Kissinger on the Changing World Order

Henry Kissinger, "The Assembly of a New World Order," The Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2014

The concept that has underpinned the modern geopolitical era is in crisis

Libya is in civil war, fundamentalist armies are building a self-declared caliphate across Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan's young democracy is on the verge of paralysis. To these troubles are added a resurgence of tensions with Russia and a relationship with China divided between pledges of cooperation and public recrimination. The concept of order that has underpinned the modern era is in crisis.

The search for world order has long been defined almost exclusively by the concepts of Western societies. In the decades following World War II, the U.S.—strengthened in its economy and national confidence—began to take up the torch of international leadership and added a new dimension. A nation founded explicitly on an idea of free and representative governance, the U.S. identified its own rise with the spread of liberty and democracy and credited these forces with an ability to achieve just and lasting peace. The traditional European approach to order had viewed peoples and states as inherently competitive; to constrain the effects of their clashing ambitions, it relied on a balance of power and a concert of enlightened statesmen. The prevalent American view considered people inherently reasonable and inclined toward peaceful compromise and common sense; the spread of democracy was therefore the overarching goal for international order. Free markets would uplift individuals, enrich societies and substitute economic interdependence for traditional international rivalries.

In the Middle East, religious militias violate borders at will. Getty Images

This effort to establish world order has in many ways come to fruition. A plethora of independent sovereign states govern most of the world's territory. The spread of democracy and participatory governance has become a shared aspiration if not a universal reality; global communications and financial networks operate in real time.

The years from perhaps 1948 to the turn of the century marked a brief moment in human history when one could speak of an incipient global world order composed of an amalgam of American idealism and traditional European concepts of statehood and balance of power. But vast regions of the world have never shared and only acquiesced in the Western concept of order. These reservations are now becoming explicit, for example, in the Ukraine crisis and the South China Sea. The order established and proclaimed by the West stands at a turning point.

First, the nature of the state itself—the basic formal unit of international life—has been subjected to a multitude of pressures. Europe has set out to transcend the state and craft a foreign policy based primarily on the principles of soft power. But it is doubtful that claims to legitimacy separated from a concept of strategy can sustain a world order. And Europe has not yet given itself attributes of statehood, tempting a vacuum of authority internally and an imbalance of power along its borders. At the same time, parts of the Middle East have dissolved into sectarian and ethnic components in conflict with each other; religious militias and the powers backing them violate borders and sovereignty at will, producing the phenomenon of failed states not controlling their own territory.

The challenge in Asia is the opposite of Europe's: Balance-of-power principles prevail unrelated to an agreed concept of legitimacy, driving some disagreements to the edge of confrontation.

The clash between the international economy and the political institutions that ostensibly govern it also weakens the sense of common purpose necessary for world order. The economic system has become global, while the political structure of the world remains based on the nation-state. Economic globalization, in its essence, ignores national frontiers. Foreign policy affirms them, even as it seeks to reconcile conflicting national aims or ideals of world order.

This dynamic has produced decades of sustained economic growth punctuated by periodic financial crises of seemingly escalating intensity: in Latin America in the 1980s; in Asia in 1997; in Russia in 1998; in the U.S. in 2001 and again starting in 2007; in Europe after 2010. The winners have few reservations about the system. But the losers—such as those stuck in structural misdesigns, as has been the case with the European Union's southern tier—seek their remedies by solutions that negate, or at least obstruct, the functioning of the global economic system.

The international order thus faces a paradox: Its prosperity is dependent on the success of globalization, but the process produces a political reaction that often works counter to its aspirations.

A third failing of the current world order, such as it exists, is the absence of an effective mechanism for the great powers to consult and possibly cooperate on the most consequential issues. This may seem an odd criticism in light of the many multilateral forums that exist—more by far than at any other time in history. Yet the nature and frequency of these meetings work against the elaboration of long-range strategy. This process permits little beyond, at best, a discussion of pending tactical issues and, at worst, a new form of summitry as "social media" event. A contemporary structure of international rules and norms, if it is to prove relevant, cannot merely be affirmed by joint declarations; it must be fostered as a matter of common conviction.

The penalty for failing will be not so much a major war between states (though in some regions this remains possible) as an evolution into spheres of influence identified with particular domestic structures and forms of governance. At its edges, each sphere would be tempted to test its strength against other entities deemed illegitimate. A struggle between regions could be even more debilitating than the struggle between nations has been.

The contemporary quest for world order will require a coherent strategy to establish a concept of order within the various regions and to relate these regional orders to one another. These goals are not necessarily self-reconciling: The triumph of a radical movement might bring order to one region while setting the stage for turmoil in and with all others. The domination of a region by one country militarily, even if it brings the appearance of order, could produce a crisis for the rest of the world.

A world order of states affirming individual dignity and participatory governance, and cooperating internationally in accordance with agreed-upon rules, can be our hope and should be our inspiration. But progress toward it will need to be sustained through a series of intermediary stages.

To play a responsible role in the evolution of a 21st-century world order, the U.S. must be prepared to answer a number of questions for itself: What do we seek to prevent, no matter how it happens, and if necessary alone? What do we seek to achieve, even if not supported by any multilateral effort? What do we seek to achieve, or prevent, only if supported by an alliance? What should we not engage in, even if urged on by a multilateral group or an alliance? What is the nature of the values that we seek to advance? And how much does the application of these values depend on circumstance?

For the U.S., this will require thinking on two seemingly contradictory levels. The celebration of universal principles needs to be paired with recognition of the reality of other regions' histories, cultures and views of their security. Even as the lessons of challenging decades are examined, the affirmation of America's exceptional nature must be sustained. History offers no respite to countries that set aside their sense of identity in favor of a seemingly less arduous course. But nor does it assure success for the most elevated convictions in the absence of a comprehensive geopolitical strategy.

— Dr. Kissinger served as national security adviser and secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Adapted from his book "World Order," to be published Sept. 9 by the Penguin Press.

Lilia Shevtsova on Putin Ends the Interregnum

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. . . Putin stubbornly refused to admit to the Russian military’s involvement in the war in Ukraine. What this means is that there are no concessions on the part of the West and Ukraine that can satisfy the other side. This is true not because of bellicosity or incompetence of the Russian leader; he is quite rational and competent. Rather, he understands all too well the logic of personalized power in Russia—that, at this late stage of regime decay, it requires him to keep Russia in a state of war with the outside world. The war with Ukraine has thus become an existential problem for the current Russian political regime. It can’t afford a defeat.

Source: Lilia Shevtsova, "Putin Ends the Interregnum," The American Interest, August 28, 2014

Dawkins on Platonic Essentialism

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Essentialism—what I’ve called "the tyranny of the discontinuous mind"—stems from Plato, with his characteristically Greek geometer’s view of things. For Plato, a circle, or a right triangle, were ideal forms, definable mathematically but never realised in practice. A circle drawn in the sand was an imperfect approximation to the ideal Platonic circle hanging in some abstract space. That works for geometric shapes like circles, but essentialism has been applied to living things and Ernst Mayr blamed this for humanity’s late discovery of evolution—as late as the nineteenth century. If, like Aristotle, you treat all flesh-and-blood rabbits as imperfect approximations to an ideal Platonic rabbit, it won’t occur to you that rabbits might have evolved from a non-rabbit ancestor, and might evolve into a non-rabbit descendant. If you think, following the dictionary definition of essentialism, that the essence of rabbitness is "prior to" the existence of rabbits (whatever "prior to" might mean, and that’s a nonsense in itself) evolution is not an idea that will spring readily to your mind, and you may resist when somebody else suggests it.

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The preposterous Electoral College system in US presidential elections is another, and especially grievous, manifestation of essentialist thinking. Florida must go either wholly Republican or wholly Democrat—all 25 Electoral College votes—even though the popular vote is a dead heat. But states should not be seen as essentially red or blue: they are mixtures in various proportions. You can surely think of many other examples of "the dead hand of Plato"—essentialism. It is scientifically confused and morally pernicious. It needs to be retired.

Source: Richard Dawkins, Essentialism, (Answer to the question: What Scientific Idea is Due for Retirement?), The Edge, 2014

Eberstadt on Increasing World Equality

Nicholas Eberstadt,"How the World Is Becoming More Equal," The Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2014

Globally, lifespans have never been so long and evenly distributed. Education has had an equalizing effect too.

Is the human condition becoming more unequal? Many assert it is, but their focus is almost exclusively on economic inequality. This is problematic for two key reasons.

First, even in data-rich America, statistics on wealth distribution are at best rudimentary. Measured economic equality differs dramatically depending on whether one looks at income (pre- or post-tax? by the year or over a lifetime?), or at personal consumption, which seems to be distributed much more equally.

More crucially, income is not the only important measure of human well-being and life chances. Consider two global revolutions that are improving the human condition and making it more equal.

The first is how long people live. In 1751, according to the Human Mortality Database, Sweden's overall life expectancy at birth was barely 38 years. But this was an arithmetic average for a population within which survival prospects were wildly, brutally disparate. Roughly a fifth of all Swedes died in their first year of life; by age 5 only 70 Swedes were still alive of every 100 born. But about half of those who made it to age 5 lived to 60 and beyond.

This dispersion of lifespans means that the distribution of survival was correspondingly unequal. When measuring disparities in income distribution, economists conventionally use the "Gini coefficient." This index runs from 0 (perfect equality) to 1.0 (representing perfect inequality when a single person possesses everything). If we use this metric to assess inequality in Sweden's lifespans in 1751, we get a Gini index of 0.46.

By comparison, the World Bank says the Gini index for income in Mexico in 2010 was 0.47. Lifespans in 18th-century Sweden, in short, were distributed about as unequally as incomes are in Mexico today.

Flash forward to 2011. Sweden's life expectancy at birth was nearly 82 years. The risk of dying in infancy in Sweden today is about 100 times lower than in 1751—and the risk of dying in early childhood is more than 100-fold lower. Today 90% of Swedes can expect to survive to age 65, and more contemporary Swedes live to 86 than to any other particular age. The estimated Gini index for Sweden's inequality in age at death has plummeted to 0.08. Lifespans have never been so long—or so equally distributed—as they are now.

The trend in Sweden holds for the rest of the world. In the early 1870s Italy's life expectancy was under 30 years and the odds of death before age 5 nearly 45%. The estimated Gini index for age at death was 0.56. Today (2009) Italy's life expectancy at birth is about 82 years, and the Gini index for the distribution of national lifespans is as low as Sweden's.

And the U.S.? Life expectancy rose from about 61 years in 1933 to about 79 in 2010. Over those same decades the Gini index for lifespan inequality was cut in half—from 0.22 to 0.11. Despite the ethnic, income and other differences that characterize our society, Americans of all backgrounds have never enjoyed such equality in length of life as we know today.

Detailed, reliable, long-term mortality for most of the world is unavailable. However, the broad pattern for every national population is essentially the same: the higher the life expectancy at birth, the lower the inequality in age at death.

Demographers suggest that life expectancy at birth for the world in 1900 was about 30 years. Today, according to the World Health Organization, the U.N. Population Division and the U.S. Census Bureau, it is about 70.

Given the close correspondence between life expectancy and the Gini index for age at death, we can be confident that the world-wide explosion in life expectancy over the past century has been accompanied by a monumental narrowing of world-wide differences in length of life. When a population's life expectancy rises from 30 to 70, the Gini index drops by almost two-thirds—from well over 0.5 to well under 0.2.

This survival revolution—and the narrowing of inequalities in humanity's life chances—is an epochal advance in the human condition. Since healthy life expectancy seems to track closely with overall life expectancy, a revolutionary reduction in health inequality may also have occurred over the past century. Improvements in global mortality for the poor have contributed to the very "economic inequality" so many now decry. This is another reason such measures can be deceiving.

The spread and distribution of education has had a similar impact. In 1950 roughly half of the world's adults—and the overwhelming majority of the men and women from low-income regions—had never been exposed to schooling. By 2010 unschooled men and women 15 and older account for a mere one-seventh of the world's adults, and about one-in-six from developing areas.

Harvard's Robert Barro and Korea University's Jong-Wha Lee have reconstructed trends in educational attainment for 146 countries from local census returns and survey results. According to their compendium, mean years of schooling for the world's adult population rose from three in 1950 to about eight years in 2010. In developing regions it has more than tripled to seven years from two. For more-developed countries, the mean is more than 11.

Using the Barro-Lee numbers, three Moroccan economists (Benaabdelaali Wail, Hanchane Said and Kamal Abdelhak ) have reckoned that the Gini index for adult mean years of schooling world-wide was cut roughly in half between 1950 and 2010, from 0.64 to 0.34. Every region has evidently witnessed progressive reductions in such inequality. For the world's males and females 15-24 years of age, years of schooling are now more evenly distributed than is income in any country.

Educational quality can still differ sharply within and between countries. And in America, according to estimates by Daniel Bennett of Florida State University, the decline in educational inequality as measured through mean years of schooling may have stalled since the early 1990s. Nevertheless, the human condition—how long people live and how much education they get—has become incontestably better and more equal.

Mr. Eberstadt is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose books include "Russia's Peacetime Demographic Crisis" (National Bureau of Asian Research, 2010).

Robert Darwell on Global Warming

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Global-warming proponents betray science by shutting down debate

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Climate-change science is “settled,” say proponents of anthropogenic (human-induced) global warming, or AGW: the earth is getting warmer, and human activities are the reason. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up by the United Nations in 1988, has issued five assessment reports since its founding. In its most recent, in 2013, the IPCC stated that it was now “95 to 100 percent certain” that human activities—especially fossil-fuel emissions—are the primary drivers of planetary warming. Frequent news reports—such as the story of the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a process that some scientists say is irreversible—seemingly confirm these conclusions.

And yet, highly credentialed scientists, including Nobel Prize–winning physicist Ivar Giaever, reject what is often called the “climate consensus.”
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Genuine scientific inquiry is degraded when science becomes politicized. The standards that have prevailed since the Scientific Revolution conflict with the advocacy needs of politics, and AGW would be finished as the basis of a political program if confidence in its scientific consensus were undermined. Its advocates’ evasion of rigorous falsifiability tests points to AGW’s current weakness as a science.

Source:Rupert Darwall, "An Unsettling Climate,"  City Journal, Summer 2014

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Munger on Governance by Unicorns

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Ever argued public policy with people whose State is in fantasyland?

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But they may not immediately see why "the State" that they can imagine is a unicorn. So, to help them, I propose what I (immodestly) call "the Munger test."  

1. Go ahead, make your argument for what you want the State to do, and what you want the State to be in charge of.
2. Then, go back and look at your statement. Everywhere you said "the State," delete that phrase and replace it with "politicians I actually know, running in electoral systems with voters and interest groups that actually exist."
3. If you still believe your statement, then we have something to talk about.

Source:  Michael Munger,"Unicorn Governance," The Freeman, August 11, 2014 

WSJ on Cash for Clunkers

WSJ_Editorial, "Stimulus for Clunkers," The Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2014

A new study shows the Obama program cost car makers money.

The annals of failed government programs always yield new surprises, and the latest is one for the ages. The White House can't even pay people to buy new cars without harming car makers.

In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper this month, economists at Texas A&M return to Cash for Clunkers, the 2009 stimulus fillip that dispensed vouchers worth as much as $4,500 if people turned in their old cars for destruction and bought a new set of wheels. Mark Hoekstra, Steven Puller and Jeremy West report their "striking" finding that the $3 billion program's two-month run subtracted between $2.6 billion and $4 billion from the auto industry.

The irony is that the goals were to help Detroit through the recession by subsidizing sales and to please the green lobby by putting more fuel-efficient cars on the road. By pulling forward purchases that consumers would make later anyway, the Obama Administration also hoped to add to GDP. Christina Romer, then chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, called Cash for Clunkers "very nearly the best possible countercyclical fiscal policy in an economy suffering from temporarily low aggregate demand."

The A&M economists had the elegant idea of comparing the buying behavior of Texas drivers who owned cars that barely qualified for cash (those that got 18 miles per gallon of gas or less) and those that barely did not (19 mph). Using state DMV sales records, this counterfactual allowed them to isolate the effects of the Cash for Clunkers incentives and show what would have happened without the program.

The two groups were equally likely to purchase a new vehicle over the nine month period that started with Cash for Clunkers, so the subsidy did not create any extra auto business. But in order to meet the fuel efficiency mandate, consumers who got the subsidy were induced to purchase smaller vehicle models with less horsepower that cost on average $2,500 to $3,000 less than those bought by their ineligible peers. The clunkers bought more Corollas, and everybody else more Chevys.

Extrapolated nationally, auto revenues may have plunged by more than what the government spent. And any environmental benefits cannot be justified under the federal social cost of carbon estimate of $33 a ton. Prior research from 2009 and 2013 has shown that the program cost between $237 and $288 a carbon ton.

The basic economic illogic of Cash for Clunkers is that you can't create wealth by destroying serviceable assets and then force-feeding consumer spending on replacements. But the saving grace was supposed to be that at least the auto makers benefited from a government-sponsored firesale on their products. Now that illusion has collapsed too. If Cash for Clunkers was "the best possible" stimulus, maybe that helps explain why the economy is still limping along six years later.

Goldberg on Piketty

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Why does Piketty reject the more romantic path of the classic Marxist? You know—“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win”—that kind of thing?

One answer to this question explains not only Piketty’s thinking but the response to his work as well: Piketty is a member of the ruling class. Piketty’s way puts Piketty and his friends in charge of everything. A one-time adviser to the Socialist politician Ségolène Royal, a star academic and a columnist for Libération, Piketty is a quintessential member of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter identified as the “new class.” Schumpeter’s prediction of capitalism’s demise hinged on his brilliant insight that capitalism breeds anti-capitalist intellectuals. Educators, bureaucrats, lawyers, technocrats, journalists, and artists, often the children of successful capitalists, always raised in the material affluence of capitalism, would organize to form a class whose collective interest lay in seizing economic decisions from the free market. As Deirdre McCloskey writes: “Schumpeter believed that capitalism was raising up its own grave diggers—not in the proletariat, as Marx had expected, but in the sons of daughters of the bourgeoisie itself. Lenin’s father, after all, was a high-ranking educational official, and Lenin himself a lawyer. It wasn’t the children of auto workers who pulled up the paving stones on the Left Bank in 1968.” No, it was actually people like Piketty’s own parents.

There is a reason the most passionate foes of income inequality tend to be very affluent but not super rich, intellectuals like Paul Krugman and other journalists eager to set the threshold for confiscatory tax rates just beyond their own income levels. But this sort of class war—the chattering classes versus the upper classes—is only part of the equation. Power plays a huge part as well. A full-throated endorsement of classic leftist radicalism would set a torch to Piketty’s own tower of privilege. The State, guided by experts, informed by data, must be empowered to decide how the Rawlsian difference principle is applied to society. Piketty’s assurance that inequality “inevitably” leads to violence amounts to an implied threat: “Let us distribute resources as we think best, or the masses will bring the fire next time.” Once again the vanguard of the proletariat takes the most surprising form: bureaucrats (the true “rentiers” of the 21st century!). A revealing sub-argument running throughout Capital is that we need to tax rich people in ever more, new, and creative ways just so we can get better data about rich people! To borrow a phrase from James Scott, author of Seeing Like a State, Piketty is obsessed with making society more “legible.” The first step in empowering technocrats is giving them the information they need to do their job.

This is what places the Piketty phenomenon squarely in the tradition of Croly and, yes, Marx himself. Piketty’s argument, with its scientific veneer and authoritative streams of numbers, is a warrant to empower those who think they are smarter than the market—and who feel superior to those most richly rewarded by it.

Source: Jonah Goldberg, "Mr. Piketty's Big Book of Marxiness," Commentary, July 1, 2014