Wednesday, May 27, 2015

My Grandfather's Job

I promise I'll leave poor Ian Bremmer alone soon, but couldn't help noticing this Tweet of his from a few weeks back:
On the scale of national policy, of course, 10 jobs is nothing, not even a blip.  A bliplet.  But Bremmer's Eurasia Group is a relatively small, narrowly-focused consulting firm.  If the increased volume of trade and investment attributable to the Trans-Pacific Partnership will give him cause to add 10, how many will McKinsey add, and +Deloitte+PwC+KPMG,  etc.?  To say nothing of the banks.

And even though all of them together may only number in the thousands, still a paltry total in the context of the entire economy, increased trade is about two things: 1) real people, and 2) ripple effects.  However many (or few) jobs are created by trade policy, those jobs are opportunities for real people, often young people who've just graduated with a very, very expensive professional degree, and who had previously been staring down the barrel of student loan defaults; defaults which would damage their credit and thus close them out of housing and new car markets for years, depriving those sectors of new customers, growth and cause to make new hires of their own.  In such circumstances demoralization quickly segues to a permanent lowering of expectations, and a generation of talent disappears into bleary mediocrity.

The answer is sure to come that this is all very dramatic, but that it pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands if not millions of middle-class manufacturing jobs lost over the last 40 years or more.  Fair enough.  But the truth is that those jobs were not lost because the U.S. signed free trade and investment treaties.  Rather, free trade and investment treaties were signed because both U.S. companies who'd begun to manufacture outside the U.S. and U.S. consumers would benefit if the products now being made in Latin America and East Asia could be imported into the U.S. at lower costs.

To reiterate: jobs didn't follow free trade overseas; free trade followed logically when manufacturing moved out of the U.S. for its own reasons.  And in most cases, when the FTAs did follow, they did so either with countries of minimal impact for U.S. labor, or very late in the game, well after the exodus of manufacturing -- one of the oldest U.S. FTAs is with Israel (29 years), hardly a mass destination for formerly American-based jobs, and the so-called DR-CAFTA (Dominican Republic - Caribbean Area Free Trade Agreement), encompassing much of Latin America, didn't come into force until 2006.  As I pointed out in a previous post, the lodestar of cheap manufacturing is China, and we have no FTA or investment treaty with China.

In the end, the simple fact is that manufacturing jobs are gone from the U.S. (with the slight caveat that lower utility costs in the U.S. resulting from the availability of unconventional natural gas and oil supplies may be making America an attractive destination for some manufacturers in high-cost regions such as Europe).  And even if those jobs were to return, they would neither be nor support the kind of upper-middle and middle class jobs that my grandparents' generation knew.  My grandfather, a WWII B-17 pilot with a business degree from Northwestern, raised five children more or less comfortably as a regional manager for National Cash Register (NCR, later bought by AT&T), a company which made and sold cash registers to the American retail sector.  The 21st century equivalent of his job has nothing to do with manufacturing or selling anything to America's retailers.  It has to do with the kind of analysis done by international firms in the financial and service sectors.  These new jobs pay a lot better than his did.  There just aren't enough of them.  Yet.  But if we can generate more of them through intelligent trade policy, isn't it all but a moral necessity to do so?

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Whither Strategy, or On the Uncertain Value of Posturing

A recent Tweet by the always penetrating and incisive Ian Bremmer may be the ultimate justification for limiting oneself to 140 characters:

"Assad Must Go ISIS Must Be Destroyed N Korea Must Give Up Nukes Russia Must Leave Ukraine If We Can't (or Won't) Enforce, Stop Pretending."

Has the crux of an entire era ever been more pithily summed?  Hard to imagine.

Yet while Bremmer's formulation cuts to the heart of the present historical moment, it's not clear that his closing admonition is readily translatable into policy (as I'm sure he himself knows well -- if his tweet is the justification for Twitter, then this post is the illustration of its limitations); because the question, of course, is what exactly are we to offer instead of our protestations?

The late Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping is supposed to have said, "If you have an ugly face, there's no use in pretending to be handsome."  On the other hand, fans of Aaron Sorkin will readily call to mind another punchy aphorism (apparently attributable to the Episcopal Priest and early AA supporter Sam Shoemaker): "Act as if ye have faith, and faith will be given you.  Put another way, fake it 'til you make it."

So, which one is it?  Which approach must guide the conduct of international affairs in this profoundly uncertain time?  Should we admit to our ugliness and make explicit our unwillingness to meet these challenges to international order with the full force of all our civilization's resources?  Or should we hold doggedly to every principle until by the sheer force of intention and endurance, we can will them into reality?

Well of course the answer is both.  This is why we elect leaders, not slogans.  When to invoke unavoidable realities and when to insist that apparently dreaded circumstances can in fact be resisted is perhaps the primary question leaders are required to answer.  Balancing these approaches in order to produce stability is the singular skill of the statesman (or stateswoman).

Thus, back to Mr. Bremmer's original quote, surely his position is not so much that in any one of these cases we (the West, the U.S., the President) would be wrong to voice our grave and adamant objections.  What he's surely suggesting is that there comes a point at which a critical mass of knee-jerk proscriptions can coalesce into a demonstrable and near comprehensive impotence, from which too many international actors can draw too many frightening conclusions about their freedom to act as they see fit.  In this, he's undoubtedly correct.

The problem, as always, is what the alternative looks like.  Mr. Bremmer has said in various fora that the U.S. has no foreign policy strategy (and in at least one forum that almost no country in the world other than China has one right now).  But to say that a unified, coherent global strategy is the alternative to our current set of ad-hoc remonstrations, is still to replace one empty vessel with another.  What would it look like not to wag our finger at Russia, North Korea, ISIS, Assad, etc?  It would look like a cogent foreign policy strategy.  Fine.  And what, in this chaotic age, does a cogent foreign policy strategy look like?

Well...

To be clear, Mr. Bremmer may have, in one of his myriad books or articles, a very cogent foreign policy strategy indeed that he could recommend to the President, which I just haven't read yet.  But if he does, well, then, can we get him on a ballot somewhere?

Friday, May 22, 2015

Russia, China, and the Power of Institutional Habits

Reading this week about joint Russian-Chinese naval exercises in the Mediterranean, I thought of something I read a little over a year ago.  In April of 2014, while visiting Hamburg with my wife, I was flipping through the Financial Times at breakfast, and saw an article about a new Russian natural gas sale to China.  At the time, Russia's invasion and annexation of Crimea was very recent, and debates about sanctions raged in Washington and Brussels.  Disapprobation, in any case, was being heaped on Russia from all sides (and deservedly so, of course).  Except from Beijing.

Whatever this sale of natural gas was (I, and everyone else, have long forgotten the salient details of the particular deal), it was a blip, and was not necessarily caused, or even occasioned, by the prospect of shrinking markets for Russian gas in Europe.  What struck me at the time, rather (nor would it have taken a PhD in the history of international relations to pick up the scent of this trail), was not the potential economic impact of Western sanctions against Russia, but the potential geopolitical consequences.

As analyst Ian Bremmer pointed out on Charlie Rose recently, it is nearly always a mistake to divide international relations into discrete sectors -- economic, political, military, cultural, etc. -- as if each has no effect on the other.  For example, as Bremmer pointed out, failure to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, particularly as a result of myopic political jockeying in Congress, would have not only economic repercussions, but geopolitical resonance as well -- it would make explicit that which is surely already sensed in friendly and unfriendly capitals around the world, namely that the American government is near paralysis.  (See my earlier comment on the TPP, here.)

My premonition in early 2014 regarding the implications of expanded natural resource links between Russia and China was very much about the possible bleed-over of institutional habits from any given sector (in this case energy) into the mindset of the parties generally.  It was, in essence that without hard work to tend the U.S.-China relationship, a chill between the West and Russia would provide an impetus for Russia to begin building the kind of broad and deep working-level and administrative-level relationships that can solidify into habits of thought.  In this sense the very forgetability of whatever Russo-Chinese gas deal I read about was what made it a signal -- for such are the kinds of institutional arrangements that gradually become normative in the collective thinking of national bureaucracies.  And if you doubt the ability of bureaucracies to influence national policy by means of sheer intransigence, well, read pretty much any political leader's memoir and you'll see.  As Henry Kissinger has quipped, Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat denied his prerogatives.

Because international relations do not proceed in direct causal lines, it is not the case that this week's naval exercises are the result of a Chinese-Russian relationship strengthened by the West's economic sanctions against Russia.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union, China and Russia have maintained all manner of relations, including military relations. Russia has sold China tremendous quantities of arms, and the two countries have even worked together on civilian nuclear power projects.  These joint exercises are not the first instances of naval cooperation, nor are they, apparently, on a scale like anything the U.S. might conduct with its NATO allies.

The question instead is whether there is developing between Russia and China a pattern of habitual cooperation that could result in new assumptions about the shape of the international situation among their leaders, their bureaucracies, and their general populations.  As well as among the rest of the international community.  Those habits, those assumptions, those defaults, precisely because they are subconscious, are tremendously powerful.  It is the task of leaders to intuit these implicit realities, and then to shape them.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Cosmosis

What I know about cosmology: precisely squat.  Take everything hereafter, therefore, for what it's worth.

This article is surely some of the best, if not the best, writing on cosmology ever.  Lucid, well-paced, a little ecstatic, it's everything writing (on any topic, really) should be.

Another extraordinary source of cosmology-writing (who'd have thought there'd be two?) is John Updike's 1997 novel, Toward the End of Time.  But that book was devastating; it's black and expanding universe was icy and tended fundamentally toward annihilation.  I despaired for weeks after reading it.  Though Updike's prose was as luminous as ever, no mere opalescence can endear to us that great and final wave of oblivion which (the book's cosmology held) is our fate.

But how about this: "Science owes its epistemological gravitas to its stern insistence that every idea faces the firing squad of experiment...That’s the methodology that gifted us the shimmering, intricate, expansive cosmos we live in today."

Or this: "Galaxies were also giving off a special kind of light, a downshifted hue that suggested they were speeding away from Earth."

In this telling, by the science writer Ross Andersen, the cosmos is all wonder and hue, all mystery, interplay, distance, light.  And science is that giddy thing it was for Einstein, who began our century of relativity by wondering what it would be like to ride a beam of light.  Who wouldn't want to live in this realm of elaborate crystalline grace and power?

So what's the lesson?  Hard telling.  Updike wasn't generally a pessimist.  And, though I've never read anything else by Andersen, it seems clear from this article that he's as devoted to rigor and process as he is to dreamy metaphor.  Nor is it a contest.  Rather, in every case, doesn't the lesson have ultimately to do with imagination itself?  As Andersen's article discusses, cosmologists face the problem that they're not yet able to observe our own galaxy (or any other, for that matter) from outside of our galaxy.  And isn't this the problem, in microcosm, of cosmology generally?  Cosmology, precisely because its subject is so comprehensive ("all of space and all of time," as Andersen points out) is fated to measure, more than anything, our ability to imagine a plausible cosmology.

Monday, May 18, 2015

Rock Stars, Serious and Otherwise


New album out today by Brandon Flowers, front man for The Killers (once described by none other than Bono as 'the swankiest rock band on the planet').  While I don't exactly share Mr. Flowers' 80s nostalgia, I do appreciate his insistence on mining that otherwise plastic-y territory for the depth of spirit and feeling that must surely have been there, however synthesized and neon green it may have been.  Similarly, though I've no affinity for Las Vegas, Flowers' invocation of his home city's glitzy pathos feels fresh and serious.

Apropos of the video below, though, here's the thing I'm finding I really like more and more as I get older: I like it when serious people are light, and loose, on purpose. 

I suppose one might raise doubt as to whether rock stars get to count as serious people.  I don't know.  Serious enough for me.



Sunday, May 17, 2015

The Life of the (Russian) Mind


 


I read this book some years back, with an eye to reviewing it for the European Journal of International Law (I never did -- those were somewhat more...irresolute days for me, shall we say).  If I recall at all correctly, one of its primary premises was that Russians simply do not arrange their concrete affairs by forming enforceable contracts.  What they do instead I don't quite remember -- I seem to think it had something to do with tacit hierarchical agreements that reflected a world-view most fully expressed in Russian Orthodox iconography.  I do seem to remember that the writing was very good, and that the premise was based on a very bold, exciting, even sort of shocking characterization of the author's observations of Russian life: an entire civilization that simply doesn't contract?  Wow.  Fascinating.

What I also remember is that the author's explanation of why Russians do not contract sort of petered out in the face of the overwhelming strangeness of the fact that they do not.  The book (again, as I recall; it's possible I wasn't reading terribly carefully then, and that I would see it differently if I were to read it today) seemed to fall back a bit on bald assertion and a reiteration of amazement at the alien feel of Russian cultural and economic mores, however correctly observed they might have been.  Turns out you need more than just a single blinding insight to sustain a book-length explanation of the causes and effects that give structure to an entire society. 

In theory, at least, the blog post is a form more amenable to the announcement of mere insights, per se.  Here, perhaps, the initial big bang of an idea's seeming rightness can carry the day, and with any luck begin a process of exploration that might eventually lead to a more fully realized argument about the deepest nature of things.  Or, maybe it's just a way for lazy weekend philosophers to absolve themselves of responsibility and cover their desultory theories in a patina of glossy plausibility.  Either way.

Tomorrow I'm to begin an online Russian language course.  I've been listening to my wife and her family speak the language for over a decade, and have already picked up some random vocabulary and basic constructions.  One of these constructions is the strange (to English speakers) mode of handling personal possession.  Where English is straightforward and declarative -- 'I have...' -- Russian is almost unbelievably tentative: U menya yist..., or 'With/near me there is...'  The language, at least on the literal level, has no direct means of attributing possession.  In Russia(n), it is literally true that no one has anything.

Obviously there a raging danger here of over-determining a world view on the basis of a linguistic quirk.  It's a familiar (and rotten) feeling for anyone who's ever attempted any systematic thinking about broad and complex subjects to have their first impressions -- so vivid and dynamic! -- run to ground on the shore of careful analysis.  (I suspect this may have been part of what happened to our author in the book above: the flash of a felt reality on the streets of Moscow seemed to hold the key to a civilizational truth, but, upon further scrutiny, the wattage of the insight dimmed and lost much of its explanatory power.)  In the case of my grammatical theory above, there's a whole tribe of cognitive linguists out there who could surely drain it of any analytical value in a heartbeat.

Still, the intuitive allure of the insight holds, I think (as, for that matter, does the intuitive allure of our author's insight about the instinctive Russian resistance to the institution of contracting).  It can't explain everything about Russia's unique economic status, or about the behavior or beliefs of individual Russians.  But it can't be for nothing that the minds of a people who have been so resiliently inimical to Western values, have been formed by a language in which there simply exists no category for ownership.

Friday, May 15, 2015

Judgement: Its Problems, Its Fullness, and the Age of Moral Exhaustion



Stunning, dense, rich, long article by Corey Robin in The Nation, on the eternal controversy over Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  Theorists, philosophers, novelists, PhD students, rabbis, and plenty of others have devoted and continue to devote their entire lives to this work, its meaning and implications, so I'll not respond to it in any direct way here.  (In any case, I couldn't -- I've never read it.)  Rather, I'll take this article's word for it that one of the central controversies of the book's vision has to do with the role of intentions in determining moral responsibility: does it matter what we mean to do, or why we do it; or is the deed all?

Arendt, according to Robin, spent parts of her career, including Eichmann, developing and elaborating upon the classical instinct that intentions, whatever their meaning, can never be determinative of moral innocence or culpability.  Rather, actions are the only salient data when it comes to judging good and evil.

This subject was a primary question as well in something I read yesterday, a bizarre and bewildering email exchange between Noam Chomsky and the writer Sam Harris.  (Also very long.  If you have the time to read all this, that's great, I think you'll be the better for it, but, as I frequently admonish myself: shouldn't you be working?)

Chomsky (whose indefensible belligerence throughout the exchange often renders his exact position undiscoverable) seems ultimately to hew to Arendt's view.  Muddied as his logic is by the imprecision of his own pique, Chomsky clearly rejects (or at least considers somehow irrelevant) Harris's position that the 9/11 hijackers' intention to kill as many innocent people as possible provides a meaningful way of distinguishing between the moral status of their act and the moral status of (the example Chomsky and Harris discuss) Bill Clinton's 1998 decision to bomb a chemical/pharmaceutical laboratory in Sudan, which Chomsky claims resulted in perhaps tens of thousands of Sudanese deaths.  (Note: as best I can tell, this is in dispute.)  Chomsky points out (over and over) that intentions, at least declared intentions, have been offered as either justification or exculpation for the most grievous crimes of history, Hitler's included.  They are, therefore, no guide to the morality or immorality of acts or actors.

My question is why so much energy is being spent resisting the felt reality that moral responsibility, both in itself, and as we are capable of judging it, is a composite of act and intention?  Every day, when faced with uncertainty regarding the moral status of actions (drone strikes, police tactics, votes in favor of free trade), we take into account both intentions and actions, we go through that complicated but familiar moral process of weighing and comparing, of judging the extent to which any given actor seems culpable.  Different cases warrant differing degrees of import assigned to the brute facts of the event and the intentions of the actors involved.  And this is fine.  We know how to do this.  We are capable of looking at a given case -- say Clinton's -- and determining that the relevant actor, whatever the outcome of his action, seemed to be doing his best; we are capable of looking next at a different case -- say Eichmann's -- and concluding that the sheer scale of horrific facts overwhelms any recourse to exculpatory motives.  In human lives, both elements are real, the mitigation of benevolent intent, and the conclusiveness of inescapable data.  To deny either of them is to deny us the fullness of our judgements about life and meaning.  We know how to do this.

Or do we?  Saul Bellow (of whose work I'm a great admirer -- see my rapturous post about discovering Augie March here) used to say that a distinguishing characteristic of modernity is that it calls upon us to make judgements almost constantly "about genocide...or about famine, or the blowing up of passenger planes" -- this is from a 1990 lecture Bellow gave at Oxford -- "and we are all aware that we are incapable of reacting appropriately."  Elsewhere, Bellow adds to the list of those imponderables which we still somehow sense we must form the right opinion about: "The new Russia and... China, and drugs in the South Bronx, and racial strife in Los Angeles...the disgrace of the so-called educational system...ignorance, fanaticism...the clownish tactics of candidates for the presidency."  Bellow wrote that in 1992.  But it seems prescient now -- interested in 'liking' Hilary Clinton or Jeb Bush on Facebook; care to re-tweet a Foreign Affairs article written by a Putin apologist?


Bellow's point was that we can't do it anymore, we don't, after all, know how to judge all this moral flotsam.  In Bellow's view, shaped as it was by the social dissolutions of the second half of the 20th Century, the result of our inundation was a violent lashing out, drug use, crime, sexual profligacy, etc.

Leaving some of Bellow's legendary crankiness aside, and whether he was right or wrong about the causal relationship between demands on our evaluative faculties and the social upheavals of the post-war era -- and those upheavals themselves having become phenomena on which we're called to render judgement -- I wonder if we might not arrive at an understanding of our present age as what I've called it in the title of this post: The Age of Moral Exhaustion.

Using the Bellovian model where there was at least a correlation (causation?  Eh, maybe not...) between our heightened awareness of the universe of morally ambiguous facts, and the shattering instability of the 1960s and 70s, would we be entirely crazy to posit a current state of affairs in which Americans have simply given up moral parsing?  Is skyrocketing income inequality the result of surrender?  Do Arendt's and Chomsky's arguments against the moral relevance of something so messy and ineffable as intent represent a kind of desperation for starker, clearer means of determining moral responsibility?  Is America retreating into the tribal bitterness of partisan politics because it's just easier to pick a side than it is to evaluate every policy argument de novo?

Well, there's a lot of tangled (and perhaps some facile) thinking in the preceding paragraph, I admit.  But this is a blog post, not a dissertation or a legal brief.  Analysts could pick apart individual causal propositions, and they're welcome to do so.  What I'm aiming at, though (and maybe this is the only thing a blog post can do...if it can even do this) is not analytical accuracy, but an emotional insight, a definitive vision of who we are now.  I'm trying to name an epoch.  (Because, you know, why not?  What else have I got going on, right?)

The Age of Exhaustion.  Moral exhaustion.  Should we be arming the moderate Syrian opposition?  Can Iran ever be a partner in nuclear non-proliferation?  Is it wrong to buy vegetables that have to be shipped all the way from another hemisphere?  Shouldn't Europe be allocating more funds to assist in the rescue of refugees at peril in the Mediterranean? We used to know how to make exceedingly subtle judgements about people and their decisions.  And maybe we still do, somewhere in our beat-to-hell spirits.  But, Lord, we're tired now, civilizationally tired.  And we don't want to do it anymore.  Am I wrong?

Thursday, May 14, 2015

And, Just for the Hell of It, Part III of the Free Trade Trilogy

The textbook defense of free trade (and investment):

Making it cheaper and easier to sell more U.S. goods in another country, say, for example, Vietnam, means that more U.S. goods are likely to be sold there.  Leaving aside entirely the question of hiring more people to manufacture these increased numbers of goods, it's clear that if more U.S. goods are to be sold to Vietnam, U.S. companies will have to hire more salespeople to sell them, more accountants to keep track of the revenue, more lawyers to ensure regulatory compliance and settle disputes; they will have to buy more shipping and insurance services, which means that shipping and insurance businesses in the U.S. will have to hire more salespeople, accountants, lawyers, and so on, in the loveliest of virtuous circles.  And remember, this pattern holds, even if the increased sales to Vietnam result in zero U.S. manufacturing hires because the goods themselves are manufactured in China, or Indonesia, or Malaysia, or wherever.  Furthermore, even if the new goods are manufactured in China, that means that more Chinese firms and workers are making more money which they can spend on U.S. goods and services.  Apple sells more iPhones in China than in the U.S.  Which means Apple can hire more product designers and software engineers (and lawyers and accountants, etc.) at its  U.S. headquarters.  Chinese manufacturers are huge consumers of the accounting and consulting services of U.S. firms.   And so on.

Now, one place where this virtuous cycle breaks down is in the scale.  Even a significant uptick in sales in Vietnam (again, just an example) for any given company (or sector) resulting from a free trade agreement, might well result in the hiring of one extra lawyer here, or a couple more accountants there.  Efficiency and replicability mean that industries like insurance might absorb large increases in sales to existing clients with practically no new hires at all.  And if the new sales are taking place in Vietnam, then the new sales force may well be almost entirely Vietnamese, with only one or two new Americans to supervise and train.  Hence the trend that has so bedeviled the U.S. economy since the recession: increased profits accruing primarily to already wealthy shareholders, with no meaningful increase in wages or jobs.  And this after the scale of job loss over the previous decades due to overseas manufacturing was so vast.

For better or worse, though, the golden age of American manufacturing, during which factory wages were sufficient to sustain families in a comfortable and culturally/politically relevant middle class, is not coming back any time soon.  The problem of coming to understand new models of economic stability and social cohesion is one that we're going to have to solve without resort to the crutch of nostalgia.  We have to use the tools we've got, and whatever its imperfections or inadequacies, free trade and investment, on the model above, is one of those tools.

Yet finally, I feel compelled to end on a fatalistic note.  In all the hubbub, all the current sturm und drang over trade (and investment) policy, it should be recalled that commerce, a human institution, will find its way, will seek its own ends and move by its own logic, no matter what.  The U.S, after all, has no free trade or investment treaty with China.


Wednesday, May 13, 2015

More on Free Trade

Such a dense topic, the politics of international trade and investment -- I feel like I want to follow up on sixteen different things from yesterday's post.  But, other fora, including the Daily Beast, and the Washington think tank Third Way, are addressing this hot topic, and doing it well.  So forgive me if I indulge in my usual abstruse, airy ruminations.  Start with this, the human...imperative, let's say (as opposed to right, which is too concrete, and legal and implies enforceability) of free trade and investment:

While prudence and discretion dictate that I not discuss my circumstances extensively, I can say that I'm in a position to make certain demographic observations about cross-border trade and investment in one of the most robust international commercial relationships in the world.  And right away, let's note -- this is a decidedly demographic enterprise.  Yes, of course, goods cross borders, in massive, almost incomprehensible quantities.  That's a large part of what trade is (trade in services being the other part).  But in conjunction with and in addition to goods, people cross borders.  Many of them, true enough, work for large corporations, and are moving from one financial services office to another, without a critical quotient of risk, excitement, or personal meaning involved.  But many of them, so many, surprisingly many, are individuals, single men and women, brothers or sisters, families.  These are people who arrive with, if not quite a song in their hearts, at least a little start-up capital, and something like the conviction that their best selves will be expressed in (or at least enabled by) a restaurant in a warm climate, a factory where technical workers are well-trained, a sales office where markets for their product are expanding.  Etc.  Their vision and willingness to take risk, it's...it's...Vitality!  Dynamism!  The fullness of human intercourse! 

Biff!  Bang!  Pow!

Look, I'm not an idiot.  I know I'm pushing this conception to its limits, perhaps beyond.  Nor am I insensitive to the reality of crass exploitation in the world of international business.  Or to the seismic rearrangement of the U.S. economy over the past 40+ years of globalization.  After all, I spent years -- years -- after law school and a Fulbright fellowship, with no hope whatever of even the most paltry, entry-level professional job.  I understand better than I'd like to how devastating an experience it is not to be needed, to feel like a superfluous person.  And I understand as well how many people in the U.S. (to say nothing of Spain, or Greece, or, by the way, Africa) have gone through and are still going through that experience.  I get it.

But arguing that the solution to this difficulty is to abolish free international trade and investment is like arguing that we must address communicable diseases by legislating against physical contact.  While it may seem to offer immediate protections, it is both impossible, and ultimately undesirable.  We are humans, and we have to touch each other.  And commerce, international trade and investment, is how we touch each other now.

Maybe that's grandiose, but I'm convinced there's something to it.  Right now, there's a line around the block of men and women looking to cross a border to start or expand a hotel, a grocery store, a bio-tech firm.  And when they do, they'll bring with them not only their cash, but their skills, intuitions, memories, personalities, stories.  They've got to be as free to do so as we can possibly make them.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Senator Elizabeth Warren and the Values of Free Trade

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has been a leading voice on the left against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the president's signature trade initiative.

Senator Elizabeth Warren was interviewed today on NPR's Morning Edition.  Read and listen here.

It struck me that certain aspects of Senator Warren's argument against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a 12-nation trade and investment treaty, were, though hardly outrageous, at least worth looking at more closely.

1) Senator Warren states that 'corporations under this deal are going to get to sue countries for regulations they don't like and...the decisions are not going to be made by courts, they're going to be made by private lawyers.'  There are a couple issues here:

First, it needs to be pointed out that companies doing business in another country can always, trade deal or no, sue that country if the company believes it has been unfairly and/or illegally regulated.  The difference is that in the absence of a trade agreement they would have to do so in that host country's own courts.  This is not a particularly daunting prospect if you're an Asian company doing business in the U.S., where local courts are, by comparison, extremely fair, competent and efficient.  But U.S. companies doing business in, say, Vietnam, might not relish the prospect of trying to hold the government of Vietnam to fair regulatory practices in the courts of Vietnam.  Thus, the provision of the treaty which grants to companies doing business in a foreign country the right to bring a claim against that host country in arbitration, are in fact far more beneficial to U.S. interests than to the interests of any non-U.S. company doing business in the U.S.  Put simply, such arbitration provisions are not being pushed on us by devious foreign countries seeking to circumvent established standards of fair play; rather, we wrote these provisions, and we gain from them far more than we lose.

This brings up a second point.  Senator Warren repeatedly says that 'decisions' in any dispute are going to be made by 'private,' and/or 'corporate' lawyers.  She says this enough times to raise the suspicion that her staff must have stressed to her the need to evoke the vague dastardliness of 'corporations' and 'lawyers,' rather than referring to the process of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) as the more or less neutral and procedurally sound process that it is, namely, the process of arbitration.  While it's true that arbitrators are paid by the parties to the dispute, and thus in this sense 'private,' they are bound by the procedural rules of the arbitral venue under which they are operating.  The most common of these venues are the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce, the London Court of International Arbitration, and the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in Washington, D.C.  These are hardly the shadowy back rooms where Senator Warren seems to suggest that the protection of American interests will be dealt away for a few dollars by unscrupulous 'corporate lawyers.'  In fact, whatever the moral failings of American businesses in recent years, why is it assumed at all that attorneys who work for private businesses (again, those nefarious 'corporate lawyers') are unscrupulous?  To insinuate this is to edge up on the kind of inflammatory demonizing that so paralyzes and degrades our national dialogue, and it's surprising to see it come from a dedicated guardian of the public interest like Senator Warren.

2) Senator Warren expresses reservations about so-called fast track authority ('greasing the skids') for the executive branch to negotiate trade treaties which would then be subject only to approval or disapproval, and not to amendment, by Congress.  This reservation is not ideological, but more a part of the eternal American give-and-take between the branches of government.  The argument on that count does not begin, nor will it end with Senator Warren.  I bring it up here only to point out that especially in the case of trade and investment treaties, with their mind-boggling number of technical provisions relating to individual products, it is difficult to imagine how the USTR could conduct a viable negotiation with other nations if those nations knew that every agreement reached with the American negotiators could later be nitpicked to death and amended to the point of unrecognizability by a Congress with complex motives.  Such a state of affairs would undercut any credibility our negotiators would have in making promises, and the resulting unwillingness of our trading partners to negotiate with us would redound to the detriment of American credibility generally; it would be a (further) signal to the world that our house is not in order.

3) One suspects as well that an effort to conduct a reasonable, viable negotiation is behind the secrecy with which the TPP has been negotiated.  Irrespective of other considerations, it seems rather certain that should the negotiating parties' every proposition be shouted about on television in the apocalyptic tones that now characterize our political and cultural climate, basic trust between the parties would be sacrificed, quickly to be replaced by exasperation among our partners, and demoralization among our own negotiators.  One struggles to understand how this could be a sustainable, let alone a desirable, state of affairs.

4) Senator Warren points out that 85% of the 500 individuals comprising 28 working groups that have 'helped shape the trade deal' are 'either corporate executives — senior corporate executives — or lobbyists for the industries that are being affected.'  Senator Warren is unarguably right to be concerned that the full diversity of American constituencies be allowed to provide input into U.S. trade policy.  However, while I don't know the source of the Senator's statistics, nor how they were calculated, I would make two points.  First, the USTR, throughout the negotiating process has opened multiple public comment periods on multiple aspects of the TPP, and received testimony and written submissions from everyone from the United Steel Workers to the World Wildlife Federation to the University of Tokyo (see, e.g., here).  Second, though one may assume that industry experts will push for the most beneficial possible terms for their companies and industries, their very expertise is crucial to an understanding of what individual provisions actually mean and of what impact the agreement as a whole will have on various sectors of the U.S. economy.  It is difficult to imagine that USTR negotiators will be so in thrall to these experts that they (the negotiators) will be incapable of taking into account the experts' natural biases in favor of their own interests.  This is not to say that there are never damaging, improper relationships between government officials and industry insiders, or that undue influence is never brought to bear.  At the end of the day, however, government and the private sector have to rely on and complement each other, and the mere fact of private sector involvement in the formation of trade policy is not necessarily evidence of anything untoward or insidious.

It is true that my personal instinct is to favor free trade and investment.  In fact, I'm interested in a line of thinking that holds it as something of a human right -- the right to full expression of professional identity, we might say.  (Though there are clearly problems with such a formulation, perhaps chief among them the fact that very large businesses do not possess anything like the nearly sacred 'identity' that persons may be said to have.)  But to be generally in favor of international trade and investment that is as free as it can safely and reasonably be is not to be a blood ideological foe of environmental or labor protection.  Rather it is to begin from the premise that exchange, of nearly every kind, between the diverse peoples of the earth is good, and that instead of opposing it, those who have righteous concerns about its consequences should work to make it better, more fair, more just.

I'm reminded of a quote in the New Yorker from then-U.S.-Senate-candidate Obama, who opined that most people are ultimately in favor of free trade, whether they realize it or not, because (among other things) they like having affordable, high-quality consumer goods.  "They just don't want their communities destroyed" because of it, he said.  That is surely the balance we have to strive for.

There's likely no reason to doubt that Senator Warren's reservations are principled and heartfelt.  I write only to clarify some of her statements in my own mind, and to examine as fully as possible whether her outright objection to free trade and investment has merit or ultimately fails to persuade.  For the reasons above, I don't think the Senator's argument carries the day.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Power


U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, on Charlie Rose last week here.  A titanic interview.  One of the more rigorous examinations of world events I can remember anywhere in the popular media (if PBS counts as a popular medium).

Trying to work out, though, questions of why people like Power can't be, or for whatever reason aren't, political leaders (an Ambassador being, of course, an unelected official).  Is it because there's an appropriate distinction to be made between the overwhelming substantive and procedural facility that an Ambassador (or, say, a General) may possess, and the broader mandate for visionary leadership incumbent upon a President?  But what is incompatible between substantive mastery and visionary leadership?  Surely neither precludes the other.  Isn't it more likely that anyone with the kind of moral and intellectual force, purpose and clarity of a Samantha Power is unlikely to see the appalling demolition derby of American politics as a viable application of their ability? 

David Remnick wrote a piece in the New Yorker a while back asking why we're likely to be left, yet again, voting either for a Clinton or a Bush for president in 2016.  Obviously many of us share in that cri de coeur, and would, for example, find someone with gifts like Power's a thrilling figure on the world-historical stage.  But isn't the answer to the question quite simply that there's no new talent in American politics because real talent is running as fast and as far from politics as it can get?

Saturday, May 9, 2015

Birdman, or The Continuing Search for Moral Heroism


Watching the Oscar-winning film Birdman recently, I realized that I frequently have the experience of being unable or unwilling to go as far as the creators of a film (usually a film; often a book, sometimes an album, etc.) want to go.  I can be with them for the most part, I can be rapt, admiring, but in the end it seems they're always committed to something I instinctively resist.  And I think it's this: they insist upon the postmodern, existentialist premise that vice is inevitable and all-pervasive.

In this they may be right, it's possible that my quibble may only be a question of emphasis.  Indeed, the dynamism of narrative art since mid-century (mid-last-century), could be said to derive from our bifurcated consciousness: everything from I can't go on; I'll go on, to Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.  All that exquisite heartbreak, I admit, is only possible if a man (or woman, of course) has his own wretched concupiscence to battle, if he has to wrest his shards of hope from a comprehensive inner brokenness.

But isn't it possible as well that the establishment of this wretchedness has shaded over into a kind of vernacular orthodoxy, a shibboleth of cool?  Isn't it possible that the need to prove our grubby, nihilist bona fides has begun to imprison us within predictable tropes of profligacy, solipsism, and chaos?  Isn't it possible that we've become incapable of countenancing the prospect of epochal triumph?  That as artists and audiences both, we are absolutely terrified of virtue?

In other writings that nobody reads, and in conversations with no one but my dauntless wife, I've thought of our era as the Age of Moral Exhaustion.  And I've sought a tectonic break from that era, a definitional icon of Moral Heroism, a natural messiah who might, by embodying the heretofore unimaginable thrill and complexity of virtue, liberate us from our compulsion to wallow endlessly in the goo of our anti-heroes' bad decisions.  Thus far, though I like to think the effort itself has been interesting, I have sought in vain.


Which is why I have to point out here (as has an entire spectrum of observers before me), that Birdman is an excellent film.  It is not a criticism of a story to say that it does very, very well that which stories in our day tend to do: to limn the pathos of a confused and unhealthy civilization.

But it is not a film that breaks with our prevailing ethos.  It's resolution and final image is one not of salvation, but of escape.  In Birdman's world, we still can't do the right thing; we can only fly away from the wrong ones.

That's fine, even beautiful.  It just isn't a vision of moral heroism.  So I keep thinking and thinking.  Moral heroism.  What is that?  What could it possibly ever look like?

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Cancer Patients and the Cards We Give Them

An interesting piece here about the kinds of cards one former cancer patient would have liked to have received during her treatment. 


Most of the cards seem either funny, or heartfelt, or both, but don't they proceed from the same assumption as the more common--though presumably deficient--kinds of sympathy and get-well-soon cards?  Namely, the assumption that the kind of person who would give a card to a cancer patient can have (either through the card, or otherwise) a meaningful impact on the cancer patient's experience? 

I guess I'm falling back here on an experience of the disease and of treatment which not every patient has--that it reduces one's world to essentials.  During treatment, I needed my wife.  I needed the rest, the repose that could be had in the lee of her physical and psycho-emotional shelter.  And I needed the tether to normalcy that my parents and other family provided.  But beyond that, what could anybody really say or do?  It was my job to survive, just to keep breathing until it was all over and I could get on with trying to stand myself up straight again (still working on that, by the way).  And nobody else could do that for me; certainly no card could. Cards were more for those who gave them than for me. 

And--a crucial point--there's nothing wrong with that.  It's ok that nobody could really help me, or be a part of my experience.  And it's ok if someone wants to take action against their own fear or confusion or impotence by the affirmative act of sending a card.  I don't mind. 

Thing is, from the moment of diagnosis, a division arises between the patient and his or her healthy compatriots.  And it was nobody else's fault that they had no idea what was happening to me, or to me with respect to them, or to them with respect to me.  And so I never needed or expected any of them to come up with a card (or a letter, or text, or email, etc., for that matter) that said the right thing.  There was no right thing.  The magnitude of the facts overwhelmed the possibility of saying the right thing, or anything at all, really.  The brute experience was its own meaning, and it happened in silence, and you can't expect anybody who hasn't gone through that to understand it, with or without a well-considered and deeply sincere empathy card.

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Parenting, and Adjectives

Been thinking a lot about this topic recently, as some friends and readers know.  The topic of parenting, that is, not necessarily adjectives (though that subject is surely never far from a writer's mind either).  Interesting, then, that this article should turn up, reflecting many of my own instincts and preoccupations.  A crucial question might be: if at least part of what one resists about the idea of becoming a parent is the current culture of parenting, to what extent can one resist that culture in doing one's own parenting?  To the same, or a similar extent that one can resist other distasteful elements of prevailing culture?  Is over-parenting as easy and appropriate to reject as, you know, Facebook, hot yoga, beards?

I don't know.  I don't think the current culture of parenting is the only thing about the idea of becoming a parent that I resist, anyway.

But, at least the article's author, Joe Epstein, gets the award for greatest curmudgeonly adjective of all time: 'piss-elegant.'  Maybe I could stand to be a parent if I still got to use words like 'piss-elegant.'  I'll have to think about that...

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Wisdom for the Ages

From a review in the New Criterion of a book on the assassination of Julius Caesar:

"Revolutions, as Strauss mordantly observes, are hard on moderates."

Well, yes.  There is that.

Monday, May 4, 2015

An Open Letter to Henry Kissinger



Dear Dr. Kissinger,

I have recently been inspired by your descriptions, in your memoirs, of the men—Elsworth Bunker, George Shultz, Gerald Ford, David Bruce, yourself—who, whatever their weaknesses, attempted to live lives of service to the ideals of the United States.  Some might call these 'Enlightenment' ideals: intellectual honesty and openness, institutional fairness, personal humility, etc.  Ideals which my own generation of distracted millenials seems often to disdain as hopelessly outmoded and bourgeois.  Ideals which seem to have faded domestically as a kind of pre-Enlightenment tribalism takes hold of the national mood.  Ideals which are unsustainable when intellectual authority in our national discussion issues more from sectarian status than from quality of evidence or argument.

Thus, it occurs to me to ask you in particular a question: if today one wished to live a life of service to the Enlightenment ideals for which the United States has at times been the standard-bearer in the world, how and where and with whom might one do so?  

I want to thank you as well, if I may, for the quality and indeed the beauty of the writings you've left to posterity.  I was born years after you left office, and thus have a limited understanding of the visceral passions inspired by the policies and personalities of your era.  I barely remember the Reagan administration.  But you evoke in your memoirs, and elsewhere, a world that feels richer than the merely technocratic one in which my generation seems caught.  You evoke a world underpinned by values thrilling enough to be worth serving; I only wonder if there are institutions in the world that continue to serve them, and if so, how an intelligent, sincere young person might come to work on behalf of those institutions.

Sincerely,

Sean Murray