Today general elections (for parliament) are held in the Netherlands. These are politically exciting/nervous times, since the electorate has polarized quite significantly. Until a few weeks back, the polls showed two main contenders to win the elections – the SP (socialists — some believe that one could also describe them as oldfashioned social-democrats) and the VVD (nominally a liberal party, but it’s more accurate to describe it as a right-wing conservative party). Yet the SP has lost drastically in the polls in the last weeks, to the advantage of the PVDA, the social-democratic party. This is probably due to the strong performance of Diederik Samson, leader of the PVDA, and the rather weak impression made by Emile Roemer, leader of the SP. The center-liberal party D66 is doing fine, but the Christian-democrats (CDA) and the greens (Groen-Links) are expected to suffer major losses. PVV, the populist-rightwing party of Geert Wilders will keep its significant size. (For a bar chart of a recent poll, go here)

The elections are not just important for the Netherlands itself, but also for Europe and beyond — and not only because there are 12.500 people with voting rights in Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius. Until now the outgoing cabinet has been an ally of Germany in their response to the Euro-crisis; but with a changing coalition in power, this may change too. SP is strongly against Europe, as is the PVV (Wilders has shifted his focus from anti-islam to anti-Europe).

It’ll be interesting to see what will happen to Dutch political landscape once the election results are known. The local media are reporting that many voters are really at a loss in deciding for whom to vote (swing/floating voters). I know several people who have always voted either for the Greens or D66 who are now voting PVDA, since they care more about not having a coalition led by the VVD rather than the (ideological, practical and strategic) disagreements between their favorite party and the main non-conservative party (being PVDA). To be continued.

For quite a while now (pre-dating Obama, but more frequently since he was elected), I’ve been reading about the Democrats’ troubles with “the white working class”. In some ways, this is unsurprising. In every country with which I’m familiar, a substantial proportion of the working class votes for the more conservative/rightwing party. And, even compared to the most wishy-washy of social democratic and labor parties elsewhere, the Dems aren’t exactly fervent champions of the worker. Still, the Repubs are even worse, so it seemed surprising to read that they regard the white working class as their base. Other things I read (sorry can’t find links now) made things even more puzzling. On the one hand, in the US as elsewhere, higher incomes are correlated with voting for the conservative/rightwing party, which seems to cut against the thesis. On the other hand, I’ve read that the average income of the US working class is the same as that of the population as a whole, which goes against the whole idea of “working class” as I understand it.

All became clear(or, at least, clearer) when I discovered that US political discussion uses two very different (though correlated) concepts of “working class”. The first is the more or less standard one – people who depend on wage labor (normally in manual or low-status service occupations) for their income. The second, specific to the US, and standard in most political polling, is “people without a 4-year college degree”, a class which includes such horny-handed sons and daughters of toil as Bill Gates and Paris Hilton. More prosaically, it includes lots of small business owners, and (since college graduation rates were rising until relative recently), over-represents the old.

Data on US voting patterns is surprisingly scarce, but Andrew Gelman has a big data set confirming the point that Republican voting rises with income. Andrew kindly sent me the data, which classifies voters by education (5 levels), income (5 categories) and race/ethnicity(4), for a total of 100 categories, and gives, for each group the proportion voting Republican. I’ve used this to look at an income-based definition of working class, encompassing everyone with an income less than $40 000. I’m not sure of the exact definition of this variable, but it seems pretty clear that people with income at this level are unlikely to be living on income from capital or a high-status job. To focus on the claim about the white working class, I’ve divided the 100 categories into four roughly equal-sized groups: working class whites (income less than 40K), middle/high income whites with and without college degrees, and all non-whites. Then I’ve looked at how many votes the Republicans got from each group in 2008.

As the pie chart below illustrates, the biggest group in the Republican voting base, and the group with which they do best is that of middle/high income whites without college degrees (the percentage after the group name gives the Republican share of the vote for that group). There’s nothing surprising in this, since all three variables are correlated with Republican voting. It’s the practice of calling this group “working class” that causes the confusion.

Disaggregating, the extreme case is that of high-school educated whites with incomes over $150K, 81.7 per cent of whom supported the Republicans in 2008. They’re a small group of course, but not negligible at about 1 per cent of the sample (155 out of 19170).

The two remaining groups of white voters are split pretty evenly between Reps and Dems, while, as is well known, non-white voters strongly favor the Dems.

The Republican voting base
(percentages after each group give proportion of that group voting R).

[click to continue…]

I don’t have much to say about the politics of the “new ECB proposal”:http://www.ecb.eu/press/pr/date/2012/html/pr120906_1.en.html that I haven’t said at “greater length”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/01/03/the-ecb-method/ already. Matt Yglesias is “right”:http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox.html to see this as a power shift, but it’s one that’s been in the making for quite a while. The policy of ‘comply with our demands for austerity or we’ll pull the plug’ was executed through “confidential”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2012/0901/1224323462647.html “letters”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15104967 rather than public announcements up to recently, but it was still the same policy. And I’m not sure that it’s a power _grab_ as such – I don’t think the ECB has planned this, so much as been pulled into a vacuum created by the corrosive cross-national politics of conditionality and implicit or explicit transfers.

Which brings us to the Bundesbank’s public opposition to the deal – it describes the purchases as “tantamount to financing governments by printing banknotes.” There’s a relevant quote in Harold James’ excellent forthcoming history of European Monetary Union, which I don’t want to talk too much about, since I’ll be reviewing it elsewhere. One of the very interesting discoveries he has made is a non-public speech that Helmut Schmidt, then the German Chancellor, made to the Bundesbank at a somewhat similar juncture in the 1970s. Germany was being pushed to support the then-European Monetary System (a complicated class of a dirty float that was supposed to lead, somehow, someday, to proper monetary union), but the Bundesbank wanted a stipulation that Germany could opt out of unlimited intervention, if this threatened domestic price stability. Schmidt secretly agreed (the precondition was discovered later), albeit with some hesitation. From the speech (which James quotes in extenso – there is plenty more juicy stuff that I’m leaving out):

bq. What interests me here is a part of the third point of your letter. I must say to you openly that I have quite severe misgivings about a written specification of this sort, a written specification of the possibility of an at least temporary release from the intervention. Let us first of all assume that it appeared tomorrow in a French or Italian newspaper. What accusations would the newspapers then make in editorials against their own Government who got them mixed up with such a dodgy promise with the Germans … In the matter itself I agree with you, gentlemen, but I deem it out of the question to write that down … there has been a beautiful saying in the world for two thousand years: ultra posse nemo obligatur. And where the ultra posse lies one decides for oneself. My suspicion is that, if it came to a real crisis, … the debtor countries clear out first and not the creditor countries. But it could perfectly well be the case that the creditor Federal Republic might one day have to clear out; it is all thinkable, only one cannot write such a thing down.

The Bundesbank’s ostentatious dissent from the ECB program is plausibly both a genuine statement of disagreement, and an implied statement that there are stark limits to what Germany will bear – that if the program does turn into unlimited support for weaker states, Germany will exercise its _ultra posse_ and pull out of its obligations. This threat doesn’t have to be explicit to be understood. This in turn highlights the complexity of the expectations that the EU has to manage at the moment. On the one hand, the EU wants to convince financial markets that this is all going to work – that the ECB will do whatever is needed to keep EU going, in the hope that this calms down expectations, so that it doesn’t actually have to use the big bazooka. On the other, the EU (and in particular Germany) wants to convince countries such as Spain that ECB support is conditional on politically ruinous austerity measures. The Bundesbank’s public disavowal of ECB policy arguably makes the latter argument a little more credible, by signalling that this is the best deal that Spain is likely to get. However, by hinting at the limits of German support, it also suggests that the ECB’s ‘unlimited support’ may in practice be more limited than it sounds, generating the risk of market uncertainty.

Gene Wolfe writes in the _Book of the New Sun_ of an executioner:

bq. a certain Master Werenfrid of our guild who in olden times, being in grave need, accepted remuneration from the enemies of the condemned and from his friends as well; and who by stationing one party on the right of the block and the other on the left, by his great skill made it appear to each that the result was entirely satisfactory.

The EU will have to do its damnedest to emulate Master Werenfrid if it wants to pull this off.

SASE, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (the academic association for economic sociology), is hosting its annual conference in Milan next year, and calling for proposals for mini-conferences as part of the main event.

bq. Up to eight mini-conference themes will be selected for inclusion in the Call for Papers by the program committee, which may also propose themes of its own. Preference will be given to proposals linked to the overarching conference theme, “States in Crisis,” but mini-conferences on other SASE-related themes will also be considered. Proposals for mini-conference themes must be submitted electronically to the members of the program committee by October 1, 2012. All mini-conference proposals should include the name(s) and email addresses of the organizer(s), together with a brief description. As in previous years, each mini-conference will consist of 2 to 6 panels, which will be featured as a separate stream in the program. Each panel will have a discussant, meaning that selected participants must submit a completed paper in advance, by June 1, 2013.

I have a vested interest here – I’m a member of SASE’s executive board – but it is a pretty good way of getting serious discussion going on a topic or linked set of topics that are too big to deal with in a single panel.

My Georgetown colleague and friend, Dan Nexon, has started doing interviews with sf/f authors for the New Science Fiction and Fantasy channel of the New Books Network. The first one up is Ken MacLeod, talking about _The Night Sessions_; Alastair Reynolds will be up soon, as will others. This is probably also a good moment for me to announce that we hope to do a Crooked Timber seminar on Ken’s work sometime around the middle of next year. We hope to have a good bunch of respondents – feel free to suggest others (especially women, given our consistent problems with gender ratio) in comments.

I just watched “Shane” (1953) and “Sixteen Candles” (1984). Reason: I never watched the first one before. I haven’t seen all that many Westerns and I just thought I’d try it. Result: yep, all pre-Clint Eastwood, non-John Wayne Westerns feel vaguely like “Star Trek” episodes to me. It’s like I’m caught in a nostalgia wormhole for this later thing that hearkens back to this earlier thing. I experience time in reverse! The Old West was always already nostalgic for Spock to cock an eyebrow: ‘primitive technology, captain’. And Kirk gets that rakish gleam in his eye and we’re off! Trivia: how many times does that kid yell ‘Shane!’ A lot, that’s how many. [click to continue…]

This past Sunday, I appeared on Up With Chris Hayes, where I spoke briefly about the rise of austerity politics in the Democratic Party (begin video at 2:13). My comments were sparked by Bruce Bartlett’s terrific piece “‘Starve the Beast’: Origins and Development of a Budgetary Metaphor” in the Summer 2007 issue of The Independent Review. Barlett is a longtime observer of the Republican Party, from without and within. He was a staffer for Ron Paul and Jack Kemp, as well as a policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official under George HW Bush.  Now he’s a critic of the GOP, writing sharp commentary at the New York Times and the Financial Times. He and I have argued about conservatism before. When it comes to fiscal policy, however, he’s one of the savviest analysts of the GOP out there. What follows is an extended summary/riff on Bartlett’s piece and what I said on Hayes’s show: to understand how austerity works in (and for) the Democratic Party, you have to understand how it once worked for the Republicans. Long story short: not so well.

[click to continue…]

We’re very pleased to announced that Corey Robin is joining the crew at Crooked Timber. I suspect that Corey is already well-known to many of our regular readers through his books such as _Fear: The History of a Political Idea_ (2004) and recently _The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin_ , and through his writings on his own site and at places like Jacobin and the LRB. Corey also has an activist past, through his involvement with the TA union at Yale and led the grad strike of 1995, which helped put the whole issue of casual academic labor on the national map. In professional life, Corey is a political theorist at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Centre. Welcome Corey!

I was on holiday in Ireland over the last couple of weeks without regular Internet access; one of the things I missed was the Niall Ferguson debate. I liked how “these”:http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/23/intellectual_power_and_responsibility “posts”:http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2012/08/niall-ferguson-and-the-rage-against.html from Dan Drezner and Justin Fox identified Ferguson’s behavior as symptomatic of a broader structural change.

Drezner:

bq. Credentialed thinkers like Zakaria and Ferguson, once they’ve reached the top, become brands that can multiply their earning potential far more than was the case fifty years ago. The ways in which the Internet concentrates attention on a Few Big Things means that if you are good and lucky enough to become one of those Big Things, money will rain down on your door. … I’ve heard from a few sources that Ferguson resigned his professorship at Harvard Business School (but not Harvard University) because he calculated that if he gave four or five extra talks a year, he could earn his HBS salary without all the tedious teaching obligations.

Fox:

bq. The path to lucrative thought-leaderdom blazed over the past couple of decades was to establish yourself with dense, serious work (or a big, important job) and then move on to catch-phrase manufacturing (I spent a few weeks following Tom Friedman around in 2005, and learned that he had made this transition very deliberately). Nowadays ambitious young people looking to break into the circuit often just aim straight for the catch-phrases. Speakers bureaus need pithy sales pitches, not complex erudition — and while speaking fees might be spare change for Mitt Romney, for journalists and academics they often represent their only real shot at a top-tax-bracket income. The result is an intellectual environment that seems to increasingly reward the superficial, and keeps rewarding those who make it into the magic circle of top-flight speakers even if they don’t have anything new or interesting to say. Or at least: a part of the intellectual environment is like that.

[click to continue…]

Given past history, I’m probably not the best person to write disinterestedly about David Graeber’s _Debt_. Still, I think that both critics and fans of his work ought to read this “comprehensive critique”:http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages/ by Mike Beggs in the new issue of _Jacobin._ Begg admires the energy and ambition of the book, but is also blunt.

bq. _Debt,_ then, does not need any more kind words from me. It’s enough to say that there is a lot of fantastic material in there. The breadth of Graeber’s reading is impressive, and he draws from it a wealth of insightful fragments of history. The prospect of a grand social history of debt from a thinker of the radical left is exciting. The appeal is no mystery. I wanted to love it.

bq. Unfortunately, I found the main arguments wholly unconvincing.

bq. The very unconvincingness poses the question: What do we need from our grand social theory? The success of the book shows there is an appetite for work that promises to set our present moment against the sweep of history so as to explain our predicament and help us find footholds for changing it. What is wrong with Graeber’s approach, and how could we do better?

My last post about migration focused on the predictions of economists about the effects of open borders. Commenter Oliver made the point, surely correctly, that, given social, cultural, economic, and political feedback effects, it is simply impossible to know. But there are other ways of thinking about the issues other than looking at the aggregate consequences. For example, we can focus on the rights of individuals to seek new lives, associates and opportunities and on the rights of groups, peoples, states and nations to exclude outsiders. The unilateral right to exclude is well-represented in the literature, especially be the work of Christopher Heath Wellman (see his contribution to the excellent Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude? (with Phillip Cole arguing the opposite cases)).

Such works, though, typically address the issues at a somewhat idealized level, asking what rights (properly constituted legitimate democratic) polities do or don’t have. That doesn’t necessarily provide adequate guidance in the actual world; nor does it tell voters who think their state has the right to exclude whether or not to support exclusionary policies. Those strike me as very pertinent questions. Proponents of highly liberalized migration policies are often chastised for being insufficiently alive to the political realities. But a fair response to the self-styled realists is to ask, given the way things are, what they are actually prepared to countenance.
[click to continue…]

My husband, E, has been deployed to Afghanistan for six months. He’s in Helmand province and spends most of his time working with the Afghanistan National Army, near Camp Bastion. He should be home by the end of September. Before he came back on R&R last month, I hadn’t seen any image or recent picture of him since March. That felt particularly strange, in this age of Skype and camera-phones. But even odder are the approximately dozen people who’ve asked me during E’s tour if I’m going out there to visit him. Overall, it’s astonishing the number of people, from acquaintances to call centre staff, who think the level of contact and risk of an infantry officer deployed to a war zone is about the same as someone making a business trip to Barcelona.

So here – more by way of personal expression than public education – are some observations about being the wife of a deployed British soldier.*
[click to continue…]

Honestly, this sort of thing is best ignored:

But I like $100 as much as the next guy, so here is my video.