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David Brooks, writing on the spirit of enterprise, graces our pages for the first time in months.
Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich? It’s not primarily because they possess natural resources — many nations have those. It’s primarily because of habits, values and social capital.
It’s because many people in these countries, as Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.
People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not. Community institutions should nurture responsibility and fairness.
This ethos is not an immutable genetic property, which can blithely be taken for granted. It’s a precious social construct, which can be undermined and degraded.
Right now, this ethos is being undermined from all directions. People see lobbyists diverting money on the basis of connections; they see traders making millions off of short-term manipulations; they see governments stealing money from future generations to reward current voters.
The result is a crisis of legitimacy. The game is rigged. Social trust shrivels. Effort is no longer worth it. The prosperity machine winds down.
Yet the assault on these values continues, especially in Europe. …
Mohamed ElBaradei who headed up the UN atomic agency did his best to defeat Bush in 2004 by leaking false compromising documents to both the NY Times and 60 minutes just one week before the election. (Here’s a contemporaneous account from one of National Review’s blogs – The Kerry Spot.) For that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. He also maintained for years that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons. Now we learn, from his own agency, he was wrong. Claudia Rosett wonders if the Nobel committee should seek a return of the prize.
Since Mohamed ElBaradei retired from leadership of the International Atomic Energy Agency, at the end of 2009, the IAEA has made great strides toward an honest assessment of an Iranian nuclear program that is obviously hell bent on developing nuclear weapons. On Nov. 8, ElBaradei’s successor, Japan’s Yukiya Amano, delivered a devastating report to the IAEA board of governors. It details abundant signs that for years Iran has been working not only toward a supply of enriched uranium that could fuel nuclear warheads, but also on detonators, on missiles to deliver them, and on preparations for a nuclear test — in sum, widely sourced and credible information gathered by the IAEA “indicates that Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.”
All of which ought to be mortally embarrassing to ElBaradei, who, together with the IAEA that he ran, collected a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for “their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way.” Even in 2005, this was a farce. In the face of alarming signs that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, ElBaradei down-played information he evidently had, leading to an official farewell in 2009, in which he visited Iran and –speaking from Iran — stressed that the IAEA had “no concrete proof that there is an ongoing weapons program in Iran,” and reassured Iran’s rulers that the IAEA did not view their missile program as “nuclear-related.” He added that in his post-IAEA capacity as a private citizen, he hoped to return often to Iran: “I would be very happy to come here as many times as I can.” …
New Editor’s Tom Elia posts on the life and career of Barney Frank.
All other criticisms of Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) aside, however valid they may or may not be, Barney Frank is really a poster boy for what is wrong with our government: that is, professional lives spent in practically nothing but government.
From about 1968-1972 Frank was first an aide to the mayor of Boston and then a US congressional aide; from 1972-1980, he was a Massachusetts state representative; and from 1980 until now he has been a representative in the US House. For more than 40 years, from the time he was 28 until now, Frank has been involved in government.
How is that for a ‘breadth of experience’? How does Frank’s lack of a broad and varied experience — like so, so many in our political leadership — actually benefit this country?
No wonder the policies he advocated seemed so foreign to so many, and in the end, were frankly just so goddamned piss-poor.
More on our leader’s lives from Al Davis’ blog at WSJ.
People who say Washington should be run like a business don’t realize that it is a business.
First, you pretend you’re in it for the people, or America, or some nonsensical ideology. Then you get elected. Then you chase money.
Remember, you are not a lying, self-dealing scoundrel, you are a bold entrepreneur, entitled to speaker’s fees, consulting contracts, and insider stock and real-estate deals. And if you end up taking a spin through the revolving door, you can be a highly paid lobbyist one minute and America’s greatest hope the next.
The GOP’s Newt Gingrich, now leading in the polls, denied last week that he ever lobbied for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One of his Republican challengers, Michele Bachmann, called it “shilling.”
Over the past decade, Mr. Gingrich reportedly bagged $1.6 million from the government-seized mortgage giants that Mr. Gingrich would tell you contributed mightily to America’s decline and its $15 trillion worth of debt. Mr. Gingrich says the money was for his work as “a historian.” …
Andrew Malcolm peers into Joe Biden’s future.
… On one level, keeping Joe makes sense. He’s tall. Genial. He’s prone to gaffes and calling Republicans “terrorists.” But he’s generally obedient and good for laughs. Seemingly harmless. Abraham Lincoln did it during the Civil War, but a modern incumbent president seeking reelection hasn’t dumped his VP in 67 years. It just looks messy.
But it’s a long time until next August in Charlotte. The economy’s not likely to surge, regardless of this morning’s jobs numbers. So, neither is approval of the O-B administration.
Come next summer the Chicago Gang could decide it needs a real game-changer on the ticket — an Hispanic, a woman, a Westerner. Someone who brings more than Delaware’s whopping three electoral votes to a table that needs 270.
And Joe would be advised in a Windy City kind of way how much he wanted to spend more time with his family after four decades of Washington service.
John Steele Gordon notes India has allowed big box stores and hopes New York City will catch up.
The economic revolution in India continued this week, when the cabinet voted to allow in big box stores such as Wal-Mart and Home Depot?.
This is a major change, as Indian retail has long been dominated by an endless number of mom-and-pop stores. Indeed India has one of the highest densities of stores to people in the world, with one store for about every ten people. With each store doing only a tiny business, economies of scale are impossible and prices are high. The distribution network behind these stores is primitive, inefficient, and causes much spoilage, which again assures high prices.
There are, of course, restrictions. Foreign firms will need domestic partners who will have 49 percent ownership and the stores can be located only in cities with a population of at least 1 million. But India has an astonishing 51 cities with more than a million people (the U.S. has nine). …
… Now, if only New York City would follow India’s example and allow its citizens to enjoy lower prices, more choice, and higher quality, it might aspire to first-world status as well.
Andrew Ferguson reports on frauds at the intersection of journalism and the academy.
Lots of cultural writing these days, in books and magazines and newspapers, relies on the so-called Chump Effect. The Effect is defined by its discoverer, me, as the eagerness of laymen and journalists to swallow whole the claims made by social scientists. Entire journalistic enterprises, whole books from cover to cover, would simply collapse into dust if even a smidgen of skepticism were summoned whenever we read that “scientists say” or “a new study finds” or “research shows” or “data suggest.” Most such claims of social science, we would soon find, fall into one of three categories: the trivial, the dubious, or the flatly untrue.
A rather extreme example of this third option emerged last month when an internationally renowned social psychologist, Diederik Stapel of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, was proved to be a fraud. No jokes, please: This social psychologist is a fraud in the literal, perhaps criminal, and not merely figurative, sense. An investigative committee concluded that Stapel had falsified data in at least “several dozen” of the nearly 150 papers he had published in his extremely prolific career.
Perhaps “falsified” is too mild a word. Stapel didn’t just tweak and twist numbers, he made stuff up. With his colleagues, Science Insider reported, “he would discuss in detail experimental designs, including drafting questionnaires, and would then claim to conduct the experiments at high schools and universities with which he had special arrangements. The experiments, however, never took place.” Questionnaires are the mother’s milk of social science, given (most often) to collections of students who are easily accessible to the scientist. After being rewarded with course credits or money, the students go on to serve as proxies for humanity in general, as the scientist draws from their questionnaires large conclusions about the way human nature compels us, all of us, to think and act.
The conclusions that Stapel drew were large indeed. One thing he liked to demonstrate in his studies was the exploitive nature of democratic capitalism. Last year, the New York Times reported on a typical Stapel study, called “The Self-Activation Effect of Advertisements.” It proved that advertising for cosmetics and fancy shoes “makes women feel worse about themselves,” as the Times put it. …
… The experiments are preposterous. You’d have to be a highly trained social psychologist, or a journalist, to think otherwise. Just for starters, the experiments can never be repeated or their results tested under controlled conditions. The influence of a hundred different variables is impossible to record. The first group of passengers may have little in common with the second group. The groups were too small to yield statistically significant results. The questionnaire is hopelessly imprecise, and so are the measures of racism and homophobia. The notions of “disorder” and “stereotype” are arbitrary—and so on and so on.
Yet the allure of “science” is too strong for our journalists to resist: all those numbers, those equations, those fancy names (say it twice: the Self-Activation Effect), all those experts with Ph.D.’s!
To their credit, the Stapel scandal has moved a few social psychologists to self-reflection. They note the unhealthy relationship between social psychologists and the journalists who bring them attention—each using the other to fill a professional need. “Psychology,” one methodologist told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “has become addicted to surprising, counter-intuitive findings that catch the news media’s eye.”
That’s a scandal, all right. Stapel’s professional treachery is a scandal, too. But the biggest scandal is that the chumps took him seriously in the first place.
The best part of today’s Pickings is the story of the “Migrant Mother” – the iconic depression era picture by Dorothy Lange of a migrant woman and her children. You’ll be pleased with how it all worked out. The story was in James Altucher’s blog.
Last night I was on CNBC’s Fast Money. Everyone seems to want to talk about the impending Great Depression: Europe fails, contagion spreads it to here, all of our banks fail, everyone loses their jobs, blah, blah, blah. The world feels like it’s ending.
But it’s not. I listed my reasons why. I won’t list them again here. It’s not important. Innovation is happening. The economy is growing. And Europe is not going to disappear.
Look at the above photograph. That’s when the world was ending. But it wasn’t ending even then.
Realist photography is an interesting art form as it doesn’t seek to “create” but rather to document intensity exactly as it is, without embellishment. Dorothea Lange took the above photograph called, “Migrant Mother” which became one of the most iconic photographs documenting the dustbowl era during the Great Depression. Lange’s life underlines several themes that I try to cover throughout this blog:
A) you don’t need a formal education to become a huge success at a field you are passionate about. Lange didn’t go to college (as was more common then) and trained herself in her style of photography.
B) you don’t need anyone’s approval to fail or to succeed. her mother wanted her to be a teacher. When Lange tried to teach, all of the fifth graders climbed out the window and went to play in the yard. So Lange quit and became a photographer. …