Some political links
Here is a stimulating exchange between Ian Williams and Noam Chomsky about Chomsky’s claim that the NATO air raids on Serbia “precipitated” the worst atrocities in Kosovo, and that this was not only predictable but in fact predicted in U.S. sources at the time. Who do you think wins? It doesn’t seem to me that Williams ever actually counters Chomsky’s descriptive claim. But it also seems like Chomsky doesn’t fully justify the utility of his observation – which is what I would want to question if I were Williams; instead Williams seems to prefer mere fuming.
Here is a series of concise criticisms of the in-vogue thinking about U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.
This article is amusing because it applies Forbes’ criteria for judging the economic policies of a president to President Bush.
Recently released interviews with some Soviets show incompatibility between Cold War propaganda and reality. I wonder why the people at the Archive conclude there was an “intelligence failure.” Why not suppose, more plausibly, that American foreign policy needed justification? No one knows better than the people at the Archive that this wouldn’t be without precedent.
In regards to the Common Dreams article: I’m always annoyed when people try to place the entire burden of the American economy on the president. To rate the presidents based on economic conditions is a vast oversimplification of the issues, such an oversimplification, in fact, that it makes the whole test Forbes came up with entirely useless (as a means to rate a president by way of inference from economic data).
Much of the economic success we experienced in the 90’s probably arose from the incredible housing market and tech boom. Subsequently, the poor economic conditions of the new millennium probably arose from the tech crash and housing/credit crash, as well as September 11 and the American automotive industry crash. It’s unclear how any of these major economic events were caused by policy made the by executive branch.
There are certain inferences one can make on such economic data, and some inferences that are simply too vast–such as direct causal links between overarching presidential policies and the state of the economy.
For example, the deficit numbers for the Bush’s administration are certainly alarming, and one could make the inference that such unabated spending habits are unlikely to help the economy in the long run. One cannot make the inference, however, that the economic policies themselves led to the economic crisis of this decade. This claim is simply too vast to be substantiated in any satisfying way. Sure, one can list off the standard economic data in much the same way the article does, but this does not in any way show causation, nor does it even give us good reasons based on induction to believe in these supposed casual links. To any rational person, it should be more likely that the various economic disasters during this decade were the cause of our economic woes, rather than policies implemented by the presidential office. This includes economic situation of presidents past as well, of course.
Part of my newfound apathy towards American fiscal politics is our seemingly inability to prove in any way what economic policies we ought to be enacting. Whether we ought to promote freer capitalism or socialism is entirely up to what statistics one might look at or what economist one might talk to. That there are brilliant economists on all sides of economic issues leads me to believe that we are lacking some understanding that would allow us to make “correct” fiscal policies. And I mean correct in a utility sense, i.e., policy that would bring about good living standards and economic prosperity for the greatest number of people.
For now, we will continue throwing irrelevant statistics at one another; and make sweeping and largely irrational claims based on them. We will continue our method of trial and error fiscal policy until one day, perhaps, we will stumble upon Utopian economic principles (given the current state of affairs, we are a long ways off, unfortunately).
Ben
It may be annoying that Forbes set up these criteria, but I don’t think it’s annoying that the author of the article cited applied them to Bush.
In at least the case of the housing crash, I think the executive branch does share much of the blame, through a combination of direct policies and those of appointees. My second-favorite economist Dean Baker gives a concise case for this in his recent book Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy.
It’s a little unclear what you are arguing. Are you suggesting that it is in fact impossible to generally characterize the effects of policies? That’s pretty lucky for policy-makers, as it liberates them from ever being evaluated. I think it is possible to generalize, and however “oversimplified” the analyses may be, they have uses for understanding events.
The first sentence of the second to last paragraph should read: “..fiscal policies stems from our..”. Sorry for my horrendous grammar (and my long windedness).
To be clear:
I’m arguing that we usually cannot make claims regarding direct causal links between presidential policy and the state of the economy. Especially in the case of the last decade, as there have been many economic disasters that seem to be largely independent from Bush’s fiscal policies, and are probably a better explanation for our economic woes.
But a good commentator doesn’t make generalized causal links and then say they are sufficient explanations. Take the popular position that the trend toward deregulation of financial markets since the 70′s contributed to the recent financial crisis. It’s relatively easy to (1) put significant blame for the alleged cause on executive branches and (2) make a good case for the causal connection, even if you disagree.
Perhaps what annoys you is when people act like these are sufficient or otherwise exhaustive explanations.
Perhaps I ought to take a step back and modify my argument a bit. I don’t think there is anything wrong with taking a broad, comprehensive approach to economics that involves 30 years worth of policy, and making claims about how that policy has effected the state of the economy.
The problem arises when claims are being made about a given president and the economic state of the country during his presidency. It seems justified to say that the economic state of a president’s term is determined by many factors, including, but not limited to, economic crisis and various economic states affected by decades of policy. However, if we are to say that, for example, Bush’s policies were the cause of all of our economic woes, then we are vastly oversimplifying the situation.
The Forbes test does this and it’s obnoxious. It’s obnoxious because it leaves out decades of other relevant fiscal policy and other pressing economic variables by claiming, essentially, that Bush’s polices were the only relevant cause of our current state of affairs. For now it seems unclear to me what the real ramifications of the Bush administration’s fiscal policy will be.
Here is an account from a survivor of the Serbian atrocities in Kosovo, taken from Samantha Power’s book A Problem From Hell:
Drita Hysenyi “had just survived a massacre in which her parents, grandparents, and brothers had all been killed before her eyes. Although Drita herself had absorbed five bullets in the mass execution, she managed to escape the crime scene, dragging her own bloodied body, as well as that of her younger sister, out of the house that the Serb paramilitaries had just set aflame.
Listening to Drita’s gruesome story, I was tempted to view her experience as a consequence of NATO bombing. After all, as bad as life was for Albanians under Serb rule before the intervention, it had not come to this. The Serbs had killed some 3,000 Albanians before NATO intervened, but they had left the majority of Albanians alone in their homes. To the naked eye, it seemed that NATO had intervened to fix a leaky faucet but had ended up flooding the house. Drita remembered the taunt of the gunmen as they mowed down her mother and father: “Where’s NATO now, shiptar?” they chanted, as they unloaded their machine guns into the wilting Hysenyi clan. “Bill Clinton can’t save you.”
But Drita had a different view. Her scarred face lit up when she recalled the moment she first heard NATO planes overhead. “I knew then, with NATO in the air, that we would win,” she said. “And we did.” Hard as it was to see Kosovo as victorious when the price had been entire families, the Kosovo Albanian survivors treated these sacrifices as the price of freedom. “You must understand,” she said firmly, “we were going to be killed anyway. It was only a matter of time. We knew it was better to die with a fight. NATO fought and now we, at least, are free.”
I’m working in the field of public health, and one thing I’ve noticed is that it is often very difficult to argue for the benefits of an intervention–I mean, difficult to show the death/disease that has been avoided or the health care $ that have been saved by preventive action. You can concretely look at hospital records and say “we spent this number of $ to treat 500 cases of malaria!” but “by using bed nets we prevented 500 cases of malaria that we predict might have developed without the bed nets and if they HAD occured they probably would have cost this number of $ not to mention the human suffering and therefore we believe the cost of those bed nets is justified!” isn’t so straightforward. I think something similar is perhaps the case with intervention in cases of atrocities and genocide. We are horrified by the atrocities that occurred in Kosovo because they happeneded. It’s harder to know concretely exactly what horrors were averted by NATO intervention, and thus it’s harder to be horrified by the imagination of the “what would have happened” if NATO hadn’t stepped in. But given Milosevic’s genocidal track record, and given (even though I admit it’s an anecdote) the approval of NATO bombing by somebody who witnessed the murder of her family, I think we can imagine that they were enormous. It’s sort of sickening to have to measure atrocities against more atrocities, but perhaps it’s necessary in these sorts of cases.