The world is aging in an unprecedented way

The World by Numbers

“Here lies Europe, overwhelmed by Muslim immigrants and emptied of native-born Europeans,” goes the standard pundit line, but neither the immigrants nor the Europeans are playing their assigned roles.

by Martin Walker

Something dramatic has happened to the world’s birthrates. Defying predictions of demographic decline, northern Europeans have started having more babies. Britain and France are now projecting steady population growth through the middle of the century. In North America, the trends are similar. In 2050, according to United Nations projections, it is possible that nearly as many babies will be born in the United States as in China. Indeed, the population of the world’s current demographic colossus will be shrinking. And China is but one particularly sharp example of a widespread fall in birthrates that is occurring across most of the developing world, including much of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. The one glaring exception to this trend is sub-Saharan Africa, which by the end of this century may be home to one-third of the human race.

The human habit is simply to project current trends into the future. Demographic realities are seldom kind to the predictions that result. The decision to have a child depends on innumerable personal considerations and larger, unaccountable societal factors that are in constant flux. Yet even knowing this, demographers themselves are often flummoxed. Projections of birthrates and population totals are often embarrassingly at odds with eventual reality.

In 1998, the UN’s “best guess” for 2050 was that there would be 8.9 billion humans on the planet. Two years later, the figure was revised to 9.3 billion—in effect, adding two Brazils to the world. The number subsequently fell and rose again. Modest changes in birthrates can have bigger consequences over a couple of generations: The recent rise in U.S. and European birthrates is among the developments factored into the UN’s latest “middle” projection that world population in 2050 will be just over 9.1 billion.

In a society in which an average woman bears 2.1 children in her lifetime—what’s called “replacement-level” fertility—the population remains stable. When demographers make tiny adjustments to estimates of future fertility rates, population projections can fluctuate wildly. Plausible scenarios for the next 40 years show world population shrinking to eight billion or growing to 10.5 billion. A recent UN projection rather daringly assumes a decline of the global fertility rate to 2.02 by 2050, and eventually to 1.85, with total world population starting to decrease by the end of this century.

Despite their many uncertainties, demographic projections have become an essential tool. Governments, international agencies, and private corporations depend on them in planning strategy and making long-term investments. They seek to estimate such things as the number of pensioners, the cost of health care, and the size of the labor force many years into the future. But the detailed statistical work of demographers tends to seep out to the general public in crude form, and sensationalist headlines soon become common wisdom.

Because of this bastardization of knowledge, three deeply misleading assumptions about demographic trends have become lodged in the public mind. The first is that mass migration into Europe, legal and illegal, combined with an eroding native population base, is transforming the ethnic, cultural, and religious identity of the continent. The second assumption, which is related to the first, is that Europe’s native population is in steady and serious decline from a falling birthrate, and that the aging population will place intolerable demands on governments to maintain public pension and health systems. The third is that population growth in the developing world will continue at a high rate. Allowing for the uncertainty of all population projections, the most recent data indicate that all of these assumptions are highly questionable and that they are not a reliable basis for serious policy decisions.

In 2007, The Times of London reported that in the previous year Muhammad had edged out Thomas as the second most popular name for newborn boys in Britain, trailing only Jack. This development had been masked in the official statistics because the name’s many variants—such as Mohammed, Mahmoud, and Muhamed—had all been counted separately. The Times compiled all the variants and established that 5,991 Muhammads of one spelling or another were born in 2006, trailing 6,928 Jacks, but ahead of 5,921 Thomases, 5,808 Joshuas, and 5,208 Olivers. The Times went on to predict that Muhammad would soon take the top spot.

On the face of it, this seemed to bear out the thesis—something of a rallying cry among anti-immigration activists—that high birthrates among immigrant Muslims presage a fundamental shift in British demography. Similar developments in other European countries, where birthrates among native-born women have long fallen below replacement level, have provoked considerable anxiety about the future of Europe’s traditionally Christian culture. Princeton professor emeritus Bernard Lewis, a leading authority on Islamic history, suggested in 2004 that the combination of low European birthrates and increasing Muslim immigration means that by this century’s end, Europe will be “part of the Arabic west, of the Maghreb.” If non-Muslims then flee Europe, as Middle East specialist Daniel Pipes predicted in The New York Sun, “grand cathedrals will appear as vestiges of a prior civilization—at least until a Saudi-style regime transforms them into mosques or a Taliban-like regime blows them up.”

The reality, however, looks rather different from such dire scenarios. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that while Muhammad topped Thomas in 2006, it was something of a Pyrrhic victory: Fewer than two percent of Britain’s male babies bore the prophet’s name. One fact that gets lost among distractions such as the Timesstory is that the birthrates of Muslim women in Europe—and around the world—have been falling significantly for some time. Data on birthrates among different religious groups in Europe are scarce, but they point in a clear direction. Between 1990 and 2005, for example, the fertility rate in the Netherlands for Moroccan-born women fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for Turkish-born women from 3.2 to 1.9. In 1970, Turkish-born women in Germany had on average two children more than German-born women. By 1996, the difference had fallen to one child, and it has now dropped to half that number.

These sharp reductions in fertility among Muslim immigrants reflect important cultural shifts, which include universal female education, rising living standards, the inculcation of local mores, and widespread availability of contraception. Broadly speaking, birthrates among immigrants tend to rise or fall to the local statistical norm within two generations.

The decline of Muslim birthrates is a global phenomenon. Most analysts have focused on the remarkably high proportion of people under age 25 in the Arab countries, which has inspired some crude forecasts about what this implies for the future. Yet recent UN data suggest that Arab birthrates are falling fast, and that the number of births among women under the age of 20 is dropping even more sharply. Only two Arab countries still have high fertility rates: Yemen and the Palestinian territories.

In some Muslim countries—Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Lebanon—fertility rates have already fallen to near-European levels. Algeria and Morocco, each with a fertility rate of 2.4, are both dropping fast toward such levels. Turkey is experiencing a similar trend.

Revisions made in the 2008 version of the UN’s World Population Prospects Report make it clear that this decline is not simply a Middle Eastern phenomenon. The report suggests that in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, the fertility rate for the years 2010–15 will drop to 2.02, a shade below replacement level. The same UN assessment sees declines in Bangladesh (to 2.2) and Malaysia (2.35) in the same period. By 2050, even Pakistan is expected to reach a replacement-level fertility rate.

Iran is experiencing what may be one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in human history. Thirty years ago, after the shah had been driven into exile and the Islamic Republic was being established, the fertility rate was 6.5. By the turn of the century, it had dropped to 2.2. Today, at 1.7, it has collapsed to European levels. The implications are profound for the politics and power games of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, putting into doubt Iran’s dreams of being the regional superpower and altering the tense dynamics between the Sunni and Shiite wings of Islam. Equally important are the implications for the economic future of Iran, which by midcentury may have consumed all of its oil and will confront the challenge of organizing a society with few people of working age and many pensioners.

The falling fertility rates in large segments of the Islamic world have been matched by another significant shift: Across northern and western Europe, women have suddenly started having more babies. Germany’s minister for the family, Ursula von der Leyen, announced in February that the country had recorded its second straight year of increased births. Sweden’s fertility rate jumped eight percent in 2004 and stayed put. Both Britain and France now project that their populations will rise from the current 60 million each to more than 75 million by midcentury. Germany, despite its recent uptick in births, still seems likely to drop to 70 million or less by 2050 and lose its status as Europe’s most populous country.

In Britain, the number of births rose in 2007 for the sixth year in a row. Britain’s fertility rate has increased from 1.6 to 1.9 in just six years, with a striking contribution from women in their thirties and forties—just the kind of hard-to-predict behavioral change that drives demographers wild. The fertility rate is at its highest level since 1980. The National Health Service has started an emergency recruitment drive to hire more midwives, tempting early retirees from the profession back to work with a bonus of up to $6,000. In Scotland, where births have been increasing by five percent a year, Glasgow’s Herald has reported “a mini baby boom.”

Immigrant mothers account for part of the fertility increase throughout Europe, but only part. And, significantly, many of the immigrants are arrivals from elsewhere in Europe, especially the eastern European countries admitted to the European Union in recent years. Children born to eastern European immigrants accounted for a third of Scotland’s “mini baby boom,” for example.

In 2007, France’s national statistical authority announced that the country had overtaken Ireland to boast the highest birthrate in Europe. In France, the fertility rate has risen from 1.7 in 1993 to 2.1 in 2007, its highest level since before 1980, despite a steady fall in birthrates among women not born in France. France’s National Institute of Demographic Studies reports that the immigrant population is responsible for only five percent of the rise in the birthrate.

A similar upturn is under way in the United States, where the fertility rate has climbed to its highest level since 1971, reaching 2.1 in 2006, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. New projections by the Pew Research Center suggest that if current trends continue, the population of the United States will rise from today’s total of some 300 million to 438 million in 2050. Eighty-two percent of that increase will be produced by new immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants.

By contrast, the downward population trends for southern and eastern Europe show little sign of reversal. Ukraine, for example, now has a population of 46 million; if maintained, its low fertility rate will whittle its population down by nearly 50 percent by mid-century. The Czech Republic, Italy, and Poland face declines almost as drastic.

In Russia, the effects of declining fertility are amplified by a phenomenon so extreme that it has given rise to an ominous new term—hypermortality. As a result of the rampant spread of maladies such as HIV/AIDS and alcoholism and the deterioration of the Russian health care system, says a 2008 report by the UN Development Program, “mortality in Russia is 3–5 times higher for men and twice as high for women” than in other countries at a comparable stage of development. The report—which echoes earlier findings by demographers such as the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Murray Feshbach—predicts that within little more than a decade the working-age population will be shrinking by up to one million people annually. Russia is suffering a demographic decline on a scale that is normally associated with the effects of a major war.

Middle Game

Cyprus' gas discovery raises political stakes

The discovery of large quantities of natural gas offshore Cyprus could give a push for ending the decades-long dispute dividing the island. But it could also end up ratcheting up tensions with Turkey.

Disputes over how to divide the spoils of the eastern Mediterranean Sea's vast gas reserves have pitted the island state and nearby Israel against Turkey in a war characterized so far by harsh language and stepped up naval activity. But the stakes rose Wednesday after Cyprus announced that an exploration partnership had discovered as much as 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in its waters.

For Cyprus, the discovery is a bonanza - at current prices, the estimated reserves are valued at $32 billion in an economy whose output came to $23 billion in 2010. And that's just the beginning: Last month, Cyprus's government announced a second oil and gas licensing round that will cover 12 of 13 blocks in the ocean south of the island.

Known as Block 12, the field of the discovery announced on Wednesday covers about 40 square miles. It will require additional drilling prior to development, but it was hailed as a "significant" discovery by Charles D. Davidson, chief executive officer of the U.S. company Noble Energy, which led the exploration consortium.

The U.S. Geological Survey last year estimated a mean of 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 122 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas in the Levant Basin Province, to which Cyprus belongs. Israel has already uncovered huge reserves in waters under its control

But to exploit the gas, Cyprus will have to reach an accommodation with Turkey over the future of the island, which has been divided into Greek and Turkish zones since 1974, said Sinan Ulgen, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Brussels. Without an agreement, Cyprus risks a perpetual crisis with its powerful neighbor, he said.

"This raises the stakes for reaching a lasting settlement with regard to the political division of the island," Ulgen told The Media Line. "For Greek Cypriots, if such a settlement is reached they can comfortably take advantage of these offshore resources. If a settlement is not reached it will always be problematic … Turkey will always try to put up an obstacle one way or the other."

Although the Greek Cypriot government is recognized as the official one and belongs to the European Union, Ankara backs the breakaway ethnic-Turkish northern part of the island and claims rights to the island's energy reserves. It has employed its navy to confront Cypriot oil drilling and escort Turkish vessels conducting geological surveys in Cypriot waters.

Greek and Turkish Cypriot sides have held on-and-off peace talks under United Nations auspices for decades. The latest round began three years ago.

Both the rhetoric and the naval muscle-flexing peaked last autumn after the Noble began exploratory activities with a license awarded by Cyprus. Israel became ensnared by virtue of an agreement that Ankara rejects dividing economic rights to the seabed they share. Two Israeli companies are partners with Noble in the Cyprus drilling.

Speaking at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington earlier this month, Cypriot Foreign Minister Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis called Turkey the "neighborhood bully" and said it had become a country that went from advocating a foreign policy of "zero problems" with its neighbors to one of "only problems."

Nevertheless, tensions gradually wound down after Turkey reached a quiet understanding with the U.S. not to intervene in Cyprus' exploration activities. But Ulgen said Ankara may be under no obligation to restrain itself now that Cyprus moves out of the exploration phase into developing a gas infrastructure.

"What is still unclear is whether the agreement covers only the first step of exploration or whether it concerns the whole process. The incentive on Turkish side would be to try to hinder this process, to show to Greek Cypriots that settlement on the island would be beneficial to Greek Cypriots as well," he said.

A rising economic and military power at a time when the U.S. and Europe are in retreat in the Middle East, Turkey is in position to make use of its navy, said Eric Grove, director of the Center for International Security and War Studies at Britain's University of Salford, said in an essay in World Politics Review this month. "Turkey's current naval fleet is not only significant but also pre-eminent among those of local actors."

But James Dorsey, senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said he is doubtful that Turkey would use it, pointing out that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has stepped back from possible confrontations with Israel over its blockage of the Gaza Strip and with Syria over its deadly crackdown of rebels.

"I would not be surprised if there would be more acrimony over where the maritime border line is and what is the Turkish Cypriot stake in this," Dorsey told The Media Line. "Whatever bluster you have out of Ankara, it is clear that the Turks are gun-shy. I'm not saying that negatively. But this is not the OK Corral for them."

But even the diplomatic route for Turkey presents a problem because Cyprus is due to take over the European Union rotating presidency in the second half of 2012, which will strengthen Cyprus' hand. "Cyprus having the EU presidency for six months is a problem for the Turks. It's going to be six months when Turkey will have a problem putting forward its issues," Dorsey said.

Gordon Banks doesn't live here anymore

Brazil overtakes UK as world's sixth-biggest economy

By Jessica Phelan

Brazil has overtaken the UK to become the world's sixth-biggest economy, according to a new report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research.

BRIC economies are expected to be bigger than Europe's by 2020.

The Center for Economics and Business Research forecasts the trend is set to continue, with Russia and India expected to overtake Europe's other major economies, France and Germany, by 2020.

Brazil now has a bigger economy than the UK, making the world's sixth-largest economic power, according to the Center for Economics and Business Research [2](CEBR).

The London-based consultancy forecast the trend was set to continue, with Russia and India expected to overtake Europe's other major economies, France and Germany, by 2020.

Brazil grew by 7.5 percent in 2010, and though growth projections are less than half that for 2011, the country has established itself as one of the world's biggest exporters. It now exports more to China than it imports from it, according to Forbes [4].

CEBR chief executive Douglas McWilliams told the BBC [5] that Brazil's ascendancy was part of a wider pattern:

"I think it's part of the big economic change, where not only are we seeing a shift from the west to the east, but we're also seeing that countries that produce vital commodities—food and energy and things like that—are doing very well and they're gradually climbing up the economic league table."

CEBR's World Economic League Table puts the US as the world's biggest economy in 2011, followed by China and Japan. Those rankings are predicted to remain stable over the next nine years.

However, numbers four and five—currently held by Germany and France—are expected to be filled by Russia (currently nine) and India (ten) respectively by 2020. Germany would fall to number seven, CEBR said, and France to number nine. Brazil is forecast to remain stable at number six, while the UK (now seven) will overtake France but still drop to eighth. Italy (eight) is expected to fall to tenth.

Europe also faces a decade of slow growth as a result of 20 years of easy credit, according to the Guardian [7]. "Paying back debts over a short timescale will restrict growth and prevent many countries, including the UK, from clawing back output lost in the banking crash for many years," the paper reported.

CEBR predicts world growth will falling to 2.5 percent in 2012, which is already a downward revision of its forecast in September. If the eurozone crisis leads to sovereign defaults, banking collapses and countries leaving the euro, however, next year's world growth is expected to be even lower, at just 1.1 percent.

Can the Polis Live Again?

The modern world has withered public space and its virtues.

By Michael Knox Beran

In 1958, Hannah Arendt published The Human Condition, her book—part panegyric, part lamentation—on what she called “public space.” What she meant by public space wasn’t just the buildings and gathering places that in a good town square or market piazza encourage people to come together. It wasn’t even civic art viewed more broadly, the paintings and poetry Arendt attributed to homo faber, the fabricating soul who translates “intangible” civic ideals into “tangible” civic art. Public space, for Arendt, was also a metaphysical arena in which people realized their individual potential. They escaped necessity’s pinch—the arduous biological round of life-sustaining labor—through a “sharing of words and deeds.” This was the tradition of the Greek polis, from which Arendt drew much of her inspiration, a place designed “to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness.”

But a new Leviathan was gobbling up the old public spaces, Arendt believed. With the advent of the modern nation-state, a social dispensation began to emerge, one whose adepts—sociologists, psychologists, planners—were skilled in techniques derived from the social sciences but whose motives were far from pure. The new social technician, part schoolmarm, part bully, sought not merely to study behavior but also, Arendt argued, to control it. The school of Pericles was giving way to the school of Pavlov.

The social signori, Arendt maintained, sought to impose behavioral norms on people through “innumerable and various rules”—bureaucratic harnesses intended to “normalize” men and women, to compel them to “behave,” and to punish their “spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.” Refractory spirits who failed to conform were to be stigmatized as “asocial or abnormal.” In her more perfervid visions, Arendt foresaw a social apocalypse, a “leveling out of fluctuation” that would result in the “most sterile passivity history has ever known.”

Arendt’s jeremiad had a good deal in common with the warnings of other mid-twentieth-century prophets, among them David Riesman and Friedrich Hayek. It resembles, too, the insights of contemporary critics like Camille Paglia, who contends that too many Americans have become “complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them.” But Arendt had her own idiosyncratic understanding of the way public space could help block the road to serfdom. The old forums, in liberating so much potential, foiled those who desired “conformism, behaviorism, and automatism in human affairs.” The question that haunts the reader of Arendt’s work is whether we can get the old places back.

Arendt was born in 1906 into a German-Jewish family living in Linden, in what is now the city of Hanover. She passed much of her childhood in Königsberg, in what was then East Prussia; at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, she moved with her family to Berlin. She was still in her teens when she first heard the name Martin Heidegger. It was “hardly more than a name,” she said, but it “traveled all over Germany like the rumor of the hidden king.” In 1924, she enrolled in the University of Marburg to study under the master. He was 35, married, and working on Being and Time. Arendt embraced him as teacher, mentor, and lover.

The traditional hostility of the philosopher toward the polis was, Arendt believed, “only too apparent” in Heidegger. The “most essential characteristic” of his pose, she said, was “its absolute egoism.” Heidegger was a mountain prophet. He shunned the “gabble” of the valley. He retired whenever practicable to his cottage in Todtnauberg in the Black Forest, where he could live, he said, in the “solitude of the mountains,” in the “elemental nearness of sun, storms, and heavens.” “It’s marvelous up here,” he wrote in 1925. “Sometimes I no longer understand that down there one can play such strange roles.”

Arendt soon left Marburg to study under Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg. She continued, however, to see Heidegger, briefly and furtively, on railway platforms and in provincial hotels. But a breach would open between them. In January 1933, Hitler came to power, and in May, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. “The Führer himself and he alone,” he declared, “is German reality and law, today and for the future.” In the same year, the police, suspicious of Arendt’s researches in the Prussian State Library, where she was collecting material on anti-Semitism for the German Zionist Organization, arrested and interrogated her. Upon her release, she fled Germany and found refuge in Paris. After the German invasion of France in 1940, the French authorities imprisoned her in the notorious internment camp at Gurs. She escaped and made her way to the United States, which became her home for the rest of her life.

Experience and reflection led Arendt to question Heidegger’s contempt for public space. His “existential solipsism” prevented him from making responsible political judgments. Yet one should not exaggerate the break between the two: it occurred by degrees and was never complete. Arendt would always regard Heidegger as the incarnation of the philosopher-king, and their bond persisted until her death in 1975. She called him “the last Romantic,” not without admiration. German Romanticism left its print on her own spirit. She was contemptuous of mere biological existence, the life of those “enslaved” by the necessity of getting their bread, imprisoned “in the ever-recurring cycle of the life process.” She wanted, as the German Romantics did, to soar into a higher, freer realm; she, too, was a Tochter aus Elysium, a daughter of Elysium.

In the spring of 1961, 20 years after she came to the United States, Arendt traveled to Israel to attend the trial of former SS lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann. Her impressions were printed first in The New Yorker and later in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. By applying the theses of The Human Condition to the Nazis’ mass murder of the Jews, she caused a sensation—indeed, a scandal.

Studying Eichmann in the dock, Arendt concluded that he was not an evil genius but a fool: “Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.” He was “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché,” Arendt wrote; in his aphasic helplessness, he could but repeat, in “officialese” (“my only language,” he said), the formulas he had learned to parrot. “The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected to his inability to think.”

Such people exist in every era, but not until the flowering of the social bureaucracies did they come into their own. Eichmann shone in the sleek bureaucracy of the SS not despite his banality but because of it. Under the social dispensation, Arendt wrote, a “substitution” of “collective man-kind for individual men” takes place, achieved mainly by means of the “social sciences which, as ‘behavioral sciences,’ aim to reduce man as a whole, in all his activities, to the level of a conditioned and behaving animal.” National Socialism was for Arendt an extreme form of the social impulse to condition human beings. The concentration camps, she wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, were themselves vast conditioning experiments, “laboratories” in which “each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any other.”

Eichmann, a man as primitive in his moral reflexes as one of Pavlov’s dogs, figures in Eichmann in Jerusalem as the incarnation of the new social man and thus the ideal Nazi administrator. A less dull creature would have either broken under the strain or turned sadist and thus upset the smooth efficiency of the operation; Eichmann plodded on, processing mass murder as though he were stamping passports. Arendt thought that Eichmann deserved to hang, but her portrait nevertheless stirred outrage because the mulish mental dormancy she attributed to him seemed to mitigate his guilt. Carrying her theory to what many thought an extravagant length, Arendt argued that Eichmann, caught up in the atmosphere of National Socialism, was “perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong.”

If Eichmann figures in Arendt’s roman à thèse as the embodiment of the banal social man, his Jewish victims make a prop for her theory of the decline of public space. Probably nothing in Eichmann in Jerusalem caused so much distress as the pages in which Arendt described the assistance that the Jewish councils, the Judenräte, gave the Nazis in implementing genocide. “Wherever Jews lived,” Arendt wrote, “there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis.”

Arendt showed little feeling for the agonizing predicament of the Jewish leaders, though she conceded that their “submissive meekness” was understandable. No “non-Jewish group or people had behaved differently,” she noted. To rebel, she knew, was to court a fate worse than death. She described how Dutch Jews were “tortured to death” after attacking a German police detachment in 1941. For “months on end they died a thousand deaths, and every single one of them would have envied his brethren in Auschwitz and even in Riga and Minsk.”

Still, if by 1941 it was too late to rebel, why had Jews and Gentiles alike failed to stand up to the thugs earlier? Arendt attributed the failure of civic nerve to the decay of public space and, in particular, to the decline of the political traditions that flourished in such space. In The Human Condition, she had defined the essence of political activity as “jurisdiction, defense, and administration of public affairs.” The crucial word is “defense.” Arendt admired the man of action who had the “courage” to enter public space and defend himself against aggressors; courage, she said, was “the political virtue par excellence.”

Arendt believed that some peoples had more of this civic bone and muscle than others. The Danes, for example, had an “authentically political sense, an inbred comprehension of the requirements of citizenship and independence.” The Diaspora Jews, by contrast, “had no political tradition or experience.” They figure in Arendt’s writings as civic castrati whose lack of political experience left them vulnerable to the pogrom. Had the Jews possessed a more adequate public space, Arendt believed, they could have developed the civic machismo that she admired.

This part of her argument, though, is at odds with her recognition that polis arts, however beautifully developed, could not in fact have saved the Jews. Even if they had turned the ghetto into a facsimile of Periclean Athens, they could not have effectually resisted a gigantic nation-state determined to wipe them off the face of the earth. They were helpless, Arendt wrote, because they “possessed no territory, no government, and no army”—in other words, no nation-state.

Arendt’s analysis of the plight of European Jewry lays bare the deeper tension in her thought. Public space, small and polis-like, is for her the school of civic courage and distinctive individuality. Yet no polis can withstand the might of a nation-state. Build a nation-state to save yourself, however, and you sacrifice the humanity and civic vigor of the agora, the forum, and the town square. The nation-state, because of its size, requires a people to undertake the very kinds of social administration that degrade the civic artistry that makes them strong and self-reliant. “Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination towards despotism, be this the despotism of a person or of majority rule,” Arendt wrote, “and although statistics, that is, the mathematical treatment of reality, was unknown prior to the modern age, the social phenomena which make such treatment possible—great numbers, accounting for conformism, behaviorism, and automatism in human affairs—were precisely those traits which, in the Greek self-understanding, distinguished the Persian civilization from their own.” It is the despairing crux of Arendt’s philosophy. The social methods of the nation-state will always overwhelm the civic intimacy of polis culture, yet without national forms to protect them, polis people are perpetually at the mercy of their nation-state enemies.

Part of the difficulty is the fetish that Arendt makes of politics. She thought politics essential to public space, yet in a world dominated by national governments, she saw no way to preserve the political tradition of the town square, the agora, and the piazza, which had been robbed of their sovereignty by the bigwigs of the capital.

Child abuse of a giant scale

The dirty secret in Uncle Sam’s Friday trash dump

By Bryan R. Lawrence

Releasing information on the Friday before a big holiday is a time-tested way to bury bad news. So when the Government Accountability Office’s fiscal 2011 financial statements for the federal government were released on the Friday before Christmas, it made sense to read them closely.

Since 1997, the United States has been a rare example of a government willing to publish financial statements using accrual accounting, which counts the cost of promises made as well as cash paid out. And the GAO’s professionalism over the years has won it a reputation for impartiality and effectiveness.

That professionalism is evident in the GAO analysis of the net present value of the Social Security and Medicare promises Washington has made to Americans. “Net present value” means the total that would have to be set aside today to pay the costs of these programs in the future. The government puts these numbers in appendices, rather than in headlines. But the costs are real.

In fiscal 2011, the cost of the promises grew from $30.9 trillion to $33.8 trillion. To put that in context, consider that the total value of companies traded on U.S. stock markets is $13.1 trillion, based on the Wilshire 5000 index, and the value of the equity in U.S. taxpayers’ homes, according to Freddie Mac, is $6.2 trillion. Said another way, there is not enough wealth in America to meet those promises.

If the government followed corporate accounting rules, that $2.9 trillion increase would be added to the $1.3 trillion cash deficit for fiscal 2011 that has been widely reported. And a $4.2 trillion deficit is something that Americans need to know about.

The Treasury acknowledges the need to show an accrual-based deficit, but the only retirement accruals it includes in its “Citizen’s Guide” to the GAO numbers are for promises to direct government employees and veterans. Promises to the rest of Americans are excluded, even though they are multiples larger than the $10.2 trillion of government debt held by the public.

The latest GAO numbers are particularly interesting because of a change in accounting standards that requires the government to explain why the cost grew by $2.9 trillion. Fully $1.5 trillion of that reflects the aging of all 312 million Americans by one year. In the GAO report from fiscal 2001, the cost of promises was $17 trillion. The growth in the cost from $17 trillion to $33.8 trillion averages about $1.7 trillion per year. The GAO doesn’t specify numbers for the other nine years, but one suspects that aging has driven most of the growth in the cost of the promises.

The cost would have been a lot worse but for two assumptions that the GAO found questionable.

First, Medicare’s cost projections assume legally required decreases in reimbursement rates to doctors that Congress has ignored for years — the so-called doc fix. For these projections to be realized, Congress would have to abide by its own cost controls and allow an immediate 27 percent cut to doctors’ rates, which is very unlikely.

Second, the Medicare projections assume that the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) will reduce health-care cost growth by 1.1 percent per year, despite doubts voiced by the GAO and a panel appointed by the Medicare board of trustees.

The panel and the GAO recommended including an alternate scenario in the year-end figures, in which the doc fix continues and the ACA cost reductions do not materialize. The result is a $12.4 trillion increase in the cost of the promises, to more than $46 trillion. Given Congress’s history with the doc fix, and the general paralysis in Washington, it’s hard to argue with the GAO’s lack of confidence in Congress’s ability to honor its own cost controls.

If the government were a company, its huge and growing off-balance-sheet liabilities would set off alarm bells. But investor confidence has not been lost — Treasurys can still be sold at very attractive yields.

Confidence has been shaken, though, among the American people. Congress’s approval ratings are at record lows. Anger is flaring across the political spectrum, reflecting a sense that something has broken in our country.

In such an environment, is it right to release critical financial information the Friday before Christmas? Is it acceptable that politicians are not required to describe the cost of the promises they have made?

In 1990, the government required that companies begin to account for the net present value of retirement promises, not just current-year cash flows. General Motors began complying in 1992; and it recorded a $33.1 billion (pretax) charge to reflect the value of its promises up to that point, which led to what was then the largest annual loss in U.S. corporate history. Seventeen years later, the “free until accounted for” promises were a major factor in GM’s bankruptcy.

The United States is stronger than General Motors. And the good news is that small changes in health-care cost trends have a large impact on the government’s long-term promises. Our system is fixable. But our politics are toxic, and each side is dug into an ideological trench. In such an environment, when hard choices need to be made about promises and taxes, why should information be buried in an appendix?

Americans deserve better. One way for Washington to start earning back our trust is by giving us all the information, even if it is unpleasant.

The new monasteries for the printed word

As The Age Of The Physical Book Retreats, The Cult Of The Physical Book Advances

By  Trevor Butterworth

The idiot is missing. Or rather, a hundred “Idiots” have failed to arrive. And as Paris awakes on the shortest day of the year, there is grave concern at Shakespeare and Company at 37 rue de la Bûcherie. Dostoyevsky’s novel was supposed to be handed out to congregants at tomorrow’s funeral of the bookstore’s American founder, George Whitman, who passed away on December 14, three days after his 98^th birthday. As an Irish bookseller explains to me, between patient calls to the distributor, “George felt as if it was written about him.”

Though Whitman may well have been as naïve as Dostoyevsky’s protagonist, Prince Myshkin – and, from the testimony of Anaïs Nin, as saintly – his fate was not that of the insane asylum, though bookselling might be thought of as a particular form of madness. Instead, the storefront pays homage to a man who used an odd educational provision in the G.I. Bill to stock his store and lending library (whose lease he purchased in 1951 with an inheritance of $500) and lived to see it become, inarguably, the most famous bookstore in the world.

There are photos – in the most dashing, he is dressed in a paisley jacket and tie, looking, for all the world like a psychedelic Leon Trotsky or a malnourished and goateed Sean Penn – and there are lengthy obituaries from the New York Times and the French newspaper, Liberation, pasted to the windows.

A young woman, in a tight fitting red hat that looks like an upturned crocus, stops with her blue suitcase and patiently reads through them in the rain. She becomes a flood as the morning wanes and tourism waxes. There are votive candles and flowers and a poem, now sodden, paying tribute to George’s “lamplighter spirit;” there are many more tributes on a large poster board inside. There will be champagne tomorrow night at the store for anyone who wants to drop by.

Shakespeare and Co. would have enjoyed a solid footnote in literary history for the writers who gathered for literary conversation not just before they were famous, but after: Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, an ungracious Allen Ginsberg.  And it evolved into literature’s Santiago de Compostela not only for the quality of its literary pilgrims, but for the quantity that took alms and shelter under its eaves. Some 50,000 “tumbleweeds” – drifters, grifters, aspirant writers and common readers – slept above the store during Whitman’s reign in exchange for a little time working in the shop and a lot more time spent reading (slacking in the latter task would wear your welcome thin).

And then, of course, there is the name, a ménage à trois of literary bloodlines. Whitman’s store was first called le Mistral before Sylvia Beach declared, at a reading in 1958, that she was passing the name and the spirit of, her former and famed bookstore, Shakespeare and Co., to him.

Beach had seen her little bookstore and lending library turn into a salon for a generation of American writers who made a home in Paris in the 1920s and 30s: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound – all showed up to chat, borrow books and mix with the local literary and artistic talent. Hemingway devotes a chapter to the store in his work “A Moveable Feast,” noting of Beach, not only her implacable generosity, but that “no one that I ever knew was nicer to me.”

But above all, and what would seal her place in literature’s pantheon, Beach became a veritable obstetrician to the birth of James Joyce’s Ulysses, stepping in to become publisher after a New York judge declared an early extract, published in The Little Review, obscene and American and English printers balked. In a long-drawn out stroke of genius, she figured that French typesetters wouldn’t understand English and therefore miss all the naughty bits. Out of such ignorance came the most influential novel of the 20^thcentury.

Beach shuttered her store with the arrival of the Second World War, and though Hemingway officially liberated it with his company of soldiers (before liberating the wine cellar at the Ritz), it never officially opened again. George named his daughter – and the present proprietor – Sylvia Beach Whitman in her honor.

Writing in the Guardian, the British novelist Jeanette Winterson said that Whitman “was an affront to modern capitalism, because he ran a successful business that put people, culture and books before money;” but that’s just the kind of silly thing writers say when they are being sentimental. Bookselling can be many things, but it is always, in the end, about balancing the books. And while Shakespeare and Co.’s fortunes sometimes courted misfortune, the fact is the shop now trades on the kind of association commerce can only dream of: Genius met here. It is as much a portal to the past as its grander neighbor, the great cathedral of Notre Dame.

But what is remarkable beyond the store’s unique literary genealogy is that, at a time when digital publishing is undoing and repackaging so much of literary culture, its nature as a store is generalizable to small bookstores everywhere. It is intimate and surprising, serious and fun. It is a curated space which is a source for curating one’s sense of the world and of self.

Indeed, if the idea of curating is one of the most significant cultural forms of the 21^st century  (and I believe it is, given the volume of cultural material available to us at this moment in history), the small, well-curated bookstore will not simply thrive as a commercial enterprise, it will be culturally indispensable.

As the age of the physical book retreats, the cult of the physical book will advance. E books are much like canned food in the 1950s, new, convenient – and excitingly so. But as with food, taste and desire changes. There will be a point when how literature is produced and distributed and consumed becomes much more important to a great many people than simple convenience. In one sense, the point is already here: small bookstores aresurviving where their big box rivals now fall like dinosaurs. What they have to offer the marketplace will only become more obvious as that market seems to shift further in the direction of digitization.

Soon – or already, in the case of the superlative small bookstore chain in the UK, Daunt Books – agile booksellers will return to their origins and become book publishers. Their offerings may never have the reach and profit of the mass-market ebook, but as the digital market expands the quiddities of the physical book will become more and more compelling to more and more people. Hand set, hand bound, rag paper editions will suddenly feel novel.

Small bookstores will be the new monasteries for the printed word in a flat-screen backlit age. And then, somewhere, perhaps, some Sylvia Beach-like devotee of the cult of the book will set up shop and…

“What date is it?” asks a bookseller,.

“The twenty first,” replies a second. “It is the winter equinox.”

“And then tomorrow, light starts to come back into the world,” says a third,

And in the gloom of morning Paris, as I scribble the exchange into my notebook, I think, where else but the most famous bookstore on earth does one get a more perfect ending? And yes, in case you are wondering, the Idiots all showed up in time too.

The only recipe for economic development

From Aid to Enterprise

Science is never settled

Climate Science Reaches a Landmark That Chills Global Warming Alarmists

By James Taylor

As 2011 comes to a close, climate science celebrates an important landmark. It has now been 33 years, or a third of a century, since sensors aboard NASA and NOAA satellites began measuring temperatures throughout the earth’s lower atmosphere.

For 33 years, we have had precise, objective temperature data that do not require guesswork corrections to compensate for uneven thermometer placement and non-climate surface temperature biases such as expanding urban heat islands and land-use changes. The satellite data, moreover, tell us the earth is warming at a more modest, gradual, and reassuring pace than was foretold by United Nations computer models.

The satellite sensors became operational at a time that is very convenient for those who believe humans are causing a global warming crisis. Global temperatures declined from the mid-1940s through the late 1970s. As a result, the sensors coincidentally began measuring global temperatures at the very beginning of our most recent global warming trend. Had the sensors been in place 33 years earlier, during the 1940s, the overall pace of warming shown by the satellite sensors would be less than half what is shown by the post-1978 temperature data.

Even so, the measured temperature trend is quite modest. John Christy, who along with Roy Spencer oversees the NASA satellite sensor program, reports temperatures have warmed at an average pace of 0.14 degrees Celsius per decade since the satellite sensors became operational. This is merely half the pace predicted by computer models utilized by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Christy appears to be making a generous concession regarding the warming that has occurred. The temperature data seem to show warming closer to 0.3 degrees over the 33 year period, or 0.09 degrees Celsius per decade. But why quibble over the difference? A warming of 0.14 degrees per decade, or 1.4 degrees per century, is still significantly less than predicted by UN climate models and far from an impending global warming crisis.

Importantly, the satellite sensors show less warming in the lower troposphere (approximately 10,000 feet above the earth’s surface) than is reported by surface temperature readings. Global warming theory holds that one of the fingerprints of human-induced global warming is more rapid warming in the lower troposphere than at the surface. The reason for this is carbon dioxide molecules reside in the lower troposphere and have their greatest heat-trapping effect there.

As a result, if global temperatures are rising as a result of human carbon dioxide emissions, the satellite sensors should report more warming in the lower troposphere than is actually occurring at the surface. In essence the satellite sensors should report a warming trend somewhat more severe than is actually occurring at the surface of the earth.

Surface temperature measurements, however, indicate more rapid warming at the surface of the earth than in the lower troposphere. According to James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute, temperatures at the surface of the earth rose twice as fast during the past 33 years as the satellite data show. Surface temperatures compiled by the UK’s University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit reflect a similar warming trend.

With temperature data indicating more warming at the earth’s surface than in the earth’s lower troposphere, one of the following must be true: (1) the surface temperature data is more corrupted by heat biases such as expanding urban heat islands and localized land-use changes than the IPCC admits, (2) the warming of the past 33 years is primarily the result of factors other than greenhouse gas emissions, or (3) longstanding, widely believed assumptions about greenhouse gas theory are wrong.

Regardless of which one or more of the three options are true, the satellite sensors have contributed greatly to our scientific understanding of the earth’s ever-changing climate. Thirty-three years and counting, we rightly celebrate the scientific advances provided by satellite temperature sensors.