The Economist focuses on what is, in many ways, the biggest single geopolitical question facing the world today – will Turkey be admitted to the EU. As The Economist notes:

the trickiest conundrum for Europe’s leaders when they meet next week in Copenhagen. That is the question of whether Turkey, a Muslim country of nearly 70m souls, which is already part of NATO, should be invited, with real intent provided that the applicant meets rigorous conditions, to join Europe’s top civilian club too. It is a massive question, because it raises the issue of where the geographical boundaries of the EU should end. Might Russia itself, one day, be included? Could Morocco ever make the grade? Indeed, if Turkey joined, why not, one day, its neighbour, Iraq?

I made almost exactly the same points in the Fin a little while ago:

The admission of Turkey, likely by 2010, would give the EU borders with Iraq, Iran and Syria, fundamentally changing the geopolitics of the Middle East. The entry of Turkey, along with a few European stragglers, would complete the process of European unification in traditional geographical terms, with the exception of European Russia. But traditional geographical terms are already being revised.
A string of North African and Middle Eastern countries, including Morocco, Egypt and Jordan, have signed association agreements with the EU. The entire region has now been renamed by the EU as the ‘South and East Mediterranean’. In the light of recent history, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and the Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area must be seen as the precursor to a Greater Europe encompassing the entire classical world.
The ideological implications are even more striking. The success or failure of Europe in integrating Muslim countries, beginning with Turkey, will do more to determine future relations between Islam and the West than any military expedition.

As an antidote to the kind of absurd declinism promoted by Karl Zinsmeister and endorsed by lots of American bloggers, it’s worth considering a triumphalist view of European expansion in which, within 25 years, the United States of Europe will extend from Cork to Kamchatka and from Stockholm to the Sahara, arbitrating disputes that the former imperial power had tried and failed to resolve. No doubt nothing as magnificent as this will happen – the new Europe is a land of messy democratic compromise rather than imperial grandeur. But success with Turkey would be a big step, including as a first course, resolution of the intractable Cyprus dispute and extending to a relationship with the Muslim world very different from that envisaged by the cultural warriors of the West.

Interestingly, the US is pushing hard for Turkish admission to the EU, and the hardest push is coming from advocates of war with Iraq. It’s unclear whether they are simply doing what’s convenient in the short term, are so confident of American supremacy that they have no concern about the rise of a European counterweight or are generously supporting a project which promises to make the world the better place.

Electrolite posts extracts from a Louis Menand review of Pinker’s Blank Slate. I’ll do the same with yet another extract from my own draft review. Comments most welcome:

The ‘evolutionary psychology’ model put forward by Pinker is essentially a rebadging of the human sociobiology model launched with great fanfare in the 1970s. The basic innovation in sociobiology, as opposed to earlier Darwinian models of society, was a central focus on reproductive strategies, rather than on adaptations associated with the struggle for food and survival. Since sex and reproduction are central human concerns at all times, the application of sociobiological analysis to humans promised to find a genetic basis for central institutions of society such as marriage and the family.

Moreover, a focus on reproduction implies a focus on genes rather than organisms. The ‘interest’ of genes in reproducing themselves does not coincide with any obvious notion of the interests of organisms. Moreover, the ‘genes-eye’ view focuses attention on conflicts of interest between mates, between sibling and, most strikingly, between mothers and children. Using this perspective, sociobiologists promised to resolve many long-standing controversies about family structure, sex roles and so on.
There were some obvious difficulties with this enterprise. Unlike other animals, human societies display a bewildering variety of familial and social arrangements. Moreover, most humans see themselves as conscious agents pursuing a wide range of goals, of which reproduction is commonly not the most significant. Most saliently, there is the widespread occurrence of homosexuality and celibacy, behaviors not apparently conducive to the dissemination of one’s genes.

A further difficulty was that, unlike with other animals, there was no satisfactory empirical data on which to base the model. If sociobiology is correct, human behavior today reflects optimal reproductive strategies in the prehistoric societies of the African savannah. But those societies are long extinct, leaving little behind from which to make inferences about the selection pressures they faced.

Hence, it is necessary to rely on observations of the cultural organisation of the hunter-gatherer bands that survived to the modern era, invariably in marginal environments that were slow to attract the attention of those with more advanced technology. Anthropologists rarely reach such bands before their traditional organisation has commenced radical change as a result of earlier contact with the advance parties of Western civilisation and the goods and diseases that accompany them.

In the first flush of enthusiasm, the advocates of human sociobiology promised that these difficulties would be overcome. Homosexuality and celibacy were to be explained by hypothetical ‘helper’ genes, which reproduced themselves by assisting the reproductive success of family members.

Pinker sees this enterprise as having been highly successful, and certainly some of the more extreme critics look silly today. Nevertheless, there is a striking difference between the confident claims of human sociobiology and the relatively modest offerings of evolutionary sociobiology. On homosexuality, Pinker frankly concedes that we have no idea why some people are homosexual and others are not.

Similarly, with regard to the heritability of behavioral traits, Pinker suggests that about 50 per cent of the observed variation in individual character traits within modern societies is genetically determined. (This proportion is conditional on the amount of variation in environment for the population being considered, and would be much lower for comparisons between societies.) Pinker views this as a triumph over nurturists like Leon Kamin who asserted in the 1970s that there was no evidence to justify a non-zero estimate for heritability (not the same thing as saying the heritability is equal to zero). Pinker does not mention the fact that, at the same time, leading naturists like Eysenck and Jensen were claiming 80 per cent heritability, and makes Kamin look silly by not mentioning his main point, which was to show that the twin studies of Sir Cyril Burt, on which Eysenck and others relied relied, were almost entirely fraudulent, being based on fabricated data collected by non-existent collaborators.

Looking for Leadership. I approached this with some foreboding – ‘Leadership’ is one of those words that has me feeling for the safety catch, especially after Paul Keating adopted it as the slogan for his doomed 1996 election campaign (I was especially irked by the superfluous full stop in banners reading “Leadership.”). And while I’ve very much liked a lot of Horne’s work, elder statesmen can start to take themselves too seriously.

But my fears were ill-founded. This is an excellent book, thoughtful and, while very critical of Howard, not a diatribe against him. I particularly liked a point Horne stresses, that the Commonwealth of Australia is unique in the way it was created by a popular vote (corrections welcome -put them in the comments thread). It’s not a bloodstained national myth of the kind that was considered appropriate in the 19th and 20th centuries, and was therefore overshowed by the Anzac legend, but it’s just right for the world of the 21st century and to the ideas of social democratic internationalism (my alternative to the pejorative “Transnational Progressivism‘) .

I’m also reading The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf. It’s a family tragedy set in the high plains of Colorado. The blurb makes comparisons to Cormac McCarthy and Alice Munro, which seems about right. I sometimes find McCarthy a bit portentous, but Haruf’s prose is simple and unpretentious. Another obvious comparison is to Willa Cather, whom I haven’t read for years, but should dig out again.

Nick Denton has also been blogging on the EU-US spats going on the blogosphere and elsewhere. He notes

Some people wrote in to complain about the American arrogance typified by Glenn Reynolds. That’s not the point at all. The current criticism of Europe is far from arrogance; it’s chippy cultural cringe, more akin to the way Australians thought of England last century. Embarrassing, coming from the superpower.

I agree, though the comparison with Australia had not occurred to me. The cultural cringe regarding England was pretty much killed off by the early 70s. It dominated the attitudes of the age-cohort of people like Germaine Greer, Clive James and Donald Horne, many of whom ended up as expats in Britain. By the time I was an adult, Australia’s crucial relationship was clearly that with the US. Although often fraught, this relationship never involved the same cultural ‘chip on the shoulder’ as that with England.

In June last year, I observed the change in the tone of US discussion of Europe. [This piece was written before S11, but the fact that it needs no real change is striking. Just about everyone in the world has taken S11 as proof that they were right all along] Here is a condensed version:

Bubbles can be filled with all sorts of noxious gases and, when they burst, the resulting smell can be unpleasant. This point was illustrated by the bursting of the Japanese bubble of the 1980s, which was accompanied by a good deal of breastbeating about ‘the Japan that can say no’ and chauvinistic revisionism about World War II. We have seen similar effluvia from the rapidly-deflating US economic bubble…

Trans-Atlantic verbal sniping has been going on ever since the Declaration of Independence. What is remarkable is the rancour with which American commentators have responded to European criticism of US policies on such issues as global warming, missile defence and the death penalty…During the boom of the late 1990s, US commentary on Europe was characterized by a tone of complacent triumphalism, while European discussion of the US bordered on panic….All of this has changed in 2001. While European discussion of Bush has been condescending, even patronising, American commentators have been almost apoplectic…

This change in tone may be explained by the fact that sentiment about national performance is closely attuned to the ten-year business cycle. Over the last decade, the US economic cycle has led that in Europe by two or three years. So while GDP per person in the US is already declining, the European business cycle is just beginning to turn down….

In addition to timing differences, the amplitude of the current business cycle in the US has been very high. An exceptionally strong boom has been followed by a very rapid deceleration. The resulting shift from absurd optimism to renewed pessimism has clearly soured many tempers.

Eighteen months later, the cycle has moved on but only a little. The European downturn I noted then is well under way, but the US economy has bumped along, with neither a sustained recovery nor a further downturn becoming evident as usual. The result is that tempers are now frayed on both sides.

The songbooks haven’t been unpacked yet, and everything is a bit rushed, so I’ll just give you the opening verse and chorus of a song I wrote celebrating the Country Party (now the National Party). The other verses were about politicians who are now long-forgotten so you’ll just have to make up your own, if you can think of a good rhyme for “Anderson”

When I was young and easily led,
And all the go was baiting Reds,
I thought I’d take up kicking heads,
And join the Country Party
Chorus
Toora-loora-loora-loo
Horse and dog and kangaroo,
And if I was a thug like you,
I’d join the Country Party

As with Bobby, I hardly knew you, the original tune is an Irish anti-recruiting song, Join the British Army

Hard on the heels of my criticism of US economic triumphalism comes the news that the US unemployment rate has risen from 5.7 per cent to 6 per cent, and that the Treasury Secretary (O’Neill) and economics advisor (Lindsey) have resigned. Digging a little further, it becomes apparent that in the core sector for productivity growth, manufacturing, things are grim indeed, with employment down by around 15 per cent over the last couple of years, and output also down sharply

Productivity growth in US manufacturing has been impressive, but, at least in part, it has been of the kind made famous by Margaret Thatcher. A lot of less-efficient plants have closed down and that automatically raises the average.

It would be easy to spin this into a declinist story. Playing the Zinsmeister extrapolation game, I could predict that the US will have double-digit unemployment in five years time and lose most of its manufacturing sector in ten.
Easy but silly. As I observed two years ago

nothing is more fickle than international economic fashion. It wasn’t that long ago that New Zealand was being hailed as a miracle economy. Some time in the next few years, no doubt, Japan will be booming while the US struggles to escape from recession. Japan’s problems will be forgotten while the malaise of American governance will be the focus of attention…. Yet when all the fuss has died down, the United States will still have the world’s richest economy, and most Americans will still enjoy high material living standards. America will still be the world’s dominant technological, economic and military, power.

Japan isn’t booming yet -it’s still paying the price for bad decisions made during the era of Japanese triumphalism. But it’s clear that the US economy has structural problems every bit as intractable as those that are evident in Europe.

Nathan Bierma writes

One of my biggest pet peeves about blogs is how amnesiac they are; they place such a primacy on the latest post–indeed, in the case of the majority of blogs who fixate on political headlines or personal minutiae, the only value in what they post is how up-to-the-minute they are–that once a post slides down the screen and into the archives, it’s effectively flushed out of existence.

Nathan has started a ‘Recycle Bin’ feature, where he reposts old (in blog terms, a few months old is ancient) posts. I’ve been thinking of doing something similar, especially as, with growing visitor numbers, a lot of current readers have never seen the old posts.

In an email response to my piece on declinism and triumphalism, Steven Den Beste writes

It is true that if you do your analysis with a narrow shutter, you can get that kind of changed impression on a regular basis. It’s also the case that many of those who have trumpeted the decline of American, when short-term opportunity arose, have an agenda and criticize us for other reasons when our economy is good.

But it’s possible to look at underlying problems and see trends which are more critical, and not illusionary. The demographic inversion that Europe faces is not transitory.

I also don’t think that the decline of Europe is inevitable; I think it may well be possible for them to turn things around. Part of why I’ve been writing what I have is a forlorn hope that my small voice may contribute to a process of waking up the people of Europe to make the changes which are necessary to save themselves, before it’s too late.

One thing we do now know: For all its ideological appeal, socialism doesn’t actually work, and the more closely any nation embraces the socialist redistributionist ideal, the less will overall its economy will function.

In this case, it is extremely disturbing that Germany essentially sat out the last economic boom cycle. It’s not merely that it didn’t perform as well during that interval as we did, it’s that their economy was in what amounted to recession the entire interval. (It’s just that it wasn’t quite as bad a recession as what’s happening there now.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that just because other people have made these kinds of arguments wrongly before doesn’t mean that I and the rest who are making them about Europe now must also be wrong. A stopped clock and all that..

There are a lot of points here, but I just want to observe that the tendency to focus on Germany as the archetypal EU nation while understandable (it’s the biggest) can be quite misleading. The most important reason is the fact that this is the first economic cycle since reunification. Reunification was a big economic shock in itself, made more so by the decision (politically justifiable but economically unfortunate) to merge the two currencies at parity. Not only were there real economic shocks, but all the economic statistics were distorted by this. For example, Zinsmeister quotes high German unemployment rates, but ignores the fact that the rate for the former West Germany is not that much different from the US (8 per cent as opposed to 6) and that even this rate is boosted somewhat by Easterners seeking work in the West. Taking all this into account, it’s not that surprising that the Germans have missed an expansion cycle.

The move to the euro raises somewhat similar issues. In a globalising world, the removal of the barrier to mobility created by exchange rates will have long-run benefits, but a single currency complicates short-term macroeconomic management, and Germany has suffered from this. Somewhat paradoxically, the Germans who lobbied hard to ensure that they would not be subject to the inflationary bias of the Italians and others, are now suffering from the deflationary effects of a tight monetary policy.

I’ve been waiting for someone to make the obvious point about John Howard’s defence of unilateral pre-emptive strikes on terrorists based overseas, but as far as I can see, no-one has. Howard could easily silence his critics in the region by announcing that they are welcome to mount attacks on individuals and groups operating in Australia that they regard as presenting a danger of terrorist attacks.

This need not be a merely hypothetical offer. There have been numerous instances of groups in Australia undertaking various forms of military training in preparation for terrorist/national liberation activities overseas (under the Howard doctrine, it’s the foreign government that gets to choose which is which). And, as Ken Parish pointed out recently, the High Court has granted refugee status to people who could reasonably be regarded as supporters of terrorism. More generally, potential terrorists have legal rights here that they might not have in their home, or target, countries.

To be serious, if Howard set out his doctrine by specifying circumstances under which our neighbours would be justified in intervening in Australian affairs, the list of qualifications would be so long as to make it obvious that there is no serious prospect of the doctrine being applied to any country with a functioning, and not actively hostile, government. Which raises again the question of why he is making these statements at all.

The same points apply to the ‘Bush doctrine’ insofar as it is presented as a general principle – imagine the reaction if some foreign country decided to apply Bush’s reasoning to US-based groups they regarded as presenting a terrorist threat. But in practice, everyone understands that the Bush doctrine is premised on the notion that the US, as the source of international law and order, is itself above the law. It would be better if this were stated clearly rather than being implied – then people like Howard would not suppose that the Bush doctrine applied to Australia.

Update For those who are still ignoring my admonitions to read the comments threads (the best part of the blog, honestly!) I’ll mention that Gummo Trotsky missed beating to this punch, even though he’d been given the tip by his reader (not the only one, he claims to have another), Ross M, who emailed

I’m old enough (that makes me one of those reviled boomers)…to remember shock horror stories and pictures of secret Ustashi training camps here in Oz…of course that was also before it was perfectly understandable that Yugoslavia could come in and take them out, and punish us for not exerting due diligence in rooting them out ourselves.

The BlogGeist strikes again!

Quite a few commentators on my recent posts regarding Zinsmeister have seen them as essentially quibbles about statistics which are irrelevant since ‘everyone knows’ Europe is in terminal decline. This is an example of one of the favorite themes of ‘pop’ economics: ‘declinism’, and its opposite, triumphalism. The basic idea is to select statistics on which a given country is performing badly (or well) and extrapolate them to predict disaster (or triumph).

Typically triumphalism is displayed by supporters of the party in office, while declinists claim that otherwise inevitable disaster can be averted only if they are put in charge and their policies implemented.

I first tackled this kind of thing fifteen years ago, at which time it was regularly predicted that Australians would end up as the ‘poor white trash of Asia’ (the phrase is attributed to Lee Kuan Yew, but was used by many others. My comments in a paper I published in the Current Affairs Bulletin, entitled, ‘White trash of Asia?’, [1987, 64(2), 18–25.] could be repeated with marginal changes today

Indeed, by appropriate selection of time periods and criteria, any nation can be made to look good or bad. For example, it is currently fashionable to compare the “dynamic” US economy with the hidebound and over-regulated economies of Western Europe. Yet, only a few years ago the US was being compared unfavourably to these very countries. All that has happened in the interim is that the US has moved from a trough to a peak on the business cycle. Over the post-1973 period as a whole, the US has done slightly worse than most European economies.
It is quite straightforward even to make a country like Japan look bad. For example, Norton and Macdonald (1981) compare a number of countries on the basis of changes in rates of unemployment, inflation and growth since 1973. Their purpose is to compare Australia’s performance with that of other countries, but when their criterion is applied to changes in growth rates, Japan is the worst performer in the OECD.

Pessimism about the US came back into vogue after the stockmarket crash and the Bush I recession, before being replaced by even more vigorous tiumphalism from the early 1990s onwards. And of course it’s not necessary to massage the stats to make Japan look bad nowadays.

In the time I’ve been observing the debate a string of countries have been touted as ‘miracle economies’ and then lost their glow – New Zealand, Norway, Japan, Austria, the Netherlands, Britain, Sweden, Germany and the ‘Asian tigers’, to name but a few. And of course, the US comes into fashion with every boom and goes out of fashion with every recession. I’ve written a lot of articles in both newspapers and economic journalism making this point, but without making the slightest impact on the popularity of declinism and triumphalism. A few examples are here, here and here.

My basic point is that differences in economic performance between developed countries over the past thirty years have mostly been transitory. Sometimes one country looks good on one criterion, sometimes another. The more durable differences are in the way income is distributed in which productive capacity is allocated between public consumption, private consumption, leisure, household production and so on. There is for example a real social choice to be made between high levels of income security and opportunities to become very wealthy. Europe goes for more of the former and America for more of the latter. Similarly, Europeans have always preferred more leisure and this difference has grown in recent years.