I’m always reading on the Corner that Barack Obama is a far-left radical driven by anti-American and anti-Western impulses. Under the circumstances, it’s weird that he keeps giving speeches that are so at odds with his world view:

President Barack Obama addresses the parliament of Ghana (White House photo)

But despite the progress that has been made — and there has been considerable progress in many parts of Africa — we also know that much of that promise has yet to be fulfilled. Countries like Kenya had a per capita economy larger than South Korea’s when I was born. They have badly been outpaced. Disease and conflict have ravaged parts of the African continent.

In many places, the hope of my father’s generation gave way to cynicism, even despair. Now, it’s easy to point fingers and to pin the blame of these problems on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense helped to breed conflict. The West has often approached Africa as a patron or a source of resources rather than a partner. But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants. In my father’s life, it was partly tribalism and patronage and nepotism in an independent Kenya that for a long stretch derailed his career, and we know that this kind of corruption is still a daily fact of life for far too many.

One sociological finding I’m fascinated with is the fact that the extent to which one overestimates one’s personal degree of control over one’s fortunes is an important predictor of success. In other words, success in life is partly a result of circumstances and luck and partly a result of individual effort. And people who overestimate the importance of effort at more likely to succeed. It makes sense when you think about it, but it’s also a bit paradoxical.

In that light, I think this is a useful kind of message to spread. It’s not helpful to a country to have its politics dominated by post-colonial grievances and attempted blame-shifting. But particularly amidst a global economic crisis, I think it’s striking the extent to which few countries really are masters of their own destiny. And it’s not just Africa. The Canadian banking system, for example, is very strong and the Canadians don’t seem to have made any important errors in macroeconomic policy. But they’re going to have a painful recession just like everyone else, because Canada’s economy is very intertwined with America’s. And you see tons and tons of this sort of thing in poor countries where the prices of commodities they export can collapse for reasons that are far outside their control. And, again, the Ghanas of the world are very seriously impacted by the nature of the global trading regime and by rich countries’ immigration policies, but Ghana has no real ability to influence either of those things.

Chris Hayes has a very nice review essay in The American Prospect that winds up focusing on the question of whether big business cycle downturns are in some sense necessary, a needed corrective to past excesses. There’s a tendency, that’s larger on the political right but also pops up across the spectrum because it’s fairly intuitive, to basically see the ups and downs of the business cycle in moralistic terms. A huge recession is punishment for our sins, and we need to just sort of bear with it. The evidence, however, suggests that this is wrong and that downturns can happen for reasons that are all out of proportion to the severity of the harm they do.

I think you see the intuitive—but wrong—thinking about this on display every time you hear someone complain that someone else, be it a government agency or a corporation or an individual, oughtn’t be engaging in some act of conspicuous spending during these days of belt-tightening. The sense that it’s somehow inappropriate is very powerful. But the reality is that if most people are tightening their belts, it doesn’t help them for everyone else to do it too. On the contrary, that makes it worse. What you need during a downturn is for those with the capacity to spend to take advantage of bargain opportunities and go out and spend.

Senate Finance Committee debates relative merits of “surtax” on high-income taxpayers versus a beer tax . . . in 1921. The idea of a “fountain syrup tax” even gets mentioned.

John Cohn’s got the hot preliminary CBO score scoop:

According to a pair of Capitol Hill sources, preliminary estimates from the Congressional Budget Office suggest that a strong public option–the kind that the House of Representatives is putting in its reform bill–should net somewhere in the neighborhood of $150 billion in savings over ten years.

Will the Blue Dogs side with their nominal concern for controlling costs, or will they side with the private industry types who don’t want public sector competition?

One issue with a lot of health care commentary (Michael Kinsley’s correctly maligned column for example) is that the concept of “cost” is somewhat ambiguous in a lot of these contexts. For example, on one way of looking at things, an initiative that raises $90 billion in tax revenue, reduces private health expenditures by $100 billion, and then provides equivalent services for $90 billion is very expensive. It costs ninety billion dollars! From another way of looking at it, though, it’s an initiative that saves $10 billion.

That’s the question of whether we’re talking about cost to the government, or cost in some more general sense.

Another issue has to do with value. If we cut $1 billion worth of regular pediatric care for poor children, that will “save money.” But that’s not the same as cutting $1 billion worth of unnecessary treatments for senior citizens out of Medicare. The latter would be a genuine saving; the former would just be denying useful services to people.

Pure fiscal cost to the government is an important thing to keep our eye on. Among other things, we need tax revenues to be adequate to cover the pure fiscal cost. At the same time, I think it’s a little perverse to view it as the main thing to worry about. If you have a system that has a high fiscal cost because it’s providing a lot of genuinely valuable services to people then the thing to do is to pony up the necessary tax revenue. The thing to really be worried about is the prospect of spending money on health care services that aren’t delivering the goods in terms of health outcomes. And that’s just as worrying when it happens in the private sector as when it happens in the public sector.