Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

This is obviously absurdly late, but I really think anyone who tries to underplay Michael Jackson’s death has to realize that the the argument that his death and life weren’t hugely signifigant relies on fairly contestable premises.

Namely, that pop culture doesn’t amtter at all.

Arguably, Michael Jackson was the most famous celebrity in the world. And even if he wasn’t the most recognizable face, he was certainly the most beloved musician ever, in terms of sheer numbers. I don’t need to regale you with the facts. Well, maybe I do so one can understand the scale of his fame.

Thriller is highest selling album  of all time. Bad had five number one singles. He was the first black man regularly to be on MTV. In Gabon, he was crowned a tribal king. Pop music can be split into two eras, pre Jackson and post Jackson. Oh yeah, he wrote nearly all of his big hits. He was the greatest dancer who could sing and the greatest singer who could dance. News of his death almost broke the internet.

If you care a whit about culture, if you care at all about the fact that other people care about culture, then yes, Michael Jackson’s death probably was the biggest story of the day, if not the week. Oh yeah, and that’s not mentioning all that weird stuff he did.

Some argue that Jackson’s celebrity — the changing appearence, the strangeness, the alienation, the accusations, the chimpanzees — surpassed the reasons anyone initially cared about this eccentric pop star. And in the minds of many, especially those who were only conscious during the weird years, he was just Wacko Jacko. But notice how the coverage of him, the remembrances have mostly been about the music. We’ve seen more footage of his first moonwalk than him dancing on the car at his second trial. This may be painfully anecdotal, but I’ve heard people my age talking about how they just realized how good his music actually is.

While it’s certainly true that the biggest victim of the celebrity saturated culture was Michael’s own sense of self, there is also the sad fact that, for so long, people only chose to focus on what wasn’t particularly exceptional. How many mentally and physically sick child stars who were beaten by their fathers and were worldwide celebrities since the age of 11 were at all normal? His music, his influence and his cultural legacy, on the other, were truely miraculous. Hopefully that’s what we will remember.

Republican intransigence in approving Obama nominees has been absurd on two levels. First, in general, the President should get to appoint his own people, unless they’re massively incompetent, corrupt or crazy. And second, when Republicans have made a stand against particular nominees, their reasons haven’t made much sense.

Case in point: Robert Groves. The background is the Republicans are making a big stink about ACORN being one of many groups that are signed up to be a 2010 census partner. Which means, according to the Wall Street Journal story by Jake Sherman, ACORN will be “identifying job candidates, encouraging its members to participate in the count and distributing literature explaining the importance of the census.” Other groups doing this include “Target Corp., Goodwill Industries and Telemundo.” Now, I understand why Republicans are worried about ACORN and Telemundo being involved in the census. It’s not that their involvement will lead to fradulent results, but that they will encourage and facillitate an accurate counting of minority, urban and poor populations. These groups, of course, are much more likely to be Democrats, and inasmuch as the census affects the apportioning of congressional districts and the distribution of federal funds, Republicans are right to be concerned. But they should at least be honest about the fact that their political fortunes are directly tied to counting as few poor minorities as possible.

That the GOP’s griping about the census is a mere pretense is most evident in their obstructing the appointment of Robert Groves, who happens to be one of the premier statisticians in the area of survey methodology. He’s exactly the type of person you want running the census. But because “he is an expert in statistical sampling and conservatives say the Constitution bars sampling for the decennial count”– they’ve managed to extract from him a promise that he won’t use sampling techniques and are still holding up his nomination. And while the Court — incorrectly in my view — ruled that sampling could not be used in apportioning congressional districts, conservatives are clearly deploying a convenient interpretation of the Constitution so they can make sure that the Census does not count the whole population.

Now, the Obama administration and the Census Bureau need to do a better job justifying why we have a census that goes beyond simply recording how where everyone lives, but still, this Republican intransigence is contrived and dishonest and should be called out as such.

Best I can tell, a key part of being a serious, interesting liberal thinker is to take some outdated shibboleths of the Left, and then criticize them very vociferously. The original way of doing this was to say all sorts of horrible things about communism — this just meant telling the truth. Then you would criticize the New Left, and then later you would say that America was afflicted by a Vietnam Syndrome that burdened us with unnecessary doubt when it came time to intervene in Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo or Iraq.

Well, my left-wing shibboleth, that very few people take seriously, is going to be any notion that hunter-gatherer societies were at all “better” than agricultural, civilized, centralized ones. Although there is some evidence that agriculture lead to the beginning of epidemic disease and may have, initially, decreased life expectancies, there is also the fact that hunter-gatherer societies were – and are – incredibly violent. An interesting article in New Scientist on the work of Santa Fe Institute evolutionary biologist Samuel Bowles has these intriguing bits of data:

In ancient graves excavated previously, Bowles found that up to 46 per cent of the skeletons from 15 different locations around the world showed signs of a violent death. More recently, war inflicted 30 per cent of deaths among the Ache, a hunter-gatherer population from Eastern Paraguay, 17 per cent among the Hiwi, who live in Venezuela and Colombia, while just 4 per cent among the Anbara in northern Australia.On average, warfare caused 14 per cent of the total deaths in ancient and more recent hunter-gatherers populations.

Now, this isn’t a pure inditement against hunter-gatherer society. For one, all this evidence comes from around 10,000-15,000 years ago, when agriculture was emerging and, as Bowles speculates “climactic swings that occurred between approximately 10,000 to 150,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene period may have pushed once-isolated bands of hunter-gatherers into more frequent contact with one another.” Second, any data gleaned from violent death rates among hunter-gatherer societes in Australia, Brazil or South Africa has to be treated very carefully, because those societies clearly aren’t the same as the ones that predominated in our pre-civilization days.

But the overall point that societies that exhibit very few of the hallmarks of civilization also exhibit very high rates of violent death, and moreover, that the occurence of violent death has been decreasing constantly, even including the horrible institutionalized mass death of the twentieth century.

Now, I don’t think very many on the left actually think that hunter-gatherer societies are particularly admirable or that they represent a model that we should emulate, but there is a particularly credulous school of social anthropology influenced by Franz Boas, which seems to have an almost Romantic attachment to pre-civilization societies and is willing to believe the best about them, despite evidence to the contrary.

I just found out. From about 5:30 on, I wasn’t using my blackberry because it was low on battery. It turns out that this Korean woman tried to tell me at a busstop in Fairfax, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

Wow. Mark Sanford and Ayatollah Khamenei must be thrilled.

In all seriousness, this is all quite sad. In fact, the entire Michael Jackson saga from the late 1980s on is really a tragedy. His ability as a performer was really on a different level.

Randall Terry is nuts. His nuttiness was most prevalent when I was either not alive, alive only according to pro-lifers like Randall Terry, or an infant, so the piece was informative for me. I also read the entirety of his most recent book, A Humble Plea, which was quite the trip.  Check the piece out.

Bruce McQuain confuses VA hospitals with Army hospitals, Ezra points this out, and Megan McArdle comes in to say this:

But here’s the thing:  Army hospitals have all the advantages that single-payer advocates love about the VA.  They’re unified.  There’s no profit incentive–indeed, the doctors are on quite low salaries.  They have great incentives for preventive care.  They certainly don’t have any profit motive to provide bad care.  So why did Walter Reed suck?  And what guarantees that the VA is the system we’ll follow, rather than the multiple other dysfunctional government systems everyone hates?

Well, how about the fact that Walter Reed was dealing with a population that had been injured in war. Suffice to say, this isn’t the normal health care population. And while I’m sure the VA pool differs from the general pool, I’m also sure that the Army/Walter Reed patient pool is much, much different from any cross section of the general public. From an organizational standpoint, a lot of problems at Walter Reed had to do with problems unique to the Army bureaucracy, as well as to the fact that they were fighting two wars at the time. Also, it seems awfully pessimistic to assume that, in a world where we decide to create a VA like system, the government would emulate the bad example, as opposed to the good one.

A certain other young blogger and I were talking about how much we adore that cantankerous, racist, homophobic, charming, lovable sui generis nut that is John Derbyshire. I mean, not only did he write a book about the Reimann Hypothesis and appear in Enter the Dragon, but he may have written the greatest paragraph in the history of political commentary:

However shocking the things I am saying here may seem in this long tranquil time, I guarantee that when the first U.S. carrier is sunk by Chinese action, or the first American city is erased by a Chinese ICBM, Chinese nationals, including those who are U.S. Citizens, will be hustled into camps faster than you can say “executive order” and will stay there for the duration, whatever the ACLU– or even the Supreme Court– thinks about it. I hope the camps will not be very uncomfortable, for I shall be there too– the Derbyshires travel as a family. I also hope that I shall be able to maintain sufficient detachment to understand that a responsible U.S. government really has no choice in the matter. (emphasis mine)

Wow. Just Wow.

(Yes, this was written some 9 years ago, but some things are just too noteworthy for timliness to be a concern)

The health care debate is very, very weird. Obama and his advisers are doing a good job of keeping their eye on the ball by viewing health care reform as primarily a fiscal policy that is our only hope to stop the expanding health care sector from taking over our economy. It so happens that the public massively supports a so-called “public option” which is our best chance to reduce costs because it would introduce a big government supplier into the health care market, which could bargain down costs and focus on providing health care as opposed to screening out sick people so as to make as much money as possible, which is what private insurers primarily do.

Obama supports a public plan — or something close — because otherwise “health reform” just turns into the government subsidizing a bunch of people buying private health insurance without any real reforms besides expanded coverage.

And yet, the public plan is see as the Rubicon that many centrist senators — including Democrats — won’t cross, for fear of offending the interests who would lose out from a cheaper, more efficient health care system.

And while it’s depressing that there actually may be just enough senators to block  actual reforms, one would hope that the popular President and the public actively supporting a particular policy option could sway the more craven of the bunch.

Ryan Avent, Conor Clarke and Matt Ronglie all have already covered this, but the CBO released their projections for how much the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill will cost. Contrary to Republican nightmares, Waxman-Markey will probably end up cost $175 per household, instead of $1,600. So, you know, esteemed economist Martin Feldstein turned out to be wrong by nearly a factor of ten.

And while this may be outside the purview of the Congressional Budget Office, it would be nice if they could score — somehow or another — the economic benefits of the world not melting down.  Call it dynamic scoring for liberals.

UPDATE For all you coming here from Yglesias, he’s very much right that just calculating the “costs” of climate change in terms of, say, expected US GDP lost is rather silly. The “somehow or another” was meant as wiggle room for all the concerns about probabilities of total disaster or the “cost” of Bangladesh no longer existing. I was just saying that if conservatives can agitate for the CBO to score tax cuts with consideration for economic growth, then we should agitate for the scores of global warming related legislation mentioning that global warming is bad and has “costs” — economic and otherwise.

Dan Senor and Christine Whiton, two former Bush Administration officials, argue in Time that all previous democratic transitions happened with Western support, and so we should more explicilty support Moussavi and the protestors in Iran. This seems like a fair point, but when you look at the actual examples they give, they are clearly irrelevant to the current situation.

First they mention the Eastern Bloc. And yes, it’s true, the United States supported opposition movements in those countries, and the Eastern Bloc was  mostly sucessful in transitioning to democracy. But the difference between, say, Poland and Iran is that Poland only had a totalitarian system because it was imposed on them by the Soviet Union. So, not only were they essentially occupied by a despised foreign nation, but once that regime became impotent, overthrowing a political and military strcuture that was dependent on Soviet support became much easier. Iran’s authoritarian leadership is not a satellite of another unpopular foreign power. This strikes me as a fairly important distinction.

Their second example is just absurd — South Korea. Senor and Whitman write that “energetic bipartisan U.S. pressure peaked in 1987 when U.S. ambassador Jim Lilley hand delivered a letter from President Reagan urging against a crackdown on protesters. The advice was heeded. Two weeks later the protesters’ demands were met, and Korean democracy was born.” But can you think of any differences between Iran and South Korea? Oh yeah, South Korea was not only a strong US ally, but there have been tens of thousands of US troops stationed there since the end of the Korean War. It seems obvious why the authoritarian leadership would be more susceptible to US pressure.

What’s worse about this piece is that when they’re done dealing with the arguments against more active US involvement against the regime, they never say exactly what Obama should do differently. This seems like a fairly important question that nearly every conservative Obama critic has been oddly silent on.

Mickey Kaus is right: had this study showed that NCLB had lead to decreases or steady “test scores for both “advanced” and “basic” students,” it probably would have been trumpeted all over the place. But instead, test scores, at least according to this 50-state study done by the Center for Education Policy, are going up for nearly everyone. This is contrary to the line of NCLB critics who say that “schools are not focusing on the highest- or lowest-scoring students.” As the report says, quoted in Education Week, “We found no strong evidence that NCLB’S focus on proficiency is shortchanging students at the advanced or basic levels.”

Of course, there’s still the question of how well test scores reflect student achievement, but this sure looks like good news.

There’s been a lot of confusion in the critiques of Obama’s stance on Iran. Some critics want Obama to be more forceful rhetorically, but don’t then substantiate how such a move would actually help the protestors, or even what the ultimate end-goal should or could be. Other suggestions, like blatant material support for opposition groups, are clearly wrongheaded.

George Packer, however, offers the most plausible case for more forceful rhetoric from Obama:

Every day you have to summon the courage to go out into the streets (where the death toll is now reportedly at thirty-two), and your awareness of international opinion is steadily diminishing as Internet and phone access is choked off, A part of your mind is alert to the danger of being labeled an American agent, always a factor in the regime’s propaganda; but given the enormous risks you’re already running, a much larger part of your mind is afraid that the world is going to lose interest or write you off, that the regime is going to stop feeling any international pressure to behave with restraint, and that when the guns start mowing protesters down in earnest, no one will be watching. When the stakes are this high, being the object of too much foreign concern is not likely to be your number one fear.

This is an argument for more pointed and judgmental rhetoric from Obama, who has the biggest megaphone in the world. But I’m not sure it’s really necessary.

Iran is not Burma, Iran is not Kyrgzstan. Even if the activities of journalists are being restricted, there are still plenty of reporters in Tehran. Also, Iran, unlike Burma, isn’t cut off from the rest of the world, and while it may seem a tad glib to say that twitter and youtube can make up for the power of the president to capture the world’s attention, if anything, those first few days of protests where Obama took, in Packer’s words, a stance that “made the U.S. look out of touch with the reality in the streets of Tehran, inexplicably afraid of offending Ahmadinejad” showed that Obama needn’t say anything for the world to know about the protesters’ cause.

Also, if the concern of the protestors is that  ”the world is going to lose interest or write you off,” then there are plenty of people and groups besides the President who can assauge those concerns. Michael Walzer has argued convincingly that instead of looking for the government to support the protestors, people should:

Confronting mass protests in Iran, where at least some of the protesters, perhaps many of them, are our political friends, let’s help them through our parties, and unions, and religious groups, and magazines. Let’s write about them, publish their stories, raise money for their activities, condemn their arrests, hold meetings, sign petitions, picket Iranian embassies in every country where we can mobilize the picketers. Let’s explore every possible means of agitation and advocacy on behalf of our principles and our friends.This is an ideological struggle, and that kind of struggle isn’t first of all the business of governments. It is the business of politically committed men and women.

If the problem is literally one of attention, of enough people knowing about and seeing the protests so that the regime is to embarassed to openly slaughter the protestors, than the work of those “politically committed men and women” — like those setting up proxy servers so Iranians can bypass censors — can make sure that the world’s eye stays focused on the protests, without Obama exacting the real diplomatic and political costs of speaking more forcefully.

But Packer and Obama are actually on the same page now, and if anything, the fact that Obama adjusted his position to make it more in line with what Packer says in necessary to sustain the protests and shame the regime shows how Obama is a relatively small player in this large, complex and very Iranian drama.

Victor Davis Hanson makes the somewhat plausible argument that liberals would not be saying that we shouldn’t get openly or vociferously involved in the events in Iran had Obama followed the policy conservatives recommend , and had Obama followed that policy, liberals would support him. Correspondingly, had the election happened while Bush was in office and Bush took Obama’s stance, Hanson argues that we would be criticizing Bush for being overly cynical.

Now, even if you accept this as true — notwithstanding the fact that Obama being president could have been an important variable in the amount of support Mousavi got — it doesn’t reflect well on conservatives. If Obama were openly taking sides, wouldn’t they just be saying it was more of the same empty, hope-filled rhetoric? Would they ever unambiguously support an Obama foreign policy position?

But the real point is that this type of counterfactual is totally silly. The reason Democrats and liberals support Obama is not because he’s Obama, it’s because they substantively agree with where Obama stands. Now, one some issues that people don’t care about or are uninformed on, they’ll follow someone they trust, but big foreign policy questions are totally different. Not only did Obama draw sharp contrasts with Bush during the campaign and while in office, he also did so with Clinton during the primary. From the beginning, Obama has defined himself by his approach to foreign policy, and has been rewarded with support. So, imagining Obama taking the exact opposite track than the one he’s taking and then speculating about how Democrats would react to it is pretty pointless.

Robert Kagan, responding to Jonathan Chait’s criticism of his Washington Post column in which he called Obama a “objectively pro-Ahmad,” criticizes Obama for accepting the legitimacy of the Ahmadinejad regime:

Bush, on the other hand, occupied a policy no-man’s land:  not being willing to endorse the legitimacy of the regime AND not helping the opposition.  my point is that Obama had moved to a policy of accepting the legitimacy of the regime, in keeping with the grand bargain approach, and that the continuation of that approach would eventually be to promise the regime that the US would undertake no actions that would in any way be destabilizing to it.

This is strange stuff. Are all non-democratic leaders of states illegitimate and thus should be ignored by the United States? Is Hu Jintao illegitimate, is Fidel Castro illegitmate? Now, even if we assume that Ahmadinejad lost the election (which probably isn’t true) and now is ruling based on votes he didn’t actually win, was he an illegitimate leader from 2005 to last week? This strikes me as an odd position to take. For better or for worse (OK, for worse), lots of countries, and even some big important countries, are ruled by leaders who weren’t democratically elected or have non democratic governments.

One could certainly argue that in some ideal or theoretical sense, Mubarak or Jintao or even Medvedev aren’t legitimate, but inasmuch as this leads you to a policy of pretending that the governments of Egypt, China and Russia shouldn’t be recognized, this discussion becomes basically moot. And when we’ve tried to just ignore countries because we didn’t like them — Cuba since the Revolution, the P.R.C. through 1972 — it didn’t actually help us accomplish any meaningful objectives. Also, at a certian point, the group of people who perform the tasks of a government are the government, regardless of any larger moral claims. Kagan’s complaints are also rendered hollow by the fact that we have all sorts of relationships with regimes that are orders of mangnitutde less democratic, liberal and “legitimate” than Iran. Saudi Arabia doesn’t bother having elections, Egypt has totally phony ones and yet we manage to deal with their leaders as if they were legitimate.

I understand why people argue that Obama shouldn’t negotiate with Ahmadinejad while all this turmoil is still going on, but ultimately Iran’s nuclear program is something we have to deal with, and if the best way of doing that is through direct talks, than all this stuff about legitimacy is very much moot.

For more, check out this.

There are obviously plenty of problems with Krauthammer’s latest column excoriating Obama for not “meddling” in Iran. But here’s one part that was especially curious:

This revolution will end either as a Tiananmen (a hot Tiananmen with massive and bloody repression or a cold Tiananmen with a finer mix of brutality and co-optation) or as a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic.

I mean, maybe, but is it really so inconceivable that the protests end with Moussavi as president and Rafsanjani as Supreme Leader? Or some other arrangement that leaves much of the institutional structure of the Islamic Republic intact? Sure, these types of attempted rebellions tend to end in violent repression, but the scenarios I’ve outlined seemed just as likely as a complete overthrow of the existing political system.

But I understand why Krauthammer wants it make it seem like a stark choice between the continued survival of a hard-line, belligerent theocracy and a new regime that would “mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism” that would “leave it forever spent and discredited” and would go on to inspire further revolts all over the Middle East. This way Krauthammer can make Obama seem opposed to all sorts of developments that all reasonable people would see as good. It would be nice if a democratic regime sprung up in Iran, made all sorts of liberal reforms, stopped funding terrorism and didn’t develop nuclear weapons. But there’s hardly enough evidence — if any — that suggests the protesters want to see that type of system or that their substantive foreign policy views, as opposed to their tone, regarding enrichment and terrorism are really all that different from what we have now. Who knows, maybe they are, but it’s hardly obvious how a total regime change shake out.

But then again, it wouldn’t be Krauthammer if he let ambiguity and uncertain get in the way of making Manichean pronouncements about American foreign policy.

Ezra posted an interesting graph showing results from a Gallup poll asking what groups Americans trusted on health care.

Ezra decided to highlight the big 73% that doctors garnered and how that was problematic. But the real interesting bit is the big difference between how much the public trusts Obama and how much they trust the Democratic Congress — a 16% gap to be exact.  And then here’s another big gap, 8%, between Democratic Congressional leaders and Republican Congressional leaders, along with a 7% gap between health insurance companies and Democratic leaders, and 23% between Obama and health insurance companies.

This seems pretty important, especially as it relates to the part of Obama/Baucus/Kennedy’s plan that is the most controversial and most important: the public option. It just so happens that stakeholder support for the public option goes in the same order of Americans’ trust that said group/person will “recommend the right thing for reforming the U.S. healthcare system.” Obama insists on it, Democratic leaders like Kent Conrad seem willing to bargain it away and Republicans and health insurance companies despise it. One also assumes that once Democrats in Congress coalesce around a single plan, that Obama will advocate for it very, very forcefully.

Now, Obama will never be popular enough to totally go over the head of Congress and appeal to the public so that they apply the pressure to get a real liberal health care bill passed. But I don’t think that there are really 41 senators who are so resolutely opposed to a public option that they can withstand public pressure. Surely Obama’s popularity with the greater public can convince the more craven and less principled ones to eventually see the light.

Phillip Gourevitch, trend setter.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda – Phillip Gourevitch

The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda – Andrew Rice

The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East - Neil MacFarquhar

I guess it’s a rule that all books based on original reporting done in dangerous foreign places have to have this kind of title. Thanks, Phillip.

Reza Aslan argues here that Iranians in 2005 and 2009 had a wider range of political and religious thought represented in their presidential candidates than Americans generally do. Now, putting aside the two most obvious rejoinders – that the Supreme Leader vets and filters out the candidates and that the president isn’t the most important official in Iran – I think Reza is just wrong about America.

First, he engages in circa-2000 Naderism by saying that the Republican and Democratic candidates tend to look and talk the same. While this is often true in a cultural sense — Gore, Bush and Kerry all had very similar backgrounds, for instance — we all know that the GOP and the Democrats don’t offer the same policy vision. In 2008, for instance, one candidate supported universal health care, raising taxes, large-scale action against global warming, and abortion rights, while the other didn’t.

But besides the ideological differences between the two candidates, Aslan seems to ignore that there are third party candidates in America as well as Iran. According to the results released by the Iranian government, which admittedly are problematic, Rezaee and Karoubi respectively garnered 1.73 and .85 percent. Ralph Nader and Bob Barr, in 2008 got .56 and .4 percent of the vote. Or, since Iran uses a run-off, you could compare the slate of major parties primary candidates to the Iranian candidates, which ranged from far-right nativism of Tom Tancredo, to the leftism of Dennis Kucinich. There’s also the fact that America has a robust two party system, which means that the major presidential candidates repersent a narrower swath of political opinon than, say, Israeli candidates for Prime Minister, but there’s correspondingly a lot of ideological diversity within the two parties. Add in the fact that Ralph Nader and Ross Perot have garnered significant — at least compared Rezaee and Karoubi — vote totals in recent history and Aslan’s comparison looks pretty facile.

Development economics is a weird discipline.  People have a good idea of what causes economic growth in developed economies, but have a poor understanding of what causes underdeveloped countries to become developed one. For example, few people think that what happened in East Asia in the 60s and 70s constitutes a model that other underdeveloped countries can follow. There are disagreements over what causes poverty, whether it’s bad governments, bad geography or the aftereffects of broad historical events. And yet, poverty, in terms of net social cost is by far the most important issue in the world.

Much of his doubt about development economics has lead to some, like William Easterly and Dambisa Mayo, to totally reject the aid enterprise and advocate that we basically just stop any top-down developmental aid to Africa. Others, like Jeffrey Sachs, thinks that all of Africa’s problems are due to its poverty and that this  poverty can be eliminated through better designed aid programs.

The truth lies in the middle, but in a strange way. Easterly and those in his camp are right about one thing, the record of rich country intervention in increasing the growth rate or measurable wealth or income of poor countries, especially in Africa, is very low. We’ve been giving tons of aid, and income has gone nowhere. On the other hand, we have a very good record in public health interventions. Smallpox, for example, was eliminated through a top-down effort by the World Health Organization.

This is all just a big wind up to Charles Kenney’s new book, or at least its free online introduction. Kenney makes the important argument that despite the depressing “economic” (i.e. income) news coming out of Africa, there has been good news on public health, well being and quality of life. More importantly, economists should do a better job of recognizing that improvements in public health, even if they don’t come with increased incomes or economic growth, are still very, very important:

As suggested by the global reach of improvements in the quality of life, income growth has not been a requirement for improvements in health or education or civil rights. Even most countries that have seen per capita income decline over the past thirty years have seen health, education and civil rights observance considerably improve. This is the greatest success of development. The last century has seen a dramatic (and literal) decline in the cost of living.

…The fact that income appears to be a poor proxy for overall changes in the quality of life suggests the need for a broad focus –a broad definition of development—for policymakers. Given that it is not clear exactly which policies at which times will promote growth, and the tenuous nature of the connection between income growth and quality of life, the first rule for economic policymaking should be ‘do no harm.’ The grail of economic growth does not justify the degradation of health, education or civil rights.Regarding support for improvements in the broader quality of life, policies might include aiding the spread of ideas through approaches that increase demand for good health and education. Communications programs and payments for school attendance or clinic visits have a role here. In addition, with the quality of service provision increasingly important to outcomes, reform of the institutions of health and education should also be a central concern.

Of course, Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen have been saying some version of this for decades, but considering how development and aid policy has had a relative revival of popularity and relevance, it’s worth remembering that it’s not all about income and growth.

Wow. Jose Saramago, the brilliant Nobel Prize winning author, has probably written the greatest editorial of all time. Allow me to stretch the limits of fair use by posting a translation taken from here.

I don’t know what other name I could give it. It’s a thing that looks dangerously like a human, a thing that throws parties, that organises orgies and rules a country called Italy. This thing, this illness, this virus threatens to become the cause of the moral death of Verdi’s country. If a deep vomit doesn’t succeed in ejecting it from the consciousness of Italians, the poison will end up corroding the veins and destroying the heart of one of Europe’s richest cultures. The basic values of human coexistence are trampled daily by the viscous feet of the Berlusconi thing; amongst its many talents, it has a funambulesque ability to abuse words, perverting their intention and meaning, as in the case of the People of Freedom, the name given to the party with which the thing took power. I’ve called the thing delinquent and I don’t regret it. For semantic and social reasons that others will be able to explain better than I can, the term delinquent has in Italy a much stronger connotation than it has in any other language spoken in Europe. I use the meaning given to the term by Dante’s language in order to translate clearly and forthrightly what I think about the Berlusconi thing—though it is more than doubtful that Dante ever used the term. In my Portuguese, and according to the dictionaries and the current practice of communication, delinquency means ‘the act of committing crimes, disobeying laws or moral codes’. This definition fits the Berlusconi thing without a wrinkle, without any jarring, to the point that it seems more like a second skin than the clothes that the thing puts on itself. For years and years the Berlusconi thing has been committing crimes of a variable but always demonstrated seriousness. It’s outrageous that it not only disobeys laws, but worse, it invents them to safeguard its public and private interests as politician, businessman and the companion of minors. Where the moral codes are concerned, it’s not even worth talking about it, there is not a person in Italy or the rest of the world that doesn’t know that the Berlusconi thing fell into the most abject of states a long time ago. This is the Italian prime minister, this is the thing that the Italian people have elected twice to serve them as a role model, this is the path to ruin which is dragging along the values of liberty and dignity that suffused Verdi’s music and the political actions of Garibaldi—the ones that, during the struggle for unification in the 19th century, made of Italy a spiritual guide for Europe and for Europeans. This is what the Berlusconi thing wants to throw into the rubbish bin of History. Will the Italians end up allowing this to happen?