In reaction to the terrorist attack in Copenhagen over the weekend, the editors of the Wall Street Journal declaim:

Stopping terrorism from becoming normal will also require describing accurately the jihadist threat. The Obama Administration in the U.S. has refused to identify Islamism—or even “Islamic extremism”—as the ideology behind the recent attacks on the Continent and the horrors in Syria and Iraq. Such obfuscation doesn’t help moderate and reformist Muslims, whose cooperation is essential to defeating jihadists. Copenhagen can set a counterterror example by calling the enemy by its name.

It’s not just terrorism our European cousins need worry about. violent crime, generally, has risen rapidly there over the last forty years even as it has declined here.

I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: the traditionally ethnic states of Europe need to decide what sort of countries they wish to be and take the steps to insure that’s what they become. One size won’t fit all and the various countries will need to make their own decisions. It’s up to them. It’s none of my business.

I can’t help but wonder in reading Robert Samuelson’s lament for the small returns to consumers from investments in information technology:

In a recent essay, economic historian John Komlos of the University of Munich argues that the economic value of new technologies has declined over time. A century or so ago, “the incandescent bulb replaced the kerosene lamp, and the value added [to national income] as well as to welfare in terms of reliability, convenience, health and safety [was] humongous,” he writes.

Similar transformations stemmed from many 19th- and 20th-century technologies: steel-making, the telephone, automobiles, airplanes, antibiotics, and radio and television.

The same is not true of much information technology, Komlos argues. Consider Facebook. “While social networking facilitated by Facebook is a popular feature of the Internet, basically it merely replaces older ways of socializing without adding much to our feeling of well-being,” he writes. “It monetized activities that were for the most part left previously outside of the market’s purview.”

why he’s selected information technology as his whipping boy? I agree with the general proposition: consumers aren’t realizing the surplus from technological innovation the way they did a century ago. Producers are. The entire question might be summed up as where are our flying cars? Or, alternatively, the future ain’t what it used to be.

However, the real place to look isn’t at information technology but at healthcare. It would take some convincing before I believed that the aggregate amount (in real dollars) that the federal government has spent on information technology research over the last 50 years amounts to what it pays to support the NIH each year ($26 billion). The Internet itself was invented on a government investment of less than $1 million. And I suspect that if you took the aggregate public and private amount that’s been spent on information technology research over the last forty years it’s dwarfed by what is spent on healthcare every single year. Are we that much healthier than we were in 1970? Life expectancy has only gone up by about 10% over the period and I’d attribute a lot of that to the reduction in smoking which is not healthcare. Said another way the return on investment in information technology has been pretty darned good while the ROI on healthcare is extremely small.

So, where are our flying cars? We’ve decided to spend the money on a few extra days or weeks of vegetative life for the elderly instead (that’s where a good chunk of the healthcare dough is spent—the last weeks of life).

However, the explanation I’d provide fits information technology and healthcare equally well. What we’re seeing is exactly what you’d expect when the government protects and subsidizes providers and relies on the providers to look out for the interests of consumers from the goodness of their hearts, for ethical reasons, and so on. Producers capture most of the surplus.

Is it my imagination or is the administration’s narrative on DAESH preparing to collapse? Consider:

Iraq’s Sunni blocs halt parliament activities after sheikh’s killing
Tribal leader: Iraqi troops in Anbar could ‘collapse within hours’
Sunnis may exit Iraq parliament after sheik’s slaying
Military and ISIS Clash Over Iraqi Town Near a Base Housing U.S. Troops

Let’s engage in a little thought experiment, purely hypothetical. That the war against DAESH in Syria is a bust is now so obvious it can hardly be denied. What are the implications for U. S. policy if the war against DAESH in Iraq is revealed to be equally ineffective? Do we arm the Kurds in the recognition that whatever arms we give them may well be captured by DAESH? I doubt the Turks will think much of our arming the Kurds since those arms could well end up being turned against them. Does the rhetoric begin the transformation from “degrade and destroy” to “contain” to something else? What happens? That’s a question. I honestly don’t know.

At Reason.com Steven Greenhut presents a status report on public pensions in California:

A newly published federal court decision found the California Public Employees’ Retirement System was merely banging the legal table with its “iron fist” in the Stockton bankruptcy case.

Judge Christopher Klein rejected the pension fund’s argument that California cities could not reduce pension benefits even in bankruptcy. The decision could dramatically change the way pensions are handled in future bankruptcy proceedings, even though the judge upheld the city’s workout plan, which leaves existing pensions untouched while “impairing” creditors.

The judge was clear: When California cities go bankrupt, pensions can be cut. After Klein made that point in his verbal ruling in October,CalPERS shot back in a statement: “The ruling is not legally binding on any of the parties … or as precedent in any other bankruptcy proceeding ….” Now it seems legally binding and precedential.

California Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for the fix that state and local governments find themselves in. If Illinois’s ruling Democrats had a lick of sense they’d seize the opportunity the election of Republican Bruce Rauner has presented them to place the blame for solving Illinois’s public pension problems on Rauner while continuing to posture on it. In other words they should fight but not too hard.

Just in time for President’s Day, Jonathan Bernstein takes note of the most overrated and underrated presidents:

My list of overrated would include Kennedy, Reagan and Wilson, and perhaps Jackson, but I’d add Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. For underrated, I usually say Grant, but I’ve also sometimes added Harding and Ford. I do wonder whether those suggesting that Ike and Truman are underrated are behind the curve by a few decades about how those presidents are viewed.

While I note that these lists are heavily colored by mythology and political affiliation, I think that certainly the most overrated president of my lifetime and probably one of the most overrated overall would have to be John Kennedy. I also a president who is conspicuous by his absence from the article. Where’s Lyndon Johnson?

When the glare of the Baby Boomers’ hatred of Lyndon Johnson (and their love for Kennedy) has passed, I think that flinty-eyed scrutiny will reveal that many of the worst aspects of the Kennedy-Johnson administration will be laid squarely at Jack Kennedy’s feet while some of the best of the period will be attributed to Johnson.

I found this interesting:

Barack Obama ranks mid-pack at 18th, just behind George H.W. Bush and ahead of James Polk. His average “overall greatness” rating, on a 0 to 100 scale, comes in at 58, just a bit above average. Obama scores well on “integrity,” but only a little above average on legislative, diplomatic and military skills. He’s also rated the second-most polarizing (behind George W. Bush).

IMO Obama’s star has already passed its zenith. He’ll always have his adherents but in 75 years when his strongest supporters have passed from the scene I strongly suspect that, right with George W. Bush, he’ll be considered a poor-to-mediocre president. I might be wrong but I won’t be around to see it.

In his most recent column David Ignatius points out something I wish more Americans recognized:

But Kurdistan also has some mundane problems, starting with corruption. The country is run by traditional political parties dominated by the Barzani and Talabani clans, who have historically controlled the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the PUK, respectively. Having the right connections, and greasing them with some cash, has become a way of life here.

I am puzzled by the fascination that so many Americans seem to have with the Kurds. I think they’re being misled. Sure, the Kurds aren’t Arabs—they’re Indo-Europeans as are the Iranians. I can’t help but see the Kurds’ “political parties” as tribal factions gussied up in democratic trappings. IMO there are reasonable concerns that the Kurds are presenting a democratic sideshow rather than real liberal democracy and what we’re seeing is just clans, tribalism, and autocracy promoted as the seeds of a modern society.

The editors of the New York Times in 2011:

There is no perfect formula for military intervention. It must be used sparingly — not in Bahrain or Yemen, even though we condemn the violence against protesters in both countries. Libya is a specific case: Muammar el-Qaddafi is erratic, widely reviled, armed with mustard gas and has a history of supporting terrorism. If he is allowed to crush the opposition, it would chill pro-democracy movements across the Arab world.

The editors of the New York Times today:

Libyans who have been fighting since the end of the 2011 civil war must take steps to reconcile and start the arduous process of building a functioning state. Western and regional leaders have limited time to put pressure on them by offering incentives and support for those willing to chart a new course. “Libya is falling apart. Politically, financially, the economic situation is disastrous,” Mr. León said. “I don’t think the country can bear a process of months.”

The collapse of civil order in Libya and the rise of Islamist groups and other criminals there was a foregone conclusion when the United States began its bombing campaign there in 2011, a campaign supported, admittedly reluctantly, by the Times’s editors. And today in 2015 if there are any “pro-democracy movements across the Arab world” they’ve gone underground. If the Times’s editors are sincere about their concern for Libya now, they should support whatever means might be required to effect their goals, regardless of the domestic political consequences. Anything else is magical thinking.

My concerns about the alleged “hereditary meritocracy” aren’t the same as Paul Caron’s:

Intellectual capital drives the knowledge economy, so those who have lots of it get a fat slice of the pie. And it is increasingly heritable. Far more than in previous generations, clever, successful men marry clever, successful women. Such “assortative mating” increases inequality by 25%, by one estimate, since two-degree households typically enjoy two large incomes. Power couples conceive bright children and bring them up in stable homes—only 9% of college-educated mothers who give birth each year are unmarried, compared with 61% of high-school dropouts. They stimulate them relentlessly: children of professionals hear 32m more words by the age of four than those of parents on welfare. They move to pricey neighbourhoods with good schools, spend a packet on flute lessons and pull strings to get junior into a top-notch college.

I have a number of problems with that including:

• Not all smart people are well-to-do.
• Not all well-to-do people are smart.
• There is a natural predisposition to want your children to be at least as successful as you’ve been and to take steps to see that happens.
• There’s a rising body of scholarship suggesting that emotional intelligence, social and emotional capabilities, are better predictors of success than cognitive abilities.
• Emotional intelligence tends not to be tested for.
• Emotional intelligence while apparently somewhat heritable is not as heritable as cognitive intelligence see here.
• After two standard deviations there’s not much correlation between Q and financial success. There may even be an inverse correlation.

My SAT scores are the same as Bill Gates’s (but reversed). My income and wealth aren’t a hundredth of his.

In ancient China jobs in the massive civil bureaucracy were predicated on passing the civil service examination. That meant that in theory the smart kid of a peasant could get a guaranteed well-paying job for life. In practice the system was corrupted so that the children of the rich, regardless of innate ability, always passed. IMO that’s the way any “merit” system will inevitably work out.

I’ve mentioned before that my practice is to keep my nose out of the political issues in states other than my own and out of those in countries other than my own for that matter. Judging by the recent editorial in the New York Times opposing Illinois Gov. Rauner’s move to oppose non-union members being forced to pay “fair share” taxes, 7/8s of which go to political contributions to politicians who support public employees’ unions, the Time’s editors are not nearly as discreet:

Allowing nonmembers to get union benefits without paying fair-share fees would tempt dues-paying members to drop out. Union coffers — and bargaining power — would be weakened. Ultimately, all working people would suffer, because collectively bargained pay increases in unionized workplaces tend to lift wages in nonunionized ones, as companies compete for employees. Anti-unionism, which has become increasingly entrenched in recent decades, correlates with stagnating and declining wages. As unions have been harmed, not only by market forces but by policies that deliberately weaken them, income has flowed increasingly to those at the top of the economic ladder rather than to workers.

For now, Governor Rauner has instructed state agencies not to deduct fair-share fees from employees’ paychecks. The unions are expected to challenge the governor’s order in court. The attorney general of Illinois, Lisa Madigan, has not supported the governor’s stance. She will have the opportunity to intervene in any lawsuits to defend state law against the governor’s overreach. The end game, however, is more likely to play out in the Supreme Court.

Nowhere in the Times editorial is there any hint of Illinois’s problems or how the Times’s editors would go about solving them. That is intellectually bankrupt and morally reprehensible. Either butt out or stand up to the plate, NYT.

The New York Times has staked out a unique position for itself as local New York City newspaper, national newspaper, and guardian of left of center shibboleths everywhere. Its editors might become better informed before sticking their noses into other states’ business.

Illinois has one of the lowest levels of state contribution to education in the nation. It has the lowest credit rating of any state. It has one of the worst public pension problems in the nation. Its ROI on federal tax dollars is the second to lowest of any state—lower than New York or California. It has the highest rate of outmigration of any state. When Illinois raised its income tax, revenues did not increase proportionally to the increase but flight from the state increased, suggesting that tax increases were not a solution to Illinois’s problems.

Public employees’ unions present a thorny issue with a number of competing rights including the right of association, the right to representation, the public’s right to fair and honest services, and the right to honest government. Political contributions from public employees’ unions from dues and “fair share” taxes collected through the power of the government effectively recycle tax dollars into political contributions and are inherently corrupt.

Gov. Rauner has thrown himself on the grenade and it will be up to the courts to sort it out. Unless they’re willing to propose a workable solution to Illinois’s public pension problems, the fruit of decades of political mis-, mal-, and nonfeasance in Illinois, the editors of the New York Times should stick to New York.