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No, The Welfare State Did Not Cause Europe’s Decline

By Zack Beauchamp on Nov 8, 2012 at 4:50 pm

Bombed out Berlin.

One common thread throughout the conservative freakouts after President Obama’s reelection is that America is over; that it will “go the way of the Europe” as a consequence. This Fox News conversation, between Steve Doocy and Mark Steyn, perfectly encapsulates the meme:

DOOCY: So is our country in a cultural decline? How do we turn it around? Let’s talk to columnist Mark Steyn. … Mark, once upon a time, you were born in Canada. But you decided that you wanted to head south, young man, to the land of opportunity. Now as it turns out, we’re not just opportunity, we’re entitlement.

STEYN: Yeah, that’s right. I’d heard about thing called the American Dream. They don’t really have a Canadian Dream or Belgian Dream or a Greek Dream. [Doocy laughs]. There was an American dream. I wanted a piece of it. Just as I got here, the United States decided to adopt the policies that have brought the rest of the Western world to ruin. When the takers are able to outvote the makers, you are a nation in steep decline.

Watch it:

This narrative, pervasive though it might be, badly misconstrues American politics and European history. Even setting aside the absurd takers/makers frame, Obama simply has not instituted staple European policies like a maximum work week, direct public provision of health care along the lines of the British National Health Service, or taxing top earners at roughly 50 percent. Even Obama’s hated spending increases didn’t bring us closer to a Greece-like budget crisis: too-low taxes, rather than too-high spending, explain why some European countries are budgetarily worse off than others today.

But even if Obama had attempted to replicate the European welfare state to a T, it wouldn’t be relevant: neither Europe’s current crisis nor “decline” in international power (in terms of military strength) were caused by Europe’s social safety net. The central reason that Europe isn’t as powerful internationally as it once was is, quite simply, one Great Depression and two World Wars. By the end of World War II, European states were virtually leveled and hence unable to function as global powers. As one RAND institute paper puts it, “[there were] 39 million deaths in Europe alone. Large amounts of physical capital were destroyed as well through six years of constant ground battles and bombing. … Periods of hunger become more common even in relatively prosperous Western Europe.” These economic aftershocks, together with the push for self-determination from previously colonized people, meant European states couldn’t sustain their prior model for global power. Europe decided to instead partner with the United States and gradually refocus its military efforts on defense rather than global reach.

One way to confirm this is to look at European military spending. Were it the welfare state that collapsed Europe’s international military might, then military spending should have declined gradually over the course of the late 40s to 70s, when various European welfare states were being constructed. Instead, Europe’s aggregate defense spending remained at roughly 3.1 percent of GDP until collapse of the Soviet Union, which caused a steep decline to about 1.7 percent in 2008. Thus, the rise of the welfare state didn’t trade off with European military might — it was the lack of a threat worth spending money on.

NEWS FLASH

WWII Vet Senator: Birth Control Mandate Is Not Like Pearl Harbor | After Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) compared a new regulation requiring insurers to provide women birth control without a copay to September 11 or Pearl Harbor, World War II veteran Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) called Kelly’s comments “misguided” and “insulting.” “It is complete nonsense to suggest that a matter discussed, debated, and approved by the Congress and the President is akin to a surprise attack that killed nearly 2,500 people…or a terrorist attack that left nearly 3,000 dead,” said Inouye, who witnessed the Pearl Harbor attack. Kelly’s office responded by calling the the contraception rule “an undeniable and unprecedented attack on Americans’ First Amendment rights.” “We will not turn a blind eye to the HHS mandate’s attack on our religious freedom,” Kelly said in a statement.

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Aug 2, 2012 at 11:15 am

Security

Obamacare Brings U.S. Closer To Policies It Has Advocated Overseas

By Eli Clifton on Jun 29, 2012 at 12:58 pm

The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday to uphold the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marked a defining moment in the decades long battle to bring affordable healthcare to the U.S. But while healthcare continues to be a divisive issue domestically, the U.S. has funded and advocated for some of the best universal health systems around the world.

The U.S. is ranked 37th in the World Health Organization’s rankings of health systems. But the impact of U.S. health policy extends beyond U.S. borders. Laurie Garrett, a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that the U.S. is now in line domestically with policies it has been promoting internationally:

Dating back to the Marshall Plan in post-WWII Europe, Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s 1945-49 occupation of Japan, and then the Korean War, it has been a matter of U.S. foreign policy to invest in the creation of universal health systems. More recently, the Marshall Plan was cited by AFRICOM in support of a Department of Defense engagement in health systems construction across Africa. This year (FY2012), South Africa was the number one recipient of health aid from the United States, totaling nearly $470 million, much of which is supporting the country’s fourteen-year program to build universal health coverage.

Indeed, Japan and Marshall Plan countries in Europe make up the majority, thirteen out of twenty, of the top national health systems in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2000 report [PDF]. Those countries are highlighted in the following chart:

And a 2010 Commonwealth Fund comparison of population health [PDF] in seven countries — Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the UK — found the U.S. underperforming “relative to other countries on most dimensions of performance.” Half of those countries outperforming the U.S. — Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK — were recipients of Marshall Plan assistance.

The ACA will provide access to health insurance for 30 million uninsured Americans and prevent insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions. “[P]erhaps it will now be possible for an HIV-infected individual in Mississippi or Alabama to have access, at taxpayers’ expense, to the same level of care as the U.S. government supports for comparable individuals in Johannesburg,” writes Garrett.

Alyssa

Guest Post: ‘Red Tails’ Fills In Our Lost History

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Jan 25, 2012 at 1:37 pm

Because I’ve been on the road essentially for a month straight, I haven’t gotten a chance to see Red Tails yet. Fortunately, reader JCS, has, and has some thoughts.

By JCS

Red Tails is certainly not a great film. In fact, the critical consensus suggests that it’s not even a particularly good film. However, most of its critics proceed from a basic misunderstanding of its place in the combat film canon and the cultural work it does to restore African Americans to their rightful place in a history from which they often have been excluded.

This is not to suggest that the film is without its flaws. The overly long running time creates some pacing problems. The villains are devilishly cartoonish in the most Raiders of the Lost Ark way possible. The dialogue is often as corny as we’ve come to expect from any production that involves George Lucas. And, perhaps most jarring of all, the general atmosphere is more befitting a 1945 than a 2012 film, right down to the score. It is dated in many ways, but intentionally so.

Its throwback aesthetic to the World War II era combat film is a choice that structures the film’s other flawed components. Ignoring the historical conventions of this genre allows critics to judge Red Tails as the film they wish it was, instead of the film that it is. Take, for example, the clichéd characters of the 332nd fighter group. There’s Lightning (David Oyelowo), the maverick who plays by his own rules. His best friend, Easy (Nate Parker), is the by-the-book squad leader. There’s a “Joker” for comic relief, a devout “Deacon,” and even a couple of versions of “The Kid.”

These stock characters provoke some eye-rolling. But they represent a deliberate attempt by the screenwriters to place the Tuskegee Airmen firmly within the tradition of the combat film narrative. Archetypes like this have always been intrinsic to that genre’s formula. The filmmakers are educating contemporary audiences about African Americans’ role in World War II by placing them within a familiar popular cultural form. The actors’ exceptional performances make this possible. Specifically, the relationship between Lightning and Easy forms the film’s emotional core, getting the audience invested enough to forgive some of the production’s more hackneyed aspects. The entire cast is superb. The Wire alums (director Anthony Hemingway was an assistant director on 23 episodes) Tristan Wilds, Michael B. Jordan, and Andre Royo handle themselves with aplomb. Terrance Howard is as characteristically solid as Cuba Gooding, Jr. is uncharacteristically restrained. And Bryan Cranston and Gerald McRaney do well in minor roles as skeptical military brass.
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Climate Progress

What Are the Near-Term Climate Pearl Harbors? What Will Take Us from Procrastination to Action?

By Joe Romm on Dec 6, 2011 at 8:23 pm

“So they [the Government] go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent…. Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger….  The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to its close.  In its place we are entering a period of consequences….  We cannot avoid this period, we are in it now….”

– Winston Churchill, November 12, 1936, House of Commons

What kind of climatic mini-catastrophes might move public and policymaker opinion over the next decade?  Please share your thoughts below.

USS West Virginia burns and sinks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii

U.S. Navy battleship USS West Virginia burns and sinks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii December 7, 1941. Reuters/USN

Wednesday marks the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.  Seems like a good time to update my post from 3 years ago, “What are the near-term climate Pearl Harbors?”

The genesis of that piece starts with an October 2008 post, “Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 7: The harsh lessons of the financial bailout.”  It concluded that a key driver of serious government action is “bad things must be happening to regular people right now.”  Shortly after that I wrote a post on the paper “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” by Hansen et al.  I noted the authors conclude:

The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not capture CO2, is herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.

A NY Times blogger posed this question, “What kind of wake-up call does Mr. Romm think is conceivable on a time scale relevant to near-term policy?”

My reply was “Multiple Pearl Harbors over the next decade — half or more of these happening” followed by a list of 9 items.

Before repeating that list, let me note that I pointed out that one of the media’s greatest failings is ‘underinforming’ people that “Bad things are happening to real people right now thanks in part to human-caused climate change — droughts, wildfires, flooding, extreme weather, and on and on.” I listed a perfect example: “my article criticizing the NYT on the bark beetle story“.  Things haven’t changed much.

If FDR had said, “Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked. But we’re still working to identify the perpetrators.”  Well, not bloody much would have happened.

Of course, the U.S. military had some warnings, but there was a massive volume of intelligence signals (“noise”) coming in.  Roberta Wohlstetter wrote in 1962: “To discriminate significant sound against this background of noise, one has to be listening for something or for one of several things….   One needs not only an ear but a variety of hypotheses that guide observation.”

The Japanese commander of the attack, Mitsuo Fuchida, was quite surprised he had achieved surprise.  Before the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, the Japanese Navy had used a surprise attack to destroy the Russian Pacific Fleet at anchor in Port Arthur.  Fuchida asked, “Had these Americans never heard of Port Arthur?“

So if you have the right hypothesis or worldview, you can make sense out of “noisy” warnings.  If you don’t, then you will be oblivious even to signs that in retrospect will seem quite obvious.  Certainly future generations will be stunned by our obliviousness.

In the case of the almost non-stop series of “off the charts” extreme climatic events that many opinion leaders seem shocked about over and over again — they aren’t merely “explainable and predictable” after the fact.  They were very often predicted or warned about well in advance by serious people.  The powers that be simply choose to ignore the warnings because they don’t fit their world view.

Unfortunately for the nation and the world, there is no American Churchill on climate.  Quite the reverse:

  • One of the two major political parties in this country has chosen to double down on denial
  • The other political party has a remarkable number of feckless people on this crucial issue, including its nominal leader
  • We have an extraconstitutional, supermajority 60-vote requirement in the U.S. Senate for legislation, that gives the minority a stranglehold on our future

That lack of statesmenship means the country is not going to act on the basis of the increasingly dire warning of scientists (see Lonnie Thompson on why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization”).

No, things are going to have to get worse.  And it certainly will take more than one climate Pearl Harbor.  I fear it will take most of these happening over the span of a few years:

Read more

Alyssa

Speaking Of Cool Biopics…

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 21, 2011 at 2:52 pm

In yesterday’s post about biopics, I wrote that “we need a more creative approach to biopics that’s oriented towards truly great stories instead of just the most famous people who a talented actor would enjoy impersonating.” Today, Hollywood gives me exactly what I want! (I really should make demands more often.) Apparently, a biopic’s under way about Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who, though he wouldn’t carry a gun, at great personal risk worked as a medic during the Battle of Okinawa and saved the lives of 75 men who were wounded. He also won the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The story poses really interesting challenges: I can’t wait to see someone dramatize a major action sequence where the main character can’t, or won’t participate, which I assume has to be a really difficult stance to maintain in the midst of a battle people later named the Typhoon of Steel.* And given how far we are from the last American draft, I wonder if audiences who have never had to face the prospect of being forced to go to a war they’d rather not fight personally will have trouble relating to Doss’ character. But even if this was fiction, it would be a pretty creative take on action and war movies. And the fact that it’s true just makes it astonishing.

*Side note: how has George R.R. Martin not stolen that title?

Alyssa

George Lucas Touches Something, Manages Not to Poison It

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Aug 2, 2011 at 11:06 am

Especially given the conversations we’ve been having about Captain America: The First Avenger’s whitewashing of the history of segregation in the armed forces in World War II, I’m moderately excited about Red Tails, the movie Lucas executive produced about the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black Air Force unit that served with distinction in that conflict:

A lot of this looks like it will be a fairly standard enthusiastic integration movie, which is fine. But I’m glad to see the trailer, at least, give a nod to the extent to which the military resisted accepting the service of talented African-American pilots, even at a point when the air war wasn’t going well for the States. “I don’t believe your boys have scored a single arial kill,” a white officer says with the air of having won some sort of argument, only to have Terrence Howard bat back at him “It’s damn hard to shoot down the enemy 100 miles behind the front lines.” I hadn’t known this before looking into it, but apparently the reason the school was at Tuskegee in the first place was because after a campaign to force Congress to allocate funding for training black pilots, the Defense Department responded by shunting the money to civilian programs. It’s an impressive demonstration of racism that the normally acquisitive Defense Department would turn down an opportunity to take money if it meant taking black people. In any case, given the reverence normally attached to our military in pop culture, it’s a good thing to see this kind of internal critique show up in the movies, particularly prestige ones.

And as much ill-will as I have stored up about Lucas, this actually looks kind of in his wheelhouse. He’s always been better at the flyboys-with-destiny stuff than anything else.

Yglesias

Buchanan’s Apologia for Hitler

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 2, 2009 at 4:43 pm

As if some neocon were setting out to parody dovish thinking on contemporary issues, paleocon Pat Buchanan has gone and written a “blame Britian first” account of the origins of World War II. Apparently, according to Buchanan, Hitler was just seeking to unify the German-speaking people in one country by annexing Danzig and had no intention of fighting a wider war:

Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.

As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?

This last line is the giveaway. After all, it’s perfectly clear that Hitler did want to invade Russia. The need for a German-Soviet war to obtain lebensraum was long at the center of his thinking. That’s why Generalplan Ost was prepared in the early years of the war and called for German occupation of vast swathes of Soviet territory. The answer to Buchanan’s riddle of how Hitler intended to invade Russia when Russia and Germany were separated by Poland is, of course, that Hitler intended to conquer Poland, the very thing that Buchanan is perversely trying to deny he intended to do.

The real question for Buchanan is why, if Hitler had no intention of marching through Poland into Russia, did he follow up his conquest of Poland by breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and invading Russia? The answer, of course, is that Hitler wanted to conquer Eastern Europe and the western USSR from the beginning.

I think that if you want to try to run the case against World War II, your best route is not to deny that Hitler wanted war with Poland and Russia. You should deny that Hitler wanted war with Britain and France for any reason other than to secure his western flank against the USSR. Then you can say the western powers should have just let Hitler and Stalin fight it out and prepare for a Cold War-style campaign of containment against the eventual winner. I think for that to be even remotely persuasive requires you to import a lot of 20/20 hindsight about the Cold War into 1939, but it’s not nearly as ludicrous as this “Hitler was just misunderstood” theory.

Yglesias

McConnell: Spending Can’t Work Except When It Can

By Matthew Yglesias on Feb 7, 2009 at 10:01 am

0_62_mcconnell_mitch_1.jpg

Mitch McConnell studies history and reaches the conclusion that we should hope for a German campaign of world conquest:

“But one of the good things about reading history is you learn a good deal. And, we know for sure that the big spending programs of the New Deal did not work. In 1940, unemployment was still 15%. And, it’s widely agreed among economists, that what got us out of the doldrums that we were in during the Depression was the beginning of World War II.”

To be precise, the historical record shows that throughout FDR’s first term, the country was on a path to recovery—albeit from a very low point. Then there was a recession-within-a-depression associated with efforts to return to McConnell-style policies of fiscal restraint. By 1940, things were much better than they had been in 1932. But still, as he says, not very good. Thus far we don’t have a very solid case against stimulus spending. And now things get worse. The conclusion McConnell wants is that “big spending programs” couldn’t help fight the Depression. But World War II was, among other things, a huge spending program. At the moment, however, we’re fortunate not to be in a position where there’s a powerful wehrmacht that needs fighting. So we can try to direct our recovery-oriented spending at useful civilian projects that will improve the country’s infrastructure or health or education rather than on tanks and bombs.

Yglesias

Multipliers and Diminishing Returns

By Matthew Yglesias on Jan 22, 2009 at 11:22 am

ww2tank_1.jpg

Via Tyler Cowen, Robert Barro tries to calculate fiscal multipliers involve in the second world war:

What do the data show about multipliers? Because it is not easy to separate movements in government purchases from overall business fluctuations, the best evidence comes from large changes in military purchases that are driven by shifts in war and peace. A particularly good experiment is the massive expansion of U.S. defense expenditures during World War II. The usual Keynesian view is that the World War II fiscal expansion provided the stimulus that finally got us out of the Great Depression. Thus, I think that most macroeconomists would regard this case as a fair one for seeing whether a large multiplier ever exists.

I have estimated that World War II raised U.S. defense expenditures by $540 billion (1996 dollars) per year at the peak in 1943-44, amounting to 44% of real GDP. I also estimated that the war raised real GDP by $430 billion per year in 1943-44. Thus, the multiplier was 0.8 (430/540). The other way to put this is that the war lowered components of GDP aside from military purchases. The main declines were in private investment, nonmilitary parts of government purchases, and net exports — personal consumer expenditure changed little. Wartime production siphoned off resources from other economic uses — there was a dampener, rather than a multiplier.

I think this is running together two separate issues. One is “whether a large multiplier ever exists” and one is whether such multipliers suffer from diminishing returns. World War II spending was enormous relative to GDP. Wartime spending on that kind of scale goes way beyond the conversations we’re having right now about fiscal stimulus—the equivalent today would be something like a $5.2 trillion package rather than the $800 billion or so we’re talking about. And to get spending up to that level the government had to resort to quasi-forced savings (“war bonds”), rationing, etc.—deliberate efforts to direct production away from where demand was highest and toward the national objective of military production. The 0.8 multiplier is probably the result of diminishing returns. The question is whether you got a decent multiplier out of the first 5-10 percent of GDP you spend on stimulus. It shouldn’t surprise us if it turns out that defense spending eventually got somewhat higher than would be economically optimal in the middle of the largest war in history.

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