BroadSnark

I came across a study this week that reminded me why I focused on history and not economics.

Carl-Johan Daigaard and Ola Olsson, economists at the University of Copenhagen, published results of a study called Why are Rich Countries More Politically Cohesive?.  They conclude that there is a correlation between market integration, wealth, and politically cohesiveness.

Basically, as people specialize and trade with each other they become interdependent.  That interdependence brings on a meeting of the minds.  This turns into an upward spiral of wealth and political cohesiveness.  That’s the theory.

In order to test their theory, they needed to compare political cohesion.  They use the World Value Survey.  On the survey, respondents rate themselves from one to ten on a left to right political scale.  Daigaard and Olsson looked at the number of respondents who rated themselves at the extreme ends of the scale.  They argue that countries with fewer people self identifying at the extremes have higher degrees of political cohesion.

They admit that this is only a proxy for political cohesion and that people in different countries hold different ideas about what is extreme left or extreme right.  But they claim “it is clear that individuals who answer ‘one’ or ‘ten’ are deliberately signaling extreme political views in the context of their political landscape.

Off the top of my head I see two major problems with this measure.  First, they are assuming that all people are equally comfortable claiming their political views.  That is a big assumption.  Let’s take Guatemala for example.  In the handy chart below, you will see that Guatemala scores about the same as France on political cohesion.

Chart showing degree of political cohesion

I’m not an expert on France, but I have spent considerable time in Guatemala and studying Guatemala.  I can’t think of a person I encountered who would have admitted to extreme left or extreme right views (although I would bet that some people had them).

This is not because of political cohesiveness.  It is because of a 36 year civil war, during which hundreds of supposedly leftest villages were burned to the ground and an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared.  And while the Guatemalan far right still enjoys prestige and power, their traditional political impunity may be beginning to erode.  All of which is to say that the accuracy of any self-identification is problematic at best.

And then there is the issue of trying to compare one country to another.  Is it really surprising to find that countries scoring low on the political cohesiveness scale are also countries who had their national borders imposed on them by colonialist powers?  It isn’t exactly shocking that Vietnam and India would fall at the bottom of the scale, given their colonial histories.  Or, to put it another way, if national borders weren’t so nonsensical, political cohesiveness proxies would look much different.  (ie. Imagine looking at just Iraqi Kurdistan and not Iraq as a whole.)

Then there is the measure of wealth that they used, GDP per capita.  Gross Domestic Product per capita doesn’t measure actual wealth distribution.  Wouldn’t it make sense that wealth distribution would have an effect on stability and political cohesion?  Let’s go back to our example of Guatemala and France.  According to the UN, France has a per capita GDP of $40,090.  Guatemala has a GDP per capita of $2,504.  Why?

By their theory, it would have something to do with trade interdependence within their national boundaries.  By their theory, it might be the relative self-sufficiency of the Guatemalan highland indigenous that correlates to any lack of political cohesion.  This ignores Guatemala’s colonial history and imposed borders.  It also ignores the very different results of their two revolutions.

France’s revolution successfully overthrew the ruling classes and brought about lasting land reform.  Guatemala’s attempts at land reform, on the other hand, were violently prevented.  Seventy percent of the land in Guatemala is possessed by 0.2% of the producers.  Is any lack of political cohesiveness due to lack of interdependence or to land scarcity (a topic not discussed in their paper)?

They aren’t the first people to suggest that trade brings about interdependence and cohesion.  As they mention, there is a whole sect of political science devoted to ideas of “the liberal peace” that arises when nations trade with each other.  What Daigaard and Olsson don’t mention is that the results of studies on the subject are ambiguous.  In fact, some types of trade (oil, for instance) are correlated with increased conflict.

There are other issues with their theory, some peripherally addressed (power imbalances, ethnic tensions, greed) and some not (risks of specialization, colonialism, and dependency).  And they base everything on the underlying principal that “without market exchange, the welfare of inherently selfish individuals will be mutually independent (and)…political negotiations..dog-eat-dog in nature.”  That is also debatable.

There’s more, but this post is too long already, so let me go back to where I started.  The problem with economics is that, all too often, economists try to simplify human actions to such a degree that it renders their conclusions virtually meaningless.  They make a pretty equation and then try to fit people into it.  Which brings me to my personal favorite assumption:

As usual, we assume rational and forward-looking individuals who can perfectly assess the effects of choices in each stage.

Good luck with that.

The Heritage Foundation put out a morning bell yesterday.  The gist of the message is that Obama slighted Reagan by not showing up for the Berlin wall ceremonies and for not mentioning Reagan in his speech.  Reagan is, of course, the savior who freed the world from the communists.

My personal favorite bit is the quote from Nile Gardiner:

Barack Obama simply does not view the world as Reagan did, in terms of good versus evil, as a world divided between the forces of freedom on one side and totalitarianism on the other. For the Obama administration the advancement of human rights and individual liberty on the world stage is a distinctly low priority, as we have seen with its engagement strategy towards the likes of Iran, Burma, Sudan, Venezuela and Russia.

Oh the irony of inferring that Ronald Reagan was a great defender of human rights.  The Reagan administration supported the most oppressive Central American governments in El Salvador and Guatemala.  They illegally sold arms to Iran to raise money for brutal counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua.  They closed their eyes to the massive illegal drug operations of their Contra buddies while incarcerating obscene numbers of American citizens for using the drugs.  And they invaded the tiny island nation of Grenada in flagrant violation of international law.

But I’m not writing this to rag on Reagan.  Too easy.  I want to write about the first part of the quote, the part about Barack Obama not seeing the world in terms of good vs. evil.  I want to write about the damage done by people who insist on dividing the world up like that.

What happens when you try to divide the world into good and evil is that the “good” people can do no wrong and the “bad” people can do no right.  How convenient to be on the hero’s side and never have to face an ethical dilemma.  The hero is good, therefore everything they do is good.  If they lie, cheat, murder, or torture it doesn’t matter.  They are the good guy, so their actions must be good.

And that victim of the lying, cheating, murdering, and torturing?  Well they are the villain.  Everything they do is bad.  If the villain saves a baby from a burning building, that inconvenient information is left out of the narrative or explained away as part of a sinister plot.  And how easy it is to dehumanize the bad guy.  Their guilt is pre-determined.  When someone from a vilified group acts in the way we expect, it confirms all our suspicions.  How easy it is to just throw them away, even a child.

Life is not a cowboy film or a fairy tale.  And we can’t afford to listen to people who have the worldview of a toddler.  Time to grow up.

I’ve been thinking a lot about justice lately. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how often people try to convince those seeking justice to set aside that desire. I’ve been thinking about how often we are told that holding people responsible for their actions would cause more suffering.

The economic disaster is a perfect example. Billions of dollars are being lost into the ether as we bail out the scoundrels who got us into this mess. We are told the vacuuming up of our present and future resources is necessary in order to mitigate short-term suffering and instability.

People are less and less inclined to believe bailout justifications, in large part because we see that those responsible are not suffering any consequences for their actions. After reading Matt Taibbi’s recent article, it’s hard not to believe that the bailout is just a scam to transfer our resources into the grubby hands of Goldman Sachs and friends. So long as our government shows no signs of bringing the people who caused this mess to justice, our distrust will grow.

Let’s take this out of a financial context for a minute. This past weekend I watched The Reckoning. The film is about efforts to get the International Criminal Court (ICC) up and running. The film highlighted the situations in Uganda and Sudan, but it could easily apply to hundreds of other situations in the world. Whenever the leaders responsible for genocide, rape, and crimes against humanity faced prosecution; they used the threat of more suffering to defend themselves.

In Uganda, the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) went on a campaign to convince Ugandans that the ICC warrants for LRA leaders’ arrests were an obstacle to the peace process. (Never mind that there was no peace process before the warrants.) The LRA presented the people a choice between peace and justice. When a warrant was issued for the president of Sudan for human rights violations, he retaliated by kicking out humanitarian organizations and putting millions of Sudanese without the assistance they desperately need.

The case of Sudan is clear. There are people who will suffer in the short term because of the warrant issued. It’s possible that the other cases, including our financial disaster, also present a choice between mitigating short term suffering and pursuing justice. But if we keep sacrificing justice for short term needs, won’t we just ensure that we will keep dealing with the same problems over and over? If people without morals see that they can get away with abusing their power, why would they ever stop?

One final observation. When I was in Guatemala I was struck by how defeated the people seemed. Nobody believed in the system. Time and again powerful people got away with outrageous crimes. Military leaders responsible for mass atrocities don’t just walk free, but run for president. Former presidents who absconded with the people’s money live like royalty in other countries. The more people see impunity, the more hopeless the situation seems. The more hopeless the situation seems, the less agency they feel. The less they participate in political life, the more power the abusers have. It is a downward spiral and we can’t afford to allow that to happen to us.

Justice is not an obstacle to stability and peace, it is a prerequisite. People who don’t want to face justice are using our fear – fear of violence, fear of starvation, fear of financial collapse – but it is by caving in that we assure all of those things will go on forever.