Gideon's Blog

In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

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Wednesday, July 05, 2006
 
By the way: yes, I had a very good Independence Day weekend. Spent the first chunk of it visiting dear friends who take a summer house at Bard College, where he teaches for the summer (or resides, or something) and she works with a summer theater group (or something). Anyhow, lovely people, and we had a lovely Canada Day (formerly Dominion Day, back when they were . . . dominated . . . or something) celebration with them. I admit to a twinge knowing that their decision to celebrate Canada Day is more of an anti-Bush gesture than a gesture of love towards the gentle giant to our north (they actually call their summer home Temporary Canada, and issue Temporary Canadian passports to visitors), but since my wife and I are genuine Canadophiles, I don't really feel guilty about participating. And we made patriotic restitution on our way home by visiting the Rhinebeck Aerodrome, a museum of early 20th-century aircraft featuring all sorts of planes that fought the Hun in the Great War (as well as some of the Hun's planes), and which I heartily recommend if you happen to be in the area with a small boy, or if you are a small boy, in fact or at heart. Call ahead to see if they will be doing an air show, which they were not when we visited on account of overly gusty winds. Ended the weekend with front-row seats for the fireworks at our dining room window.

It is a privilege to be a citizen of a country where they make it so easy to be happy; it is a shame so few of us manage it, and a shame I manage it myself so infrequently.

 
The Derb has begun publishing what, based on his last outing, sound like they might be his . . . unexpurgated thoughts in The New England Review. His latest is about Robotics vs. Helotics. It's a good one, not unworth thinking about.

My quick thoughts:

- I'm not sure that we'd be able to beat Japan in the robotics "race" even if we tried. The Japanese are going to be better at robotics than we are regardless of our immigration situation, because they are better at electronic gadgets than we are. We lost virtually our entire consumer electronics industry to Japan over the course of the 1970s-1980s, and we've gotten virtually none of it back since. Why? I don't know - but we did, and we haven't, and I suspect that this is just something they are better at than we are. And helots don't sit on our heads and sing music in our ears, nor do they put on little plays inside our televisions.

- Moreover, the Japanese triumph in electronics (and their emerging triumph in robotics) is not due to some kind of techno-sclerosis on the part of the United States caused by the importation of cheap labor. Proof? America is the world leader in both computer software and biotechnological innovation. Is this because we're just "better" at software and biotech? Maybe, though I suspect that three big factors relevant to our success have at least as much to do with their weakness as they do with our strength, to whit: we speak English (giving us access to a broader global pool of talent) while they speak Japanese (giving them access to . . . themselves); we have a more open immigration policy (a lot of our high-tech companies are staffed, and even founded, by *high*-skilled immigrants from a variety of countries) while they are not the most hospitable place to live and work if you are not Japanese; and we have far more developed and open capital markets, including but definitely not limited to venture finance, while they have a famously scleroric and hidebound financial system. Japan *could* change at least the latter two of these things, but they probably won't, because they like being themselves, inefficiencies and all.

- Regardless, while robotics may or may not be preferable to helotics, it's no cure-all for a low fertility rate. And a fertility rate of below 1.3 children/woman is just plain too low, no matter what, if only because of the psychological consequences of being a nation of only children, to say nothing of the economic consequences of having such a small percentage of the population at peak levels of productivity and creativity. And then there is the national-psychological consequence of having so many elderly people. Even if we can take pills to remain more vigorous later into life, we'll never be young again. I'm 35, and I'm already acutely aware of the ways in which I feel old - changes that have happened to me only in the last 5 years. The brain is not infinitely plastic; the teenage years are probably the last opportunity to really change the way the wiring works in a profound way. By the 30s to 40s, almost everything substantial is set. If we live vigorously for another 30 years or another 60 years beyond that date, we'll live as vigorous *old* people. That is to say, among other things, as very conservative people. While an elderly-yet-vigorous robo-powered Japan might grow even mightier in terms of financial clout, how much influence will they really have over the direction the world takes? It's not so clear to me. I've made this point before: a fertility rate modestly below replacement - 1.7 to 1.8 TFR - strikes me as culturally and economically sustainable pretty much indefinitely, as is a fertility rate modestly above replacement. Either means a norm of 2-3 children per couple with a good admixture of childless or single-child families and a handful of larger families thrown into the mix. A TFR of closer to 1 means that most couples have only one child. I don't think that's conducive to societal health or an indicator of civilizational confidence.

- Enthusiasts for high immigration tend to point to 19th century America as a model, and proof that there is no choice between robotics and helotics because we're not importing helots but future burghers and yeomen who merely have funny last names and spicier food. Although constitutionally predisposed towards openness to immigration, I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that this analogy is badly flawed. In the 19th century, industrialization meant both that fewer people were needed to work on farms and that factories needed more people to work in them. There was a huge migration from the countryside to the cities as a consequence. In spite of having a higher fertility rate than European countries, America had less of a surplus rural population because we such a huge excess of arable land (and, moreover, arable land without title), and we wound up importing large numbers of European immigrants to settle the land as well as to work in the factories. Well, the burgeoning demand for people today comes from service industries like health care and in construction. These activities have to be performed on-site - i.e., even if we still have "excess" land in some sense, we can't fill it up with immigrants in the same way as we did in the 19th century because these immigrants are being imported precisely to work where the existing population lives and requires services. It's worth noting, however, that these jobs are also the hardest to automate - far harder, as Derb himself notes, than factory work, which is why we already have factory robots but don't have robots to perform a variety of personal services. Robotics, therefore, may be in part a *cause* of the trend towards helotics, and not an alternative thereto, at least in the near term.

- Moreover, I will also note that in much of the world the migration from countryside to city is still largely incomplete, and that this migration is today occurring in a period of global deindustrialization - even China is automating more and more, and consequently employing fewer and fewer people in factories. Because service economies have shown far slower increases in productivity than industrial economies, however, global deindustrialization makes it unlikely that most developing countries will be able to produce enough jobs to employ their excess population. Therefore, while it may be true that Japan may get to robotics faster than everyone else, their choice for robotics and against helotics may be extremely expensive in the short term, because the world will be producing a lot of helots for a while yet, and the robots are still very expensive (the cost of robotics is front-loaded, of helotics back-loaded - and the latter can be reduced substantially if one is willing to give up on the ideal of middle-class egalitarianism and revert to Indian or Brazilian norms in these matters). And it's not clear there's any first-mover advantage here; we, after all, invented a lot of the electronics that Japan now dominates the manufacture of. Whether or not the choice for high levels of unskilled immigration has consequences that Derb (or I) don't like for the structure of our society, I'm less convinced that the Japanese lead in robotics means they will become the superpower of the 21st century.

- The great mystery, to me, remains *why* fertility rates have dropped so low in so much of the world. Singapore is very crowded. But Australia most assuredly isn't, and they have a TFR of below 1.8 (yes, that's a lot higher than Singapore's 1.0, but it's still below replacement). I'm very skeptical of the argument that it is all a question of religiosity; fertility rates are dropping fast in much of the Middle East and in the subcontinent, the two most religious regions of the world. I am reluctantly drawing towards a Derb-like conclusion that one cause of the decline in fertility is the slow-dawning realization among humanity that we ourselves are obsolete. We need very few humans indeed to feed ourselves, and fewer and fewer to make all the stuff we use. Much of the developing world is unemployed, as is much of the youth of the developed world. We are running out of telos, and most of us are neither stoical enough to go on when we can't go on nor creative enough to make it up as we go along. Indeed, for most of us what's left is *competition for status* and that is by its nature a negative-sum game - most people must necessarily be losers - which is not conducive to the optimism necessary for family-formation. In any event, if this is right, then the only thing Japan is accomplishing by investing heavily in robotics is digging their own grave faster than the rest of us.

 
Kudos to Jonathan Chait for writing what may be the perfect column to illustrate why I am not a liberal Democrat.

 
Well, it's a nail-biter, but I think we can assume at this point that Calderon has won the Mexican election, contrary to my own prediction at the end of last year. I hope we can agree that this is good news. Lopez Obrador was unfairly characterized as a Chavez-wannabe, but neither was he plausibly a Lula, someone with populist roots but who had come to terms with the nature of his country's economic position in the world and the constraints of the dominant liberal paradigm (and of, well, reality).

I don't think it serves American interests for us to bet too heavily on any particular political outcome in, well, most countries, certainly not basically friendly ones like Mexico. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't invest in a process the success of which matters to us a great deal. After President Bush's reelection, I advised him to focus on three countries in Latin America: Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Brazil is an emerging regional economic and diplomatic power; it behooves us to have a better and more substantial relationship with that traditionally neglected country. It also behooves us to show the world that we can get along very well indeed with Latin American countries that elect left-wing governments so long as those governments do not directly threaten American interests or subvert democracy. Colombia we should embrace and support, because they have been staunch supporters of America facing enemies who are our enemies as well. In this I'm preaching to the converted, of course.

As for Mexico, I argued that Bush should sit down with Vicente Fox and have a little talk, explain to him that there had to be more give and take in the US-Mexican relationship. Specifically, Fox would have to publicly tackle corruption, particularly in the army, and take real steps to control Mexico's side of the border (rather than, as currently, actually assisting traffickers in people and drugs to penetrate into the US). In exchange, the United States would commit to significant financial assistance for development that could absorb internal migrants from Mexico's south who are currently being "moved on" to the United States.

We now have another opportunity to present such a deal. America has an enormous interest in Mexican economic success, an interest that would not have been served by a Lopez Obrador victory. But it is vital that we distinguish America's interests from American *business* interests, and as well to distinguish America's interests from *Mexican* business interests. Business interests north and south of the border are indifferent to the plight of the underdeveloped Mexican south; indeed, they may be positively inclined on both sides of the border to excessive (very nearly exclusive) reliance on the "safety valve" of emigration in addressing this longstanding problem. One of the more interesting inversions of the Mexican political scene is that it was Vicente Fox of the nationalist PAN who argued that Mexicans who leave for the United States are actually Mexican patriots, and that Mexico has a legitimate interest in their success in America, while it was the leftist Lopez Obrador who took the more patriotic line that mass emigration from Mexico was a national tragedy and a sign of the failure of Mexico's political and economic system to provide opportunity at home. Calderon may be inclined, based on his background and history and the general positioning of the PAN, to govern as the representative of the business class. Ironically, it may fall in part to the Americans to prod him into being more of a *national* leader, in large part by making him aware of political reality in the United States, and the fact that the safety valve is inevitably going to close, the only question being how fast and how hard.

Calderon has been heard to say that one kilometer of road in Tabasco (was it Tabasco?) is worth ten kilometers of fence on the border in terms of ending illegal migration from Mexico to the US. Okay, we should say: we'll pay for that road in Tabasco. It'll be good PR, and it might even help. But in exchange, we expect real results: on corruption, and especially on corrupt support by the Mexican military and police for traffickers in narcotics and people. The safety valve is closing. The more Mexico does to show a good-faith effort to control the border on their end, the more good-faith effort we'll show to close that valve gently. It should be clear to Calderon that, if no such good-faith effort is forthcoming, politics on this side of the border will slam the valve shut harder and faster.