How Rich Countries Die

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

Philip Greenspun reviews Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations, which he believes should be titled How Rich Countries Die:

Olson showed back in 1982 that modern macroeconomic theory was basically worthless in developed stable countries. Macroeconomics posits a free market in which wages and prices adjust dynamically. That applies to an ever-smaller sector of the U.S. economy. We have a rapidly growing governnment that directly or indirectly employs more than one third of our workers, many of whom are unionized. We have a health care system that consumes 16 percent of GDP and is staffed with doctors who restrict entry into the profession via their licensing cartel. The financial services sector is about 10 percent of the economy and they now tap into taxpayer money to keep their bonuses flowing in bad times. The automotive industry kept itself profitable over the years by successfully lobbying for import tariffs. When the profits turned to losses, they successfully lobbied to have taxpayers pick up those losses. A university-trained macroeconomist might be able to predict what will happen to babysitters in a depression, but not the price of cereal, the wage of a manufacturing worker, or the fate of those Americans who collect most of our national income (e.g., Wall Street, medical doctors, government workers).

A cashflow approach is much more effective for figuring out where we’re headed. Money flows out to the folks on Wall Street who bankrupted their firms, to schoolteachers who’ve failed to teach their students, to government workers who feel that simply showing up to work is a heroic achievement, to executives and union workers in America’s oldest and least competitive industries. If times are tough and money is tight, that means almost nothing is left over for productive investment. What would have been a short recession will turn into a long depression and decades of higher taxes and slow growth to pay for all of the cash ladled out. Special interest groups will continue to gain in power.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 12 Comments »

Why are so many Jews so stupid about politics?

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

Why are so many Jews so stupid about politics?, David Samuels — of Tablet, “A New Read on Jewish Life” — asks Edward Luttwak:

They have not had a state for 2,000 years, they have had no power or responsibility and it will take centuries before they catch up with the instinctive political understanding that any ordinary Englishman has. They don’t understand politics, and of course they confuse their friends and their enemies, and that is the ultimate political proof of imbecility.

Posted in Edward Luttwak, Policy | No Comments »

Is Islam Compatible with Capitalism?

Thursday, September 15th, 2011

Muslim economies haven’t always been low achievers, Guy Sorman notes, but since the Long Divergence beginning in the 12th century they’ve slowly fallen behind:

A key factor in the divergence was Italian city-states’ invention of capitalism—a development that rested on certain cultural prerequisites, Stanford University’s Avner Greif observes. In the early twelfth century, two groups of merchants dominated Mediterranean sea trade: the European Genoans and the Cairo-based Maghrebis, who were Jewish but, coming originally from Baghdad, shared the cultural norms of the Arab Middle East. The Genoans outpaced the Maghrebis and eventually won the competition, Greif argues, because they invented various corporate institutions that formed the core of capitalism, including banks, bills of exchange, and joint-stock companies, which allowed them to accumulate enough capital to launch riskier but more profitable ventures. These institutions, in Greif’s account, were an outgrowth of the Genoans’ Western culture, in which people were bound not just by blood but also by contracts, including the fundamental contract of marriage. The Maghrebis’ Arab values, by contrast, meant undertaking nothing outside the family and tribe, which limited commercial expeditions’ resources and hence their reach. The bonds of blood couldn’t compete with fair, reliable institutions (see “Economics Does Not Lie,” Summer 2008).

Greif’s theory suggests that cultural differences explain economic development better than religious beliefs do. Indeed, from a strictly religious perspective, one could view Muslims as having an advantage at creating wealth. After all, Islam is the only religion founded by a trader—one who also, by the way, married a wealthy merchant. The Koran has only good words for successful businessmen. Entrepreneurs must pay a 2.5 percent tax, the zakat, to the community to support the general welfare, but otherwise can make money guilt-free. Private property is sacred, according to the Koran. All this, needless to say, contrasts with the traditional Christian attitude toward wealth, which puts the poor on the fast track to heaven and looks down in particular on merchants (recall Jesus’s driving them from the Temple).

But Duke’s Kuran believes that Islam did play a role in the Long Divergence. It wasn’t the Koran, which the Muslim faithful see as written by God and unalterable, that impeded Muslims economically, he argues, but instead sharia, the religious law developed by scholars after Mohammed’s time. Not that sharia was overtly hostile to economic progress; it established commerce-friendly legal rules that, for instance, allowed for bazaars and for the arbitration of economic disputes. Rather, Kuran maintains, sharia became economically counterproductive because it was less efficient than the Western legal framework.

The most significant of the sharia-rooted economic liabilities was the Islamic partnership, which proved no match for the Western world’s joint-stock company. Partnerships were short-lived, dissolving with the death of any of the partners, and they tended to be small, often formed among family members. Joint-stock companies, which sharia prohibited, had much greater reach and risk-hedging power. Sharia inheritance rules were a second drag on economic development, Kuran explains. Since the Koran sanctions polygamy, sharia required a husband’s wealth, upon his death, to go in equal portions to his widows and children, which worked against capital accumulation. In the Roman law that held sway in Europe until the nineteenth century, by contrast, the eldest son inherited his deceased father’s wealth, creating vast fortunes that could be put to economic work. Some economists point to sharia’s prohibition of interest as another hamper on development, but this is much less significant than it appears. From at least the twelfth century on, sharia lawyers authorized “fees” that could accompany money-lending, getting around the ban.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

The People Revert to Their Natural Order

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

Once a dictatorship falls and the regiment dissolves, the people revert to their natural order, Edward Luttwak notes:

A few Egyptians are Westernized, hence they have exited Islam whatever their personal beliefs may be. But otherwise, there is no room for civilization in Egypt other than Islam, and the number of extremists that you need to make life impossible for the average Westernized or slightly Westernized Egyptian who wants to have a beer, for example, is very small. The number you need to close all the bars in Egypt is maybe 15 percent of the population.

Posted in Edward Luttwak, Policy | No Comments »

A Child’s Nap Is More Complicated Than It Looks

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

A child’s nap is more complicated than it looks:

Today, researchers believe that very young children take naps because so-called sleep pressure builds rapidly in their brains — that is, the need for sleep accumulates so quickly during waking hours that a nap becomes a biological necessity. It is not just a question of how much total sleep that children need in 24 hours. Possibly because of the intense synaptic activity that goes on in their highly active, highly connected brains, young children are less able to tolerate long periods of time awake.

In the early 1980s, Dr. Alexander A. Borbély, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, posited a “two-process model of sleep regulation.”

The “circadian process,” which has been localized to a specific place in the brain, works a little like a clock, tying our sleep to schedules and to cycles of light and dark, regardless of how much we have or have not slept. This interacts with the “homeostatic process” which works differently, pushing us harder toward sleep the longer we stay awake and building up sleep pressure, which can be measured via EEG recordings.

Napping happens “because children have a much faster sleep homeostasis — they build up sleep pressure more quickly, they are not so tolerant toward longer waking periods,” said Dr. Oskar Jenni, a pediatrician who is director of the child development project at the University Children’s Hospital Zurich.

You see, children take naps because they need naps.  Um, yeah, thanks scientists.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

A Brief Dry Spell for the U.S.S. Monitor’s Ironclad Turret

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

Military secrecy was a bit lax during the Civil War, John Tierney notes, but contractor deadlines were a lot tighter:

The technology that revolutionized naval warfare began with a five-sentence message delivered to The New York Times 150 years ago, on Aug. 9, 1861, and the information was not exactly classified. It was an advertisement placed by the Union Navy, to appear the following six days, under the heading “Iron-Clad Steam Vessels.”

“The Navy Department will receive offers from parties who are able to execute work of this kind,” the ad announced, describing its desire for a two-masted ship “either of iron or of wood and iron combined. The plans had to be submitted by early September, giving designers less than a month.

Less than six months later, a shipyard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, launched not merely an ironclad but an entirely new kind of warship. The U.S.S. Monitor had no masts and no line of cannons. It was essentially a submarine beneath a revolving gun turret, something so tiny and bizarre-looking that many experts doubted the “cheese box on a raft” would float, much less fight.

But somehow it survived both the Navy bureaucracy and a broadside barrage to become one of the most celebrated ships in the world. Its designer and crew were the 19th-century celebrity equivalent of astronauts. Long after the ship sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras, N.C., the turret remained a cultural icon: an “armored tower” in Melville’s poetry, an image on book covers and film posters, a shape reproduced in items from toys to refrigerators.

Now the original turret, which was recovered from the ocean floor nine years ago and placed in a freshwater tank to protect it from corrosion, is on display again. It has been temporarily exposed to the air so that it can be scraped clean — very carefully, in front of museum visitors and a live webcam — by a team of researchers at the U.S.S. Monitor Center of the Mariners’ Museum here in Newport News.

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

Blunt and Clear

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

Either you popularize your point bluntly and clearly, Bryan Caplan says, or you fail to popularize it. He cites the following passage from educational psychologist Douglas Detterman, quoted in Robert Haskell’s Transfer of Learning:

I thought it was important to make things as hard as possible for students so they would discover the principles for themselves.  I thought the discovery of principles was a fundamental skill that students needed to learn and transfer to new situations.

Now I view education, even graduate education, as the learning of information.  I try to make it as easy for students as possible.  Where before I was ambiguous about what a good paper was, I now provide examples of the best papers from past classes.  Before, I expected students to infer the general conclusion from specific examples.  Now I provide the general conclusion and support it with specific examples.

In general, I subscribe to the principle that you should teach people exactly what you want them to learn in a situation as close as possible to the one in which the learning will be applied.  I don’t count on transfer and I don’t try to promote it except by explicitly pointing out where taught skills may be applied.

Posted in Education | 5 Comments »

College vs. Work

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

John Derbyshire shares an anecdote from a reader about college vs. work:

I work as an energy trader and recently took a customer down to Appalachia to visit some coal mines. On our visit to one of the mines, there was a large sign prominently displayed: Accepting Applications. Once the meeting and mine tour were finished we were in the mine manager’s office and I asked him, “How come you’re hiring? Did you just lose some workers?”

“Hell, no!” was the reply. “We are always looking for people.”

Not sure if you have had the chance to visit Appalachia, but there are large pockets of poverty here, especially when the overall unemployment throughout the country is close to 10 percent. Hard to imagine there would be any job openings. So I asked him again, “How come? Don’t you pay enough?”

He explained to me that a high school graduate can start working at the mine and make roughly $40K a year. After 90 days of training (or in the industry lingo, when a worker goes from being a “red hat” to a “black hat”) that pay jumps up to about $50K a year.

Now granted, this isn’t easy work. It’s a 50-hour work week (with overtime of course), which includes night shifts and weekends. But $50K for a high school graduate?

The manager went on to explain to me that, “If you know which end of a wrench to pick up” the company will be glad to train you to be an electrician, equipment operator, etc. in which case your salary will rise to $75–$100K a year.

I asked him, “Then how come you can’t get workers?”

His reply was telling. “All you have to do to get a mine job is come to work every day, work reasonably hard, and pee clean. We just can’t find people who can do this.”

Apparently it’s not even illegal drugs. Legal prescription painkillers are the main cause. People will shop doctors and get multiple prescriptions. Doctors are happy to prescribe these, because they run clinics and make money from Medicaid selling the pills.

Finally I asked the manager, who was in his mid 50s or so, “What about your kids?”

He replied: “Oh, they both went to college.”

“What are they doing now?”

“Working for the state government.”

“How much do they get paid?”

“About $25 grand a year.”

Posted in Business, Economics, Education, Policy | No Comments »

A Second Henry Kissinger

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

If America had been able to tolerate a second Henry Kissinger, David Samuels says, that person would have been Edward Luttwak — but Luttwak does not agree:

Kissinger at 88 is writing brochures for Kissinger Associates. His last book on China is one such work written by the staff at Kissinger Associates. It is designed to curry favor with the Chinese authorities and nothing else.

I know him personally very well, but he is such a deceptive person; he’s a habitual liar and dissembler. Although I’ve spent a lot of time talking to him, I have no insight on him at all. His book ends with a paean to U.S.-Chinese friendship and how every other country has to fit in. I have to review it for the TLS, but I’ve been delaying it by weeks because I don’t know whether it is a case of senility or utter corruption.

Posted in Edward Luttwak, Policy | No Comments »

Soviet Military Technology

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

The Soviets did not wait until the Cold War to start copying western military technologies. For instance, the Tupolev Tu-4 bomber was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress — to the best of their ability to copy it:

On three occasions during 1944, individual B-29s made emergency landings in Soviet territory after bombing raids on Japanese Manchuria and Japan. In accordance with Soviet neutrality in the Pacific War, the bombers were interned and kept by the Soviets, despite American requests for their return.

Captain Howard Jarrell and his 10-man crew took off from Chengdu, China, on 31 July 1944 for a mission against the Japanese Showa steel mill in Anshan, Manchuria. Capt. Jarrell’s B-29, called “Ramp Tramp”,(B-29-5-BW serial number 42-6256) was assigned to the 462nd (Very Heavy) Bomb Group and was part of a large air strike composed of approximately 100 aircraft. At the end of the bomb run, the inboard right engine (No. 3) “ran away” and could not be “feathered” (setting the variable pitched propeller blades parallel to the airflow to minimize aerodynamic drag). So, the engine had to be shut down, which increased the drag of the unfeathered propeller. This made the plane burn more fuel, so it could not get back to Chengdu. The pilot headed toward the Soviet base at Vladivostok, Russia to land the damaged bomber. The crew were allowed to escape into American-occupied Iran in January 1945. The bomber was not returned and instead used in the USSR during 1948-49 as a drop ship for underwing launching of 346P glider, a development of the German DFS 346 rocket-powered aircraft. It was also used by the Soviets in the effort to copy the B-29 as the Tu-4 Bull.

On August 20, 1944 the US Army Air Force B-29 Superfortress “Cait Paomat” (42-93829) flying from Chengdu was damaged by anti-aircraft gunfire during a raid on the Yawata Iron Works. Due to the damage sustained, the crew elected to divert to the Soviet Union. The aircraft crashed in the foothills of Sikhote Alin Range east of Khabarovsk after the crew baled out. The crew was interned and allowed to escape into American-occupied Iran in January 1945. The airframe was used by the Soviets in the effort to copy the B-29 as the Tu-4 Bull. The complete wing and engines of this aircraft were later incorporated into the sole Tu-70 Cart transport aircraft.

On 11 November 1944, during a nighttime raid on Omura on Kyushu Japan, the USAAF B-29 “General H.H. Arnold Special” (42-6365) was damaged and forced to divert to Vladivostok in the Soviet Union. The crew was interned.[44] On 21 November 1944, the USAAF B-29 “Ding Hao” (42-6358) was damaged during a raid on an aircraft factory at Omura, Japan and also forced to divert to Vladivostok. The interned crews were allowed to escape into American-occupied Iran in January 1945. Both B-29s were not returned and instead used in the Tu-4 Bull development effort.

The Tupolev OKB dismantled and studied Ramp Tramp and the other two B-29s, and Stalin ordered Tupolev and his design bureau to copy the B-29, and produce a design ready for quantity production as soon as possible. As the supply of aluminum in the USSR was in different thicknesses than available in the US (metric vs imperial), the entire aircraft had to be extensively re-engineered and the Tu-4 cannot be regarded as an exact copy despite external appearances, with Tupolev even substituting his own favored airfoil sections for those used by Boeing.

In 1947, the Soviets debuted both the Tupolev Tu-4 (NATO ASCC code named Bull) copy of the B-29, and the Tupolev Tu-70 transport variant. The Soviets used tail-gunner positions similar to the B-29 in many later bombers and transports.

A little over a decade later, the Soviets copied American Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, too:

The Taiwan Strait battles inadvertently produced a new derivative of Sidewinder: shortly after that conflict the Soviet Union began the manufacture of the K-13/R-3S missile (NATO reporting name AA-2 ‘Atoll’), a reverse-engineered copy of the Sidewinder.

It was made possible after a Taiwanese AIM-9B hit a Chinese Communist MiG-17 without exploding, the missile lodging itself in the airframe of the MiG after which the pilot was able to bring both plane and missile back to base.

According to Ron Westrum in his book “Sidewinder”, the Soviets obtained the plans for Sidewinder from a Swedish Colonel, Stig Wennerström, and rushed their version into service by 1961 copying it so closely that even the part numbers were duplicated, although none of the known Soviet sources mention this. Years later, Soviet engineers would admit that the captured Sidewinder served as a “university course” in missile design and substantially improved Soviet and allied air-to-air capabilities.

The K-13 and its derivatives remained in production for nearly 30 years. In the 1960s, the possession of the K-13 in the Soviet arsenal caused major changes in the USAF bombing tactics, forcing bombers from high-altitudes down to lower levels, below enemy radar coverage. In 1972 when Finnish Air Force started using Sidewinder (AIM-9P) in their Saab 35 Draken fighters, they were already using Soviet -made Atoll in their MiG-21s; Finns found the two so similar that they tested Sidewinders in MiGs and Atolls in Drakens.

(Hat tip to a Slovenian guest, who described these stories as “screaming Isegoria” when he came across them.)

Posted in War | 6 Comments »

Voluntary Departure

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

Tim Worstall shares a tale of “voluntary departure” from the US:

On entering the country on a 10 year, multi-entry, business visa (I owned a small business in the US at the time) immigration officials decided that I should not be allowed to enter.

I was not allowed legal representation of any kind. I was interviewed and then the notes of the interview were written up afterwards (ie, what the officer remembered he and I had said, not what was actually said).

I refused to sign such misleading notes. I was told that if I did not I would be deported, my passport declared invalid for travel to the US for the rest of my life.

So of course I signed and then made my “voluntary departure” which included being held in a cell until the time of my flight, being threatened with being handcuffed while going to the flight and the return of my passport only upon arrival in London.

My 10 year multi entry visa had of course been cancelled. My attempts to get matters sorted out, so that I could visit my business, were rather hampered by the way that the interview notes which I had signed under duress were taken to be the only valid evidence by the INS (as was) that should be discussed when deciding upon visa status.

I lost the business and haven’t bothered returning to the country in the more than decade since.

There is no law, evidence, representation nor even accurate recording of proceedings in such “voluntary departures”. It is entirely at the whim of the agents at the border post. I was actually told by one agent “I’m gonna screw you over”.

Something of a difference from what’s scrawled over that statue in New York really. And I’m most certainly not the only business person this sort of thing has happened to.

He goes on to explain the problem:

The specific point at issue was the difference between a B1 business visa (the 10 year, multi-entry one mentioned) and an H1B or even Green Card.

On an H1B or Green Card one is of course allowed to take up a paid working position in the US. On a B1, you’re not. On a B1 you can enter the US, hire staff, conduct business meetings, do most of the things which are “running a business” but you’re not allowed to actually “run a business”.

The dividing line is a little sketchy to say the least.

It’s possible that I was on the wrong side of that line. Certainly, the immigration officials at the airport thought I was. I stoutly maintain that I wasn’t (I didn’t “run the business”, didn’t take an income from it, didn’t manage it directly).

However, my point isn’t about where the line is: it’s that the decision process about which side of it I was was left entirely to those immigration officials in an airport 1,500 miles from where the actual business was, without any form of legal process being possible and under, as I’ve indicated, a certain amount of duress. And a certain lack of what we’d all consider to be due process.

Their major evidence was the amount of time I had spent in the US in the preceeding years. Time for which I at all times had a valid visa and time which had been approved by immigration officials at the various ports of entry (under the I-92 rules).

It does have to be said that it’s your country and you can allow in or not who you please, as you please. But given the way in which the decisions are made you might understand the wariness that some of us have about deciding to invest in the country?

In an entirely unrelated case, an English writer was asked to come and give a speech about his work. An honorarium was involved. He was turned back at the US airport because, in the opinion of the officials at said airport, that honorarium was “too high”.

If, even with a valid visa, entering the country is something of a lottery then please don’t be all that surprised if some decide not to buy tickets.

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

The SEAL Raid in Iran That Didn’t Happen

Monday, September 12th, 2011

The SEAL Raid in Iran that didn’t happen is just one of the 7 things you didn’t know about the War on Terror:

When U.S. forces routed the Taliban government in Afghanistan and forced bin Laden and his top lieutenants to flee, many senior al Qaeda leaders, including bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, escaped to neighboring Pakistan. But a separate group, including the al Qaeda leader’s son, Saad bin Laden, fled to northern Iran, where American troops would not pursue them and the Iranians would likely not detain them. But the Shiite clerics running Iran placed the al Qaeda operatives and their family members under virtual house arrest, and they became a shield against possible attacks from the Sunni-based terrorist organization.

One plan in particular illustrated the bold thinking and wildly unrealistic aims of the military’s initial approach after 9/11 to kill or capture terrorist leaders. The plan called for hunting the eight to 10 senior al Qaeda leaders and operatives who had sought refuge in Chalus, an Iranian resort town on the Caspian Sea, where they had been detained.

At the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., military planners drew up options for Navy SEALs to sneak ashore at night using state-of-the-art mini-submarines. Once they landed, the SEALs would slip past Iranian guards to snatch the al Qaeda leaders. Another option called for Special Operations helicopters to spirit American commandos into the town and whisk them out again with their quarry. The Americans went as far as conducting two or three rehearsals at an undisclosed location along the U.S. Gulf Coast in early 2002. They conducted small-boat insertion exercises involving about 30 Special Operations personnel, most SEALs, and eventually concluded the mission was feasible if they were provided with more detailed intelligence on the locations of the al Qaeda members and the security around them.

The logistics of the mission were daunting. Chalus sits at the edge of the Elburz coastal mountain range about 70 miles north of Tehran, and the failed rescue of the American hostages in Iran in April 1980 loomed large in commanders’ memories. Eventually, Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rejected the mission as too risky and too politically volatile. Many of the al Qaeda operatives are reportedly still there.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight

Monday, September 12th, 2011

Once we feel included in a group, we can’t help but see outsiders through a warped lens called the illusion of asymmetric insight:

You believe every person not you is an open book. Of course, the research shows they believe the same thing about you.

In 2001, Emily Pronin and Lee Ross at Stanford along with Justin Kruger at the University of Illinois and Kenneth Savitsky at Williams College conducted a series of experiments exploring why you see people this way.

In the first experiment they had people fill out a questionnaire asking them to think of a best friend and rate how well they believed they knew him or her. They showed the subjects a series of photos showing an iceberg submerged in varying levels of water and asked them to circle the one which corresponded to how much of the “essential nature” they felt they could see of their friends. How much, they asked, of your friend’s true self is visible and much is hidden below the surface? They then had the subjects take a second questionnaire which turned the questions around asking them to put themselves in the minds of their friends. How much of their own iceberg did they think their friends could see? Most people rated their insight into their best friend as keen. They saw more of the iceberg floating above the water line. In the other direction they felt the insight their friend’s possessed of them was lacking, most of their own self was submerged.

This and many other studies show you believe you see more of other people’s icebergs than they see of yours; meanwhile, they think the same thing about you.

The same researchers asked people to describe a time when they feel most like themselves. Most subjects, 78 percent, described something internal and unobservable like the feeling of seeing their child excel or the rush of applause after playing for an audience. When asked to describe when they believed friends or relatives were most illustrative of their personalities, they described internal feelings only 28 percent of the time. Instead, they tended to describe actions. Tom is most like Tom when he is telling a dirty joke. Jill is most like Jill when she is rock climbing. You can’t see internal states of others, so you generally don’t use those states to describe their personalities.

When they had subjects complete words with some letters missing (like g–l which could be goal, girl, gall, gill, etc.) and then ask how much the subjects believed those word completion tasks revealed about their true selves, most people said they revealed nothing at all. When the same people looked at other people’s word completions they said things like, “I get the feeling that whoever did this is pretty vain, but basically a nice guy.” They looked at the words and said the people who filled them in were nature lovers, or on their periods, or were positive thinkers or needed more sleep. When the words were their own, they meant nothing. When they were others’, they pulled back a curtain.

When Pronin, Ross, Kruger and Savitsky moved from individuals to groups, they found an even more troubling version of the illusion of asymmetric insight. They had subjects identify themselves as either liberals or conservatives and in a separate run of the experiment as either pro-abortion and anti-abortion. The groups filled out questionnaires about their own beliefs and how they interpreted the beliefs of their opposition. They then rated how much insight their opponents possessed. The results showed liberals believed they knew more about conservatives than conservatives knew about liberals. The conservatives believed they knew more about liberals than liberals knew about conservatives. Both groups thought they knew more about their opponents than their opponents knew about themselves. The same was true of the pro-abortion rights and anti-abortion groups.

The illusion of asymmetric insight makes it seem as though you know everyone else far better than they know you, and not only that, but you know them better than they know themselves. You believe the same thing about groups of which you are a member. As a whole, your group understands outsiders better than outsiders understand your group, and you understand the group better than its members know the group to which they belong.

The researchers explained this is how one eventually arrives at the illusion of naive realism, or believing your thoughts and perceptions are true, accurate and correct, therefore if someone sees things differently than you or disagrees with you in some way it is the result of a bias or an influence or a shortcoming. You feel like the other person must have been tainted in some way, otherwise they would see the world the way you do – the right way. The illusion of asymmetrical insight clouds your ability to see the people you disagree with as nuanced and complex. You tend to see your self and the groups you belong to in shades of gray, but others and their groups as solid and defined primary colors lacking nuance or complexity.

(Hat tips to Arnold Kling and Tyler Cowen.)

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Not the Usual Washington Think-Tank Product

Monday, September 12th, 2011

I love David Samuels’ introduction to his interview with Edward Luttwak:

Edward Luttwak is a rare bird whose peripatetic life and work are the envy of academics and spies alike. A well-built man who looks like he is in his mid-50s (he turns 70 next year), Luttwak — who was born in 1942 to a wealthy Jewish family in Arad, Romania, and educated in Italy and England — speaks with a resonant European accent that conveys equal measures of authority, curiosity, egomania, bluster, impatience, and good humor. He is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, and he published his first book, Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, at the age of 26. Over the past 40 years, he has made provocative and often deeply original contributions to multiple academic fields, including military strategy, Roman history, Byzantine history, and economics. He owns a large eco-friendly ranch in Bolivia and can recite poetry and talk politics in eight languages, a skill that he displayed during a recent four-hour conversation at his house, located on a quiet street in Chevy Chase, Md., by taking phone calls in Italian, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese, during which I wandered off to the porch, where I sat and talked with his lovely Israeli-born wife, Dalya Luttwak, a sculptor.

The walls of Luttwak’s donnish study — which is by far the nicest room in the Luttwaks’ house, with the best view, and might otherwise have served as the dining room, if Edward and Dalya were more like their neighbors — are lined with bookshelves containing the Roman classics, biographies of Winston Churchill, works on military history and strategy, intelligence gathering, Byzantine art, old atlases, and decorations and plaques from foreign governments. Luttwak’s work as a high-level strategic and intelligence consultant for the U.S. Defense Department, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Japanese government, and the defense departments and intelligence services of other countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East (he appears to be spending a lot of time in South Korea and China) is also augmented by a parallel life as an “operator,” about which he is both secretive and obviously proud.

While the details of Luttwak’s life as a private intelligence operative are sketchy, he has been actively involved in military and paramilitary operations sponsored by the U.S. government, foreign governments, and various private entities. By his own admission, he has been directly involved in attacks on physical targets, interdiction efforts, and the capture and interrogation of wanted persons — although “admission” is clearly the wrong word here, since he is almost boyishly eager for visitors to understand his familiarity with the nuts and bolts of special ops and cites his own field experience to support his estimations of people like Gen. David Petraeus, whose reputation as a counter-insurgency genius he dismisses as a fraud. He is also careful to state that his activities have never violated U.S. law. The Walter Mitty-ish component of Luttwak’s enthusiasm for his other life — academic by day, special operator by night — seems less significant in his psyche than a driving appetite for physical risk that has helped him understand military strategy and related policy questions in a way that the current generation of Western policymakers often does not.

Loved and loathed, and capable of living multiple lives, any one of which would quickly tire out a less intellectually and physically robust man, Luttwak glories in the undeniable fact that he is not the usual Washington think-tank product. His instinctive tendency to reject common wisdom as idiotic, combined with his need to prove that he is the smartest person in every room, has deprived him of the chance to shape events in the way that every policy intellectual not-so-secretly craves. Yet his first allegiance is clearly to the habits of mind that have made him one of the most brilliant strategic thinkers in America, capable of understanding the psychological and practical necessities that drive human action in a highly original, insightful and counterintuitive way.

We met last month, at the height of a rainstorm. What follows are selectively edited portions of the transcript of our interview, during which I made a point of not asking him about his childhood experience as a Jewish refugee in Europe, which seemed like a subject for a different conversation.

Posted in Edward Luttwak, War | 5 Comments »

Less Academics, More Narcissism

Monday, September 12th, 2011

The University of California is cutting back on many things, Heather Mac Donald notes, but not useless diversity programs:

Not only have diversity sinecures been protected from budget cuts, their numbers are actually growing. The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time “vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion.” This position would augment UC San Diego’s already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.

It’s not surprising that the new vice chancellor’s mission is rather opaque, given its superfluity. According to outgoing UCSD chancellor Marye Anne Fox, the new VC for EDI “will be responsible for building on existing diversity plans to develop and implement a campus-wide strategy on equity, diversity and inclusion.” UCSD has been churning out such diversity strategies for years. The “campus-wide strategy on equity, diversity and inclusion” that the new hire will supposedly produce differs from its predecessors only in being self-referential: it will define the very scope of the VC’s duties and the number of underlings he will command. “The strategic plan,” says Fox, “will inform the final organizational structure for the office of the VC EDI, will propose metrics to gauge progress, and will identify potential additional areas of responsibility.”

What a boon for a taxpayer-funded bureaucrat, to be able to define his own portfolio and determine how many staff lines he will control! UC Berkeley’s own vice chancellor for equity and inclusion shows how voracious a diversity apparatchik’s appetite for power can be. Gibor Basri has 17 people working for him in his immediate office, including a “chief of staff,” two “project/policy analysts,” and a “director of special projects.” The funding propping up Basri’s vast office could support many an English or history professor. According to state databases, Basri’s base pay in 2009 was $194,000, which does not include a variety of possible add-ons, including summer salary and administrative stipends. By comparison, the official salary for assistant professors at UC starts at around $53,000. Add to Basri’s salary those of his minions, and you’re looking at more than $1 million a year.

UC San Diego is adding diversity fat even as it snuffs out substantive academic programs. In March, the Academic Senate decided that the school would no longer offer a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering; it also eliminated a master’s program in comparative literature and courses in French, German, Spanish, and English literature. At the same time, the body mandated a new campus-wide diversity requirement for graduation. The cultivation of “a student’s understanding of her or his identity,” as the diversity requirement proposal put it, would focus on “African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans, or other groups” through the “framework” of “race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, language, ability/disability, class or age.” Training computer scientists to compete with the growing technical prowess of China and India, apparently, can wait. More pressing is guaranteeing that students graduate from UCSD having fully explored their “identity.” Why study Cervantes, Voltaire, or Goethe when you can contemplate yourself? “Diversity,” it turns out, is simply a code word for narcissism.

Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »

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