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.