There’s an awful lot to agree with in Tom Friedman’s column this weekend about Israel’s growing isolation and the Netanyahu government’s inability to find a way clear, but he perpetuates the unfortunate trend of American liberals (usually Jewish ones) sort of playing dumb about what’s going on. The method here is to feign incredulity that Netanyahu could be so foolish and to say we don’t understand why he’s being so darn pig-headed.

It’s fairly clear, though, that Netanyahu isn’t “failing to put forth a strategy” or suffering from a lack of “subtle diplomacy.” Netanyahu came to the United States recently and delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress in which he described his strategic objectives as including perpetual military control over the Jordan Valley, perpetual Israeli control over East Jerusalem, and the non-emergence of a genuinely sovereign Palestinian polity on whatever scraps of the West Bank remain for Palestinian residents once Jewish settlers have grabbed all the bits they want. This is an immoral strategic objective to pursue, in my opinion. I would also add that it’s a foolish strategic objective to pursue. But it’s clearly Netanyahu’s objective, and he’s pursued it quite doggedly and quite effectively for a long time now. He pursued it successfully as Prime Minister in the 1990s. He continued to pursue it as a member of Arial Sharon’s cabinet. When Sharon looked like he might abandon this objective, Netanyahu broke from Sharon. That was a risky move, but he made the risk pay off by returning to power some years later a Prime Minister. And now back in the highest office in the land he’s pursuing it again, and he seems to be pursuing it successfully.

It’s true that regional isolation is one of the costs of this policy, but that simply underscores the extent to which there’s a real strategic commitment here and a price Netanyahu is willing to pay.

In the United States, mobile phones are mostly a kind of cool gadget. The real revolution was the invention of the telephone in the first place. But in much of the developed world, wireline phone networks never got properly built out and proliferation of mobile phones represents the first mass penetration of this aspect of modernity. Gallup shows us that in sub-Saharan Africa mobile phone usage varies enormously from place to place with, not surprisingly, phones being more widespread in the places that are doing better:

What’s more, as smartphone costs continue to fall that sector is likely to be the main driver of internet access in poor countries.

Jeffrey Sachs writes:

The housing boom between 1998 and 2008 was an indirect reaction to the loss of manufacturing. As the US shed manufacturing jobs in the 1980s and 1990s, the Federal Government and Federal Reserve tried to compensate by boosting jobs in construction and other sectors shielded from international competition (so-called non-traded sectors). The Fed cut interest rates and the White House and Congress promoted housing finance, including through reckless deregulation and irresponsible behavior by government-backed entities like Fannie Mae. These efforts produced a temporary boom in housing, followed by the bust in 2008.

I think a lot of people are confused about this. There was, obviously, a huge boom in the price of land in the United States of America during this period. But was there really an extraordinary boom in housebuilding?

At the height of the “boom” we were adding units about as quickly as we were adding them in the late 1970s, when the total population was smaller and China’s “opening up” was just a glimmer of an idea of a possibility. If the Federal Reserve was trying to engineer a homebuilding boom it didn’t really work.

John Quiggin notes that the beginning of income stagnation around 1970s was still consistent with rising living standards for a while at least:

The measures mentioned above compare snapshots of incomes at different times. But (as conservatives regularly point out) standards of living are determined mainly by lifetime incomes, not by income in any particular year. Given the pattern described above, lifetime income for someone who worked, say, from 1940 to 1985 was well below that for someone in a similar class position who started work in 1970, just when the long increase in real wages was slowing for most and stopping for some. For every year of their working life, the 1970 starter gets a wage (adjusted for age, education and so on) that’s as high as the maximum attained by the 1940 starter after 30 years of steady growth. Unsurprisingly, that translates into a bigger house, and more of most items that require savings, whether or not their price has risen relative to the CPI.

The upshot is that even though the wage stagnation phenomenon has been happening for decades, it’s only roughly around now that we’re seeing the stagnation on a full cohort level as a group of workers who’ve spent their entire working years in the stagnation era head to retirement.