Not Like Us

As an apocryphal story from World War II goes, American troops were on high alert for German saboteurs trying to infiltrate their lines.  Speaking fluent American English and knowledgeable about all the ordinary things Americans would know, the saboteurs dressed and presented themselves as fellow Americans lost from their own units.  A “lost fellow American” was brought to one old sergeant for interrogation, and the sergeant asked him where he was from, to which the fellow replied, that he was born and raised in Baltimore. Then the sergeant asked him to name the street that runs by the harbor and on into Little Italy, the location of many fine Italian restaurants.   The fellow answered quickly, “That’s “Lom-bard” street. At which point, the sergeant took out his pistol and shot him.  For any native of “ole Bawlamer” would have pronounced it, “Lum-ber” or “Lum-berd” street.  We humans are really good at spotting those “not like us.”

We’re becoming ever more sophisticated at spotting infiltrators.  Back in prehistoric days, anthropologists tell us, the origins of art were the color coded stripes we painted on our faces to enable recognition of tribal membership at a distance.  Now we spot it in many ways.  The news today is of riots in moderate, compassionate Sweden against mainly Islamic immigrants, by poor native Swedes who view them as obnoxious job takers.  The same kinds of riots take place in Greece, as neo-Nazis challenge job-seeking immigrants from Albania and North Africa.  France pats itself on the back for the seamless way it absorbed Portuguese immigrants, aided immensely by sharing a common religion and a similar language.  Immigrants on their way from Central America through Mexico face violence and exploitation before they ever get near the U.S. border, from Mexicans whom many Americans would have difficulty in distinguishing from the immigrants being attacked.  Even China faces unrest as rural laborers from distant provinces move to the major cities.  And in the U.S., the immigration reform legislation trudges its way through the Congress, attacked bitterly at each step.  In part, that’s because resolving the American political issues requires understanding deeper global problems that go beyond America and beyond politics.

The first parts of these global issues are the causes, strength and likely duration of the current waves of immigration.  The easy explanations are economic.  The classical economic view is that all production of goods and services comes via the interaction among natural resources, capital and labor (these in turn break down into a variety of sub-factors like human versus intellectual versus financial capital, etc., the number and kind of which varies depending on which economics course you slept through.) Global movement of capital and technology and information and facilities forces a consequential global movement of labor, whether welcomed or not.  When two or three of the factors shift location, the others are forced to follow.  Greek immigrant riots are the consequence of shift of capital from Greece back to northern Europe.  The increasing dominance of multinational corporations in the global economy generates rapid strong fluctuations as the corporations rapidly change locations seeking their best advantage.  The pressure to reduce the cost of labor (that’s the rest of us) creates more and more wage flattening everywhere, and displaced labor searching desperately for a job, any kind, anywhere.  In addition this migration pressure will only strengthen as climate change produces more droughts, flooding, water wars, etc., around the world.   A big part of the migration out of Africa comes from increasing drought.  The growing visibility of the small elite, who profit exorbitantly from these movements while millions suffer, raises resentment among both immigrant and “native” working poor, and riots occur.  They are good explanations of the causes and inevitable increases in immigration, but can’t cover the whole story of what to do about it.  There was no global migration in the ancient Middle East, when Prophets reminded their people “you too were once strangers in a strange land”, a sure sign that discrimination was going on.  And while early humans may have feared that those “not like us” were stealing the finest antelope, their animosity to the “not like us” expressed by color coding their faces was closer to the defecatory circles around territory spread by hippopotami than to rational economics.

It does, however tell us about the things that won’t work.  Building a wall along the Mexican border to halt immigration is reminiscent in so many ways of the story of Canute, king of the Saxons, who in his pride told the tide not to come in, and got a good soaking for his efforts.  It tells us that America cannot just become a highly attractive place to live and work without participation in making other places better off, too.  Sweden’s problems are due in part to its being so moderate, compassionate and tolerant that it serves as a magnet for displaced labor.  You don’t move from Africa to just below the Arctic Circle by happenstance.  America’s wave of immigrant labor comes from Latin America, and any American immigration reform must look also to the causes of displacement in the south, and work with those nations to correct them.  And it tells us that reform that does not address the nature and causes of the fear and resentment on both sides of the question will not be effective in the longer term.

A major source of resentment among immigrants has been the lack of a clear path to citizenship; the legislation makes a start on that.  A major rational source of fear among opponents of immigration is worry about too easy access by terrorists from abroad.  Rational screening of immigrants is likely to remain part of the legislation. By the way, that’s always been a problem in American immigration.  The “Molly McGuires”, a secret society of Irish coal miners in Pennsylvania in the 1840's fought the big mine owners through tactics that today would clearly be labeled terrorism, and some historians depict the shooting spree of Billy the Kid in the Lincoln County Land War as a kind of terrorist extension of the Irish struggle for independence (Billy was a child of recent Irish immigrants to New York City who drifted west and changed sides.  Most of the ranchers in the Lincoln County War were English landlords. The homesteaders and sheep herders were very like the ancestors Billy had left in Ireland.)  Terrorism-minded hotheads have always been a part of the immigration stream, but we've endured that.  Another rational source of resentment among immigration opponents is competition for a dwindling job supply, but that presumes a static economy consumed with fear of corporate movements elsewhere.  An economic focus on infrastructure building and new technologies would work wonders.  Chinese labor was welcomed in America in the 19^th century while the intercontinental railroads were being built, and American railroad companies advertized in Europe for settlers to fill the spaces they had opened up. There are towns across an aging America that are drying up because of lack of young workers to carry on.  In short, economic reform must accompany immigration reform.

But the deep-down human issue is that immigrants are “not like us.”  They’re not properly color coded, or speak with strange accents or worship different gods.  The difficult problem is within all of us, to strike the proper balance between the need for native tolerance of difference and immigrant willingness to assimilate.  So far, the immigrants are doing a better job than the natives.  There is a rising fear that democracy can’t work in an enormous multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society where people just can’t get along with each other well enough to make necessary decisions.  But alternatives to that society are no longer available.  That’s what history is all about, listing the other experiments that failed.  This is our 21^st century test, how to work with the fact that tribalism and a global world are basically incompatible.  We need to translate within ourselves “not like us” to “possibly the bringer of a fresh approach.” 

Corporation Man

An interesting program on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) reported recent findings by anthropologists about the relationships between Neanderthals and modern humans, Homo Sapiens. It had always been thought that sapiens and Neanderthals were so different that they existed together only for a short time in competition before sapiens wiped out Neanderthals entirely.  It turns out Neanderthals were a lot more like us than we had imagined, with speech genes like ours and the beginnings of art. And though we had thought interbreeding impossible, it turns out that Neanderthals and sapiens occupied the same territories for thousands of years, and that Neanderthal genes are included in all our inheritances.  In fact, some of the genes which give us disease resistance were originally from Neanderthals.  Neanderthals didn’t just get vanquished; they are part of us, still protecting us.

Last week I was “waxing wroth”, as the old books used to describe having a tantrum, about losing our focus on major issues like climate change because of media focus on more entertaining things like whether three days of confusion over press release language about Benghazi constituted a cover up. A second mega-tornado in or near their home territory in less than ten years seems to have at least caused some southwestern congressmen to shuffle their feet uneasily on the climate subject, but other major issues remain in obscurity.  An issue that might as well be in the witness protection program for all the attention it gets is the continuing struggle between multinational corporations and national governments. That issue was first brought to my attention by David Rothkopf’s book, Power, Inc., which I’ve mentioned before.  In it Rothkopf likens the struggle to the struggle between Neanderthals and sapiens, with the nation state as the Neanderthal on the way out. But the nation state has been fighting blindfolded.  It’s not just a blindness peculiar to conservatives; liberals seem equally indifferent.  Joan Walsh, a liberal whose book I criticized in my last post, recounts ad nauseum the sins of American Republicans but seems oblivious to the ways both Republicans and Democrats are being eaten alive by multinational corporations claiming to be American “persons” just like the people next door.    But it seems to be acquiring some visibility internationally.

Apple has been heavily criticized both here and abroad this past week for its use of the tax shelters created by shifting profits around between shell subsidiaries.  A Senate report alleges that Apple has avoided $76 billion in U.S. taxes by shifting them to no-tax Irish corporations that have no employees and exist only on paper.  Britain’s Prime Minister has added Amazon and Starbucks to the list, and the EU Council president, citing Google among others, has raised it to a top issue as a major factor in their economic crisis.  Corporations like GE and others that pay no tax on billions of dollars of revenue are becoming commonplace.  It’s on its way to being a major agenda item for the G-8 and possibly the G-20 meetings as they roll around.  That sort of attention will be required because, as I’ve noted, multinationals’ major weapon in the struggle is that they, unlike your local business, are not confinable within national boundaries.  They are “your” corporation when they seek subsidies, protection or business from you. They vanish elsewhere when you ask for taxes or the obligations of national loyalty.  They do not pledge allegiance.

Currently, nation states are being starved in a systematic way by the multinationals.  The taxes avoided by multinationals in just the U.S. add up to more than the national deficit, creating both the deficit issues conservatives abhor and the inability hated by liberals to fund infrastructure development, new technology and social programs. I do not mean that multinationals act in any concerted way seeking to starve nations.  That would be stupid – they and their employees live and feed on the multiplicity of goods and services provided by the nation.  They just, like parasites, mindlessly keep on feeding until their host is dead without any action to keep it alive, then expect to move on to another.  But of course, their host and its people are also their customers, and additional nation states are in short supply.

A real Modus Vivendi needs to be established between multinational corporations and their host nation states.  A first goal needs to be an international structure of tax treaties that will ensure continued fiscal health of the nation states.  As one OECD official recently stated off the record, "international tax treaties are intended to avoid double taxation, not to allow double non-taxation.” But the other major issue is that corporations, unlike real “persons”, currently have fiduciary responsibilities but no social responsibilities.  Both through internationally enforceable regulation or through broadening of corporate responsibilities to include obligations both to host nations and to their employees everywhere, multinationals must contribute to the sustainability of the world they inhabit.  Social responsibilities are not just externalities.  For example, an international requirement for adequate health care coverage or retirement coverage would be a major step forward.

I mentioned that we get some of our disease resistance from Neanderthal genes.  A responsibility to “promote the general welfare” is part of the genetic makeup of the Neanderthal nation state that David Rothkopf thinks is on the way out.  It is part of our social “immune system”, defending us from social ills brought on by our obsessive pursuit of personal gain.  Those social ills ultimately, when left unchecked, have always resulted in our killing each other through wars and revolutions and unable to work together on our common problems. The creation of a new age of international corporatism must not result in removal of the system that helps keep us as a species alive.

The Contradictions of Liberalism

The associate pastor of my church recently observed that, in addition to our having no choice about the family we are born into, we have no choice about the community.  Our community includes those we know well and those invisible to us, people we like or intensely dislike, those we agree with and those whose opinions we hate, those we need and those who need us.  Relationships exist with all those around us, whether we like it or not.  We delude ourselves, she concluded, by thinking that we can create our own community consisting only of people we like and need.  Our only real choice is the quality of our relationships with others.  She was right of course, but hers is a truth we mostly forget.  Excluding and hating the bad guys seems so much fun.  Liberals like to think that “it takes a village to raise a child,” but some like to select the villagers carefully.  It’s one of the contradictions liberals are prone to.

I’m reading right now, reluctantly, a book, “What’s the Matter With White People?” by Joan Walsh.  I say reluctantly because, though I agree with a lot of what she has to say, the book is such a constant flailing of Republican targets, and is filled with such venom against them, that I wince as I read it.  It’s like reading a blow-by-blow account of one of those 75-round boxing matches from the time of John L. Sullivan.  Her vision is of a battle in which unwitting Democrats constantly over the years are being tricked and splintered by those duplicitous Republicans.  I would be equally appalled by a Republican counterpart to her book.  The targets are broad and much too easy to hit, aiming from either direction.  Ms. Walsh is of Irish heritage, as partly am I, and reminds me of the old Irish joke, “Is this a private fight, or may anyone join in?”  There, I’ve probably just created another tiny splinter group.  And her book is a prime representative of the contradictions of some liberals.

Modern liberals are known for their emphases on community, planned social action to improve the lot of the disadvantaged, and an active role for government in doing so.  Their vision is of a democratic society in which individuals, each of them a bundle of minority opinions on a variety of issues, all of them equal before the law, work together to create change for the betterment of all.  The success of the democratic process that such a vision entails depends on the willingness of all to work together and achieve compromise between conflicting values.  One of the best examples of both the difficulty and potential of such a process occurred some years ago in a community meeting involving a fierce and acrimonious debate over zoning for a proposed subsidized housing development.  The proposed housing’s chief attacker was an elderly white lady, filled with fears and anger, and the chief supporter was a young African-American minister.  Suddenly, to my and everyone’s shock, the young minister got up in the midst of one of her diatribes, walked over to her and hugged her, saying “I’m so glad to see the pride you have in the place you’ve grown up in, and your determination to keep it from being harmed.  I just want you to know that I’m proud of this community too and also want to keep it from harm.  And we'll work hard for that.” She was flabbergasted, but her attitudes changed overnight, and she became a proponent of the change.

Walsh lamented how the intense fragmentation among liberal interest groups prevented developing and legislating the social action program they all sought.  Each group fought for its own special interest, regardless of the needs of others. In doing so, they often were their own worst enemies.  In particular, her book is about the loss of the blue-collar working class from the liberal New Deal coalition, in large part because of racial conflicts stemming from their competition for the same jobs in a dwindling job base.  Her “bad guys” were of course Republicans who deliberately pitted working class groups against each other, but she doesn’t recognize that exclusionary advocacy in itself was a major contributing factor (though she rightly praised Martin Luther  King, Jr. for his inclusion of people of all races in his advocacy.) 

And the greatest need, a prosperous, quality community for all, requires inclusion of all, but fierce advocacies for that community can entail exclusion of those with whom we disagree. That is what we see on both sides of the aisle these days.  Republicans and Democrats are equally guilty of vilifying and excluding each other, making progress of any sort impossible.  But at least the Republicans have the excuse that the exclusionary behavior is consistent with their individualistic ideology.

Walsh, our representative liberal, starts her tirades with a lament that liberals have lost their focus on needed economic progress that would produce more jobs and have focused more and more on cultural changes, from a woman’s freedom of choice to inclusion of minority groups to gay marriage.  She concludes it by lamenting all the cultural conflict that stands in the way of economic progress and wondering whether democratic progress is possible in a multicultural nation.  Does she sense the contradiction there?  She seems blind to the possibility that a growing economy could bring prosperity to all, and in the process reduce cultural conflict, or that acceptance of the poor and disadvantaged does not make a community whole by itself if it does not include acceptance of those already doing well.  Or that appropriate government action is the issue, not size.  Even the appropriate size of armies changes as technology evolves, and there is nothing necessarily incompatible with a smaller, highly efficient government and highly effective treatment of social ills.

The problem that both she, as the representative liberal, and the arch conservatives share is viewing the issues at conflict in terms of a zero-sum battle over a constant or dwindling pie.  Neither seeks to persuade the other in the other’s own terms that a victory can be shared.  Instead each seeks to find a way for the other to lose, expecting that their loss will be his victory.  At my wife’s recent college reunion, one speaker commended another for always, from college days on, starting out by asking about any deal, what’s in it for the other guy? That had turned that question asker from a poor boy into a highly prosperous publisher, respected by all.  We all need to keep finding ways for everyone, including those we may regard as enemies, to win. 

Lost in Translation

In the early days of both the cold war and of the computer industry, a popular joke was that the CIA had developed a program for natural language translation between Russian and English and was testing it for its ability to handle idioms. One test was to first have the program translate “Out of sight, out of mind” into Russian, and then have the program translate it back into English.  Developers were appalled when it came back, “Unseen, insane.”  That issue’s been long since corrected.  But sometimes that may be the most accurate translation.

This past week, the newspapers have been filled with what Don Rumsfeld calls the “perfect storm” of criticism of the Obama Administration .  Benghazi hearings featuring accusation of cover ups with all questions being the wrong ones, congressional tantrums about stupid IRS actions made in response to prior congressional requests for closer scrutiny of 501(c)4 applications and activities, outrage over the White House and AG “I didn’t know about it” response to the too wide spread investigation of leaks to the AP, when knowledge on their part of details of a White House leak investigation would have been an outrageous signal of possible White House intrusion into the investigation – all sound and fury, signifying what?  As is often the case, issues like climate change, the impending disaster of the upcoming baby-boomer retirement generation, the success of the American economic stimulus approach versus the EU austerity approach, the infrastructure disaster already on our hands, the 4000 Americans dead from gun killings just since the Newtown killings, etc., etc., are among those not covered.  All these have fallen out of the “media window.”

The media window, for those not familiar with it, can be seen this way.  Take, for example, the front page of your daily newspaper, and draw lines to form rectangles around each article.  Typically, there will be about six or seven of these rectangles on each page of your paper.  The same applies equivalently to the “space” in its allotted time of your TV news reports.  The total of these at any time is the “media window.” At any given time there are only a limited number of these “windows” available, and possession of them is fought for viciously by the various groups struggling either to get their message out or to prevent some rival group from getting their message out.  There are hundreds of these rivals on any given day, and possession of these windows is refereed by the news editors, and publishers, who often have their own axes to grind, or just want to sell newspapers or attract viewers.  Scandals and highly inflammatory language attracts viewers or readers, and drives out quieter but more significant news.

For example, yesterday the Washington Post contained the equivalent of several pages (dozens of windows) about Benghazi, the IRS, the AP investigation and goings on in Syrian politics, while including one short article on a highly significant report about climate change and no mention at all of a significant event regarding the EU economic austerity program.  The climate change item was a just released report in Nature that a multitude of fish species have migrated north toward polar regions over the past few decades; a strong confirming signal about global climate change.  Climatologists use fish migrations as a key indicator of significant climate alterations.  But the average fish will know more about those changes than the average American, thanks to lack of coverage.  The unreported economic item was a report that EU finance and IMF officials were visiting the UK to beg for a reduction by the UK in their austerity program because of the deleterious effect of the program on both Britain and the EU.  That was another major  confirmation of the success of stimulus over austerity approaches to handling recession.

Most political reporting I view with a ho-hum, jaundiced attitude, knowing it to be just the ephemera of daily living, provided more for excitement than for any real significance.  But a few things get me really upset.  At the top of that short list is refusal to deal with issues that will have major effects on the lives of my grandchildren, and other peoples’ grandchildren.  When I read that Boehner or some other politician is stating flat-out that he will not permit the House of Representatives to deal with climate change, I know he will be toward the top of the list of most despised politicians in American history 50 years from now because of his refusal to allow action when it was possible.  But that won’t help my grandchildren then or now.  The same, to a lesser extent, applies to politicians and interest groups standing in the way of a vibrant American economy because they might actually have to help pay for it.  And a major weapon in the arsenal of those resisting change is to distract the American people from real issues by inflammatory reporting that drives out the significant issues from even being reported.  We the people, and our media, allow it, and we will not go down well in history for doing so. In this case, “Out of sight, out of mind” is truly insane.

The Contradictions of Conservatism

A favorite pastime among social philosophers is reflecting on revolutions, and of course the juiciest have been the French Revolution and the 1848 Revolution (that’s the one that Les Miserables is all about.)    There is something about carnage in the streets, when viewed from a distant, musty office, that stirs the blood.  Even Hegel called Napoleon, "History on horseback."  In my student days, Burke’s and Marx’s and DeTocqueville’s reflections on those revolutions, along with Weber’s more abstract Religion and the Rise of Capitalism and Adam Smith’s The  Wealth of Nations were required reading, so the free-for-all they started in my head is still bouncing around in there fifty years later.  The benefit is that one sees patterns of thinking not that obvious from reading any one of them in isolation.  For example, that conservative thought is based on a profound skepticism about the future, while liberal thought is equally skeptical about the past.  And that overvaluing either one of those is, as Adam Smith observed, liable to lead to social turmoil.

Edmund Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France was the original conservative Bible, was quite explicit in his view that it can seldom be right to sacrifice the present for an uncertain future.  To his opposite, Marx, the past and present were all sacrifice which must make way for a glorious future.  While DeTocqueville was somewhat more optimistic about the future of democracy, he regretted in advance its failings when compared with his aristocratic past.  Burke’s skepticism led him to advocate progress as a cautiously incremental experimentation with change, always alert to unintended consequences. That is why it is a misnomer in some ways to credit the current sequestering and push for austerity to conservatism, for the Great Conservative himself would have probably repudiated them.  That current enthusiasm for present sacrifice to make way for a glorious future is far closer to Marx.  As is the economic determinism.  Burke would never have “thrown out the baby with the wash” by deliberately turning happy, prosperous workers into the unemployed to advance an uncertain future golden age of balanced budgets.

The elderly of course are those with the shortest future, so sacrificing their present for a future uncertainty should by all rights be anathema to conservatives.  Yet, trimming Social Security cost of living increases and forcing public retirees out of their current health insurance into uncertain insurance pools are all part to the austerity proposals of the current “conservatives” in the Congress.  In the words of Alexander the Great, they should change their ways or change their name.

And they should lift their visions higher.  A current principal villain for conservatives is Keynesian economics.  They regard Keynesian economics as the source of impetus for stimulating the economy at the risk of future deficits and as the cause of all deficit ills.  Social conservatives deride Keynes as not caring about the future because of his homosexuality.  Apparently Keynes' essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" bears no weight.  Yet Keynes himself, according to his biographer Robert Skidelsky, writing in the Washington Post, based his economic views on  Burke’s principle of not sacrificing the present for a radically uncertain future.  And his willingness to stimulate the economy was confined to "transition periods" of major economic change.  For that reason, Keynes could not tolerate long term mass unemployment in such transitional periods when something could be done about it. 

And of course, the present that should not be sacrificed includes the abundant opportunities to invest in startup industries that will reshape the American, and global economy.  We are indeed in a transitional period when old technologies are withering and the new technology sectors that will drive the future are being born.  One thing that is certain about that future is that other nations will take advantage of the changes if we don’t.  We are at a turning point for our economy where true conservative and liberal economic interests should coincide, where what is good for manufacturing is good for the country.  What is lacking among conservatives is the courage not to waste the present for a stale and gloomy fear of the future.  Instead, they are caught up in a paper chase after chimaeric financial products at the expense of constructing new industries and new infrastructures to support them.  Building "cash" is now the name of the game. 
According to conservatives, the great perceived danger of Keynesian stimulus is that it will baloon the money supply and devalue their treasure troves.  But to avoid it, they are sitting on their "cash", balooning currency through endless creation and circulation of derivatives.  The eventual implosion of that bubble will leave them with little of value, and the lives of countless others in shambles.  They contradict themselves.

Choosing the Right Reason

An article today in the science and health section of the Washington Post was all about the possible effects of aluminum exposure as a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease – it’s likely and very common, but no one knows for sure.  Another health article was from the Consumers’ Union, warning about common myths regarding antioxidant dietary supplements.  It was all about current findings in the effectiveness of antioxidants in eliminating free radicals, about how they operate and about how to choose between them – a worthwhile article, but it  neglected the major current finding, as reported in Scientific American, that  some amounts of free radicals have been shown in lab studies to increase longevity.  So, highly effective antioxidants might actually shorten your life span.  Another continuing science issue being reported on, though not in this particular edition, is the effects of climate change, a subject of controversy for years now as the weather around us gets weirder and weirder.

Also being reported in the politics section of the Post is the raging controversy in the Republican Party over the costs and benefits of immigration reform.  Jim DeMint, head of the Heritage Foundation and a bitter foe of immigration reform, has issued a report saying the proposed reform will cost taxpayers 6.3 trillion dollars.  He summarizes his argument in a Post article.  Reform proponents are crying foul and citing the many omissions and errors in the calculations, while claiming that to the contrary, reform will boost the economy to new heights and reap a handsome profit.  One of the major errors they cite is that DeMint has included as a cost the retirement and healthcare benefits paid to immigrants after they become citizens; proponents note that they are rights available to all citizens and shouldn’t be charged as costs in the analysis.    But they would be citizens as a result of immigration reform.  As someone who’s done a number of economic analyses, I could make a case for either point of view.  Newspapers on principle print conflicting views, both in science and in politics, and it is up to the reader to work out the truths.  That is why bad science continues to flourish alongside good science, and that is why dubiously motivated political writing continues also.  The best guide for the reader is always to remain sensitive to the motivation of the writer.  Things are always written for a purpose, to clarify or to obscure, to put forward one point of view or another.  The Post has gone so far as to issue a disclaimer to its own article, but why it did so is also subject to challenge.

Science and politics share the trait that they generally progress through incremental experimentation, not by quantum leaps.  Even Newton claimed that his success was because he stood on the shoulders of giants.  And Newtonian physics was eventually replaced by Einstein.  Our nation at its founding was viewed as a great experiment, and Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, reflected the continuance of that experiment.  Reaping profits on immigration is not what the "great experiment" is all about. It is, as Lincoln noted, dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal. At any point the full truth is elusive and not fully visible. Aluminum may or may not cause Alzheimer’s, antioxidants may or may not improve health, our recent weather may or may not be the result of climate change, and immigration reform may or may not be a net economic benefit. There is large room for controversy, and it always exists. That is true both in science and politics.  The recent movie, Lincoln, is a wonderful portrayal of just how that political process worked out in Washington in the 1860’s.  What is clear to us now was the subject of strenuous disagreement among men of good conscience 150 years ago.

Machiavelli, in his advice to the Prince, remarked that for every new thing, there are many reasons it should not succeed and only one why it should, and that the Prince should choose the one.  That remains true today.  The real issue with immigration reform is choosing the right reason, and that reason has little to do with economics.  The reason for immigration reform is that it is a moral imperative in order for us to remain true to our principles as a nation.  I personally believe with the Post and other proponents that reform will provide major economic benefits, but that is secondary.  We as a nation simply cannot look at ourselves honestly while denying the very principles on which our ancestors founded us.  And we must remain honest with ourselves, or we lose our future.

Shared Visions

Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, probes into just what it is that make such successes as the Great Gretsky, Bill Gates, etc., the icons that they are.  He finds as much to credit in their dates of birth as in their other attributes.  Canadian hockey stars, IT giants and star New York lawyers tend to have birthdates within certain ranges.  Those birthdates confer opportunities which the highly successful then exploit.  For example, in a system which places young hockey players in levels by calendar year, talented young players who are bigger and stronger than equally talented players born late that same year will accumulate extra attention and coaching that leads to adult stardom.  New York lawyers who work in low status branches of law because of religious discrimination against them at top firms will find themselves the top dogs because of their experience when their fields suddenly become the most highly regarded.  Ah, opportunity, such an interesting word! 

In the article by Stephen Pearlstein that I have mentioned, Is Capitalism Moral?, Pearlstein comments that equality of opportunity  is the American spin on how to compensate for unequal market outcomes in a way that makes the market moral, but that the difficulty comes in figuring out which disadvantages require compensation. That comes to mind when reading about the current debates in education.  All agree that education is a key to future success in a 21^st century global economy.  And equality in educational opportunity seems a requirement for economic opportunity to be truly equal.  Jefferson rightly regarded public education as the key to maintaining our liberties and the health of the nation.

Two of the current issues in education are the proposed “core learning” standard and the extension of required free public education to kindergarten and preschool levels. 46 states have agreed to accept the standard, but four continue to hold out and a number of the nominally accepting states appear to be dragging their feet in preparing their teachers to teach it.  So equal educational standards across geographic areas, in a country where 25 percent of the people change their location each year, has a long way to go.  As for public preschool, congressional conservatives have planted their feet firmly against it.  Bah, humbug!  Cannot the poor learn by candlelight as Lincoln did?  Those are problems enough, but of course a bigger problem is that such proposals do not go far enough.

Gladwell’s observations about opportunity extended to education also.  He noted that while a major difference in educational attainment between rich and poor at the high school level shows up in all studies, when testing is done at both the beginning and end of the school year, it turns out that the learning gains between rich and poor are roughly equal.  The differences at the high school level for public school students are the cumulative effects of summer vacation!  Children from wealthy families continue their learning at summer study camps while the poor tend to forget parts of what they learned during the long summer layoff.

Differences are even greater between elite private schools and public schools.  A first grade student in good public schools these days is expected to start out knowing how to read the simple words learned in kindergarten.  That in itself is a step forward from pre Sesame Street days when all reading began in first grade.  But in the private school, the first grader is handed a book and expected to read it.  The curriculums and teaching methods at the private schools are equivalent to those in the gifted and talented programs of the public schools, but are available to all the students.  Each summer break has an extensive required reading list associated with it.  When combined with the summer study camp experiences the students all experience, the results at high school levels can be startling.  The fundamental assumption throughout is that students are capable of more than they at first think they are.

The attainment issues at such early ages are much less the results of difference between students than they are of differences in the resources applied to teach the students.  And here of course that equality of opportunity issue rears its head.  How can the product of a non advanced placement education in public school be equal in opportunity to the product of an elite private school education, and how does one compensate for the difference?  But this is where things get interesting.  In a global economy, our national competitiveness depends on the educational attainment of our whole population, not just that of a wealthy elite.  And we have come to recognize that attainment is also, like opportunity, a word with many dimensions.  We measure attainment only in terms of college preparedness, while the world and the markets recognize many different scales.  How do you compare the attainments of Wayne Gretsky and Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking and Picasso?  The big buzz word these days is the manufacturing renaissance, using American know-how in robotics and nanotechnology.  That renaissance will require millions of educated workers, some college graduates and others skilled technicians, to succeed.  We as a nation cannot claim lack of opportunity.  The solutions to our equal opportunity issue and our global competitiveness issue are the same. 

We need comprehensive educational reforms just as we need comprehensive immigration reforms.  The immigration reforms, in addition to satisfying a moral imperative, would provide the millions of additional workers we will need in a busy economy.  But all workers must be trained to acquire the skills to succeed.  Alongside our 7.5 percent unemployment rate, we currently have 600,000 jobs going unfilled because of the lack of workers with the skills to fill the jobs.  A booming economy would generate millions more jobs.  And a modern education process is the key to both creating and filling those jobs.  Lengthening of the school year, summer study programs, rapid implementation of “core learning” requirements, expansion of teaching resources and approaches to provide “gifted and talented” methods to all students, development of high-tech apprenticeship programs (Britain has increased its apprenticeship programs ten-fold in the past decade and Germany is racing ahead to become one of the world’s most prosperous economies through its high-tech training), all these are needed.  And plodding, piecemeal adoption of reforms will leave us further and further behind.

To accomplish the needed reforms we need to expand our economic vision alongside our moral vision to recognize that both seek the same goals.  Achieving educational reform requires a common effort that cannot be accomplished only through private business.  A selfish refusal to support education through taxes is contrary both to our morality and to our economic success. The necessary massive reform and support of the public education system is not going to be profitable to any one business, but its outcomes will increase the profits of all.  And the outcomes will contribute to restoring the morality of the markets.