Jan Thurins tankar

Inequality?

2012-01-26T15:47:00.002+01:00

The insight of Adam Smith was to find a path running the economy that aligned itself with human character but he had indeed first written a book that was published prior to 1776 that involved morals. Already in this age it was clear that human character is important for capitalism to work. Smith’s first book The Theory of Moral Sentiments from 1759 was considered by himself to be his magnum opus.

Greed and corruption is a problem in all economic systems and would not be a reason for dismissing the most natural way of driving an economy. One important issue is how meritocratic societies allocate their talent—in civil society or in the state. It will be very difficult to cooperate between the US and China if they differ in this way. The reason for allocating differently might be the degree to which people are willing to risk their wellbeing. The state or the party offers a more secure job.

Another important issue is the dignity involved in earning your keep and receiving redistributions. It is linked with where you find most of the competence in society. The Chinese might actually think that the state should establish companies and run the economy whereas this is most efficiently performed by civil society in the West. Could redistribution turn the need for human dignity around in China against the grain of normal psychology?

In Scandinavia redistributions are popular, relatively speaking. Part of the reason for this might be the Law of Jante which says that you should not try to stand out, stay in line, don’t think you are something from a society described by Aksel Sandemose in a book called En flykting korsar sitt spår. Inequality is bad, something that is making a splash internationally currently. The fact is that you say that Anglo-America with its relatively higher inequality is much worse than Scandinavia in this fashion. You would then claim that the culture of Anglo-America is worse than that if Scandinavia and that all British and Americans should become like the Swedes, Norwegians and the Danes. I’m not so sure.

The Tax Thing?

2012-01-25T13:46:00.002+01:00

When they attack Mitt Romney and Warren Buffet for not paying enough taxes because they are taxed around 15-20%, I began thinking about what Obama said tonight: it is common sense that everyone should pay the same percentage? Many tax systems are even progressive and require higher income earner to pay proportionally more. I realize that what I’m going to write is like swearing in the church in Sweden but I don’t agree with the common sensicality with such progressive tax systems. A wealthy person does not cost society more than a less wealthy. Thus lack of common sense in same tax rates because the total amount paid by a wealthy person on a lower percentage could very well be higher than that for a less wealthy person. Rather they provide vital investments with their fortunes that benefit society apart from costing society the same per capita. They often sit on more information that society benefits from as well.

So what is going on in Scandinavia where people think you should pay more if you are richer. Does a rich person get anything for this, like for example power and influence? In this case people that have other talents than becoming rich should in some fashion be rewarded likewise for justice to reign? SCB.se has data on where tax money comes from. The bulk does not come from the richest fraction but from the middle classes. However, in the US the top 1%, earning more than $500,000 per year, control 40% of the wealth. The bulk of the tax probably still comes from the middle classes in the US. The question then is if it is fair that the richer pay a higher percentage? Milton Friedman advocated a flat tax rate as did some of the Republican presidential candidates lately. Such a tax system has the advantage of being simpler and supposedly bringing in more money per tax rate per person. In other words it is supposedly more efficient. It is possible to think that lower income takers can have less tax but higher income takers the same as the middle class or less? The US has, according to Wikipedia, the most progressive tax system among OECD countries but on a lower average level. Progressivity is derived from the “ability to pay” and as I suggested that is good at the lower incomes but does not necessarily make sense in the higher range. Why should rich and successful individuals give their money to the state instead of managing them themselves? As Lincoln said: government should only do what the individuals cannot do themselves. What is flying around right now in the debate is the notion that it is necessary to tax the rich higher percentages for the state finance s to function. What would this mean? It would mean that we could not live without the rich—an interesting thought.

State of the Union Address 2012

2012-01-25T06:25:00.000+01:00

It is a nice tradition to participate in the dissemination of US intent for the year. Obamas talk was focused on the issues of the presidential election and he covered the majority of Republican concerns and tried to sound as a Republican. He still talks heartedly about joining across the aisle. He quoted Lincoln, the GOP president, that government should only do what the citizens can’t do by themselves, thus seemingly taking initiative from the Republicans. Since the military is very popular, he used the military as an example of nonpartisan work.

He did not speak about balancing the budget though and aggressively lowering the debt as the Republicans. He paraphrased Romney and Santorum on bringing the jobs back, however. It was clear from the response of the audience that this is a very important issue. Globalization is dead and fragmentation is here, as I argued earlier. There was clear fighting spirit from the audience on this issue. “With a level playing field, nobody beats the US”. He said that the coming boom in shale gas was due to government research. This is a major issue too but he raised a caveat for disclosure of the chemicals used for environmental safety.

The talk and the response from the audience gave a clear impression of a unified US on the move again. In the Financial Times today there is an article describing that the Davos conference has been placed during the celebration of the Chinese New Year which makes China not sending high level people. Obama almost sounded like Romney in claiming following the rules for trade he also said he had passed less regulatory law than George W Bush. He almost sounded Republican for the sense of unity.

Swedish Opposition Politics?

2012-01-21T19:33:00.001+01:00

The Swedish prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, said the other day that there is no relevant opposition and Dick Erixon, a blogger, suggested that the opposition should fuse the Left Party and the Social Democrats under the new leader of the Left Party. The reason is that Håkan Juholt, the former leader of the Social Democrats, resigned today and left the Party in shambles. One of his last public statements was “It is not me, it is the Party”. The Social Democratic Party is in some kind of funk, everybody agrees, but no one talks about what the problem might be. Not long ago they rid themselves of the competent Mona Sahlin, who was better than Juholt, and now who.

So what ails Swedish Social Democracy? The Danes just elected a coalition led by Social Democracy and in France it is very likely that Francois Hollande of the Partie Socialiste will take over after Nicholas Sarkozy. SPD in Germany might be a strong contender in the next election against Merkel and her CDU.

Welfare might be in trouble that is making Social Democrats wonder if the good years of the West will be replaced by leaner years where it will be more difficult to afford the level of welfare people have gotten used to? Another problem might be the neo-fascism some people have established in Sweden and that there should be problems accepting the continuous development of the guiding control state that massacre individualism that otherwise is more and more important for entrepreneurism and innovation on all levels of society. Then I don’t know if Social Democrats are worse than other politicians to use this sort of techniques.

Social Democrats then seem to hold on to the equality parameter which is talked about even in liberal environments like the US. Belief in capitalism is down to 60% from 80% in the US and this country was known for not demonstrating envy of wealth but rather admire those that do well. Not so really in Sweden. The Financial Times is running a series of articles on the “Crisis of Capitalism”. The consensus seems to be that there is no other system and that we have to endure the downsides. There is also a sense that honor should reenter the game—less greed. The political opposition in Sweden doesn’t seem to discuss this however. Most people agree on equality of opportunity but the crucial question that separates Europe from the US is equality of outcome. Together with security it anchors Europe at a lower GDP growth and higher unemployment.

Using partly the same welfare idea as the Social Democrats the Alliance parties, The Moderates, The People’s Party, The Center Party and the Swedish CDU, have annihilated the idea of Social Democratic opposition. My humble question is, however, if it would not be better leaving focus on the welfare state on the opposition and advocating a more American republican line that would address problems in the future with focus on individuality, liberation of labor laws, and freedom. It seems like Europe is suffocating itself compared to North America. Europe has a great advantage though. It pays less than half for comparative health care but the US economy still seems to be more alert, adaptive and dynamic.

The Road to Serfdom

2012-01-11T21:03:00.003+01:00

I have been reading Hayek’s best-selling cult book The Road to Serfdom and the problem is that I don’t know if it is the 1930s again. According to my experience the last 13 years a new type of fascism is back to haunt us. The problem is I don’t know how spread these practices are. In Sweden they could be, as Hayek suggests, the result of years of social democracy that has formed the nation of Sweden.

Behavior wise this might be derived from the need from societal guidance rather than individualism where more people have things to say about each person’s behavior and thus there would be more occasions for punishment which could act over the years. People that are more orderly could suffer from greater risk of cyclically develop fascism. There is a problem with political violence currently.

According to Hayek individualism promotes a social process of super-individual forces that drives the growth of reason. I must say I buy into this principle all the way. It is the same principle that makes basic science work to the benefit of mankind. Hayek said that tending a civilization as a gardener tends a plant by understanding its structure and function is the best approach. Only one civilization bloomed so far in the 1500s to 1600s and this has fertilized all others.

Another point Hayek might have made is that freedom is more important than security, what is called “trygghet” in Swedish. The US is less secure than Europe and risk taking is something that the Americans are fond of. They lie closer to the edge and try more things and it is possible to come back after a bankruptcy. What would be interesting to know if this attitude difference has anything to do with the proficiency and creativity in science as well as in business? Business pays in a way for science so there is definitely an indirect effect. American freedom has lured many a scientist and innovator to the US though, despite of less security.

A person like Hayek is not throwing people on the street though. He says in 1944: “but there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity for work, can be assured to everybody”. This sounds like an ordinary Swedish “försörjningsstöd”. What is becoming more of an issue these days, and which is more readily state by Americans, is that the European welfare model could turn out to be too expensive when four times as many people from China and India is joining the race. The Italian welfare minister cried in public when the new technocrat prime minister laid down his new budget.

Individualism breeds tolerance the lack of which is an increasing problem in Europe the last years. Right wing populism is back and in Hungary Victor Orban is trying to make his country more autocratic which luckily the EU is trying to prevent and is reacting on. Well, how serious is the situation? What bothers me is that everyone is trying to tell me that I should not complain and that I exaggerate. However, if I can’t complain on what I have encountered, there is real trouble in Europe.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year?

2011-12-22T14:03:00.001+01:00

Romney for President

2011-12-15T15:03:00.002+01:00

Looked at what I could find on the Republican presidential debates. Mathias Sundin writes on his blog about it but I decided to take a look myself to get a feel for the candidates. By now there is in principle only Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich left the couple of weeks before the election. Romney is the stable one and Gingrich is getting all kinds of critique but is most popular in the polls right now. That is a pity. I think Romney comes across at the most suitable candidate. As a businessman and former governor he would be able to contact the important business sector that Obama has alienated himself from. As a former governor that has balanced budgets and gotten rid of a deficit he has the right experience. He also personally comes across as the most presidential of the candidates. He returns to the subject of reorganizing America for growth and function all the time when other candidates get lost in details. Republican candidates are really serious about not increasing federal spending something that just gets lost here in Europe because of the way they tax and spend here. They say that they don’t afford increasing spending, period. There is apparently also a discussion on how to change Medicare which is totally unfunded by now. If the republican voter choses Gingrich rather than the moderate Romney there would be a distinct shift to the right. Gingrich have said he would choose the firebrand John Bolton, the UN ambassador of George W Bush, to become his Secretary of State. I could not see the US with this package. Also Romney is scoring better against Obama than Gingrich and thus would have a greater chance of becoming president.

I Think I'm Becoming More of a Conservative

2011-12-13T16:50:00.000+01:00

I salute David Cameron for his veto to the EU because I think I have become more conservative and appreciate the maintenance of Anglo-American culture versus the new form of polity that is emerging in Europe under the leadership of Germany. Liberal seems to mean merging the Anglo-American culture with the Continental which is not realistic. Gideon Rachman points out in his column that the Netherlands and France seem to be hanging rather lose in the new constellation formed. France because the socialists, if they win in the spring, would opt against. What I don’t like with the Germans so far is the strong anti-Americanism displayed in their English propaganda magazine Spiegel Online International. The English journals and magazines are more neutral against Germany.

Sweden has ended up in a precarious situation the reason for which I am a little unsure. I had this idea that the Swedes that historically have had a soft spot for the strong leader would have liked the EU and to become more of a guided citizen of Europe than a member of the “free world” now when crisis strikes and federalism is back on the agenda. Many politicians and industry in Sweden are German and would like an EMU membership but the populace is to 80% against this development currently. This surprised me actually and the question is if this is Germanophobia, Anglophilia, or just holding tight in your wallet for southern profligacy? The fact that English is used in media and music to a great extent in Sweden probably adds to the ambivalence. Birgitta Ohlsson, the EU minister, Jan Björklund, party leader in the People’s Party, and Carl B Hamilton, chairman of the EU commission today write in Svenska Dagbladet that Sweden should join the “core of Europe”. That would mean EMU membership or at least membership in the new coalition. The new suggested Left Party leader Jonas Sjöstedt immediately takes a point that they act against the people. It is interesting to find Tories side by side with Swedish Left Partiers!

People are demonstrating in Italy because of Monti’s austerity measures which raise the question if the German austerity way is actually going to destabilize Europe. If these problems become more severe this might lead to a notion from the market that a federalization attempt of the Eurozone would not add to financial improvement. People seem therefore have lost hope and walk out on the street without a clear objective. They do not sense the reality of the emergency. Large numbers are just large numbers and not years of hard work with less to balance the books. They feel unfairly treated and cheated by everybody. Almost all serious writes that publish in the free media diagnose the problem as a problem of a widening gap between the rich and the poor. In order to entice investors Merkozy let the private investors off the hook in the deal and loaded the problem onto the taxpayers, something that did not show very clearly in the aftermath.

What kind of new culture is forming under Germany on the Continent then? It is different both in its economy and in its general culture. Germany is well founded in philosophy, literature and music but it is not clear exactly where they stand politically, except that they have a right of center and a left of center party with a strong former communist block as of recently. Catholicism will be a strong factor in its development. They even have a German-born and raised Pope. That is a factor that ameliorates the fusion with Poland but not with Sweden. Britain is a more secular and religiously open-minded country which fits better with the liberal immigration politics of Sweden. The Orthodox Greeks are culturally and economically way out as I pointed out before. How does Catholicism influence people then compared to a more secular religiously open-minded setting. It could have an effect on the degree of privacy due to the culture of the Confession. Personally I believe strongly that maintaining privacy is a survival factor for future civilizations.

What does Britain have to offer the Swedes then? Its culture multiplies the knowledge-factor via the second language with a factor of at least ten times. We can directly access the Anglo-American literature and all its text books for academia. Unless Sweden would go back to German as a second language they will always have problems on the Continent. The problem there for the Germans is clear. Their language does not sound that attractive so it does not work as efficiently to foster a culture as English. Therefore there is a risk that there will be harder power than what would be needed in the English case. In an era where teaming up to survive is becoming more and more necessary to challenge the gargantuan Chinese state it is important to realized that Sweden is a small country which has to form ties with for them the right partners. The time has come again for a decision. Last time around Sweden made a U-turn after the war. Will they make a U-turn post battle this time when the smoke clears?

The Post-World War II Era in a Nutshell?

2011-12-11T17:06:00.002+01:00

The following is a tale created by excerpts from Samuel P Huntington’s Political Order in Changing Societies from 1968 with my comments in brackets:

The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government. The differences between democracy and dictatorship are less than the differences between those countries whose politics embodies consensus, community, legitimacy, organization, effectiveness, stability, and those countries whose politics is different in these qualities.

The US, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union have different forms of government, but in all systems the government governs. [Fukuyama did not like this one]

I do know, Walter Lippman has observed, that there is no greater necessity for men who live in communities than that they be governed, self-governed if possible, well governed if they are fortunate, but in any event, governed.

In politics, as in economics, the gap between developed political systems and underdeveloped political systems, between civic polities and corrupt polities, has broadened.

During the 1950s and 1960s the numerical incidence of political violence and disorder increased dramatically in most countries of the world. This was due to rapid social change and the rapid mobilization of new groups into politics coupled with the slow development of political institutions.

The equality of political participation is growing much more rapidly that the art of associating together. Social and economic change—urbanization, increases in literacy and education, industrialization, mass media expansion—extend political consciousness, multiply political demands, broaden political participation. The primary problem of politics is the lag in the development of political institutions behind social and economic change.

[Huntington’s book came out 1968 as governments started to apply the technology. The democratic wave he then observed was probably due to this application where political institutions where suppressed rather than extended in scope. We might be in a phase where this suppression is giving in and the social and economic development have ran ahead of the suppressed new-speak political development. It went well in the Age of Transformation and Optimism but now in the Age of Anxiety we will be governed by people that never knew how “normal” life was—the driven people. Has the psychology of man changed with the technology use?]

In American thinking, the causal chain was: economic assistance promotes economic development, economic development promotes political stability. However, economic development and political stability are two independent goals and progress toward one has no necessary connection with progress toward the other.

A second reason for American indifference to political development was the absence in the American historical experience of the need to found a political order. This gap in historical experience made them particularly blind to the problems of creating effective authority in modernizing countries.

Madison warned in The Federalist No 51: the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. The primary problem is not liberty but the creation of a legitimate public order. Authority has to exist before it can be limited, and it is authority that is in scarce supply in those modernizing countries where government is at the mercy of alienated intellectuals, rambunctious colonels, and rioting students.

[The development of social and political order decreased severely with the introduction of technology governance. Development was frozen in time. The worst example was perhaps Libya. In developed countries where the political order was established we found a different development post-1968. However, was the fall of the Soviet Union due to a technology –induced crash? Is the polarization seen in the US right now due to larger hostility between systems of people due to the technology? In my experience people in systems have reverted to clannish behavior. It is on/off behavior.]

Brussels 2011: The First Battle of New-Democracy, or "New-Speak"?

2011-12-09T13:33:00.000+01:00

It seems like 17 or 23 countries will follow Germany into a second floor in the EU as expected. Britain vetoed the regular EU deal. Indeed, this is an interesting situation for an Anglo-American. On the one hand saving the Eurozone is good for the economy in the short run. On the other, this makes Germany powerful and can harm the economy by V1s and V2s towards the City of London later.

I must say I have a problem with this development of the democracy concept that has taken place the last 40 years or so. I don’t know if it is an improvement or something that has the potential of authoritarianize the whole situation. My experience with the new democracy, or “new speak”, is rather awful. Dehumanization, violence, threats, property right violations, loss of integrity! It smells communism and totalitarianism. With the risk of making a fool out of myself, I’m inclined to ask the question if the cultures of Germany, Japan, Russia and China will revert to fascism of a socialist kind? I’m posing the question to myself, which culture will prove most resistant to “new speak” in the body?

Beginning in the Middle East we found out that people want change. It is understandable that the quest for a new world began where the pressure was hardest. It seems to have moved to Russia now following this gradient, discounting the Occupy movement which is a little different in character. That we are talking about a global problem is clear from the words of a Tunisian poet Abou el-Kacem al Chebbi “If, one day, a people decides to live, fate will answer their call.” Sounds quite Western to me actually. There is no life under “new speak”. The American Independence Declaration is under severe pressure at the moment.

Brussels meeting on the Euro?

2011-12-08T16:47:00.001+01:00

Tried to use the occasion for the meeting to gain in understanding on the current situation in Europe. The top government officials in Sweden are taking a cautious stance on the Eurozone political maturation issue. Swedish voter interest in the Euro has plummeted so the Swedes are running away from the problem whereas the Poles are trying to help by joining as soon as possible with higher growth than the Eurozone average. Sweden will help via the IMF though.

Swedish officials don’t think the crisis is a political crisis as I do. Part of this reason seems to be that Europe is solvent and in better economic shape than the US. This is, I think, a very good argument for the crisis being rather political. What Merkozy wants by introducing the Maastricht criteria again in a new form is hard to understand though. The whole charade seems to work, sort of, but it might be borderline knife-wrestling. Someone said that this is not a debt crisis it is rather a current account crisis, ie having used current account rather than budget deficit maximum of 3% and the public debt maximum of 60% would have predicted the crisis. Using 3/60 would not have predicted the crisis.

At the same time as it might be absolutely essential for making progress the fiscal union/integration issue is causing ire in other countries that are beginning to feel sidelined. Britain does not want the Eurozone to go down for the sake of its economy but would probably don’t mind politically. However, since the “peripheral” countries are withdrawing from the issue the only way forward is indeed a fortified Eurozone. It is unlikely that Merkozy will manage to entice all 27 countries and instead move forward with the 17.

The question is if an “economic government”, a second floor on the EU edifice is necessary. How much of a charge on democracy would be possible to use to save the Eurozone? Neither France nor Germany would want an official loss of sovereignty though. Is the current affair an attempt to secure the cooperation of financial workers in another fashion? Is the elite placing tentacles that the populace is not controlling? The reason I’m asking is the serious writers call the meeting “making a fudge”. If people meet to do the same as earlier, that did not work earlier, my guess is that they need a cover for something else. I understand it is very uneuropean to question the good intent of the meeting but who are we trying to fool here? In any case, it is fascinating that the issue is so polarized among those that think the Euro will fall and those that think we have business as usual. This is not economics. This is politics.

To Veto, or not to Veto?

2011-11-30T20:52:00.000+01:00

Radoslav Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, says two important things. He fears German inactivity more than more conventional threats because it would lead to a Eurozone collapse. He also says it must be possible to govern Europe and suggests that the veto right of individual countries should be removed. This would mean that Germany, which Sikorski calls an indispensible nation in Europe, could form coalitions and vote through their decisions, ie govern. Other powerful members could do the same later if things would change. If it becomes possible to govern Europe, markets would be pleased and interest rates would go down to alleviate the debt crisis.

I did not find the information that Europe should be governable through the removal of the veto in Sikorski’s recent Financial Times paper but in today’s editorial, he might have said it at his talk on Monday. It would of course be a fundamental change where more influence would be ascribed to the countries in Europe which do well rather than to all countries equally. More function, less solidarity. An “economic government” could be formed with such a 17 or 27 “party” system. Majority coalitions would form and be subject to revision according to country performance.

I submitted a post in January this year on my blog that discussed a theoretical construct of “influence points” in the EU that would give incentives to participate in a transfer union, ie you get “paid” for contributing money to the EU. It would perhaps be easier to remove the veto function for members? In practice the veto function was removed already for Greece and Italy which just had to do what they were told in order for the Eurozone to survive. Right now it does not seem like a transfer union is possible, Germany does not have that much money anyhow, but rather a pact where fiscal control and austerity was enforced harder. One thing is clear, it is difficult to find solutions with the current set-up of the Union. It is rather like it is constructed not to work and the markets don’t believe in it anymore.

If I have understood the concept of an “economic government” of the type proposed by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008, it would be superimposed onto EU in the Eurozone. That means it would be independent of the Commission, The Council and the Parliament. The question is then how many countries of the original 17 that will remain there after the smoke clears. Spain has gotten the good word lately. Italy is on/off and Greece is likely to disappear.

A system for the Eurozone where you get something extra for good performance would create a national goal that would help motivate people more than just doing well for their own country. Participation would be more serious and competitive. Paying large sums of money without getting anything for it does not seems to work, although people are speaking for solidarity in times of crisis.

Niall Ferguson's Take on Europe?

2011-11-20T14:47:00.002+01:00

Niall Ferguson has written a ten year projection on Europe, The Saturday Essay, on wsj.com. I guess this is the kind of thing he dishes out to students at Harvard for comments. Therefore I can’t resist the temptation to comment myself, albeit on a more humble level.

Ferguson thinks Norway will pop the question about a Nordic Union with Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland but he does not think they would be in close contact with Britain. This idea was up for discussion in the Swedish press not long ago. They even speculated on how to fuse the different royal houses into one. At the time I thought this was irrelevant because of the presence of the European Union. Why one more? The foreign minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, thought the same way. The Nordic countries are actually quite different, especially Finland, which is already a member of the Eurozone. Ferguson thinks they would change allegiance, apparently. This is perhaps not so likely. There is a movement in Finland right now in the other direction. They want to remove Swedish from their schools. Finland was taken from Sweden 1809 by Russia after having been together for 700 years. This legacy means many Finns speak Swedish. Being close to Russia after years of Finlandization they rather cuddle up to Germany and the Eurozone for independence of a sort they prefer.

Sweden might also be in the mood of joining the Eurozone according to the politicians and the industry. It makes sense both economically and security wise. It is interesting that very little of current discussions on Europe involves NATO and security issues. America has vanished from the equation. It seems like Germany and the zone has supplanted it. People giving opinions on the matter in the Swedish press thinks Sweden, Denmark, and Britain will be forced to join the zone and support countries in trouble. Only the independently wealthy Norwegians seems to be able to do as they please. If politicians and industry in Sweden want to join Germany, it still might be difficult to convince the populace which watches British and American TV every day and don’t want to pay for the profligate Greeks. However, if the US can’t fix their gridlock in Congress soon and start working on their debt, people will lose their sense of security from the US and turn to Germany for comfort.

Ferguson is bullish on Britain and wishes it will stay out of the Eurozone which is my feeling also. He thinks Ireland would rejoin the English kingdom which I would also believe on cultural vibes. The Brits would not ever join the Eurozone and I have earlier suggested that they would form not Taiwan but Japan outside a Chinese equivalent Continent. He thinks Britain would be preferred for banking by China rather than Brussels although he envisions some sale of assets to the Chinese to go with that. When the ten Euro-countries fall to the Germans, that Ferguson suggests, there will be a new phase in European development built on German language and culture. Maybe Brussels will be moved to Berlin rather than to Vienna that Ferguson suggests. When France, Spain, Italy and seven other countries fall, people would flee to the security of a joined Eurozone that keeps the Russians at bay.

Ferguson seems to have an idea that the SPD would gain momentum is Germany. Angela Merkel, raised in East Germany, does have a streak of Social Democrat over her politics so maybe he is right and that the Eurozone will become something to the clear left of the US and Britain, even if the Democrats rule. Sweden’s center-right is also moving leftwards. What happens in China will probably also be important in terms of foreign investments. If China becomes socialist rather than robber baron capitalist they might favor the Eurozone preferentially over the new English kingdom. Personally I have this naïve idea that the US and Europe would start investing in jobs in their own hemispheres rather than in Asia, despite short sighted growth aspects and then Britain could count on support from this angle as well.

In 2012, Ferguson believes, Israel will attack Iranian nuclear facilities with all problems thus induced, like a blockage of the Strait of Hormuz. I don’t think this is likely. According to The Economist the Israeli military is against such a move which is going to be too problematic. My feeling is that the Arab Spring is slowly going to make the region Islamist/socialist. That would make the Israeli position continuously worsening as the US seems to leave the area for South East Asia in their Pacific Century. The response to the Muslim world is then going to be focused on the relationship with Europe which differs between The New English Kingdom and the Eurozone, or The United States of Europe, as Ferguson calls it. Israel does not have a good relationship with Europe, unfortunately, and might be forced into accepting to give up it Jewish state for something similar to South Africa, since Europe is so heavily on the side of the Palestinians, which I’m personally not. The fact The Arab Union went against Assad, sort of, is though a positive sign for the area, that could speak for a relative future stability.

Wolfgang Münchau at the Financial Times the other day claimed that saving the Euro would destroy the EU. Ferguson is on the same track. It is very likely that Germany with its “not now but later” approach have worked the situation into a two pronged result. Either they become rulers of the Eurozone with a weakened France or the whole thing falls apart with them still standing on the remnants to mind their own business with Russia.

The Moderates and the Social Democrats in Sweden moves in the German direction

2011-11-18T13:27:00.001+01:00

Muddling through seems less and less an objective for the elites in Europe. The cost of borrowing threatens to strangulate the Euro zone and the independence of the ECBs printing press is at risk at the peril of future inflation. However, according to World Weekly at the Financial Times edited by Gideon Rachman, 80% of Germans think the Euro zone will survive.

Former EMU propagator Göran Persson, the former Swedish Prime Minister and a Social Democrat, now says that Sweden should join. So says another former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who is the current Foreign Minister and a Moderate. The Swedish people is not there yet though. There is not a majority for EMU membership at the polls.

Bildt and Persson talks like there is no risk for the Euro but David Cameron would rather see a networked Europe of independent states fearing that a fortified Euro zone would start to dominate the peripheral countries in the EU. According to the latest news, however, he agrees with Angela Merkel concerning the need for Lisbon Treaty change, as long as the cash cow, The City of London, which supplies 30% of British GDP, is not made less globally competitive by enemy legislation or taxation.

In other words, Merkel is beginning to have an effect on northern Europe as the British press is increasingly doubting the viability of the Euro, to the irritation of Berlin who claims media has been against it all along. Detailing how an economic program for saving the Euro is beyond most people but deciding whether or not they are British or German should be more feasible and my earlier request for the official Swedish position on this question seems to have been answered. Not only the Swedish business community, which trades preferably with Germany, but also the two main parties are now for Germany.

My one or the other kind of argument is not shared by David Miliband or the Labor party in Britain who wrote the other day that Britain needed Germany and who argued for a fortified EU. He calls being “outside” the EU a disaster for Britain. Cameron, on the other hand, is pressured by at least 100 MPs in this direction. It is understandable that many Brits would not mind that the Euro zone, as a future potential adversary, would disintegrate. It is a straight forward balance of power argument. A multipolar Europe rather than a divisive block construction.

Gideon Rachman argued for an orderly dismantlement but was told that this might lead to such disorder that extremist parties might get power in Europe again. I’m not convinced this would happen, though, we are not far enough from the war yet. But the problem of how to organize Europe still does not have a clear answer that can be formulated in the press for the people to take in.

Someone wrote today that politics is still at the top despite global finance. It has its own politics and as the Occupy movement has demonstrated, as has reactions in Europe of other kinds, some people don’ t like this politics. The politics of global finance is today nation-building in Asia and nation deconstruction and austerity in the West. No doubt there is a reaction. It is also funny to see how it is assumed that the economy in Asia is more powerful that in the West when it is immature and cannot really be compared with the economy in the West.

Following what has been written about the possibilities for Italy to get out of its predicament is not particularly hopeful. The press is against Italy but evidently seasoned politicians in Sweden and also Britain is for Italy. The math, which is simple enough, is clearly against. Politicians must therefore factor in a change of heart that has taken place in southern Europe for reform.

The Next Trend?

2011-11-17T12:45:00.000+01:00

Samuel P Huntington wrote the following in his 1996 book Clash of Civilizations:

“In the early 1990s, Chinese made up 1% of the Philippine population but were responsible for 35% of the sales of domestically owned firms. In Indonesia in the mid-1980s, the Chinese were 2-3% of the population but owned roughly 70% of the private domestic capital. Seventeen of the twenty-five largest businesses were Chinese-controlled, and one Chinese conglomerate was responsible for 5% of Indonesia’s GDP. In the early 1990s, the Chinese were 10% of Thailand’s population but owned 9 of the 10 largest business groups and were responsible for 50% of its GDP. Chinese are about one third of the population in Malaysia but completely dominate the economy.”

The US is going Pacific and the UK is pondering Europe. David Cameron is talking about a “networked Europe” rather than a block Europe. The Germans, however, wants “more Europe” which probably means a more German Europe, if Angela Merkel is going to get full support from the Germans. Thus the new trend is that the US is facing stiff competition from the Chinese in East Asia and the Pacific and the UK in Continental Europe.

Another new trend might be the language question. Mandarin Chinese might take over much of the English dominance in East Asia and German might have a renaissance on the Continent. Culture follows power! Before World War II Swedish children learned German as their first foreign language.

Anglo-Americans and also other Europeans might though find comfort in the following statistic:

“If demographic trends continue, well over 50% of the world’s Christians will be in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia within 25 years—a clear shift from Christianity’s traditional home in Europe and North America.”

It is from the 2010 book Religion and Politics in America: Faith, Culture, and Strategic Choices by Robert Booth Fowler et al. Perhaps we should let the Chinese dominate East Asia and focus on South America and Africa which even lies in our time zones and where we are more likely to find hearts and minds than in the assertive Asia.

This book also tries to explain how a religious America works compared to a secular China. The religious pluralism observed in America functions as a vent for freedom making possible a streamlined collective approach in the economy. People will feel free with maintained integrity as long as they can exercise their faith.

The last 20 or so years in the US feature what could be called the Fifth Great Awakening with an increase especially in evangelical Protestantism. The First Great Awakening in American came before the Revolution in the 18^th century. Periodically America turns spiritual and looks for the next political reform. We have yet to see what lies in stock this time.

The problem is that you can't talk about the problem?

2011-11-10T12:34:00.004+01:00

Yesterday Italy ended up in real trouble. Some said its economy is dead other meant that it still has a chance. After all it a country based on knowledge and it has significant assets to back it debt. But it seems like this was the straw that broke the camel's back. There is talk today on Huffington Post of a two-speed Europe solution. There is talk about a budget czar for the Eurozone in the Financial Times.

A budget czar that takes control over the budgets of member states would mean that it is clear that they can’t do this on their own. Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal have failed to match expenses with income and can’t sustain welfare states on the same level as states in northern Europe. We have technocracy delegitimizing democracy in such states and would need a panel of judges to decide which countries are in and which are out.

Nicolas Sarkozy has been advocating for a two speed Europe whereas Angela Merkel has spoken for a more homogenous variety. Merkel is of course right as far as the EU motto is concerned but if technocracy with economic steering, a Eurozone economic government, will make countries like Greece balk at this prospect, they will have to split the Eurozone somehow. A solution with debt redemption over 20-25 years via a fund is a more probable proposition which is also discussed in the Financial Times today.

So, what people are beginning to talk about is that democracy does not work everywhere. Still you have politicians who stand tall and say they wish democracy for Libya’s people soon, when there are problems in southern Europe already. The question today is whether or not southern Europe will accept technocracy or if they will cut themselves loose and stay democracies. Greece is an interesting example because 70% poll favorably for the Euro at the same time as they poll 60% against the bail-out from the Eurozone.

The Eurozone needs opposition in Europe?

2011-11-08T16:50:00.000+01:00

It is a little embarrassing for Germany that all other members of the Eurozone will default, so let’s argue that they will solve this somehow. Fredrik Reinfeldt, the prime minister of Sweden has invited other peripheral countries, like Denmark and the UK, to a tête-à-tête in Stockholm Northern Future Forum in February 2012 according to Svenska Dagbladet. It is a follow-up from last year in London. Sir John Major reminded us the other day in the Financial Times that EFTA still exists: Norway, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Island. How about forming an opposition team if it is impossible to get all countries under one flag?

The benefit of such a scheme would be that people know who should support who. Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece belong to team Germany. Although Arnold Toynbee said in his famous tome A Study of History that civilizations are OK as long as they expand. Then the barbarians come back, Toynbee said. People are still talking about expanding the EU which to me seems doubtful considering the circumstances. As I blogged about once before, Samuel P Huntington suggested you leave countries with distinct other culture out and the diversity of the present EU has been shown to be too large. The Catholic Croatia is probably going to work whereas the Orthodox Serbia should remain outside.

It should be noted that the fault line between the Eurozone and its hypothetical opposition is Catholic/Protestant to a large extent. We have Poland, Germany and France on the one hand and the UK and the Nordic countries on the other. Assuming that Poland joins the Euro. It is at the same time a fault line between more devout and secular. It will work better language wise also since the Nordic countries are well versed in English and France and Germany prefers their own. In other words, forget the EU. The EU was a peace project but with Poland, Germany and France in the same boat peace is assured.

Europe?

2011-11-08T09:17:00.000+01:00

Germany is the current power house in Europe and it seems like there are wishes that Sweden should help Greece to help Germany out in the Eurozone. How about investing this money in Britain instead? They are a little short right now.

Europe does not seem to be a "house"?

2011-11-06T18:05:00.002+01:00

China and even Australia has said that Europe should “restore its house”. This was the apparent conclusion from the G20 meeting in Cannes last week. The problem seems to be that Europe is not a house even if it needs to be. Wolfgang Münchau, at the Financial Times, wrote that if Europe saves the Euro, EU will fall. You will get Euroland and some peripheral countries. According to David Rennie at The Economist, British tabloids already write about “The Fourth Reich”. One of the peripheral countries is Sweden which does not have a majority for the Euro. I am particularly curious about Poland. Last time they chose Britain they ended up in Russia for a while. I’m asking this because people that write about such things tend to group Sweden, Norway, Poland and Britain together.

There is so much writings about Greece, a country with only 2% of the EU budget, that I have gotten the feeling it is to gloss over the fact that global governance via G20 is dead. Anne Marie Slaughter, in her book A New World Order from 2004, wrote about the globalization paradox. Global governance is not possible, even if needed, it is a threat to individual liberty, and should and have been replaced by networks of specialists like presidents, ministers of finance, and regulators that interact outside of the state function, even if the state and regular diplomacy is still important. The EU has been used as the ultimate example of such networks but if it now breaks up this is yet another proof of the difficulties with global governance.

A while ago The Economist wrote that there are the Chinese economy, the US economy and the European economy now. If you add the Indian and the Japanese, that seems to be just right. My question is if not the globalization phenomenon is being followed by a regionalization? There is going to be more and more focus on saving jobs locally even if you can save a few dollars by sourcing the job. The East Asian assertiveness depends on globalization and might be combated by regionalization. The French and the Germans saved their car industries for example. The race for education, to out-educate, to out-compete, will also lead to regionalization. There will be emphasis on preventing brain-drain, which is a means of eviscerating the US who depend on highly skilled immigration.

Carlson's Law?

2011-10-30T19:24:00.003+01:00

Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum cites Curtis Carlson, CEO of SRI International, which is a company that serves as an innovation factory for governments and companies, in their book That Used to be US from 2011. Carlson’s Law reads: Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb. Innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. The role of the CEO is now to help create the environment where those decisions can happen where they should happen, to support them and reward them and inspire them.

This law helped me understand what Fredrik Reinfeldt said in a recent speech where he discussed management in the Moderate party of Sweden. Reinfeldt said that people are surprised that he just sits and listens and does not say anything. He had sent off 100 party members to a course to increase their listening ability. I must admit that I thought: Hey, Mr Prime Minister, an occasional good idea to lead by would perhaps be good but maybe I have learned something new. Reinfeldt really played down leadership and perhaps thinks in terms of the stewardship mentioned above by Carlson.

Interestingly, this is a differential to political leadership as it compares China and the West. Reinfeldt riled against the “strong man”, or “starke man”, concept. They guy that always takes charge and give orders profusely. It seems like the role of the party leader or CEO has changed the most. Taking charge has moved to the grass root level and that is of course bound to create a certain measure of chaos.

What I still don’t understand with Reinfeldt management theory is, however, how the leader of a country can get by without a vision for the future. Reinfeldt said that he did not like visions and that they usually tended to cost at least 100m SEK. My idea of a vision is rather something that makes a 100m SEK profit for the country. The citizens of a country need an overarching goal to follow. Such a goal could very well be a foreign political one where the government makes up their mind on Sweden’s position in Europe and the world.

No More Multiculturalism in the EU?

2011-10-25T21:47:00.001+01:00

Angela Merkel, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy have all said that multiculturalism is dead in Europe. That would mean: we don’t want any Muslim ghettos in Sweden. But do we want any Swedish ghettos in the EU? Sweden represents 2% of the EU population. There are 4% Muslims in Sweden.

I guess this is a way of expressing what I have already said, in so many words, but it is an interesting angle. The low interest in teaching history lately might have been an attempt to make people more European by having them less prone to local identities. They have apparently had the same kind of ideas in the US. People like Niall Ferguson have fought against this trend by pointing out that certain cultures perform better than others and that there is competition in the world. Arguing for history education is thus counterproductive for multiculturalism but it might help people evolve faster by realizing how to compete globally.

In fact, multiculturalism is not dead in Europe at all. The EU motto is “united in diversity”. It is like preserving diversity in nature. Save the species! But what is nature’s idea with many species? It is if one does not survive another might. It is an insurance policy. My question is can we afford this insurance today? After all, most of Europe’s countries have been tagging along for quite a while.

OK, the talk of an “ever closer union” might be old hat in some quarters but there seems to be this force around, and people to match, that makes this happen a little in the dark. Inch by inch! People don’t seem to like this, reading from the polls, but, inch by inch. Time has come to ask if this is good or bad.

Harmonizing the rules across the EU actually makes some sense but will the sense of freedom linger while streamlining things. The US unionized with one language 200 years ago. The Chinese 2,200 years ago. I guess what I’m trying to say is that things are moving in a direction where politicians in Europe need to work for changing the motto of the EU. Why not “United at Last”.

I would not mind in principle at all that Sweden disappeared as a sovereign country as long that I felt that we were moving in the right direction. Swedish culture is probably close to a competitive mainstream that would be selected. Some other countries in EU27 would have to adjust more. Personally, I would move to the US, if I could afford it but, I honestly believe that a United States of Europe would be a good thing for Sweden.

The reason for arguing in this direction for me would be that Western civilization performance is at stake if two competitive centers, North America and the EU, don’t form. A two-party system for the Western Civilization.

Merkel Needs More Time?

2011-10-21T13:01:00.002+01:00

Due to circumstances these days people have ideas about how to solve the European debt crisis. So do I. In my humble opinion this is a crisis of confidence, a political rather than an economic crisis. Angela Merkel works on a plan for Europe that the market is going to accept and that will calm things down.

Given that Germany have not benefitted on other countries in Europe for succeeding economically, their culture works best for Continental Europe. If the rest of the nations want to succeed with Germany, they must change their culture to more resemble the German. Write a new constitution for a federal Europe accepting Germany as a leader nation. Unfortunately, in this sense only 66 years have passed since World War II.

As I said before, I personally belong to the Anglo-American paradigm, and I don’t think the UK would change their culture in the German direction, but France might. The Continent could thus become a small China with the UK as Japan on the side. I don’t see anything less than the appearance of a Continental European Creed which is unanimously accepted as something that would ease market pain in Europe. Greece, for example, is moving in the German direction with lots of pain disclosed and maybe they will succeed.

Some people say: “there is no time for this”! Such people tend to have watches but EU federalists have time and one argument is that the time has come for conglomerates in the size of China, North America, and India. Federalists say that we have to join this train. It’s leaving the station now! If Europe doesn’t catch it, the European welfare state is bust and Europe, once proud, will become irrelevant. I don’t agree with Reinfeldt, Merkel has to take charge. Continental Europe needs a plan. There is indeed no time for muddling through.

American Exceptionalism turns Universalism then What?

2011-10-19T20:43:00.001+01:00

Samuel P Huntington’s epos from 2004 Who Are We? is an interesting read even for Europeans. The Jews have claimed that they are God’s chosen people, which of course have irritated quite a few, but if 300m Americans claim the same thing this must be considered preposterous, or? After the fall of the Soviet Union Francis Fukuyama, a student of Huntington, wrote a book called The End of History and the Last Man. We had, according to Fukuyama reached a point where liberal democracy was the Universal remedy for world politics. With the rise of China, without God and democracy, we have seen that East Asia can create prosperity as well. That leaves the Western Civilization divided: Europe, the cradle of Western Civilization and the Scientific Revolution, which could also be called exceptional, and the New World now led by Obama, the first Pacific President, no longer universal.

The attitude to the economy and the respective solutions to the financial crisis is different between the US and Europe. The US want to stimulate and Europe choses austerity. The welfare state is more developed in the EU. The US population is growing whereas the European countries are contracting relatively speaking. Immigration takes place in both with the US filling up with Mexicans and Asians and Europe with Africans and Muslims. The US is highly religious whereas Europe is more secular. Americans work harder than the Europeans, at least more hours per year, and are genetically from adventurous, more risk prone, Europeans. Americans have involved themselves more in world security and have a significantly larger military force. Since World War II the Americans have excelled in science and technology but the Europeans are catching up. I will always work for maintaining good relations between the US and Europe but have seen during the last years that they are distancing themselves from each other more and more.

There is, however, one big difference: America is the United States of America but the EU can’t make up its mind about federalizing. When I started out in Political Science a few years ago, I thought the United States of Europe was a good idea. I thought English as a second language for all EU states was commendable and would keep a common culture alive trans-Atlantically. Then I realized that this was unattainable due to public nationalism. The European debt crisis gives Europe a push in the United States of Europe direction. How strong this push is going to be is an obvious question? Greeks are out demonstrating for World War II money from Germany so tensions have evolved to a malign degree.

The Davos Men or economic transnationals, that Huntington discusses, live in a global world already where they have less nationalism to start with but they might not actually need the Western Civilization either because they do a lot of business in Japan, India and China as well. However, they might just have to start thinking about getting the public with them a little considering for example the Occupy Wall Street movement. In this sense I am very Huntingtonian. They used to say there is more trans-Atlantically that we have in common than separating us. I still think this is true. The lesser evil is probably to keep the EU together, despite democracy deficit, to develop this market as a global competitor. We are going to need people around us that do business our way and that continue developing science as we started. In this way southern immigration into our civilization becomes a good thing that maintains the Western world in an amiable relationship with this world.

Freedom of Religion in the US is Individualistic

2011-10-16T15:15:00.001+01:00

Denis Lacorne wrote in his book that Samuel P Huntington claims that the US is a deeply religious country, defined by an American Creed, and that the US is neither secular nor a religious theocracy. It was actually Gunnar Myrdal who in 1944 defined the American Creed. After reading Huntington’s Who Are We? from 2004, I’m convinced that Huntington’s idea is more correct. He says that the new US was already forming as John Locke was born 1632 thus staying with Tocqueville on this one. American exceptionalism, he says, is not to a little part due to its religiousness. What also makes the US unique and the most religious protestant country is that many sects were allowed to form and thus made possible a more individualist religious life. What Lacorne also forgot to say was that the Catholicism in the US is very protestantized which makes it less authoritarian.

However, if you ask Americans what about the US they are most proud of 85% say the political system. This should be compared with 7% for Germans. It therefore seems like the Americans are united under an American Creed, a political idea, at the same time as they have religion for community and support. In 2002 a court in San Francisco decided by a 2 to 1 vote that the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance were a violation of the separation of church and state. The words therefore were unconstitutional. However, this became highly controversial and the Senate passed a resolution 99 to 0 that the decision be reversed. A Newsweek poll claimed 87% of the public supported inclusion of the words while 9% opposed. Atheists are less popular than Muslims in the US.

President Clinton claimed that America needed a third “Great Revolution”, in addition to the American Revolution and the Civil Rights Revolution, where they “prove that we literally can live without having a dominant European culture”. Huntington means that this multiculturalism would threaten American Identity. He sketches four development possibilities: multiculturalism; bifurcated into Latin and English; exclusivist with revival of racial and ethnic concepts: and a preferred cultural path where Americans stick to their Creed. In light of the dismissal of multiculturalism in Europe this is interesting. Currently “ever closer union” is what seems most popular to save the Union in what could be described as a desperate attempt to find a European Creed.

The Road to Political Freedom

2011-10-09T20:51:00.001+01:00

Thomas Friedman claims there is a close connection between economic freedom and political freedom in his book Capitalism and Freedom from 1962. He points out that there is no place with political freedom that does not have economic freedom but he also says that economic freedom does not guarantee political freedom. Seems up to date today! However, Francis Fukuyama discusses the political without the economical in his latest book The Origins of Political Order. I did wonder about that but it is of course a simplification for clarity. Cultural matters might not be sufficiently independent of economic issues to be treated separately.

Fareed Zakaria writes on the Global Public Square blog that President Obama thinks the US has gone “soft”. One thing is that he for example has apologized for America’s conduct, which I think is way out of line. I wonder what he meant by soft? Is it staying democratic and free that is soft nowadays?

There is a tendency to think that China’s and the East Asian authoritative economic miracle is a discovery of a short cut to material wellbeing. The cumbersome and confusing democratic parliamentary way is passé. But if you add the J curve of Ian Bremmer to transit from economic freedom to political freedom there is indeed an obstacle to pass. There is no country that made that pass without exterior help so far. Is it possible? Perhaps the soft nation is rather on the right track and China on its traditional 2,500 year authoritative ditto. You simply have to believe in America like Mitt Romney stated in his recent speech that countered Obama’s idea.

How important is then political freedom? After all Friedman says that economic freedom is an extensive part of total freedom. Is it worth dying for? That is not an obvious question in Europe for example where defense budgets are slashed. The Arab Spring tells a story where people non-violently demonstrate for freedom non ultra descriptus. Is this a reminder?

If political freedom does not add benefits to society in the form of a more developed material wellbeing, the West might be in for trouble of convincing the rest of its glory. This is another way of asking what President Obama meant by going soft. Losing faith in a way of life on a higher qualitative level! I for one think political freedom offers a higher quality life.

What Obama actually said was this:

“The way I think about it is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft and, you know, we didn't have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades. We need to get back on track."

This might mean that Obama does believe in democracy but somehow thinks people were a little too “lazy”. But I was not of the understanding that the US had been less competitive rather succumbed to a financial disaster. So, I still wonder what he meant by soft which apparently the two GOP candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Perry also did.

So, was Friedman right? Is there really a close connection between economic freedom and political freedom? This remains the crucial question for the upcoming decades and perhaps this century.

Democracy and Religion?

2011-10-02T16:09:00.000+01:00

I realized yesterday that we have half a year left to spring now in Sweden. First week of April is a common spring initiation around here. Took a walk today in the early fall with fresh leaves fallen on the ground. The smell of fall was evident in the air. The lawn has slowed down.

Reading a book about Religion in America by a French author, Denis Lacorne from 2011. It is originally written in French in 2007 but contains an afterword that comments on Obama’s “Faith-friendly Secularism”. Lacorne talks about the American civilization and makes some corrections on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America from 1835. He does not think, like Tocqueville, that democracy took off from the Puritans in New England but rather had a secular origin from the Founding Fathers.

Lacorne thinks evangelism was the religious origin of the national walls of America and suspected atheist Jefferson was elected 1800 with the help of evangelical votes that objected to the bullying of the then established churches. The romantic American historian George Bancroft did however also point at the Puritans as a source of democracy and religion in the US like Tocqueville.

What I think is interesting in this context is that Thomas Jefferson, the drafter of the Independence Declaration and the third President of the US, had three favorite historic persons in mind when he acted namely: Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton. Maybe he pictured a future country in the name of science more than he pictured it religious even if he probably was realistic enough to feature a religious context for his country. Jefferson was a lawyer like Bacon.

The question then is if Americans have become, or always been, so different from the Europeans that we can’t keep Atlanticism going? The relative success so far on the Libya mission of NATO will of course help for a while. Economically France and Germany have started a battle against Anglo-America. They, for some reason, don’t think you should make money on money. A Tobin tax is the latest aim in suppressing the City of London.

The US is more religious than Europe currently. It has been possible to assume that this could give the US its higher growth rate, although I have not ever seen that in writing. However, the non-religious China is doing fine on growth even if this growth to a large extent so far is a proof of the success of Western globalism. Some Chinese academics say that the lack of Christianity was what made the West stronger and there are attempts right now to restore Confucianism, a new Confucianism, as a moral precept for the masses. Marx would probably turn in his grave. Marxism is still the official dogma of the Chinese communist party.

Tocqueville thought democracy needed religion to function. Contrary to his contemporary American historians he advocated Catholicism as the optimal form of Christianity. He viewed the multitude of more “enthusiastic” Protestant sects as having a divisive effect on government. In other words he thought of religion as a societal stabilizer just like China is searching for right now. Without democracy, however, religion is a competing organization and with Poland in mind Catholicism probably has a hard time in China. I understand that the Party is appointing bishops.

Today I read about the Swedish Church in Svenska Dagbladet. They have to start getting rid of church buildings for economic reasons. Many are standing empty and demand heating and maintenance. The Christian Democrat party in Sweden is in jeopardy not to make the 4% level needed for entry into Parliament in the next election and their larger brother in Germany is also losing votes. I can’t help asking Tocqueville’s question: is democracy in trouble in Europe? Angela Merkel is losing power being the most important person to hold the EU together. The obvious follow up question is if it is good for democracy if the Euro and thereby, as Merkel is fond of pointing out, the EU will fall?

In the Middle of Nowhere

2011-09-21T19:25:00.000+01:00

There seems to be a common denominator between Greece and Palestine. Samuel P Huntington says in his book Clash of Civilizations from 1996 the following: “Greece is not part of Western civilization, but it was the home of the Classical Civilization which was an important source to the Western Civilization. In their opposition to the Turks, Greeks historically has considered themselves spear carriers of Christianity. Unlike Serbs, Romanians, or Bulgarians their history has been intimately entwined with that the West. Yet Greece is also an anomaly, the Orthodox outsider in Western organizations. It has never been an easy member of either the EU or NATO and has had difficulties to adapt itself to the mores of both.”

Huntington has Russia as the core state in the Orthodox civilization so he would advocate that Greece would be better off in the Russia group together with the Serbs. Palestine seems to be positioned between the West and the Muslims but supported mostly by the West economically and technocratically on a base of Islam. Both Greece and Palestine lies in the fault line of civilizations. Today it seems like Greece is on the way out and Palestine on the way in.

Palestine is trying to change the status quo by asking for international support different from the US and the EU. The US and Israel is against the solicitation of UN membership because it disturbs the peace process. So far I have not read anything that would indicate that an eventual UN membership would change anything on the ground, so what is it Abbas want to achieve? Is it really possible for the PA to be in the middle of nowhere, not with Hamas and the Arab street and not really with the US and Israel if they are to be living in peace side by side?

Huntington says one more thing. There is no solution for fault line conflicts which would indicate that efforts should be made to produce the most agreeable status quo possible. What is happening now then is not appropriate because it provokes one of the parties.

The Palestinians don't want any Jews in their state!

2011-09-18T22:49:00.003+01:00

"THE PALESTINIANS have certainly never given either the Americans or the Europeans a good reason to support their cause. Just this week, the PLO representative in Washington told reporters that the future state of Palestine will ban Jews and homosexuals.

And yet, the Obama administration and the EU have made the establishment of a racist, homophobic Palestinian state the greatest aim of their policies in the Middle East.

Every single Palestinian leader from the supposedly moderate Fatah party has rejected Israel's right to exist and said that they will never set aside their demand that Israel accept millions of foreign-born Arabs - the so-called Palestinian "refugees" - as citizens. They say this with the full knowledge that this demand is nothing less than a demand for Israel's destruction.

And yet, both the US and the EU, which certainly do not support the destruction of Israel, insist that it is imperative to strengthen and support the supposedly moderate Fatah party which seeks the destruction of Israel."

Caroline Glick writes the above in her blog. The article is also on display in The Jerusalem Post where she is a regular columnist. She wonders a little why the West bothers. Glick points to the fact that it is the US and the EU that helps keeping the Palestinians going but does of course, like noone else, have solution for a peace process.

I have earlier heard about an South African kind of solution for Israel and Palestine but the two-state solution advocated by most states and the news that Jews can't live in a future Palestine rules this out. I'm looking, in my frustration over the situation, for a future solution that takes into account demographic realities in the area.

Keeping up a status quo situation has been an understandable way of looking at the issue but current affairs seem to indicate that the Turks and Arabs are not pleased with the status quo any longer, although they might be the ultimate winner of such an approach in the long run? Impatience is in the air!

There was an article on the wsj.com site today that desribed a soccer game between an Israeli team and a Turkish team in Istanbul this weekend. There were people shouting anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans. It reminded me of a tennis game in Malmö a while ago that had to be played without an audience--for the security of the Israeli players. Will it be possible for Turks and Arabs to whip up international pressure on Israel that will necessitate that they give up on their security concerns. Security is not important here. A worst case scenario would be to have Israel lowering their guard for a strike while the West is busy with their economic problems.

The question is why the Arab Spring is taking place and why there is impatience in the Palestine-Israel question all of a sudden? Removal of all Western supported dictators? Humiliating the West in this fashion just to return to normal as the West has lost themselves on the rebels--on the right side of history, as if democracy already was installed.

Is it because the US was cautious in Libya and that no European power would assist Israel in an emergency. Pure power play, in other words. The reaction from the West on the Arab Spring has been positive until recently when it has been conditional for Turkey to lead the way, forgetting all about Israel, because it complicates the issue. I guess I have to settle for a hope that this looks worse than it is?

Turkey and Egypt?

2011-09-14T09:37:00.001+01:00

The Financial Times writes today that Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a passionate speech in Cairo yesterday has said the “Israel must pay a price for its aggression and crimes”. They also write that this has alarmed Israel and that it worries the US. Erdogan also calls for the acceptance of Palestine as a state via the UN.

Turkey has now permanented its policy shift with this tough stance against Israel where it also tried to work up an aggression among other states in the area. Erdogan has also said that he will bring a Turkish naval escort to a new Ship to Gaza flotilla at the same time as he says the Mavi Marmara incident was an act of war.

In the mean time rioters attacked the Israeli embassy in Cairo. Israel brought home some 80 embassy personnel but has since said that they will try to restore the for them important mission in Egypt. After all, Egypt is one of two countries in the Middle East that has a diplomatic relationship with Israel. The other one is Jordan. The Turkish diplomatic relationship is on hold as is the earlier close military collaboration. Turkey has, though, agreed under the flag of NATO to harbor radars for missiles from Iran on their territory. It seems like Erdogan is forcing the US and NATO to choose him or Israel.

Erdogan is currently on a trip to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya hopefully as a model for Arab modernization. It would be of great concern if the trip in reality turns out to be forging a coalition against Israel in these fledgling states. The problem at hand is that Erdogan is not acting favorably to a fellow democratic nation but rather walks the religious line.

September 11, 2001?

2011-09-11T18:53:00.001+01:00

Daniel Pipes claims, in his book In the Path of God from 1983 which was republished 2002 after the 9/11 catastrophe, that militant Islam, or fundamentalism, is hopeless which I agree with. He drew the conclusion in 2002 and 1983 that Muslims had to westernize in order to modernize. I guess this is not valid because Asian countries have been modernizing without completely westernizing, keeping a distinct original character. Samuel P Huntington, in his book Clash of Civilizations from 1996, claims that the Western civilization is not universal hinting at the possibility that the Sinic and Muslim civilizations will never merge into the Western. My analysis of this extremely important issue is that the western culture is the most biological and psychologically most correct one. Other cultures have to use more coercion to get people to thrive. This would be an argument for advocating westernization. Already John Locke, who was trained as a physician, set forward psychologically relevant rules and rights. A major risk is that an Asian country could with harsher, inhumane methods push their people to challenge the West economically. Someone said that an equivalent of the Roman Empire development could take place from this time’s democratic embryo. I don’t believe this will happen though. The West is more significant than Greece was at the time.

Why did the destruction of the 11^th September 2001 take place? Pipes argues that westernization is more problematic for the Muslims than modernization and the Arab Spring that we witness today is probably more a modernization attempt rather than a westernization ditto. Since 1983 the population of Egypt and Iran has doubled, and this madness creates a very large youth unemployment. Most Muslims adhered to traditional Islam where people realized that sharia did not work and had come to a compromise which Pipes calls The Medieval Synthesis, although there has been fundamentalists all the way from the beginning. Pipes argues that from about 1970 oil wealth has made Muslims more fundamentalistic although he says in the foreword of the 2002 edition of his book that the issue is more complicated.

Looking back ten years it has become seemingly conventional wisdom, especially in Europe, that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have been completely in vain. I’m not so sure. If the US had not reacted forcefully, terrorism might have been encouraged. Now the swift occupations told governments in the Middle East to prevent terrorism on their soil that might otherwise be dealt with in a similar fashion. Saddam Hussein was also a person that was so disastrous in the region that removing him also set a precedent which Gadhafi now have faced. I therefore do not think the human sacrifice demanded so far have been in vain. What we have learned so far, however, is that being the leader of the free world is making you undeservedly unpopular.

The Climate is Worsening Around Israel

2011-09-09T13:19:00.000+01:00

The new type of martyrship that the Turkish activists that sacrificed their lives while attacking the Israeli commandoes in the Ship to Gaza incident were revealed in a report by the UN that vindicated Israel against these marauders. Egypt was also aggressive recently after a terrorist attack against Israelis close to Eilat. However, due to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the event has worsened the relationship between Turkey and Israel to the point of retracting their ambassadors, since Erdogan demand of an Israeli apology has not been met.

Who is this Erdogan? Well, according to Ian Bremmer in his book The J curve, he was educated in religious schools as a devout Muslim. As a teenager, he was forced off a soccer team for refusing to shave his beard he considered it his religious duty to grow. Elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, Erdogan declared himself the city’s “imam” and opened his first city council meeting by chanting from the Koran. After reading an Islamist poem at a 1998 rally, Erdogan was convicted of using religion to provoke disorder and sent to jail for four months. The poem read in part, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets/The minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers. The jail sentence apparently made him more Kemalistically secular but how much of a religious soldier is he still while being a very popular prime minister?

Erdogan’s life witnesses the tense relationship between the democratic government and the military which characterizes Turkey and which makes it less suitable to join the EU. Erdogan has, according to Der Spiegel held a rally in Germany to 15,000 Turkish immigrants where he suggested they should not integrate into the German society. Thus supporting Turkish enclaves in Germany, his Turkey is less suitable for EU membership. At least if the current ever closer union represents the future path of development.

The question is then what path Turkey is going to find for themself in the appearing Middle East and North Africa environment at the same time as they are alienating themselves from Israel? They are playing an important part in supporting the NTC of Libya and have issued warning to Syria for their human rights violations. Will they evolve as a democratic model for the rest or will they rather become like the rest to blend in? Turkey being the most democratic Muslim country is an important phenomenon with a rather unique history to match. It does not seem likely that we will find a leader of Kemal Atatürk’s type in the area with such a will to emulate the West.

State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century?

2011-09-06T20:43:00.000+01:00

Francis Fukuyama provides a crash course in State Building, note not Nation Building, from 2005 when he reacts to the turnover of power from the US derived CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) in Iraq to the Iraqis in 2004, a year after the invasion. No Iraqis ruled Iraq during this time. It is well worth the time to ponder the fate of Libya with this book. Which country, for example, should help Libya out, they have asked for civilian help, since cultures vary so much? The UN is a mish-mash of countries and institutions are the key to development which are highly culture dependent.

Libya is in the lowest stability phase of its Ian Bremmer J-curve now. Which way do the majority of the Libyans want to go today? Which way would they want to go in a generation’s time after adding some rule of law and primary education? Fukuyama states that the major problem in aiding a country like Libya is that there is a lack of domestic demand for reform from the elite. It is a little of what we see in Tunisia and Egypt today. The difference here is that the elite was not fighting as rebels and died in the 20,000nds. Hopefully there will be a certain seriousness due to the sacrifice that will help transcend the elite even since Libya wants in general education level due to Gaddafi’s 42 year rule.

Which culture will make the next major move?

2011-09-01T13:54:00.000+01:00

Took a walk down to the Ersdal Bay and back via the harbor today again, as I did yesterday. 15 to 17 degrees Celsius, thus perfect. Time to make some plans for the fall. The overall subject that I am researching is which culture should carry mankind into the future. Into the unknown. It is not going to be just one. East and West will probably continue to run parallel. The two party system of the world. The main hypothesis is that the West has found out a path of higher fidelity than the East with a more mature political development. Thus assuming that there are no genetic differences between the two populations. The political system of the West is more mature for the simple reason that people are allowed to think and act politically. From Ian Bremmer’s book The End of the Free Market form 2010 it is possible to extrapolate that there is about 25% state capitalists in the world currently which is offsetting the balance and currently causing a slump in the West. Since the rich in the West are making money in the East as austerity is mandated in the West for ordinary people, notable billionaires are talking about paying more in tax for the sake of stability. Personally I think it is not wise with too progressive tax tables since the rich allocate money better than the state for the performance of the economy. Bremmer brings up this point, while claiming that the state is not that good as the shareholders in allocating funds, why state capitalism risks being less efficient economically.

Although I’m not so sure myself, it seems like most people think the power of science and innovation on all levels is going to play out equally well in the East as in the West. That would remove Joseph Nye’s argument of the higher recruitment of talent to the US than to China and leave Gideon Rachman’s focus on the economy more pertinent. The economy will depend on how people organize themselves in the functioning parts of the world and how areas like the Middle East and North Africa develops from lower levels. The fight on how to build up Libya has started and the obvious question is if it’s going to be free-market or state capitalism which is important since Libya’s development could become a blue-print for the entire area. State capitalism is probably easier to apply to a country of Libya’s type, Algeria is already state capitalist to a certain degree and also runs on oil, but I hope they will convince the Libyans to choose free-market capitalism due to the better harmony possible with the EU in this case. Bremmer has a series of comments in his book as to the prognosis of state capitalism and he seems to think that it represents a dead end, which I tend to agree with. Improvements of free-market capitalism are a more probably path of development. In an era where the economists have problems understanding the economy it is troublesome that we ask politicians to regulate it, understanding it even less, but it seems to be necessary.

Libya

2011-08-28T14:01:00.000+01:00

I guess the Libya issue has entered the twigh-light zone for a while with Gaddafi still at large. When I first heard about the aid plans I was very skeptical and like Germany opted against it but when it actually started I said to myself OK you had your day in court and I began arguing for the air support, no boots on the ground mission because I accepted that Britain and France had so much info as necessary to change the regime. It did not come without cost for the Libyans though. I saw one figure of 20,000 casualties, a large enough figure that leaving Gaddafi in power might have caused less loss of life, but wars of liberation are often quite bloody. NATO has apparently flown some 20,000 sorties of which 7,500 involved bombing missions. Less than Kosovo in the 1990s, but still significant.

Obama's approach was leading from behind this time around. Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that the mission would not have been possible without American intelligence and the initial wipe-out of air defenses was also dominantly American. On the positive side is that the rebels have done this on their own unlike in Iraq and if an involvement like the last 6 month's does not lead to winning the hearts and minds of the Libyans, nothing will, which would be good to know. A Libya that in the future is friendly with the West would obviously be a great asset. Iraq trades mostly with Syria though so we enter a sensitive face now where people Like Nicholas Sarkozy, the savior of Benghazi, might play an important role. The Libya mission is of course in line with Sarkozy's effort with the Club Med that Germany wasn't particularly enthusiastic for.

So, enter nation building. Gaddafi had held his people down with low emphasis on education which could mean that serious nation-building would not take place within a generation which is a problem. The US asked quietly before the NATO mission begun if the European nations involved had thought through how expensive it would become, well aware that they had spent 3trn in Iraq already and that the EU was facing a debt crisis. Improving the prospects for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the Libyans is of course worth a lot and might have a stabilizing effect on the multiculturality of the EU. Well managed the oil wealth of Libya could mean a success rather than failure since it amounts to independence with the right development strategy.

On the most positive side then is that Europe might be in on a collaboration with the Arabs in moving North Africa closer to Europe. France , who was not in on the Iraq mission, is now in the front. Germany said initially that they would not mind helping out humanitarily and it would of course be good with a unified EU approach to supporting Libya. With some luck Libya might turn out to become more of a success story that the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, which would depend on a reshuffling of the security personnel in addition to a change of government.

My 1,500th post--On China by Henry Kissinger

2011-08-24T19:39:00.000+01:00

This is possibly the best book I have read which to a certain degree depends on my current interest in how different cultures solves their state formation. Kissinger goes through the relation of the West and China since 1793 when the British was turned down by the Qing emperor.

The Chinese are apparently back to Confucianism in the "socialism with Chinese characteristics" that Deng Xiaoping built on the embers of what Mao left him with. Chinese characteristics is apparently anything that will make China great.

My problem of a return to Confucianism is that this philosophy placed China at a great disadvantage and that is was individual initative, the market and economical know-how from the West that made China what it is today. Deng was pushing for science and technology but he was very clear about not permitting any creativity in the political arena. He retired 3 years after Tiananmen after a Tour of the southern part of the country where he reiterated his thesis which still seems to be law in China.

Mao was against Confucianism as a class oppressive philosophy. Mao apparently thought Communism was liberative. It is clear from the book that there is no common ground between the West and China on values. Kissinger ends the book with a chapter where he asks, just like Niall Ferguson, if history will repeat itself with China as Germany and the US as Britain around 1900.

He ends the book on a positive note though and hopes that we will be able to build the world together rather than having it being shook by China's rise as predicted by Zhou Enlai when he and Kissinger sent out their 1971 communiqué after the opening up of China by Richard Nixon. Kissinger has a citation by Nixon where he claims the Chinese with a decent government would lead the world. I don't think they have that though and it does not seem like they will get one either. They simply do not have the proper values. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not respected in China.

The Symbol of Cooperative Individualism--"Alliansen"?

2011-08-21T13:26:00.000+01:00

Fredrik Reinfeldt, the prime minister of Sweden, yesterday in his Summer Speech thanked Maud Olofsson, the retiring Party Leader of the Swedish Center Party, because the Swedish right of center Political Alliance would not have come into existence without her. Apart from he skill as a minister she then must have projected a cohesive function and it would be interesting if it is this talent Hilary Clinton, the US State Department Secretary, is tapping now by consulting Olofsson.

If Olofssons largest talent is as a cohesive force for keeping four individualist parties together in an alliance, the current search for a new party leader in the Center Party would have to balance the need for cohesion and a profile that keeps that party above the 4% barrier for membership in the Riksdag, the Center Party just polled 4,3%. The unusually open search for a new party leader in the Center Party is of course highly dependent on the latter and Reinfeldt yesterday was careful with inviting the new leader to the "Alliansen".

It is of great importance that this coalition is maintained for the wellbeing of Sweden and as Reinfeldt pointed out in his speech the left of center coalition that challenged him last year does not exist anymore. All leaders will be exchanged shortly when also the Left Party is electing a new leader and furthermore they don't have a common project. We were lucky that the Swedish people called their empty hand.

Right track or wrong track?

2011-08-14T13:44:00.002+01:00

Over 70% of the population think the US is on the wrong track. What seems to be important then is which new track is the US going to take? Or, which solution to their problems are the Americans going to chose? It should also be noted that Congress only gets a 17% job approval figure.

A possible hint can be seen in the result of yesterday in the Iowa Straw Poll where Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, both Tea Partyers with a libertarian streak, took 56% of the votes. Europeans are probably going to have problems with this direction if it materializes.

The Vikings might not have been that bad after all?

2011-08-13T07:58:00.000+01:00

According to Francis Fukuyama’s book The Origins of Political Order from 2011 rule of law and accountable government originated in Europe quite early. Rule of law consolidated to the Common Law in England after the Norman Conquest of 1066 and Rule of law on the Continent came about from the canon of the Catholic Church which they put together from the Roman Justinian Code after having freed themselves from the state by Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085). Individuality also was established from church ideas as well as from the inherent heritage from the barbaric German tribes and Anglo-Saxons. There must have been something inherently fair about these savages, like the Vikings, once they became christened and formalized their rule of law. The strong position of the woman in the family must stem from this source. It is conceivable that the political development had importance for the scientific revolution. The church was also important in the alternative path to democracy and rule of law for example seen in Denmark where the church educated the peasants who were then used by the king to balance out the nobles. The woman’s standing was good in Judaism at the time of David and Solomon but deteriorated down to the time of Christ. Jesus is of course quite kind to the woman, relatively speaking. A christened Europe in any case was a very different place compared to Muslim military slavery run countries, India and China.

Fukuyama pointed out the strong standing of the English woman relative the Muslim and Indian cultures that were also religious. She could sue and get sued, bequeath property and own and sell property without a male guardian from the 13^th century. It is interesting to speculate on cultural difference between western barbarians and more eastern barbarians, the Teutons, that perhaps gives rise to the different philosophy seen between Britain and Germany. Fukuyama also pointed out that the Norman Conquest only changed the top layer of society and not the general organization of England into shires. In the same line of evidence it is then possible to say that christening of Barbarians in Europe did not change organization initially but that the individual character of each tribal society in a way was maintained. Another idea that might be interesting to delve on is that if there were differences in the time between 600 and 1000, are there larger or smaller differences between areas today? It might be possible to say that education homogenizes the populations but it might also be possible to say that different language groups might develop more differently than before because of faster communications. Clovis I was the first Catholic king of France who lived 466-511. Arian Christianity was common among the Goths at the time and the Catholic Venerable Bede christened part of England in 597. Vernacular translations of the Bible came first in England 1382 and then in Germany 1466. Italy and France did their translations later than northern Europe--an early difference in handling freedom.

The World Financial Order?

2011-08-07T10:47:00.000+01:00

S&P, one of the three large credit rating agencies in the US, late on Friday, after the markets closed, downgraded US one notch to AA+ from AAA. In this context it should be noted that a Chinese credit rating agency, Dagong, downgraded the US last week to a level on par with Spain. There seems to be a war on the interpretation of what is important and the reason might be that we are witnessing a clash between two economic cultures. The Chinese being state capitalism.

My own confidence in the US and its people is completely unshaken and it should be mentioned that France, Japan and South Korea don’t see any problems with US creditworthiness according to the Financial Times. China, according to the Chinese news agency Xinhua, makes a lot of noise and seems to disregard the fact that you do take a risk buying state papers. Instead they want to remake the world financial order to secure their investments. It would be interesting to read an initiated Swedish article evaluating the benefits or disadvantages to Sweden if China gets their way?

Technology dependent states--China and the EU?

2011-08-01T09:50:00.000+01:00

The first unified China, the Qin Dynasty, lasted only fourteen years, from 221BCE. It was a highly suppressive affair that alienated everyone in society although there was a unification of the spoken and written language. It was replaced by the Han Dynasty, 202BCE to 220CE, where Confucianism came back and the moral of the emperor ruling for the benefit of the ruled moral came back from the Legalist tradition under Qin. In 5BCE there were 60m people in China together with 130,000 bureaucrats.

Today there are 1,350m people in China and it occurred to me that Deng Xiaoping in 1978 would never have embarked on the Chinese miracle if it had not been for the technology that no one dares to speak of. Controlling such an amount of educated Middle Class Chinese the way the party wants to would not have been possible. If I am right in my conjecture, this would mean that the protocol used by the 80m people in the Communist Party is a prerequisite for the state whereas the West is using the technology on preexistant functioning states.

This would mean that governing such large conglomerates as China and the EU needs the technology. Francis Fukuyama discusses how China’s development compared with that of Europe and it is interesting to note that the seemingly blind alley that the Chinese already embarked on in 221BCE with the first modern dictatorship is something they might have cemented with the technology today making it virtually impossible for a democratic development. Fusing Europe in the EU is also something that has reversed democratization.

The frustrating discussion that have been ongoing since the financial crisis in 2008 on the fate of the EU then in all probability to a certain extent revolves around the question if national states are going to let go of their regular governance to the governance aided by the technology and thus emulation of China. Historically Europe never mustered the coercion needed by Qin to unify China. The geography was configured so as to promote different cultures and languages and the brute force of unification never materialized. Furthermore, the Catholic Church induced a social development that never happened in China which lacks the rule of law and an accountable government still today.

The latest gossip on the EU is that a two-speed super-state will form on the Continent with Britain on the side. The question then is if Germany will lead the Continent in the Chinese technology dependent fashion and that democracy with functioning governments using the technology will remain in Anglo-America?

Je pense, donc je suis

2011-07-24T16:54:00.002+01:00

The publication Descartes never published and that came out first after his death was called Le Monde or The World. It contained his physico-mathematical world view and featured the heliocentric theory. Galileo was in trouble at the time for this and Descartes decided not to publish. That happens to be the same name as Gideon Rachman used when he recently changed the name of his blog on FT.com. Maybe he also has things that he cannot say until posthumously? The problem of world politics might be in the same developmental level as science was in the 17^th century?

Checks and Balances?

2011-07-19T18:15:00.001+01:00

In the Afterword of The End of History and the Last Man from 2006 I find a possible reason for the 2011 book of Fukuyama called The Origins of Political Order. Fukuyama says that what is missing is a treatise that deals with the political development devoid of economic concerns. My humble question is if this really is possible? Probably as a research project. As Gideon Rachman points out in today’s column the political system needs a fix in the US. Or does it? Isn’t the battle between Republicans and Democrats that is ongoing the cradle of a new solution to the deadlock and America’s problems? Rachman says that left to themself either D or R can solve the problem. The problem seems to be whether the US is going in a European direction or if it is going to become more “American”. The crucial point here is that it can’t do both. The Americans have to decide which they are going to choose. My guess is that the debt crisis in Europe is going to give the Republicans an edge. The Americans are currently feeling out the new multipolar world. Obama’s potential doctrine from Anne-Marie Slaughter with the US as the most connected country that everybody wants to talk to might not have materialized, although I liked the idea. This would mean we are back to balance of power.

I listened to Carl Bildt’s Sommar program on the radio on Sunday. It is interesting to find the only foreign political statement in Swedish media in the entertainment section. Outlining Sweden’s interests he pictured a unified Europe as the vehicle of Sweden. In my current judgment he was a little too optimistic on Europe. Then he painted a grand importance of the Balkans and Afghanistan way out of their importance globally. Towards the end of the program though he said important things like that science is going to solve many of our problems with environment etc. He radiated a positive view on the world and was very nationalistic. He called Swedish the language of honor and heroes. A good foreign minister could thus be excused. It could be contrasted with the American “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. The Swedish is definitely more Hegelian. Freedom is more important than honor and all brave people are not necessarily heroes. If Bildt is more German than Anglo-American, he will become disappointed over that Germany is not going to jeopardize its economy by saving the Euro which is the most probable outcome of the current situation.

What motivates people who succeed?

2011-07-07T13:44:00.000+01:00

Fukuyama writes in The End of History and the Last Man from 1992:

"A civilization devoid of anyone who wanted to be recognized as better than others, and which did not affirm in some way the essential health and goodness of such a desire, would have little art or literature, music or intellectual life."

I have earlier said that as far as intellectual life goes curiosity is probably more important than the drive for recognition but this requires a few more comments. The same would be true for art and music.

Could it be that the more physical the endeavor the more important is the recognition component in success? An athlete is motivated by trying to improve himself in his regular training but is then in need of proper competition nerves when in play. Whereas a scientist or artist does the real thing in the lab or study and then just displays it in public. In other words a civilization according to Fukuyama's idea above would have no sport or competitive business but plenty of art and science.

Norah Jones on world politics--Sinking Soon?

2011-07-06T14:55:00.000+01:00

We're an oyster cracker on the stew,
And the honey in the tea,
We're the sugar cubes, one lump or two,
In the black coffee,
The golden crust on an apple pie,
That shines in the sun at noon,
We're a wheel of cheese high in the sky,
But we're gonna be sinkin' soon.

In a boat that's built of sticks and hay,
We drifted from the shore,
With a captain who's too proud to say,
That he dropped the oar,
Now a tiny hole has sprung a leak,
In this cheap pontoon,
Now the hull has started growing weak,
And we're gonna be sinkin' soon.

We're gonna be
Sinkin' soon,
We're gonna be
Sinkin' soon,
Everybody hold your breath 'cause,
We're gonna be sinkin' soon

We're gonna be
Sinkin' soon,
We're gonna be
Sinkin' soon,
Everybody hold your breath 'cause,
Down and down we go.

Like the oyster cracker on the stew,
The honey in the tea
The sugar cubes, one lump or two?
No thank you none for me.
We're the golden crust on an apple pie,
That shines in the sun at noon,
Like the wheel of cheese high in the sky
Well ... we're gonna be sinkin' soon

The right of center Allians of Sweden will break up?

2011-07-06T14:48:00.000+01:00

Reading today in Svenska Dagbladet about a fragmentation in Swedish politics. The Center party in Sweden wants to break lose from the Allians, a right of center coalition of the Moderaterna, Folkpartiet, Centerpartiet and Kristdemokraterna. Recently the ten year party secretary Maud Olofsson announced that she will leave her post coming a congress in September. She had been instrumental in forming the Allians that initially won the election of 2006.

Small parties like Kristdemokraterna and Centerpartiet have suffered from losing voters being minors in the Allians. People have moved to the largest party Moderaterna to gain influence. They now poll around 4% which is the entrance bar to the Parliament. The finance minister Anders Borg, Moderaterna, have made an invitation at the yearly political gathering in Almedalen to offer collaboration with The Green party. I guess he saw the fragmentation coming. Another reason is that the Alliance is ruling as a minority government, a phenomenon that is common in Swedish politics, and is thus looking for a more stable situation. The Greens are moving forward like in Germany.

Also Jan Björklund, the minister of education, is suggesting that Sweden as the first country in Europe should introduce Chinese at the high school level. He says it will be more important for Sweden than French and Spanish. He did not say German, which gives the general direction of the thinking of government. They are German Chinese in their minds and will combine this with the Anglo-American presence. I have heeard comments that it is easier to collaborate with the Chinese than with neighbors in the EU so I guess it all makes sense. China seems to be successfully ruling by dividing in Europe.

Which brings me to the question of the prospects of the US. Walter Russell Mead, the editor of The American Interest and a professor of foreign policy at Bard College in NY, wrote a very up-beat article about America on wsj.com because of Fourth of July that was nice to read. It all made sense in the gloom given in the press about America at presence. I am a firm believer that the US will work themself out of their current fiscal problems and stand tall again. I even kept my American pension money in New York. Europe on the other hand seems to lean towards Chinese help rather than self-reliance.

Sweden is an engineering country and today there is a debate article in Svenska Dagbladet where people claim they should broaden the engineering education which is overdue. The article is a response to a report issued by Svenskt Näringsliv where the relative role of Natural Science/Technology and Humanistic subjects was discussed. I tried to read most of the main articles in this debacle but did not see the question about what the competition from China and India study. Volumewise they will churn out hundred of thousands, almost a million, engineers per year that work for lower salaries. I guess what Sweden wants to achieve is to produce engineers that can make Swedish companies rather than working for foreign companies in Sweden. This might require a modernization of an earlier successful educuation as Nina Wormbs and Sverker Sörlin argued in their article.

Is it possible to show respect for a country that does not take its citizen's political instincts seriously?

2011-06-28T10:26:00.000+01:00

The debate on what you can demand in terms of human rights in China is on since Wen Jiabao is visiting Europe. David Cameron and Guido Westerwelle thinks it is possible to discuss difficult questions at the same time as you trade with each other. I agree fully!

It must be considered difficult to show China respect when treating its citizens in the present way. Wen Jiabao thinks we should show China respect and tolerance. Tolerance OK but treating grown up people like naughty children is not something that is impressive.

The Chinese often brings up their long history. I guess it is a favorite when comparing themself with the US. However, what happened during the last 2-300 years is far more interesting. Also, I have problems with the Mao era where people were severely mistreated during especially The Great Leap Forward and the Culture Revolution. It is what China does now with its new found power that potentially is going to be treated with respect. Will they continue with the first modern dictatorship or invent something new?

Gideon Rachman on FT.com is displeased with David Camerons capabilities in his column today. He thinks you have to treat China as a power and not only as a market. Speaking truth to power does not seem to be a discriminator between Britain and Germany though, even if standing up for freedom in Libya was. The final judgment on Libya will come at the death toll when the debacle is over, though.

"America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home"

2011-06-25T13:22:00.001+01:00

Thus spoke President Obama in a speech where he made the right choice of a way forward for conflicts in areas where suggesting keeping troops on the ground should lead to a head examination, according to the defense secretary. Raids like that on Osama bin Laden and drones are probably a preferred way of future operation.

After the financial crisis when the tide turned on America, I actually wrote a post summarizing the situation in the way Obama did but he had problems with the Republican party and the military and went into the surge attempt. After some effect of the surge, Obama can now say that more military and a prolonged military engagement is doomed to fail and have his people's majority on his side.

Another fact that might be affecting the American opinion is that China is just moving ahead with their economy not paying any attention to problems in the world. The futility of the Arab Spring in terms of what can actually be achieved with military means might also play a role. The successful raid against bin Laden renders an opportunity for a mission accomplished of some sort.

Carl Bildt reacted strongly on the idea that Americans should focus on their own problems but is he really surprised? This notion has matured over the last three years. Also, if you want to do nation building it might pay off to select countries that are in a significantly better shape than Afghanistan and Somalia to build credit and to gain experience. Starting out with one of the bottom tier countries might just give development strategies a futile and failing air. Obama is giving people like Westerwelle and Bildt problems though because their cause for being in Afghanistan for their populaces, nation building, is significantly weakened.

As I claimed ahead of the Libya debacle, it is one thing to wish you can prevent ethnic cleansing but another to actually being able to do something. We might stand ahead of an era where the failing states will have to be left to their fate while the establishment focuses on countries that can be saved by others.

Does science have any positive influence on human rights?

2011-06-17T20:31:00.001+01:00

Samuel P Huntington was one of Francis Fukuyama's teachers and is most known for his pamphlet The Clash of Civilizations. Fukuyama writes in the Afterword from 2006 of his influencial book The End of History and the Last Man the following:

"Huntington is quite correct when he says that the historical origin of modern secular liberal democracy lies in Christianity which is not an original view. Hegel, Tocqueville and Nietzsche, among many other thinkers, have argued that modern democracy is a secular version of the Christian doctrine of the universal dignity of man, and that this is now understood as a nonreligious political doctrine of human rights. In my opinion, there is no question that this is the case from a historical point of view.

But while modern liberal democracy has its roots in this particular cultural soil, the issue is whether these ideas may become detached from these particular origins and have a significance for people who live in non-Christian cultures. The scientific method, on which our modern technological cililization rests, also appeared for contingent historical reasons at a certain moment in the history of early modern Europe, based on the thought of philosophers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes. But once the scientific method was invented, it became the posession for all of mankind, and was usable whether you were Asian, African or Indian."

The question then is whether science have a positive influence on human rights because then liberal democracy might be transferable to for example the Chinese culture? It might via the science of psychology unless the psychology of the Chinese differ from ours. Since the sudden death of behavioralism, psychology have made enormous progress due to the fact that minds can be read. Minds can be read on people that does not know of this and of people that cooperate. Thus psychology knows how people think about human rights. What they prefer. I have a feeling the answer is out there but a little hard to come by. Whether this research was ethical or not is an other question.

Katas in Industry?

2011-06-15T21:33:00.000+01:00

I'm working on the problem on which culture is best suited to harbor the future and an interesting thing occurred to me.

The Japanese did very well in making cars. This probably depended on the fact that performing motorical sequences assempling a car resembles performing so called katas in martial art. A kata is a series of motions executed to practise a sham fight. They are practised by repetitive performances and it is known today that some 10,000 repetitions is necessary to optimize a motion program. Katas are part of Zen Buddhism and it is religion for many Japanese.

However, the assembly line was invented in the individualistic USA where free spirits probably suffered more in straight jacketing themselves into repetitive motion schemes. It would appear that the Japanese could have had an easier path to inventing the assembly line by just setting up a series of katas to make a car? Today the Japanese assemble cars faster than the Americans. They also write more patents per capita. They are doing worse on the GDP per capita though. They lost ground against the Americans on this parameter lately.

Perhaps it is time to start talk about what you innovate and not how much you innovate?

I'm beginning to feel that the political culture is very important for the quality of research. Therefore it is very hard to be Swedish globally speaking because what Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton did was trendsetting and very mature early on, still going strong. If Germany is going their own way now, it is also very hard to be a European because they will part philosophically and value wise. If this split becomes real in the wake of the euro-zone debt crisis this might have effects on coordinating research EU wise but it might be good for the competition in Europe.

Differences between the US and Germany?

2011-06-14T14:51:00.000+01:00

I have been told that in the US a person that has suffered a bancruptcy can get a second chance but that in Germany such a person is lost forever. It occurred to me that this difference might stem from the Hegelian master and slave problem. A person is not a man if he has not lived through a death challenge. If he does not dare the challenge he becomes as slave. The bancrupt person died, so to speak.

What is not clear is if the nowadays risk-averse Germans, which can be seen in the differences between Germany and the US on the economy and on military matters, on nuclear power, are truly Hegelian or not. A death challenge to become a serious person is a rather silly adventure. Modern education would be meaningless since an educational endproduct would not be useful without a risk to vanish. Hegel spoke before public education though.

One category of functionary in the modern society, the soldier, firefighter and police, could of course be selected on Hegel's basis. I guess we know today that the percentage of humans that qualify in this category is rather small. Smaller in Europe than in the US, apparently.

The US and Germany seems to have less and less to say to each other. When Angela Merkel was over the last time and gave a speech before Congress she irritated the hosts by pushing for greenery. Now recently they took a stand against nuclear everything. The economy, Middle East policy, Libya.

So, while the Swedes sit and watch their BBC productions on TV, do they become more German or Anglo-American? I don't see any polls on these issues. Why are we afraid of discussing this? There was a recent poll on a higher interest for Swedes to join NATO but this is not a discriminatory between Germany and Anglo-America. The German-US split might break NATO. That is probably why Obama gave Angela Merkel the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that can be given a civilian.

What happens if the US pulls out of NATO?

2011-06-14T12:16:00.000+01:00

The US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a talk recently that has been commented today by Gideon Rachman on his FT.com column. Jan Kallberg also writes on his blog about the change in US preferences "after" the war on terrorism. Kallberg says that nuclear weapons are going to make a comeback.

What we observe now is a US that might lower their defense costs a bit and a Europe that is substantially lowering theirs. China is significantly increasing their costs yearly. This obviously reflects how these different power centers view the global risks and the projection of global power. Although I think that the difference in risk taking within NATO is more severe than the actual amounts the countries are contributing, I am not sure why the European countries downplay military risks in this fashion when the economically booming China is thinking otherwise. China is apparently not content with economical weaponry.

Kallberg argues that what is going to become important is the actual military capability. If the European countries cannot even keep up a fight in Libya for a few weeks, as Gates pointed out, there is no capability. So if NATO falls, Europe will be dangerously alone. A country like Sweden would have problems paying for the benefit of being under the US nuclear umbrella and in practice be without defense. I hate to bring this up in this apparently risk-free era but I simply do not trust Russia.

Tony Blair pointed out the other day that the EU for the sake of power should join the US to defend Western values. He also said that he advocated for an elected EU president to minimize the democratic deficit, although he did not see this as realizable but spoke of it as a goal. The president he discussed should not be above the national heads of states in this case. I think it is statesman-like to speak up for the West in light of the above discussion. It is highly reasonable.

However, reasonable or not it does not seem to reflect what is happening even if the EU could need common views on common problems these days of debt problems and polarity in the future of an ever closer union. Proponents against military matching with the US probably say that we can't do much in Libya or Syria anyhow. The fact remains though that a country that crash Iraq in a matter of days has a different leverage on events given a unified West that is not divided on itself.

Returning to the reason for why Europe does not spend much on military defense, it may be very difficult to invade EU with soldiers. However, if nuclear weapons will be in vogue a country like Iran would want to get some and can thus threaten the EU with severe damage, something the EU might have to act upon. If European countries run out of munitions after a few weeks, it would seem like a coordinated raid to eliminate a nuclear threat from Iran would be highly hypothetical?

Political Science?

2011-06-13T14:39:00.001+01:00

Writing a Universal History, ie a history with meaning and a goal, an endpoint, was treated most seriously in the German idealist tradition. Immanuel Kant wrote in 1784 an essay where he suggested as much. This was pre-Darwin one should note. Still Francis Fukuyama based his book The End of History and the Last Man on Kant and Hegel. I simply do not understand this.

Fukuyama writes that Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle wrote in 1688 that "there will be no end to the growth and development of human wisdom". Fontenelle's progress was just in natural science though but it would be important to ask if not social and political progress also would be influenced by science?

Claiming that there would be an end to progress in political science would be to demonstrate the naïveté that Albert Einstein talked about having a personal God concept. Einstein's God concept included the obvious expansion of knowledge and pointed out that what we see now is rather limited. We don't know what God looks like. Putting a face on God or claiming that no more advances would be made in organizing people here on Earth is similar.

However, Immanuel Kant wrote in his 1784 essay: "A philosophical attempt to work out a universal history according to a natural plan directed to achieving the civic union of the human race must be regarded as possible and, indeed, as contributing to this end of Nature." If the 'natural plan' is to be read 'evolution' it is not entirely sure what Kant means. Did Kant have an idea of an evolution of society? Also, 'end of Nature' does not have to mean that an endpoint has occurred in time and its development. It could be just a step on the way.

The trans-Atlantic alliance?

2011-06-11T22:40:00.000+01:00

The ft.com ran an article about Robert Gates, the US secretary of defence, on Friday. Gates claimed that NATO alliance was at risk. The reason was the bad performance of allies in Libya. It is the old problem having some people doing the light work and others doing the hard work and the difference in how much resources they spend per capita.

I reread the book Of Paradise and Power by Robert Kagan from 2003 for the occasion. Henry Kissinger said of this book: "Though in the past we have often disagreed, I consider this essay one of those seminal treatises without which any discussion of European-American relations would be incomplete and which will shape the discussion for years to come".

Kagan says the following: "One of the things that most clearly divides Europeans and Americans today is a philosophical, even metaphysical disagreement over where exactly mankind stands on the continuum between the laws of the jungle and the laws of reason. Americans do not believe we are as close to the realization of the Kantian dream as do Europeans."

Furthermore, Kagan does not think the Europeans want to strive for a unified "West". So what have happened since 2003? Well, Obama turned out to be very popular in Europe compared to Bush but this does not seem to have bridged the difference in how Europeans and Americans view their security. The Arab Spring, however, in my humble opinion, should make the Europeans more willing to view things the American way.

Where is the next interesting thing happening?

2011-06-08T20:03:00.000+01:00

Is it going to be the most efficient economies that take the lead or is it going to be the most legitimate and therefore probably the most stable, albeit slower growing. China, South Korea and Japan represents a highly efficient area that is very competitive relative each other. Boston, Washington-Philadelphia, Texas, California and Chicago is another conglomerate that is in the legitimate category. In Europe we have London, Paris, Brussels and Berlin.

Although I have heard comments against this idea, I believe that we have entered a new era where rule-systems group into those utilizing pain, those who fool with pain and/or use subliminal stimulations of various kind and psychological terror, and normal ones that treat people like human beings with dignity.

Another favorite theory of mine is that the democracy wave that occurred during the 1970s and 1980s where dictatorships gave up power, so to speak, because they kept it behind the scenes with the technology, in reality was the transfer to a new order of so called democracy according to the second principle above.

There is good hope that the principle where people are fooled to believe that pain is going to be used against them will move in a more dignified direction as people try out to breach the orders and take the consequences that are not too severe. The dictatorships that use pain might very well go down hill on developments in the general direction of Libya and Syria. People just begin to go out and die in the streets when life has become bad enough.

There is a risk that the second category, fooling with pain, revert to using pain. Let us for the sake of mankind hope that this is not going to happen. Let us also hope that life in category two above is not too supressive. It was noteworthy that there were no leaders in the Egyptian revolt, just non-connected grassroots.

The Global Position?

2011-06-07T16:30:00.004+01:00

I see that some people claim that they are global liberals or that Sweden is a global country. Is this an escape from the real people "verklighetens folk"? I must admit I feel a little guilty myself but the question is what such a stratification does to a country. The global postion is a little fuzzy.

As I noted before, the Libya debacle is a case in point. Swedes and Danes share the same base in Italy but do not do the same job and Germany is not doing anything. This is examples of different penetration of the stratification problem.

As a global liberal it is necessary to take a strand for helping the so called rebels in Libya which means you get in trouble supporting Germany's new anti-nuclear line as the path forward for Europe especially when you get 40% of your electricity from nuclear power. Again it is possible to escape as a global liberal with global values but such values are theoretical. They don't exist in reality in a country. I wonder if calling Sweden a global country is not the same as declaring it neutral in all conflicts and keeping one's options open? Saying that we do what the EU does is not true either. We are not even part of the euro-zone.

Then again how homogenous is the global position. Is it the position of global peace? Or the position of global finance? Is it the defunct G20? Jeffrey D. Sachs suggested the world should be divided into self-sustaining regions instead of a G20 mechanism where the regions take care of economical and security questions. Our region would then be the Nordic countries. Some 25m people. Since Norway is not part of the EU and Sweden and Finland not part of NATO we are not even ready to take care of our immediate environment.

With our language education we are part of the Anglo-American culture domain. But apart from security issues, Great Britain and the US are not so close anymore. Germany just took a path that seemed unpalatable for Sweden and thus an ever closer Union does not look potentially good right now, which is what is necessary to save the Euro. You see, neutrality politics becomes tempting again.

Where is the future forming right now? 1523 when Gustaf Vasa got financial help from Lübeck to take back Stokholm from the Danes and then help to organize Sweden saw a development where Holland slowly took over control from Lübeck and thus formed the Western civilization with England during the 16th and 17th centuries. Sweden became on their own then from their benefactor, independence, but did not get part of the real action until later. Are we doing the same mistake today?

The Swedish Independence Day?

2011-06-06T22:39:00.000+01:00

2005 they decided to make the 6th of June an official holiday in Sweden. A little nationalism in exchange for a religious holiday called Annandag Pingst.

Gustaf Vasa was crowned on 6th of June 1523 and made Sweden into a unified country. He introduced Protestantism 1527 and 1536 there was a meeting in Uppsala where the religion was formally changed. Gustaf Vasa used this change to enrich himself on behalf of the Catholic Church and paid back debts to the Hansa town Lübeck which had helped him gain power. He used German advisers to reorganize the country between 1538 to 1543 and made Sweden a kingdom based on heredity in 1544.

Gustaf Vasa was not a renaissance man but an organizational genius. Another well-known Swede, a man of the people, that has characterized himself as an unconcerned poet that wanted happy people around him dancing in an opulent nature is Evert Taube, the most famous Swedish troubadour. Gustaf Vasa did leave one important trace the Nordic ski race, the worlds largest, but Evert Taube has left many more. He is the great romanticizer of the Swedish archipelago and it's cult day Midsummer.

I myself have reached a point in my life where I try to figure out who I am and I have realized that Evert Taube gives me some clues. I got some of his songs from iTunes today to refresh my memory. Evert Taube was born on the lighthouse island Vinga not far from where I live and since I spend many summers of my youth in the Göteborg archipelago I definitely feel having roots in the simplicity and frugality of this environment.

However, my father emigrated to the US and became an English Professor in a small Wisconsin town called Menomonie which I visited first time 15 years old. My father and I used to listen to Evert Taube songs in their kitchen and I therefore have feelings of home in the small American town as well. Working almost ten years in Philadelphia later made me indifferent and for non-national reasons I ended up back in the Göteborg archipelago. Politics had not been important in my life.

After having become a new kind of prisoner, with an artificially lowered intellect as the result of some kind of arbitrary judgment, I became very interested in the political history of the US. Today I am probably more American than Swedish. Standing up for freedom and individualism rather than for peace is the most probable discriminator. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not more American than my two American-born children.

The Rational Optimist

2011-06-03T10:40:00.001+01:00

In a book called The Rational Optimist from 2010 Matt Ridley strikes out in favor for a highly positive outlook for the future of Man. The book was discussed on wsj.com, http://www.thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/1938-matt-ridley-vs-bill-gates.html, by Bill Gates and Matt Ridley. Matt Ridley took a PhD in Zoology 1983 and then worked at The Economist from 1984-1992.

Ridley does not talk about political problems of mankind like the coming and going of wars. He is concerned with the continuous advance of technology and living standards due to human exchange, or trade, and specialization. He does very few comparisons of civilizations. He sees innovation like a "bush fire" that flares up here and there and then dies out. He does not delve into the very interesting question of why this is so.

Ridley is the first person I encountered that does not think science is the mother of innovation in technology. He thinks it rather the other way around. But if you ask the question why the latest bush fire, that I believe is very different from earlier ones, the scientific revolution occurred, was that something happened in the mind of people in Europe that then opened for innovation. Scientific breakthroughs generated this new mind set from a base of a certain maturity of Christianity and political development around.

In this regard Ridley is not separating basic science from R&D. He does not separate the more spiritual part of investigative human behavior from the engineering part. Basic science creates the mood of innovation R&D creates products. He says "few of the inventions that made the industrial revolution owed anything to scientific theory". However, both the way they worked and the way they thought were influenced by earlier science.

One question that keeps appearing is for what Nobel Prizes should be awarded. I recently heard a suggestion that institutions rather than individuals should be considered. The person was at CERN and they have problems with who should get the prize for the Higgs particle. Another difficulty is the difference between prizes for new knowledge or for methods that generate new knowledge. An old example of this is the telescope that was invented by Lippershey who did not do science but that was quickly adapted for scientific productive work by Galileo.

The problem with the institutional idea is that part of the benefit of awarding prizes in science is that people like to have role models to look up to which is more difficult with an institution. Propinquity is proven important in science but individualism is equally important.

What I like with Ridley's book, however, is that it illustrates the way to think about the future. Science and innovation is speeding up rather than slowing down and we can expect to see our present world as old and out of date anytime soon. Moving into the future at the present pace is a spiritual endeavor.

Germany goes anti-nuclear

2011-05-31T09:51:00.001+01:00

The fact that Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel, a former physicist, follows the sentiments of the German people of dislike for nuclear energy must be considered an interesting development.

Germany gets 25% of its electricity from nuclear power and if they perform a change like the proposed one it must be possible. I have earlier advocated for the center-right parties in Sweden to take initiative from the Green party on energy which is exactly what Merkel is doing in Germany. This is probably more important than my earlier support for nuclear power as an alternative for Sweden because it might prevent new left of center coalitions to form.

If the technically highly proficient Japanese ran into such problems with Fukushima this has to be taken seriously. Three Mile Island 1979, Chernobyl 1986 and now Fukushima is beginning to be too much. This demonstrates that the technology is too unsafe together with the problem of storage of spent nuclear fuel. Furthermore, the technology seems to be problematic to keep up and running with resulting power shortages in Sweden lately during the winter time.

The decision of Merkel's government is going to keep the pressure up on Germany's green technology industry and stimulate to even more serious research in the field. This will probably be good also for Swedish initiatives. I regard Merkel's initiative as a liberal conservative step forward in time. I have earlier asked the question if politicians with science background are path-finders and the politicians of the future. By following the sentiments of the public and rating various security risks, I think Angela Merkel is doing the right thing. The initiative is probably going to cost some carbon dioxide but this is in all probablity a lesser problem.

Unsustainable?

2011-05-27T14:05:00.000+01:00

Something is unsustainable in the West as this word is being used more and more. However, Sweden is currently having a growth of 6,4% during the first quarter 2011 with some of the highest taxes on Earth. It should be mentioned that the OECD ranking of GDP growth in Sweden is going to fall during the upcoming years.

The health care spending in the US is twice as expensive per capita as the one in Sweden and some say that it is on the average not of the same quality, even if the US has the sharpest health care in the world. The Republican Congress is presently not raising the debt ceiling of the nation. Some say that instead of pondering the size of the ceiling they should balance the budget. There seems to be a general consensus that expenditures rather than revenue, or taxes, should be considered.

Perhaps it is a little frustrating that the Nordic way does not ring any bells at all in the US. What is perhaps of great interest is why this is so. I have not calculated on this but my gut feeling is that is would not be possible to lower costs and fund a balancing of the US budget. Taxes have to be raised.

So we are talking about cultural differences where Sweden seems to be a posh suburb of the US and that a comparison straight off country by country is not really possible. A surplus country like Sweden also fared better during the financial crisis that highly leveraged deficit countries like the US and the UK.

It would be interesting to know whether the US or Sweden scores best on innovation per capita? I don't have that comparison but if Sweden was to score better there should be an argument for the US following Sweden's lead. However, if the US scores better Sweden have to ask themselves if contributing to the top class innovation of the world is not more important that living poshly. Is living standard more important than contribution to progress?

It's different this time--but analogous?

2011-05-24T16:21:00.000+01:00

Niall Ferguson, the Harvard historian, has said that the four most dangerous words are "it's different this time". Gideon Rachman, chief foreign correspondent at the Financial Times, writes in his column today that some people say world wars are "blips" in the progress of humanity in science and technology. He thinks there will be more blips on the way.

Could it be that such a blip just passed with the financial crisis of 2008, which by the way is still ongoing, and that this was analogous with World War I and that we are unhappily awaiting a second major economical war. It's different this time--but analogous. Conventional wars are history and the chief military officer of the US becomes the leader of the CIA. The fight has become intelligence-driven.

The world, and especially Asia, seems to have engaged in a major tussle half a generation down the line where education and IQ is promoted in a fashion that martial arts where promoted in Japan prior to World War II. Asia has seriously "downloaded" the science and technology app and is going to show the world which system or culture that promotes this lore most efficiently.

The West is taking a beating and its neighbors are trying to break free in the Arab Spring. The reaction of the West is to tailor make a response that is ideologically corrupt and that they hope will improve the relation that is unfolding. Rachman called it at one point "the last hurrah of the West" which it is, as long as people are trying to tell the Arabs what to do instead of just helping out.

But there is reason to the blip-theory. We have advanced since the 16th century despite all wars in a breath-taking speed. However, few people inhabit both the science technology domain and the political ditto and this can make politicians think scientists are cynical not worrying about the negatives of technology. Wars are fought over differences of value systems and the dominating value systems are economy-linked today. Is it the most efficient economy or the most humane that is going to win.

An interesting scientist turned politician is Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. Is she the politician of the future? She has recently been very cautious about nuclear power after the Fukushima catastrophe and she listens carefully to the public opinion. In a present educational war to empower the peoples of the nations such a leader might be optimal. And Germany is doing rather well economically as well. Margaret Thatcher was also a scientist turned politician via a lawyer's degree.

The question is, however, if Francis Bacon's old maxim "knowledge is power" is benefitting science and technology today sending the world out in a power and money innovation-driven quest. The risk is that politicians lose the average guy somewhere along the way. Care has to be taken to making innovation both in economy and science interesting also for the common man. Should it be linked to nationalism and dressed up like team sport? Sport serves the world well right now as a safety valve for exuberant emotions in the physical domain. Perhaps we need something similar for the spiritual domain.

Gap between the rich and the poor is increasing everywhere--a Noah's Ark phenomenon?

2011-05-23T20:00:00.000+01:00

Now, what can this phenomenon depend on? In Sweden there is only 25% of the people that want to join NATO but a large parliamentary majority for the Libya and Afghanistan operations. The elites think differently than the people. The same thing seems to be happening in Germany, except for Libya, but for Greece and Portugal.

This is Sweden where the gap is supposed to be unusually low. In an election in Spain people want what they call real democracy. They want the people to be a resource.

In the world at large we find to lanes. One where the people is a resource and the other where government is afraid of the people that has to be controlled. Ian Bremmer discusses this phenomenon by means of what he calls the J-curve. You can move from one state to the other via a minimum. But how do you peacefully move from an order where government fear the people to where they think the people is a resource? Did this ever happen in modern times, actually? Probably not if you talk about countries like the UK and China. There was a democracy wave but I have my doubts on how serious the democracy is in these cases because people might just be controlled in this new way that nobody talks about.

There has been hope, and still is in some quarters, that the two lanes will merge and liberal democracies all over the world will live peacefully ever after. However, recently many voices have appeared that say we are in for a Zero-Sum game and conflict. One large potential trouble is the competition for resources. India and China say the Earth cannot support us if we consume like the West. The West probably sends this moral back by humbly asking if they are not too many already.

Science did help us in one very important aspect. Contraceptives. It has been estimated that the world population will peak at 9bn around 2050. This is a very positive thing. After that, we can manage. However, one question that pops up is if the increasing gap between the rich and the poor is a Noah's Ark phenomenon? If it is, it will be very hard to counteract.

CIA is becoming a four letter word in Sweden again?

2011-05-23T10:51:00.001+01:00

I read today in Svenska Dagbladet, the center-right top Swedish daily, a sour article about two CIA operatives that had been caught spying on terrorists by SÄPO, the Swedish secret police, without coordination with the latter organization.

There are two ways of dealing with this information. You can feel passed by and offended or you can ask yourself why the US might have done this. If you like I do, think that the security of the United States is good for the security of Sweden and that the CIA is a force for good, you think that there might be a reason for why CIA did not coordinate with SÄPO or "Secret Service", and then I assume that SÄPO knows what "secret service" is doing.

The obvious question then is whether or not there are leaks that would tip off the prospective terrorists in the security organizations? As usual for Sweden, it is a matter of chosing sides or staying neutral.

Ask the average atheist

2011-05-22T14:10:00.000+01:00

Atheist: There is no God. The supernatural does not exist.

Pantheist: Has the quest of science then come to an end or what is the unknown?

Atheist: The unknown is what we do not know yet. Wonderful things.

Pantheist: But how many wonderful things? Do you vision an end to what could be revealed?

Atheist: I believe not.

Pantheist: Very well then!

Early Modern Period

2011-05-21T19:00:00.000+01:00

The way they thought was different during the Scientific Revolution, or Early Modern Period, ie 16th and 17th centuries. They looked for connections like why the sunflower follows the sun, or the tides follow the moon or the planets orbit the sun. The era ends with Newton's law of gravitation and Kepler's explanation of the tides. Lawrence M. Principe points this out in his book The Scientific Revolution: A very short introduction from 2011. He devotes a whole chapter on this topic in his brief history.

The majority of researchers, or natural philosophers, were Christians and they operated closer to the supernatural and metaphysics. There was more of a 'why' and not so much only 'how' in their work. I have suggested that we should fuse science and religion to enter the materialistic domain and search for the unknown, thus asking why and how. The majority of people need faith according to Psychology of Religion. Perhaps they could do with the unknown rather than the supernatural? Is this to propose returning to old ways rather than breaking new ground? How important was the supernatural connection for the operation of the natural philosopher? Can it be totally replaced with that of the unknown?

The specialization that has taken place in science over the years has been very successful. But it has made people lose the overview or the holistic aspect of science. Philosophers say that philosophy is disappearing because they cannot keep track of what is going on in science. Cognitive science has started to give answers to old philosophical questions and philosophy into history of philosophy. One way of alleviating the lack of overview is that researchers switch careers and do philosophy in the end of their time to work up an overview over a larger field. The time in a researcher's career is most creative early on anyhow.

Today it is possible to monitor people's thoughts and to steer thoughts. Would it be possible to invent new ways of thinking that could improve reasoning? One way of reasoning might be good at one point in time but inefficient in another. Or is the undisturbed natural way of thinking the best. How homogenous is it? It will of course be possible to investigate how successful scientists and philosophers think to get ideas on how to optimize thinking and perhaps to get more people thinking better.

People did probably think in a way that was new during the Scientific Revolution and that was different from how they thought in China. Is there a new way of thinking that would lead us towards a second Scientific Revolution?

Our Posthuman Future?

2011-05-19T17:07:00.001+01:00

Francis Fukuyama has pondered the consequences of biotechnology in his book from 2002 called Our Posthuman Future. Again it is kind of the end of something. The air of the book is skeptical. He sees problems where I see opportunity.

The progress in molecular biology continues to be record breaking. One way of improving our situation, that might still be a little science fictionesque, is to speed up evolution of positive traits. How would it be, for example, to start producing humans that lack aggression at the current levels. In my humble mind and with my experience this could actually be done today by neuropharmacology, which Fukuyama might be calling the technology that no one dares to talk about.

If you are a fan of Hegel, however, this might mean that we rob future men of the experiences that deepen their personalities. It would, as Fukuyama points out, be dangerous to remove too much of human nature without saving some of the old varieties.

Another development is Artificial Intelligence. Fukuyama is pessimistic on the birth of consciousness in computers. I also have a feeling that the water-based computation that the brain does might be necessary and unique but I would really like to see us reaching the "singularity", where it would be possible to download one's mind in a computer and continue living forever with a potentially sharper intellect and a tremendous memory. A shortcut in evolution. Human nature will change and a new species would be born. A political concern would be who should be in control. The new species or the old one.

It remains very interesting to speculate on what regular evolution would do with our intellects. What kind of human we would have in 1m years. It is 60,000 years since Homo sapiens left Africa the first time and most people do not think there is any significant genetic differences between now and then. The work they are doing in Germany on the Neanderthal DNA might shed some light on this. Is there an upper limit in the intelligence that is possible to create on the current platform? This would be interesting to know because perhaps the new man made evolution via computers would be the only way of significantly improving our position.

Stem cell research has great potential but is hampered by problems with so called innocent life. The use of embryos for research should in my opinion not be problematic. Due to the unfortunate atrocities of war, we have learned that mental retardation in children from mothers living through the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings happened between week 8 to 15. This should mean that the nervous system is assembled during this time and that no functioning brain which could give rise to human life, ie pain and sorrow, could be present earlier than this period. An embryo is just cells like those in your finger, which actually also has potential for life today via cloning. The Catholic Church actually has a dogma that stipulates that life begins with sperm/egg fusion which is problematic today anyhow because life can be produced via cloning bypassing the fusion of sperm and egg.

Despite a continuous rise of the GDP per capita in the West people have not become happier. Are we wasting GDP or is science benefitting from the improvement and can deliver solutions to the stagnation in experienced happiness? Fukuyama describes how we take drugs like Prozac to improve our life. Stability is a problem these days and it is interesting that Fukuyama predicted the Arab Spring in principle by stating that demographic research says we would have old women deciding in Europe with angry young men in the Middle East. It is problematic, of course, with a giant computer dispensing wellbeing to the masses of Europe to prevent people from demonstrating in the streets and to care less about hardship. The question is how tempting it would be in the name of Peace.

Weakly deterministic?

2011-05-17T19:51:00.001+01:00

Francis Fukuyama's book The End of History and the Last Man is an interesting book. It constantly provokes the reader. However, I'm a little surprised that Fukuyama in 2006, when he writes the Afterword in the book, still believes in his weak determinism that the world is destined for liberal democracy only. I have said most of this earlier but this is a summary.

Despite that 2006 was the culmination of problems of starting democracy in Iraq, Fukuyama discusses this problem in the Afterword and speculates that the problem of separating state and religion might be a permanent problem for Muslims to endorse democracy. The development of the Muslim communities in Europe will probably cast light on this issue. Will Europe become a Eurabia that plays down democracy for authoritarianism and sharia?

However, the largest problem with the idea that liberal democracy will win out eventually is the success of China the last 30 years. They took ideas from West, worked hard and managed to come out on top. At least temporarily. They claim that once ideas are generated democracy is inefficient. If they are equally strong, authoritarianism and liberal democracy might start to oscillate and thus co-exist peacefully.

There is a problem though. If authoritarians buy a company they will affect the lifestyle of the employees more than if liberal democrats buy a company. This asymmetry will definitely cause problems. There was an article on wsj.com the other day that advocated for letting the Chinese buy companies in the US. The argument went that there are now 700,000 Americans working for Japanese companies in the US and this is working just fine. But then, the Japanese do play baseball. In Sweden the Volvo Cars experiment with Chinese ownership is ongoing with initial positive results.

The main philosophical argument used for the weak determinism for liberal democracy is that its driven by the need for recognition. I'm not sure why the strong determinism of Hegel and Marx are to be taken serious. In retrospect they are ridiculous and why spend time on ideas from thinkers that have proven ridiculous ideas? In my own experience philosophers often have a few gems and then a lot of crazy ideas, which could be such an argument.

It is a great difference between the Anglo-Saxon pursuit of happiness and the need for recognition. I was under the impression that the latter created two world wars and that the former saved the day. Ideas that fascinate the masses can be very dangerous when wrong. Fukuyama is in principle saying that a scientist is working for the recognition he might get rather than out of curiosity when the latter is probably more biologically correct. Money comes to you. So does fame. When a scientist is getting a crazy idea the possible effects on his life comes after the fact, obviously.

The reason for why liberal democracy is more universal would be that the majority of people like being free. However, with 1,3bn Chinese, 1,2bn Muslims and 1,1bn Catholics it is possible to start wondering if this really is true. Part of mankind prefer order and no responsibility. They are natural or cultural followers and thrive in hierarchical systems. Liberal democracy is more demanding. I believe liberal democracy is a higher developmental form and that future improvements will derive from it but perhaps not as a majority system.

A good question is if it is possible to figure out if an idea is wrong even if it is popular. Have Fukuyama's idea led to too much give-aways to China so that they have evolved too fast and therefore will become intoxicated of their own invincibility, which could be a risk. During Mao, 1949 to 1976, China bottomed out in relation to the GDP of the UK. Now they will match the US GDP in 2016. If people start thinking like this, we will probably see more protectionism. A few years ago it was not uncommon to hear that doing business with China will make them change their political system. I remember watching Swedish TV where a commune politician from Karlstad was going to China and changing them.

Obama is going to be active on the Israel-Palstinian issue again

2011-05-16T17:23:00.000+01:00

Caroline Glick at the Jerusalem Post writes on her blog that Netanyahu and Obama are going to meet again in Washington and discuss the fact that Fatah and Hamas has supposedly fused and how this is going to result in demands on Israel to give up land in Jerusalem and the West bank. Prior to the meeting with Netanyahu, Obama will give a speech to the Muslims again where he praises the populist movements causing the Arab spring.

The Arab spring and the killing of Osama bin Laden have remade the situation around Israel. Amr Moussa, the prospective new president of Egypt, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish premier since 2003, have apparently said recently that Hamas does not do terror anymore. Hamas has killed more Israelis than Al-Qaeda has killed Americans, Glick says, and they still do not recognize Israel. It is also going to be interesting how Hamas' militia is going to fuse with Fatah's US-trained ditto. The Fatah militia was apparently so good there was at least a theoretical possibility that they could provide security for a Palestinian state. The unification sounds on scrutiny impossible at best.

But pressure is building on Israel not only from the US but also from the EU. However, what is going to happen in the Middle East depends a little on what exactly the Arab spring turns out to be. Egypt is apparently going to dump their peace agreement with Israel and the US want to endorse the Muslim Brotherhood. It is perhaps all and well that Obama is going to praise the Arab spring but from the reports I'm reading it is not clear whether or not the populist movements really are friendly towards the West. After all the movement were against Western supported dictators. We should also remind ourselves on the hostility shown towards Western journalists so far. Progress after the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia is also very slow.

Individualism vs community

2011-05-15T17:33:00.000+01:00

Henry Kissinger has written a book that is coming out this week called On China. Kissinger had an article on wsj.com yesterday with excerpts from the book. He ends with a wish that Zhou Enlai's "this will shake the world", from 1971 when Nixon and Kissinger opened up China, will instead become the China and the West will build the world together.

Francis Fukuyama claims that individualism is doing the US a disfavor the last decades and that more of community is in need to better the economy. In this respect is should be remembered that Barack Obama was a so called community organizer early in his career. The first Pacific president. I'm beginning to sense the real reason for the polarization of the US. It might be individualism versus community. If the Republicans are for individualism, I'm definitely on their side. The Americans might have to take a charge on their GDP per capita but this is due to reorganizations in the world economy and not due to the underlying principle on how they work.

Individualism does not mean that people can't work in a group but it means that the individual perspective is protected to prevent the status quo. Some people like to say that "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" but I believe that it is better to have an attitude of always wanting to improve things. If you believe that we have not reached the end of history, and that we need to make new leaps of faith like the Scientific Revolution to further human evolution, the principle of individualism is paramount. Our next future is not going to depend on engineering but on new profound ways of looking at things. I firmly believe that individuals do this most effectively. What has been interesting to see is that great ideas often have come from outside of universities.

So what we seem to have now is a situation where China is going to suppress the West or the West is going to destabilize China. It is going to be interesting to see if building the world together is going to work. Let's hope so but it will in all probability be due to a realization of the need to tolerate each other's ideas and values. Not on a merger.

Is there an end to history?

2011-05-12T19:57:00.000+01:00

I'm obviously a little late to the discussion of Francis Fukuyama's book The End of History and the Last Man from 1992. I have seen numerous references to the book over the years and always wondered why he thought there is going to be an end to history. It seems non-biological. Why should evolution stop if you don't count man made catastrophes? The political development is also part of the evolution.

What happened since Fukuyama wrote this book is the ascent of China. It is therefore interesting to find in the above book that Fukuyama writes that market-oriented authoritarian countries should in theory perform better than democracies, when he obviously does not think China would count as such a country at the time and not later in the book Trust either.

I'm not sure I agree but one of the main themes of the book is the Hegelian quest for recognition which says that the Chinese will eventually demand democracy. It is more probable that we will see continuous cycles of empires as Fukuyama writes about in his recent book The Origins of Political Order.

Should we forget about democracy then? Probably not since freedom of thought and living quality might have important effects on the development of science. This is a yet unknown. Do we want to gamble? The last ten years there has been a lot of talk that China would reform due to the contact with the West but I'm beginning to feel that the reverse is taking place on the altar of the economy. My question then is: how stable is China?

Dick Erixon brought up the question the other day if democracy would be needed in the future. He rushed of to a debate but never commented on what he learned. Should the politician re-school themselves to "whack-a-moleians" Chinese style, without any right to political opinions, or should they instead try to inspire people to work towards some goals? There is this game on American fairs where you take a hammer and begin to hit moles as they appear in the holes. It is very hard to inspire without goals and technocratic goals are not particularly intresting for most people.

Swedish weapon export to dictatorships?

2011-05-11T20:28:00.000+01:00

There seems to be a move towards blocking Swedish weapon export to dictatorships because the governing parties have a similar view as the social democrats. A while ago I commented on the path that Sweden was to take in positioning themselves internationally. The old peace path seems likely despite a short stint in Libya which the social democrats have been intent to stop.

The free world has weapon production for defending themselves which depends on proficiency in science. This production depends on the sale of certain weapons that are not the cutting edge and that you don't fear yourself. Without this sale your security bill is going to become much higher and the competitiveness of the industry is going to be weaker.

I see nothing wrong in selling arms to dictatorships. However, as I commented on earlier I have problems with partnerships with dictatorships. Blocking sale of weapons when other NATO allies are doing this is an unfortunate moralizing event.

Money Comes to You

2011-05-10T20:52:00.000+01:00

A few days ago I stated that the US and China seem too preoccupied with the "economy, stupid" for being in the mood for creating great science and that Europe with their more laid back style might be in this position instead. Here in Sweden government is singing their mantra about creating jobs.

With the risk of being blamed to be non-competitive, I want to say that what I rather meant was that "Money Comes to You" as the saying goes.

I thought about this when our president in the EU said that Europe is a great place to live in, and I say this again, that it would be a great pity if the best place to live does not produce the best results being the place where the ideas and creativity of people find the most fertile soil.

Nietzsche is supposed to have claimed, I don't like him by the way, that the equivalence of the European welfare state means that a slave mentality has arrived and that no one wants to achieve anything anymore. I guess what we have to prove here in Europe is that Nietzsche was wrong.

Europe Day or Schuman Day

2011-05-09T16:49:00.001+01:00

Carin Jämtin, the social democratic press secretary, wanted to have a Muslim holiday in Sweden the other day. She apparently changed her mind. Perhaps she realized that a holiday for the peace of Europe would be more appropriate. Wolfgang Münchau at the Financial Times claimed on Sunday that Europe has a political crisis, not a debt crisis. You need a political union for having a financial union. Today Herman van Rumpuy has a column in the Svenska Dagbladet, one of Sweden's top dailies.

When I started out reading up on the EU project a few years ago I began idealistically with the idea of a United States of Europe with English as a common second language with TV channels and everything. As the years went by I realized, however, that this seems to be unrealistic even if top information recently claimed that its going to be ever closer union or large problems.

Having economics as the measure rod comparative history nowadays stratifies Europe in a way that complicates the concept of an ever closer union. Many don't want to bail out economies that do not perform. If you want an ever closer union it is not possible to have the economy as the value measurement. The political crisis Münchau is talking about is depending on this problem: what is important? In a union where defense is not important you wonder why the economy would be. The economy is today's defense, perhaps. Van Rompuy, however, states that Europe is the best place to live. Not the most progressive. It is strange that this would not mean the same thing. The same man is pessimistic on European innovation, though.

A holiday for the peace in Europe would be a good thing, however. I would not celebrate a Muslim holiday if it would be instated. Judeo-Christianism is more than a religion for me. It formed the basis for Western Civilization. Therefore our present holidays should be safe.

The War against the Modern Society

2011-05-08T16:57:00.002+01:00

No, it is not Osama bin Laden I think of but the Pope, Benedictus XVI. The British-German blogger Alan Posener has written a book called Påvens Korståg from 2011, or the 'crusade of the pope'. He attacks the Pope's anti-relativism. According to Posener the Pope rather think we should return to before the French Revolution.

The book contains a chapter concerning the Pope and natural science. Rodney Stark's book For the glory of God from 2003 claims that science is derived from theology. Stark seemed to have a rather pro-Catholic attitude. Reading between the lines of Posener's book I get the feeling that the Pope might have ideas like--science is a temporary phenomenon that will go away. The Church will be on top again.

It is clear that we have a battle of who's on top--religion or science. I have earlier stated that I also think that science, elucidating the unknown, is derived from elucidating God or the super natural. However, Faith in God is not a problem but Catholic faith carries a lot of dead weight such as prohibition of condom use and anti-homosexual ideas despite the fact that 20% of Catholic priests are homosexual, according to Posener.

Science today claims that morals stem both from genetics and from reason. Therefore there is a slow shift in morals over time varying in different cultures. Is this good or bad? The Pope says bad and that means we have a little over a billion people that are supposed to think the same. I think that such a drift is positive. It is part of a slow improvement of the human condition. Science, mind you, continuously offers guidance for improving things. Great care has to be taken, however, for not making the wrong conclusions. It is very hard to say that things could not be better.

That brings me to the topic of democracy. The wisdom of an educated populace is of paramount importance when it comes to the very frequent problems that experts can't judge. If the populace gets the blame for errors, there is stability. The Chairman Maos of the world rule by a Mandate from Heaven like past emperors. Confucius stated that the moral of the ruler should guide him to be benevolent towards the people. The Chinese, however, acknowledge that there were good and bad emperors and no one to blame but the top.

I have argued for fusing religion and science and I should perhaps say then that I have understood that many claim that religion and science occupy two non-overlapping domains. This is however some kind of truce. There are some people that are both priests and scientists that I have read. I could not get further than the truce if I did not remove the supernatural and replace it with the yet unknown. The reason science is taking over in the battle between religion and science is that science is developing and religion is rather stagnant. The God concept is developing. Animism, polytheism, monotheism, personal God versus impersonal God. I believe the next development is a non-personal materialistic pantheism. This means that a scientist/priest can also interest himself for why things are like they are and not just how things happen.

The First Modern Dictatorship

2011-05-05T19:39:00.000+01:00

Reading The Origins of Political Order from 2011 by Francis Fukuyama. I'm not through the book yet but Fukuyama describes China in a fashion that makes it very easy to see what situation they are in today.

The first modern dictatorship in the world was apparently the Han dynasty, approximately 200 BC to 200 AD. This state was formed after a period of intense warfare which could have been the reason for why the Chinese decided to leave their kin-ships and accept the loss of freedom that a strong state meant. Since then there has not been any rule of law or accountability for the people in China. Today they are just operating such a state with modern technology. It has always been a lot of people relatively speaking in China, due to the rice that lets more people live on a given lot of land. The Chinese have learned how to manage large populations. Occasionally these empires breaks down, what Fukuyama calls patrimonialisation, ie the core family and extended family takes precedent again.

I have earlier written that I believe that the Chinese and those who they inspire are on a different track that does not lead towards democracy as we speak of it in Europe and the US. Fukuyama's book seems to confirm this suspicion. We therefore probably have to live with suspicious Russians and infamous Chinese to take over our car industry. If we don't drop it instead.

If I was doing research in ethics, I might wonder if it is possible to work in collaboration with the Chinese? If not corporate culture would be too different? It is one thing to buy things from the Chinese and to sell them our goods. However, it would all depend on where Sweden is heading. I haven't seen that poll but it would interest me to know what the Swedes believe is the future governing system on Earth. Europe, by the way, according to Fukuyama, developed socially before they developed politically which is unique and which contributed to our modern liberal democracy. We treasure rule of law and accountability.

General Petraeus did President Obama a favor

2011-05-02T13:04:00.000+01:00

So he did it again! General Petraeus achieved what President Obama had promised during his presidential campaign. To hunt down and eliminate Osama bin Laden. First the surge and then what people had given up hope to achieve.

The symbolic value of having found and elimiated al Qaida's figure head should be significant. For Petraeus, now shouldering the CIA, it was important to have achieved something in Afghanistan. For Obama, this was important for his relection chances.

Trust

2011-04-28T16:42:00.000+01:00

"As this book should have indicated by now, the more one is familiar with different cultures, the more one understands that they are not all created equal. An honest multiculturalism would recognize that some cultural traits are not helpful in the sustenance of a healthy democratic political system and capitalist economy."

The above citation comes from the 1995 book Trust by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama says the neoclassical economy is to 80% correct. The rest is culture dependent. All individuals are created equal with human rights to match but then they end up in various cultures with different potentials.

I found this book when I arrived at the conclusion that I did not know how to increase trust in societies that lacked this. Fukuyama's book does not mention the Middle East as low-trust but well France and Italy that aspires to good relations with the low-trust North Africa and Middle East in the Club Med association. He does not have a recipe for increasing trust either.

The main message of the book is that familiarism countries, with low-trust to people outside the family, like China or Italy, does not produce such large corporations like high-trust countries like Japan, Germany and the US. These countries would then not have the same potential economically. China today seems to defy this rule, however. Perhaps they are compensating for high-trust outside the family with "systems" of people held together by fear?

Leading by example is in my opinion much superior to leading by fear. Protestantism offered a more individualistic situation for people that then could relate to each other rather than to an authority like the parish priest. The fear of God was not used as a motivation. God became someone you related to directly on a more equal basis than Catholics and Muslims.

If the high-trust outside the family has not passed the North/South divide in Europe it is not likely that it will spread to North Africa and the Middle East. Today we have a situation in Europe where Southern European countries are in worse economic shape than Northern states. It should be remembered in this context that the Western Civilization started in the Netherlands and England. Cultural factors then important for breaking the Malthusian ceiling could still be in operation.

As Fukuyama points out, the melting pot America have managed to unite around common values and principles but have recently performed worse in this context. Fukuyama speaks about individualism taking precedence. The EU project is in actuality not even trying with its divisive motto "united in diversity". Is this good or bad? Perhaps it all depends on how large the optimal size of a nation is.

Arab Spring?

2011-04-27T20:20:00.000+01:00

A young inexperienced president in the US and a stalemate or worse in Afghanistan together with a large population of young unemployed people in the Middle East and North Africa, some liberal most fundamental, creates an impetus for people to revolt against Western supported dictators and fill the streets with blood because there is no future if they don't do something.

The Arab Spring and doing the right thing in Libya, which is one way of looking at the problem, creates a refugee crisis in Europe that fuels anti-foreign sentiment parties to move forward at the same time as the US is withdrawing from their NATO responsibilities in Europe finally realising that there is no interest for paying for security in Europe with a Pacific focus on most issues. Obama is the first Pacific president of the US, born in the middle of the ocean and spending some formative years in Indonesia.

The question is how much the Arab Spring is going to change Europe? Is it going to make the North/South division of Europe more forceful or does it create a new East/West debacle?

Back to Nature or Forward into our Civilization?

2011-04-27T18:00:00.000+01:00

I have often felt that our current worship of Nature, ie taking care of the environment, has pantheistic proportions. However, saying so means that politics is mixed with religion and science which is not helpful. Politics has that primate character that religion and science lack. It concerns power.

Making the dichotomy is of course not easy. Francis Bacon already in the 16th century claimed that knowledge is power and the Church has meddled a lot in politics since then. It is not possible even recently to separate religion and politics. We have the faith bound George W. Bush and Tony Blair couple and their position against political Islam.

Presently, in Sweden, the Church is using religion to go against the government on a healthcare issue. I feel this is quite OK since it is simply an issue of helping the sick and the poor and how much this is supposed to cost.

Returning to the pantheism above it is important to stress that we don't want to return to the caves in order to save energy. Solving the energy question is currently a race between the different power centers. Who is going to succeed first? As I said the other day, I think Europe is in the right mood and has the best set up. The US and China are too caught up in their economies. We need an idea. Europe is rich enough for that. Ideas are cheep, they say.

G0 world?

2011-04-20T20:32:00.000+01:00

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini calls the world, not a G20 world, but rather a G0 world. In the next Foreign Affairs Gideon Rachman will restate his version of a G0 world, ie a Zero-Sum world that he voiced in November of last year.

It certainly looks a little gloomy out there. The US has gotten a warning from S&P for its economy and the Arab Spring is still in full bloom. China is demonstrating its fear of the possibility of a revolt by imprisoning the artist Ai Weiwei. Totalitarian regimes are poor in science and art. Yet another country in the EU is rearing a strongly populist EU-sceptic party the True Finns. Being almost a fifth of Finland's population they might prevent the Euro-zone from bailing out Portugal.

People are starting to talk about Asia initiating a new economy based less on consumption. This sounds good but it would not be good for the West that is dependent of Asia's consumption to regain growth to escape the jaws of debt. The combination of a Europe mired in debt and a North Africa and Middle East perhaps coming out of repressive regimes needing support is not good. Especially with immigrants to the tune of 5-10% in Europe and anti-immigrant populism.

Europe once led the way for mankind through the Malthusian ceiling and now having regained strength and confidence could be a center for research and development featuring competition between the various European countries. This is probably more possible now when the lure of the US is going down with the rise of China. If Britain, France and Germany can lead the way in competition with the US, the societal organization, that is far superior to that of Asia, can support a new revolution in science.

We are a couple of generations past the War and just have to learn to integrate the Muslims that knock on our doors from the south. Immigration provides the life blood for the economy. It is necessary to separate faith from behavior and customs. Faith is important, alien customs can be enriching at times but not as a separate system. Learning is paramount. Celebrating our heritage it is important to secure this very idea. Interest in becoming a teacher has gone down 15% the last year in Sweden. This is a very bad sign.

People in the secular Sweden are looking for something to believe in. The environmental issues came up strongly until about a year ago when the US and China put the lid on this problem. Putting more emphasis on learning and science could be beneficial for a country looking for something to unify around. After all, solutions to environmental problems are bound to be scientific. The competition from countries like South Korea where students are pushed very hard is going to be fierce. We have to find a European solution based on quality and tradition.

Women in the advancement of science?

2011-04-17T13:58:00.000+01:00

Found something surprising in Charles Murray's book Human Accomplishment from 2003. One would suspect that more women have contributed to top scientific discoveries during the latter half of the 19th century when women really have made an entrance in society in many fields but nothing much have happened. If anything the contribution has been lower.

During 1901-1950 the percentage of women with Nobel Prizes in Chemistry was 4%, Medicine 2%, Physics 2% and Literature 11%. During 1950-2000 the percentages were Chemistry 1%, Medicine 4%, Physics 1% and Literature 8%. The total has thus gone down from 4% to 3%.

The only way I can explain this phenomenon is that the people contributing with Nobel Prizes belong to the group of extremely intelligent individuals that are more common among men than women. Average intelligence is the same for men and women but men feature more extreme talent and also more low talent. It could also mean that all extremely talented indivduals are found and activated.

If you accept the notion that the contribution is lower, it could be that emancipated women are less interested in science.

The most intriguing problem of today?

2011-04-16T18:48:00.000+01:00

Johan Norberg, a public intellectual, gave a very good presentation of how the West got rich on the Swedish radio program Obs the other day. In the UK Niall Ferguson, professor of history, got a series of TV programs on the same topic: civilization. Norberg only had 15 min for this interesting problem and wondered if Europe started to move because there was not a central authority that broke the nascent spirits. The leader of The Economist this week discusses authoritarian crack-down in China. Therefore I wonder about Norberg's conclusion that the Rest has learned the game by now. It seems to me that they have learned nothing if you believe that there is more to discover.

One reason, argues Norberg, for Europe's success is the geography. Many power centers. It is therefore worrying that the EU is homogenizing this and is working for a centralized power system. Could it be that in the name of peace we are destroying the very basis for pluripotentiality in Europe? This would be the mother of all Catch 22s in the world.

If you accept that governing such large amount of people as China, India and the EU is not really feasible without too much repression, the present EU with strong national states is perhaps preferable. Karl Sigfrid, a moderate politician, wrote the other day that Swedish freedom of expression is threatened by EU laws.

Can the West afford to nation-build the entire Middle East?

2011-04-05T14:39:00.001+01:00

Emma Sky, General Odierno's Chief Political Advisor in Iraq, writes informatively in the Foreign Affairs March/April issue. She ends her article with the following paragraph:

"Iraq still has a long way to go before it becomes a stable, sovereign and self-reliant country. Continued engagement by the United States can help bring Iraq closer to the American vision of a nation that is at peace with itself, a participant in the global market of goods and ideas, and an ally against violent extremists. Under the terms of the Strategic Framework Agreement, the United States should continue to encourage reconciliation, help build professional civil service and non-sectarian institutions, promote the establishment of checks and balances between the country's parliament and its executive branch, and support the reintegration of displaced persons and refugees. US assistance is also needed to bolster Iraq's civilian control over its security forces, invest in the country's police units, and remove the Iraqi army from the business of policing. Should Washington fail to provide such support, there is a risk that the Iraqi government may become increasingly authoritarian rather than democratic--undermining the United States' enormous investment in blood and treasure."

According to Joseph Stiglitz the cost of the Iraq mission is about $3tn, ie the current entire Chinese foreign exchange reserve would not pay for this. Seven years into this nation building and efforts are seemingly needed to run the place. Is there really an end in sight for support in Iraq?
We have just engaged Libya one of many states currently in turmoil. This time so far without people on the ground. Perhaps this is going to work better but the rebels in Libya, and perhaps many others in the Arab world, seem to demand help.
My feeling is that the countries in question should, if they really like to emulate the West, do so spontaneously. The West should only use soft power. However, if it is decided that there is a security argument for the West to engage in nation-building, this is going to have to be an argument on the order of preventing World War III to be sustainable.
It must be reasonable to assume that the countries in North Africa and the Middle East can develop a new way to govern themselves post-Arab Spring. According to Emma Sky above this is unfortunately going to gravitate towards an authoritarian model.

Equality for Women and an Educated Populace

2011-04-03T21:30:00.001+01:00

If you want to improve things in North Africa and the Middle East, it is easy to say that what they lack for a more prosperous society is more equality for women and to educate their people to a higher degree.

However, what seems to be important for prosperity in northern Europe is trust between individuals. Thinking about this for a while I realized that I had no idea where this might have come from or how to improve the situation where it is not present. A country like Brazil is low on trust but has become more prosperous but lack in equality and thus quality of life.

Some people would say that Western society developed from property owning peasants on family farms. I'm not sure why such people would come to trust each other more than the nomads of northern Africa? The rule of law perhaps makes more sense when people settle down and have to interact without being able to move.

So, what are we going to do when we have entered Libya using what we know from the experience from Afghanistan and Iraq? Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal said wisely that once you are in there are any reasons for not leaving. I saw today on the Swedish news a nice looking rebel woman, her hair blowing in the wind, talking like a democracy would form next year and ending with "don't fail us now".

I believe that it will take Libyans generations to order the mess that is now being created, ie if a political solution can be found to the civil war now present. The problem is that since it is so difficult to stake out a path for improvement there will be problems for the coalition to unite behind a common goal.

"When Evil is your neighbor, it is insufficient to stay silent"

2011-03-30T19:48:00.000+01:00

I have just read the book Att Bo Granne med Onskan, or 'to live as a neighbor with evil', from 2010 by Klas Åmark, a professor of History at Stockholm University. The title of this post is Åmark's final words in the book.

In 2001 Göran Persson, then prime minister and a social democrat, commissioned 20m SEK to a grant project of six subjects over five years where Åmark was to write a summary which became the above book. The project concerned the relationship of Sweden with Nazi-Germany during 1933 to 1945. According to Åmark, Persson does not think it is necessary to apologize for being neutral during World War II. Apologize is perhaps a strong word but personally I think we should have sided immediately with Britain against Nazi-Germany.

The book is written without much discussion of the concomitant relationship with Anglo-America. You get a feeling that Sweden was surrounded by Germany and the Soviet Union without any hope of remaining in their civilization but instead having to succumb to the novel alien Nazi-world. Sweden did not take up arms to fight for what they say they stand for today and which was the alternative then.

When the social democrats now force the rightwing coalition to accept that the rebels can't be helped by ground attacks with the Swedish air force contingent that is to participate in the Libya war, they call upon this ghost of letting the heavy fighting to Anglo-America. It is of course good that Sweden joins the battle with NATO, even if I'm personally against these particular attacks for reasons that I have given in earlier posts, but it would be interesting to know if the Swedish people really is for this adventure since they are against joining NATO.

I'm not saying that entering the Libya fight would be the same thing as joining World War II. The Libya mission is one of these policing activities. But together with Afghanistan and Iraq it represents a conflict between democracy and dictatorship, something Torgny Segerstedt wrote a book about after having stated in 1933 that Hitler was an insult to the world. I don't know but the fact that Libya held the chairmanship of the UN Human Rights Committee qualifies as such but Gaddafi does of course not represent a military threat although there should not be any funds available for fighting at present, economically speaking.

It is not only the Arab and Persian worlds that are dictatorial. We also have China. Strangely, pragmatism and economic realities then also become our enemies to a certain degree. However, I am being constantly reminded that the economy rules which together with problems of disclosures of what the realities of power actually is today, which sometimes makes me worried.

In 1939 the situation was more clear. Anglo-America was democracy. They are more lonely though. So much greater reason for clearly side with enlightenment. It is good to see that Sweden is perhaps a little more on democracy's side today.

Fragmentation of the West, then of the EU?

2011-03-24T13:26:00.000+01:00

Well, Saddam Hussein managed to fragment the West when Germany and France did not sign up to the Iraq War. It is now evident that Muammer Gaddafi has managed to fragment the EU since we find France and the UK on one side and Germany on the other. The fragmentation of the Franco-German axis is interesting because the credit rating of France depend on its close association with Germany according to Georg Soros. NATO is not really functional since Germany and Turkey are against the Libya intervention and the EU is a joke.

I'm not talking about the UK standing at the side of the Euro-zone, which is another type of fragmentation, but of the divide along the line of the interpretation of multiculturalism. One definition of this word means that all cultures are equal and should get equal respect in society where they coexist. I guess this is an extension of an anti-racial idea where race equals culture. In my mind all cultures are not equal even if human rights are equal in all cultures.

It is very easy to make claims that violate such an idea. Take for example the Cosa Nostra in Sicily. A culture, not good. The Burmese culture, for example, is not known for its beauty either. In Sweden the cultural solution that the Sweden Democrats want is not popular but almost 7% of the Swedes want to subscribe to it.

Gaddafi's culture, his idea of a society, is regarded by many as something the like of Cosa Nostra even if they generally do not send their sons to the London School of Economics and get awarded PhD's. Gangster cultures have to be taken seriously these days when the Mexican's fight for law and order against the drug mafia.

You run into problems with multiculturalism when cultures become civilizations like the Muslim world and the Chinese world. I believe that mankind can evolve optimally from the Western culture but not from the authoritarian cultures due to the superior freedom of thought. However, just like democracy lasted for about a hundred years in Athens the trust of authoritarianism might threaten it after about a century right now. Samuel P Huntington became famous with his "Clash of Civilizations" which we now find in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. We also find it in economic squirmishes between the West and China.

What are we then to make out of the so called Arab Spring? It seems like some countries prefer to treat it as a democracy movement and the search for universal freedom. But then we should remind us that the countries rioting have about 7% of their population liking the World Trade Center disaster. The West has many enemies in these countries and we don't know yet who will be in charge when the debacle is over only that organized religion is best poised to take over.

Which is then the best approach to take if we want to become friends with countries in North Africa and the Middle East? Do we want to participate in their civil war as some seem keen to do? It is very difficult since there seem to be different principles of engagement in different geographical regions. Dictators are good in Bahrain but bad in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt. I still think it is very dangerous to enter the fray.

The Libya Rebellion

2011-03-23T18:27:00.001+01:00

Gideon Rachman discussed the Libya situation recently on FT.com where he said that it was a battle between the "hot-heads", Cameron and Sarkozy and the "ditherers", Obama and Merkel. Caroline Glick, of the Jerusalem Post, writes the following on her blog: "The US's new war against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi is the latest sign of its steady regional decline. In media interviews over the weekend, US military chief Adm. Michael Mullen was hard-pressed to explain either the goal of the military strikes in Libya or their strategic rationale. Mullen's difficulty explaining the purpose of this new war was indicative of the increasing irrationality of US foreign policy." These are harsh words about Obama's foreign policy.

However, Obama did try to impose his idea on the Israelian situation in the volatile Middle East by suggesting that progress was made on the two-state solution. He knew that Mubarak was coming to the end of his tenor and that, as Glick points out in her blog, the Muslim Brotherhood was standing in the door as the strongest candidate. He also knew, as Glick also points out, that the rebels in Eastern Libya might be al-Qaida since they had funded the al-Qaida in Iraq.

When during the second televised debate during the pre-election era Obama stated that a goal of his was to become independent of Middle Eastern oil in ten years, he indicated that he is on the way out and has since said that he is viewing across the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. This is obviously not good for Israel since they are rather integrated to the US than to the EU. My question is if the US really has that many objectives in the Middle East as they used to. Is it not rather the EU with their large immigration from the Arab world and a larger percentage of their oil than the 10% the US is importing that has interests?

William Hague, the UK Foreign Secretary, claims today in The Times that the Arab Spring event, only in its cradle, has passed the 9/11 event in importance. It has been argued earlier that the financial crisis of 2008 is rather the most important event during this century and that China, the winner of that debacle, is not very keen on fighting in Libya, having abstained from voting in the Security Council. Hague claims that it is a universal opinion that people prefer the rule of law rather that rules imposed by state intelligence services. Apparently the Chinese do not agree and I know for sure people in Sweden that also do not agree, although I prefer the rule of law myself.

Liberal interventionism?

2011-03-21T11:08:00.002+01:00

After the understanding that foreign troops or intervention in the Middle East and South Asia fails and backfires, the Arab League leader is already hesitant, and the BRIC nations abstained from laying their votes in the security council, which would translate into tarnishing the reputation of the West and boosting that of China, with significant negative effects in world trade, it is important to ask whether it is not more liberal to let the Libyans to themselves rather than intervening?

We don't have to go to North Africa to run into this problem. In the EU we have a problem between Germany and Greece that one person said was as close as you get to war in the EU these days. The German public doesn't think the life style of the Greeks should be paid for by German taxes. This phenomenon now changes the way the EU is going to operate in the future presently laying the grounds for a two speed EU.

Solidarity among all the nations with redistributions that work within a country like Germany does not work between EU countries, ie Europe is not the United States of Europe. The USA, by the way, does not have a majority for the Libyan debacle. Sixty percent is against.

Being liberal then is to let people have their own culture. The Greeks have their's and the Libyans their's. This does not mean the Greeks or the Libyans are less intelligent or does not mean you have to invoke racial ideas. But they want to live differently. In Sweden then, within our culture, we are not so keen on letting people perform honor killings, genital mutilations like those in Africa nowadays or in China producing eunuchs pre-Mao. Not to mention foot bindings. All these are control minded people's dreams of humiliations.

So we live in a non-authoritarian section of the world where human rights are respected to a greater extent. It is conceivable that some five to ten percent of Libyans are democratic and share our values but it is not necessarily conceivable that Libya would be more stable and that peace would rein if they were in power over more authoritarian subjects. The notion that democratic values are universal is a theorem in need of proof. The proof of time.

You don't drop democracy from 14,000 feet?

2011-03-19T15:39:00.000+01:00

Tony Blair writes today in The Times the following: "First, there is no doubt that the best, most secure, most stable future for the Middle East lies in the spread of democracy, the rule of law and human rights. These are not “Western” values; they are the universal values of the human spirit. People of the Middle East are no different in that sense from the people of Europe or America."

David Cameron said the other day, about Tony Blair, that "you don't drop democracy from 14,000 feet". Why is it then that they seem to be very intent on doing just that again? Some countries that are said to have acquired democracy like South Korea is probably not very similar to European democraccies either. But Libya is further away than this even. They lack the Confucian tenacity and the attributes of European and American democracy. It took hundreds of years to develop this culture of democracy.

Let us assume for simplicity that authoritarian values are not heriditary then the people in Libya dwell in a basin separated by a ridge to that of Western democracy and freedom. Where then is the nearest pass? Helping out with air and ground attacks was not a success in Iraq nor does it seem to work in Afghanistan. I believe that hitting ground targets in Libya, especially now when Gaddafi already is in Benghazi, will kill civilians and then there is a hundred percent incidence of avert reactions and the whole thing back fires.

I believe the most reasonable solution is to let the Libyans fight it out and eventually find out how they want to live and what culture to emulate if they so wish. There will be the least casualties in this way.

Fama, Pestus et Bellum?

2011-03-16T21:33:00.001+01:00

1300 73m, 1350 51m, 1400 45m, 1450 60m, 1500 69m and 1550 78m. What you just read were the populations of Western Europe at these years from Bennett, MK The World's Food (1954) p5. It took 250 years for the population increase to resume after famines, pest and wars.

Douglass North wrote 1973 that property rights in Europe in general and in England in particular was a determining factor for the development of the Industrial Revolution after 1700. He also claims that the reason for why free men got property, real as well as immaterial, was the the negotiation position of serfs improved as the malicious 250 years went on. Labor was scarce and land less so. For some reason this only happened initially in England and Holland.

Niall Ferguson, who excels in comparative history, does a comparison between the development of property rights in North and South America in his recent book Civilization: The West and the Rest. Thus he creates an argument for the importance of such rights that were coupled with representation as one of his six arguments for the rise of the Western Civilization. He also makes the point that this was a British import since they worked also in Canada, New Zeeland and Australia. Hong Kong did better than Manila.

The comparison between North and South America is interesting in one additional respect that Indians remain in South America to a much higher extent than they do in the North which raises the question about the ethical problem of having replaced the North American Indian culture with ours. They were put to work for the conquistadors whereas they went to their own reservations in the North. It is a very difficult question because it is not really possible to say that we should not exist because we were bad to the Indians.

I have realized that some people have problems with defending their own civilization today because of this. However, it was of course a different situation then and people thought in different ways. We are supposed to be enlightened today but similar effects can be seen recently when a lot of people cheer Anglo-America on as they enter Iraq to attack them for this a few years down the line.

Science, another of Ferguson's factors, helped us understand that racial differences does not matter that much after a horrible malconclusion of pseudo-scientific results that led to such a monstrosity like the Holocaust. Is it possible then to discuss cultural differences, with comparable history for example, or do you get a racist epithet by doing this? Realizing that many people would not agree, I think you can. It is important for developing cultures that work well and that lead to humane and efficient societies. But then again, you have to say that our culture is preferable to that of the North American Indians. More humane?

Intervention in Libya?

2011-03-14T21:29:00.000+01:00

Skicka Nordic Battle Group till Libyen Brännpunkt SvD: "På försvarets hemsida kan vi läsa att ”Nordic Battlegroup är en viktig del för att stärka fred, frihet och demokrati i såväl Sverige som andra delar av världen”."

Magnus Andersson and Rikard Nordin both active in the Swedish Center Party Youth Organization wants to enter the fray in Libya. I have no idea what Nordic Battle Group could actually do there but I would like to argue about the wisdom of doing so.

The situation in Libya is horrible any person with good intentions would like the killing to stop. However, I personally don't think it is in actuality possible to do much about the situation from the outside. Robert Gates, the US Defense Secretary, even goes so far as to say that anyone that advice the President to enter Libya militarily should have his head examined. The reason for why he says so is probably that it is very easy to enter such a situation with good intent but very difficult to actually get out at a later stage. It is more than clear that trying to help will back fire and give you a bad reputation.

Should you go in anyhow to save people's lives? Probably not in this case because it is highly likely that Muammar Gaddafi started this debacle to copy the Damascus Spring event in Syria. To prepare for his sons to take over by exposing "troublemakers" that then can be eliminated to give them peace of mind for another generation. This Conspiracy Theory is valid if the present situation seem to hold out in that Gaddafi will regain his power in the country. It is unfortuantely only possible to have a position on activity of leaving the Arab countries to mind their own business.

I have heard that the Arab League is talking about the no-fly zone in beneficial terms. I'm not sure I trust their judgement on the issue though. They might just want the US to get bogged down at yet another site. Also, when you find out the no-fly zone was not enough you end up doing more and then you get stuck. It is a contradiction in terms that the Arab League is positive for an intervention since it is governed by rulers that would not themselves like interventions.

The Dieting Problem

2011-03-13T17:35:00.001+01:00

There was recently a debate in the press about the ethical problem of society giving the individual rules to follow concerning his/her health. The reason is of course that there are societal costs involved. Smoking is such a habit that is being phased out in society seemingly successfully. Over weight (BMI=25-30) and obesity (BMI larger than 30), however, is a more sensitive subject. BMI=weight in kg/square of height in m).

I recently had a reason to research the topic of dieting. It occurred to me that the reason for the veritable jungle of dieting advice on the net and the literature is that making controlled experiments would be very difficult where you both find out which calorie deficit you should use for optimal results and on top of that which type and composition of the food to use. To do this with one single person of the same age is for example not possible. It would have to be performed on large cohorts of individuals where compliance for a standardized diet would be impossible to achieve. The problem is of major importance due to the large proportion of people that are overweight and that try to diet.

Knowing that liver glycogen is first made available when you start to fast followed by muscle glycogen which makes the dieter very happy initially because glycogen binds water, up to 4 liters in a 70kg male, which gives initial weight losses that are substantial. What is not clear from available information is how the glycogen is rebuilt, if it happens when the weight increases due to water accumulation rather than fat. It is conceivable that it can happen continuously or that it happens after the diet is over and the dieter searches his/her equilibration weight.

Thanks to detailed information on food products and databanks with food energy information it is possible to find out where your break even point is in the energy consumption of your sedentary life. Online calculators can be used to calculate your basal metabolism rate from your sex, age, height, weight and for calculation on how much energy you have to remove to get a certain weight loss per week. As a rule of thumb a pound of fat has 3,500 calories which means that you have to lose some 500 calories a day to drop 0.45kg per week. The Microsoft Excel program makes it very easy to do these chores. Losing a kilogram a month on fasting 300 calories per day would be something many people could easily do in this fashion.

The break even point, ie practicably a level of calorie intake that accounts for your basic life without exercise, can then be used to arrange for a given life style that can be maintained in this fashion. After all, it occurred to me, taking responsibility for what you eat is approximately the same problem as brushing your teeth.

I could not find information on what level of weight loss per week would be optimal. However, it is mostly recommended that people should not diet faster than half a kilogram per week. Not more than 10% of your starting weight over 6 months. The reason for this is that higher levels of calorie deficit per day than about 500 might induce a starvation mode. This is when the body starts using energy more efficiently which means that the weight loss would decrease making it less optimal for more dieting pain.

Detailed information on this important issue would be useful due to the enormous impact on the psychology of dieting. Starvation mode is dangerous because you burn lean tissue rather than fat because the body lowers the amount of the more metabolically active muscle tissue. Exercise during dieting is beneficial for avoiding the starvation mode. You can find programs calculating energy consumption for various types of exercise over your sedentary level on the net. If you walk, you use about 1 calorie per minute for every 1km/hr you walk.

Dieting regimes often discuss the possible effect of the proportion of protein, carbohydrate and fat in the diet. Hard data for this are hard to come by but it is known by athletes that a high carbohydrate containing diet where the fat content percent is about 20 is optimal. A 70kg male needs about 32g protein per day to repair. The reason for this is that higher glycogen stores are built in the muscles which give the athlete a higher durability and thus trainability. This can obviously be important for people that in general move about during the day. They will be less tired at the end of the day. However, eating becomes more boring.

Scholar's ink is holier than martyr's blood!

2011-03-10T12:57:00.001+01:00

Already by 1500 more than 1,500 scientific and mathematical articles had appeared in print claims Niall Ferguson in his just released book Civilization: The West and the Rest. The reformation of 1517 fragmented the Church in Europe whereas it was lying like a wet blanket over the Ottoman Empire. Printing books became prohibited by death penalty 1515. Calligraphy of the Quran was more in Ottoman style.

It is not 'comme il faut' to point this out among Western scientists, but Ferguson reminds us that science led to proficiency in war by sharpening the weapon systems in use. He shows a graph where the results in mathematics are compared for countries of the East and the West and notes that the Easterners are beating us in tests distinctly now on the basic school level. However, we don't know if school math tests will translate in superior elite mathematicians. As I pointed out earlier, it is still up to the Chinese to prove that they will achieve the same per capita results in science as the West without freedom of thought.

Interestingly, Ferguson also points out that there is a delay in the effect of superior science by telling the tale about Ottoman siege of Vienna 1683, that could have ended badly, a couple of years ahead of the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia and John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, books that cemented the appearance of the United States by inspiring Thomas Jefferson and the Scientific Revolution.

Furthermore, Christians new that separation of Church and State was important as can be seen in the Biblical statement from Matthew 22:21 "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's". The Muslims have a problem with this to this date. Political Islam is a problem today in Europe. As I pointed out earlier, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) also quoted the Bible when claiming that Man should subdue Nature at the same time as he advocated for science.

How much of a problem is this today when the West contemplates the problems in North Africa mostly as a threat to their economy by a raised price on crude oil rather than a fight for human rights and political freedom. Well, if we look back on the Iraq war and remember how much bile the US and Britain has had to endure for the liberation of the Iraqis it should be easy to understand this. By staying out of this intervention, France and Germany began a strain on the trans-Atlantic relationship that today is cemented with differences in the economical outlook for the future. Needless to say, it is of great importance to Islamists to rule by dividing the West which Muammar Gaddafi, as Saddam Hussein, knows when he bombs his own oil installation to look for an effect on the price of oil.

Right-of-Center in Politics--Here to Stay?

2011-03-08T10:38:00.001+01:00

A couple of articles in The Times today, one editorial and one from David Miliband, the former Labor foreign secretary, deal with the problem the center-left is facing in Europe. I also read a book by Göran Greider, a free-thinking social democrat unsatisfied with the recent election result in Sweden where the right-of-center alliance won, discussing the heritage of Olof Palme recently called You don't escape Olof Palme.

Perhaps that is what mankind in Europe actually has done, it escaped social democracy, an over-moralizing phenomenon. We have found out with new means that the populace is actually placed a little right-of-center rather than left-of-center. Differences seen earlier might have been due to differences in the elite rather than among the broad masses. The internet and social media has now lifted the bar sufficiently to erase these differences and we will for some time now find politics where it has landed?

Göran Greider mourns Palme's "democratic socialism" without being able to formulate an alternative because the majority has proven to be placed right-of-center? He is even so unsatified that he asks "there must be a way out of here". Maybe there is not?

Is a Meritocracy Necessarily Beneficial?

2011-03-03T21:34:00.000+01:00

Reading Ian Morris' Why The West Rules--for now from 2010. Morris creates an index composed of organizational function, ie, city size, calorie consumption, information capacity and military capacity, equally weighted, and follows this from 14,000 BCE till today.

The West, which in essence is everything west of India, starts out 2,000 years ahead of the East mostly due to the availability of plants and animals to domesticate. The West leads over the East until after the Roman Empire and the Han dynasty after which, and during the age when Muslims and Christians dominated the West, the West passes the East during the Industrial Revolution around 1800.

Like Kenneth Pomeranz Ian Morris speculates on how the West leaped ahead. They both focus on the utilization of coal. Interestingly, metallurgy was more advanced in China and they had used coal for heating since the 11th century but they did not mechanize pumping of water with a coal-fueled steam engine like James Watt did. This was a collaborative endeavor with an investor, metallurgy and academic skills. The preparation of the field with science and efficient economy was naturally important for the whole thing to actually take off.

Morris' explanation for why the many more Chinese did not succeed is that they did not enter into the scientific revolution but instead initiated a second renaissance, succumbing to authorities from the past. He also describes how the Chinese due to lack of interest turned down mathematics form Portuguese Jesuits despite the fact that the Jesuits won competitions in China on predicting solar eclipses. It is evident from this that they did not get that idea formed by Francis Bacon to find new knowledge that would "liberate mankind".

Freedom was already important in the West at the time of the American Revolution and meritocracies, like the one in China, can probably act as a filter to weed out creative non-conforming elements that show less interest in learning classics by heart. This phenomenon might still be important for how to arrange education in society. Learning without problem solving, as in a primary education, is probably only good up to a point, then it becomes inefficient.

"Muscular Liberalism"?

2011-03-01T20:54:00.000+01:00

Paulina Neuding writes the following in a Project Syndicate article recently: "Thus, the lack of “muscular liberalism” in one of the world’s most liberal countries has paved the way for both Islamists and right-wing populists. Europe’s leading politicians have spoken out, and now it is time for European civil society – its newspapers, critics, curators, academics, and publishers – to declare the failure of multiculturalism and show some courage in defending the values they claim to embody".

I'm not sure I like the expression "muscular liberalism". First, I am not sure exactly what it means and second, because it sounds a little non-intellectual for a quite complicated and academic subject. It was first used by David Cameron, the UK prime minister, at a security conference.

I agree with Paulina Neuding, however, concerning standing up for a person like Lars Vilks when he is assaulted by people that does not know how to behave in a Western country, although, I, as earlier stated, think it is not a good idea to humiliate religious belief unnecessarily.

I have realized that some people don't think a position like mine is strong enough against multiculturalism, defined as Neuding does in her article. Religious belief is very important for a majority of people on Earth, so I don't understand why the intermediate position should be difficult to accept. Different faiths have to be accepted in society although cultural expressions of violent tendencies, both actions and threats, have to be prevented.

Civil War in Libya?

2011-02-27T15:43:00.000+01:00

More and more people talk about an upcoming civil war in Libya. The question is if the civil war erupting in Iraq after Saddam Hussein's fall, due to the powder keg suppression of his regime, could have happened as is now potentially happening in Libya?

Even if the aspiration for freedom is driving change, the question is if people thus freed will be tolerant or if they will just reestablish a dictatorship?

David Cameron's trip to the Middle East

2011-02-22T18:34:00.000+01:00

David Cameron has demonstrated that he is able to do what the EU can't by being the first statesman visiting Egypt after the revolt. In a speech given at the Kuwaiti parliament today, refered to in The Times, he claims that each country in the Middle East has to find its own way in its own tempo. The West should not impose their form of democracy.

Aspirations of freedom is driving the change that might happen. There is reason for cautious optimism, according to Cameron. It is highly interesting that Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" that has haunted him for some years due to China's economic progress, might actually have returned. The crisis in Arab states shows that an alternative to democracy does not work.

Even if democracy is not the end stage of history, it is probably the platform from which all mankind might have to evolve.

The J-curve is unstable, in both ends?

2011-02-17T12:26:00.000+01:00

Ian Bremmer writes today in The Financial Times about the J-curve that he originally introduced in 2006 as an illustration of what is currently happening in the Middle East. The J-curve is the graph created of dots forming a J plotting stability on the y-axis versus social openness on the x-axis. North Korea is on the tip of the J on the closed side and the US is on the open side at a higher stability position on the head of the J.

His point is that moving from the lower enforced stability position you have to pass a minimum which they are currently flirting with in the Middle East.

My comment would be that we are currently seeing a move from both ends of the J towards the minimum due to the nature of the stabilizing order. People are becoming more and more resistant to the charm of Secret Service which results in that the Service tries to become more efficient, spelling deterioration.

Speaking from the democratic end it might be wise to react before democratic values are forgotten so that a return to the good old order can be achieved.

Stabilization is good?, and bad. It is possible to increase the concentration ability on students, recently discussed as superior Chinese mothers on the wsj.com thus fighting a war against Asia by forcing more and more young people into an artificial efficiency.

It can also be really bad by imprisoning people at lower intelligence levels--marginalization.

The Great Divergence

2011-02-16T18:02:00.001+01:00

Between 1500 to 1700 there was a battle of ideas between Europe and China which they were not aware of at the time. Today this battle is about how to govern large populations most efficiently.

Kenneth Pomeranz in the book The Great Divergence from 2000 essentially claims that China was at a comparable level of development during the time of 1500-1700 but due to geographical reasons, ie availability of coal, Europe won this game.

This is the politically correct version, no doubt. Apparently people working in the field of comparable history over this era belong to one of two schools. One where people imagine that the West always was more or less ahead. We actually started out about 2000 years earlier with the domestication of animals. The other, which Pomeranz belongs to, claims that there is not much difference and that circumstances matter most. People from the different schools tend to call each other names.

Niall Ferguson, that discusses the matter in his book The Ascent of Money where he refers to Pomeranz book, don't think China will change to a democratic governance. They will keep autocracy, something that made them follow Mao in his madness. His head still features on the "Red Back" despite his mistake The Great Leap Forward that killed 30m people. This worries me. As I pointed out earlier on my blog, the battle is about whether or not creativity will reach the same per capita level in an authoritarian system as in a more free setting.

Stability, for example, is a problem for China which is hardly discussed here in the West. When there is a need for discussing stability, people suffer unnecessarily. This is not a trivial issue. Making people more stable could become an industry? The earlier we begin to discuss what may be lost in this process, the better.

Swedish Foreign Policy?

2011-02-16T12:36:00.001+01:00

The so called crisis commission of the Social Democratic party, set up to frame the moment after two consecutive losses in elections, has generated a new policy that, for not being a copy of the center-right coalition, turns out to be a so called "vänstersväng", a return to the left.

Urban Ahlin, the porte parole of the Social Democrats for foreign policy, proclaims the following in a debate article in Svenska Dagbladet today:

1. Demands should be set on the junta in Myanmar. Burma, for not using the name of the junta, is squeezed in by India and China and as such has new influence that competes with that the West might have. China's influence is particularly strong and therefore success in dictating rules for the junta might be hopeful at best. My question would be if it in reality is useful for Sweden to have a foreign policy on this matter and if not acting via EU might be preferable. Ahlin wonders if the junta has broken rules against humanity which it in all probability has. It is also right that Aung San Suu Kyi's party should get legal status but that and free elections is the same as requesting a regime change. Not likely.

2. Ahlin claims what most people know that the US and the EU have had "short sighted" interests in Northern Africa for stability. After Tunisia and Egypt, this seems to be what people say. However, asking for democracy in this region has a little of the same ring to it like the beauty pageant "and I also want peace on Earth". At times like these people discuss whether or not democracy is a universal quest for mankind. I have begun to doubt this. It takes hundreds of years to prepare for it and many nations seems more prone to authoritarian regimes and tries to solve their problems in this fashion not having such a history. The current battle of ideas has to be won in order to proceed globally with democratization. It has become necessary again to prove that democracy leads to a better society. I, for one, am convinced it does.

3. EU should put demands on the collaboration with Russia according to Ahlin. This is in all probability very important. Russia is not developing in the right direction right now on human rights and the fight to lower corruption. Great care should be taken in the interactions with Russia.

4. Sweden should support Palestine to become an independent state, says Ahlin. Well, this is what the Israelis also have agreed to, given a set of conditions. I agree that these conditions are important. Especially now with the unknowns presented in the region by the revolt in Egypt. The security requirements for Israel have become more important all of a sudden than they were a month ago.

5. Sweden should stop charging for visa for people from the Eastern Partnership area in Eastern Europe. Strange demand since a person not affording a visum would not afford a ticket?

6. Ahlin wants Sweden to increase its engagement in the UN. It might seem appropriate to do so in The Age of Anxiety but I would think improving bilateral engagements with friendly nations should be better than flirting too much with the dictatorship stuffed UN and their weak leader. Sweden, with its earlier neutral past, really needs to improve such ties.

7. I also don't have any constructive suggestions on the tragic case of Dawit Isaak.

8. The Social Democrats want to set a side a billion SEK of the money allotted to international aid to the support of handling conflicts and work preventing war!?

9. The Social Democrats are going to monitor the governments acting in the Afghanistan assignment and will also demand a wide agreement in the Parliament about the structural issues of the foreign service. The Social Democrats apparently has had problems realizing that there are differences between the right and left concerning in which countries Sweden should have embassies. Naive!