President Sarkozy responds to mass protests and strikes in the wake of his call for pension reforms:

It is an essential reform. So it is normal for it to trigger concerns and significant strike action, as was the case yesterday. It’s one of the functions of the trade union organizations to call for demonstrations and strikes. I am conscious of the concerns being expressed in this way. Just as I am conscious of the disruption it causes those using public services. This is why we brought in the requirement for a minimum service on public transport [in the event of strikes], which has always been fulfilled since 2007.

The core of the plan is “a rise in the minimum retirement age to 62 from 60 and in the full pensionable age to 67 from 65″ which would more or less bring France in line with current American practice.

Julian Zelizer:

As President Obama finishes his second year, he and his staff would do well to catch up on what the social scientists have been saying about politics in addition to the books about his campaign. Though certainly not as engaging, their work offers great insight into the constraints of governance that he has faced. When Obama abandoned government reform upon taking office he ensured that he would have to struggle against the many structural factors that social scientists have been writing about, such as Senate rules that require sixty votes on all legislation or the revolving door between Congress and K Street.

One way to think about the 2008 election is that Team Obama developed such an awesome message that a first-term African-American Senator with the middle name “Hussein” was able to get 53 percent of the vote against a broadly popular war hero. Another way is that conditions in 2008 were so favorable to the Democrats that a first-term African-American Senator with the middle name “Hussein” was able to get 53 percent of the vote against a broadly popular war hero. One explanation is more appealing to the members of Team Obama and another explanation is better-supported by scholarly research. And the two theories have different predictions about what kinds of governance strategies are likely to prove fruitful.

The White House announced on Friday it’s intention to nominate Cameron Munter as ambassador to Pakistan, so I looked up his bio:

Cameron Phelps Munter is a United States diplomat and career foreign service officer. He is an advisor for political and military issues to Christopher R. Hill, US ambassador in Iraq.

Ambassador Munter was sworn-in as United States Ambassador to the Republic of Serbia on July 26, 2007, succeeding Michael C. Polt and stayed in this position until 2009 when he was transferred to work in Iraq. A career Foreign Service Officer, Ambassador Munter was Deputy Chief of Mission at the American Embassy in Prague, Czech Republic from August 2005 to June 2007. He volunteered to lead the first Provincial Reconstruction Team in Mosul, Iraq, from January through July 2006, and then returned to Prague. He came to Prague from Warsaw, where he served as Deputy Chief of Mission from 2002 to 2005.

Before these assignments, in Washington, Ambassador Munter was Director for Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe at the National Security Council (1999-2001), Executive Assistant to the Counselor of the Department of State (1998-1999), Director of the Northern European Initiative (1998), and Chief of Staff in the NATO Enlargement Ratification Office (1997-1998).

You can tell from these assignments that he’s a very well-regarded career foreign service officer and thus a natural fit for an important job in Pakistan. But it’s also a nice little postcard into the US government’s general lack of interest in specific regional, cultural, or language knowledge. A guy’s plugging away in Europe, doing a good job, volunteers for a post in Iraq, goes back to Prague, but then gets called back to Iraq, does a good job there, and next thing you know he’s Ambassador to Pakistan.

Politico introduces a new power couple to its staff:

We have been giving some thought for a while about how we might incorporate opinion columnists into our coverage. We are about to start with a bang: Starting in October, veteran columnist Michael Kinsley and newly minted columnist Joe Scarborough will be appearing in our pages weekly.

These two will offer ideological balance, as their opinions generally come from competing ends of the political spectrum. But what they have in common is much more important: They are both original thinkers with exceptionally compelling voices. Both are intellectually honest people who by long habit resist doctrinaire thinking or hypocrisy by politicians of any stripe. They both have a natural appreciation for the nonstop argument, and nonstop carnival, of politics.

Aside from the unsurprising stale/male/paleness of this duo, I’m provided with yet another opportunity to marvel at the frequency with which the term “intellectually honest” is bandied about in punditry circles. I feel like I’ve been somehow held back in my career by confusion about what this phrase means. Does it just mean “honest”? And if the phrase “intellectually honest” is synonymous with “honest” then why are so many professional writers using it?

The whole thing to me really seems like a kind of cop-out. How hard would it really be for an editor to put out a help wanted add saying “I want to pay you a bunch of money to write coherent English sentences without lying?” Talk about a low bar! When I read books or articles or columns or blogs, what I’m looking for is writers who I learn from. Dahlia Lithwick is a good columnist (and so is Michael Kinsley) because she’s usually persuasive and accurate on interesting subjects not because she’s “honest.”

I guess people feel that admitting that accuracy has some relevance would be to merely encourage cocooning. But people who are serious about learning-to-read will still try to avoid this. Ross Douthat, Tyler Cowen, and David Frum are all people I tend to disagree with but you still learn from reading them. But that’s because they, like the liberal writers I like, make some persuasive and accurate points on important subjects. Honesty’s great, but it’s a terribly low bar to clear.

Jake Blumgart doesn’t like my posts on manufacturing, and comments:

1. What do we generally make these days? A lot more crap than we used to. Which is one of the reasons you see countries like Germany, which held on to its high-end industrial base, doing a brisk export trade with the developing world, particularly China(and having lower unemployment and a bit of an easier recession than us). Which is part of the reason why they have a trade surplus and we have a trade deficit in the hundreds of billions. Both international and national markets are less and less interested in our industrial output.

2. How many of manufacturing jobs are there these days? This is the obvious point, and a lot of people tend to shrug it off. ‘The economy is changing, and some one has to get burned in the process.’ A lot of people also said these manufacturing jobs would be replaced by comparable new jobs–which has turned out to be manifestly false. Thus, a bunch of people who could have been in the middle-class have been reduced to flipping burgers or serving as a security guard for $10 an hour, no benefits. To make matters worse, America’s social safety net is pretty shitty, and a lot of them have fallen right though.

3. How much do the remaining manufacturing jobs pay? Not as much as they used to.

Several responses to this. I think point one is simply mistake. The industrial output figures I like to highlight measure value of goods produced, not raw quantity, so it’s not like we’re just churning out garbage.

As to the rest, there are many valid concerns here, but people with valid manufacturing-related concerns need to raise those concerns and not other different concerns. I keep highlighting the fact that manufacturing output is increasing, rather than decreasing, because the discussion of the subject is dominated by words and images that imply the reverse. But the phenomena we’re actually experiencing, and the hypothetical phenomenon of a long-term trend toward declining industrial output, would be two very different things.

Think about two different problems a logging town might have. One problem is the forest gets ruined by blight—no more lumber, no more jobs. Another problem is that labor-intensive two-man saws might be replaced by more efficient saws—more lumber, but fewer jobs. These are both problems for the town, but they’re different situations and they require different policy responses and it’s important to understand what problem you’re having.

One way to think about the skill-biased technological change issue that I think is useful is to construct for yourself an exaggerated hypothetical in which SBTC is definitely driving a big increase in inequality.

Like what if someone invented a machine that could cure many serious diseases, but for some crazy reason to make it work you need to describe the symptoms in Romansh. What’s more, part of the nature of the machine’s potency is that relatively small descriptive errors can produce fatal results. So since basically nobody speaks Romansh, the machine is really only useful when accompanied by an operator who can translate into Romansh. The translator doesn’t need to have specialized medical training, but he or she does need a really solid grasp of both the Romansh language and whatever language the patient is speaking in order to conduct the back and forth appropriately.

Big windfall for Romansh speakers, obviously. What’s more, you’ll see inequality within the domain of Romansh speakers. Among the Romansh speakers of the world, I assume that German, Italian, French, and English are the most commonly spoken “other” languages. And obviously being Romansh-English bilingual is going to be more rewarded by the market than being Romansh-Italian bilingual. The tiny number of people capable of translating from Romansh into Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic are going to reap super-enormous windfalls. To some extent you’ll wind up relying on risky “chain translation” of Romansh to English to Russian as the most effective way to treat illness. And of course there will be lots of efforts by people to learn Romansh. But it’s hard to scale-up language capabilities in this way since there are only so many competent teachers and they’ll all be in high demand both as teachers and as translators.

So what would be the correct policy response? I say—higher taxes to finance more and better public services, the exact same thing that’s the correct policy response to the actual world. In part that’s because I’m more sympathetic to SBTC as a description of what’s happening in the actual world, but in part that’s because I don’t really see what difference this causal analysis is supposed to make for forward-looking policy.