If there is one word that captures many Europeans’ response to the continent’s financial crisis, it is denial. Witness the description by the editors of France’s newspaper-of-record, Le Monde , of France’s S&P credit-downgrade on January 13 as ” un non-événement financier .” The fact that this “non-event” will increase France’s borrowing-costs (not to mention those of the EU’s own bailout fund) at a time when France’s government is already struggling to contain spending apparently escaped Le Monde’ s attention. This habit of ignoring reality, however, goes beyond blinkered reactions to one-off occurrences. It’s also reflected in many Europeans’ perceptible inability to acknowledge some of the deeper dynamics driving the crisis. Here most of us think of unaffordable welfare states and other sinking ships to which many Europeans cling like limpets. But there is one element at work in Europe’s crisis that even fewer Europeans will openly acknowledge: the economic forces set in motion by Europe’s slow-motion population implosion. The demographic facts concerning European population-trends are clear. The replacement level for a population (what keeps it stable) is a fertility-rate of 2.1 children per woman. According to the UN, the average fertility-rate of European women was 1.53 between 2005 and 2010. The figures for Greece (1.46), Spain (1.41), Portugal (1.36), Italy (1.38), and Germany (1.36) were especially depressing. France (1.97), Britain (1.83), and Sweden (1.9) did marginally better. Ireland alone managed to attain the 2.1 threshold. All these figures represented decline from 1955-1960 rates : Greece (2.27), Spain (2.7), Portugal (3.29), Italy (2.29), Germany (2.3), France (2.7), Britain (2.49), Sweden (2.23), and Ireland (3.58). These developments translate into more old people, fewer young people, and, eventually, shrinking populations. But it also shifts what’s called “the dependency ratio”: the ratio of retirees per member of the labor force. On some estimates , Italy, Spain and Germany will have very high dependency ratios by 2050: every two workers will be supporting one retiree. Those working will also have to pay either greater contributions or higher taxes to fund existing pension systems. The present situation is further worsened by another ominous trend: the growing exodus of tens of thousands of young EU citizens searching for work to Latin America, North America, and Asia. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of young immigrants to the EU from developing nations are heading home. The odds that many will return to Europe in the near-future are dim. These facts have made some Europeans willing to ponder the necessity of labor-market and welfare reform, not least because those countries that have weathered the crisis better than others (e.g., Germany and Sweden) actually implemented such changes in the 2000s. Getting Europeans to talk publicly about the continent’s population-trends and their economic consequences, however, is a different matter. Why? One reason is that many Europeans have long been in thrall to the over-population gospel. Long before Paul Erhlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) — whose doomsday future-scenarios of a world devastated by famines, mass disease, and social unrest unleashed by overpopulation never materialized — numerous European economists had bought into this thesis. In 1798, the Anglican vicar and one of the first modern economists, Thomas Malthus, published his Essay on the Principle of Population . This argued that growing populations would produce an increasing labor-supply. The result, Malthus insisted, would be lower wages and therefore mass poverty. “The power of population,” he claimed, “is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.” Another English philosopher-economist, John Stuart Mill, was so convinced by Malthusian arguments that he actually spent time in London parks distributing birth-control pamphlets to bemused onlookers. By the 20th century, plenty of other prominent European economists were getting into the act. Knut Wicksell, a Swede whose thought was immensely influential upon often otherwise-opposed economic schools of thought, loudly proclaimed depopulation’s economic benefits. Likewise the German economist Wilhelm Röpke conjured up visions of a world overrun by teeming masses unless birth rates radically declined. (Oddly enough, John Maynard Keynes was one of the few economists to abandon his earlier Malthusian views and argue — to the British Eugenics Society no less! — that population-growth helped create demand and thereby fuel prosperity.) But it’s not just economists who have propagated anti-natalist positions. For decades, European governments have been pushing population-control programs upon developing nations (including trying to force them to legalize abortion) by making foreign-aid dependent upon adopting such policies. The phrase “neo-colonialism” comes to mind. Then there’s the Swiss theologian Hans Küng who — as if locked in a 1970s time warp — avowed in 2010 that the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception was facilitating “overpopulation.” And, as always, we have environmentalists adamantly maintaining that population growth is putting the planet’s future at risk. The existential scale of Europe’s present economic crisis may, however, at last be providing space for those Europeans unconvinced by neo-Malthusian orthodoxies to crack the consensus on these matters. One such figure is Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, the Italian economist who heads the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (otherwise known as “the Vatican Bank”). In article after article, Tedeschi has observed that graying and dwindling European populations imply not only reduced demand but also higher tax burdens on those who are young and working. The resulting shrinkage of disposable income discourages those of child-bearing years from having more children. This in turn gradually narrows the dependency ratio, thereby creating even greater strains on Europe’s already-tottering welfare states and over-loaded tax base. So while deficit-reduction and welfare reform matters, perhaps the biggest long-term test for Europe is to break the vicious cycle fueled by population aging and decline that could worsen the already-bleak fiscal future for young Europeans. But this will require many Europeans to do something they find even more difficult than scaling back welfare programs. And that is to break through the politically correct taboos that presently strangle objective discussion of Europe’s population challenges, and concede their miscalculation of the economics of population. I’m not holding my breath.
Originally posted here:
Europe in Demographic Denial
For all those who think I intended to compare, in the sense of come anywhere close to equating , Newt Gingrich with David Duke, I hereby insist that such was neither the intent nor in any sense a fair reading of the carefully constructed argument I made. But for those who read between the lines to see something not intended, I apologize, because the impression is a noxious one. But think about how arguments often are constructed: One pulls something that is both near to one’s own experience and also known to the public — and one chooses the most stark example to make one’s point. The VOTER response to Duke was such an interesting phenomenon, and such a stark example of the voter equivalent of “jury nullification,” that I thought it made THAT point (about voters focusing on what they see personally above all other info) better than anything else I could come up with — ESPECIALLY because it was an example I was so personally familiar with, having spent so much time fighting against Duke and dealing with just that phenomenon. Frequent readers of this site will have noticed that I have on a number of occasions used examples from the Duke experience in the course of making other, broader points. To use a favorite Gingrich word, I frankly thought I had made a more than ample effort (two long paragraphs on what I was describing with Duke, plus another of the exact sorts of things — none of them racial — I said voters are discounting about Gingrich) to explain quite precisely what I meant. On a purely logical level, I still think I constructed a solid explanation of what I meant. On the other hand, there was another time here that I did almost the exact same thing, but with Mussolini rather than Duke serving as an example, in terms of the economics pushed by Barack Obama. My explanation there was exhaustive, even quoting extensively from Wikipedia to show the generic nature of my point. In that case, Chris Matthews went ape on me, as did other lefties — and most readers of this site rushed to my defense , recognizing exactly that I had not tried to portray Obama personally as a murderous thug, etcetera, but that I had made a very careful point that by logic was entirely valid. What I guess this shows is that how one reads something depends on where one’s sensitivities lie: If one is feels inclined to defend the subject being criticized, one sees more evil intent in every part of the criticism itself. It is a normal and decent human reaction, and one I ought to have considered before making the situational analogy. If there was a misreading originally, it was a misreading I left myself open to, and, again, I apologize. On the other hand, for those who read my earlier explanations and still insisted that I had INTENDED to do what I said I did not intend — including fellow bloggers — that is an entirely unmerited insult not just to my intentions but to my integrity. It is not acceptable.
See the original post here:
Clarification: No, Newt is no Duke
The brilliant Chavistas at the Center for American Progress have revealed the reelection strategy for President Jimmy Carter II. This time they are going to get the 1980 election right. Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin enlighten us with their publication, ” The Path to 270 : Demographics versus Economics in the 2012 Presidential Election.” The authors recognize the grave political difficulties created by “the perceived inability of the Obama Administration’s policies to spark real recovery,” creating “serious doubts about Democratic stewardship of the economy.” But the authors think the Democrat party under the Saul Alinsky revolutionary Barack Obama can reinvent itself to a new majority composed of government dependents, government workers, African Americans, Hispanics, and credulous,
Joe Schoffstall went to New York’s Zuccotti Park last week and found a man holding aloft a hand-lettered sign with the slogan, “Arrest the Bankers.” Schoffstall, a young reporter for Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, asked the man a simple question: “What are your thoughts on Israel?” The protester’s response, captured by the MRC’s video camera , was memorable: “Israel is white Europe — eastern Europeans — who has [ sic ] usurped and occupied Arab land, and they have displaced the indigenous Arab Palestinian people at gunpoint. When Israel was founded in 1948… in 1949, Israel secretly began working on a nuclear… atomic nuclear program to wipe out her neighbors. So the hatred of the Arabs for Israel is understandable.… And I’ll say that the Jews control Wall Street. Google ‘Jewish billionaires.’ Google ‘Jews and the Federal Reserve bank.’ Google ‘Jews and Wall Street.’ America’s finances is [ sic ] controlled by the Jews. Wall Street, the media, the legal profession — Jewish money is the engine in politics.… The Jews commit more white-collar crime than any other ethnic group on the earth and they go unprosecuted because they can buy their way out of it.” It would be unfair to conclude from this one demented example that the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is significantly motivated by, or deliberately tolerant of, paranoid anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. But the rant recorded by Schoffstall’s camera crew was not the only example of such kook-fringe beliefs among the mobs that have descended on lower Manhattan and other urban spaces across America in the weeks since these anti-capitalism protests began. Documented examples of anti-Semitism among the “Occupy” crowds were sufficiently numerous to prompt the Emergency Committee for Israel to release an online ad questioning support for the demonstrations voiced by Democratic Party leaders, including President Obama, who said the movement “expresses the frustrations that the American people feel.” Obama’s invocation of “the American people” and their “frustrations” might permit some other conspiracy theorists to suggest — with far better evidence — that the protesters camped in Zuccotti Park are part of a deliberate effort by the president and his party to undermine the free enterprise system. Several conservative commentators have interpreted “Occupy Wall Street” in light of Saul Alinsky’s radical maxim: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.” Others see the anti-capitalist mobs in the context of the ” Cloward-Piven Strategy ” to foment a crisis that would bring about a socialist revolution. This suggestion cannot be lightly dismissed. One of the architects of that 1960s-era strategy, Professor Frances Fox Piven, is an active supporter of the movement and told a public-radio interviewer : ” I think we desperately need a popular uprising in the United States.” Piven also denounced the financial industry at a Sept. 29 rally in New York where, in a bizarre call-and-response speech , she told the crowd: “You’ve heard people say they’re greedy, and they are greedy. You’ve heard people say that they are thieves, and they are thieves. But they’re also cannibals, because they are eating their own.” Any reasonably well-informed person who listens to Piven’s counter-factual assertions (e.g., that we have budget deficits “because big business and finance has stopped paying taxes”) need not wonder why so many allegedly smart young people have joined the “Occupy” movement. Piven is one of the nation’s most influential academics, past president of the American Sociological Association and a “Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Political Science” at the graduate school of the City University of New York. Professor Piven is not merely a teacher, but a teacher of teachers, whose former pupils are now themselves influential professors at many of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. And it is perfectly plausible to say that Professor Piven’s most illustrious student, dating back to the era when she taught at Columbia University, is the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Six decades after Bill Buckley warned of the academic elite’s collectivist drift in God and Man at Yale , we now behold the rotten fruit of that tree: An Ivy League graduate in the White House praising the inchoate rage of anti-capitalist mobs, a rage incited by the likes of Professor Piven at rallies that draw heavily from among the brightest students at our nation’s finest universities. Whereas the anti-Semitic idiot interviewed by Schoffstall could be dismissed as a marginal kook whose views are not representative of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement as a whole, the same cannot be said of Professor Piven and the young protesters who enthusiastically echoed her words in Zuccotti Park. Those who declare that capitalists are “thieves ” and “cannibals” are proclaiming doctrines propagated by the academic left for more than half a century. Students haven’t been taught to understand capitalism, but rather to hate capitalism. Hating is easier than understanding, after all, and elite students nowadays are far more likely to be assigned the Marxist history of Howard Zinn than to be schooled in the economics of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. Hostility toward the free market is one of those hateful prejudices that, to borrow a phrase from Rodgers and Hammerstein, “you’ve got to be carefully taught.” Idiots on the fringes of the “Occupy” crowd who demonize Jews may ultimately be less dangerous than the allegedly well-educated young people who form the core of the mobs that vilify capitalism. And as Ronald Reagan once observed, “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
Originally posted here:
Organized Ignorance
Lisa Jackson isn’t the only one happy about how the Environmental Protection Agency is destroying jobs . You may recall some remarks Jackson made previously about the EPA in the face of evidence that proposed regulations would cripple some industry and deeply harm the national economy: In fact, Jackson believes that there is no reason to be concerned about the economics whatsoever. After all, what do the industry leaders know about their own industry when compared to a former chemical engineer? WSJ : This cost-benefit bias may explain why Ms. Jackson could claim at a “green jobs” conference in February that under the Clean Air Act, “For every $1 we have spent, we have gotten $40 of benefits in return. So you can say what you want about EPA’s business sense. We know how to get a return on our investment.” Essentially what Jackson is saying is that the return on investment for the EPA, in the form of regulatory fees, is more important than the very industries that they are tasked with regulating. And it’s not as though Jackson is oblivious to these economic certainties, she just doesn’t seem to care. This conversation between Jackson and Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) caused the Congresswoman to refer to the EPA’s stance as being ‘ hellbent on destroying jobs ‘: “We’ve had a back-and-forth [with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson] on whether they actually do look at job creation and job losses and the economic impacts of the regulations that they’re creating,” Caputo said. “It’s obvious they do not. [Jackson] told me that, and her folks have said that too — not just to me, but to numerous other people.” Well, Jackson is not alone in her enthusiasm for the destruction of industry and jobs. It turns out that there is another smitten individual, and she used to be Romney’s favorite go-to on environmental issues. Actual standards have not yet been sent to the White House, but EPA is getting closer, air chief Gina McCarthy said yesterday. ‘ We’re kind of excited about nearing the finish line on this ,’ McCarthy said at an air quality conference in Arlington, Va. (Gabriel Nelson, “White House Starts Review of EPA’s Utility Toxics Rule,” E & E News, October 25, 2011) (emphasis mine) So what is she so excited about? None other than the very regulations I’ve written about that are going to cost the nation a total of 1.44 million jobs and cause an 11.5% increase in electricity bills according to an independent study performed at the request of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. The report is of course related to the Clean Air Transport Rule (CATR) & the Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) Requirements. This is all coming from the same EPA that has created such an enormously burdensome system which they fully acknowledge would be ‘ absurd ‘ to comply with, even while they are requesting billions more dollars to add over 200k more bureaucrats to the rolls. The same EPA which is dead set on destroying the coal industry, which is precisely what our Commander in Chief said he would do at the outset of his presidential bid. They are systematically destroying an industry which will cost us jobs, the ability to reliably produce power, billions of dollars to the economy…and Gina McCarthy is excited that they’re almost ready to start. The pushback from the environmentalists is always the same. They claim that job losses will be offset by job gains in the ‘green’ sector. Between electric cars with questionable business models shipping jobs to Finland and solar panel manufacturers like Solyndra spending almost an entire $500 million loan on a factory that no one was buying product from, my faith in these magical green jobs is rapidly dwindling and I already started from a position of total cynicism. Don’t ever forget, this is all precisely what Barack Obama promised he would do. What candidates do and say matters. Who they work with , what their objectives are, what their previous statements have been. These things have a direct correlation to how they will make decisions and how they will govern. Did I mention that Gina McCarthy used to work for Mitt Romney as a top level environmental advisor? Follow @Ben_Howe
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Romney’s Former ‘Green’ Quarterback is ‘Excited’ EPA Job-Killing Regulations Nearing Finish Line
