I’m not sure how relevant this is to the debate between Ha-Joon Chang and Jagdish Baghwati over the importance of manufacturing, but Chang’s point about Dutch agriculture is fascinating:

Take the case of the Netherlands. Unbeknown to most people, it is world’s third largest agricultural exporter, despite having little land (it has the world’s fifth highest population density). This has been possible because the Dutch have “industrialised” agriculture by, for example, deploying hydroponic agriculture (growing plants in water) that uses computer-controlled feeding of high-quality chemicals—something that would not have been possible if the Netherlands did not have some of the world’s most advanced chemical and electronics industries.

If the land area of the lower 48 United States were as densely populated as the Netherlands, the USA would need to contain about 3.1 billion people. And it seems that would conceivably leave enough land left not only to feed the country, but to actually export agricultural products. This is not a feasible policy proposal, obviously, but it underscores the extent to which rich, well-governed countries have the capacity to allow more people to come live in rich, well-governed countries.

It’s slightly on the silly side, but I think this Tim Pawlenty self-promotional video is ultimately pretty awesome:

I continue to be fascinated by the way in which the rhetoric of “freedom” is always so closely associated with authoritarian populist nationalist movements. Absolutely nothing in the imagery of the video or the policy agenda of the Republican Party is suggestive of freedom. It’s full of flags and grim-faced folks and bourgeois respectability and military jets flying in tight formation. It’s an ad from a conservative politician that’s about exactly what an ad from a conservative politician ought to be about—about preserving a way of life against Muslims, freeloaders, sexual deviants, and other threats.

Contrast Pawlenty’s video with an advertisement that’s actually about freedom:

You could totally imagine Job Cohen using that music and those images to talk about how the Netherlands is the most successful country on earth because it’s also the freest and actually meaning that Dutch people enjoy an unusually high level of personal freedom. And wouldn’t he be right?

Relatively few Americans are aware that recent years have seen a large backlash in the Netherlands against the quasi-legalization of marijuana that their country is famous for. In particular, the “legalization in one country” paradigm has helped generate a lot of drug tourism that Dutch people don’t seem to like very much. But Keith Humphreys reports that the drug tourism issue may not doom the coffee shops after all:

An EU judge has upheld the legality of Maastricht’s proposal to restrict “coffee shop” sales to Dutch citizens. This decision probably saves the coffee shops as a social experiment in the long term despite the fact that the loss of tourist business will make some of them fold. Maastricht and a number of other cities were planning to close their shops rather than continue to experience the problems that come with drug tourism.

Good news for Dutch people. Of course this won’t fly in the USA. If Michigan wants to create legal smoke shops, they’d need to put up with a stream of people from other states coming in to get high. Of course you might see that as a feature—something to draw business in from out-of-town the way Vegas did with gambling back in the day.

One interesting development over the past ten years has been the tendency of European far-right parties to migrate away from their historic commitment to anti-semitism and toward an embrace of revisionist Zionism, with Islam-bashing serving as the conduit. Take this report on Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders’ meeting with Avigdor Lieberman:

The two politicians discussed international and party-political issues in a ‘friendly atmosphere’. Mr Wilders en Mr Lieberman, who have known each other for a long time, met at the foreign ministry. The Freedom Party leader offered his condolences for the victims of the forest fires near Mt Carmel in northern Israel. More than 40 people have been killed in the fires so far.

Mr Wilders will remain in Israel for the time being, and give a speech in Tel Aviv on Sunday. In it, he will further clarify his position that Jordan “is the only Palestinian state that ever will be”. Mr Wilders was invited to give a speech on the subject by Israeli MP Arieh Eldad, a member of the ultra-nationalist party National Union.

Birds of a feather, etc.

I’d long known the factoid that Dutch people generally do the least work of anyone in the world:

But I just today read Jessica Olien’s explanation that this basically amounts to very few women working full-time rather than to Dutch full-time workers taking it easy: “less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time … [l]ess than 4 percent of women wish they had more working hours or increased responsibility in the workplace, and most refuse extended hours even when the opportunity for advancement arises.”

According to Nicole Bosch, Bas van der Klaauw, and Jan van Ours this is tied up with a number of familiar gender inequities. Women who increase their hours in the paid labor force don’t find that their share of household work responsibilities falls. Consequently, lack of full-time work is closely associated with childbirth. But while these factors are obviously important drivers of women’s labor force participation (or lack thereof), they’re also hardly unique to the Netherlands. Instead, Dutch women seem to have somewhat different subjective perceptions of their household financial needs:

Furthermore, it seems that financial need for long working hours is less severe for Dutch women than for women in other countries. In the Netherlands, less than 40% of women indicate that they do not work less because of financial constraints. In other European countries, where many more women work full-time, over 50% of women say they do not work less due to financial constraints. It should be noted that due to part-time work, about 25% of working Dutch women earn less than what would be considered the minimum income for being financially independent.

This makes me curious about Dutch family structure. Do they have a much lower proportion of single women? It’s worth noting that the Netherlands is among the richest countries in the world, with a GDP per capita a bit above America’s in exchange rate terms and a bit below in PPP terms. They also have a more equitable distribution of income and higher-quality public services, so the median Dutch household is in fact more financially secure than the median household in pretty much any country. So to return to Olien’s article, I think it would be a mistake to say that Dutch women are happy because so few of them are involved in full-time work. I would say instead that most Dutch women are happy because Dutch people enjoy an extremely high material standard of living (you should really see what passes for a slum in the Netherlands, it’s absurd) and that this reflects itself in part via women’s disinclination to toil for long hours in jobs they don’t find rewarding.

I got the sense talking to people on both sides of the Green Line that grassroots activists in Israel and Palestine haven’t totally caught up with the evolution of Israel politics in the United States. It’s still the case that if you gaze over at Capitol Hill your typical strongly pro-Israel politician is a Jewish liberal such as Henry Waxman or Anthony Weiner who may feel some dissonance between their general political views and heavily militarized Israeli nationalism. But stories like this one from Rachel Slajda reflect the shape of things to come:

A legal attempt to stop the construction of a mosque in middle Tennessee is getting expensive. The preliminary hearing has dragged on, with several days of testimony stretching over more than a month. The county has added $50,000 to its litigation budget to cover expected defense costs and is warning that that number could go up.

So who’s funding the plaintiffs — three local residents who don’t have access to taxpayer money?

Their lawsuit is being supported, in part, by a Christian Zionist group called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations. PJTN hired, and is paying, one of the two lawyers for the plaintiffs.

The point here is that PJTN’s views on Israel are just part of a larger worldview that casts Muslims and Islam as the enemy. You see a secular version of this in Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders’ strong support of Israel. To Israel’s advantage, these are people who won’t even be nominally interested in whether or not Israel adheres to human rights norms or other dictates of humane conduct. To Israel’s disadvantage, however, these are people for whom the conflict with the Palestinians isn’t a problem to be solved. Instead, on this view the whole point of Israel is to wage war against Muslims and peace would render the state superfluous.

In the American imagination, the Netherlands is famous for its “coffee shops” and laissez faire approach to marijuana. But one thing I found out when I visited Amsterdam a few years ago is that the trend in recent years has been toward stricter rules on coffee shops (for example, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages in establishments that also serve marijuana) and a reduction in their number.

And now it seems that the new right-wing coalition government taking office is certain to crack down even further:

Certainly the outlook for coffee shops is bleak. Among the few policies that the three parties in the new coalition government agree on is the need to reduce their numbers. The governing agreement released last week laid out plans that will force them to become members-only clubs and shut down those shops located near schools.

The coalition is also advancing the idea of prohibiting the sale of cannabis to non-Dutch residents, which amounts to a death knell for many coffee shops.

There are various ins and outs to this, but as I understand it there are two main problems with the status quo. One is that under the old tolerance regime there’s still no way for a coffee shop to legally obtain the supply of marijuana you need to operate on the scale of a business. Consequently, de facto legalization hasn’t actually eliminated the black market and associated criminality. Secondarily, the main market for the coffee shops turns out to be drug tourists from abroad. That reduces the Dutch political constituency for keeping them open. And the two factors interact together to create a situation where there’s a strong case to be made that legal coffee shops (by bringing drug tourists from the UK and the US into shops that need to tap an illegal wholesale market to gain their supplies) increase the scale of organized crime in the Netherlands.

I think that if you’re looking for stable alternatives to prohibition you either need to more to a more robust form legalization than the Dutch had—complete with totally legitimate marijuana farmers—or else adopt the Mark Kleiman “grow your own” proposal in which growing pot, smoking pot, possessing pot, etc are all legal but commerce in marijuana would be illegal.

The debate over the Affordable Care Act was largely a debate about improving America’s morally bankrupt and economically inefficient health insurance system. But there’s more to health care than insurance payment mechanisms. A recent Commonwealth Fund report compared health systems and concluded that the Netherlands has the best performing one, which certainly makes the fact that ACA establishes a Dutch-style insurance system for non-seniors look good. But as I observed in my original post on the matter, the quality of Dutch health care likely derives from how its providers work rather than from the structure of its insurance payments.

Eric Voeten backs this up with some anecdata:

Last summer, I had to bring my daughter to a Dutch doctor. Not only did I succeed in seeing someone that same morning but the cost were less than my regular co-payment in the USA, even though I have no insurance in the Netherlands and had never seen that doctor before.

The key is that the Dutch have an extensive system of family doctors, who generally operate a practice from their homes with minimal administrative assistance. These family doctors provide basic health care, do house visits, and are the gatekeepers for (more expensive) specialized care. This keeps a lot of people out of hospitals who do not need to go to hospitals. Of course, reforming insurance is relatively easy in comparison with making the type of structural reforms that would create a similar system in the US. Yet, these may well be the types of reforms that have a broader impact on quality of life.

And there’s the rub. It’s much more feasible to provide affordable insurance to everyone if the per unit costs of medical services are lower. In America, they’re very high. In part that’s because the American consumer disproportionately subsidized medical innovation from which the whole world benefits. And in part it’s because our system is simply inefficient.

For several years now the Commonwealth Fund has been doing invaluable comparative reports of different countries’ health care systems based on surveys with doctors and patients. Time and again these surveys show that there’s no perfect system out there, but that the American system delivers incredibly high costs in exchange for nothing in particular in terms of quality. The latest report adds the Dutch system into the mix and finds it’s basically the best. Here’s the summary:

Personally, I’m an admirer of the ultra-cheap UK system that I think appropriately de-prioritizes health care services relative to other public services and achieves decent quality and enormous efficiency while doing so. But everything about that system cuts against the American grain. The Australian system, at least as I understand it, is structurally much more similar to what we do in America and probably more in line with our cultural norms and manages to do a much better job than our system. The high-performing Dutch system is broadly similar to the Affordable Care Act in its structure, but it adds a government-run social insurance component for catastrophic costs.

The Netherlands overhauled its insurance system very recently, however, and I have to believe the quality of its providers has longer-standing roots than the 2006 reforms.