Solving Dani Rodrik's Trilemma

Huh? Rodrik's Trilemma? What's that all about?

Sorry to be so abrupt, but I only read about it last night in this article about the Euro crisis. The idea is that you can't have democracy, national sovereignty, and global free trade all at once. Let's let Turkish-born Dani Rodrik tell the story from his own blog.

I have an "impossibility theorem" for the global economy... It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.

But then, why would we want to? Of course, on his blog, Dani thinks in terms of bureaucratic arrangements overseen by policy experts. But we are better than that.

So let's recast the problem. Let's call democracy the conflict of the factions. In a pure case, the current civil war in Thailand, you have two political factions, "competing patronage networks, bound together primarily by personal loyalties and emotional attachments," each with about 40 percent of the vote duking it out on the streets.

Let's call national sovereignty the conflict of the nations. In a pure case it is Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia fighting the war of the worlds--for what? Hitler wanted access to Russia's resources.

Let's call global economic integration the conflict of the corporations. In the pure case it is auto or cellphone companies competing for the custom of the global consumers.

Notice what is missing in this? Exactly. We have the political sector, the economic sector, but somehow the moral/cultural sector went missing.

And, of course, the moral/cultural sector has the answer to the problem.

The answer to the trilemma is Don't.

In democracy, don't try to establish a vast tribal patronage faction that imagines that it obtains economic security with a culture of compulsion featuring tax and spend and crony capitalism.

In national sovereignty, don't think like Hitler that you have to have military control of resources to be safe. In the modern world all resources are available on the global market. And the real resource that matters is not under the ground but between the ears.

In global economic integration, don't try to run your corporation on the assumption that it has to take over the world in order to be safe. Hey, corporations come and go. People move on. Life goes on.

Of course, the injunction "Don't" is the injunction of all the great Axial Age religions. They all recommend dialing back the conflict and surrendering to the fact that you can't force the world to guarantee your security and your safety.

"In service is perfect freedom:" that's the injunction from Christianity. Don't try to dominate the world. Try to serve the world.

Do that and you won't have a trilemma.

Young Turk Doesn't Get It

Liberal commentator Cenk Uygur doesn't want to hear messenger Lee Harris. He'd rather stick with his liberal faith system. That's my take from Cenk's interview with Harris on The Young Turks. (Cenk is a Turkish American. Get it?)

In his new book The Next Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite, Lee Harris fleshes out the commonplace conservative meme that the tea party movement "is only the latest installment of an ongoing cultural war that began long before the current economic crisis. It is a rebellion against a self-appointed intellectual elite" that knows what is best for everyone.

Liberal Cenk wants none of it. But his arguments against Harris are instructive.

First of all, he argues that, while he accepts the Tea Party disillusionment with the bailouts, he also believes that Tea Partiers, while not actually racists, are still protesting the passing of their power. They can no longer pass the same job down to their sons, because there is a pesky Hispanic or black competing for that job.

And the Tea Party rage is misdirected. It's not the liberal elite that's the problem, it's the "establishment" in Wall Street and Washington, insurance companies that want to cut you off for a pre-existing condition, eevil corporations, etc.

Now this, to me, shows a very interesting blindness. It is addressed this very day by Victor Davis Hanson in "The Technocrats' New Clothes." Climategate, the Icelandic volcano, and the Greek meltdown tell us that the all-knowing technocratic elite don't know so much after all, writes Hanson.

So let's go back to Cenk's two arguments. First of all, the only reason that a father could pass a job down to his son was that the liberal elite insisted we had to give monopoly powers to labor unions, and institute "prevailing wage" laws that discriminated in the 1930s against unorganized Negro workers. Anyway, since labor unions in the private sector are almost defunct, except in government protected sectors like autos and government construction, what's the problem, except where powerful liberals get to put their kids into elite universities.

If there is a passing of power, it is that the once-favorite clients of the liberal elite, the white working class, are no longer favorite clients. But the white working class never had much power. The political power then and now resided with the liberal political, educational, and cultural elite.

Secondly, the power of the Wall Street and Washington "establishments" issue directly from the power and size of government. If government weren't so big and powerful, then the Washington establishment wouldn't be so powerful. And if government weren't sluicing so many bonds through Wall Street then the Wall Street establishment wouldn't be so powerful.

Why is government so big and powerful? Because liberals, through their dominance of the day-to-day public square, particularly through news media, through education, and through the TV and movies, want government to be involved in everything from health care to the environment.

When you decide that you want most things decided in the political sector then you create a huge political establishment trying to influence the way that the trillions of dollars are spent. But that establishment is an establishment that the liberal elite wished into being with their big-government political philosophy.

There have been some comments in recent days about the decline of the old WASP establishment. The elevation of Elena Kagan, Jewish American, to the Supreme Court would mean that there are almost no Protestants left on the court, according to Robert Frank. The Protestant establishment has slowly declined away from its once all-powerful domination of politics and culture.

Well yes. But the point is that the WASPs have gracefully allowed new competitors to displace them. They have not used the power of the state to keep the newcomers down. They played by the rules, and the rules moved them out of power.

But what about the liberal elite? First of all, liberals like Cenk Uygur deny that they even constitute an elite. Why would they want to do that? Secondly, when challenged, they fight dirty. You can start with the vilification of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork, George W. Bush, Miguel Estrada, and Sarah Palin. You could continue with the bare-knuckle governing methods that rammed the unpopular health bill through Congress.

The great question facing the United States is not that there are populists that have less than pure motives for their populist rage, or that the populist activists are likely to be misled by special interests. Hey, what else is new?

The great question is whether the liberals will go quietly when they are shown the door.

Crime and Society

One thing leads to another. I was reading an article about something or other and saw the name Leon Festinger. He's the chap that developed cognitive dissonance theory.

Cognitive dissonance theory observes that people adjust their beliefs to rationalize their behavior rather than the other way around. But enough of that.

Here's what struck me. Festinger did work on social networks. Quoting Wikipedia:

Festinger explored the various forms that social groups can take and showed, together with Schachter and Back, "how norms are clearer, more firmly held and easier to enforce the more dense a social network is."

Oh really. So that would explain the explosion in crime during the 20th century. The looser that social networks are, and the more people live in the city with few social ties, the less they are likely to conform to social norms.

This is telling us, in case you wondered, that the way to break up society is to make the natural social networks less strong. Then, of course, you have to compensate by increasing the size of government and multiplying the number of laws, and increasing the span of "zero tolerance" and general frightfulness.

And you sit around and decide that, despite your immense education and compassion, there is nothing you can do about crime and social breakdown.

The whole thrust of conservatism, ever since Edmund Burke, is that the key to social tranquility is the "little platoons." People owe their greatest loyalty to the little platoons, and will contribute most to them. Little people, on the other hand, get lost in big organizations. That's why big organizations need to have bureaucracies and rules and enforcement mechanisms.

The trick, of course, in this modern, global age, is to balance the loyalty to the small and the particular with tolerance for and trust in the universal. We want people to be able to learn to trust foreigners and people of different religions and different culture.

Conservatives believe that this is best achieved in a society where government, the agency of force and division, is as small as possible and voluntary association is as large as possible. Conservatives want people to be richly connected in a dense network of social organizations from the family to the church, to the fraternal association and to their place of work.

Liberals, on the other hand, want to free themselves from the local--the family and the church. They want to live like Romantics, creating original works of art in yeasty and exciting urban bohemia. But of course, when you burst out of local community you have to replace it with something, because we all need the support of social institutions. That's why liberals support the welfare state.

And that's why the US is divided into two political camps: the married with children, religious, working population orbiting around the Republican Party and the single, childless, secular and non-working folks gravitating towards the Democratic Party.

The agenda for conservatives is clear: work on encouraging and fertilizing the non-governmental associations. That's a society that needs fewer laws, less compulsion, less conflict. No doubt it will also be less violent, more sociable, and happier.

And that's why women are the future of conservatism. Because women are best at the local and the intimate, relationship and face to face.

How Do We Get Out of This?

How much money should the government spend, asks columnist Robert Samuelson? That is the question raised by the huge Obama deficits and the sovereign debt crisis in Europe.

It's also the question raised in Britain by Janet Daley when she writes: "Labour Must Admit It -- Big Government is Dead."

Unfortunately the problem is bigger than than just arguing about how big the government should be. The problem starts with the whole question of what government is for.

Michael Barone raises the question rather neatly in an article dissecting Attorney General Eric Holder's reluctance to admit that radical Islamism is a problem. It's the belief that ordinary Americans are a Howling Mob.

The reason that President Bush rushed out on 9/11 and urged Americans to be nice to their Muslim neighbors issues from the same source as Holder's reluctance to name. Both of them fear the Howling Mob. They fear that Americans are just one knee-jerk away from descending on their Muslim neighbors and killing them--or their African American neighbors, or their gay/lesbian neighbors.

It's that patronizing elitism that drives the whole notion of big government. Ordinary people can't be trusted to be civilized; government must instruct them. Ordinary people can't be trusted to educate their children; government must teach them. Ordinary people can't be trusted to get health insurance; government must mandate it.

The attitude becomes self-validating, for when people don't have to suck it in and run their lives responsibly, many don't. If many people act irresponsibly, then elites assume that ordinary people are irresponsible. And why not? The bigger the government the more power to the governing elite.

The proper answer to the question about the size of government is this: Government should not be a jot bigger than it has to be to keep the peace and run the legal system. That's because anything is better than teenagers and twenty-somethings running around in the street with guns.

As for everything else, Americans would be a lot better off, materially and morally, if they did for themselves rather than paying big government to do it badly. They would be more involved in their children's education, more involved in granny's health care, and more involved in pitching in to contribute to civic improvements.

But what about the poor? Well, with all the money not going into taxes, then Americans would have a lot of money, and a lot of moral inducement to get out there and help. They could start by helping out a neighbor, and quietly help a parent with school fees, and go on from there.

With government a lot smaller, it would be able to expand rapidly in time of war or emergency and help get the nation out of a jam. Without breaking the bank.

As for the Howling Mob, here's a little known fact. Ordinary people very seldom turn into a mob. It usually takes a charismatic leader--i.e., a politician--to arouse their rage and get them to surrender their individuality and their timidity to the madness of a crowd.

Gender Imbalance in Education

There is a shocking gender imbalance in the nation's higher education system, raising huge questions of equity and discrimination.

Yes, you are right. Women are enrolling and graduating at rates totally in excess of their share of the population. They are outrageously and inequitably overrepresented in college enrollments and graduations.

Dr. Mark J. Perry of the University of Michigan is the guy keeping track of these numbers. Here is how the imbalance is expected to work out in the Class of 2010, showing the number of women graduating per 100 men. (Perry's numbers from here).

Degree	Men	Women
Associate	100	166
Bachelors	100	135
Graduate	100	152
Professional	100	98
Doctorate	100	107

You can see what is going on. Women are outgraduating men in all areas that don't lead directly to a job.

But, of course, all the programs to encourage women and discourage men are still in place. It just shows the utter incompetence of the poltical system to do anything except hit people over the head. Back in 1970 the men/women university graduation rate of all degrees was 60/40. By 2017 it will be 40/60.

OK let's take another look at the numbers. This time it is enrollment in graduate school by gender (numbers from here).

Discipline	Men	Women
Business	100	84
Education	100	303
Engineering	100	28
Health Science	100	398
Physical Science	100	49
Public Admin.	100	292

You can see the comical nature of the current push to advance women in engineering and science, the so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) effort that hit the radar during the defenestration of Harvard President Larry Summers. I guess the sisters won't be happy until women are outgraduating men in all disciplines!

But the numbers speak for themselves. Women predominate in the areas that are stereotypically interesting to women: teaching children, caring for peoples' health, organizing people. They are underrepresented in areas that are not so interesting to women: areas dealing with things rather than people.

You really wonder about the sanity (let alone the wisdom) of pushing so hard against nature.

Government Legislating Morality

We all know that conservatives are all eager to act as moral policemen, eager to spy on liberals in the bedroom. And we all utterly deprecate it.

But what about liberals?

Moral Police Inspector Michelle Obama wants to tell us what to eat. Armed with a task force report she and her food police sergeants are eager to implement 70 recommendations to improve child nutrition.

Then there's Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn whose "Walk Bike Ride" initiative aims to change the transportation system in Seattle to encourage walking, biking and transit and discourage automobile transportation.

At a loftier level there's Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, and his new book The Politics of Happiness. Bok has looked at other countries whose governments now are working on Gross National Happiness instead of Gross National Product. He has a stack of government policy recommendations for the US so that it can increase happiness.

Nobody doubts that it is a good thing for children to eat healthy and for people to walk and for people to be happy. The question is: should the government get involved, given that government is force?

Liberals get annoyed with me when I point out that all this government action that puts a moral spin on things, or puts government in charge of happiness, is a violation of the First Amendment, or at least Thomas Jefferson's take on it. In the US we have a separation between Church and State. That is, beyond actually banning an establishment of religion, we feel that the moral and the political should be kept apart.

Liberals get annoyed because they don't think that their political agenda should be considered a religion. But if you are secular and don't belong to a church, then your only way of establishing moral order is through government directly, or indirectly through government schools and government colleges.

Just as we all agree that the Spanish Inquisition was a bad thing, enforcing the moral rules of the Catholic Church with a moral police force and the death penalty, so the same should apply to all governmental efforts to sneak out of the bread and butter of government, the providing of basic public services, into the more exhilarating world of moral militancy.

It's comical, really, that our liberal friends have smuggled the idea of a national church in the back door, but they do that with everything. It will end, of course, in tears. The idea of separating the moral and the legal is a highly sophisticated idea that allows a gray area of behavior that may be morally condemned but not legally sanctioned. That gray area we call freedom. But liberals seem to end up implementing everything on their moral agenda with a law. And that means enforcement by the cops or, as we now say, "enforcement officers," and it reduces the area of freedom, the right to make mistakes.

The problem posed by the the secularization of society erupted immediately upon the birth of the secular society with the French Revolution in 1789. Politicians like Robespierre found themselves enmeshed in the moral, and enforcing the moral code with the guillotine. We have created a word to describe the government that combines secular lawgiving with secular religion: Totalitarian. And the French revolutionaries spawned the bloodier secular religio-political regimes we know as communism and fascism.

I'd just say to Michelle Obama, to Mayor McGinn, to Derek Bok, and to all my liberal friends: be true to your ideals. Believe in the separation of church and state and apply it to your own moral agenda. If you don't you'll be sorry.

Dear Sen. Patty Murray

Yesterday, Senator, you voted against reform. You voted against cleaning up our financial mess. You voted for crony capitalism.

Yet The Wall Street Journal reports that no Democratic senators were to be seen as Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) led the debate against Sen. John McCain's amendment to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bankrupt government mortgage twins. And only two Democratic senators, Feingold and Bayh, voted for reform.

And yet you are running for reelection to the US Senate this fall? Are you serious?

Maybe your staff hasn't quite brought you up to speed on this. The primary cause of the financial meltdown in Fall 2008 was the flood of mortgage debt--about $5.5 trillion in all--sluiced into the credit markets by the the two Government Sponsored Enterprises. All the CDOs and CDSs and other Wall Street shenanigans that you tribunes of the people railed against were merely dodges to hide the government-created mess of liar loans and dress them up for fixed-income pension funds.

If there is one thing the nation needs to do, before health care, before stimulus, before green energy, before fixing education, it is to put the Fannie Freddie era behind us and bring sanity back to the nation's mortgage finance.

On Tuesday you refused to do that, voting to kick the can down the road.

And that tells the voters of Washington State all they need to know about your fitness to serve another six years in the United States Senate.