modern world.



(Both photos are from SweetOnVeg, which has a website, Facebook page, and Twitter feed.)

Why are world leaders suddenly shocked, shocked that Qaddafi is killing people?

Good question.

Visualizing how all countries are getting richer and healthier

A dazzling presentation by Hans Rosling.

You can play with the data here.

Does Obama's "'Sputnik' moment" idea from the State of the Union speech make any sense?

Nope, says my mom, and I agree. That whole post is worth reading, but here's the gist:

If you remember how Sputnik felt — and I do — you'll probably say, but there is no equivalent of Sputnik. There are just a lot of countries, full of human beings, trying to get ahead economically, like us — not against us. There's no race with dramatic consequences for the winners and losers, and there's no impressive physical object that signifies that bad guys are winning the race. If you don't remember Sputnik, you're like: Sputnik?

I found last night's speech very dull, and I turned it off less than an hour into it. The idea that we're supposed to be alarmed that other countries are making too much progress relative to us, and that this is going to be our motivation to make economic and technological progress, leaves me cold. I wonder how many people honestly share this view (as opposed to people who are merely willing to echo Obama's point because they support Obama).

I don't care if we're #1 or #2 or #10 out of 200 countries, by whatever metric has been agreed on by experts. In fact, being #1 is a burden. I'd like to try being #2 for a while. Let another country take on the role of being officially at the top, and see how they like it. It hasn't been uniformly wonderful for the United States to have that distinction. I care so much more about whether this is a nice place to live.

UPDATE: Over on my mom's blog, a commenter named "Revenant" makes a good point:

Sputnik was launched by a genocidal Communist dictatorship that was not only our sworn enemy, but capable of destroying all life on Earth. That's why Sputnik was shocking. We were "losing" to an enemy that had the capacity to obliterate us.

Our biggest modern rival, China, is a mere regional power whose economy relies on exporting goods and services to... er, us and our allies.

How to harmonize Islam with feminism, freedom, and Europe

Mona Eltahawy and Claire Berlinski have an hour-long conversation on that question:



(Links to a couple websites they refer to: Ricochet and Musawah.)

Short URL for this post: goo.gl/x6Sj

Australian dollars have reached parity with US dollars

An Australian Facebook friend of mine said the other day (quoting this), when he was anticipating the news:

We're going to parity like US$20 is $19.99

"Comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication."

Peter Beinart, who admits that he "was comfortable there too," explains why "the American Jewish establishment" has lost its former luster among a new generation of Jews. (Via.)

A sample:

[T]he message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu government is . . . : since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, "Victimhood sets you free."

This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.

As John McWhorter has argued in a different context, the sense of victimhood, even if it begins as an entirely appropriate reaction to horrendous injustices against the victimized group, can gradually make a "transformation . . . from a problem to be solved into an identity in itself." (That's from page 2 of his 2000 book Losing the Race -- a brilliant page-turner that I give my highest recommendation.)

Previously on this blog: "How to think: Minimize your identity?"

The "Hottest Heads of State"

Here's a well-done list of the world's heads of state, in order of hotness.

It's interesting to look at some of the lower-ranked heads of state and try to detect the hallmarks of unattractiveness. Many of them look like the photos were taken with a fisheye lens or distorted with a Photoshop tool.

Not surprisingly, the photos of some of the higher-ranked heads of state seem chosen to be flattering. But I've always found that photo of President Obama strangely unflattering.

(Photo of Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed from Wikimedia Commons, by Mauroof Khaleel. Photo of Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko from the European Parliament's Flickr site, by Pietro Naj-Oleari.)

Article Skipper: Will the United States stay the world's top superpower?

Yes, argues Josef Joffe in Foreign Affairs. (Free registration is required to view the full article.)

Inspired by Mickey Kaus's old blog-post format, here's my haphazard dissection of the article:

1. Wordiest passage: Joffe takes over 1,000 words (everything under the article's first subheading) to make the following point: People have been predicting America's decline for 50 years, but it hasn't happened, so we should be skeptical of current predictions of decline.

2. Most unsupported yet intriguing assertions:

a) [U]nless China is not of this world, society's chickens will come home to roost, demanding to be fed or freed.

b) [I]t may take a liberal, seafaring empire to turn national interests into international public goods.

c) Who would actually want to live in a world dominated by China, India, Japan, Russia, or even Europe, which for all its enormous appeal cannot take care of its own backyard? Not even those who have been trading in glee and gloom decade after decade would prefer any of them to take over as housekeeper of the world.

Would Europe really be so bad?

3. Most thoroughly supported assertion: China is very unlikely to overtake the United States as the world's superpower. (And since China is widely considered the most plausible contender to bump the US from the #1 spot, it seems likely that we'll stay #1.) For example, this is one of his many convincing arguments:

China will grow old before becoming rich, as Mark Haas, a professor of political science at Duquesne University, has noted. According to Goldman Sachs, by 2050 the Chinese economy will long have overtaken the U.S. economy, with a GDP of $45 trillion, compared with the United States' $35 trillion. But by then, the median age in the United States will be the lowest of any of the world's large powers, except India. The United States' working-age population will have grown by about 30 percent, whereas China's will have dropped by three percent. The economic and strategic consequences will be enormous. China's aging population will require a shifting of resources from investment to welfare, thus reducing China's growth. And as the economic pie shrinks, a growing number of pensioners -- 329 million by 2050 -- will demand a larger slice. This will necessarily cut into the share for the People's Liberation Army.

4. Biggest understatement:

The United States was far from universally loved under President George W. Bush.

5. Biggest self-contradiction: First, Joffe gives statistics to show that Europe is far behind the United States:

In all instances of declinism, economic failure serves as Exhibit A. But current figures show the U.S. economy to be worth $14.3 trillion, three times as much as the world's second-biggest economy, Japan's, and only slightly less than the economies of its four nearest competitors combined -- Japan, China, Germany, and France. ...

Today, there is only one challenge to the dominance of the U.S. economy: the European Union's aggregate GDP of $18 trillion. But the more appropriate comparison may be with the 16-member eurozone, which has a common monetary policy and a rudimentary common fiscal policy -- and a collective GDP of $13.5 trillion, less than that of the United States. But an unwieldy conglomeration of 27, or even 16, states cannot be a strategic player.

The United States also comes out ahead among major powers in terms of per capita income ....

The gaps become exorbitant in the realm of military power, where the United States plays in a league of its own. In 2008, it spent $607 billion on its military, representing almost half of the world's total military spending. The next nine states spent a total of $476 billion, and the presumptive challengers to U.S. military supremacy -- China, India, Japan, and Russia -- together devoted only $219 billion to their militaries. The military budget of China, the country most often touted as the world's next superpower, is less than one-seventh of the U.S. defense budget. Even if one includes among potential U.S. adversaries the 27 states of the EU, which together spend $288 billion on defense, the United States still outweighs them all -- $607 billion compared to $507 billion.

Nor can any other great power boast the United States' naval strength, a measure of a state's ability to project power quickly and over great distances. In 2005, as Robert Work, a defense analyst and now undersecretary of the U.S. Navy, has shown, the U.S. Navy commanded a naval tonnage exceeding the world's next 17 fleets combined. ... China, India, Japan, Russia, and the EU put together could not conduct a major war 8,000 miles from their shores, as the United States has done twice in Iraq and once in Afghanistan in recent years.

But then he says:

Europe -- although it bests or equals the United States in terms of population, economic size, and military might -- no longer has the mindset that once made it the master of the world.

Huh? I thought he already spent several paragraphs explaining that Europe pales in comparison with the United States' economic and military power. Admittedly, they seem to be close with respect to GDP. But his statement that Europe "bests or equals the United States in terms of ... military might" makes no sense given his earlier statements.

He goes on to argue that what really puts the US ahead of Europe is our "warrior culture":

The armies of European countries are no longer objects of national pride and no longer serve as ladders for social advancement, nor are they the principal agents for promoting the national interest. ... The EU takes pride in being a civilian power that expands by force of example, rather than by force of arms.

That seems like a perfectly reasonable point, but he should have simply claimed that culture matters as well as -- not instead of -- the raw numbers on the economy and military.

6. Least inspiring burst of patriotism:

As the twenty-first century unfolds, the United States will be younger and more dynamic than its competitors. And as a liberal empire, it can work the international system with fewer costs than yesterday's behemoths, which depended on territorial possessions and had to conduct endless wars against natives and rivals. A Tyrannosaurus rex faces costlier resistance than the bumbling bull that is the United States.

7. Most genuinely inspiring bursts of patriotism:

a) The speed with which Barack Obama captured hearts and minds around the world after his election in November 2008 represented a rare moment in the annals of the great powers -- a moment of relief at having a U.S. president who made it possible for the world to love his country again.

b) The United States' choice of its role, in addition to its vast material riches, made it the twentieth century's indispensable nation. While acting on its own interests, it twice saved Europe from itself, and then saved it a third time, during the Cold War, from the Soviet Union. In the interwar period -- again, obeying its own economic interests -- the United States sought to blunt what John Maynard Keynes called "the economic consequences of the peace" by pumping dollars into Europe's economies. Although the Dawes and Young Plans, two U.S.-led economic assistance programs after World War I, were surely designed to make Europe safe and profitable for U.S. investments and exports, they also promoted recovery in Europe, as the Marshall Plan did a generation later. Much has been said about the splendid institutional architecture the United States put in place after World War II, from the United Nations to NATO, and from the International Monetary Fund to the Organization for European Economic Cooperation. But the point needs repeating: to find profit for itself, the United States provided for others.

People who live on a dollar a day

They're not necessarily poor.

Roxana Saberi has been freed.

Great news about the American journalist who was sentenced to 8 years in an Iranian prison.

But I'm still waiting for Hossein Derakhshan, also in Iran.

And did you know about Laura Ling and Euna Lee in North Korea?

As that Wall St. Journal article notes, the news we've been getting from North Korea has all been about diplomacy and weapons. Clearly, nothing that happens in North Korea is very important unless it involves diplomacy and weapons.

Reporters Without Borders says (via the Washington Independent):

North Korea is one of the hardest countries in the world for the foreign media to cover. The North Korean authorities occasionally issue press visas for cultural or sports events or for visits by foreign officials. Once inside North Korea, journalists are closely watched by the North Korean authorities, who prevent them from interviewing members of the public. Entire regions of the country are completely closed to the international media.

It is also very difficult for the foreign press to operate freely in the Chinese provinces adjoining the North Korean border. South Korean and North Korean journalists who often work in the border region say trying to cover refugees and trafficking there is still very risky. “Chinese police raids and the presence of many undercover North Korean agents make working on the border very complicated,” Reporters Without Borders was told by a journalist working for an independent North Korean radio station based in Seoul.

North Koreans take an enormous risk if they provide information to the news media. Reporters Without Borders has documented the case of Kim Sung Chul, a member of the armed forces who has been held since October 2006 after the Kukka Anjon Bowibu (state security) identified him as the person who clandestinely filmed the video of a public execution that was broadcast on the Japanese television station Asahi TV. He is now in a concentration camp.

A North Korean TV journalist, Song Keum Chul, has been detained in a camp since 1996 for questioning the official version of certain historic events.

International human rights organisations estimate that at least 200,000 people are detained in North Korea’s concentration camps and reeducation camps.

The ethics of sanitation

That sanitized heading is derived from a blog post by Colin McGinn: "Sanitation (philosophy of)." He says:

I've just finished reading Rose George's The Big Necessity, about toilets and human waste (euphemism alert!)--as part of my interest in the emotion of disgust. [See the update at the end of the post for a response from Rose George. -- Jaltcoh] I'd strongly recommend Aurel Kolnai's monograph "On Disgust" as a philosophical treatment of the subject; it contains some excellent phenomenological work with some important conceptual distinctions (far better than most of what passes for work on the emotions in current analytical philosophy). But Ms. George brings out the medical/cultural/political aspects of the problem of our disgusting bodies--what to do with and about all the shit we produce. The effects on health of inadequate toilets in the "turd world" (Naipaul) are catastrophic, but the sheer unpleasantness of living near human excrement is also appalling. Yet most people don't want to have to think about it, because of the distastefulness of the topic: no celebrity wants to hitch herself to the shit bandwagon. Our general repression of matters disgusting prevents us facing up to a serious health problem. If we are the "god that shits" (E. Becker), then we are in full flight from ourselves. I even wonder whether religion itself and the whole idea of a god is produced by our self-disgust.

Then there's this New York Times article, which tells us:

2.6 billion people [are] toiletless. [Actually the New York Times doesn't tell us this; that's just quoting a protester's sign. Does the Times have higher factual standards than the average protester or blogger? -- Jaltcoh]

[T]he lack of [sanitation] kills far more people each year than warfare does. ...

[T]he persistent lack of toilets and sewage treatment leads to the deaths of some 700,000 children a year from diarrhea and other avoidable ailments linked to fecal contamination. ...

About 194 million school days are lost each year, in part because many girls stay home when schools lack toilets.

I admit that when I read about circumstances that are not just unimaginably wretched but also unfathomably widespread, I feel a sense of hopelessness: the problem is too big to solve, so it doesn't even seem worth trying. But actually, the situation seems to be getting much better:

[T]he fraction of humanity without adequate toilets and sanitation ... dropped to 42 percent in 2002 from 51 percent in 1990.

It's hard to have a visceral reaction to statistics like "42 percent" vs. "51 percent," for the same reason Stalin reportedly said that one death is a tragedy while a million deaths is a statistic. A decrease in 9% out of the world population of 6.7 billion is about 600 million people -- a staggering improvement in just 12 years.

And as for the girls who are prevented from going to school mentioned above, that seems to be getting less and less bad too. As of this 2005 article *(also from the NYT) about the situation in Ethiopia,

[m]ore than 6 in 10 girls of primary-school age are enrolled in school ... compared with fewer than 4 in 10 girls in 1999. Still, boys are far ahead, with nearly 8 in 10 of them enrolled in primary school.

There's a reflex among reporters -- and people in general -- where every disturbing problem in the world needs to be described as "the increasing problem of ___," without first checking to see if the statistics remotely bear out that empirical assertion. Why the pessimistic instinct? Anyway, I applaud the New York Times for not indulging in it. Not every horrendous problem is "increasing." Some things are horrendous but getting better.


IN THE COMMENTS: Rose George, the author mentioned at the beginning of this post, stops by to say:

you're quite right that some things are getting better. but sanitation is the most off-track of all millennium development goal targets, still. and we'd have to build a toilet every second until 2015 to meet it. so no, not all doom and gloom but also no reason to lessen the pressure. that 2.6 billion figure by the way is the standard one used by the UN and the World Bank. And I reckon it's probably an underestimation. Anyway thanks for posting on this noble topic.

(Photo by Susan Sermoneta, who's both on Flickr and has this personal website.)

More proof of human stupidity

This sentence recently appeared in a serious news report in the Economist:

[E]fforts to convict albino-killers have been thwarted by a rotten judicial system, with witch doctors using bribery or threats of spells to escape trial.

If humans were truly rational beings, that sentence would never have to be written.

More:

Alas, the killing of albinos has spread outside Tanzania’s borders to Kenya, Uganda and particularly Burundi. On January 2nd an eight-year-old albino boy living in Burundi was hacked to death in front of his mother. The killers took his arms and legs. ...

Investigators say the body parts of a single murdered albino sell for over $1,000, with the skin and flesh dried out and set into amulets and the bones ground down into a powder. Artisanal miners in the gold and diamond fields directly south of Lake Victoria are the main buyers. Some sprinkle albino powder on the walls of their narrow pits, hoping for glitter. Uneducated and desperate to strike riches, they are taken in by witch doctors’ stories of the wealth-giving properties of the potions.

My problem with relativism

My dad posted this on his (now defunct) blog a few years back:

Relativism has been much talked about lately because of the words of Pope Benedict XVI.  [He's referring to these comments from 2005. - Jac]  I greatly respect what I’ve heard from the new pope so far. He is defending Western civilization, a civilization I love and I find worth defending. But I’m also concerned that relativism is turning into the new anti-intellectual, anti-progressive code word. I’ve been asking myself to what extent I’m a relativist.

It turns out that I’m relatively relativistic, not absolutely relativistic. In the normal course of things, I’m eager to consider all points of view and welcome input from all cultures and groups. I support affirmative action even though it doesn’t serve my self–interest and may at times have worked against me. By temperament I prefer a diverse world. Although I go to a medical doctor, I’m open-minded enough to have tried acupuncture. You get the idea.

Where does my relativism stop? It stops at the absolute necessity of defending our civilization’s survival. Thus I supported the war in Afghanistan and was impatient with those who thought that this country had no right to shoot back against its real enemies. I opposed the war in Iraq because I did not feel that Saddam’s regime, however odious, represented an imminent threat against us.

I’m disgusted by those on the left whose cultural relativism consists of an absolute disapproval of the United States: those who gleefully point up every historical misdeed of this country while excusing the misdeeds of other countries as being results of different cultural values. Those who make cushy livings in the United States by vilifying the United States, biting the hand that feeds them. They belie their own claims to relativism. The historical misdeeds need to be brought up, faced honestly, and used as incentives to avoid similar wrongs in the future. But people who act as if the most important thing about George Washington was that he was a slaveowner are simply obtuse.

This issue is important today because Western civilization really is under an imminent threat, perhaps more in Europe than in this country. Islamic militants understand this and European leftists do not. In Holland and France recently the peace–loving liberal public has received some big shocks: the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh for making a film critical of Islam, and a number of violent attacks on French students by Muslim gangs shouting racial epithets. Such incidents have galvanized the right and split the left in those countries. The backlash does not promise to be edifying or thoughtful. The conflict is bound to increase.

The Islamicization of Europe is a real threat for the next generation. It shows an intent to take revenge not only for the Crusades but for the Battle of Tours. Meanwhile, relativist leftists are starting to look more and more like their liberal, well–bred counterparts in Chekhov’s plays: sitting around chatting amusingly about their own helplessness and the need to reform society. They don’t dare stand up in their own defense because it’s not the attractive thing to do.

No society, whether privileged or not, has an obligation to comply in its own demise. Liberalism does not mean permitting others to try to destroy you.

If I’m only relatively relativistic, then, does that actually make me more relativistic than the absolute relativists? Who knows? I’m not into solving paradoxes. I live comfortably with them.

But it means I’ll never be fully acceptable to the left. I saw an example of this about a decade ago when I was living in the doctrinairely leftist environment of Madison, Wisconsin. I had a friend who was a leftist activist – a nice, mild-mannered guy, and we had a lot of interests in common. He was going through a divorce, and I’d gone through one a few years earlier and could talk to him about it. We were at a social gathering one evening and there was some Indonesian gamelan music on the stereo. I like Indonesian gamelan music and had just enjoyed a concert of it at the university. So we were talking about how nice the music on the stereo was.

This gave my friend an opportunity to make a multiculturalist point. “How come Mozart is so much better known than Indonesian gamelan music?”

“Maybe because Mozart wrote better music?” I asked.

He looked at me with utter horror, as if the mask had been peeled from my face. “Better music?”

I had said the impermissible. And though the discussion ended there, after that evening he and I never got together socially again.

But you know, much as I can enjoy Indonesian gamelan music, Mozart is better. Tastes can vary. I may like Rembrandt and you may like Titian. But anyone who thinks Jeff Koons is an equally great artist is simply a fool.

I agree with just about all of that. (I do have one quibble, but I'll get to that later...)

I responded in the comments section:

I've had many conversations with Madisonians along the lines of your conversation with your friend about Mozart and Indonesian gamelan music. It amazes me how friends of mine who have devoted enormous amounts of time toward honing their own artistic talents can turn around and insist that no evaluation of artistic merit can possibly have any authority. If no art is better than any other art, then what motivation does the artist have to perfect his or her craft?

It often seems to me that one of the main things driving aesthetic relativists is the idea that objective aesthetic judgments are somehow just too self-centered to be acceptable. "Who are YOU to say that this art is better than that art? You think YOUR taste is any better than anyone else's?!" Well, yes, my taste in music is better than some people's, because I have chosen to spend a lot of time listening to music closely and repeatedly. And my taste in poetry is not as good as many people's, because I have not done what it takes to refine my taste in poetry. This is not being arrogant; it's just being honest.

The irony that always comes up in these conversations is that it is the relativists who are most interested in imposing their own absolute pronouncements on art. The relativist essentially says: "My whole aesthetic theory is the infallible truth; don't you dare contradict me." This same relativist will, of course, criticize me for being close-minded because I have the audacity to suggest that a Brittney Spears song is not quite as good as the 9th Symphony.

BTW, let's not fail to give Indonesian gamelan music its due. After all, it inspired Debussy to write some of the greatest music of all time.

RELATED:

1. A very intricate analysis of the merits of relativism (much more balanced than I'm willing to be!).

2. The philosopher Simon Blackburn on why he's not a relativist.

3. "We need to stop being such cowards about Islam."

(Painting by Vermeer; file from Wikimedia Commons.)