December 15, 2007
Back Talk V Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:10 AM EST This discussion began with two examples of politicians being sandbagged by journalists and not putting up with it, to their credit. I agree with Alexander Burns that politicians have to be careful with this tactic, as it can backfire, especially if one lacks the talent for coming up with the right response in real time. Chris Dodd, I think, responded perfectly to the moderator’s unfair question in the debate the other day. It was far better than a justifiably angry response would have been. (By the way, I believe I speak for the entire political nation when I hope that Carolyn Washburn never, ever, again moderates a presidential debate. She may, for all I know, be an excellent journalist. But she was as good at leading these two debates as I would be at quarterbacking in the NFL.) Some people who have considerable political gifts just lack the talent for instant response. Dan Quayle certainly didn’t do a good job responding to Lloyd Bentsen’s nasty jab at the 1988 vice-presidential debate. And in the 2000 campaign, some radio journalist whose political sympathies were not hard to discern—radio’s answer to Dan Rather—asked George Bush who the prime minister of, I think, Tajikistan was. Bush, needless to say, didn’t have a clue, and he fumbled his response. In retrospect, what he should have said, I think, was, “I haven’t the faintest idea and neither did you until you looked it up this morning so you could blindside me with the question.” On the other hand, people with the talent for instant and witty response might not make good Presidents. I’m a great admirer of Groucho Marx and Johnny Carson, but I have my doubts about how they would have fared in the White House. It might be noted that British politics is much more accustomed to witty zingers. Anyone who survives the fiery furnace of House of Commons debate—much rowdier than in Congress, and where the repartee is often very witty and sometimes vicious—long enough to get to high office is going to be good at instant response. I remember Margaret Thatcher being referred to in Parliament as “La Pasionara of privilege” and “Attila the Hen,” both in the I-wish-I’d-said-that category, even though I’m a great admirer of Lady Thatcher. I am glad to see that Alexander Burns is no more of a Hillary Clinton enthusiast than I am. I have long suspected that her lead in the polls over the last few months was mostly because of name recognition. Now that we’re getting down to the wire and the people, not just the punditocracy, are thinking about choices, her lead is evaporating. But her biggest problem may not be her evasiveness and unlikability, but her baggage. The biggest Clinton steamer trunk of all, of course, is her spouse. Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine, has an article in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about the possibility of Clinton’s being appointed to the Supreme Court. There is precedent for this. William Howard Taft, after all, served as Chief Justice from 1921 to 1930, an office he vastly preferred to the Presidency. I find a Bill Clinton justiceship highly unlikely for two reasons. One, Supreme Court justices are expected to shut up on questions that might come before the Court and about what goes on behind the scenes there, and Bill Clinton is not exactly famous for his reticence. Two, I can’t see the Senate—any Senate—confirming to the high court a man who had his law license suspended for five years for “serious misconduct.” So far as I know he has never asked for reinstatement to the bar. Anything can happen, of course, but my guess is that we have seen the high point of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
December 13, 2007
Back Talk Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:05 AM EST At the apparently rather bizarre Republican presidential candidate debate in Johnston, Iowa, yesterday, Fred Thompson scored points when he wouldn’t give a yes-or-no answer to a non-yes-or-no question. The moderator wanted a show of hands from those who “believe global climate change is a serious threat and caused by human activity.” Thompson asked for a minute to explain his position and when the moderator refused to give it to him, he flatly refused to answer the question. In focus groups where the participants had meters recording their positive and negative reactions, the meters went off-the-chart positive for Thompson. The American electorate obviously like displays of backbone from candidates. Ronald Reagan’s candidacy surged in 1980 after he made his famous “I am paying for this microphone!” remark when a moderator tried to cut him off. In 1988, George Bush took on Dan Rather (link—scroll down) in an interview where Rather kept trying to ask have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-yet questions about Iran-Contra, and he also saw a surge in support. Since talking back to journalists seems to work so well, I wonder why candidates so seldom do it. Journalists, after all, have public approval ratings on a par with congressmen and people who talk on cell phones at the movies.
December 8, 2007
Mining Disasters II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:35 AM EST Just as an addendum to Fredric Smoler’s post on mining and its death toll, it might be noted that that toll has been decreasing steadily for the last century in this country. There are three principal reasons for this. One has been the effort to prevent another disaster such as occurred at Monagh, West Virginia, a hundred years ago, when 362 lives were snuffed out in an instant. In 1910 the U.S. Bureau of Mines was created to investigate accidents, advise on safety procedures, and teach courses in mine safety. Regulation of mines has been increasing steadily ever since and today is governed by the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, which created the Mine Safety and Health Administration as part of the Labor Department. The second reason has been the growth of open-pit mining and the reduction of tunnel mining, which is intrinsically far more hazardous. Open-pit mining uses far fewer miners per ton mined, and the two principal causes of tunnel mining disasters, collapse and explosion, are negligible factors. The third reason is that management has come to realize that an unremitting emphasis on safety is simply good for the bottom line. The result in the United States mining industry has been spectacular.
Year: Average Annual Deaths / Average Annual Injuries
1936-1940: 1,546 / 81,342
1941-1945: 1,592 / 82,825
1946-1950: 1,054 / 63,367
1951-1955: 690 / 38,510
1956-1960: 550 / 28,805
1961-1965: 449 / 23,204
1966-1970: 426 / 22,435
1971-1975: 322 / 33,963
1976-1980: 254 / 41,220
1981-1985: 174 / 24,290
1986-1990: 122 / 27,524
1991-1999: 93 / 21,351
2000-2004: 67 / 13,601
Even if you factor in the reduction in the total number of mine workers, thanks to greatly increased productivity, the reduction in mining deaths has been impressive. In 1970 there was about one death per million man-hours in coal mining (the most hazardous type of mining). By 1977 the ratio was down almost to one death per three million man-hours. In 1995–99, there was less than one death per six million man-hours.
Indeed the number of work-related deaths in all occupations has been declining for the last century. In 2004 there were only 5,703 work-related deaths in the United States (and almost 14 percent of them were homicides and self-inflicted injuries). That is not many more than the number of miners being killed every year in the first decade of the twentieth century, and we have a vastly larger workforce today than we did a hundred years ago. That’s also equal to the number of miners killed every year today in China.
November 28, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:10 PM EST A few points. 1) I didn’t say that “the United States is necessarily better off with an electoral system that theoretically favors small, rural states over big, urban centers.” I said it was better off with the present system than with a system based purely on the popular vote. The present system, devised 220 years ago in an utterly different world, is by no means without its flaws. No system is. One might have an electoral vote system, just for instance, where the votes were allocated not according to the state’s representation in Congress but according to its population: one electoral vote for each 100,000 citizens recorded in the last census. That would give California 359 electoral votes and South Dakota 8, a 44–1 ratio instead of 55 and 3, a 13–1 ratio. (To be sure, best of luck getting such an amendment ratified.) 2) Mr. Burns is taking rhetorical advantage of a careless choice of states, which is good for scoring college debate team points but not so good for finding the truth. Idaho and Vermont are both solidly in one camp and so would be largely ignored in either system. But there are plenty of small states that tend to move back and forth between parties: New Mexico, Nevada, Delaware, etc. I don’t think any candidate for President is going to say, “Oh, the hell with [fill in the name of a small toss-up state]” under the Electoral College. But who’s going to bother with the 371,000 voters in Delaware (which in the last 15 elections has gone Republican 8 times and Democratic 7) when they can concentrate on the rich vote mines of Florida, Texas, New York, and California instead? Delaware issues would be utterly unimportant. Candidates wouldn’t even have to know what they are. 3) Mr. Burns writes, “I’m not sure that Al Gore or Samuel Tilden would agree about the consistent clarity of the Electoral College . . .” Why wouldn’t they? They undoubtedly didn’t like the results in 1876 and 2000, but those results were clear enough. 4) I know of no evidence that either President Clinton in 1993 or George Bush in 2005 thought themselves the holders of overwhelming mandates. To be sure, Clinton won a fairly resounding Electoral College vote in 1992 (370–168), but that very savvy politician knew perfectly well that that was because of Ross Perot siphoning off votes in states that Bush might well have won in a two-man race. In 2004, Bush’s Electoral College victory was a mere 286–251. As Mr. Burns has pointed out, a shift of a mere 60,000 votes in Ohio would have made John Kerry President. Clinton’s health-care plan and Bush’s attempt to reform Social Security both failed, I think, for quite other reasons. 5) He writes, “If the 2000 election had been settled without the Electoral College, there would not have been a 50-state scavenger hunt for votes. In fact, there would not have been a ‘messy, divisive legal battle’ at all. The outcome would have been an indisputable victory for Al Gore.” I wonder how Mr. Burns can be as certain of this as he might be of the time the sun rose on the day after Election Day in 2000. A mere 544,683 votes, a little over 10,000 per state, separated Al Gore and George Bush, out of 101,463,105 votes cast. I imagine the Republicans would have fought just as ferociously and screamed fraud just as loudly all over the country as the Democrats did in Florida. Given the utterly disgraceful mess the voter registration rolls are in in most states, how easy it is to register without proof of being enfranchised, and how easy it is to vote without proof of identity, they would have found very rich pickings.
November 27, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:05 PM EST I am not sure that abolishing the Electoral College would change the way elections are conducted in modern times in the way that Alexander Burns envisions. The Electoral College is biased in favor of the small states (which is most of the states). California has 55 electoral votes and South Dakota only 3. But California has about 600,000 people per vote and South Dakota only 200,000. So while there’s not much point in a candidate for President showing up in hopes of winning a majority of the minuscule popular vote in South Dakota (it’s a third smaller than New York’s Westchester County), three electoral voters can make all the difference in a close race. Bush beat Gore by only 5 electoral votes in 2000. So I think that in a race determined only by the national popular vote, much of “fly-over country,” as coastal elites call it, would be ignored, and the race would be fought in the great media centers (i.e., New York, Washington, and Los Angeles) and the major cities. That would not be a good thing. The Electoral College forces candidates to consider each of the 50 states and to spend time and resources in those that seem possible to win, no matter how small. Without it, they would ignore the Vermonts and the Idahos. Those states that are solidly one party or the other would be largely ignored with or without the Electoral College, unless, like New York, they are full of media. As Mr. Burns points out, there have been only three times that the Electoral College went against the popular vote. But each of these times the popular vote was so close that it was well within the margin of error, and we will never know in any absolute sense who won the popular vote in those elections. Yet in each case the Electoral College produced a clear winner, who thus had a legitimacy he otherwise would have lacked. Cleveland beat Blaine in 1884 by a mere 26,361 votes, less than .2 percent of the total. But he won in the Electoral College 219 to 182. Four years later, Cleveland beat Harrison by 90,596 votes, but lost in the college 233 to 168. In both cases we will never know who actually won the popular vote. And of course there have been several times when the popular vote was effectively a tie, with the winner in the college just barely edging out his opponent. Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960 34,226,731 to 34,108,157, but carried the college handily 303 to 219. Had Cook County, Illinois, politics been a bit closer to the ideal of a Jeffersonian democracy, Kennedy would have lost the popular vote and still have been President. He won Illinois by less than 10,000 votes, and Richard Dailey’s Cook County was remarkably late in reporting its results. Then there were the four times when no one had a majority of the popular vote (1860, 1912, 1992, and 1996) but someone carried the Electoral College handily. Wilson won only 45 percent of the popular vote but almost 82 percent of the Electoral College vote in 1912. Despite being a minority President, he had a very effective first term. Finally, imagine a squeaker election in these over-lawyered days without the Electoral College. In 2000, because of the college, the messy, divisive legal battle was fought only in Florida, and it still took over a month to sort out. But without the college it would have been fought in all 50 states, because each and every vote would have been precious. An army of lawyers would have had new Mercedes in their driveways when it was finally over, but the Republic would have been very ill served. Clear winners are always better than unclear ones, and the great virtue of the Electoral College is that it always produces clear winners.
November 22, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:55 AM EST It would be interesting to contemplate what would have happened in 1860, had the scheme mentioned by Julie Fenster really happened, in which states agreed to award their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, rather than the popular vote winner in that particular state. (By the way, I have my constitutional doubts about this idea. It seems to me it would be “an Agreement or Compact with another State,” therefore requiring the consent of Congress under Article I, Section 10, a consent that would be very difficult to get through the Senate at the least.). As I understand the idea, since Lincoln won the popular vote, the Southern states would, under this agreement, have had to cast their electoral votes for Lincoln. Of course, they would have done no such thing, and the agreement would have broken down instantly. One of the great strengths of the Electoral College is that it has usually produced a clear winner, even when no one had a majority of the popular vote, giving that winner much needed legitimacy. Besides Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and Bill Clinton in both 1992 and 1996 failed to win a majority of the popular vote. But in all cases their right to the office was unchallenged. Only when the election was extremely close and charges of irregularities abounded, such as in 1876 and in 2000, has the legitimizing function of the Electoral College to some extent failed. I favor keeping the Electoral College as it is for numerous other reasons. They are best expressed by Alexander Bickel in a magisterial essay in his book Reform and Continuity. It’s long out of print, but any library that doesn’t have a copy can get one through interlibrary loan. It is well worth the time of anyone whose mind is not beyond the reach of reason on the subject. In this most democratic of countries, it is always hard to argue against anything that can be portrayed as “undemocratic,” because, the logic goes, since democracy is good, anything that is undemocratic must be bad. But as with anything else that is good, from candy to exercise to alcohol to sleep to butterfat to aspirin, there can be too much of a good thing. Many states still suffer from the excesses of Jacksonian democracy (the election of judges, for instance). One can make a very strong case that the reforms in 1975 that got rid of the undemocratic seniority system in Congress produced not superior democracy but an out-of-control spending machine building bridges to nowhere and tea-cozy museums. Then of course, there is the filibuster in the Senate, which effectively requires an extra-constitutional supermajority of 60 votes to get anything done there. Personally I have no problem with it in legislative cases. The point of the Senate, as Thomas Jefferson put it, was to function as the saucer in which to cool the coffee, by curbing the majoritarian passions of the House. The filibuster is a means of forcing the majority to compromise with the minority. (In cases of confirming presidential nominations, however, no compromise is possible, so no filibuster should be allowed. The Senate, not a minority of it, should give or withhold advice and consent.) It might be noted, of course, that one’s opinion on such matters as the Electoral College, election of judges, the seniority system, and the filibuster often depends on whose ox is being gored at the moment. I doubt the left would be so up in arms about the Electoral College these days had George Bush won the popular vote and Al Gore the College in 2000. They would instead be defending the astonishing political wisdom of the Founding Fathers, not trying to outwit them. (Good luck in that enterprise, by the way. They’re not an easy bunch to outwit.) As a classic example of this, I offer my favorite whipping boy, the editorial board of The New York Times. If you oppose the filibuster in the Senate as an unconscionable affront to democracy and majority rule, you will like this editorial of May 11, 1993, when there was a Democratic President and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. If, however, you favor the filibuster as one of the indispensable checks and balances that keeps tyranny at bay, you will like this editorial this editorial of November 28, 2004, when there was a Republican President and Republican majorities in both houses.
November 21, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:05 PM EST Julie Fenster’s post is very interesting. I had no idea that Lincoln invented political junk mail. But I can’t help wondering if Lincoln, four years later, changed his opinion regarding the Electoral College. In 1860 he won only 39.89 percent of the popular vote but carried 18 states and won 180 electoral votes, 59.4 percent of the total, making him the undisputed President. Had the Founding Fathers been “outwitted,” and electoral votes allocated according to the popular vote, the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives. There Lincoln would have had to battle it out with Senator Stephen Douglas, who had the second highest popular vote total (but, curiously, the lowest electoral vote total). With each state getting one vote in the House, I very much doubt that Lincoln would have emerged the victor. Instead, Douglas would have led us through the nation’s greatest crisis (unless, of course, he managed to prevent secession altogether). So would there be today a Douglas Memorial at the western end of the Mall in Washington? We’ll never know. But Douglas died in June 1861 (of typhoid fever, but he apparently was also suffering from throat cancer, which would have killed him soon enough), barely three months into the presidential term. So Herschel Johnson, former governor of, ummmm, Georgia, his vice-presidential running mate, would have probably inherited the White House, unless the Senate had chosen Lincoln’s running mate, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, which is highly unlikely. So would there now be a Johnson Memorial? My guess is no. He opposed Georgia’s secession but acquiesced in it and served in the Confederate senate. After the war he was disbarred from sitting in the U.S. Senate. So in at least one instance it is surely a good thing that the Founding Fathers weren’t “outwitted.” This seems to me a good example of why we should be careful what we wish for.
November 18, 2007
The Fair Tax Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:15 PM EST Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and current Republican presidential candidate, was on Fox News Sunday this morning. According to two polls, he is suddenly a contender in Iowa, despite having spent only a tiny fraction of what Mitt Romney has spent there. He is now running an amusing ad. One of his signature issues is the “fair tax.” For a short run down on its provisions see here. Basically, it junks the federal income tax, social security tax, corporate income taxes, gift taxes, estate taxes, self-employment taxes, etc., and replaces them all with a retail sales tax of 23 percent on goods and services. Because sales taxes are inescapably regressive (i.e., they impact the poor more than the affluent, because the poor, by definition, spend most of their income on necessities while the rich bank most of their income), the fair tax would rebate monthly to everyone 23 percent of poverty-level income. I have not, by any manner of means, looked at the fair tax proposal in depth. But almost anything that would replace the current income tax would have to be an improvement. The federal income tax code, as originally passed in 1913, was only 14 pages long. Today, 94 years later, it is tens of thousands of pages long and quite literally nobody really knows all of what is in it. After the original tax was passed, the rich—the only people who had to pay it in 1913—naturally looked for ways around it, and their well-paid lawyers and accountants quickly found “loopholes” to allow them to do so. Ever since, the government and the lawyers and accountants have been engaged in an evolutionary arms race: Lawyers find loopholes, Congress either plugs them or, just as often, regulates them, leading the lawyers to find new loopholes, and so on ad infinitum. Worse, Congress regularly passes out goodies in the form of amendments to the tax code that benefit only a favored few and often only a single individual. In recent years the tax code has been amended at a rate of about 4,000 times a year. This allows members of Congress to sock it to the rich—-”these people must pay their fair share!”—in public, while quietly letting them off the hook in private. As a result, the so-called progressivity of the tax code is an utter sham. The poor don’t pay incomes taxes, and neither do the rich, who shelter their incomes in trusts, corporations, and a thousand fiddles. It is the middle class, those dependent on a regular salary, that get socked. Warren Buffett has said he pays a lower tax rate than most people who work in his office. Teresa Heinz Kerry, the very rich wife of Sen. John Kerry, reported during her husband’s 2004 presidential campaign that her income was over $5 million but her taxes were only about $600,000, or 12 percent. I don’t know about others, but my income, at least, was a lot lower and my tax rate a lot higher. The fair tax certainly has great advantages. The IRS would go out of business. The vast underground economy would no longer escape taxation, because the earners of that unreported and sometimes illegal income would get taxed when they spend it instead of when they earn it. The huge compliance costs of the current system, for both corporations and individuals, would disappear, going into their respective pockets to be spent (and taxed) or saved (and not taxed). Prices would decline as the passed-along costs of the corporate income tax and payroll taxes were taken out. It would encourage savings and discourage consumption. It would, to be sure, not be nearly as apparently progressive as the current income tax. But it would be even more progressive in fact, which is what should count, even for ideologues. Who would be hurt? Tax lawyers would be hurt badly, and tax accountants would be devastated. Tax bureaucrats would be out of a job. So would tens of thousands of Washington lobbyists. And members of Congress would be hurt in two ways. First, they would no longer be able to hand out dark-of-night tax fiddles to the well-heeled. Worse, they would no longer be able to play the game of “Don’t tax you and don’t tax me/ Tax the man behind the tree.” They could still raise or lower taxes, but only for everyone. Taxation for reasons other than raising revenue would be much more difficult. Social engineering via the tax code would be, effectively, impossible. Such idiocies as an estate tax that has been declining for years and will disappear entirely in 2010, only to arise, like the phoenix from the ashes of its own cremation, in 2011 at the original rate would vanish. If Mike Huckabee should win in Iowa in early January, or even come close, the major issue of the 2008 election might very well not be Iraq. It might be taxes. The Democrats wouldn’t like that one little bit.
November 16, 2007
Movies and History Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:35 PM EST I imagine that doctors tend to dislike movies about doctors, and lawyers movies about lawyers, because they see the inaccuracies that pass unnoticed by those who are not in those professional fields. There are few movies about historians—not a profession, perhaps, that lends itself to drama—but there are plenty about history. I confess to being a sucker for them most of the time. I don’t mind the often necessary time shortening and the introduction of fictional characters. But I wonder why so many of them have quite unnecessary historical solecisms. For instance, last night I watched Amazing Grace about William Wilberforce and his long struggle to get the slave trade abolished in England. I enjoyed it for the most part. But one minor character was named the Duke of Clarence. He spends much time in the House of Commons and at one point in a card game with Wilberforce and out of ready money, he throws his black coachman into the pot (Wilberforce throws down his cards in disgust and storms off). I understand the dramatic needs the character serves. But why call him the Duke of Clarence? There was a real Duke of Clarence at the time. George III gave his third son that title in 1789 (in 1830, much to his surprise and delight, the Duke of Clarence became King William IV). And dukes, of course, don’t sit in the Commons. They sit in the Lords (or they did then; most got the boot in 1999). And in a very famous case in England in 1772, Lord Mansfield declared slavery to be contrary to the common law, making all slaves in England free. So the coachman, however little he might have been in charge of his own destiny, was not property to be wagered at cards. It would have been the work of a moment to give the character a fictional title. Since heirs to higher titles use one of their father’s lesser titles as a courtesy and could sit in the Commons until their father’s death, any title but duke would have done. It would have taken hardly longer to devise a dramatic means of conveying the common attitude of most of the aristocracy toward blacks at the start of Wilberforce’s campaign. I think producers should hire historians to clean up their scripts before shooting starts. It wouldn’t cost much, by Hollywood standards. I, for one, would be willing to work for a whole lot less than your average second-tier movie star. And I mean a WHOLE lot less.
November 15, 2007
Historical Probabilities and Markets II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST I certainly agree with Fredric Smoler that the price of Confederate bonds in Amsterdam was a measure of the speculators’ perception of the probability of Confederate victory, not a measure of the actual probability. Speculators in Europe, at least ten days away from the North American battlefields, could not have had full knowledge of what was going on. And, as Mr. Smoler notes, they were not competent to evaluate the military situation in any event. Then, given the fact that wars can be lost “for want of a nail,” or because of highly improbable chance events that nonetheless occur, the speculation in Confederate bonds was sheer gambling, not reasoned investment. I can think of two other examples off the top of my head of military actions that rational people would not have predicted. I don’t think Macedonian bonds would have sold well in Amsterdam when Alexander the not-yet-Great set out to conquer the Persian Empire. And would speculators have bet on Nimitz instead of Yamamoto before the Battle of Midway, even if they were in on the secret that Nimitz was reading the Japanese naval code? Markets are notorious for over- and underestimating the probability of future events due to “the madness of crowds.” From tulipomania in the early seventeenth century to the dot-com bubble that burst in 2000, the history of markets is filled with what appears, at least in retrospect, to be remarkably irrational behavior. This irrationality is not always to the up side. It’s a commonplace that “the stock market has predicted ten of the last three recessions.” I believe that British government bonds held their value even in Britain’s darkest days in 1940. Of course, there’s a difference here. Everyone knew that Confederate bonds would be worthless in the event of a Confederate defeat, as indeed, they were. But would Britain, even defeated, have repudiated its debt? I doubt it, and, obviously, so did investors. Hitler, after all, wanted peace with Britain and would have cut a deal far short of unconditional surrender. Just by the way, British consols, which are government bonds that never mature, have been the best measure we have of the price of money over the last 250 years, as there is no yield to maturity to factor into the current price. The only other factor is the likelihood of Britain defaulting on the interest. Even in 1940, not many thought that a serious risk. While crowds are no better than individuals in predicting future events that are contingent on many factors, they are very good at one kind of prediction. If you fill a very large jar with, say, jellybeans, and invite people to guess how many beans are in the jar, the individual guesses will be all over the map. But the average of all the guesses will always be spot on. There are now markets on the Internet in which people can bet on the outcome of political races. I believe they do a better job of predicting outcomes than the polls. The reason, perhaps, is that people must put their money where their mouth is in a market, whereas they can tell a pollster anything they feel like. Also, of course, polls are supposed to be of a carefully selected sample of the total electorate, many of whom couldn’t care less. People in a political marketplace betting on outcomes are all interested in that outcome and trying to analyze what will happen. So the jellybean effect is in operation. One poll that has an excellent record of predicting outcomes in presidential races is the polls of the Weekly Reader, which polls school kids in very large numbers. It is not a “scientific poll” in any sense, but it has a very good track record of being right. The reason, perhaps, is that while grownups often tell pollsters what they think they ought to say, the kids just echo what they hear at home. From the mouths of babes . . .
November 13, 2007
New York Times Columnists and History Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST My friend James Taranto, of OpinionJournal.com, notes that the columnists of The New York Times have been having a historical discussion on what Ronald Reagan said in a speech at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, at the start of the 1980 presidential campaign and, more important, what he meant by it. Philadelphia, of course, is famous for having betrayed its own name when three civil rights workers were murdered there in cold blood in 1964, one of the most terrible events in the long national struggle for civil rights. Here’s the “money quote” from the speech: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.” Paul Krugman has, numerous times, called Reagan’s reference to “states’ rights” flat-out racist code language. Yesterday David Brooks called that a distortion. Today Bob Herbert chimes in with his own interpretation of that moment, reasserting that it was a blatant appeal to white racism. Taranto notes that that interpretation is somewhat ex post facto, as neither the speech nor the phrase “I believe in states’ rights” attracted much criticism at the time. Anthony Lewis, then a liberal Times columnist, whose civil rights credentials are 100 percent in order, wrote about the speech only six weeks later and gave Reagan a considerable benefit of the doubt if not complete exoneration. Personally, I have not studied this in any depth, but I certainly don’t think Ronald Reagan was a racist, and neither, obviously, do the vast majority of the American people who increasingly regard him as one of the giants of twentieth-century American history. But did he use racist code language in pursuit of Southern votes, which would have been certainly cynical but not necessarily racist? Like Anthony Lewis, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. The phrase “states’ rights” is embedded in a paragraph supporting the traditional meaning of the phrase, and apparently it evoked no particular reaction from the mostly white crowd. It was certainly well buried code language if code language it was. So perhaps he meant nothing more than what he said he meant by it: “I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.” As Sigmund Freud is famously supposed to have said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
November 11, 2007
The Politics of National Security III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:45 PM EST Alexander Burns’s response to Senator Lieberman’s speech is to quote the “centrist Democrat” Ed Kilgore. I haven’t the faintest idea how centrist Mr. Kilgore is, although even a centrist Democrat is pretty far left these days, especially with presidential primaries coming up and given the need to appeal to the Moveon.org tail that now so wags the Democratic dog. But the website on which he posted (The Democratic Strategist) is an explicitly partisan Democratic one. “The Democratic Strategist will be clearly focused on developing political strategies for promoting Democratic candidates and issues.” Therefore his job was to criticize Senator Lieberman, not to consider the worth of his argument. He proceeds to criticize in the usual fashion of partisan Democrats: We’re right, everyone else is wrong. Q.E.D. Mr. Burns quotes him as follows: “You’d never know from Lieberman’s speech that the Democratic tradition he’s pretending to uniquely defend had a lot to do with multilateralism, collective security, international institutions, diplomacy, non-military means, human rights, bipartisanship, and the rule of law—all parts of the tradition that Bush and contemporary Republicans have aggressively rejected, and that today’s Democrats explicitly support.” I must have been napping. When exactly did the Republicans aggressively reject the rule of law, human rights, and bipartisanship? Was it at the same time they were aggressively rejecting Mom and apple pie?
November 9, 2007
The Politics of National Security Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Independent Democrat of Connecticut, gave a very interesting speech at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University yesterday called “The Politics of National Security” that seems to me to have been underreported (neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times covered it). It looks at the history of these politics since World War II, and I think it is well worth reading. It can be found here. I would be interested in the comments of my fellow bloggers.
November 5, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:00 PM EST Mr. Burns should have made clear when he quoted me as writing, “There’s only one problem: It is patently unconstitutional,” that I was talking about another matter entirely (congressional representation for Washington D.C.), not the line-item veto. To be sure, the Supreme Court threw out the 1996 act that gave President Clinton a line-item veto, by a vote of 6 to 3, for reasons Mr. Burns elucidated. The fact that three justices thought it constitutional makes the word “patently” inappropriate here. Justice Breyer’s dissent, which was joined in part by Justices O’Connor and Scalia, is worth reading. It is a classic Hamiltonian argument of implied powers, distinguishing between things that are explicitly forbidden by the Constitution (such as granting titles of nobility) and means on which the Constitution is silent (such as chartering a bank, in Hamilton’s case) to a legitimate end. Yesterday’s Supreme Court dissent has very often become tomorrow’s majority opinion, as Mr. Burns knows full well. Mr. Burns writes, “President Bush asked Congress to enact the line-item veto in his 2006 State of the Union Address, and Senators Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell moved to comply.” Unless President Bush and the Republican leadership in the Senate last year are in some alternative constitutional universe, this too would indicate that the line-item veto, in one form or another, cannot be “patently” unconstitutional. Further, he writes that Rudy Giuliani was the man who initiated the lawsuit that resulted in the Supreme Court’s decision. Indeed he was, but I think it was really the mayor of New York more than Rudy Giuliani who initiated the suit. If Mr. Giuliani gets elected to the Presidency next year, I’ll be very surprised indeed if he doesn’t have a constitutional epiphany regarding the line-item veto. That veto could take many forms and be limited in many ways, some of which might have passed muster with the Supreme Court majority of 10 years ago. One way would be simply to repeal the provision of the 1974 Budget Control Act (perhaps the mostly wildly misnamed act in the history of Congress) that forbids Presidents to impound funds rather than spend them. President Nixon—in his desperate last days as President—signed the bill but stated that he thought that provision unconstitutional. I agree, as I see no constitutional requirement that the President spend the money that Congress appropriates, while there is a flat prohibition against “money being drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law . . .” As far as I know it has never been tested in court. There is nothing to stop a President today from asserting the same idea and impounding funds, inviting a lawsuit. I bet he would win it. Of course impoundments are a greater power than a line-item veto. The latter could be overridden by Congress, the former cannot be. I did not label Congressional spending corrupt; I labeled pork corrupt. And it is. Forcing the Navy, say, to buy ships it doesn’t want and can’t use as a favor to some company located in a particular congressional district is corrupt, however legally the appropriation is enacted. It is corrupt because it is spending public money for private gain. When I referred to a new contract with America, I did not mean simply the line-item veto but a whole panoply of reforms, most of them congressional rules, not laws. Requiring that committees reconciling differing versions of a bill not add new spending, for instance. Requiring earmarks to be publicly posted on the Internet so that the people can see them in the light of day in time to form an opinion. Forbidding non-germane amendments. Requiring all political donations to be posted on the Internet the same day the money is deposited into the legislator’s campaign bank account, with full disclosure of who is actually giving the money. There are dozens more that are obvious to anyone whose first interest is not getting reelected to Congress. Mr. Burns writes, “If this is an issue that voters currently care about, I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of it yet.” That is because it hasn’t been tried yet. But corruption was a major issue in the 2006 election (far more potent than Iraq, in my opinion). I would invite Mr. Burns to take a look at the ridicule heaped upon the first contract with America in 1994 by the mainstream media, on precisely the grounds that the voters didn’t care, before the election of that year. The ridicule stopped on Election Day when one of the great political tsunamis in American history swept the Democrats out of power in Congress (and practically everywhere else).
November 5, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:25 AM EST If ever there was a textbook example of why we need a line-item veto, the water projects bill that President Bush vetoed in its entirety on Friday is it. The bill funds the Army Corps of Engineers, which currently has a project backlog of $38 billion. The Corps requested $4.9 billion for what it identified as necessary projects for this year—dams that needed immediate attention, for instance. But construction projects are dear to the hearts of members of Congress. They get to boast of bringing home the bacon, to cut ribbons at groundbreaking ceremonies, and, all too often, to get the project named for themselves, a common practice I find obscene. So the water projects bill is always as full of pork as a bratwurst. The bill as passed by the House funded $14 billion in projects, almost three times what the Corps asked for. The Senate funded $15 billion. Once a bill passes both houses, it usually needs to go to a committee made up of members of both houses to reconcile the differences between the two versions. The final bill is then voted on by each house and sent to the White House if it passes, as it almost always does. When the water projects bill went to the committee this year, a funny thing happened. Since the House authorized $14 billion and the Senate $15 billion, one might think that the final bill would have authorized, say, $14.5 billion. But welcome to Washington: It authorized $23 billion. In other words, $8 billion of pure pork was added to the already pork-laden bill behind closed doors with no debate whatever. The President’s veto is almost certain to be overridden. Pork, if nothing else in Washington, is a splendidly bipartisan affair. Meanwhile, The New York Times yesterday reported that the military appropriations bill is also loaded with pork. The House version has 1,337 earmarks, not a single one requested by the Pentagon, which is not a branch of the federal government famous for self-restraint in the appropriations process. The cost would be $3 billion. The Senate has added $5 billion more. (The Times also points out, in great detail, how much of the money in these earmarks ends up being spent on lobbying for further earmarks and the fact that the companies favored by congressmen and senators to receive earmarks have a funny habit of seeing that the solons in Washington get handsome campaign contributions.) So the next time you hear a member of Congress decry the federal deficit, don’t believe a word of it. The Army Corps of Engineers requested $4.9 billion. Congress is cramming down its throat $23 billion. If the military appropriations bill pork is added in, that’s $26.1 billion over and above what was requested. That amounts to 15.6 percent of the federal deficit in fiscal 2007 just in those two bills. Much of this grotesque corruption (not necessarily illegal, of course, although ask Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney how they like their accommodations in the federal penal system) stems from the early 1970s. Members of Congress, to be sure, have always been willing to spend the public’s money to ensure their own reelections, but the ending of the presidential power to impound funds (i.e., refuse to spend them) and the breakdown of the seniority system in Congress caused a collapse of discipline. In the seniority system, the senior member of the majority party on each committee was automatically the committee chairman. Thus he didn’t have to cater to other members of the committee in order to be elected chairman. He could hand out pork judiciously, if that’s the word. Once the seniority system ended, however, Congressional logrolling (you vote for my project and I’ll vote for yours) became more and more rampant, until it spun completely out of control in the last few years. A line-item veto, in which particular appropriations could be struck from a bill before the President signs it, would end this at a stroke. As, I’ve said before, good ideas spread, and 43 states have given their governors the line-item veto. (The Confederate Constitution, by the way, also gave the executive the line-item veto.) The President is the only one in Washington elected by the whole country (along with the constitutionally powerless Vice President), so he is the only one without parochial interests, the only one who looks at the budget, and the national interest, as a whole. Making him a major player in budget negotiations, which he isn’t now, would go a long way toward establishing fiscal discipline. With the public’s disgust at corruption in the last Congress, which resulted in the Republicans losing their majorities after 12 years, and the ratings of the current Congress, which make President Bush wildly popular in comparison, I would guess that the party willing to seize the issue and make a “contract with America” that would offer specifics on how they would bring fundamental reform and transparency to Congress would do very well next November.
November 2, 2007
Paul Tibbets Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST Paul Tibbets died yesterday at the age of 92. He was a retired brigadier general in the Air Force, and his death would have been of interest chiefly to family and friends, except for one mission in a long military career. That one mission, however, earned him a reefer on the front page of the New York Times. On August 6, 1945, the 30-year-old Tibbets, then a colonel, commanded Enola Gay (named for his mother), the B-29 that carried an atomic bomb to Hiroshima and dropped it. When the bomb exploded 1,890 feet over the city, it killed instantly somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 human beings. Thousands more died later of radiation poisoning and radiation-induced cancers.
Tibbets was a bomber pilot (one of the very best, by all accounts, which is why he was chosen for this mission) and he did what bomber pilots do in wartime, having received a lawful order. Therefore he is purely symbolic, no more responsible for the bomb or it use than any of the other eleven men on board Enola Gay. It is interesting that while I have known of Paul Tibbets all my life, I haven’t the faintest idea who was the pilot on the B-29 that dropped the second bomb, on Nagasaki, three days later.
And yet a powerful symbol he was. He requested that there be no funeral service or headstone placed on his grave, for he did not want to be a locus for antiwar demonstrations. History, like life, is not fair.
It will never be settled whether President Truman (who was responsible) was right to order the use of the atomic bomb, for if history is not fair, it is also not mathematics. Different people can have different opinions. As for me, I think he was right, especially given the knowledge he had at the time. The Battle of Okinawa had been horrendous. The island is only 454 square miles, yet capturing it had taken from April 1st to June 21st and had cost the lives of 11,260 American soldiers, sailors, and marines, along with 33,769 wounded. A total of 36 Allied ships were sunk and 368 damaged; 763 American aircraft were destroyed. About 110,000 Japanese were killed. Extrapolating from Okinawa, everyone thought the conquest of the main islands of Japan would be a bloodbath for both sides quite unprecedented in history. Further, both the country at large and the armed forces were very war-weary. The victorious American forces in Europe were, to put it mildly, unhappy at the prospect of being transferred to the Pacific.
Had Truman decided not to use the bomb, one wonders what would have been the public reaction afterwards when it was learned that he’d had a weapon that might have ended the war in a week (which, after all, it did) with no American casualties at all. Truman really had no political choice. I think he also had no moral choice. The roughly 110,000 deaths from the two atomic bombs is a ghastly number. But it is a tiny fraction of the deaths Truman had every reason to believe would result from the alternative. Many of those deaths would have been American servicemen, of whom President Truman was commander in chief.
When Paul Tibbets landed Enola Gay back on Tinian, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s highest decoration for valor after the Medal of Honor. As far as I’m concerned, he deserved it. And now he deserves to rest in peace.
November 1, 2007
The Melting Pot—2007 Version Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 AM EST Some enterprising genealogist recently unearthed the fact that Barack Obama is the ninth great-grandson of a Maryland immigrant named Mareen Duvall. Duvall, a French Huguenot, was a classic American success story. Arriving in Maryland in the 1650s as an indentured servant, by the time of his death in 1694 he was one of the largest landowners in Anne Arundel County. He had 12 children, so he has a vast descendancy. There is even something called the Society of Mareen Duvall Descendants. One of those descendants turns out to be . . . Vice President Dick Cheney, who is Senator Obama’s ninth cousin once removed. Also related to Senator Obama through Mareen Duvall are the Duchess of Windsor, Harry Truman (twice, thanks to a cousin-cousin marriage some generations back), and the actor Robert Duvall. Oh, and me too. Mareen Duvall is my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, making me a ninth cousin of the Vice President and a ninth cousin once removed of the senator. It is amazing how genealogically interconnected Americans are. Of the 42 men who have been President, only 15 have no known relationships to other Presidents. Franklin Roosevelt was related to no fewer than 16 other Presidents, the two Bushes to 15, Taft and Coolidge to 14. Part of the reason for that is that Roosevelt, the Bushes, Taft, and Coolidge have many New England ancestors and thus are descended from the mere 25,000 or so immigrants who came in the Great Migration from 1620, when the Mayflower arrived, and 1642, when the English Civil War broke out. Immigration to New England largely stopped after that and so the descendants of the 25,000 intermarried over and over until the nineteenth century, when the “New England diaspora” began and new immigrants, such as the Irish and Portuguese, began coming to New England.
October 26, 2007
Al Gore and the Nobel Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:10 PM EST After Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize there was considerable discussion here about whether he deserved it. I thought not, as it seems to me that his contribution to the problem (assuming it is a problem) of global warming has been highly propagandistic and intellectually dishonest. It seems I’m not alone in this attitude. John Christy, a member of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was the co-winner of the prize, doesn’t think very much of Al Gore’s labors in the vineyards of climate change either. Here’s what he said on CNN the other day.
October 19, 2007
The Great Crash of 1987 Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:25 PM EST It was twenty years ago today Black Monday when the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 508 points, or 22.6 percent, on a record volume of 600 million shares, three times the previous volume record. The equivalent numbers today would be more than 3000 points on the Dow and a volume of around fifteen billion.
The market had been very strong for months. It began 1987 at 1985 and on August 25 reached its peak at 2722, up 44 percent for the year. But the next two months were volatile, to put it mildly, with the market trending downwards, a pattern reminiscent of 1929. On Wednesday, October 16th, it fell 95.46, a record in point terms. The next day it fell 58 points and on Friday 108.35.
At the opening bell on Monday, October 19, all hell broke loose. The crash had actually begun in Far Eastern markets, especially Hong Kong, and rolled around the globe, hitting Europe before New York. By the start of trading, sell orders were piled high in brokerage offices and many stocks could not open on time because of the imbalance. When the futures markets opened in Chicago, they added to the sell pressure. At midday rumors hit the Street (Wall Street has long had the world’s most efficient rumor mills) that the chairman of the SEC had suggested the Exchange shut down temporarily. This exacerbated the panic as traders rushed to avoid having exposed positions with no way to close them.
No one knew what to expect the next day, but while volume was again extraordinarily high, the market stabilized by noon, and October 20 would prove the low for the year. The market began to recover in December. Within two years it had recovered its 1987 high, and it is now more than ten thousand points higher. The causes of the great crash of 1987 are still much in dispute. Why it didn’t presage a depression, as previous stock market crashes had always done, is less so. For one thing, the extraordinary technological possibilities of the microprocessor were just beginning to be exploited, and they would open a floodgate of profits as they were. We have not begun to see the end of that tide. The Internet did not even exist in its modern sense twenty years ago. For another, for the first time since 1792, the federal monetary authorities, in this case the Federal Reserve, did what such authorities need to do in such situations: they flooded the Street with liquidity. Will such a crash happen again? Undoubtedly. It is a commonplace that Wall Street knows only two emotions, fear and greed, and can switch between them in the blink of an eye. Roughly every twenty years, apparently the length of time it takes to forget the lessons of the past in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, and 1929 we had great crashes. Then it was almost sixty years until 1987. Human beings haven’t changed, but the financial world is very different than it was twenty years ago. Increasing globalization and decreasing national barriers are ever more tightly integrating world markets. The Internet makes it possible to trade stocks from anywhere in the world. Sharply reduced brokerage commissions have encouraged frequent trading. Fast-spreading wealth has greatly increased the number of traders. And new instruments and derivatives have still uncertain effects on the market. Most of all, the amount of information available in real time is now staggering. Michael Bloomberg became one of the richest men in the world by providing a means of accessing and manipulating that information in ways that were inconceivable twenty years ago. As Bette Davis said in All About Eve, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
October 15, 2007
The Duke Non-Rape Case—Sources Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:00 AM EST In a post last June, Alexander Burns wrote, regarding the Duke case, “I . . . find it believable that the Duke faculty, as well as members of the national media, joined in a ‘rush to judgment that was racist at its heart.’ . . . I’m curious where I might look for evidence of such racism. I’ll admit that I try my hardest to block out the hysterical yammering of Nancy Grace and journalists like her, so I’m probably not as tuned in to this case as the average American. This being the case, what would I say if I wanted to convince somebody that the media and faculty would have reacted differently if the exotic dancer in the case had been white?” I would highly recommend Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, by Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson. It reads like a John Grisham novel (in fact it’s blurbed by Mr. Grisham) but is written by a nationally respected legal reporter and a history professor at Brooklyn College who blogged exhaustively on the case as it was unfolding. The book has been very well reviewed, even in The New York Times Book Review, although the Times, deservedly, comes in for brutal criticism in the book for its shamelessly agenda-driven coverage of the case. On Amazon, it’s been reviewed by 32 readers, 30 of them giving it five-star reviews. (There is one four-star and one, inevitably, one-star review.)
October 14, 2007
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Nobel Peace Prize II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:10 PM EST Joshua Zeitz helpfully clarifies that Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his embrace of nonviolent means to achieve the goals of the civil rights movement, not for his opposition to the Vietnam War. Mr. Zeitz is, of course, entirely correct, and I never meant to imply otherwise. Let me add that I think Dr. King deserved the prize as much as anyone who has ever received it. The civil rights movement produced a profound social revolution in this country. A historically oppressed minority demanded justice and, after a long, intense, often bitter struggle, received it. I wonder if people under, say, 50, realize just how intense, protracted, and bitter the struggle was, how much it consumed the political attention of the country in the late forties, the fifties, and the early sixties. But considering its size and the depths of feelings on both sides, it was, I think, a remarkably bloodless struggle. It was by no means completely bloodless. Like all such movements, the civil rights crusade has its honored martyrs, many of them, including, of course, Dr. King himself. Compared to comparable struggles in other countries and at other times, however, the death toll was very low. I think that was due in part to the strength of American constitutional institutions and respect for the rule of law, but much was certainly due to Dr. King and the other leaders of the movement, who argued that moral force would win the day and sooner than physical force could. But for them, this country might have been drenched in blood in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and we are forever in their debt that it was not.
October 13, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST Just a few responses to Alexander Burns’s post. The nature of peace and war has changed markedly since Alfred Nobel established the Peace Prize in his will, calling for it to be awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” I think he would be astounded at how much standing armies have shrunk in size over the last few decades and how long it’s been since there was a “peace congress.” Great-power war was a constant threat in Nobel’s day—Abou Ben Adhem’s nightmare. It is much more remote today. So who receives what is perhaps the most prestigious prize in the world has—and should have—changed. Perhaps its name should be changed to the Nobel Humanitarian Prize to reflect the new reality. And certainly I have no objection to the prize, whatever it’s called, going to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have done good work in the cause of humanity. Mr. Burns mentions three people who have not contributed to peace in any direct sense but have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Norman Borlaug, Muhammad Yunus, and Al Gore, and puts them on the same plane. I do not. Both Borlaug and Yunus, when they were recognized, had accomplished a great good. Borlaug had developed strains of wheat that produced much higher yields. Thanks to these new strains, Mexico became a net wheat exporter by 1963 and Pakistan and India both saw wheat production double between 1965 and 1970, the year Borlaug won the Peace Prize. The “green revolution” he fostered has continued to spread to other areas and other crops, greatly reducing world hunger. He is one of the giants of the twentieth century and was known to be so when he won the Peace Prize. Yunus began his microloan program in 1976 and established the Grameen Bank (which shared the prize) in 1983. In the next two decades it helped tens of thousands of Bangladeshis lift themselves out of abject poverty by providing low-interest credit, and the idea has spread widely to other countries. Increasingly, private foundations are helping to reduce poverty in this way, rather than by means of grants to governments, which are often deeply corrupt in poor countries (by no means the least of the reasons they are poor). But Al Gore was awarded the prize merely for his prediction of the consequences of not following one possible way to combat global warming. His movie, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar for best documentary but is, in fact, propagandistic, selecting facts and making unsubstantiated claims with gay abandon. A British judge recently ruled that there were at least nine serious errors of fact in the movie and ruled that it can only be shown in British classrooms if it is accompanied by balancing information. Al Gore has consistently refused to debate the subject, even though he is an excellent debater. (He mopped the floor with Ross Perot on the subject of NAFTA, for instance, early in the Clinton administration.) Even The New York Times, which gave the story the lead with a two-column head, (all other Nobel prizes this year got only a reefer on the front page), states that Gore’s co-winner, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is much more cautious in its predictions. Gore, for instance, predicts a 20-foot rise in sea levels over the next century; the panel thinks one foot (about equal to the rise in the last hundred years) is more like it. That’s a very big difference. Al Gore has unquestionably raised the public consciousness regarding global warming. But he has done his level best to shut down any discussion of both its causes (an open scientific question) and possible solutions other than the one he favors—capping and then reducing carbon emissions—an open political question. To use a financial metaphor, Borlaug and Yunus had their money in the bank when they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Al Gore has, at best, a paper profit. If he ends up intellectually broke, the Nobel Peace Prize will have been diminished. Mr. Burns is correct that I erred in saying that the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian Parliament. It awarded by the Nobel Prize Committee, which is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. That strikes me as a distinction without a whole lot of difference. (By the way, if someone would like a short course in how microlending works and would like to read a wonderful novel in the process, let me recommend A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute. Shute was a wonderful storyteller perhaps best remembered today for his On the Beach, made into an unforgettable movie by Stanley Kramer.)
October 12, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:50 AM EST To no one’s surprise, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Al Gore and the United Nations Committee on Climate Change for their work on global warming. Let’s take a look at previous American Peace Prize winners and what they received the prize for. 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt, for leading negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese War. 1912 Senator (and former Secretary of State) and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Elihu Root, for his work in advancing arbitration as a means of settling international disputes. 1919 President Woodrow Wilson, for advocating the establishment of the League of Nations. 1925 Charles G. Dawes, member of the Allied Reparations Committee (and later Vice President of the United States), for developing the Dawes Plan to help Germany stabilize its economy and meet its reparations obligations. 1929 Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, for his work on the Kellogg-Briand Treaty to end war. 1931 Jane Addams, international president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, for his advocacy of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty. 1945 Secretary of State Cordell Hull, for his work establishing the United Nations. 1946 Emily Greene Balch, honorary international president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and John R. Mott, chairman of the International Missionary Council and President of the World Alliance of Young Men’s Christian Associations. 1947 American Friends Service Committee, on behalf of the Society of Friends (the Quakers). 1950 Ralph Bunche, principal secretary of the United Nations Palestine Commission and chief mediator to end the first Arab-Israeli war. 1953 Former Secretary of State George C. Marshall, for the Marshall Plan. 1962 Linus Pauling, for his crusade against nuclear testing above ground. 1964 Martin Luther King, Jr., for leading the American civil rights movement. 1970 Norman Borlaug, for leading the “green revolution” that greatly increased food yields. 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for the Vietnam peace accord. 1985 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, for its campaign on the dangers of nuclear war. 1986 Author Eli Weisel, for his “practical work in the cause of peace” and for delivering a powerful message of “peace, atonement, and human dignity.” 1997 Jody Williams, jointly with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which she headed. 2003 Former President Jimmy Carter, “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” 2007 Former Vice President Al Gore, for his work on global warming. It seems to me that this list can be divided into groups. There were those, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Bunche, and Henry Kissinger, who accomplished something in the cause of peace by ending a war. Then there were those such as Woodrow Wilson, Charles Dawes, Frank Kellogg, Cordell Hull, George Marshall, and Norman Borlaug, who made (or attempted to make—neither the League of Nations nor the Dawes Plan nor the Kellogg-Briand Treaty worked) future wars less likely by specific actions, policies, or scientific accomplishments. Then there are those, such as the Society of Friends, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King, Jr., the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and Eli Weisel, who opposed war (or violent means to obtain domestic political goals) or particular aspects of war and who were given the prize for their eloquence or symbolic value in the cause of peace. Finally there were the political peace prizes. Had Jimmy Carter shared the 1978 prize with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin for achieving the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab nation, I doubt that anyone would have objected. It was a huge advance toward bringing peace to the world’s leading powder keg, and Carter contributed significantly to achieving it. But since leaving the presidency, Carter has been drifting ever further leftwards and has wallowed in the moral smugness that has always been his most prominent characteristic. (Just the other day he said that the only thing he regrets about his Presidency was not having sent one more helicopter to rescue the hostages in Iran. Really. Running for reelection, he carried only as many states as Herbert Hoover had carried in 1932 and won even fewer electoral votes. But he has no regrets having, I guess, made no mistakes other than failing to send enough helicopters.) Had he possessed the gift of eloquence he might have contributed something to the cause of peace since 1981. But no one has ever accused President Carter of that. The only speech of his that has lasted in the national memory is one of the most disastrous in recent presidential history, the “malaise speech.” Violating the longstanding and wise unwritten rule that ex-Presidents should give their opinions in private, he has publicly opposed American foreign policy at nearly every turn. And that was what he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for. As for Al Gore, his prize, too, seems more political than anything else. Has he brought about peace anywhere? No. Has he instituted a policy, treaty, or scientific revolution that makes war in the future less likely? No. Has he been unusually eloquent in the cause of peace? No. He has instead advocated, often by tendentious means, a scientific hypothesis that is by no means settled and a political program predicated on that hypothesis’s being fact. The political class (the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian parliament) loves that particular program because it would greatly increase the power of politicians. Ergo the prize. Other programs might accomplish much more at far, far less cost and disruption to the world economy (see here for another approach). Indeed, Al Gore’s approach to solving global warming might well increase the chances of future war by bringing fast-rising world prosperity to an end. Prosperity is good for peace. Alfred Nobel wanted the peace prize he established awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” How Al Gore and his crusade for one particular approach to combat global warming fits that bill is a mystery to me.
October 8, 2007
A Dying Language Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:00 PM EST Many of the world’s languages are in deep trouble. There are about 6,000 of them at the moment, but they are dying out at the rate of one every two weeks as those who use them as a native tongue die and their children prefer to speak one of the major languages instead. Indeed, the top 20 languages in the world—as measured by number of native speakers—are now spoken by 96 percent of the world’s population. One language, of course, English, is rapidly becoming everyone’s second language and is now widely spoken in no fewer than 107 countries. If the world ever settles on a single language, it is highly likely that it will be English, which has numerous advantages as a lingua franca over and above being the world’s most widely spread language. The Wall Street Journal today carries a front-page story on one man’s crusade to save another dying language, Morse Code. Morse Code, of course, is not, strictly speaking, a language at all. It is a code that works perfectly well in any language that can be expressed in the Roman alphabet and, I imagine, can be adapted for other languages as well. But it is unquestionably dying. The federal government no longer requires competency in Morse Code in order to get a ham radio operating license. The Internet, cheap phone rates, and other technological advances have mortally wounded it. Morse Code was invented in the United States, by Samuel F. B. Morse. It was the only part of the Morse telegraph system that was wholly his creation, and a brilliant one it was. By noting the frequency of letters in English, Morse assigned dashes and dots to each letter, the most frequently used getting the shortest code. So E, the most common letter, is simply dot, while Z is dash dash dot dot. To Morse’s surprise, Morse Code proved so easy to learn that it was not even necessary to write it down: a trained operator could just listen and understand it by ear without “translating” it. Ham radio operators used to do exactly that, but there aren’t many Morse users left anymore. So a retired astrophysicist named Chuck Adams, who loved using a ham radio as a child, cooked up a software program that can translate books into Morse. If you would like to listen to, say, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds in Morse Code, Mr. Adams will be happy to sell you a CD for a modest $10.50. It won’t save the Morse Code from ending up in the Smithsonian as Mr. Adams’s generation passes from the scene. But at least, like the grammars and recordings being created by linguists desperate to save dying languages from being utterly lost, it will preserve the sounds and rhythms of Morse forever.
September 28, 2007
What Hath Google Wrought? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:40 AM EST Last night I was watching a documentary on the life of Franklin Roosevelt by David Grubin. I got it from Netflix, and I recommend it. The film showed FDR delivering his Fourth Inaugural Address, on January 20, 1945, which he gave at the White House with little ceremony. I was struck by a sentence in it and made a mental note to look it up this morning. The speech is not one of FDR’s more famous ones and so it is not to be found in such compendia as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations or William Safire’s Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History. Twenty years ago, I would have had to go to a library. The odds are no better than fifty-fifty that the local ones would have had it, so I probably would have had to send for a book, and it might have been three or four days before I was able to get my hands on the text. Even at the New York Public Library it would probably have taken me at least an hour to determine where I could find it, send in a | 
