Ape Man

While I should have been studying, I wrote a new essay. I would like to say more, but it is already pushing midnight and I got to get up early tomorrow to go to work.

I am no fan of Obama. But I felt a little sorry for him give all the abuse he took for saying…

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

If you listen to all those people spouting off about what Obama said, you would think that I should be offended by those statements. I have a lot of relatives in small towns in Pennsylvania. I work in with a bunch of guys from small towns in Pennsylvania. I live in a rural area myself. What’s more, almost everyone I spend any amount of time with is heavily into God or guns or both. So I guess I am amongst those who should feel insulted by Obama’s clinging remarks.

But I don’t.

It’s not that I think Obama’s comments were accurate. As I will explain latter, I think he got things completely backwards. But it is hard for me to get mad when I think someone is trying to defend me.

Even though he did not know what he was talking about, I think Obama honestly thought he was defending us folk. After all, he was talking to an audience in San Francisco were everyone assumes that we hill folk are dumb drooling idiots who are easily manipulated by those evil republicans into voting on social issues when if we knew what was best for us we would vote based on our economic interests. In that context, I read Obama as saying “Why shouldn’t they vote solely on social issues when neither Democrats nor Republicans have ever been able (or willing) to help them out with economic issues?” I think Obama was trying to remove the slur of stupidity that is so often imputed to rural folk by the more sophisticated urban dwellers by pointing out that rural folk could not rationally expect either party to do anything substantive about their economic issues. So why should it surprise anyone that they cling to social issues? What else can they realistically do?

In the context of how I have seen many urban people talk about rural folk, this constitutes a ringing defense. But it is also wrong.

To understand why this defense is wrong we will start with some music.

Now perhaps the above clip signals nothing more to you than the fact that country boys are overly macho, boastful ignorant slobs who like to celebrate their cultural backwardness and fondness for killing wildlife. Depending on your world view and personality, such a view is defensible. But if that is all you can see in such a song, you are as blind as a bat.

Ask yourself this: does anyone make songs boasting about living in the suburbs? Is there a class of music devoted to celebrating living in subdivisions that is the equivalent of country music?

The answer is no of course. So what does that tell you about rural culture?

While you are pondering that question, let me make some observations on the song.

In the first place, let me point out that anyone who hears the above song and thinks it is about the superior economic security supposedly enjoyed by country boys is missing the point. The focus is not one the economic superiority of the rural life, but on its masculine superiority and by extension its social superiority.

A Country Boy Can Survive does not seriously argue that a city boy is going to starve as result of rising interest rates and falling stock markets. Rather the implicit contrast is that economic bad times can cause the city boy to lose his 9 to 5 job. If that happens to a city boy, what is he worth? Chances are, none of the skills that made him useful to his employer have any relevance to the needs of his household. So a city man without a job is good for nothing but housecleaning. In other words, to the masculine mind he is worth nothing.

By contrast, if a country boy losses his job, he can still hunt, fish, or fix anything. His masculine role is independent of economic forces. He is worth something even if his employer no longer wants him.

This message of male empowerment is why the death of the singer’s friend is given such prominent role in the song. If you understand the country mindset, you will understand that the tragedy of the friend’s death was not the fact that he died, but that he was unable to defend himself from a punk with a knife. If you don’t get the message loud and clear that a country boy would not find himself in that situation, you are deaf.

But the story of the friend’s death also serves to highlight the social superiority of the country life. The implicit message of the song is that in the country we are all a band of brothers whereas in the city everyone is preying on each other. The bitter “for 43 dollars my friend lost his life” is meant to accentuate the broader point that in the city your worth is measured in dollars and cents, not your social ties and adherence to a cultural code of honor.

The social superiority and masculine superiority of country life are closely intertwined, as the line “We say grace and we say we say Ma’am” makes clear. That line conjures up the image of a close-knit community with strong shared values. But saying grace is a peculiarly male function in rural life. Thus, that line also highlights the fact that in the country men are men and women are women in contrast to the city, where males and females are interchangeable cogs in the economic machine.

I should note that though the song is from a male view point, the outlook expressed is not exclusively male. I know of one woman who comes from a country background, lives in the country, and has typically country attitudes. She is employed in a male dominated technology field and she does not act overly feminine (e.g., she is not afraid to express her opinions or get her hands dirty). Yet she will not look twice at any man, no matter how big his paycheck, unless he is rough and tough. Nor does she bother to conceal her contempt for all men who fail to measure up to her idea of what masculine is. And this is not because she lacks options.

I would not venture a guess as to how widespread this attitude is, since I am generally not privy to the honest thoughts of women. Truthfully, the only reason the above example sticks in my mind is because it violated my understanding of how the universe should work, to come across a woman who is more chauvinistic than I am. But I have seen and heard enough that I would be willing to bet that the attitudes expressed in “A Country Boy Can Survive” finds an echo in the female half of the race.

But so far we have been taking the song at its word as far as its depiction of what country life is like. It gets more interesting if you consider where the song stoops to a falsehood.

What makes the falsehood so remarkable is that the song is remarkably honest for such a boastful song. Oh, you might be able to quibble about its portrayal of urban life if you were so inclined (though you should remember that the song was written in the early 80’s when urban crime was more of problem than it is today and rural crime was less of a problem than it is today). But I don’t think that anyone who has lived in rural areas can fail to think of dozens of men who could honestly make almost all the explicit and implicit boasts in the song without the slightest exaggeration.

But there is one line that would sound false. That’s where Hank sings “I live back in the woods, you see, the woman, the kids, the dog, and me.” The impression given is that of nice traditional family living off in the backwoods. But a man who can honestly make that boast is a lot rarer in the backwoods than men who can do the rest of the stuff that Hank sings about. Certainly Hank can’t make that boast. He divorced his fourth wife not so long ago.

When I think about all the men that I know who could be called country boys after the model of Hank’s song, a lot of them follow the same pattern.

For example, there is this one guy I know. We will call him Tall Boy. He is an excellent hunter. He hunts anytime it is legal. It doesn’t matter if it is black powder or bow season. It doesn’t matter if it is deer or turkey season. He is always out there. If he is not hunting he will be out fishing. And he is an excellent fisherman. It doesn’t matter if he is casting for salmon, waiting for bass, or sitting out on the ice. He always does well. In between fishing and hunting, he hunts for mushrooms in the appropriate seasons, tends his honey bees, rebuilds his tractor, cuts his supply of firewood, bails hay for his wife’s horses, works on whatever construction project he had going, and occasional tends to the small business that he owns, just to name a few things that he occupies his time with. He is one of the few left around who butchers a cow by bashing it over the head with sledge hammer. A very humane way of killing a cow if it works, but if it doesn’t, you are dealing with a half a ton of very mad beef. I could go on and on telling you about all the skills he has and all the things he has done but it would take a small book.

He got his skills growing up on a farm. His father abandoned the family when he was young, leaving his family struggling. His mother use to send him out to poach deer so they would have something to eat. He only married once but his wife did not want to have any kids because of his drinking problem along with other problems. He often mentioned how much he regretted this and many other things that he did when he was younger. He had no happy home life.

I know another guy. We will call him Square Boy. He hunts deer, coons and many other things. He goes after mushrooms himself, but not to the same extreme as Tall Boy. He raises beef cattle, horses, dogs, and homing pigeons (so that he could race them against other flocks). He gets firewood and bails hay. He was an iron worker, a tree man, a sawyer, and a landscaper among many other things. He built his own house and barn. He has blotches all over him that he acquired in Vietnam from Agent Orange. He is known for his huge capacity for hard work and inhuman toughness. He once cut his arm almost completely off with chain saw. He pinched it tight with his free hand and walked over to the neighbors so that they could take him to a hospital. Once there he refused to allow the doctors to give him anesthesia and when they insisted he turned and started walking out. They gave in and sewed up his arm without anesthesia. I never did find out why he did not want anesthesia. I suspect it was because he did not have insurance and did not want to pay for it. He is a very tight with his money. Again, to tell the full tale of the range of things can do and has done would take a small book.

He grew up in a dirt poor family. He told me how he used to pull the blankets over his head and hold them tightly down because he was afraid of the rats that lived in his house. He said he used feel them running over his bed at night. His father died while he was a still a teenager. He dropped out of school so that he could help support his family after that happened.

He married and had a couple of daughters. But he is divorced and he never sees or hears from them anymore. He says his ex-wife turned them against him. This saddens him greatly. He also wishes he could have had at least one son.

I know another guy. We will call him Small Man. He is a big time hunter and fisher. He loves to shoot off guns and he has a gun collection that would outfit a small army. But what he was really known for was his black powder shooting skills. He used to win shooting matches at a hundred yards with him using a black powder rifle and his opponents using scoped rifles. He made his living as a butcher, a welder, and by working in stone quarries amongst other things. He had a bit of small man complex and would often get involved in fights with people much bigger than him. Typically he would win, because when he loses his temper he would go insane and wouldn’t even realize what he was doing until it was all over. Once when he was angry he hit a door so hard he knocked it off its hinges. Again those are only some of the highlights.

He grew up in large family. But his brothers and sisters came from several different fathers. For a while he lived in a house without any indoor plumbing while he was growing up.

He got married and had a daughter. But he divorced and his daughter lives many states away. He rarely sees her but she will send her son to stay in the summer time. He loves to teach his grandson how to hunt and fish and other such rural activities. He is proud of what a good shot is grandson is and plans to leave him his gun collection when he dies. He will be heartbroken if his grandson decides he is no longer interested in visiting his grandpa once he hits his teenage years.

And I could tell many other stories like this. Most of the country boys I know don’t have nice little nuclear families to go home to. And I don’t think my experience is atypical. The statistics tell of a lot of teenage pregnancy and single parent homes in rural areas. And those numbers are all the more jarring when you look at them in context of the rapid aging of most rural areas. You get the feeling that very few young people in rural America have their life together.

Don’t get me wrong. There are happy families out in woods where the men of the family can honestly make all the boasts in Hank’s song without having to fake the happy family bit. I know of some of them myself but I won’t bore you with their stories (if are interested in reading about a happy rural family you can go over to the Pioneer Woman’s site). To truly understand the concerns of most rural folk, you need to understand that the permanent problem facing rural areas is the absence of children. And you will not be able to understand the problem of the absence of children if you examine the happy families.

If you doubt that missing children are a big concern in rural areas, just pick up any old hunting magazine. Odds are you will find at least one article in the magazine that laments that the fact that few young people are taking up hunting. It is common knowledge in hunting circles that the number of hunters is going to implode in the coming decades. The average age of your average hunter keeps climbing. And all attempts to bring in more young people into the field have fallen flat on their face.

The causes of this coming implosion are also well known in hunting circles. It has to do with the declining number of children being born and the sharp increase in single parent homes. It is the latter that gets the most attention in hunting magazines. Over and over you read that kids don’t go hunting with their dads like they used to. The biggest reason for this is that often their dads are not at home anymore.

Now it occurs to me as I am writing this, that the three example country boys I gave might not support the idea that fathers not being around to teach their kids to hunt is anything new. But I can tell you the vast majority of hunters I know learned to hunt from their fathers. Those who did not learn from their fathers learned from their grandfathers.

Tall Boy would be a good example of this. He learned from his grandfather who lived on the farm with Tall Boy when he was growing up. Contrast that with Small Man who is trying to teach his grandson who lives many states away and you will understand why the kids today are less likely to learn from their grandparents. And since the majority of hunters that I know are divorced and no longer live with their kids, it is not likely that they will learn from their dads either.

As hunting goes, so goes rural culture in general. But you should understand that rural culture or even hunting in particular is not just about blowing up furry critters with large caliber rifles. If you don’t understand what I am talking about, you didn’t listen to Hank’s song very close.

It is this love of their culture, and not any economic insecurity, that causes rural folk to “cling” to social issues. After all, those whose primary love was money and other materialistic things left for the city a long time ago. Those that are left were self-selected to care about other things more than money.

To be sure, we can overstate this. There is more than a few people who are bumming around the countryside because they lack the ambition or the brains to leave the place where they were born. And there are others whose primary concern was the privacy or fun that that they could find in the country.

But the love of many for the culture that can be found in rural areas is very real and not just a faked artifice of country music. In my neighborhood there was a couple who were having serious financial problems due to the problems their small business was facing. As a result, they were thinking of selling their place and moving to cheaper place 20 minutes away in an effort to save money and extract some equity from their land.

Tall Boy became very upset with them over these plans. He took it as a kind of betrayal. He had made efforts to help them out and he thought they could cut down on their expenses a lot more than they had. He felt that the fact that they were going to move even though they could have tightened their belt and stayed with help from their neighbors showed that they did not value their friends very much. When I observed that they were only moving 20 minutes away and that it would still be possible to visit back and forth without too much trouble, he retorted that you can’t be a good neighbor to someone who lives 20 minutes away.

As turns out, they did not move. But the incident demonstrates how Tall Boy placed a high premium on living in a place with a tight social network in spite of the moral failings which made it impossible for him to raise a family. His conception of a good community was a place where anyone would jump in their truck at a moment’s notice to fly down the street to help out a neighbor. Or conversely, where anyone could jump in their truck and go borrow a tool that was needed. It was his conception of what a community should be like that lead him to join the volunteer fire department when he found out they were short of people (he is now the captain). In other words, even though he led a wild life (and still does to an extent) he always sought out and tried to foster the rural ideal of community.

This paradox between being unable or unwilling to live the type of life that is necessary to raise a nuclear family, but at the same time deeply attached to a tight-knit community explains the social conservatism of rural areas, even though statistics show they don’t live that much differently than urban people do as far as personal morals. Every man who loves rural culture knows that it is doomed without strong families. For without strong families they know there will be no hunters. They know that without strong families there will be no neighbors who will help them. They know that without strong families there will be no tight-knit communities.

And if you get to know the men who love rural culture, you will hear them regret that there is no one for them to pass all their skills to. They express the wish that they could go back and do things differently. They are horrified that that they are aging and facing death and there is no one to carry on after them. They loved the patriarchal ideal of being men in a community of men, but now they find themselves facing the most horrible of the patriarchal curses. They have no descendants.

This is why Hank felt obliged to fake the idea that country boys were all out their raising happy families. If the culture dies, there will be no more country boys. And that is a thought that Hank does not want to face. It is also the fear that Obama does not seem understand.

I am taking classes at a local trade school at night. You should not confuse this place with the various technical schools that are around. This place is where the mentally handicapped are sent from the various school districts. This is the place where all the people who are considered too dumb to go to college are sent to learn a trade. In short, this is a school for losers.

In keeping with the school’s mission to take care of the losers, the school also offers adult education programs that are geared towards helping those poor blue collar saps who have lost their jobs and don’t have much in the way of marketable skills. It also tries to reach out to those who dropped out of high school and/or were thrown into jail before they could figure out what they wanted to do with their lives.

I started taking a class at this institution for losers back in January with some trepidation. I already have a good job for the area in which I live and I am not looking to find another job. But there has been a shadow hanging over my job for a little over a year now. It’s not that I am in any danger of losing my job per se, it’s just that in my current job title I can be transferred into a paper shuffling job at the blink of an eye.

I don’t want that to happen. I really don’t want that to happen. But there are people in positions of influence who do. And in one sense, I can’t blame them.

Most of the people who hold my job title have more experience in the field than I have been alive. It was the occasion of some bitterness on many peoples’ part that I got my title so easily and with so little experience. The only real advantages that I offer to offset my inexperience are that I know how to handle a computer and I am reasonably hard working.

So it makes a certain amount of sense to put me behind a computer and let me solve paperwork problems, write proposals, and generally make my bosses look smart. That is why I felt it necessary to make myself as valuable as possible out in the field. And the only way I could see to do that was to get some additional training.

Still, I was not sure that the school for losers would help me out any. I could easily imagine myself being bored out of my mind and not really learning anything.
On the plus side, I had a brother who took a class at this intuition and he got a decent teacher. On the other hand, almost all my brother’s fellow students were big time losers. For example, most of them did not take a test that they were told had a good chance of getting them a job because they did not think that they could pass a drug test. Pot was too dear to their hearts to give up for an employment opportunity. Who needs a job when you are a young single male?

And if deep within your evil soul you are imaging that all of these losers were black or Hispanic you can guess again. We are talking about a class full of white guys here. There were a few exceptions, of course. But the exceptions tended to be the better students in the class. Like an immigrant from Africa who was holding down a job, taking the class, and sending money back to Africa. He wasn’t afraid of no drug test.

But such people were exceptions. Most of the class was white and on drugs. And they just did not care.

Now maybe I am weird, but the thought of spending a major portion of my free time with people like that does not exactly fill me with joy. Moreover, I had good reason to think that my brother had just gotten lucky with his teacher and I thought that it was unlikely that I would be as fortunate.

Happily, I can report that everything has gone just about as well as I could have possibly expected. For one thing, I managed to pick up a decent teacher myself. I don’t know if that is because there are a higher percentage of good teachers at this institution for losers than I had previously supposed or if it is because my brother and I have been receiving preferential treatment from on high. I do know for a fact that there are some teachers at this school that would drive me up the wall if they were my teachers because I had one of them for a sub for a few days.

Regardless of the reasons why, the fact that my teacher really knows his stuff has been a major plus. It helps that he has a real enthusiasm for teaching us. I guess that it helps that we are a breath of fresh air compared to his day class. While he is waiting for the official class start time he will usually tell us about the things that have gone wrong in his day class. One day the story will be about how he had to confiscate a knife from one of his students. Another day it will be about how he gave everyone in his day class an open book test for the third time and they all failed it (for the third time). And every so often he lets us know how great it is to be teaching a class where everyone wants to learn which makes everyone feel good about themselves.

And I have to say that it is nice being in a class where everyone wants to learn. I have to say that the quality of my classmates has been an even greater surprise than the quality of my teacher. When the lady who was giving us orientation made a general announcement that the people who had test scores that indicated that their math and reading scores were too low for the class, (they make you take an assessment test before you register) but were being allowed to take the class anyway, had to understand that no extra tutoring would be provided, I assumed the worst.

But only one guy seemed like he was on drugs and he dropped out in the first week. Almost everyone in the class already has a job, and most of those who don’t are without jobs by their own choice. So they are all a pretty responsible bunch. And these guys are not spending their evenings in class because they want to fool around. They are all there to learn and it shows.

Sadly, this does not mean that everyone is staying on top of the course material. In fact, I would say that about half the class is having trouble keeping up. The course is just too advanced for most of them. They might not have any trouble putting things together, but the abstract reasoning required for design and troubleshooting is giving them fits.

I am handling it all right but the class still sucks up enormous amounts of my time. That is why I have not been posting much on my blogs. I expect that will continue to hold true until August.

How would you like to deal with a rogue nuclear armed state in the Middle East? That may be coming to you a lot sooner than you think.

I am not speaking of the usual suspects like Iran or whatever other currently fashionable bogey man you want to name. Rather, I fear that Israel may well turn rogue in the not too distant future.

Of course, to a certain brand of political thought, Israel already is rogue and has been since its inception. But this view is the result of a lack of imagination on the part of those who espouse it. However, those who hold this view may succeed in turning their condescending insults into reality.

I should say that the prime criteria for determining a rogue state should be its willingness to listen to world opinion and to try to maintain itself as a member of good standing on the world stage. For example, Iran, Syria, and North Korea have shown time and time again that they will do whatever they want in pursuit of their goals. America and China often ignore world opinion, but they take it into account more often than their critics give them credit for, especially if you take into account what they could do if they truly did not care what the world thought. Germany, on the other hand, could be looked on as model world citizen given their efforts to avoid offending anyone.

This is not to say that the lengths to which a nation goes in order to appease world opinion is a sign of its moral standing. Rather, I am trying to use the word “rogue” in an objective sense as opposed to a moral sense. A rogue nation is one the outside world can no longer influence into acting the way world opinion in general desires.

In this sense, Israel has never been truly rogue no matter what certain members of the prattling classes say. Reading the history of Israel is to read the history of a nation shaped by world opinion. It was world opinion that founded Israel. It was world opinion that led Israel to draw back from gains they could have taken and held in all their wars. To be sure, Israel has sometimes flouted world opinion. But no more than France has.

But this could all change. From example, read this quote…..

I look at the press from the West and get very angry. Its mostly about their injuries. Another article about Palestinian protests about our attacks. This is ridiculous. If there were no rockets raining on us the IDF wouldn’t have anything to do there. I don’t like the way we are portrayed. We don’t want this war. They are dragging us in. What can we do? There are rockets raining on us daily. But in the media we look like the aggressors. It feels so unfair to be sitting here and reading that. My entire perspective has changed. I used to think that Israel needed to take care of how it looked to the western world — that we can’t look like monsters. Now I know it doesn’t matter. They will paint us however they want. I just can’t read the news anymore, it makes me too angry. We need to move forward with our lives, protect ourselves. The government has a responsibility to protect its people. The question is, what is the best way to do that?

I have read comments likes this from Israelis from all across the mainstream political parties since the Palestinians were given a state. From the right, these types of comments come as no surprise. It is what they always believed anyhow.

But increasingly, you hear these things from the left in Israel. This is what is changing.

From what I have read, the left feels betrayed by the whole peace process. Not so much by the actions of the Palestinians as by world opinion. Most of the left in Israel had no illusions about how easy the road to peace with the Palestinians would be. They knew that there would be bumps in the road and problems to overcome. But I don’t think they anticipated that no matter what Israel did, it would always be the bad guy. In fact, I think most Israelis supported a peace process more for what they thought it would do for their standing in world opinion than for what they thought would be any real chance of peace.

Therefore, I think that the biggest failure of the peace process in the eyes of most of the left is not that the Palestinians are still shooting at them, but that they are still the bad guys. This has embittered a lot of Israelis who thought they had more in common with the leftists of Europe than the bad old free market types of the US. The thought that they will never be accepted by their ideological comrades means that many in the left no longer see any point in the policies that they once supported with all their heart.

This sense of anger has been compounded by the aerial attacks enabled by Hamas’ stock of rockets. Aerial bombardments have produced extreme anger in the affected populace no matter where in the world it has happened. From the British in London, to the Germans in Berlin, or the North Vietnamese around Hanoi, the affected populace has always wanted to lynch those they thought responsible for their plight. The Israelis are proving that they are no different.

I don’t think that Israel is going to go rogue next month. Nor do I think it will go rogue next year. But if things keep going like they have been going, the Israel of Arab propaganda may become a reality.

We should remember that at the start of World War II British bombers were denied permission to strike at German warships at dock because of fear that they would hit innocent civilians in the process. By the end of World War II they were firebombing German cities at night with the intent to cause as much damage and to kill as many men, woman, and children as possible. A similar change in Israel would be bad for Israel, bad for the Arabs, and bad for the world as whole.

And a large share of blame will rest on the shoulders of those who thought they were most for peace. They forgot that that if you tell a child that he is stupid no matter what he does he will probably come to believe you. And if you tell nation that no matter what they do, they will still stand condemned, then they will decided to do something worthy of condemnation.

The difference between the war in Iraq and the Vietnam War is simple: Vietnam was winnable and Iraq is not.

Now I am not casting aspersions on the success of the surge or anything like that. In any kind of military terms the US army has done well. This is especially true if you compare them against the actual performance of other armies in similar situations and not against some pie-in-the-sky ideal. The current incarnation of US armed forces has certainly performed better than the incarnation of the US armed forces that fought in Vietnam.

But this superior performance by the current incarnation of US armed forces has obscured a critical fact. The political goals of the United States were achievable in Vietnam and they are not achievable in Iraq. This is not readily apparent to a lot of people because popular opinion holds that Vietnam was doomed to failure from the very beginning whereas some people still hold out hope for Iraq.

Others might take the opposite tack and argue that in the case of Vietnam, the US was coming to the defense of an already independent nation, whereas Iraq was an invasion of a sovereign nation. Thus, you can’t really compare the two.

But this is really just a matter of political correctness and not a reflection of any kind of reality on the ground.

If a free and fair vote had been held in accordance with the agreement the French made when they withdrew, South Vietnam would never have existed to ask for help from the US. More to the point, there were a lot of people with guns in South Vietnam who were willing and able to fight hard against what they perceived as a US invasion. But if a free and fair vote had been held in Iraq, Saddam would never have been elected. More to the point, there was almost no one in Iraq who was willing to fight for Saddam or to preserve the integrity of Iraq.

All I am trying to say is that American’s intervention in South Vietnam was at least as much as an invasion as the invasion of Iraq. And the goal of the invasion was the same in both cases, to create and sustain a political ally of the US. How then can I say that the political goals of Vietnam War were achievable whereas the invasion of Iraq was not?
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Professional economists normally have no use for Chartists. The idea that you can predict future price movements based on past behavior of the Chart has not empirical support. Most economists will tell you that there is not much to separate a Chartist from witch doctor.

But one might imagine that Alex Tabarrok has come around to the Chartists way of thinking based on his latest post. For he argues that housing has reached a permanently high plateau (shades of Fisher?) solely the basis of how he interprets a line on a chart.

I am tried to avoid being to snarky, but I don’t think I have ever seen a more poorly supported argument advanced over at Marginal Revolution. But all Mr. Tabarrok did was look at a chart and offer up a gut feeling. In the process he neglected to consider some very important data.

For one thing, he did not consider the stunning growth in the number of houses on the market. If the bubble was a result of the government restriction of supply in some key cities as some of his commentators suggest, how come places like California and Florida saw some of sharpest run ups and now have a ton of houses on the market?

Another thing I would have expected Mr. Tabarrok to do would have to consider the difference between the cost to rent and the cost to own. This has historically been one of the key metrics for trying to decide if housing is overvalued or not.

And of course, there is also the demographic component. If you were going to predict permanently high plateau, you would think you would want a sharp increase of people relative to the housing stock. Where are those people going to come from?

Not from Mexico, and not from natural increase.

But there is one thing that Mr. Tabarrok’s charts tell us. They tell us that housing prices went up really fast and really sharply in the space of 10 years. What, (besides Mr. Tabarrok’s intuition) is to say they will not go down with equal speed and sharpness?

I am happy to read arguments that go against what I personally believe. It keeps me on my toes. But I don’t count looking at a chart and saying “That line looks permanent to me” as constituting an argument.

Normally, this is something I would post over at the Ethereal Voice. But I don’t think many of the people who read the Voice would really appreciate it. So I figured I would put this on my personal blog instead.

I found this at Sippican Cottage. We must be similar is some way because I find that share something of his twisted sense of humor. If you don’t get the joke, watch this.

I have to say, I like the music on the parody better then the original, but then, I never cared all that much for the original. On the flip side, the singing on the parody really grated on me. But that might just be due to poor sound quality on youtube.

There was a time in my life when I thought and read a lot about Japan. I was just starting to get interested in economics when Japan was at the height of its boom and everyone was talking about how they were going to take over the world. Then came the crash and Japan became the sick man of the first world. This turnaround fascinated me.

Time constraints and other interests have prevented me from following the subject as I would like. So I can’t say that I have anything really profound or informative to say about Japan. (If you want more up to date thoughts on Japan I recommend checking out Claus Vistesen and Edward Hugh’s Japan Economy Watch site.) But I can’t watch the current crisis unfold in America without comparing and contrasting it to what has been happening in Japan. So I thought that I would lay out some of the things that I learned from watching Japan so as to provide a basis for explaining some of my thoughts on America’s current situation.

1. People save at a rate determined by anticipated needs, not on expected rate of return.

At one time I thought that expected rate of return had a lot to do with the rate at which people saved. So I was inclined to be dismissive when I first came across the idea that lowering the interest rate could actually increase the rate of savings (I don’t remember where I first came across this idea, but it was in the context of somebody arguing that lowering interest rates could actually be counterproductive for Japan). But watching Japan and the people around me in America convinced me that individual savings rate had little to do with expected return.

Given my interest in history, you would have thought that I would have realized this from the get-go. After all, when people saved up food and other supplies in pre-industrial times they were not dissuaded by the fact that their savings had a negative real return. The fact that the rats are going to eat a portion of grain is not going to stop you from stockpiling grain when you know that you are going to have to eat come winter. That is so obvious that it is hardly worth mentioning.

Yet it should also be obvious that an aging population with little in the way of safety nets (either in the form of extended families or governmental entitlements) are going to have a high savings rate no matter what. If people anticipate needs in the future they will save even if the real return is negative.

This is why all the people clamoring for Japan’s central bank to inflate the currency and “force” people to spend more were wrong. Even if Japan had managed to force all savers to pay for the privilege of saving through a drop in buying power (which they never quite managed although they came close), I don’t think they would have accomplished their goal of lowering the savings rate. Japan’s people just have too many good reasons to anticipate future needs for them to stop saving just because returns go negative.

Since the early 90’s up until the present, America has demonstrated the other side the coin. Even though Americans have had a rate of return on their savings that has been high compared to the rest of the world, Americans have not seen fit to increase their savings rate. If anything, the American savings rate has been dropping as the rate of return went up. Instead of taking their outsized returns on their savings as encouragement to save more, Americans seem to have taken it as a sign that they could save less.

I suspect that we will see the savings rate in America go up as the expected rate of return falls (which it likely will as a result of the current economic problems).

2. It is aggregate real expected rates of return that determines how much people will borrow. Not real interest rates.

I am going to have trouble explaining this one so bear with me.

At one point in my life, I would have thought that mentioning real expected rates of return and real interest rates in the same breath would have been a tautology. I always assumed that real expected rates of return and real interest rates could be charted as a kind of supply/demand chart.

That statement is probably meaningless blather to a lot of you so let me try a more detailed explanation. Real interest rate is the interest rate minus the rate of inflation (or plus the rate of deflation) right? So what does this imply?

To my mind it implies that there is a finite amount of “real” money available to be lent out. Otherwise you could change the real interest rate by printing money. But printing money only changes nominal interest rates. Real rates are not affected.
So what cause real interest rates to rise and fall? Demand for the money. What determines the demand for money? Expectations of future returns. People are not going to want to contract to repay money in the future if they think they will have less money in future relative to what they owe, than they have in the present.

In other words, if a company thinks it will make 10 percent on its capital, it will be willing to borrow at 9% to get that capital. Or if consumers think that their incomes are going to go up in the future, they will be more willing to borrow money now. In both cases it is the expected rate of future returns that governs the price they will be willing to pay to borrow money. (Although in the case of consumers, it is the future returns of their labor instead of the future return of their capital that govern their willingness to borrow.)

If this is true, interest rates should be higher when people expect to make a lot of money in the future and lower when people don’t expect to make a lot money. In other words, real interest rates should reflect the expected rate of return.

So far, so good. But there is one big question left unanswered by the above theory. Is the “real money” available to be lent out a relatively fixed sum or is it a variable number? And if it is a variable number can central banks affect that number?

Watching Japan has led me to believe that “real money” is not all that variable in the short term. I think “real money” is a reflection of the production possibilities of a society. Thus, I think the only way a central bank can lower real interest rates is to lower the expected rate of return.

This is what the Bank of Japan did when it tried to lower real interest rates. In the process of trying to lower real interest rates they kept banks with lots of bad loans on the books, construction companies with no work to speak of, and various regional government bodies from going bust. In my opinion, this lowered the expected rate of return faster than the bank was able to lower the real interest rates. And that caused people’s desire to invest or spend in Japan to fall in an equally dramatic fashion. The net result was that Japan as a nation exported more and more capital overseas rather than spend it in their own country.

To understand why this is so, imagine that you want to start a business. Now imagine that your potential employees have a choice between taking an uncertain job with your startup or a certain government job turning Japan into a giant parking lot (common Japanese make work scheme). Or imagine that your start up is going to try to compete with a company that the government has decided is too big to fail. What do you think the impact of these scenarios would be on your expected rate of return?

This is why I say aggregate real expected rates of return are more important than real interest rates. The goal of policy makers should be to insure that real expected rates of return are as high as possible. That will encourage people to borrow and spend in their own country instead of overseas. It will also encourage foreign investors to invest in the country. But if they focus on lowering real interest rates, they will simply lower demand for real money by lowering the expected rate of return. And that is in no one’s interest.

3. The impact of monetary policy on a nation’s economic health is vastly overstated.

To a certain extent, this lesson was implicit in the other two. But it struck me how much the central bank of Japan was being blamed for things it had no control over. I accepted that the Bank of Japan had not acted perfectly. But I came to believe that most of the criticism that was directed against the BOJ stemmed from the fact that most economists attach too much importance to monetary policy.

For example, I remember one paper by a couple of economists who worked for the Fed. They admitted that according to most standard economic theories, the BOJ had done everything right based on the data they had at the time. However, they went on to argue that the data available to BOJ was slightly flawed. They argued that if the BOJ had had better data available to it, Japan’s depression could have been avoided. They essentially argued that minuscule differences in policy would have had massive differences in outcomes.

Needless to say, I did buy their conclusion. But their demonstration of how closely the BOJ had followed standard advice for how central banks should behave was a real eye opener to me. The more I learned about Japan’s problems and the more I read about economics, the more I came to suspect that the importance placed on central banks was a result of confusing correlation with causation.

A good example of what I mean by that is the accusation that central banks are the cause of investment bubbles. I have never seen a good theoretical or empirical argument that even comes close to demonstrating that this is true. I can’t think of anything that would prevent mob behavior from creating over-investment in certain sectors even if monetary policy was “perfect.” It seems to me that in the absence of mob behavior, overly loose monetary policy would cause across the board price rises. Not a more narrowly based investment bubble.

In fact, rather than bubbles being caused by overly loose monetary policy, I suspect that bubbles cause overly loose monetary policy. If mob behavior causes an overinvestment in a particular area (usually because of new technology whose benefits are not yet fully known and thus make it difficult to accurately assess future return) it makes it more difficult to accurately measure inflation. On one hand the bubble could hide an undesirable increase in the money supply because everyone would be rushing to invest in narrow segment of the economy. On the other hand, an overzealous bubble picker could actually cause deflation by trying to end a bubble that was caused by an overly enthusiastic mob as opposed to easy money.

Don’t get me wrong. I fully accept that central banks can cause inflation and deflation. I fully accept that inflation and deflation are bad things. Therefore, I don’t dispute central banks have an important role to play in any national economy. But so do electrical grid operators. Yet nobody blames them for every recession.

Economies have grown in real terms even as they were experiencing deflation. Economies have grown in real terms even as they experienced high rates of inflation. Yet if an economy experiences a contraction with only mild accompanying deflation (as happened to Japan) people have a tendency to place a huge share of blame on the central bank for the contraction. Ditto if an economy is experiencing slightly elevated rates of inflation as it goes into a contraction (say, like what is happening in the US right now).

I don’t believe that perfect monetary policy can prevent contractions. I don’t even believe that perfect monetary policy can prevent long periods of economic contraction. I don’t believe that perfect monetary policy can prevent overinvestment in certain sectors. I don’t believe that perfect monetary policy can prevent government actions that make things much worse. (The tariff bill that Hoover signed into law, for example.)

In Japan’s case, the central bank was faced with a bursting bubble along with an ageing demographic, and a government determined to prevent any kind of readjustment that might threaten social stability (which in practice meant no readjustment whatsoever). It is difficult for me to imagine a policy that the BOJ could have followed that would have prevented the mess that followed.

Monetary policy is only a small part of the sum total of economic behavior. And those who look to monetary policy to solve all their economic problems are going to be sadly disappointed.

Both liberals and conservatives tend to have a Euro-centric view of history. That is to say, both camps tend to view the rise of the Europeans as something that was bound to happen. This view enables liberals to avoid confronting the cultural failings of the countries that were conquered by Europeans on the grounds that you cannot blame the victims for something that was bound to happen. This view enables conservatives to have an inflated sense of the superiority of European culture as compared to their competitors.

A good antidote to this Euro-centric view of history is to study the times when European culture was on the ropes. The rise of the Turks is particularly instructive, for they did to many European countries what the European countries would later go on and do to the rest of the world.

Turkish vs. European battles were battles between professionals and talented amateurs, just as future European conquests would be. Europeans were often more interested in settling scores amongst themselves than they were in fighting the Turkish threat. This was true even after it became clear how serious the Turkish threat was. Again, this is similar to the situation that confronted the European imperial expansion. Those cultures that managed to avoid conquest (such as Thailand, Ethiopia, or Japan) were the ones that managed to stay united. Almost without exception, those countries that fell to Europeans did so because the infighting amongst themselves seriously weakened them.

Yet somehow I never hear liberals using the same kind moral condemnation of the Turkish conquests that they use for the European ones. And I never seem to hear conservatives talk about how the European culture was inferior to the Turkish one in the same way that they talk about the victims of European conquest.

But I think that if you read history without blinders you will see that the only thing that prevented Europe from suffering the same fate as Africa was a few odd miracles and a couple of heroes. Or you could call it luck if you would prefer not to view the world as the medieval Europeans did.

No matter how you look at it, I think a fair-minded person would have to admit that the Turkish success was due largely to their institutions and culture. In other words, you could have placed any average member of Turkish upper class on the throne and it would not have made much difference. The Turkish military machine did not depend on heroes to win its wars. By the same token, when the Turks finally went on the decline it was because their institutions had become utterly corrupted. In those circumstances, even good Turkish leaders had a hard time winning battles.

By contrast, those few successes that the European cultures had at delaying the Turkish advance depended on the character of particular individuals. Once those particular individuals had died or otherwise lost power, the Turkish advance would roll on as before. So in one sense you could argue that those particular individuals did not accomplish a heck of lot in the long term.

But if you see the corrupting of imperial institutions as being a foregone conclusion (as I do), then the Turkish advance into Europe becomes a race against time. How far could they get before their institutions became worthless?

In that context, those individuals who managed to halt the Turkish advance for a time seem pretty significant. If a half dozen people had never been born over a span of a couple hundred years, the Turks would have taken much of Europe. If even one or two of them had never been born, Rome, Vienna, and who knows what else would have fallen.

Attaching such importance to a few individuals is unpopular in this day and age. It is argued that individuals are rarely all that important compared to the broader cultural context. But the fate of Europe was balanced on a hair for a couple of hundred years. It very easily could have gone the other way. In that context, I would argue that a few key individuals did make a dramatic difference.

It would require a book to properly support such a sweeping argument. But if I have aroused your interest, I can suggest some places for you to start reading on your own.

Ironically, one of the best places to start is to read about a man who was not even European. I am speaking of Timur (or Tamerlane as he is sometimes known). This murderous man had the morals of Hitler. But he created an empire on the basis of his own talents as a military commander. And in the process he destroyed the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Ankara.

This obviously delayed the Turkish expansion by a number of years. They basically had to rebuild their empire from scratch after Timur died. But I think the fact that Ottoman Empire was able to reconstruct itself after the disaster at Ankara was a testament to the strength of their institutions. In contrast, consider how fast Timur’s empire fell apart after he died.

As I have said, this is a common refrain throughout the rise of the Ottoman Empire. There were great captains who managed to halt the Turkish advance for a time, but their influence never lasted long.

But that does not mean that Timur had no effect on history. Think of how much further the Turks would have gotten if Timur had not interrupted them. It took a while to recover from the devastation that he wrought.

Skipping ahead in time, read up on John Hunyadi. If you went back in time and took him out of the picture I think that the Turks would have taken Vienna. Not only did he do more to stop the Turks than any other European captain, but he also seemed to have a clear eyed view of the deficiencies of European institutions. At the very least he understood the importance of establishing a professional army, and he was able to pass on a legacy of sorts to his son Matthias. His victories also gave Skanderbeg a chance to return Albania where he turned into one of the “heroes” who were instrumental in slowing down the Turkish advance.

But like most of other “heroes” his heirs were not able to sustain his legacy. The institutions that Hunyadi tried to start were not able to take root. And in the end Hungary did fall to the Turks. But he bought Europe time.

There are few others that are worth reading about such as Mircea the Elder, Skanderbeg, and Jean Parisot de Valette. I would argue that those who came earlier like Mircea the Elder did more to affect history than those that came later like de Valette. To be sure, nobody expected de Valette to be able to hold on to Malta (least of all the Turks). But in de Valette’s time the Turks were at their peak and their intuitions were starting down the path of decline. So I don’t think the scope of Turkish conquest would have changed much if de Valette had not been around.

By contrast, without the time that Mircea the Elder provided for Europe there might never have been a Hunyadi or a Skanderbeg and the Turkish advance could have swept into Rome and Vienna. But Mircea the Elder is not as well known as de Valette is because the Balkans eventually fell to the Turks and remained under Turkish rule for a long time. One can only wonder how much differently history would have turned out if his advice had been followed at the Battle of Nicopolis.

Would it have really mattered in the long run if the Turks had managed to conquer more of Europe? I suppose the answer to that question depends on how much of the current dysfunctional nature of the Balkans you want to blame on their long period of Turkish rule.

But my point in bringing the history of the period up has more to do with speculation about the future than it does about speculation about the past. The institutions that enabled the Turks to own the Mediterranean degraded to the point that they became “the sick man of Europe.” Is it not possible that Western institutions will degrade in a similar manner? In an eye blink of time on historical scale, Europe was much like Africa is today. What is to keep it from regressing back from whence it came?

Such things seem farfetched now. But I do not think it ever crossed the Turks’ minds that the Europeans that they defeated time and time again would one day make most of the world their thralls.

I have a new essay up on my essay site called “On Holy Fear”. Well, at least it is new to my readers. I actually wrote it about this time last year (all except for a few paragraphs anyway). But it was so awful I could not stand to post it.

Sad to say, I reread it, and it is still awful. But I am going to post it anyway.

In a way, I think it makes an interesting case study. Its catastrophic failure is more revealing of my peculiarities than some of my essays that were more successful. I suppose that this could be a good thing.

In theory, I agree with Joel Dueck. We should cherish those moments that show us up as we really are. But sometimes I wonder which picture is really me? And how come none of them have ever served to make me kinder?

But I digress. “On Holy Fear” was not a “catastrophic” failure because it failed to live up to my expectations. It certainly failed to meet them, but that is not why I failed to post it. After all, “The Dangers of Historical Symbolism” was a great disappointment to me. But I posted the dang thing anyway.

“The Dangers of Historical Symbolism” at least had the virtue of alerting people to various historical personages who are commonly overlooked. Even if the essay fell short of what I wanted it to accomplish, I could still feel that if a person could overlook the bad writing they might get something of worth out of it.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing for “On Holy Fear.” It will educate no one and it failed to convey what I wanted it to convey. You would not even know the amount of work that I put into. It reads like a stream of consciousness piece. You would think that it was typed as I thought it and unrevised.

I think the fact that “Holy Fear” shows so little sign of having any work is what embarrasses me the most about it. If I had written it up in a day and posted it on my Ape Man site with all the rest of my poorly thought-out blog posts I would not have minded. But to have spent all the time on it that I did and have it still come out like it did was quite dispiriting.

My big mistake was to get cocky. I thought my writing skills had been improving since I had first started writing essays. So I thought I could get away with trying to express a feeling of sorts as opposed to an idea. I have never been good at expressing feelings but I thought that an expression of a particular feeling was a necessary follow up to “Spinoza, Einstein, and The Failure of Reason”.

You see, I knew that most people would see “Spinoza, Einstein, and the Failure of Reason” as some kind of post-modern argument that truth is unknowable. But that was not my intention at all. I firmly believe that the truth is knowable even if it is not provable. (The modern mind always gets those two things mixed up.) Put it another way, just because we cannot encompass the truth does not mean that we can never know any of the truth.

But since I do believe in a sort of common revelation (though I do not mean that term in the same way that most Christians do), so I believe it is possible to search for the truth. In fact, I think that it is imperative that we do so.

So I never intended for “Spinoza, Einstein, and the Failure of Reason” to denigrate the importance of Truth. Nor did I intend to dismiss those who search for the truth in the hopes of finding it. Rather, I wanted to stir up a kind of fear in the hearts and minds of those who feel that the truth matters. To accomplish this end, the false sense of authority that people impute to reason needed to be destroyed.

To most people, the desire to put fear into people’s hearts is a desire to dissuade them from doing something. But to my mind, the truth is dangerous and as such it is important to stay afraid when you pursue it.

But how do you express such a thought or explain why?

Fear is a feeling. Explaining its importance is like trying to explain the importance of love. You might be confident in your mind of it is importance. But try to explain it and all that will happen is that you will sound trite or overly mystical. And that in a nut shell is why I put so much effort into “On Holy Fear” for so little return.
I would write out paragraphs or pages and then I would turn around and delete them all because they were either incoherent or trite. No matter what tack I took the essay always seem to turn out too much like a sermon for my tastes. And I hate sermons.

But after wasting a lot of my time I finally gave up. I gathered up all my voices into an imaginary audience and I set out to write out my essay in the form of a sermon. It was a desperate act based on the theory that if you can’t beat them you might as well join them.

The fact that the wind was blowing hard at the time that I gave in provided me with notion of how to go about using my experience in the trades to explain the importance of fear. The result was that the first part of my essay was stupid and a touch overly macho, but at least it was somewhat coherent.

Unfortunately, explaining the importance of fear was the easy part (which is probably why I spent too much time doing just that). The more important part from my point of view was to explain why the truth was dangerous and why it should be feared even as it should be sought.

This was the part that defeated me. I just could not find the words to express what I wanted to say without sounding trite or incoherent. Since I am prone to overdoing things, I managed to do trite and incoherent at the same time.

In retrospect, I never should have tackled subject. Instead, I should have written an essay about Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Menno Simons. The lives of both of these men always come to my mind when I think of the dangers of the truth. Not because both them were oppressed by the authorities. But rather, how they both became enraptured with the power of the truth that it became a kind of idol to them. So great was what they found that they lost interest is looking for more. It must have seemed to them that they had already become so much greater than their contemporaries that there could hardly have been farther to go. As a result, the truth that they found ceased to become something that ennobled them and instead became something that damned them. (This is truer of Solzhenitsyn than Simons, but Solzhenitsyn has not died yet so maybe I should not rush to pass judgment).

Admittedly, that all seems more mystical than practical. Still, I think it would have been more profitable to write an essay explaining my perception of the life and works of one of those two men than it would have been to take my feeling in the abstract and try to justify it. Originally, I intended to work Solzhenitsyn into my essay. But his life and works deserve an essay all their own. Working him in as a bit player in support of a larger point just did not work. At least, it did not work the first 42 times I tried it.

Anyway, that is why the essay has its bizarre form. Originally I was going to cut the second part of the essay off and post what was left over at my Trade Watcher site. That probably would have been the best way of salvaging something halfway decent to post out of all the work that I put into it. But when I reread it I saw that it would take more work to edit it into a form that would make sense for my Trade Watcher site then it would take to vomit out a few more paragraphs and finish it off.

Laziness won out, naturally. Besides, I figure that a little public (or sort of public) humiliation every now and then is good for the soul.

I would like to think that putting it up will inspire me to make time to write another essay so that people don’t see “On Holy Fear” the first time that they go to my essay site. But I doubt it will work that way.

Changes in my work situation that happened right around when I gave up working on “On holy fear” mean I have less free time to work on my essays. And while that is not really much of an excuse, because you can always find the time for things that are important to you, it means that I have to spend that much more of my free time writing if I want to produce one. That’s work and I am lazy by nature.

I do intend to write at least two new essays this year. But I know myself well enough to know what that is worth.