Does Too Much Debt Really Matter?

An American economist looks at Europe

By Pedro Schwart

Economists, especially in Europe, seem to be divided into two irreconcilable camps over the question of 'growth versus austerity'. From 2008 to 2012, the talk was all of consolidating public budgets, increasing taxes, closing down or merging unsafe banks, selling their assets at fire-sale prices, cutting down on pension and health entitlements, firing public employees, reducing trade union privileges and opening labor markets to competition—the classic panoply of measures the IMF used to demand of Third World countries when it moved in to rescue them. This time and for the Eurozone, the IMF was content to play second fiddle: the rescuers were Germany and other northern and central European countries; the peccant countries they had to rescue were those on the outer fringes of the Eurozone. The expectation was that this hard medicine would bear fruit at the latest in 2013 and bring renewed growth and employment after four years of contraction. Unexpectedly, and for reasons we hope to discover someday, there was a second dip in the recession. Public opinion, especially in countries suffering from high unemployment, became restless. In despair many Europeans leaders turned their eyes towards the United States, hoping to learn the lessons of its money-printing Federal Reserve and bond-issuing Treasury. The European Central Bank chief Signor Draghi promised to do "whatever it takes" to save the euro; Signor Monti was dealt a sharp lesson by Italian voters; the French President and the Spanish Prime Minister demanded growth-fostering measures to ease public deficit reduction; the European Council set in progress a program to help employ young people; and the European Community as a whole launched a plan to better rail and road transport on the Continent. Frau Merkel was cast into the role of a Dickensian Gradgrind who wanted everybody to stick to "Facts! Facts! Facts!" The policy climate had changed.

These moves were dictated by political convenience, but the change in policy direction was reinforced by the effect of a scientific dispute that reverberated beyond the confines of Academia; an econometric mistake committed by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff seemed to put the austerity camp in disarray. At least this is how Paul Krugman, in line with many others, presented his case for a deficit financed stimulus.

The Reinhart-Rogoff slip-up

The controversy went like this. Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) had come to the not-so-surprising conclusion that an excessive accumulation of public debt tended to reduce the rate of growth of a country. They went further. They thought they could see a threshold in the historical series of their sample of countries, whereby a debt equivalent to more than 60% of GDP in developing economies and of 90% for advanced economies was accompanied by a non-linear reduction in growth. Though Reinhart and Rogoff in their paper (2010) allowed for the possibility that the causation could go from low growth to high debt due to falls in tax revenues, the implication was that it was debt that led to lower growth when it went over the threshold of 60% and 90%. This is how, in discussions about austerity versus stimulus, I myself, along with many others, understood the results.

I don’t want my awareness raised, thanks.

Hands up if you're fed up of experts thinking they're more 'aware' than us plebs

By Frank Furedi 

Last Thursday was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Awareness Day. If you missed it, that’s probably because every week there are awareness days. We’re swamped by them. There are literally thousands of organisations whose mission is to raise our awareness. There is also a vast number of politicians, policymakers, experts, professionals, academics and earnest volunteers who are all devoted to the cause of raising awareness.

Those who set themselves up to raise the public’s awareness are not just providing information; they’re also making a statement about themselves, about who they are. They, unlike those who require their support, are aware. Awareness is presented as a state of being all of us should aspire to attain. In its common usage today, the term awareness resists any clear definitions. It is not simply about knowing or understanding. So AIDS awareness, for example, is not reducible to knowledge of that disease; rather, it implies the adoption of the values of safe sex and the lifestyle associated with its values. People who are aware are likely to demonstrate this fact publicly, by wearing the right-coloured ribbon or bracelet or T-shirt and using the appropriate language. To be aware is to be on the morally superior side: not eating meat; not practising unprotected sex; not smoking; exercising regularly; riding a bicycle; recycling… these are just some of the rituals that signal that a person is aware.

Campaigns designed to raise awareness are as much about advertising the status of the campaigners as they are about changing the outlook of a target audience. For example, advocates of breastfeeding produce literature that affirms the virtuous nature of their own lifestyles while also inviting those who have not seen the light to become aware. The very term ‘raising awareness’ involves drawing a distinction between those who are enlightened, who are aware of something, and those who are not. It draws attention to the fundamental contrast between those who know and those who are ignorant, between the morally superior and the morally inferior. So someone who allows his children to eat junk food is not only unaware and ignorant; he’s also morally questionable.

Awareness-raising campaigns impute to their advocates the values of intelligence, sensitivity, broadmindedness, sophistication and enlightenment. For that reason, the mission of raising awareness has become a key cultural resource for those who want to distinguish themselves from others. Awareness-raisers are invariably drawn towards inflating the behavioural and cultural distinctions between themselves and the rest of society; they are preoccupied with constructing a lifestyle that contrasts as sharply as possible to the lifestyles of their moral inferiors. What is really important about their lifestyles is not so much the values they exhort, but that they are different, in every detail, from the lives led by obese, junk-food eating, gas-guzzling, xenophobic and fundamentalist consumers of the tabloid press and junk culture.

Last curtain falls on Nabucco pipeline

Nabucco's demise affects the politics of energy supply along the entire Southern Gas Corridor to Europe

By Vladimir Socor

Nabucco-West, the pipeline project that was to have carried Azerbaijani gas from Turkey to the Central European Gas Hub near Vienna, is exiting from the stage after the rival Trans-Adriatic Pipeline project (TAP, Greece-Albania-Italy, led by Norwegian Statoil) prevailed last week in the contest for priority access to Azerbaijani gas.

On June 26, the gas producers' consortium at Shah Deniz in Azerbaijan communicated this decision to the parties and to the European Union in Brussels. There will be no encore for Nabucco-West. "The Nabucco project is over for us. Our goal now is European gas for European customers," Gerhard Roiss, CEO of Austrian OMV, the Nabucco consortium's lead player, said.

Initiated in 2002, the Nabucco project held potentially winning cards of a strategic nature. Along with intrinsic comparative advantages, Nabucco long enjoyed the European Commission's political and (unofficially) advisory support. Given this project's superior potential, the commission prioritized Nabucco as the mainstay of the planned Southern Gas Corridor to Europe. However, missteps in Vienna detracted from the project's credibility, ultimately offsetting its advantages.

The proposed 3,900-kilometer pipeline, with a 56-inch (1,420-millimeter) diameter and an annual 31-billion-cubic-meter (bcm) design capacity, seemed moribund by 2011. The transportation project's ambitions were outrunning the actual gas field development in the Caspian basin by many years. Consequently, Nabucco lacked supply sources and investment capital while facing steep cost increases for the project.

The project company could not deal with these problems by citing outdated cost estimates, or by voicing wildly premature hopes to access gas from northern Iraq (a hope that could not even look optimistic since it presupposed a long, expensive connector pipeline). By 2011, Nabucco was losing credibility all around in its then-existing form.

Outside the consortium's official framework, OMV from time to time took some steps of its own that were inconsistent with the Nabucco project's logic. At one stage, OMV attempted a hostile takeover of Hungarian MOL. When this failed, OMV sold its large package of MOL shares to Russian Surgut Neftegaz, which used it for its own hostile takeover attempt against MOL.

At some stage, the Austrian side proposed allowing Gazprom to use part of Nabucco's capacity in the future for Russian gas, which would have defeated this project's supply diversification goals. While the Baumgarten terminal was a major selling point for Nabucco, OMV at one time agreed to share control of the terminal with Gazprom, until the European Commission invalidated that agreement.

In early 2012 Azerbaijan gave Nabucco a chance to survive in a more realistic form. Azerbaijan's State Oil Company (SOCAR) initiated the Trans-Anatolia Pipeline Project (TANAP) to build the gas pipeline across Turkey to Europe, with Azerbaijan as main shareholder and project operator. TANAP, in effect, replaced Nabucco on Turkey's territory, taking over the burden of responsibility for two-thirds of Nabucco's route.

This enabled the Nabucco company to reconfigure its project as Nabucco-West, from the Turkish-Bulgarian border to the continental gas hub at Baumgarten near Vienna. Its length now reduced to 1,300 kilometers, Nabucco-West looked more affordable and possibly bankable.

Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution

Have a drink and relax. It's going to take more than five minutes to go through this one.

by Murray N. Rothbard

Law is a set of commands; the principles of tort or criminal law, which we shall be dealing with, are negative commands or prohibitions, on the order of "thou shalt not" do actions X, Y, or Z.[1] In short, certain actions are considered wrong to such a degree that it is considered appropriate to use the sanctions of violence (since law is the social embodiment of violence) to combat, defend against, and punish the transgressors.

There are many actions against which it is not considered appropriate to use violence, individual or organized. Mere lying (that is, where contracts to transfer property titles are not broken), treachery, base ingratitude, being nasty to one's friends or associates, or not showing up for appointments, are generally considered wrong, but few think of using violence to enjoin or combat them. Other sanctions, such as refusing to see the person or have dealings with him, putting him in Coventry, and so on, may be used by individuals or groups, but using the violence of the law to prohibit such actions is considered excessive and inappropriate.

If ethics is a normative discipline that identifies and classifies certain sets of actions as good or evil, right or wrong, then tort or criminal law is a subset of ethics identifying certain actions as appropriate for using violence against them. The law says that action X should be illegal, and therefore should be combated by the violence of the law. The law is a set of "ought" or normative propositions.

Many writers and jurists have claimed the law is a value-free, "positive" discipline. Of course it is possible simply to list, classify and analyze existing law without going further into saying what the law should or should not be.[2] But that sort of jurist is not fulfilling his essential task. Since the law is ultimately a set of normative commands, the true jurist or legal philosopher has not completed his task until he sets forth what the law should be, difficult though that might be. If he does not, then he necessarily abdicates his task in favor of individuals or groups untrained in legal principles, who may lay down their commands by sheer fiat and arbitrary caprice.

Thus, the Austinian jurists proclaim that the king, or sovereign, is supposed to lay down the law, and the law is purely a set of commands emanating from his will. But then the question arises: On what principles does or should the king operate?[3] Is it ever possible to say that the king is issuing a "bad" or "improper" decree? Once the jurist admits that, he is going beyond arbitrary will to begin to frame a set of normative principles that should be guiding the sovereign. And then he is back to normative law.

The Flat Earth Society, Climate Change, and Total Dictatorship

The Flat Earth Society believes climate change is real. Really.

By Mary Theroux

The climate crisis is real, it’s here, and it’s time for absolute power for Obama!

President Obama is set to expand his rule via Executive Order, last week outlining a series of climate proposals he plans to push through via executive action rather than working through Congress. His rationale for this further step to rule by dictat rather than the Constitution is that Congress is mired in gridlock.

Further, the issue of climate change is just too important to bother with that whole pesky balance of powers theory in that dusty old piece of parchment:

The question is not whether we need to act. The overwhelming judgment of science, of chemistry and physics and millions of measurements, has put all that to rest.

Ah, yes, “overwhelming judgment” a/k/a “consensus,” that scientifically-based test of Truth.

I guess President Obama missed this from Atmospheric physicist, MIT Professor of Meteorology and former IPCC lead author Richard S. Lindzen:

The influence of mankind on climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant.

Or the March 2012 study, showing that a mere 32.6% of 11,994 academic, peer-reviewed articles over the past 10 years endorse the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), with 66.4% stating no position on AGW, 0.7 per cent rejecting AGW and in 0.3 per cent of papers, the authors said the cause of global warming was uncertain.

Yet in a clever twist of the statistics, the study was used to “prove” a 97% “consensus” on AGW. Here’s how it was done:

Taking out the 66.4% of studies that stated “no position” on AGW, the pro-AGW activists summed the 32.6% of the papers endorsing AGW, the 0.7% rejecting, and the 0.3% uncertain to narrow the set down to 4,000 papers. Of those 4,000 papers, 97% said that recent warming is mostly man made:

We found over 4,000 studies written by 10,000 scientists that stated a position on this, and 97 per cent said that recent warming is mostly man made. [emphasis added]

Never mind the almost 8,000 studies that stated no position.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics, indeed.

In further support of his great climate change-driven power-grab, President Obama explained:

We don’t have time for a meeting of the flat-earth society.

He might want to reconsider: As it turns out, the President of the Flat Earth Society endorses the theory of man-made climate change:

the Flat Earth Society is a real group, and its president says he believes climate change is real. He also doesn’t like being used as an example of backward thinking on the issue.

For further critique of the substance of President Obama’s climate change claims, including refutation by the Apollo veterans who formed The Right Climate Stuff research team (TRCS), see here.

Is The Economic Crisis An Indictment Of Capitalism?

That the currently dominant system has failed can hardly be contested

by Shawn Ritenour

One of the sad narratives of the financial meltdown of 2008 and its aftermath is that it was and remains the result of unbridled capitalism. Too much freedom spoiled the economic broth.

While doing research for a current project I'm working on, I came upon a remarkable essay by Ludwig von Mises. It turns out that Mises considered the question of whether economic crisis is an indictment of laissez-faire capitalism back in 1931 in the wake of the worst global economic downturn of the Twentieth Century.

In an essay, "The Economic Crisis and Capitalism," published in the German Neue Freie Presse(available in English Translation in Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, Vol. 2), he explains why the answer to the question is a decided no!

It is almost universally asserted that the severe economic crisis under which the world presently is suffering has provided proof of the impossibility of retaining the capitalist system. Capitalism, it is thought, has failed; and its place must be taken by a better system, which clearly can be none other than socialism.

That the currently dominant system has failed can hardly be contested. But it is another question whether the system that has failed was the capitalist system or whether, in fact, it is not anticapitalist policy--interventionism, and national and municipal socialism--that is to blame for the catastrophe.

The structure of our society resets on the division of labor and on the private ownership of the means of production. In this system the means of production are privately owned and are used either by the owners themselves--capitalists and landowners--for production, or turned over to other entrepreneurs who carry out production partly with their own and partly with others' means of production. In the capitalist system the market functions as the regulator of production. The price structure of the market decides what will be produced, how, and in what quantity. Through the structure of prices, wages, and interest rates the market brings supply and demand into balance and sees to it that each branch of production will be as fully occupied as corresponds to the volume and intensity of the effective demand. Thus capitalist production derives its meaning from the market.

The Beautiful City

Beauty emerges from paradox

by TROY CAMPLIN

What makes a city beautiful? It’s not its parks and architecture, decorative though they may be. It’s not the mannequins dressed in high fashion, or the creative window displays. A city’s beauty comes from its life, from how its structures keep people teeming on the sidewalks and arterials—pulsing like blood through a body. A city’s beauty comes about the same way all beauty comes about in nature: through the unity of apparently opposing phenomena.

“Neighborhood accommodations for fixed, bodiless, statistical people are accommodations for instability,” wrote the great observer of cities, Jane Jacobs. In order for a neighborhood to have staying power, Jacobs thought, the people in it must constantly change. A city only becomes stable through “a seeming paradox.” That is, to get a critical mass of people to stay put, a city has to have “fluidity and mobility of use.” And so the neighborhood itself must change and reorganize itself in order to keep its people there. Fixedness and change. Healthy cities exemplify such paradoxes.

Cities are also products of attraction and repulsion. These forces somehow find balance. Identical businesses may repel each other, but similar businesses can attract each other. You won’t typically find two hair salons next to each other, for example, but it’s not uncommon to find a nail salon, a shoe store, and a clothing store in proximity. Why do fast food restaurants attract each other? And why do malls seem to keep their distance? A glance at any online map will show the shopping malls in an area to be roughly the same distance apart—close enough to each other to reduce transportation costs, far enough away to reduce competition. The presence of a mall, in turn, attracts more shopping and more restaurants nearby. These forces of attraction and repulsion work together to create a city’s textures, its amenities, and its strange centers of activity. 

Another apparent contradiction Jacobs finds in cities lies in their ability to reconcile the dweller’s desire for both the private and the social: “A good city street neighborhood achieves a marvel between its people’s determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from the people around.”

These public places foster weaker social bonds and, thus, create the conditions for a public life. Weak bonds are the social forces created by private citizens who shuffle and cluster on the neighborhood street. It’s the morning nod to the Bangladeshi man who minds his newsstand each day. It’s thirty seconds of sports banter with the doorman at work. We end up being far more social when our weak bonds dominate our more clannish instincts—such as the bonds that hold together street gangs or let whole nations tolerate ethnic cleansing. Of course family and friendship bonds are strong, but it’s not clear it’s healthy to extend these to the wider society. Because we ultimately choose our bonds, a healthy mix of weak and strong bonds will originate in all the choices cities can provide. And such bonds will change with one’s needs.

Our Legacy Systems - Dysfunctional, Unreformable

America's legacy systems are like stars about to go super-nova

by Charles Hugh-Smith

There are two problems with the vast, sprawling legacy systems we've inherited from the past: they're dysfunctional and cannot be fixed/reformed. The list of dysfunctional legacy systems that cannot be truly reformed is long: Social Security, with its illusory Trust Funds and unsustainable one-to-two ratio of beneficiaries to full-time workers; Medicare, 40% fraud and ineffective/needless care; the healthcare system (if you dare even call the mess a system), 40% paper shuffling and 25% defensive medicine and profiteering; weapons procurement--the system works great if you like cost overruns and programs that take decades to actually produce a weapon; higher education--costs have skyrocketed 700% while studies (Academically Adrift) have found that fully a third of all college graduates learned little of value in their four years; the financial system--now that we've given the Federal Reserve oversight over Too Big To Fail Bank practices, do you really think we'll ever get rid of TBTF banks?

One place to start an investigation of any legacy system is to ask: how would we design a replacement system from scratch? The gulf between a practical, efficient replacement system and the broken legacy system is a measure of the legacy system's dysfunction.

We all know why legacy systems cannot be reformed or replaced: each has a veritable army of constituents and vested interests. Every single person drawing a check or payment from the legacy system fears reform of any kind, as each fears that their place at the feeding trough might be threatened.

As a result, reform is necessarily superficial, a simulacrum of real reform that satisfies the PR need to "fix the system" but actually hardens the system against future reform by adding layers of complexity that act as defensive complexity moats.

There is a fundamental asymmetry between those threatened by reform and the reformers. The reformers are trying to save the system from eventual collapse, but the benefits of their efforts often fall to the cohort of young people who have not yet become voters or entered the workforce; these citizens don't exist politically.

Meanwhile, those drawing paychecks, benefits or payments from the legacy system will fight with every fiber of their being to protect every cent of "their fair share." (Needless to say, every share is fair and deserved.) Those resisting reform are fighting to the death, so to speak, while the reformers have no equivalent motivation or political persuasion.

The Descent of Hungary

The goulash democracy

By RAYMOND ZHONG

How much can the European Union, by law a club of democracies, actually do to stop a freely elected government within its borders from turning its democracy into an autocracy?

This week the Venice Commission, the European Council's advisory body on constitutional matters, issued a stinging report on recent judiciary reforms passed by Hungary's ruling Fidesz party, which the group says are antidemocratic and jeopardize the right to fair trial. The European Commission is in talks with Budapest for this and other potential violations of EU law. Last month the European Parliament broached procedures that could effectively kick Hungary out of the EU.

All signs indicate that compromises will eventually be reached. This is not a fight that either side wants to see end messily. Yet European institutions can only do so much to reverse the ugly turn that public life has taken here on Budapest's splendid stone boulevards, and in its houses of power.

***

The scale and speed of what has happened in Hungary since 2010 took even old Budapest hands by surprise. In April of that year, Fidesz and its coalition partner won a two-thirds majority in Parliament following eight years of incompetent, scandal-plagued rule by the Socialist Party. Fidesz chief Viktor Orban took office as prime minister with, he declared, a broad mandate for change.

In its first 20 months in office, Mr. Orban's government restructured public administration in almost every aspect of Hungarian life. Among the 363 new laws Fidesz passed between May 2010 and December 2011—about one new law for every two working days—were reforms of the courts, the central bank and media regulation. There was a new constitution. There was a new electoral map that favored Fidesz candidates, and a reduction in the number of MPs. There were new laws governing taxation, health care, churches, universities, even the tobacco trade and the State Opera—all with the effect of bringing power closer to the center and placing Fidesz appointees in key posts.

During the Cold War, Hungary was said to be governed by "goulash communism" due to Janos Kadar's experiments in free-market economics and gradual loosening of his totalitarian rule. Today we are witnessing the birth of goulash democracy: parliamentary government spiced with strong centralized control and elements of single-party rule.

None of this might have mattered so much to crisis-addled Europe, however, but for the failure of Mr. Orban's economic program. Imposing Europe's highest tax on banks and windfall levies on sectors dominated by multinational firms has done no miracles for foreign investment and growth, or for confidence in Budapest's solvency.

How the Left came to reject cheap energy for the poor

Any effort worthy of being called progressive, liberal, or environmental, must embrace a high-energy planet

by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus

Eighty years ago, the Tennessee Valley region was like many poor rural communities in tropical regions today. The best forests had been cut down to use as fuel for wood stoves. Soils were being rapidly depleted of nutrients, resulting in falling yields and a desperate search for new croplands. Poor farmers were plagued by malaria and had inadequate medical care. Few had indoor plumbing and even fewer had electricity.

Hope came in the form of World War I. Congress authorized the construction of the Wilson dam on the Tennessee River to power an ammunition factory. But the war ended shortly after the project was completed.

Henry Ford declared he would invest millions of dollars, employ one million men, and build a city 75 miles long in the region if the government would only give him the whole complex for $5 million. Though taxpayers had already sunk more than $40 million into the project, President Harding and Congress, believing the government should not be in the business of economic development, were inclined to accept.

George Norris, a progressive senator, attacked the deal and proposed instead that it become a public power utility. Though he was from Nebraska, he was on the agriculture committee and regularly visited the Tennessee Valley. Staying in the unlit shacks of its poor residents, he became sympathetic to their situation. Knowing that Ford was looking to produce electricity and fertilizer that were profitable, not cheap, Norris believed Ford would behave as a monopolist. If approved, Norris warned, the project would be the worst real estate deal “since Adam and Eve lost title to the Garden of Eden.” Three years later Norris had defeated Ford in the realms of public opinion and in Congress.

Over the next 10 years, Norris mobilized the progressive movement to support his sweeping vision of agricultural modernization by the federal government. In 1933 Congress and President Roosevelt authorized the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority. It mobilized thousands of unemployed men to build hydroelectric dams, produce fertilizer, and lay down irrigation systems. Sensitive to local knowledge, government workers acted as community organizers, empowering local farmers to lead the efforts to improve agricultural techniques and plant trees.

Is Italy Ungovernable?

Broken from Birth

By RAYMOND ZHONG

Silvio Berlusconi seemed exceptionally pleased with himself right up until his last days in office. As Rome's cost of funds climbed early this month, Italy's prime minister maintained that his government's finances were shipshape and that the Italian economy was in fine health. "The restaurants are full and the planes fully booked," he told the G-20 summit in Cannes. Only after Mr. Berlusconi finally lost his parliamentary majority on Nov. 8 did his grin give way to a grimace and his gleaming perma-tan start to look a bit pale.

Did the Berlusconi era have to end this way, 17 years after il Cavaliere was first elected? Perhaps not, David Gilmour says. The historian and author is just surprised the end didn't come sooner.

"It should have ended long ago. It should have ended inside Italy, for Italian reasons. I think in no other country in Western Europe, or the States, would he have survived so long. He would never have survived so long, let alone been elected by an overwhelming majority in three elections."

Mr. Gilmour's latest book, "The Pursuit of Italy," is a wide-ranging ramble through Italian history, a tour in chronological order but with frequent digressions. It was meant to be a much shorter book, Mr. Gilmour says, one focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries. But his editors kept pushing him to follow the threads farther and farther back. "Go back to the Romans, David. Go back to Cicero."

Cicero, in Mr. Gilmour's telling, turns out to have plenty to say about Italy today, but the real cornerstone of modern Italy's woes is nevertheless more recent. According to Mr. Gilmour, the "Italian reasons" for which Mr. Berlusconi ought to have fallen have to do with the country's strong regional divisions, which perpetually fracture national politics and create weak institutions. Unifying the country, therefore, has cost it immeasurably. Seated before a log fire in his study, in a converted cottage deep in the plains of Oxfordshire, Mr. Gilmour explains.

In 1860, a sailor and radical named Giuseppe Garibaldi led a band of soldiers down the Italian peninsula and defeated the armies of Sicily and Naples in the name of the Sardinian King Victor Emmanuel II. Garibaldi had failed in his designs to unite the Italian kingdoms twice before, and he spent years in exile overseas before returning to the island of Caprera, near Sardinia, in 1854.

The third time was the charm. On March 17, 1861, Victor Emmanuel was declared the head of state of a new country called "Italy." But whether any of the peninsula's residents wanted to be "Italians" was uncertain from the start. "The South wasn't united," Mr. Gilmour says. "It was conquered."

Breaking Bad (Habits)

Better now than later

by Stephen Roach

It was never going to be easy, but central banks in the world’s two largest economies – the United States and China – finally appear to be embarking on a path to policy normalization. Addicted to an open-ended strain of über monetary accommodation that was established in the depths of the Great Crisis of 2008-2009, financial markets are now gasping for breath. Ironically, because the traction of unconventional policies has always been limited, the fallout on real economies is likely to be muted.

The Federal Reserve and the People’s Bank of China are on the same path, but for very different reasons. For Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues, there seems to be a growing sense that the economic emergency has passed, implying that extraordinary action – namely, a zero-interest-rate policy and a near-quadrupling of its balance sheet – is no longer appropriate. Conversely, the PBOC is engaged in a more pre-emptive strike – attempting to ensure stability by reducing the excess leverage that has long underpinned the real side of an increasingly credit-dependent Chinese economy.

Both actions are correct and long overdue. While the Fed’s first round of quantitative easing helped to end the financial-market turmoil that occurred in the depths of the recent crisis, two subsequent rounds – including the current, open-ended QE3 – have done little to alleviate the lingering pressure on over-extended American consumers. Indeed, household-sector debt is still in excess of 110% of disposable personal income and the personal saving rate remains below 3%, averages that compare unfavorably with the 75% and 7.9% norms that prevailed, respectively, in the final three decades of the twentieth century.

With American consumers responding by hunkering down as never before, inflation-adjusted consumer demand has remained stuck on an anemic 0.9% annualized growth trajectory since early 2008, keeping the US economy mired in a decidedly subpar recovery. Unable to facilitate balance-sheet repair or stimulate real economic activity, QE has, instead, become a dangerous source of instability in global financial markets.

With the drip-feed of QE-induced liquidity now at risk, the recent spasms in financial markets leave little doubt about the growing dangers of speculative excesses that had been building. Fortunately, the Fed is finally facing up to the downside of its grandiose experiment.

The Demographic Blues

Now the big bad wolf is coming to the door, and those who built their homes of straw and sticks face trying times

by WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Back in the late 1960s, when I was a callow youth with no common sense to speak of and a huge, misshapen ego, the Big Scare energizing the United Nations, the foundation world, the leaders of civil society and the intellectual establishment of the day was the Population Bomb. It’s hard for young people today to understand how terrified, urgent, self righteous and utterly convinced the Population Bomb movement was. The closest analogy today is the global green movement and its apocalyptic warnings about climate change. The Population Bomb worriers didn’t have as many grassroots organizations in support of their agenda as the greens do today, but the establishment, the mainstream press, and the great and the good were even more worried about the Bomb then than they are about global warming today, and the forecasts we were getting were even more dire.

Basically, the problem was that people were having too many children—especially, though it wasn’t polite to say this, non-white and non-educated people. All over the developing world, modern medicine was reducing infant mortality, but people were having just as many children as they did back in the days when half of all babies died in their first two years of life. With life expectancy increasing for older people as well, the world’s population was exploding, and the inevitable result would be famine, war and you name it.

The most visible spokesperson for the alarmists was Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist whose 1968 book The Population Bombpredicted inevitable mass famines and other unspeakable horrors starting in the 1970s and accelerating to Armageddon as the starving billions fought over crusts and war boiled across an emaciated world. As the professor warned us in exactly the same kind of prose alarmist greens now use,

 “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…”

One of the chief villains of the movement to defuse the Population Bomb was Pope Paul VI; his encyclical condemning birth control among Catholics was considered an act of mass murder. After all, with the world’s population heading inevitably and inexorably off the cliff into unspeakable disaster, for the Roman Pontiff to ban one of the few possible methods of saving the planet was horrible beyond all thought.

The bomb was a dud. Though Dr. Ehrlich went on to peddle other scare stories about Malthusian meltdowns of various kinds for almost half a century after the world failed to collapse, his reputation has never been the same. The decades since the great population hysteria have seen a steady decline in the rate of population growth to the point where in many countries the biggest worry now is population decline. The number of people without secure access to an adequate diet is falling; the 21^stcentury currently looks set to spend more time worrying about obesity than starvation.  While the world population continues to rise, most experts now believe (for what it’s worth) that the world population will level off rather than explode.

Crisis in Egypt - More worrying than ever

A sense of foreboding is rising across an increasingly troubled land

IT IS an odd thing when a nation of 84m people lumbers towards a precise appointment with a wholly unknown destiny. But such is the case with Egypt. The fatal date is June 30th, the first anniversary of Muhammad Morsi’s inauguration as Egypt’s first freely elected president. The event is a planned nationwide protest, calling for Mr Morsi to go, in the manner of Egypt’s dictator of 30 years, Hosni Mubarak, only 30 turbulent months ago.

No one knows if the protests will succeed, nor what might happen if they do. What is sure is that they will be big and very possibly bloody. The country is polarised, the mood highly charged. Already skirmishes in provincial cities between friends and foes of Mr Morsi’s party, a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, have left a handful of dead and scores of injured.

Many expect clashes to worsen and spread before a showdown on June 30th. The army has already deployed across the country to secure key installations and has reinforced the gates of Mr Morsi’s palace with concrete barriers. Worried citizens are stockpiling necessities, with a panicked run on petrol causing mile-long queues and snarled traffic. Embassies caution their citizens to avoid likely trouble spots.

With a mix of error and mischance, Mr Morsi has managed to anger every tier of Egypt’s class-ridden society. For those concerned mostly with money, whether rich or poor, his government’s glaring failure to stem a dire economic slide counts most. Inflation, unemployment, government debt and poverty have all swollen markedly during Mr Morsi’s short tenure. Shortages of fuel and power are now chronic.

For those concerned more with politics, whether from an Islamist or secular point of view, the Muslim Brotherhood’s secretive and bullying style has proved deeply frustrating. Many on the religious right accuse Mr Morsi of using religion simply to secure power, not to make Egypt more Islamic. Non-Islamists accuse the Brothers of attempting a creeping takeover of state institutions, as well as of rank incompetence. “It’s not a question of whether they are Muslim Brothers or liberals,” wrote Mohamed ElBaradei, a prominent opposition figurehead, in a recent scathing article. “They are simply not qualified to govern.”

'You Can't Eat Sharia'

Egypt is on the brink -- not of something better than the old Mubarak dictatorship, but of something even worse

BY MOHAMED ELBARADEI

Two years after the revolution that toppled a dictator, Egypt is already a failed state. According to the Failed States Index, in the year before the uprising we ranked No. 45. After Hosni Mubarak fell, we worsened to 31st. I haven't checked recently -- I don't want to get more depressed. But the evidence is all around us.

Today you see an erosion of state authority in Egypt. The state is supposed to provide security and justice; that's the most basic form of statehood. But law and order is disintegrating. In 2012, murders were up 130 percent, robberies 350 percent, and kidnappings 145 percent, according to the Interior Ministry. You see people being lynched in public, while others take pictures of the scene. Mind you, this is the 21st century -- not the French Revolution!

The feeling right now is that there is no state authority to enforce law and order, and therefore everybody thinks that everything is permissible. And that, of course, creates a lot of fear and anxiety.

You can't expect Egypt to have a normal economic life under such circumstances. People are very worried. People who have money are not investing -- neither Egyptians nor foreigners. In a situation where law and order is spotty and you don't see institutions performing their duties, when you don't know what will happen tomorrow, obviously you hold back. As a result, Egypt's foreign reserves have been depleted, the budget deficit will be 12 percent this year, and the pound is being devalued. Roughly a quarter of our youth wake up in the morning and have no jobs to go to. In every area, the economic fundamentals are not there.

Egypt could risk a default on its foreign debt over the next few months, and the government is desperately trying to get a credit line from here and there -- but that's not how to get the economy back to work. You need foreign investment, you need sound economic policies, you need functioning institutions, and you need skilled labor.

Meet the Gangs and Vigilantes Who Thrive Under Morsi

The Egyptian State Unravels

An anti-Morsi protester holds a homemade gun in Cairo

By Mara Revkin

“Everybody needs a weapon,” said Mahmoud, a 23-year-old Egyptian arms dealer, as he displayed his inventory of pistols, machetes, and switchblades on the living room floor of his family’s apartment in the crime-ridden Cairo neighborhood of Ain Shams.

With Egyptian government statistics indicating a 300 percent [1] increase in homicides and a 12-fold increase in armed robberies since the 2011 revolution, Mahmoud and other black-market entrepreneurs are capitalizing on a growing obsession with self-defense and civilian vigilantism among Egyptians who have lost patience with their government’s inability to restore security. Frustration with lawlessness is among the numerous grievances that will drive antigovernment protesters to the streets on June 30, the one-year anniversary of President Mohamed Morsi’s inauguration.

Mahmoud is one of many post-revolutionary lawbreakers who were victims of crime before they became perpetrators. When I asked him how he made the decision to start selling black-market weapons, he replied sarcastically, “What decision? I had no choice.” Over lukewarm Pepsi served by his mother, Mahmoud explained that he used to earn a living as a taxi driver. But shortly after the revolution, his car was hijacked at gunpoint by a local gang. Like many of the amateur black marketeers responsible for Egypt’s current crime wave, Mahmoud is a far cry from the hardened criminal I had been expecting; he is just a young man hoping to earn enough money to move out of his parents’ house, marry his fiancée, and replace his stolen taxi.

Despite the commodity boom, Brazil is close to boiling point

People have lost faith in the political process 

By Daniel Hannan

How should a government respond when it is the target of nationwide protests? Swedish leaders reacted by wringing their hands and empathising, Turks by calling counter-demonstrations, Syrians by shooting the demonstrators.

The most original response has come from the President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who brazenly co-opted the protesters to her cause. “The size of the demonstrations”, she said, “shows the energy of our democracy, the strength of the voice of the streets and the civility of our population.” Brazilians are certainly civil: you won’t find a cheerier, more relaxed people in the Western hemisphere. Yet they have taken to the streets in their hundreds of thousands – and, despite President Rousseff’s words, not entirely peacefully.

Brazil, the B of the BRIC countries, is now the seventh largest economy on earth. Yet, despite the commodity boom that has lifted the entire continent, its economy is stalling. Is the unrest economic? Not entirely: there has been a decade of growth and unemployment is low. The protests began over notionally financial issues – bus fares and the cost of hosting the Fifa World Cup – but they soon became a vehicle for anyone who was unhappy about anything.

If the unrest turns violent, disorder becomes self-reinforcing. In any population, potential looters outnumber police. Law enforcement works on the theory that not all the looters will go on a spree at the same moment – just as banking rests on the assumption that we won’t all simultaneously withdraw our deposits. When the hoodies realise that the forces of order are overstretched – during a blackout, for example – pillaging usually follows.

Television images of riots signal to every potential looter that the police have their hands full. It’s what caused the disruption in London two years ago; and Stockholm last month; in Istanbul last week; in São Paulo this week.

Why the pent-up frustration in Brazil? Largely because, as in much of South America, people have lost faith in the political process. Across the region, military regimes gave way in the late Eighties to civilians. Free-market politicians had their chance in the Nineties and blew it, presiding over corruption and cronyism. In country after country, voters turned in despair to the populist Left: Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president Rousseff’s charismatic patron, in Brazil.

Liberté, Égalité, but Not Homosexualité

Why French Feminists Are Fighting Gay Marriage

By David A. Bell

The only thing clear right now about the U.S. Supreme Court’s pending decision on the Defense of Marriage Act -- the law that bars the federal government’s recognition of same-sex marriages -- is that Americans will read the verdict as the latest salvo in a long-running culture war. But it is worth remembering that this is a culture war that is increasingly being fought internationally -- and often in terms that do not line up with the debate in the United States. Americans have become accustomed to thinking of the argument against gay marriage as being motivated by religious conservatism. But that is not necessarily true elsewhere.

France offers an instructive example. Although 60 percent of the public supports gay marriage, the country has been beset by vitriolic protests since the National Assembly narrowly passed a marriage equality law last spring. From a distance, the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets may have seemed little different from the evangelical activists often seen at similar demonstrations in the United States. But Americans would be surprised to discover how different their motivations often are.

To be sure, religion is not irrelevant to the French protests. The most prominent protest leader, a comedian who adopted the nom de guerre Frigide Barjot, a snarky nod to the 1960s actress and sex symbol Brigitte Bardot, embraced a fervent Catholicism during a pilgrimage to Lourdes. (She now calls herself “Jesus’ press secretary.”) Catholic clergy have denounced the marriage legislation, and several religious associations have helped organize the protests.

But opponents of marriage equality in France’s mainstream parties have mostly kept their distance from religious groups. Relatively few of the street protesters interviewed by reporters talk of God, wave the Bible, or have verses from Leviticus tattooed on their arms. (Which should come as no surprise, given that France is a largely secular place, where barely half the population even still identifies itself as Catholic and regular religious attendance does not even reach ten percent.) Indeed, the most prominent opposition has come from the ranks of professional groups such as law professors and psychoanalysts, whose U.S. counterparts generally favor marriage equality by large margins. A considerable number of public intellectuals have also expressed loud opposition to the law, including the essayist Alain Finkielkraut, the novelist Jean d’Ormesson, and the philosopher Sylviane Agacinski (the wife of former Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin).