Dear Greeks:

05/13/2015 Jacques Delacroix Current Events Aristotle, ethics, European Union, Germany, Greece, public debt

I hear you can’t pay your debts again. I am a little sorry but you brought it on yourselves. A few reminders.

Your country is a democracy. The way you got into this pickle is through the stupid, self-indulgent policies of those you elected. You did it again in your last election by bringing to power a bragging leftist party in the old Stalinist mold. What did you think they would do: Frighten the European Union, The International Monetary Fund (Number one stockholder the US), Germany, the world, into submission, into erasing your debt? Think!

The reason Germany is your principal creditor is that one of your previous governments begged Germany for help and it agreed to help. The Germans did not cram loan after loan down your throat; you asked. The big sillies thought you would be honorable and pay up as agreed. Do you care about your future reputation, your honor, your children’s future ability to walk in the world with their heads up? Here is a basic rule of politeness which is also a moral rule: When somebody gives you a hand, you don’t bite it viciously.

There are several reasons your government can’t pay its debts. One reason is that your political class is corrupt trough and through. Another is that you are reluctant to pay taxes the way normal people do in the European Union. Too many Greeks want to work and pretend-work for the government instead of doing real work. And your government still owns stuff no government anywhere should ever own because governments always make a mess of running them, resorts, among others.

Another reason why your government can’t pay its bills is that your country is genuinely poor for a European country. There too, you have a lot of explaining to do. For one thing, you have been living above your means for a long time, pretending you were more or less like Danes, or Germans. Well, the truth is that you are not, not even close; Danes and Germans are very productive; you are not. So, you should not have ever expected to work short weeks and to take long summer vacations, like Danes and Germans. Such privileges do not come automatically with membership in the Union, you know. You should look over the border on the despised neighbors, the Turks, instead. They don’t pretend to themselves that they are already rich; they go to work early and they close their shops late. Many of them work six days a weeks. Over the past ten years, the growth rates of their economy has left yours in the dust. Coincidence?

And you only make yourself even more scorned with your treatment of others. The real horrors that Nazi Germany inflicted on Greece more than 70 years ago are not much of an excuse anymore. A previous government of yours, an elected government, accepted reparations a long time ago. And, by the way, in 1945, Germany was much more devastated than Greece, and still in 1948. See where the Germans are now, and where you are? Any comment?

And do you ever wonder why the Estonians, in the stultifying Soviet prison for fitly years, never ask for new loans to pay back older loans? And how long anyway did you expect German workers to work until age 69 so your public servants could continue to retire at 63? Are you out of your minds?

One last thing: You are not exactly Classical Greece. Stop wrapping yourselves in Aristotle’s toga. Really study Socrates. He chose to die than cheat even a little. Neither he nor Aristotle was a whiner. That’s why they are still remembered and honored.

In the end, I wish you well. Everyone can unlearn bad habits and learn basic rationality, even late in life. I hope you soon leave that club where you don’t belong. I hope further that you can make your way back. Begin by getting up at 6 every morning. Also, learn the obvious: socialism does not work well for rich countries; it’s miserable for poor countries.

Musings About Statism and Cultural Production

05/09/201505/11/2015 Jacques Delacroix Culture American culture, cultural studies, French culture, media studies

I have not fed this blog for a while. First, I am lazy. Second, I am finishing a serious writing endeavor. It’s entitled: “Indecent Stories for Decent Women: Poaching.” You can just imagine what it’s about. Third, I have a critical project in mind and I am not sure I want to dive into it. The problem is that I think it needs to be done and I don’t see who else can do it. Yet, I hesitate because it could easily consume weeks. The topic below.

I spend a lot of time watching TV5, the international French language channel. I watch movies including old ones, some from countries other than France; I take in the news and also documentaries. In addition, I read a centrist French newspaper on-line pretty much every day. I look at Le Monde when needed although I detest that French version of the New York Times. I read novels in French haphasardly, according to what the tide brings in. Every so often, at completely unpredictable intervals, I find old to very old French classics at Logo, the excellent local used books store.

There are three recurrent shows I like on TV5. Plus, some of the network’s offerings from bilingual African countries are novel. I dislike pretty much everything else there. One might ask why I submit to this regime of daily torture. The answer is that I am engaged in a mental parallel study of cultures. There are millions of bilingual immigrants who could do the same but few have the leisure, or the mental equipment, or perhaps, the inclination to become involved in such an amorphous task. One problem I have is that I don’t know who else is interested in the results of my cogitations.

My astonishing dislike of contemporary French culture is my starting point, of course. My mind runs on two explanatory tracks about this. The first track, fairly anodyne, is simply that I am paying the price of age. I am sick of seeing the same mediocre movie over and over. This is not just about French culture: If I read another daily paper article about the dilemma of American middle-class women who are forced to chose between children and career, I will scream (scream like a girl, that is). This detestation applies especially hard to French culture however, I think. This is subjective, of course, but I believe French culture has accomplished just about nothing in thirty years. It has retreated concretely in several areas.

The second track is the potential relationship between statism and cultural production. France is a good example of a statist society where, at any one time, out of one hundred euros, sixty are in the hands of some government entity or other. I have the intuition that the French have been paying for their cradle-to-grave welfare state with tremendous cultural sterility.

Speaking of that second track, specifically, I have several concerns. First I don’t know if it has already been done extensively and the fact just escaped my attention. Second, I am not sure if anyone would care if the relationship I posit existed. Third, there is a possibility that my specific access to French cultural production gives me a bad sample of what’s really going on there.

I have dealt with these second track issues before. I will give the references soon.

Le émeutes de Baltimore en blanc et noir

04/30/201505/11/2015 Jacques Delacroix Current Events Baltimore, civil liberty, police misconduct, racism

A Baltimore, un homme de vingt-cinq ans interpellé par la police en sort la colonne vertébrale brisée. Il en meure après quelques jours. L’interpellation elle-même était probablement illégale. (Aux Etats-Unis, la police doit avoir de bonnes raisons pour interpeller un citoyen vaquant à ses affaires. Il y a tout un code qui doit être respecté.)

Les résultats de l’enquête interne ne sont pas publiés dans les délais rapides que désire l’opinion publique. Des émeutes éclatent plusieurs soirs de suite, avec pillages et incendies volontaires.

La presse française ne rate pas une occasion de dire des conneries, parce que ses journalistes sont paresseux, et incultes, parce que, souvent, ils ne connaissent même pas l’Anglais. La victime est noire, les policiers interpellateurs sont blancs (ou pas d’ailleurs, on ne le sait toujours pas). Donc, pas de problème, c’est le même film qu’avant, le même depuis trente ans ou plus. Les policiers blancs, racistes bien sur, ont froidement assassiné un jeune noir innocent. Justice ne sera pas faite car “l’Establishment ” est blanc et également raciste, bien sur.

Dans ce cas-ci, la moitié des policiers de Baltimore sont noirs, le directeur de la police municipale est noir. La maire – à qui il aura appartenue d’appeller la garde nationale à la rescousse – est noire, plus de la moitiée de son conseil municipal est noire. La procureur d’état (de l’état du Maryland) chargée de l’affaire est noire. (Il s’agit de l’autorité chargée d’inculper ou pas.) La ministre fédérale de la Justice – qui n ‘a d’ailleurs pas prise directement sur ces évenements locaux – est noire, comme son prédecesseur , d’ailleurs. J’allais presque oublié, le Président des Etats Unis, qui ne perd pas une occasion non plus de réciter des insanités, est aussi noir.

Voici une généralisation valide pour remplacer les clichés usés de la presse française: Partout ou se passe des évènements lamentables, comme celui qu a couté la vie au jeune homme de Baltimore, on trouve un pouvoir installé appartenant fermement au parti Démocrate, le parti du président Obama. Baltimore est au mains des Démocrates depuis quarante ans sauf pour un interlude de quatre (4) ans.

WORK

04/20/201511/21/2016 Jacques Delacroix History industrialization, Jacques Ellul, Karl Marx, labor, leisure, mechanization, organic food, Peter Miller, rationalization, tacit information, work, worker productivity

This is an essay with a strange origin. My friend Peter Miller, an artist and a craftsman, is also a trained sociologist like me. He posted an essay on his blog about crafts. It’s a sophisticated and unusually perceptive essay. He asked me for comments. I begun answering him in a letter and then, quickly, I thought both his essay and my comments might be useful to others. I think anyone interested in the nature of work and changes in the nature of work should read both Peter’s essay (see above) and mine. I don’t know exactly in what order but it seems to me that my essay is easier for the non-specialist who pays a mortgage or who studies for his Calculus finals. It would not be hard to make me change my mind on this though.

Dear Peter:

This is a thick narrative that demands a lot from the reader. Those are separate and additive reasons to turn it into a book. It would benefit by being watered down; some of the things that you say in one sentence would be better said in three. Just an unsolicited opinion on form. (Lack of solicitation has never stopped me before.)

It seems to me that your argumentation is not finished, that you have not looped the loop. I explain.

The pilot automation that is the pretext for your essay seems to me to be only a special and late instance of a process that began massively and kind of suddenly in the late 18th century. I mean the rationalization of work associated with the Industrial Revolution, of which it is only one facet, I think. I think this because, if nothing had changed in the realm of production but the capture of large amounts of inanimate power, the world would have still experienced a big economic growth spurt. The rationalization of production supplied additional economic benefits.

“Rationalization of production” means the specification in advance of the one best way to achieve a well defined end. It’s not “whichever way works” but “the exact best way.” Nearly always, it involves the decomposition of a task into smaller components most of which are easier to complete than the whole, usually, much easier. This is contrast with crafts production which involves a trained worker doing a job from beginning to end.

Note: This contrast is overdone as far as many crafts are concerned. Craftsmen did not wait for the 18th century to rationalize their methods. They did it in small steps that spread slowly or not at all. (Ask me how we know this.) For every single instance of production the comparison between crafts and rationalized production is often exaggerated. This is in the nature of contrasts. The real difference on the ground is a matter of emphasis, of course.

Until recently, the rationalization of production was a pre-condition to mechanization, the replacement or, usually the partial replacement of human workers by machines. Mechanization is another source of enlarged societal wealth because machines are, on the whole, less expensive to employ than people. Machines don’t get sick; they are maintained at predictable intervals. They don’t take vacations. They don’t retire with benefits. They never feel lazy. They are never reluctant to do the work assigned to them. With machines, the same number of people can do more than without machines, other things being equal. The cost of machines plus their human tenders is normally lower than the cost of people plus people.

Rationalization does not require mechanization. It just makes it easier. Many clerical jobs were rationalized in the 19th century without benefit of any mechanization.

The rationalization of production, and of work that may or may not be considered production (rearing children, for example) is, to a large extent, an attempt to separate every job into parts each of which can be handled on a routine basis. This allows for production to increase seemingly while reducing the level of competence required of the line producers. (Yes, it sounds familiar to you, Peter, because I am paraphrasing someone; his first name was Charlie, his buddy was Freddie.) I mean by “level of competence” three things: specific job training, general education, intelligence and other otherwise desirable personal features. As the level required in all three for a given job drops, the cost of securing workers of the requisite competence also tends to decrease. At least, it drops at first. Over time, the story is vastly more complicated than this. (See below.)

The average worker of the early twentieth century was probably less skilled – any way you define skill – than his 17th century counterpart. He also needed less intelligence to do his work properly.

Here is an illustration of these basic ideas. Today, one can buy shoes made by machine in South Korea or by hand in India. That is, modern mass production along rationalized lines, in the world, exists side by side with craft production fairly similar to all shoe production before 1750. The average line worker in a Korean shoe production does not need to be very bright, and he can be satisfactorily trained in a month or so. By contrast, a traditional Indian shoe-maker is apprenticed for four to five years, or more.** He cannot be stupid and he needs patience, perseverance, and a superior ability to focus, among other personal traits. It’s true that today’s unskilled Korean worker probably has more formal education than the Indian shoe-maker. That’s not because he needs it to do his job but because he lives in a rich society where formal education is a consumption item. It may also be to enable him to spend rationally. It may make him a better citizen. It’s not required by his job beyond basic literacy, if that.

Historically, this rationalization of work driven by the search to save on production costs had an unexpected positive downfall: In many cases it reduced defects in the final product as well as accidents during work. These facts would have been enough to move forward the general movement toward rationalization wherever defects in the product were costly, as with steel, or silicon, or where human life was valued,* wherever the old process was dangerous.

The movement of rationalization of production never stopped; it continues as I write. Fast food restaurants modeled after McDonald are one of the most visible fairly recent results of this process. And some of us remember the days when service stations were staffed with adult men who actually knew how to check your oil and your tire pressure. Automatic piloting is just another instance of the same long societal process of rationalization. (Incidentally, I would guess that if you could compare the dangers of flying with or without automatic pilots while keeping everything the same – you can’t – you would find the former much safer.)

With every tiny step in the rationalization of work voices were raised to regret the crafts methods the new techniques were destroying. A few of those voices belonged to people who were fully qualified to pass judgment. I mean, individuals who had worked both in craft and in the corresponding rationalized industry, home weavers working by hand converted into weaving machine tenders, for instance. I am guessing there would have been and there are still few of those. Many more, like the artist and print-maker Peter Miller, know only the crafts side of things. (I don’t know this for a fact but I imagine that Peter has spent little time in a factory of any sort. He will correct me if I am wrong.) I can’t imagine that there were many who wrote on the lost world of crafts who also possessed both industrial experience and craft experience. Those imagined or proceeded from more or less distant observation. Others, a third kind of commentators, the loudest voices by far, belonged and still belong to professional intellectuals who have known neither craft nor modern industry. Karl Marx is the chief, the best known of those.

Digression: Pseudo “Marxists” in universities and elsewhere have derived a whole quasi-scholarly industry for fifty years from a few paragraphs in Marx’s youthful 1848 Manuscripts that have the merit of being easy to read. In one of those, Marx wrote of the “alienation” of the worker from his work contrasting the inherent pleasure of craft work with the sort of coitus interuptus of factory work. The fact that generation after generation of sociologists have failed to find empirical confirmation of such alienation among real live workers never stopped this industry from expanding. The best treatment of the topic comes the 1964 thin book by the French anarchist Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society. It provides a more sensitive, better informed, detailed, and of course, much more thorough view of the lost world of crafts than does anything in the Marxist tradition. End of digression.

Much of the nostalgia for a pre-rational world is simply mistaken, sometimes grossly mistaken. I sometimes overhear discontented, intemperate comments about the coffee shop chain Starbucks, which has managed to systematize the preparation and serving of coffee products while enlarging their scope. More often than not, I read between the figurative lines of the complaints a longing for the good old days when coffee in America was prepared and poured by real people in real places. In fact, I knew America well before Starbucks and I can assure you that nearly everywhere, the coffee was bad and bitter, the pouring sometimes surly, and the sitting stools hard. It is as if the Starbucks haters remembered their childhood in charming, civilized Florence or Rome, rather than in the real Fort Wayne and Buffalo where they grew up. Nostalgia will do this to you, the lying bitch!

When all is said, I am not attempting here to argue against the merits of crafts activity. Anyone who has even built and painted a garden fence he was not forced to make for pay knows that there is pleasure in making things from beginning to end. It does not take even long before one learns the difference between a well built fence and an ugly one. Craft work is learning work. And millions of what the French call “Sunday painters” (like me) are well aware of the fact that their artistic creations give them more pleasure than almost anything else on earth except babies (and sometimes, making babies). I mean both the result on canvas and the process itself. By the way, “Sunday painters” are amateur artists who know their work has no economic prospects and may not even deserve to be shown. I don’t have a survey in mind but I suspect that even those who are aware of committing frankly bad paintings love their art. Activity that links the senses, brain, and hands is often a labor of love. That’s why we miss the crafts.

Not surprisingly, nostalgia for the crafts era is all around us and it’s in most of us if not in all of us. My house was built in 1906 of planks that were probably hewn with primitive tools. That’s one (one) of the reasons my wife and I bought it. When I made some repairs on it I found hand forged nails that I put away like treasures. If I am told that a pot was hand-made I become immediately willing to pay a premium for it over a machine-made pot that looks identical to me. Examples are legion. Most of us have an addiction for an “authenticity” that is often the product of selective ignorance. The magnificent Gothic cathedrals, built largely by hand, survived; the clay and straw hovels that abutted them did not. Neither did the results of the lack of toilets immediately at the foot of the great cathedrals. Crafts nostalgia may even taken tragic forms and yet survive.

In France, every year, several people die from eating “artisanal” cheese. It’s labeled by the government according to specific rules. (This is France, after all where the government does almost everything!) One component is that it’s made from unpasteurized milk; another is that it’s shaped by hand. The first feature probably accounts for all the deaths. Some consumers no doubt want unpasteurized milk because it’s more “natural.” Others and some of the same, chose cheese made by hand for aesthetic and sentimental reasons. They get the deadly bacteria as a bonus. The striking thing is that French society broadly defined appears to consider a few deaths an acceptable price to pay for the privilege of consuming cheese issued from a crafts process. The consensus includes those who would never touch artisanal cheese with the business end of a fork.

So what to do with our nostalgia for the crafts and for their more or less imaginary era?

First, we must all admit that we don’t wish to go back to the days when every nail was forged by hand and cost $5.99 retail! Poverty does not mean not earning enough money; it means not earning enough money to buy the things you need or want. If your income is stationary but the price of bread shoots up to $10 a pound, you are poorer. If lettuce is $5 a pound, – as with organic lettuce – you are poorer than if it costs $1.50. We should not allow our nostalgia to drive us into poverty.

Second, we must recognize that the rationalization of production – together with mechanization and reliance on fossil fuels – have made us rich beyond belief, rich to a degree that I, myself, couldn’t have believed fifty years ago. (Good point to plug my book: I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography – which goes in detail over the poverty of everyone fifty and sixty years ago.) We are richer because we have become collectively enormously more productive in the past 150 years and accelerating in the past fifty years. We are more productive because of fossil fuels, because of mechanization but also because of the rationalization of production alone. The higher productivity is obvious in the manufacturing fields but I can’t go into it here because of the complicating factor of outsourcing. Let’s take agriculture because Americans import relatively little by way of agricultural products. Here are some numbers that are easy to remember to implant the facts firmly in your mind:

In 1860 about 60% of the American workforce was employed in agriculture and in lumber. Today, the percentage is less than 3% (three per cent). We are not worse fed than in 1860, food has just dropped in price. No catch!

Let’s go back to our shoe workers. Rationalization of much production has made all of us very rich by historical standards irrespective of our individual merits. The low-skill, borderline idiotic shoe machine tender in South Korea earns ten times more money than the skilled, smart, attentive shoe craftsman of India. One lives in a society where rationality of production prevails, the other, not.

The cheapness of the things we need is such that we are not forced to work very long to secure them. In addition, a very large fraction of our society does not work at all (children, many adolescents, middle-class wives and ex-wives, retirees with thirty more years before them). Collectively, we have enormous leisure as compared to our ancestors, even our near ancestors.****

Wealth gives us, with leisure time, the luxury to experiment and schools of all kinds (including California community colleges). Wealth even makes it easy to preserve old traditional techniques as in Peter’s examples: Am I willing to spend pennies each year to support the preservation of craft techniques of Japanese pottery I have never even heard about? Yes; why not? Those who are so inclined can become craftsmen in the broadest sense of the word because we can afford to try and fail. I would bet that there are more painters in Santa Cruz County (“Silicon Valley Beach”), population 50,000, today than in all of Paris in 1880. Are they any good? Not my topic; my topic is nostalgia for crafts production. It’s not art criticism. Crafts are here, in abundance, where I live, no doubt about it.

Note: I understand that real craftsmen in the traditional mold, such as Peter, may argue that I stretch the meaning of crafts beyond recognition because it does not incorporate the common notion of a long, supervised apprenticeship. I think they are wrong. I suspect they confuse “craftsman” and “good craftsman.” (I don’t know exactly, in fact, what Peter would argue; I am just guessing on this. We will find out, I hope.)

Here is my third proposal about what to do about our nostalgia for crafts: We can believe that we have entered the age of post-rationalization of production. Manufacturing is under control, agriculture too, as I pointed out. Such a belief would not be completely absurd. Today, the amorphous category “Services” accounts for about 70% of American GDP, (the sum total of the value of what all Americans produce in one year at home). The percentages are similar for other developed, rich countries. But, “Services ” is a bad category; it was invented more than a hundred years ago to mean: “everything but agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining and manufacturing.” It did not amount to much at the time. “Services” was a sort of residual category. Nonetheless, on the face of it, it’s possible to believe that in a short time, almost all of us, will be teachers, brain surgeons, professional poets, software “architects,” brewers, not to forget waiters – excuse me, “waitpersons.”

All these occupations have in common that they rely on tacit information. That’s information that is not well understood by the user himself. For that reason, it’s also difficult to transmit that kind of information deliberately to others and in a systematic manner. It’s normally communicated to others through more or less formalized apprenticeship arrangements favoring direct observation of more senior workers.

My own position about this belief in a world of production changing in that direction is like my attitude toward Sasquatch***** I don’t believe in it but I would like to be wrong.

I am not sanguine no, I am rather cautious for two reasons. The first is that the least likely industries have been rationalized in my lifetime; burger making is a strong case in point. The second cause of my cautiousness is that I am witnessing right now, as I write, massive rationalization taking place around me in another unlikely industry, the practice of medicine. I can already see the day when we will be remembering with longing the Bill’s Burger days of medicine when the doctor knew our name and used mostly his intuition to diagnose us. (Sometimes with fatal results, of course.)

A final note in passing. Being beyond the age of rationalization would have serious benefits in terms of power relations in general. Hierarchical arrangements are much less useful, or more difficult to implement when the work process is not rationalized. We see see this in Silicon Valley every day. Unfortunately, this does not mean that it’s the wave of the future. This is yet another story, of course.

————-
* Yes, I mean Christian and, especially formerly Christian regions of the world well on their way to secularization. (This means more or less endowed with some degree of religious indifference.)

** I suspect that the apprenticeship time could be cut in half without damage to competence but that’s another story and it would still remain a long time.

*** “Artisan” just means “craftsman.” “Artisanal” means produced according to a more or less crafts method rather than in a plant with machines. Saying it in French in the US allows for a higher profit margin by exploiting the naive and pretentious.

**** It’s true that traditional peasants have much down time but it’s mostly not leisure because they are lacking the other ingredients of leisure. As I write, I realize I may be overstating my case on this. More thinking needed.

***** Also known as “Bigfoot” and, “L’ Abominable Géant des Forêts“.

Facts vs Narrative: American Peronismo

04/07/201505/11/2015 Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events, Politics Argentina, conservatism, Cuba, cultural studies, GDP (PPP) per capita, Latin America, narrative, Peronismo, socialism

Anyone who has written anything other than an accident report, maybe even only three letters to his mother, knows or guesses the following: facts often interfere with the quality of a narrative. Only very great writers manage to incorporate all the relevant facts without damaging the beauty of their narratives. Or, they make up facts that will fit without damage into their narrative. I am thinking of Mark Twain among a few others. But that’s in mostly fiction writing, intended as fiction and perceived as such by the reader. The other option is to leave out all the hard facts to the benefit of narrative beauty and then, you have poetry!

Writers in genres other than fiction – old-school journalists, for example – face the same issue, the same dilemma. While they wish to communicate facts, they understand that an attractive narrative helps them in their task. If nothing else, an enthralling story, does keep the reader, and the listener awake; even merely a pleasantly told story Only the un-gifted who face what they think is a captive audience (no such thing, I think) abandon narrative altogether. They insist on bullet points of facts, a method that seldom achieves much of anything, or anything lasting, I believe.

There is thus another, more subtle reason to craft one’s narrative when transmitting facts, a reason to which I just alluded: Facts embedded in a good narrative are retained longer than facts thrown out at random.

Form really matters when you tell others things you believe they ought to know. But facts are often undisciplined, they often refuse to be choreographed into the opera you wish to stage.

Every writer of other than fiction faces the same issue although more or less frequently. The issue is this: what to do with facts that injure an attractive feature, or the whole integrity of the narrative to which it belongs, like this:

“Dear Mom and Dad: I really, really enjoy Camp Iroquois. In the morning, with have this huge breakfast outside with huge omelets and as much bacon as we can eat plus pancakes with syrup and jam. Then, we wash a little and sometimes the counselors make us brush our teeth and we throw wet towels at each other. After that we, play baseball or touch football until noon. (Don’t worry, Mom, I am wearing my cap and lots of sunscreen.) After games, we all have barbecued lunch with hot dogs and lots of relish and cold coke. And then, we rest under a big tree and a counselor reads us adventure stories. After the story, we go and bathe naked in the pond that’s very close. Just the other day, I went to the pond early by myself and I slipped into water that reached above my head. You couldn’t see anything underwater and there was lots of mud at the bottom. So, I forgot that I could swim a little and I swallowed some pond water. Fortunately, Counselor John, the tall one I told you about was just walking by the other side of the pond. He ran and he pulled me out just in time. I coughed a lot of brown water but I guess I am fine, now, so, don’t worry. And, Mom, don’t worry about the laundry either because we hardly wear any clothes most of the time. Plus, I have found a way to make my underwear last for more than one day by just turning it inside out. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you that right after diner, every night, the counselors make a big bonfire and we sing songs until we feel tired and we have to walk to our tents to sleep.

So, Mom, and Dad, you see, I am having a great time at camp so, don’t fret about me.

Your son, Peter.”

You see the problem? The narrative of a happy kid whose parents need not worry about a thing would be improved by the removal of the near-drowning episode. If the child were wise beyond his years, he would leave it out, right?

The same problem arises with every political narrative, including the long-flowing narratives that serve as action guides by default for political parties and for political currents:

Do you tell a good story on an ongoing basis or do you include the relevant facts even if they interfere with its flow?

It seems to me that there is a major difference between political left and right in their willingness to worsen the narrative with facts. I may be wrong. I will listen to criticism and to contradictions. If my perception is correct however this preference for the narrative explains a great deal. It explains the fact that the left everywhere is inured to its own failures and to the success of its adversaries. Curiously, it explains why there is such a preponderance of leftists in practically all the arts, from Hollywood to French singers.

This preference for form over fact even explains the continuing puzzle that is the country of Argentina. I explain: There is no reason why Argentina is not Canada, as prosperous as Canada or nearly so. In fact, three times in one hundred years, the Argentinean standard of living nearly equaled that of Canada. Each time, it was after an important conflict elsewhere. Each time, Argentinians squandered their wealth; each time, they allowed themselves to fall back into poverty instead of taking off and out of underdevelopment for good.

The current government in Buenos Aires is the third iteration of a populist movement called “Peronismo.” The movement is based on a good story: a benevolent, and originally elected dictator, distributes the unjustly acquired wealth of the insolent rich to the poor to the “descamisados,” to those who don’t even have a shirt on their back. Sure the process, is sometimes a little messy but it does not matter; it’s the intention and the goal that matter. And if you stop the clock at any time during the re-distribution process, you will easily find poor families that are better off this year than they were last year.

Peronismo promises to create social justice and a decent life without the rigors and the discipline of communism, for example. The first two times, Peronist regimes ended in economic disaster, the second time, also in a brutal, murderous military dictatorship that lasted for seven years. The current Peronist regime recently had to assassinate a prosecutor in his home because he was about to splash the presidency bloody with a precise, well documented tale of murder and corruption in high places. (Argentina is not a stereotypical Latin American dictatorship however; the current president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was properly elected .)

The thing, when you talk to Argentinians of the middle class is how civilized they are, how courteous, how well educated, how well informed, (much better informed that middle class Americans in general, if you ask me). And they speak a beautiful Spanish that bears lightly the faint echo of the millions of Italians that form the bulk of Argentina’s population. And their songsters and their singers are second to none. I am listening to Mercedes Sosa as I write, whose “Gracias a la vida” would make me shed tears if I could shed tears. Before her there was Atahualpa Yupánqui, a singer and poet of the poor much better than any country music singer I know (and I know many). Even Buenos Aires pimps invented the tango which is more than you can say about pimps anywhere else. And then, there is that gaucho sitting on his skinny horse sipping hierba mate from a silver tube in a gourd. He always looked to me like a more authentic version of Western movie cowboys because he is not that well groomed, if truth be told; he is just more manly.

In brief, Argentina, the nation, has an excellent narrative. It’s all the better because it is not spoiled, it does not contain disturbing facts: Destiny and history favored Argentinians from the beginning but they are poor most of the time. (Currently, the country has a GDP (PPP) per capita of $19,000, against Korea’s $33,000, a country that had nothing in 1955, and $53,000 for the US – CIA Fact Book) Argentines always dive into poverty for the same reason: They insist that dividing into twenty a pie intended for six will be just fine. They give no attention to the requisites for baking a bigger pie. They are quick to endorse concrete injustices committed in the name of abstract justice. (After all, the expressed wish of the sovereign people must take precedence over constitutional formalities.) If all these obvious historical facts were woven into it, the narrative would not be nearly as attractive; it would be disfigured. It might be disturbing enough to force them to pay attention and begin fixing what’s wrong with their society at last.

It seems to me that a preference for the flow, the coherence of a narrative over the inclusion of relevant facts is commonplace but I think it’s routine among the tribes of the left.* Communism killed at least 100 million people. Yes but it fought injustice. Cubans lead miserable lives in Cuba; those who fled with the shirts on their back are twice richer than those who stayed, after only a couple of years parking cars in Miami. Yes, but the Cuban revolution was deserving of a great movie and it ended by providing free medical care for everyone. That is justice.

Even worse, the US is an international bully variously attacking other, weaker countries for their oil or to force them to adopt institutions they don’t like. A sense of decency requires that Americans stop the bullying.

In the US, the Democratic Party, propelled by its energetic left wing, often garners the extra votes it needs to win – beyond the obligatory black votes, union votes and teachers’ votes – by telling a good story: It’s the party holding the fort against the “war on women,” it’s the party of the little guy; it’s the party of the perpetually racially oppressed, of those oppressed merely because of their sexual preference, even of the newly oppressed “middle class.” Its narrative tugs at your heart strings unless you are very critical and very well informed. It’s a narrative that is squarely opposed to facts. Here are some facts that would change the liberal American story’s face, if they were allowed into that story:

The War on Poverty may have been a good idea originally. Fifty years later later, we are allowed to take stock. There is no reason to believe it was a success. There are reasons to think it was a failure.
The death rate of young black Americans is stupendous. Few die at the hands of police however. Mostly, they kill one another and they succumb to drug overdoses.
At any one time, at least half of American adults are opposed to abortion on demand. A high proportion of these think it’s murder plain and simple.
There is no evidence that, on the average, women earn less money than comparably situated men. There is a law forbidding this and there is no evidence that it’s often violated.
Out-of-wedlock birth is highly correlated with poverty for all social and racial groups.
The thesis that human activities (industrial, cars) are causing a rapid rise in global temperature that will cause catastrophes for the environment and, eventually for humans, that thesis is not well established, if it is established at all. Evidence against as a well as evidence in support is amassing quickly.
When the US does not act as a world policeman, unspeakable horrors multiply.

I could go on and on, obviously. Liberals don’t want to include these basic facts in their narrative of injustice and of oppression, domestic and international because it would simply destroy it. Absent the narrative, they would lose almost all elections. That’s why it matters to contradict tirelessly with facts the fairy tale in reverse tirelessly propagated by the left and by media now mostly at its beck and call.

Under the guidance of the Democratic Party (today’s Democratic Party), America would become another Argentina. The Democratic Party is not “socialist” as old Republicans are fond to grumble. (“Socialism” is a word that has lost any fixed meaning. It may never have had one. Perhaps, it was always only an incantation.) The Democratic Party is Peronist. Peronism is a form of soft, self-indulgent fascism that drags everyone except the dictator’s buddies into poverty. (See my short essay on fascism on this blog: “Fascism Explained.”)

* Here is an example of a conservative narrative that would be spoiled by relevant facts. Conservative media heads keep repeating that the first thing to do to solve the problem of illegal immigration, is to “secure the border.” Let’s not kid ourselves, they mean the southern border of the US, the border with Mexico. Missing from this concise and manly, energetic-sounding narrative:

The fact that most illegal immigrants today do not come from Mexico, or from elsewhere in Latin America.

The fact that those who do come from south of the Rio Grande don’t actually swim across that river or trudge in the desert at night but that they drive in and fly in and then, overstay their visa.

The fact that arrests of illegal aliens where they are easy to catch, at places of work that concentrate them such as slaughter houses, the fact the number of such arrests is tiny, year after year. (I mean that this requires an explanation.)

The fact that illegal immigrants who are arrested and who, under the law, are supposed to be deported by priority, criminals, often get to stay, mysteriously.

All these facts who detract from the “secure the border” narrative for the simple reason that none of facts above would be altered if the National Guard stood right on the border with Mexico elbow to elbow, fingers on the trigger of their machine guns.

The Framework Agreement on Iranian Nuclear Everything: Questions

04/03/201504/03/2015 Jacques Delacroix Current Events Europe, international relations, Iran, Israel, oil, United States

Today, the day after President Obama announced in the Rose Garden a “framework agreement” intended to limit the Islamic Republic of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, I read the Wall Street Journal account carefully but it did not help. I don’t understand it. It may just be too early for a good analysis. In the meantime several questions loom large in my mind.

If I don’t understand the details, do I believe in an agreement with a hostile country described by a man who promised that “you could keep your doctor”?
Do I believe that this agreement is to the advantage of the United States? The question arises because it was negotiated principally by two men with a track record. The first, Pres. Obama, succeeded in exchanging five terrorist generals for a single American soldiers who is a deserter according to those who were on the battlefield with him. The second, the current Secretary of State, demonstrated that you could leave the Palestinian/Israeli relationship in an even worse state than you found it.
The President and the Secretary of State did not manage, as a part of this supposedly momentous agreement, to get three Americans held by Iran released. One of them is a former Marine. It should have been a tiny footnote to the main text. Ah, well, there is no text, just an oral argument! Frankly, in the bigger picture the freeing of three people is a small, symbolic thing. Symbols matter a lot though when you don’t have access to the hard facts. I don’t, you don’t.
Is the mullahs’ government – that always cheated in the past – going to abstain from lying, this time? If it does not, is this agreement going to be the cause of the death of thousands of innocent Iranians (as collateral damage)? I ask because, the next administration may not have the current administration’s difficult-to-believe indulgence. It may just decide to take care once for all of a sore festering for twenty years. If an American administration does no such thing, what is the likelihood that a future (future) government of Israel will take the chance to see millions of Jews murdered? This is not gratuitous fear mongering. Two days before the announcement, an Iranian general was on TV affirming that Israel has no right to exists.
Do I believe that our European partners will stand firm and renew their sanctions if Iran is caught cheating? The question arises because they were salivating on all their national TV at the prospect of selling, selling anything in Iran once the sanction were lifted.

On the bright side, the lifting of some sanctions will unleash a torrent of Iranian oil on the world market. This will further depress of global oil prices. One more thorn in the foot of the gangster Putin.

We Must Have Order!

03/27/2015 Jacques Delacroix Current Events authoritarianism, bureaucracy, libertarianism, local government, Santa Cruz, the Left

I sometimes think that the small daily vexations of government do more to wake up regular people than the really big abuses of government. Below is a relevant anecdote.

Seven or eight years ago, the City of Santa Cruz forbade me from cutting the tree figuring in the picture below. It’s a redwood tree. It’s in my tiny front yard. Its invasion of a sewer line cost me $10,000 before I asked humbly for permission to remove the tree. Now, the tree roots are destroying the foundations of my house as well as the sidewalk in front of it. The city says that I am responsible for fixing the sidewalk, indefinitely, apparently because redwood tress grow at least for several hundred years.

Now, to be fair, the City arborist told me a few months ago privately that if I asked for permission to cut the tree again now, it would probably be approved. It does not do me much good now. She said no when I could afford to cut it now, I can’t afford it. Besides, the city insists that I have to pay for a permit to remove the tree I did not want in the first place. This is more offensive than the much higher cost of taking the tree down which involves real work, at least. (It’s true that I bought the property with the tree on it. I had no idea then that I could even be denied the permission to cut a forest tree.) I am quite insensitive to the need of my city to have redwood trees, specifically, within its boundaries.

First, everyone knows that redwoods are destructive. Moreover, they sterilize the area where they grow. Second, it’s not as if our citizens were deprived of trees, as people might be, say, in Arizona. In fact, there is a large forest a four minute drive from my house, seven minutes by bicycle, tops. It’s a 90% redwood forest. It’s not clear to me that I must recognize a duty to subsidize the redwood viewing of residents and visitors who are too lazy to drive or bike there.

Note my delicateness of mind: I admit that many of my fellow Santa Cruzans would be morally torn between the desire to commune with redwood trees, on the one hand and their fervent wish to not contribute to global warming by driving four minutes, on the other hand. But I think they can just bike there, or walk. I also admit that there are people in Santa Cruz who don’t own a car and who are physically unable to bike or walk to the forest. I would be in favor of a city-sponsored collection to bus them to the redwood forest four times each year. I would gladly contribute, voluntarily, that is.

Two deeply different views of the world are at odds here. Now, let me assure you that although I am a conservative, I like trees. I like cherry trees and apple trees mostly, for obvious reasons, but redwoods are OK because they give high grade lumber. And, yes, they look wonderful. That is, they look wonderful where they belong, in a forest, with their brothers and sisters and all the cousins around. My own redwood tree (the tree that my family and the City apparently jointly own) is a object of shame. It’s so bad, that I never use it to give directions to my house although it stands right out. It’s an object of shame because PG&E, the publicly regulated monopoly, has the right to shape it in any way it chooses. I am sure there are technicalities that escape me here but the shape it prefers makes my redwood tree look like an old, overused toilet brush. Sorry for the vision, I call them as I see them!

Well, I planted a yellow rose bush nearby and the bush found the spot attractive. It grew and grew under my firm benign neglect. Eventually, it had to discover that the nearby redwood tree makes a good ladder to the sun. The result is in the photo above. Well, I think you are not going to believe this but a member of the leftist and left-liberal city council complained about the rose bush on the tree. She says it looks unkempt. Here you have it – not left-wing thought, there is no thinking involved here – but the leftist temperament in a nutshell: Things have to be neat; personal preferences do not matter; bureaucracies give you predictability even if at stupendous cost, the market is inherently messy. We must have order even if it impoverishes our lives.

Mexican immigration and the Open Border: Mexicans Go Home and Mexican Kindness

03/16/2015 Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics American politics, Canada, immigration, Independent Review, Mexican culture, Mexico, NAFTA, open borders, Sergey Nikiforov

I just returned from a two-plus weeks stay in Mexico for the second time in less than five months. A couple of comments to add to my previous essay on Mexican underdevelopment. Plus, some unrelated political sociology comments.

In 2009, my friend and I published a long piece on Mexican emigration to the US in the libertarian periodical The Independent Review. (Nikiforov and I are both immigrants to the United States.) The article is entitled, “If Mexicans and Americans Could Cross the Border Freely (pdf),” and the full text is available through a link on this blog. In that article, we argued that we would all be better off if the southern American border were open to crossing by citizens of both countries with no expectation of a change in citizenship for either.

Well, the politicians did not listen to us then and their inattention led to the recent Republican fiasco whereas, President Obama used an executive order to more or less legalize five million illegal aliens, most of them Mexicans whereas, the Republican Senate called him out and ended up caving piteously. (Do you remember or have you already forgotten? Stupidly, Republicans tried to use the threat to de-fund Homeland Security at a time when aggravated terrorism news fill the airwaves.) As often happens, the Republican leadership confused the issue of constitutional principle with the substantive issue of limiting immigration. Myself, I would chose total firmness on the first and flexibility on the second, for fear of ending up the A.H., no matter what the outcome. The Republican leadership lost the constitutional arm wrestling and still ended up the A. H. Congratulations, guys!

Our article was long and intricate as is normal for a scholarly piece. Here are two highlights from that piece on which I wish to comment after my two recent stays in Mexico:

A We argued that Mexicans – who constitute the largest immigrant group to the US – should be given special treatment over other aliens. Several reasons for this: They are our close neighbors; they have been joined to us through NAFTA for now 23 years, insuring that our lives are tightly enmeshed economically. Then, because of a long series of past interactions some may find deplorable, Mexicans tend to make very good immigrants. Two reasons for this superiority, in turn. First, nearly everyone agree that Mexicans (in the US) tend to be very hard workers. Even their direct competitors in the work place tend to assent to this judgment. Second, sociologically, Mexicans make good immigrants because they are astonishingly familiar with our society, including with our institutions, before they set foot on American soil. In particular, Mexicans don’t find perplexing our fundamental constitutional principle of separation of religion and government. (That’s, as opposed to immigrants from other areas I could name.)

Nikiforov and I argued that Mexican citizens should enjoy unimpeded passage into the US, and the freedom to take any job for which they qualify, all without any path to American citizenship because, Mexicans already have a citizenship, that of Mexico. We point out that the European Union has used this model for more than twenty years and experienced few downsides. (The current ferment in Europe about and opposition to immigration does not involve neighbors from the EU, with one single exception I will discuss if someone asks me.)

B We proposed that many Americans would find it comfortable to spend their last years in Mexico because of a specific aspect of Mexican culture, to wit, contemporary Mexicans tend to be sweet in general and considerate to older people in particular.

This is what I found in twice two and half weeks in Puerto Vallarta in the pas five months that is relevant to these issues.

First, on the matter of Mexicans wanting to work in the US but not necessarily wishing to live there, we were much more right than we thought when we wrote about this. The anecdotal evidence is overwhelming that this would work. Everywhere I went in Puerto Vallarta , I bumped into people who knew some English that they had learned in the US, mostly as illegal immigrants here working at undesirable jobs. None of those people had been expelled, deported. All had returned to Mexico under their own power after saving some money. Thus, they had chosen to go home because it’s home, just as we predicted in the article.

One middle-aged man sticks to my mind, a taxi driver. He had stayed in the US (illegally) for several years. He had refrained from visiting with his family in Mexico for stretches of two or three years at a time to avoid being unable to return to the US. You might say that he was trapped in the US for longer periods than he wished because of our immigration laws. He finally decided to go back to Mexico and to his family for good after he had saved enough money to build a house for each of his three daughters. He specified that only one of the daughters was of marriageable age by the time he had the three houses standing. To my mind, this is an exemplary story of emigration/immigration. On my query, the man declared himself satisfied with his choice and with his life since his return from the US.

He was earning, driving a taxi, about 1/5 or less of what he earned in the US doing unpleasant work. He liked his job; he enjoyed returning to his family every evening; he liked the schools; paradoxically, he liked Mexican schools. (This is paradoxical because daily life in Puerto Vallarta, including in the schools is much more relaxed, much more genteel than what prevails in the US except in the most elite neighborhoods. In that part of Mexico, the bloody drug traffic-based blood-thirsty banditry is found strictly in the newspapers. It is not at all apparent in daily life. The quality of this daily life is at the antipodes of the impression of Mexico reaching us through the US media. Gangs are not in the school unlike in Salinas, California, for example.)

On point B, the attractiveness of Mexico to older Americans, I find that I tend to censor myself anytime I write about the topic because I fear appearing to be gushing like a teenage girl. During my last stay, of two and half weeks, I did not meet a single Mexican man, woman or child who was not completely pleasant except two. One was a taxi driver and he was morose but, that’s because he was drunk. (Nobody is perfect.) The second was a female merchant who acted displeased because I tried to bargain down an item in which I was interested. Another merchant – from whom I actually bought and whom I befriended – told me later that my bargaining had been reasonable and that the woman was undergoing a painful divorce. Mexico is not perfect and I may have looked like the woman’s soon-to-be ex-husband. You never know; these things happen.

Absolutely everywhere, my gray beard drew the kind of respectful behavior I don’t expect in the US. (And that I don’t deserve, to be honest!)

I can hear the snickering from here: “Of course, he stays in a tourist ghetto were everyone is occupationally obligated to appear nice.” No, I did not spend all my time there; I was forced to go out and I liked to go out. I found that everyone smiles a lot, including at each other, even among perfect strangers, that everybody ceded passage, that waiting lines are always orderly. Being a formerly great social scientist, I yielded, of course, to the temptation to conduct verbal experiment. Unfailingly, I made everyone I wanted to laugh at the drop of a hat. I mean small children, old ladies and adults of all sexes. (Yes, my Spanish is that good. Eat your heart out or learn to conjugate irregular verbs! Those are your choices. There are no others.)

Issue A and B are joined in the strangest way within my latest short stay in Mexico. Puerto Vallarta in the winter is swarming with Canadians. Their flight from the cold may have a great deal to do with this fact but it has a virtuous side-effect. I suspect many flew in to warm up and ended up warmly loving Mexicans for the reasons I depicted above. They beat Americans at it, in that city, at least. Oh, and the only sullen faces around Puerto Vallarta all belong to them. It became a game of pop-sociology for me: guessing from afar who was American and who was Canadian. It soon become embarrassingly easy: The Americans are the loud ones who say hello and who laugh easily. (Besides, I think the presence of Canadians explains much of the bad food there.)

After this last experience, I am very tempted to start a new racist fad: Speaking ill of and persecuting Canadians. It could be fun and they are not (yet) a federally protected minority.

Guantanamo: A Conservative Moral Blind Spot

02/05/201505/11/2015 Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Politics Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, civil liberty, civil rights, CNN, ethics, globalization, Guantanamo Bay prison, legal theory, Mohamedou Slahi, terrorism, war and peace, War on Terror

A current Guantanamo detainee, Mohamedou Slahi, just published a book about his ordeal. The book is redacted of course but it still tells an arresting story.

M. Slahi was captured in 2000. He has been held in detention, mostly at Guantanamo prison since 2002 but in other places too . The motive was that he supposedly helped recruit three of the 9/11 hijackers and that he was involved in other terror plots in the US and Canada (unidentified plots.).

According to CNN:

Slahi admits to traveling to Afghanistan to fight in the early 1990s, when the US. was supporting the mujahedin in their fight against the Soviet Union. He pledged allegiance to al Qaeda in 1991 but claims he broke ties with the group shortly after.

He was in fact never convicted. He was not even formally charged with anything. Slahi has spent 13 years in custody, most of his young adulthood. If he is indeed a terrorist, I say, Bravo and let’s keep him there until the current conflict between violent jihadists and the US comes to an end. Terror jihadists can’t plant bombs in hotels while they are in Guantanamo. And, by the way, I am not squeamish about what those who protect us must do to people we suspect of having information important to our safety. I sometimes even deplore that we do to them is not imaginative enough. And, I think that the recent allegations to the effect that torture produces nothing of interest are absurd on their face.

But what if the guy is an innocent shepherd, or fisherman, or traveling salesman found in the wrong place? What if he is a victim of a vendetta by the corrupt police of his own country who delivered him over? What if he was simply sold to our intelligence services? What if, in short, he is has no more been involved in terrorism than I have? The question arises in Slahi’s case because the authorities had thirteen years to produce enough information, from him and from others, to charge him. They can’t even give good reasons why they think he is a terrorist in some way, shape or form. It shouldn’t be that hard. If he so much as lend his cellphone to a terrorist I am for giving him the longest sentence available. or simply to keep him until the end of hostilities (perhaps one century).

And if having fought in Afghanistan and having pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda at some point are his crimes, charge him, try him promptly even by a military commission, or declare formally, publicly that he is a prisoner not protected by the Geneva Conventions, because he was caught engaged in hostile action against the US while out of uniform and fighting for no constituted government. How difficult can this be?

I am concerned, because, as a libertarian conservative, I am quite certain that any government bureaucracy will usually cover its ass in preference to doing the morally right thing. (The American Revolution was largely fought against precisely this kind of abuse.) Is it possible that the Pentagon or some other government agency wants to keep this man imprisoned in order to hide their mistakes of thirteen years ago? I believe that to ask the question is to answer it.

This kind of issue is becoming more pressing instead of vanishing little by little because it looks like 9/11 what just the opening course. It looks like we are in this struggle against violent jihadism for the long run. Again, I am not proposing we go soft on terrorism. I worry that we are becoming used to government arbitrariness and mindless cruelty. I suspect that conservatives are often conflating their dislike of the president’s soft touch and indecision about terrorism with neglect of fairness and humanity. I fear we are becoming less American.

Let me ask again: What if this man, and some others in Guantanamo, have done absolutely nothing against us?

Of course, I hope the US will keep Guantanamo prison open as long as necessary. In fact, I expect fresh planeloads of real terrorist from Syria and Iraq to come in soon. I really hope that Congress will have the intestinal fortitude to call President Obama’s bluff on closing the prison. Congress has the means to stop it if it wants to.

Mexican Underdevelopment: Pop-Sociology

01/26/201505/13/2015 Jacques Delacroix Culture corruption, economic development, entrepreneurship, GDP (PPP) per capita, libertarianism, media studies, Mexican culture, Mexico, underdevelopment, Western culture

It’s six a.m., I am sipping my first cup of coffee on the small balcony near the tall coconut tree. It’s still dark but I can see a short stocky woman sweeping the ground of the open space in front of the hotel next door. Right away, I detect that something is wrong in the picture although I am not fully awake. The broom the woman is using is too short, its straw end is frayed. She is bending over more than should be necessary; some of her energy is being misspent because she pushes harder than she would have to with a newer broom. No big deal! Except…

Mexico is the kind of country where the dentist kisses you when you leave. (This particular dentist is a pretty willowy blonde.) Perhaps, Mexico is the only country of its kind. I don’t know; I have not been everywhere. No American dentist has ever attempted this maneuver on me, or on my attractive wife either. I have avoided French dentists since 1960. A dentist in Morocco once gave me a root canal with no anesthesia whatsoever. I forgave him long ago but I wouldn’t let him kiss me if you paid me. The universal amiability of Mexicans might color everything I say below. You are warned.

I just spent three weeks in Mexico, in the pleasant resort city of Puerto Vallarta. With a population of 250,000, it does not feel much larger than Santa Cruz, California with its population 4/5 smaller. Still it’s large enough to be considered a real place, not a boutique resort. I was staying in a small hotel on the beach, of course, which limits observation. But my wife and I did most of our own cooking and therefore, we had to shop often in an ordinary supermarket located in an ordinary commercial center. This is important as a kind of regular and forced immersion into normal local life. We did not have a car so, we took taxis several times a day. This is important too because cab drivers everywhere are a rich fount of information if you manage to steer them from small talk. Yes, I know Spanish, and not only in my imagination as described in my masterful “Foreign Languages and Self-Delusion in America” (if I say so myself) but for real. I understand everything that is said to me in that language; I am able to eavesdrop on conversations between strangers; I can read the newspaper; I listen to television news without effort.* In brief, I was in a reasonable good position to observe, interpret and ask questions.

This stay in Mexico was like a refresher course on a topic that occupied me professionally for about twenty-five years: Why some countries are poorer than others. (When you begin thinking seriously about this simple question, you quickly discover that the plausible answers are numerous and complex.) I used to do it in a rigorous, quantitatively based manner, estimating statistical models and the like. This time, I am indulging myself frankly in pop-sociology. It does not imply any rejection of my past endeavors.

Comparisons between the way things are done in Mexico and in the US come naturally because the surface similarities between there and here are obvious. Mexicans want what we want and they work openly for it and, in time, they get it. Material progress usually takes a familiar American form, from shopping malls to cineplexes, to the Discovery Channel…, you name it.

Mexico’s GDP per capita is less than one third of the American equivalent (about USD 16,500 vs 52,000, Purchasing Power Parity, a formulation which makes the two figures comparable) Mexico is a poor country but not one of the poorest by a long shot. Why would it be poor?

Mexicans are not a short on entrepreneurial spirit. Every nook and cranny shelters a business of sorts. I enter a tiny corner shop in a non-touristy part of town selling I don’t know what. A toddler sleeps on a blanket on the cold floor. (It’s hot.) Against one wall, three cramped stalls offer Internet access. The owner, the toddler’s father, tells me he is opened from 7 am to 10 pm. He charges me forty cents to recharge my cellphone battery, not an especially low price considering his cost and the little labor involved. There are restaurants everywhere, also far from the tourist tracks. Some have only four tables. Most are still empty at 8 pm. Two social mechanisms seem at work. One is simple mimicry: The guy across the street has one. What does he know about birria that I don’t know? The other is a version of the Chinese eating place economic rationale: If people don’t come to dine here, my family can always eat the food; I have many children anyway. Nothing is going to go to waste. The economic risk is small. It can’t hurt. Perhaps, rents are low because there is not much alternative use for the relevant spaces.

Food is everywhere anyway. If someone goes hungry in Mexico, it’s somewhere else. Yet, food prices are low but not very low. Rice is cheap, avocados are cheap; apples are the same price as in California perhaps because they come from afar. This is an undeveloped capitalism, with poor infrastructures; moving foodstuff is still expensive. A cup of reasonable good coffee costs USD 1,40; that’s probably more than in an Arkansas diner. That’s what it means to be poor: Your money does not reach very far.

Three facts of possible economic relevance strike you quickly; two are concrete and easy to verify; the third is intangible, or kind of unsubstantial, but that does not make it irrelevant. First, nearly every shop is overstaffed by a significant factor. That’s easy to see when people perform identical jobs with identical technologies as in the US. There are twice or more salesladies in the clothing area of a department store as there would be in KMart, the perennially failing chain. In the butcher section of the supermarket, employees are waiting for you. That’s nice but it’s probably superfluous. I could wait two minutes instead, so could Mexican housewives. In the restaurants that actually have some business, the waitpersons (waiters and waitresses ) seem to be spending most of their time standing still.

The second observation concerns low individual productivity. It’s not that Mexicans don’t work hard. In Mexico as in the US, Mexicans are remarkable for working hard for long hours. They seem to know no coffee breaks and little even by way of lunch breaks. The problem is that you see everywhere people doing work for which they have received little or no training. I watched with increasing fascination, several times a day, a laborer failing to finish a simple brick path. He did not manage to complete in three days what I am ready to bet an American bricklayer would have done in less than a day. (Yes, I know something about bricklaying too.) That’s a big productivity differential. Even the pharmacists filling my prescriptions seemed hesitant. They did not exude the authority of American pharmacists with an advanced education. Since Mexicans in general rarely lack in personal authority and, by elimination, I am forced to hypothesize that my pharmacists where just sort of learning their job as they went along.

Incidentally, I have reasons to believe that this shortage of training does not extend to superior occupations: Mexican doctors and Mexican engineers are not inferior to their American counterparts, I am guessing. (The fast development of medical tourism into Mexico from both the US and Canada testifies to the quality of the former, I think.)

The third observation, which I called intangible is difficult to render, of course. It’s almost only an impression but one that is redundantly encountered. The information dispensed by the conventional Mexican media seems very thin. The nightly news program on major channel serves poor fare as compared to the Spanish language but American Univision. If there are new or substantive programs on radio, I have not discovered them. (I may very well have missed such.) I mean that I almost missed National Public Radio there ( a difficult admission for me, obviously). Whether you read the daily newspaper or not does not make much difference in your level of information. Here is a test case.

On a weekend day, there is a massive protest march in Mexico City. The demonstration is to protest the disappearance of 43 young people from the same teachers school. Everyone except their parents knows they have been murdered. The demonstration is both very large and quite orderly as compared to anything of the same kind in the US. The police uses tear gas but only sixty people are arrested. There is no mention of anyone seriously hurt.

I buy the Sunday version of what has been designated to me as the best national daily newspaper in the country (“El Excelsior“). A description of the demonstrations and photographs cover the front page, as you would expect. The two innermost pages are devoted to the same events. In addition to eyewitness accounts are included serious interviews of government officials, of protest march organizers and of several pundits. I make myself read every word. At the end, I have learned close to nothing and I have no new perspective on the crime, sociologically, politically or otherwise. I just get confirmation of the fact that the mayor of the town where the young men disappeared and his wife have been arrested. I turn to the “global” page and get a reading of events in Iraq and Syria that I would probably not understand absent my previous familiarity based on American media. In three weeks, I see and hear not a single reference to President Obama’s executive order concerning illegal immigrants about half of whom are of Mexican origin.

I think that Mexicans, including well-educated Mexicans, are not well informed unless the Internet makes up for the obvious deficiencies of the conventional press, which is hard to believe. I would be hard put to explain how this affects Mexican economic development except that it may result in a blindness to new economic opportunities. Mexican entrepreneurs dedicate themselves to old pursuits or they imitate the gringo model late and imperfectly, perhaps (perhaps). Even where a Mexican industry has experienced notable global success such as the brewery industry, it did not innovate much, if at all. No innovation, no temporary super-profits, no generous wages (as we see in Silicon Valley, for example). This is all speculation. Others may have written on the relationship between the general level of information of a population and its overall productivity and it may have escaped my attention or, I may have forgotten it. Maybe readers will come to my rescue on this.

So, here you have it: skimpy training of ordinary workers, inferior tools, a poor physical infrastructure, an under-informed populace, together make for much lower gross productivity than what we are used to in the US. But, overall, in a sort of rough way, wages follow productivity. Mexican workers produce little and they get paid accordingly little. Note that the same factors of poverty interact with one another: Low pay encourages the hiring of a surfeit of workers; modestly paid workers may not be perceived as deserving good tools; an underdeveloped infrastructure buffers business decision-makers from all kinds of competition, including competition for workers, thereby keeping wages lower than they need be. Workers may not be well informed enough to struggle for higher wages. And, of course, workers with low pay make poor consumers. Among other things, they fail to fill the restaurants their entrepreneurially inclined neighbors open for them.

By now, you may wonder why something is missing from this story. I mean corruption, small corruption and especially, big corruption. Two reasons for this absence. The first is that, naturally, corrupt behavior is not readily amenable to casual observation. The second reason is that I am not convinced that corruption of any kind goes much way toward explaining Mexican underdevelopment.

Low level corruption first. In Mexico, it’s common to deal with an ordinary traffic transgression by asking the policeman who stopped you to pay the fine on your behalf because “I am too busy, sorry.” I am told that any amount of cash close to half of the amount of the official fine will do the trick. This sort of practice pervades Mexican life, I am still told. (I have not had a personal experience of it for twenty years myself.) It’s not clear to me that it has any relation to underdevelopment. In the above example, what is basically a tax gets diverted from the government to private pockets. Likewise, when building permits are sold by building inspectors rather than earned and deserved, a relaxation of anti-growth regulations takes place, doesn’t it ?

I don’t know, incidentally, that there is much private corruption in Mexico. I must have taken more than sixty taxis while I was in Puerto Vallarta. They have no meters but rates are fixed by zone. Only one tried to take me, for about USD 3. That’s an extremely low hit rate as compared to say, New York City.

Now, on to big-time corruption. By its nature, it’s hard to observe except if you read the paper carefully and with great, diligent constancy. (See above.) Here is one possible case that came to my attention while I was in Mexico. A big house on a golf course comes up for sale for USD 1.5 million. The seller is a police official described to me as not very high on the totem pole. Someone I know makes an offer. The asking price shrinks to USD 750,000 if he will pay cash. How did a police official get his hands on that house? Did he inherit a pile of money from his father, from a rich aunt? By insisting on cash, is he simply trying to avoid taxes or does he have a more sinister reason? I don’t know and here again, I am not sure it matters. Perhaps, it does in relation to the accumulation of capital; I wouldn’t know which way though.

People of libertarian inclination have to choose: If government is inimical to happiness in general and to economic prosperity in particular then, the suspension of government efficacy, as with corrupt government practices, must be for the better. Or, another, more benign theory of government must be developed.

* If you wonder at my linguistic prowess, don’t. First, Spanish is a dialect of Latin, like French, my native language. Second, I have been studying Spanish for a straight sixty years. It stands to reason that I have made some progress.

The Best Book I Have Read Recently

01/21/2015 Jacques Delacroix Books, History anthropology, bilingualism, book review, Jared Diamond, learning a language, linguistics

I make some notes about almost all the books I read. I am thinking my notes may be useful to others. Here is an instance; it’s about a good book I read recently:

Jared Diamond’s 2012 The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?

A confession first: When I die, I want to come back as Jared Diamond. He had the exemplary academic career; he wasted no time; he took advantage of academia’s largess and low standards to change himself several times into a different kind of scholar. He addresses ordinary literate people with much success. He is a great teacher.

What Diamond means by “traditional societies” (in the title) is an imaginary aggregate of what social scientists call “hunters-gatherers” and “horticulturalists.” The latter are largely hoe cultivators, people who don’t use the plow but who grow food. Horticulturalists live entirely in tropical and equatorial climates.

Diamond’s book makes very good reading and, in addition, he tries to make it practical, useful at every step. His guiding theme is that by observing traditional people more closely, we may be able to improve many of our civilized practices. He visits in turn how his traditional societies define strangers and how they deal with war, child rearing, the treatment of the aged, attitudes toward danger, religion, language and health.

Traditionals, in general (also called “primitives”) live in fairly small units because their technologies (plural) cannot support large concentrations of people. They have no cities; they are not “civilized.” Diamond makes the implicit assumption (implicit, I think) that small scale and the preservation of “traditional beliefs” go hand in hand. He makes the further assumption – a fairly common one – that today’s traditional societies are similar to the societies in our own past. Thus, the part of the title that says, “Until Yesterday.” According to this assumption, the observation of such societies has much to teach us about how we – civilized people – grew up, so to speak, and about what we lost while growing up.

I am skeptical about both assumptions, not rejecting, skeptical. First, I don’t really believe that tradition does not change. I think that traditional people live in environments that change to some extent, sometimes rapidly. They change, in particular, because the powerful civilized societies in which they are embedded tend to grow, thus threatening or reducing the traditionals’ physical space and their resources. The tragedy of the Plains Indians reduction to near nothing must have happened many times before. Thus the thing that defines traditional people, “tradition” itself must change to some extent to accommodate change in their environments. The mere fact that traditional societies are around to be observed at all tells us that they must have adjusted to some extent. Thus, when considering them we don’t know if we are looking at our own past, or at pathetic survivors next to extinction, or on the contrary, at extraordinarily skillful ones. That’ s a problem for the generalizing Diamond invites us to engage in. That’s my second main objection to Diamond’s overall approach.

In point of fact, the traditional societies to which Diamond alludes include none situated in the temperate zone. It’s not his fault, of course, Lapps in Northern Scandinavia and Finland may be the only ones left more or less intact. But this fact aggravates my skepticism about the exemplarity of the primitive groups Diamond describes. I cannot eliminate from my mind the fact that civilization arose only in temperate zones, in the Middle East, in Europe, and in China. And independently, in the temperate elevations of meso-America and of South America. Perhaps, possibly, probably this is not a coincidence. Diamond’s tropical, desert, and far north groups may be in no way similar to our ancestors.

Beyond these general remarks, I have two specific quarrels with Diamond. The first is about health and the second about language acquisition. Diamond contends that the maladies of old age that affect civilized people today, including arthritis, cardiac illness, and diabetes, are practically non-existent among primitive people. He also says that primitive people have low life expectancy, I think he means at all ages. So, I am wondering if the first statement is not simply the result of a major sampling error, of a major optical illusion: If people seldom live beyond age fifty-five there will be few of the illnesses associated with old age in their society. It would seem like a gross error for a man of Diamond’s intellectual distinction to make. He may have in fact taken care of this objection and I missed it. Or, he did not do it loudly enough and then, why?

My second specific objection concerns one of the many statement he makes on language acquisition. At one point, he declares himself in favor of “crib bilingualism.” That’s the practice of speaking to babies in more than one language from birth. Personally, I think it’s a dangerous gamble. I don’t have any systematic data. My judgment relies on anecdotal evidence spread over fifty years. So does his. I believe he has not done enough due diligence of tracking possible downsides of the practice. (I don’t need to track its upsides because they are obvious: Get two languages for the same price, same as heads of cabbage at the flea market.)

I may write Prof. Diamond soon at UCLA where he teaches to ask him to discuss these points. Don’t wait on me to act to read this wonderful book though. Do it, do it critically if you can.

Also, read my book : I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography

Capitalism for the Intelligent Ignorant – Just a Detour Through Money

10/09/2014 Jacques Delacroix Liberty

FACTS MATTER

I was hoping to go straight to Part Two of my essay on capitalism. It will be about the actors of capitalism. An alert reader, Jim N, stopped me dead in my tracks by questioning what I said about the gold standard. I had only mentioned this topic in connection with the single main constraint on capitalism today, the fact that government agencies get to decide how much money flows into the economy. So, here we go, here is a digression on money made necessary by an attentive reader. He uses the word “currency” in his comment. I will use the more familiar word “money” because I think it means exactly the same thing for our superficial purposes

Money is anything that can be used to store value. Suppose you bring a chicken to the local market to sell it. In a non-money economy, if there…

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How to Date a Woman and Why I Love America

10/05/201410/06/2014 Jacques Delacroix Liberty "gender studies", patriotism, United States

FACTS MATTER

Young men are confused nowadays because even this kind of talk is politically incorrect. I am talking about talks on how to please women and influence their decision to do this or that. I am an experienced man from another era when men knew what they were doing and the women appreciated it. So, here is some guidance based on a recent dating experience I had.

First thing first: Women don’t primarily want love or riches or wondrous sex (though neither one or the others hurt).

They want to be entertained, endlessly.

Women want to be amazed by unfamiliar objects but within a context where they feel safe. so, I took my date to a print shop. She had never been to one. I checked the progress of a new poster for my book (“I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography.”) She thought that was very, very nice. A…

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Les pumas de grande-banlieue: histoires d’emigration

10/05/201410/06/2014 Jacques Delacroix Liberty les pumas

FACTS MATTER

Un recueil étonnant par un immigrant de longue date qui n’a jamais oublié être élève de Diderot et de Voltaire (en plus du poète Jacques Prévert). Il y raconte la Californie en trois courtes nouvelles, trois micro-essais et une mini-autobiographie. On y trouvera: des pumas, bien sûr, une voisine infernale et casi-meutrrière, une cocasse leçon d’Anglais, une interrogation critique sur le lien possible entre francophonie et indifférence aux faits, une présentation insolite de la discrimination raciale, la pêche à la langouste, la bourride, le patriotisme, la vie dans un château d’eau en bois, la traversée des Etats-Unis an auto-stop, la débâcle du Marxisme, l’université Stanford, la transformation de vergers en Silicon Valley.

En version electronique sur Amazon:

En France:
http://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B00NI2PCGO

Aux Etats-Unis
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NI2PCGO

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Part Two of Capitalism for the Intelligent Ignorant: the Actors

09/26/201409/27/2014 Jacques Delacroix Economics, History capitalism, institutions, money

FACTS MATTER

This is a little complicated. Part One of this series listed the main constraints on pure capitalism. Then, I took a detour – which was NOT Part Two – on the subject of money which is a quite specialized topic. Below is Part Two of Capitalism for the Intelligent and Ignorant. It describes the main actors of capitalism, of real capitalism, of capitalism such as it exists. with an emphasis on the American instance.

As have stated forcefully in Part One the government is a the biggest economic actor in all developed countries. Although it’s nowhere constitutionally required, at any one time, the government has most or almost most of the money in its hands. This fact alone requires it to do some investing. It’s also the biggest buyer of many things because of the sheer size of government agencies, including the armed forces. It’s also a major seller of…

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Notes On Liberty

Spontaneous thoughts on a humble creed

Author: Jacques Delacroix

Dear Greeks:

Musings About Statism and Cultural Production

Le émeutes de Baltimore en blanc et noir

WORK

Facts vs Narrative: American Peronismo

The Framework Agreement on Iranian Nuclear Everything: Questions

We Must Have Order!

Mexican immigration and the Open Border: Mexicans Go Home and Mexican Kindness

Guantanamo: A Conservative Moral Blind Spot

Mexican Underdevelopment: Pop-Sociology

The Best Book I Have Read Recently

Capitalism for the Intelligent Ignorant – Just a Detour Through Money

How to Date a Woman and Why I Love America

Les pumas de grande-banlieue: histoires d’emigration

Part Two of Capitalism for the Intelligent Ignorant: the Actors

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