Paul Krugman waxes gloomy: “So far, there’s nothing pointing to a fundamental turnaround this year, or next, or for that matter as far as the eye can see.” Ryan Avent’s not so sure:

Whoa! There is nothing pointing to a recovery at any time in the future? As I said, the world spent four years doing everything wrong, and yet the Depression finally came to an end. Even if we’re not taking all the steps Krugman would have us take, we are at least avoiding the big errors that doomed the economy before. Krugman is basically saying that this downturn will last as long as the Depression or longer, despite the drastically different — and economically orthodox — policy path taken by the world’s large economies. This seems crazy to me.

Those are good points. On the other hand, there’s at least one factor indicating that recovery is harder on present circumstances than it was during the Great Depression—our much higher level of human capital. Consider this chart from the 1940 Census (apologies for the legibility issues, this is literally a chart from the 1940s, not a new chart based on 1940 Census data):

A majority of Americans hadn’t so much as set foot inside a high school. These days, about 80 percent of Americans have a high school diploma and about a quarter have a bachelor’s degree. As the 2007 CPS report on educational attainment says “this reflects more than a three-fold increase in high school attainment and more than a five-fold increase in college attainment since the Census Bureau first collected educational attainment data in 1940.”

This reflects a large-scale increase in the skill-level of the population which has done a great deal to drive prosperity. But it also points to a problem with recovering from economic downturns in modern circumstances. Unskilled workers do work that, by definition, requires few skills. You need to be willing to show up and work hard, but beyond that it’s easy to teach you how to do the job. That means that an unskilled worker can, broadly speaking, be a generalist. If there’s a downturn in demand for maids in a given labor market but an uptick in demand for CVS cashiers, then unskilled workers can shift from one sector to another without much of a problem. Skills, by contrast, tend to be somewhat specialized. When a fifteen-year veteran newspaper writer gets laid off, his fifteen years worth of experience leave him with skills that have some value outside of the newspaper sector—general writing and verbal ability are always useful. But fifteen years worth of newspaper experience is most valuable in a world where there continues to be robust demand for newspaper writers and that’s not the world we live in.

The skill-base of the American workforce is the cornerstone of our prosperity. But a large economic dislocation typically forces some sectoral shifts. And when you have large sectoral shifts, the value of your workforce’s skills diminishes. I believe something similar is true for capital goods. The cars manufactured in the 1920s and 1930s were crude compared to today’s cars. And the tanks of the 1940s were crude compared to today’s tanks. So it was easier to convert the car factories of the 30s to tank production than it would be to effect an equivalent transformation these days. Or, more to the point, it was easier to do that than it will be to convert capital goods related to the production of houses into capital goods related to the production of import-substituting manufactured goods.

Another issue is that it’s at least possible that America’s key export industries—aviation and entertainment—are both in long-term structural decline.

Apparently on alternate years the Office of Personnel Management does a huge survey of the federal workforce in which they, among other things, rate each agency on four dimensions. Lee Siegelman determined that “the correlations between agencies’ scores on any pair of dimensions are all .88 or above” so you can useful combine the four scores into a single composite and then get a nice chart:

The best-run federal agencies, according to this measure, are the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Management and Budget, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Three cabinet departments — HUD, Homeland Security, and Transportation — are bottom-of-the-listers. The worst-run agency by far, though, appears to be the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees nonmilitary international broadcasting by the government. It used to be part of USIA, but it became independent in 1999, and, to judge by the assessments of those who work there, seems to be something of a disaster. What is it about the Broadcasting Board of Governors that’s soo bad? Basically everything, according to the OMB survey: It ranks dead-last on three of the four dimensions iand 36th of 37 on the other dimension.

Fortunately, the Broadcasting Board of Governors isn’t that big a deal in the scheme of things. By contrast, the low quality of HUD, DOT, and DHS is a very significant problem. There seem to be some very interesting ideas about sustainable communities coming from the leadership at HUD and DOT that I’m very interested in, and that have important implications for our long-run growth, quality of life, and ecological sustainability. But it seems to me that these initiatives are unlikely to be successful unless the agencies running them can be reasonably effective.

The head of the Pakistani Taliban, Beitullah Massoud, has threatened to strike Washington, DC with a terrorist attack. But while everyone takes Massoud’s threat to the stability of the Greater Hindu Kush area seriously, nobody seems to take his threat to do this very seriously. As Spencer Ackerman says “It’s difficult to see how Beitullah Massoud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, has the capability to launch attacks against the U.S.”

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that this points to what I think is a serious conceptual flaw in the administration’s thinking—this heavy emphasis on the idea that we need to deny al-Qaeda a “safe haven” in Afghanistan or Pakistan. As Andrew Exum observes, it’s not at all clear that a “safe haven” is necessary to carry out a terrorist attack:

Thus, [European governments] are wary of their Afghanistan operations leading to greater unrest in their own immigrant communities, being as likely to look to the suburbs of Paris and London for terror plots in utero as they are to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan. The foiled 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot, for example, was allegedly plotted almost entirely within the confines of my old neighborhood in East London. And while some terrorists–such as Mohammed Sadiq Khan, who is believed to have masterminded the 7/7 bombings–traveled to Pakistan and trained in militant camps, the common denominator that has emerged from domestic terror threats in places like the United Kingdom is that their staging ground was actually on the internet rather than in a physical “safe haven.”

And as per Spencer’s point, not only is a safe haven not necessary, it’s not sufficient either. A safe haven in the mountains in Central Asia doesn’t let you carry out a terrorist attack in the United States. You need an attacker physically located in the United States, in possession of explosives that are also physically located in the United States, in order to attack the United States. The danger is of a terrorist being here or else in someplace like Western Europe or Canada from which it’s easy to get into the United States. Recall that key action in the 9/11 plot took place not just in Afghanistan, but in Hamburg and the best governance initiative in human history is not going to make Afghanistan as orderly and prosperous as Germany. The attackers went to flight school in America; you can’t learn to pilot a jumbo jet in the mountains. Clearly “al-Qaeda has a safe haven” is worse than “al-Qaeda does not have a safe haven” but orienting our national security policy around the goal of denying safe havens is not going to achieve what we’re looking for. And as Exum explains, it could easily lead to dangerous overreach:

The emphasis on destroying “safe havens” also establishes a tricky rationale for our presence in Afghanistan. Even if we succeed in spreading effective governance to southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, are we then prepared to go to wherever the transnational terror groups relocate? Are we prepared to clear out the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon? Or provide governance to the Horn of Africa? The new Obama plan is a dangerous precedent. If the reason we are staying in Afghanistan is to deny al-Qaeda the use of safe havens, where are we going next?

I think that’s right. You need to be wary of a strategic concept which implies that the security of American citizens requires the United States to achieve effective physical control over 100 percent of the world’s land area. We should be especially wary of it given that effective physical control of U.S. territory didn’t actually stop the 9/11 attackers from traveling throughout the country, learning to fly, hijacking airplanes, etc. Absent al-Qaeda acquisition of a nuclear weapon (and they’re not going to find one in Kandahar), the main way al-Qaeda can threaten the United States is by baiting us into implementing costly and unworkable policy responses and some of the “safe haven” rhetoric seems to be pointing us in that direction.

And here I was working on a piece arguing that the new Israeli government either wants the United States to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities or else, more likely, implicit U.S. approval for Israel to do so itself. Jeffrey Goldberg just asked Bibi Netanyahu:

In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama. The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and quickly—or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself. [...]

Neither Netanyahu nor his principal military advisers would suggest a deadline for American progress on the Iran nuclear program, though one aide said pointedly that Israeli time lines are now drawn in months, “not years.” These same military advisers told me that they believe Iran’s defenses remain penetrable, and that Israel would not necessarily need American approval to launch an attack. “The problem is not military capability, the problem is whether you have the stomach, the political will, to take action,” one of his advisers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me.

To make just a quick point, the idea that Israel would be “forced” to bomb Iran is laughable; people shouldn’t write stuff like that. It’s possible that Israel will bomb Iran in the near future, but nobody’s going to force them to do it.

As for needing American approval, I suppose this all comes down to what we mean by “necessarily” “need” and “approval.” You can’t fly from Israel to Iran without going over Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq and every discussion of this I’ve ever heard specifically says the Israelis would need to go through Iraq. It would of course be possible for Israel to do that without American approval. But none of those three countries would conceivably give Israel permission to use their airspace for this mission and the United States is committed to the defense of all three. In practice, the fact of an Israeli attack would be read throughout the region as proof of an American green light, especially were the attack not swiftly followed-up by a sharp curtailment of American aid. And for Americans, that’s really the point—as long as Israel is the biggest winner in the U.S. aid sweepstakes, Israeli actions are inevitably seen as the actions of American proxies, and if we can’t get Israel to respect our interests then we need to revisit that relationship.