Monthly Archive for December, 2010

I’ve written about Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man before, but to be explicit about it, I accept the general strain of political philosophy which says that people seek universal individual recognition and dignity and prefer to have that recognition and dignity conferred by a mutual voluntary social contract between fellow citizens, secured by a government with robust but clearly circumscribed powers of enforcement according to the rule of law. And not only do people prefer this socio-political arrangement—liberal democracy undergirded by economic rationalism—but it is in fact the only arrangement that satisfies the dual human demands for individual recognition and material well-being. Further, there is a soft historical teleology at work in which the world’s nation-states are homogenizing around these ideas and their concomitant political and economic institutions. Alternative systems and ideologies throughout history purporting to be competitors of the liberal democratic model have proven undurable, unstable, inefficient, and in general fundamentally flawed in some fatal way, even as they were able to endure for a very long time, and indeed still do endure. Despite the apparent resilience of alternative systems, capitalistic liberal democracy remains the strongest, most appealing, and most complete form of social organization and represents the historical culmination of the process of human political evolution: the "end of history."

This is Fukumaya’s basic thesis. It is quite a claim, I know. The ideas of course did not originate with him, but he’s probably their most cogent and well-known modern explicator. Versions of these ideas about recognition and dignity and political and economic liberty are ubiquitous in our national civic discourse. They animated the U.S. civil rights movement, were suffused into fifty years of Cold War rhetoric, were the impulse behind George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda, the philosophical foundation of liberal interventionist arguments about Iraq or Bosnia, and the reason for the ascendancy and legitimacy of the global human rights movement.

The near-evangelical zeal with which advocates have imbibed this premise is explained in part by this chart from Freedom House, showing country rankings of freedom over time. (The most recent Freedom House "Map of Freedom" is here.)

If you imagine the chart starting in 1800 the trend is even more dramatic. (And some of the countries listed here as "Partly Free" may still qualify as liberal-democratic-capitalist if defined generally enough.)

Perhaps none of this is very controversial so far. The controversial part comes when advocates and governments assert that since these values have universal appeal, they will necessarily flourish anywhere in the world if we only remove what seems to be the one or two main impediments.

In the journal The National Interest—interestingly enough where Fukuyama’s original essay that inspired his book appeared in 1989—there is a good essay-review by John Gray that attempts to undermine the entire historical and philosophical foundation of the universality of human rights, and the belief in the inevitability of their worldwide appeal and eventual triumph.

Gray spends much time arguing that the conception of universal human rights is a thoroughly modern invention. "The belief that rights are fundamental in political ethics is a late twentieth-century fancy," and largely emanate from Harvard philospher John Rawls and his 1971 book A Theory of Justice. This sounds fishy to me. Surely the modern iteration of the global human rights movement is, well, modern; but the very idea that rights are fundamental in political ethics? Gray dismisses John Locke by arguing that Locke derived his conception of rights from natural law, and (so his argument goes) since natural law is mandated from God, the rights so derived are less legitimate. This is a weak distinction, especially in light of Locke’s influence on Paine, Madison, and Jefferson, none of whom Gray even mentions, and all of whom made vast contributions to the "centrality of rights in political ethics," and all of whom had conceptions of natural rights apart from inerrant divine mandate (yes, even though some gave rhetorical deistic nods to the "creator.") 

Gray also argues that proponents of universal rights make the mistake of neglecting the essential role of the state in guaranteeing such rights, and so tend to ignore or discount the importance of strong state institutions in securing an environment in which rights can flourish. Gray doesn’t go so far as to say that rights don’t exist unless there is a state to recognize and enforce them. But he says, "without the state they [count] for nothing."

I’m not sure what sort of metaphysical claim Gray is making here. If he concedes that rights "might in some sense exist prior to the state" then how could they count for nothing? Surely Gray agrees that rights being respected is better than rights being denied. So I say that working to legitimize and codify the respecting of rights is noble and essential work. A polity that believes in the a priori legitimacy of their rights-claims, and the inherent injustice of their denial, may just want to work toward a social contract which builds more effective state institutions and better enshrines their claims in the rule of law. Why is that dangerously utopian? And why ought we not support it? Look at Freedom House’s map again.

But to be fair Gray’s problem isn’t with those who want to strengthen democratic institutions, it’s with those who think removal of tyrants is a synonym for freedom:

If rights are what humans possess in the absence of a repressive regime, all that needs to be done to secure human rights is to remove the despot in question. But if rights are empty without the state to protect them, then the nature of the government that can be reasonably expected to emerge when tyranny has been overthrown becomes of crucial importance.

I don’t know who disagrees with the idea that rights can only be secured by an effective state. Societies organized by sub-rational associations of tribe or sect or religion, and animated by ethnic chauvinism or nepotism or aristocracy or the subjugation of women or minorities, are indeed not fruitful environments for human flourishing. Fukuyama argues that there is a historical mechanism at work in which that simple idea is gaining increasing legitimacy, and being enacted in practice, the world over.

At length Gray discusses Iraq and Afghanistan as places not prone to transformation into rights-respecting societies. If his argument is that the United States has a deeply circumscribed ability to spread human rights by military force, then sure, I agree. But he also villifies the notion that we should be vigorously engaged in legitimizing the repecting of individual rights claims, and delegitimizing the systematic denial of such rights. This I see as the real value in the human rights "movement," yet it’s what Gray believes is dangerously utopian: 

A project is utopian when it can be known in advance that its central objectives cannot be realized. This may be because these aims are impossible in any human society, or because they cannot be achieved in particular communities in any future that can reasonably be anticipated. […]

If securing rights presupposes an effective state, as early modern thinkers acknowledged and contemporary liberals have forgotten, the human-rights agenda is plainly utopian in much of the world. Many of the nearly two hundred actually existing sovereign states are collapsed, corroded, criminalized or weak. Incapable of maintaining a rudimentary peace, the task of sustaining a government, let alone rights, is beyond their competence.

True, liberal democracy in Somalia cannot be reasonably anticipated any time soon, or in the next lifetime or two or three. But there is an essentialism in Gray’s outlook that is troubling. The same arguments about "particular communities" were variously trotted out to warn against the possibility of democratic transformation in East Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East. Yet none of these regions or peoples have been untouched by the appeal of the liberal democratic model and the basic freedoms it enshrines.

As I said at the start, no one argues that alternative systems cannot and do not endure, or that failed or "corroded" states exist and will remain immune to democratic institution-building for a long time. But why do we, along with the vast majority of mankind, regard such alternative systems as axiomatically inferior? First, because obviously results matter, and the discrepancy in results is profound. But it’s also due to the mysterious process by which certain societal norms are legitimized and delegitimized over time. The ideal of universal natural rights is in part responsible for the evanescence of a world in which young ambitious nobles were expected to add to their holdings through conquest, or could claim power by the divine right of kings. Such norms are delegitimized through an inscrutable and gradual process of advocacy and rationalization. (Bad norms can be inculcated in the same way of course.)

As I’ve written before, a clue to the universal appeal of liberal democratic principles is the extent to which even the world’s most decrepit tyrannies adopt the rhetoric and institutional forms and practices of liberal democracy:

Everyone has a parliament and an austere parliamentary building, hollow though it may be behind the facade. Everyone allows its citizens to queue up from time to time and put ballots into ballot boxes, even if election outcomes are never in doubt. Everyone has a nominally independent judiciary, even if in practice it is a mere puppet of the executive. Everyone has language that inhibits the behavior of police and security forces, though in practice capricious law prevails.

Even North Korea has a constitution that appears to guarantee all sorts of rights of free speech and assembly and media. What I mean is that, with very few (but very notable) exceptions, all nominally alternative systems feel the need to legitimize their power through the language and form of liberal democracy, and they recognize the primacy of civic rights as something they ought to be for, have to be for, even if in practice they continue to deny them. 

I don’t want to seem overly optimistic about the pace of liberal democratic transformation or its amenability in the remaining hard places of the world. Authoritarians everywhere are very adept at perpetuating their power by wielding a brutal internal security apparatus and by co-opting the opposition. They also systematize and institutionalize their rule in ingenious ways.

Take Egypt. There is a piece in Slate on how the Mubarak regime, in the midst of an ongoing succession crisis, has tried to ensure the continuing support of the country’s powerful military by giving it a massive economic stake in the status quo. It’s estimated that the defense ministry controls 33 percent to 45 percent of the domestic Egyptian economy:

It employs 40,000 civilians, who assemble water-treatment stations for the Ministry of Housing, cables for the Ministry of Electricity, laptops for the Ministry of Education, and armaments for the Ministry of Interior’s vehicles. Meanwhile, other ministry employees produce washing machines, refrigerators, televisions, and metal sheeting for construction projects.

They have monopoly power over these industries, and this means a hefty profit for the Army, and a lavish financial incentive to give Mubarak a free hand in political matters as long as the current arrangement continues. Meanwhile a garrison state has been created, and the hope of disentangling this vast web of entrenched corruption, co-signed by the country’s most powerful entities, is basically impossible to imagine. 

China also represents an ongoing test case for liberal democratic evangelists. Despite its thus far successful authoritarian growth model, there are incipient wellsprings of social and political unrest as not all strata of society have benefited equally from the economic boom. Young people whose parents gave up everything to send them to college find that the opportunities for upward mobility implicitly promised them by the regime are not available in practice. The urban economy simply does not produce enough good professional jobs for all of them, leaving them embittered with stifled ambition. It remains to be seen if the regime can balance its religion of stability with the demand for recognition of these new hoards of educated urban hopefuls.

These are fascinating and difficult cases of economic and political development. But the fact remains that by any metric, civilization on net has undergone an undeniable process of emancipation from ignorance and savagery and superstition and irrationality, and the steady codification of values and rights unrivalled in their promise for individual human dignity and material prosperity. To deny that there does seem to be an inexorability associated with this process is itself a willful delusion, and a dystopian one. 

At his excellent and steroidally substantive National Review blog, Reihan Salam has been making an interesting and challenging case against the DREAM Act. Reihan’s argument is basically that due to political constraints, the right to live and work in the U.S. is a scarce good. We can mete out that scarce good using humanitarian metrics (privileging poor and hardship-stricken migrants) and non-humanitarian metrics (privileging highly-skilled and educated migrants). Reihan argues that if Dream Act proponents were serious about crafting a truly humanitarian immigration policy, they would do so by privileging the world’s poorest residents from the world’s most hopeless nations, rather than comparatively well-off migrants from Mexico:

Given the power of remittances relative to overseas development assistance, the decision about which less-skilled migrants to welcome into the United States, either on a temporary or permanent basis, is a weighty one. I would exclude all less-skilled workers with OECD countries and focus on workers from highly-indebted poor countries, and from regions in humanitarian crisis. There would, of course, be some prudential limits.

Which countries do I have in mind? One place to start, and potentially stop, is with countries with a GDP per capita below $2,500, e.g., countries like Burundi, Comoros, Kenya, Madagascar, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Zambia, among many others. Haiti, a country ravaged by natural disasters and a failing state, is another strong candidate. Note that Mexico, a member of the OECD with a GDP per capita of $13,609, ahead of Turkey, Brazil, South Africa, and Colombia and just behind Malaysia, is not on that list.

To be sure, Mexican migrants, like Malaysian or Dutch or Korean migrants, should be allowed to take their chances in what we might call the non-humanitarian track. But I can’t see how citizens of Mexico, an upper-middle-income country, merit slots that would otherwise go to families that would otherwise face the threat of dire poverty (i.e., lives led under the two-dollar-a-day standard), ritual mutilation, and much else.

But I don’t see how this bears on the Dream Act argument. The potential Dream Act beneficiaries will have graduated from an American high school and either joined the military or completed two years at university. They are not necessarily “less skilled” than anyone else. In fact one message of the Dream Act is to say that a child who has grown up and been educated here, who is law-abiding, who volunteers for military service or matriculates at a university, has massive potential to be a highly-skilled and productive member of society. It recognizes that legitimizing such people and allowing them to pursue their careers here, build their social capital here, and pay their taxes here, benefits all of us.

I also think there is a key distinction between the Dream Act kids and Reihan’s group from Zambia or Haiti or Burundi. We are not now deciding, and the Dream Act does not purport to decide, who gets the scarce slots to live and work in the U.S. Like it or not, the beneficiaries of the Act already do live and work in the U.S. Reihan is surely right that these beneficiaries are higher-income, higher-skilled, and higher-status than any other cohort of sympathetic would-be migrants from the world’s poorest countries. (And this whole line of thought seems like a giant straw man: who exactly has argued that the Dream Act represents the greatest utilitaritarian means of alleviating aggregate world suffering and poverty?) But the fact that the Dream Act beneficiaries already have considerable roots here adds another humanitarian element that Reihan simply ignores. Conor Friedersdorf makes the case:

Unlike would-be immigrants, potential Dream Act beneficiaries have developed friendships, formed romances, an invested themselves into communities in the United States. All that will be lost if they are forced to leave… […]

[T]he ties the Dream Act beneficiary has to US citizens binds in two directions –– if he or she is given legal status rather than deported, there is a constellation of American citizen friends, lovers, neighbors, teachers, corner grocers, and employers whose loved one, friends or friendly acquaintances will be around for many years, rather than tragically deported or else living in the shadows, circumstances that’ll make some of the important stakeholders in this hypothetical very sad.

I don’t accept Reihan’s implicit either/or construct, as if there were actually a choice on the table between EITHER legitimizing the 825,000 or 2 million Dream Act kids OR the same amount from some hell-on-earth failed state. We can do both! But using Reihan’s construct, the humanitarian damage wrought by denying entry to the world’s most wretchedly disadvantaged must be weighed against the humanitarian damage of tearing apart the social ecosystems of not just the eligible immigrant kids already here, but that of their entire extended network of American friends, family, and associates. That is a lot of social capital to undermine for no reason.

Advocates of a more restrictive and punitive posture toward undocumented migrants often say that they are not against all immigration, just the illegal sort. It’s the rule-breaking and breach of fairness that irks. If only those illegals had “gotten in line” and “waited their turn” like the lawful ones did, there’d be no issue.

Will Wilkinson helpfully points out that this narrative of good (waited in line) migrants and bad (skipped the line) migrants is deeply misleading. A hard-working Mexican with relatively low skills and low education, who has no family in the U.S., has ZERO pathways to legal residence in the U.S. There is simply no line to wait in. Wilkinson:

So you pack up one day, take a hair-raising hike through the desert with your young daughter, meet up with your friends in Tucson, and get to work on the American dream. What were you supposed to do? Consign yourself and your daughter to a life on the edge of poverty out of respect for the American rule of law? Please. […]

[The Dream Act] says that we will not hobble the prospects of young people raised and schooled in America just because we were so perverse to demand that their parents wait in a line before a door that never opens.

Reihan argues as if we are haggling over the creation of an entirely new immigration policy from scratch. If we were doing so, then maybe his world welfare-maximizing scheme would be something to consider. But the scheme assumes that America’s borders are completely secure and that we could truly “choose” who comes here to live and work. But we aren’t doing that. People come here from Mexico because it’s right next door and the economic opportunities here simply compel it. Some of these people brought their unwitting children with them. Many of these children were raised and schooled here. Why not recognize the unique status of these already- or partly-assimilated children, and if you like, also advocate for a massive expansion of the U.S. diversity visa lottery to help those truly, madly, deeply screwed by mere accident of birth? Forsaking the former for the latter makes no sense.

There’s an interesting piece in Slate by Shankar Vedantam on the well-known paradox that conservative states, whose politicians and residents decry the scourge of federal spending, are far larger recipients of federal dollars than liberal states. Indeed, the federal system today is highly redistributive, and getting more so. Deep red Alaska receives back $1.64 for every $1 it sends to Washington, while Massachusetts gets back only $.82 for every $1 it send to the feds. (During the health care reform debate I wrote a bit about this.)

Here’s a chart (via Ezra Klein) showing how much each state gets back for every $1 it ships to DC in taxes. The blue-colored states are net donors to the federal government, and the red-colored ones are net recipients. 

If you think it looks mysteriously like another red/blue divide, you’re right:

So yes, liberal America subsidizes conservative America; and in fact the correlation grows the higher the overall conservative sentiment is in your state. The question is why. Why do deeply conservative states profess to loathe federal spending when they are the largest beneficiaries? Why do they keep electing politicians who ensure this redistributive scheme continues, even as the politicians themselves campaign rhetorically against it? Perhaps relatedly, why are solidly conservative states so poor?

There are so many provocative correlations and unsatisfying proximate causes here, interweaving culture, race, and class; none of which I’m able to synthesize in a blog post, or indeed anywhere else. (I suppose a fine place to start would be Andrew Gelman’s Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, which shows that the ubiquitous red/blue state dichotomy is specious to begin with when it comes to explaining individual voter behavior. I also need to read Kinder and Kam’s book Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinions, which shows how the strength of one’s ethnocentric identification (how we sort ourselves by basic in-group/out-group affiliation) can predict views on all sorts of public policy questions, including—particularly relevant for this discussion—views on social insurance and welfare programs. Basically, ethnocentric whites are more likely to be against means-based welfare, which they view as disproportionately benefiting black people and other perceived out-groups. But they are more likely to support social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security, which they somehow identify as being more "white." Throw in a dash of cognitive biases which allow people to deftly shield themselves from awareness of their own inconsistencies, and perhaps we’re getting somewhere.)  

Anyway, since health-related spending is presumably at or near the top of federal outlays to states, I checked to see if a larger proportion of medicare or medicaid recipients happen to live in conservative states, which would help explain the disparity. But this doesn’t appear to be the case. Kaiser has an excellent chart showing each states’ share of total medicare and medicaid enrollment. Crosschecked with state shares of total U.S. population, there doesn’t appear to be any over-representation in red states or under-representation in blue states.

Then what is it? Some individual states are easy to explain, for instance if they are home to heavily subsidized industries or have a large share of federal jobs. But what else? Well we know that blue states are wealthier on average than red states. I’m sure there are excellent historical and sociological reasons dating back to the founding as to why southern states have less robust information/tech/health economies and therefore can’t attract affluent, educated professionals who pay tons of taxes and demand tons of amenities and services. But as Vendantam notes, this wealth disparity between states doesn’t alone explain the difference in federal redistribution; the trend has continued even as the tax code has become less progressive over time.

For a better explanation, Vendantam looks to economist Gary Richardson, who argues that this redistributive scheme has come about through specific Republican tax policies originating from Newt Gingrich’s 1994 "Contract With America." Since that time,

[t]he proportion of government spending on groups that traditionally supported Democrats fell. The proportion of government income from groups that traditionally supported Democrats rose.

"Tax rates declined more for groups that tended to vote Republican. These groups include people with incomes in the upper tail of the distribution, such as small business owners, property owners, and investors accruing capital gains. … At the same time, expenditures fell more for programs directed toward people that tended to vote Democratic. These groups included welfare recipients, inner-city residents, and individuals in the lower tail of the income distribution."

I am not sure if Richardson/Vendantam are implying a deliberate manipulation of the tax code to benefit partisan affiliates and punish partisan opponents. Either way, certainly shrewd politics to structurally rig things in favor of your political base at the financial and well-being expense of others. And I won’t dare imply that this is a unique Republican phenomenon.

I’m giving ordinary voters a pass on this, since this stuff is impossible to parse out even for people who follow it a lot. But it would sure be nice if their conservative political leaders tamped down the hypocrisy and showed a little more awareness and modesty here, and stopped peddling their constituents some fevered fantasy of state autarky while at the same time ensuring that they keep stuffing their faces with the federal pie.

Speaking of federal pie, and by way of inserting yet another complicating variable–Diabetes rates by state: