Ukraine and Leadership

Some ancient (it's been attributed to many) is reputed to have said, “There go my followers.  I must hurry to catch up with them, for I am their leader.”  We laugh at that as a slap at timidity in leadership.  We've always had the idea that the role of leaders is to lead the charge, flag high and sword waving.  But we wouldn't relish our leadership leading a rush of lemmings, including us, over the cliff.  We want bold leadership without bad consequences.  Leadership of lemmings is probably best done from behind.  It was a wiser Machiavelli who said, “Fortune sometimes favors the man who acts boldly, and sometimes favors the man who is cautious, but always favors him who knows when to be bold and when to be cautious.”  That’s the kind of leader we rationally would prefer, but our gut instinct is to cheer on the flag waver.

That’s the dilemma the Obama administration faces these days.  We elected Obama to get us out of foreign entanglements after sobering up from several years of overindulgence in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Yet we chafe at the bit to jump into Syria and Ukraine.  I've noted before that going into Syria is like jumping feet-first into the middle of the 30 Years War, with angry factions shooting at you from all sides no matter what you do and no way of knowing what actually is the right thing to do.  It’s relatively easy from a historical perspective to know that we have to tread cautiously or not at all in the Middle East these days, but we still have that urge to knock heads and fix that mess.  Ukraine is harder.

Viewed one way, the Ukrainian protests remind us of our own American Revolution, with Putin as George III and Kiev as Boston, though Yanukovych is no George Washington or Sam Adams.  It’s hard not to grab your musket and become a Minute Man.  It’s a middle class revolution against foreign tyranny, economic consequences be damned, and from our own history we love it.  Yanukovych is concerned about Ukraine’s indebtedness, and is willing to surrender some of Ukraine’s freedom of action to get rid of it by putting Ukraine back in Russia’s orbit rather than joining the EU.  We, with our history, don’t relish the idea of selling your heritage for a mess of porridge.  But oddly enough, that’s something like what Scotland did in the 1890s when, to rid themselves of debt, the Scots surrendered supremacy of the Scottish parliament to the English parliament in foreign policy.  Scottish separatists are still regretting that more than a century later, but it’s worked in the meantime.  With memories of Edward long shanks, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the fall of the Stuarts, it wasn't easy for the Scots either, but their financial concerns outweighed their history.  There isn't only one right choice.

From another perspective, Ukraine resembles Russia’s Cuba.  With historically grounded paranoid fears of invasion from the south, Russia has always maintained its own Monroe Doctrine by cultivating, coercively or not, a row of allied buffer states.  Ukraine, like Cuba to the U.S., would be a key loss.  We remember how we felt and acted when the Soviet Union began cultivating Cuba and threatened to place missiles there.  It’s an honest concern on Russia’s part, and understandable.  What is less understandable is Yanukovych ignoring the expressed will of his own people.

Once again, Machiavelli reminds us of the value of knowing when to be bold and when to remain cautious.  Ukraine is a matter clearly involving Ukraine itself, the Russians and the EU.  Intruding the U.S. into that volatile mix merely roils the waters without solving anything.

The broader question is when to act boldly in a multi-polar world.  Veering too far toward caution simply leads to isolationism, itself a dangerous course in a constantly changing geopolitical environment.  An obvious set of tests are that resolving the situation is in our national interest, the situation demands action on our part, our action will be decisive and there is a clear exit strategy – somewhat akin to the Powell Doctrine.  In diplomacy, however, those tests are themselves complex and capable of multiple interpretations.  Every hot spot around the world does not require our intervention, and in many a proper course of action is not obvious.  We are no longer caught up in a zero-sum game with the Soviet Union, where each loss for them is a victory for us.  Analysis requires cool heads, and action needs to be unimpeded by domestic overheated rhetoric.  Mobs do not seek for nuances, but sometimes in diplomacy nuanced action is necessary. 

 American politics has never lacked for rhetoric but the level of it has grown much worse since Vietnam gave the press and politicians license to suspect everything.  Younger people may not remember that until Vietnam American presidents avoided domestic criticism by travelling abroad.  The saying was that inside the U.S. the president was head of his party and abroad he represented all of us.  Foreign policy was mostly considered bipartisan territory.   Now senators and celebrities take their own trips abroad to muddle the waters and political criticism does not die down no matter how far the president has travelled.  It sometimes includes even the expression on his face as he meets foreign leaders.  It leaves our friends confused and our enemies chuckling.

The greatest loss is the ability to act cautiously.  Obama showed, to universal acclaim, his ability to act boldly with the raid on the Ben Laden compound.  Every cautious step he takes is heaped with domestic criticism.  But John Wayne is not the model for our diplomacy.  Showing the flag is no longer appropriate to every situation in a multi-polar world.  Obama could do a much better job of explaining the whys of acting cautiously, but he needs political room at home to do so.  The real test of his leadership is his ability to get the American people to understand and go along with his proposed actions.  For that, he needs our ears and minds, not our partisan rhetoric.   We need to provide them.

Political Correctness

I’ve experienced lately the distress of “being nibbled to death by mice.”  That’s what an old friend at the office used to call those days when the big things you want to do get overtaken by a multitude of little things that just won’t wait.  One of the things I’d rather have worked on lately has been writing, but there’s been no time.  The mice of January “must do’s” leave no room for excuses, lacking even the empathy of a rat.   I regret that, but it does bring to mind interesting news on the science front.

Recent scientific studies show that rats care about the distress of other rats.  In a study reported in the Washington Post, researchers report that the distress is a product of mammalian socialization, not genetics specific to rats.  That is, all species that raise babies have the capability to respond to distress in others of their species, since babies could not survive if their parent did not respond to their signs of distress.  It is the fundamental building block of empathy, and all mammals possess some degree of it.  Response only to similar members of the same species, such as similarly colored neighbors, is a trained trait learned in childhood.  So, where did Libertarians, with their “cheerful indifference to the needs of others” go wrong?  For, as an example, to a scientist, indifference to the distress of a neighbor much like you who is long-term unemployed is clearly not in accord with natural instinct, but an acquired trait.  It requires refusing to recognize the neighbor as having common human traits.  How, and why, did Libertarians learn to go against natural instinct?  It brings to mind Colbert’s comment that “Reality has a Liberal bias.”  The scientist would probably agree.

The Libertarian might argue that I’m just being “politically correct”, and there’s truth in that.  But what is political correctness in the first place?  Scientific correctness is straight-forward.  A fundamental assumption of science is that there is a “correct” relationship between cause and effect. Smash an atom with an x-ray beam and it will fission, not melt; expose a conditioned dog to the sound of a bell, and it will salivate, not scratch its ear and yawn.  Politics is based on an opposite premise, that there is no “one” correct way to proceed but many, subject to negotiations between parties with differing views and interests.  That in fact is what liberty is all about, the ability to view things in different ways.  We cherish our liberty, and would not want to give it up, even when it requires letting other people be loudly and disastrously wrong-headed.  Libertarians may be going against nature, but they have the right to do so.  That is our true national political correctness, and we remain proud of it.

The problem nowadays is that our views on liberty were developed in a time when all political causes and effects were local, and the world was much less complex.  No one best way was fine in a village argument over locating the school house, but when you’re dealing with the consequences of global climate change or education for a high-tech world economy or the impacts of cross-breeding species of food crops through genetic engineering, it’s a different matter.  There are “best” ways, there are usually severe time-constraints for effective action, ignoring them can be disastrous for billions of people, and finding them requires analysis by experts and willingness to follow uncomfortable courses.  Scientific and political correctness clash head-on.

We've already solved the problem in the financial sector, the one we seem to find the most important. In the U.S. we established the Federal Reserve System, and elsewhere they had already had central banks for many years.  That amounted to delegating to experts the manipulation of the flow of money trough the national economy to avoid debilitating controversy and stalemates arising from the differing interests of all the parties involved.  Climate change and education would seem to be at least as important.  An argument often made against such delegation of major decisions to boards of experts is that it breeds conformity and wide-spread “political correctness”, but it’s hard to spot that as a consequence of the Federal Reserve. Another argument is that expert decisions requiring taxation for funding take your money without your voice, taxation without representation.  But decisions by the Federal Reserve can raise or lower your income dramatically, and we never seem to notice.

The fundamental argument is that each delegation to experts constitutes a lessening of individual liberty.  That’s a substantive argument, and the consequences of ignoring it can be seen in totalitarian regimes like the former USSR or Communist China, where boards of experts planned everything from factory quotas to the number of children you could have.  A creeping conformity can in fact overwhelm whole nations in disastrous ways.  But your liberty ends at the tip of another person's nose, and here we're counting billions of noses.  And there are correct ways to proceed. As it stands, we are simply using individual experts as weapons to cudgel opponents rather than collecting and using effectively the consensus of the entire scientific community.  A delegation to  a board of experts by Congress in specific areas like climate change or genetic engineering, with their conclusions accepted or rejected In Toto, would seem to address that concern.  

We live in a complex and dangerous world where major choices must be made and implemented correctly and quickly.  It is disastrously outdated to think those choices can be made as in olden times, around the village elm with the decision going to those who can talk loudest and longest.  The world will not wait for our decisions.

Insurmountable Opportunities

Back in my office days, we used to look at crises as they arose – there was always at least the “Friday afternoon flap” and often things much worse – and call them “insurmountable opportunities.”  It’s based on the old saying, which may or may not be accurate, that the Chinese character for crisis is a combination of the characters for danger and opportunity.  That’s somewhat akin to Rahm Emmanuel’s famous comment that no crisis should be wasted.

There’s nothing particularly new in the UN report on climate change, due to come out on Monday and whose executive summary was released Friday, except two things.  A number of drafts have been floating around for a while, and it reports the same dismal things as heard previously, only, in some cases, as in sea level rises, sounding worse.  The first new thing was a level of certainty of 95 percent for climate change being caused by human activity.  That’s polite scientific language for “really sure.”  It’s the level of certainty about your condition a surgeon would like, but sometimes doesn't have, before cutting you open.  It’s far beyond the “preponderance of evidence” a civil jury would need to find you guilty of contributory negligence; fossil fuel corporations should remember that.  In other words, we have ourselves to blame.  It’s hard to understand why people who would accept surgery on less evidence still refuse to accept man-made climate change.  They’re valuing their wallet over their internal organs.  That would be a really good study for the social psychologists.

The second new thing was the certainty that climate change will continue for centuries with temperatures rising above 2 degrees Celsius despite what we do.  That means prevention is definitely too late and amelioration and adaptation are now definitely the goals.  That, strangely enough, could be a big part of the solution to our economic problems.  Countering and making use of the effects of climate change could be, and eventually will be, a major new economic sector. Industries and jobs will be created, if not here than certainly elsewhere.  We should make sure they’re here.   I've mentioned the major infrastructure issues to be dealt with many times.  Rising seas and more severe storms mean major new construction.  Green technology is very slowly, and with lots of resistance, coming on board.  That change is occurring much too slowly; a noted historian of energy technology predicted recently that natural gas will be the dominant fuel for the next 50 to 60 years, with wind and solar only becoming dominant after that.  We need lots bigger pushes in those technology areas.  But things are beginning also to get interesting in the adaptation area.

Adaptation is already thriving in other countries.  Remember how rising temperatures are sure to produce more droughts with the need for desalinization of sea water, and of course, much less snow.  An Israeli company is making good money converting sludge from desalinization into artificial snow for resorts.  Other adaptation startups are popping up all over.  There should be a boom in the pipeline industry.  New materials are needed for insulation.  As climate changes some areas will fade and others boom.  Innovative building construction and land development should really grow.   Urban agriculture is a wave of the future. They've used green houses in Crete for many years to grow vegetables protected against the sun.   What is lacking here is not opportunity, but the imagination to use the many opportunities that exist. 

A problem we have to deal with these days is all the entrenched technology, which owners want to hang on to rather than facing the risk of exploiting the new.  When Marconi invented the telegraph, he first tried selling it to France, but it was rejected there because of the competing existing businesses.  He took it to America, where it became an instant success because there was nothing to compete with it.  We increasingly act like France did rather than America, to our loss.  What we need are policies which encourage, possibly though temporary subsidies and tax breaks, the innovations needed to ameliorate and adapt to climate change.  The innovators should not be in it alone.  We all have an interest in their success.  Climate change is a crisis that should not be wasted.

Irrational Ignorance

It’s strange the little things you can learn sometimes from abroad about your own country’s history.  A Dutch reporter recently cited an exchange between Henry Ford and Walter Reuther, the head of the auto workers’ union. Ford was showing Reuther a newly automated factory and said to him, ”Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay union dues?”  To which Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy cars?”  Sometimes it’s more complicated than that.  Boeing has been negotiating with its machinists’ union, trying to get them to agree to 401(k)’s instead of fixed benefit pensions, along with other concessions.  The workers don’t buy planes, though if they can any longer afford it, they are passengers.  Boeing is using the usual corporate ploy of threatening to move its new plane operations elsewhere, to “ensure it remains competitive” and of course to guarantee its CEO his over $100 million annual compensation package.  Latest word is that the machinists have caved in and agreed.  It’s just another lost battle in the erosion of worker and retiree income that comes about from the capability of corporations to move elsewhere.  It's what economists like Robert Reich, Larry Summers and Joseph Stiglitz regard as a basis for the continued stagnation in our economy.  But it may echo in Congress and elsewhere also.

2014 is the year issues meet head-to-head during negotiation over proposed trade pacts between the U.S. and both the EU and China.  Negotiations have been going on in secret with mainly corporate interests in the loop, but the Obama administration is promising to protect worker interests.   But agreement by the workers and the Congress is going to take a lot of trust, and Boeing is not helping any.  At the same time as it’s negotiating secret trade pacts to promote American exports, the administration is promising to reduce income inequality and protect worker rights.  The goals seem at cross purposes, since profitable exports are generally perceived as requiring low labor costs at home.  At the same time, Larry Summers points out that the real roadblock to a robust economy is inadequate demand for goods and services, and low-paid workers are not going to do much in the way of stimulating demand.  He seems to be echoing Reuther, while the corporate interests are talking like Ford.  We're facing the kinds of policy choices that would benefit greatly from the input of a well-informed public, but that's not what seems to be happening.  Left strictly to the markets and to secret corporation negotiators, the workers are most likely to lose again.  It seems the only way really to cure income inequality and the economy is not from within the usual market mechanisms, which give power only to the corporations, but with the electorate.  The fact that trade negotiations are occurring during an election year may prove interesting.

George Will of course would prefer that those ignorant voters not get in the way of clever negotiators.  In a recent column, he opines that the principal problem with democracy is… democracy!  He quotes favorably Churchill’s quip that “the strongest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”  He bases his views on the “public choices” view of economic theory which holds that “rational ignorance” prevents voters from being well informed on policy choices, and makes them opt for “sentimental” (that seems his code word for considering the needs of others) solutions, rather than the market-based solutions he prefers. He seems to think we would all be better off just letting the markets decide things.  George forgets – surely his education must have included it – that in a democracy, the voting process is a principal means of legitimizing government and stabilizing society.

Rational ignorance is the failure to learn about a topic resulting from a decision that knowing about it won’t affect your life much.  But policy decisions do affect your life a lot.  It’s just that in a market economy where the corporate interests hold the reins of power, only political means are available to the “average voter” to affect outcomes.  The voting booth becomes the “market” in which he can express his choices in a meaningful way.  George could have more closely examined the “average voter” and found that the principal difference between him or her and the corporate negotiator is not in rational ignorance – the negotiators have plenty of that themselves - they understand how policy options affect markets, but not people.  The real difference lies in the quality of their education and the extent of their self interest.  The negotiator, like George, is much better educated and much more happily uninterested in the fortunes of others.  But part of the cure for the ignorance of both the average voter and the negotiator is supposed to be democracy itself.  George could have quoted Churchill saying that “the only thing worse than democracy as a form of government is all other forms of government.”  Or Lincoln saying “God must love the common man because he made so many of him.”  Or Alexander Pope acidly remarking that “How God feels about riches can be seen from those he bestows them on.”   Take that, Donald Trump! 

A quality education in a democracy is supposed to be a public good available to all, provided through public funding as a benefit for all.  It was Jefferson who emphasized that with his sponsoring of the University of Virginia, in his own words, his greatest achievement. If the average voter is not even aware enough to know at least roughly the impacts of policy on his life, then we have failed to achieve a necessary goal of democracy.  The price of liberty is both eternal vigilance and quality education.  If agricultural policy is going to raise or lower the cost of a loaf of bread by a dollar for the average voter, or put or take out a million dollars from the pocket of a billionaire, there is no reason the average voter should rationally be less interested than the billionaire.  Yet elite educations even at the high school level generally include some economics and political science and other subjects needed to better understand policy choices, while much public education is deficient in all that. The deficiency continues at college levels.  The “average voter” starts off with a major educational handicap.  It is that handicap which must be cured for effective democracy, and that requires the enlightened funding which many of the prosperous are so unwilling to provide.

Back in the days of slavery, slaves were prohibited from learning to read and write; their owners knew that an educated person would not willingly remain a slave.  Now in the 21^st century, education must go far beyond the rudiments if we are to maintain ourselves as a free and prosperous nation.  That requires loosened pockets among those who have already benefited from their own superior education.   To overweight ignorance as a factor in policy choices is to turn it simply into an excuse for ignoring the genuine needs of the economically powerless. That  itself displays a kind of irrational ignorance, for it leads not only to the kind of economic stagnation we have been experiencing, but to economic and political strife.