The House of Representatives moved last week to create a process to clarify the legal status of Puerto Rico with a two-stage vote. First, Puerto Ricans will vote on whether they want the status quo or want a change. Second, they’ll vote on whether they want to be a state or an independent country. Apparently this is controversial among US politicians with Puerto Rican roots:

Some of those differences were evident among lawmakers of Puerto Rican background. Puerto Rico-born Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., whose parents were from Puerto Rico, strongly opposed the measure, saying it was designed to push a statehood agenda. “This is the Puerto Rico 51st state bill,” said Gutierrez, an independence proponent. “The deck is stacked.”

But another Puerto Rico-born lawmaker, Democrat Jose Serrano of New York, backed it. “I support it because for the first time in 112 years the people of Puerto Rico will have an opportunity to express themselves.”

As you know, I try to oppose knee-jerk nationalism in American foreign policy. But that anti-nationalistic outlook has broad applicability, and I have to say that in this case knee-jerk Puerto Rican nationalism seems mighty illogical. The United States of America is basically the richest country on earth, and being a part of it gives Puerto Ricans a lot of practical advantages that the independent countries of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean lack. The right to move to the US-proper and work here legally, for example, is extremely valuable and was even in a time when Puerto Ricans living in America were subject to considerably more racist discrimination:

I think reasonable people can disagree as to whether the current situation, which has tax advantages, or statehood, which would be more dignified, give Puerto Rico more political power, and possibly drive investment by definitively settling the island’s status. Right now, however, Puerto Rico’s per capita GDP is quite high compared to Latin American countries and independence would seem to imperil that with no practical upside. All that said, were Puerto Ricans to choose a nationalistic path they’d hardly be the first people on the planet to do so and I think they should have the right.

In the manner of newspaper articles, this Steven Erlanger piece from yesterday gets a bit confused as it tries to weave three separate points together, but it does a good job of moving beyond Greece-bashing to note that there’s been a catastrophic failure of German leadership here:

Mrs. Merkel has been the central figure in the debt crisis, as she has tried to respond to German voters’ displeasure at having to bail out Greece, after years of bailing out eastern Germany. She delayed action on the problem for months, hoping to put it off until after critical regional elections on May 9.

Ultimately, that proved impossible. But her foot-dragging, combined with her insistence that Greece pay a severe long-term price for its profligacy and that the German Parliament approve any bailout, gave the markets both reason and room to run up the price of Greek debt to unsustainable levels. That forced the International Monetary Fund and the Europeans on Wednesday to practically quadruple the commitment to Greece, to try to calm the markets and not turn their attention to Portugal, another weak reed.

“The fact that a German regional election can play such a disproportionate role in messing up efforts to contain what was a much smaller crisis several months ago is astonishing,” Mr. Kirkegaard said. And the fact that there will be no European Union summit meeting until May 10, after the German elections, “is so blatantly political,” he said.

There’s a relevant contrast here with how Bill Clinton’s administration dealt with the need for a Mexico bailout in the late-1990s. There, too, the problems were in a sense “Mexico’s fault” and opportunistic politicians could portray it as hardworking American dollars going to rescue irresponsible sun-baked types. But it would actually have been quite bad for the US for Mexico to go bust, so the Clinton administration sucked it up and did the right thing for the United States—which also happened to be the right thing for Mexico. Merkel’s unwillingness to challenge the framing of Germany being asked to make a charitable contribution to a wayward cousin has made both the politics and substance of this worse.

Europe is probably going to be a mess for years, which you’ll hear American rightwingers say is a consequence of universal health care or some such, when in fact we’re largely looking at the bad consequences of conservative hard money policies.

My mother’s name was always “Margaret Joskow” so I suppose my knee-jerk view has always been that women, whether married or unmarried, should do the traditional thing and stick with the name they were born with rather than adopting some crazy new name-changing social convention. Soon enough I learned that my mom was actually somewhat unusual, but the mainstream process still strikes me as bizarre. And Wency Leung reports that it’s also bad signaling:

Women who take their partner’s name are regarded as more caring but less intelligent, less competent and less ambitious, researchers from the Netherlands discovered. Moreover, they’re less likely to be hired for a job and are perceived to earn much less at work than those who keep their own name.

Of course just going through life with the same last name as your father is also a patriarchal concept, so ultimately there may be less to this debate than their sometimes seems. I imagine that in the distant future we’re probably see some whole new convention, whereby a family is supposed to make up a brand new name for itself. In general, I think people tend to lack sufficient imagination about what gender norms will look like 200 years from now.