I am not outraged over Facebook, Apple, and Google’s having removed Alex Jones and his site Infowar’s content from their sites. It is not censorship: the First Amendment limits the actions of the government and those are private companies. Frankly, I do not understand why anyone would be outraged over it.

There is a good backgrounder at The American Interest by Henrietta Horn on how Sweden’s welfare state developed over 150 years and why it is flagging now. Here’s a sample:

From the turn of the 20th century to the 1970s, Sweden’s GDP grew by an average of 2.4 percent—compared to less than 2 percent for the United States and Western Europe. Sweden’s GDP per capita soared from the global average in 1850 to double the average by 1930 and triple in 1965.

This export-fueled growth occurred in a peculiar political setting: From 1928 to 1991, Sweden was ruled by a single political party—the Social Democrats—for all but six years. This single-party rule presided over a corporatist state that was extremely friendly to large corporations, while building a cradle-to-grave welfare system on the back of very high levels of taxation. This stifled small business and entrepreneurship, but that mattered little as long as big industry and government provided sufficient employment for the population.

The Social Democratic “Swedish model” became in effect a hegemonic state ideology: a third, allegedly morally superior path in opposition to both Soviet-style communism and American-style capitalism. With this came a public rejection of all political or military alliances with a view to maintaining neutrality in wartime. In private, Sweden’s Social Democrats—who in the interwar period had taken a clear stance against communism—threw their lot in with the West, including far-reaching covert defense planning with NATO. But only a select few in the country’s military and political leadership knew this; the population at large, and the left-wing grassroots, did not.

Sweden is one of the European countries faced with a decision. Will it remain ethnically and culturally Swedish, will it become multi-cultural, or can it be multi-ethnic and still culturally Swedish? What does it mean to be culturally Swedish? I cannot and will not answer those questions for the Swedes. It is their decision to make and has serious implications whatever they decide.

I sometimes think that Lawrence Summers is the greatest comedy writer of our time. At Bloomberg View he rises to the defense of globalization:

Since the end of World War II, a broad consensus in support of global economic integration as a force for peace and prosperity has been a pillar of the international order. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall a generation ago, the power of markets in promoting economic progress has been universally recognized. From global trade agreements to the European Union project; from the Bretton Woods institutions to the removal of pervasive capital controls; from expanded foreign direct investment to increased flows of peoples across borders, the direction has been clear. Driven by domestic economic progress, by integrative technologies such as container shipping and the internet, and by legislative changes within and between nations, the world has grown smaller and more closely connected.

This has proved more successful than could reasonably have been hoped. We have not seen a war between leading powers. Global living standards have risen faster than at any point in history. And material progress has coincided with even more rapid progress in combating hunger, empowering women, promoting literacy and extending life. Every single day since 1990 there were an average of 108,000 fewer people in extreme poverty. Since the beginning of the 21st century, global life expectancy has increased by more than four months a year. A world that will have more smartphones than adults within a few years is a world in which more is possible for more people than ever before.

Take careful note of his measures of success: lack of war between “leading powers”, fewer people living in extreme poverty. These are very desirable goals. That “leading powers” is a very fuzzy, “no true Scotsman” sort of measure is waved away. Since World War II, 73 years ago, the United States has been at war in Korea 1950-1953, in Vietnam 1955-1975, in Zaire in 1978, in the Lebanese Civil War 1982-1984, in Panama 1989-1990, in the Gulf War 1990-1991, in Iraq 1991-2011, in Afghanistan 2001 to present, in Pakistan, in Somalia, in Uganda 2011-2017, in Iraq again 2014 to 2017, in Syria 2014 to present, in Yemen 2015 to present, plus a variety of smaller engagements and a 40 year Cold War with the Soviet Union. Said another way except for a few brief punctuations of peace we have been at war the entirety of the last 73 years.

Does it really matter whether Americans are being killed by “leading powers”, by tiny countries, or by terrorists? Or does it just matter that Americans are dying and we’re spending trillions? For goodness sake for most of that period we’ve had no near-peer. And we haven’t even touched on the several wars between China and India, by any reasonable standard “leading powers”.

And, while it is true that China and India are far better off, accounting for most of those taken out of poverty, consider the graph above. The “Gini index” is a measure of income inequality. Over that 73 years we have become drastically less equal.

In summary tens of thousands of Americans have died defending the global order, a relative handful of Americans including Dr. Summers have become very well off indeed while the rest of us have languished. By my standards globalization has been a complete flop for the U. S. If the rest of the world wants us to defend the order by which they are prospering and we have become a plutocracy practically unrecognizable as the country we were, they should make it worth our while.

Dr. Summers is unable to explain how that can happen.

In his Washington Post column today Robert Samuelson pronounces upwards mobility dead:

About 90 percent of children born in 1940 ultimately exceeded their parents’ incomes. That is, almost everybody. This makes sense; the babies born in 1940 were affected by both the 1930s’ Great Depression (which reduced incomes) and the post-World War II economic boom (which raised incomes). However, for children born in 1970, only 61 percent earned more than their parents, and for those born in 1980, only 50 percent did.

That’s a sea change. It suggests that we’re already at the point where many in the present and next generations of younger Americans won’t live as well as their predecessors. If current trends continue, that certainly will be true.

You can see the consequences among millennials, those born from 1981 to 1996. Their squeezed incomes have forced them to rearrange their lives. They’re marrying later, buying homes later, having children later and — to save money — living longer with their parents. What’s also surprising is that the biggest losers seem to be the children of the middle and upper-middle classes, precisely those who are supposedly most protected against adverse changes, according to a new study by Brookings Institution scholars Richard Reeves and Katherine Guyot.

“For many people, [economic success] does consist of doing better than your parents did,” they write. “This seems to have become steadily harder to achieve for those born into middle-class families in particular from 1950 onward.”

That is certainly the case with my siblings and me. More of us earn less than our family did growing up than earn more.

There are many reasons for the change. Trade with China is all but certainly one of them but it isn’t the only change. I think the decline of unions is more a consequence of the change than its cause but I seem to be in the minority in that belief.

I can’t help but suspect that abandoning middle class morals, mores, and habits are had consequences that the Me Generation didn’t imagine.

Chicago is in the national news again. And it is because of violence on the South and West Sides of Chicago. Again. From ABC 7 Chicago:

CHICAGO (WLS) — A violent weekend in Chicago left 10 people dead and dozens more wounded, police said.

Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson plans to hold a news conference at 11 a.m. Monday.

Despite the decrease in homicides over last year the violence continues at an unacceptably high pace. Gun control won’t solve this problem. The problem is caused by unemployment, desperation, and gangs.

Trust between the black community and the Chicago police is low, a situation created by decades of police abuse and malfeasance. Nonetheless more and better policing is really the only short term solution. Otherwise there will continue to be a steady stream of mostly black victims.

There’s an interesting article at The Conversation by Jean Twenge that considers the causes of the recent spike in depression and suicides among adolescents. Was it caused by smartphone use?

In a new paper published in Clinical Psychological Science, my colleagues and I found that the increases in depression, suicide attempts and suicide appeared among teens from every background – more privileged and less privileged, across all races and ethnicities and in every region of the country. All told, our analysis found that the generation of teens I call “iGen” – those born after 1995 – is much more likely to experience mental health issues than their millennial predecessors.

What happened so that so many more teens, in such a short period of time, would feel depressed, attempt suicide and commit suicide? After scouring several large surveys of teens for clues, I found that all of the possibilities traced back to a major change in teens’ lives: the sudden ascendance of the smartphone.

I suspect it is not smartphone use alone but the technologically-enabled isolation I’ve written about before. The adolescent years are important in the development of social behavior and try as we might to rationalize it, smartphones are not a substitute for face-to-face interactions. Or exercise for that matter.

Hat tip: The Moderate Voice

I strongly recommend that you read the article at The National Interest in which 14 experts give their views on how the relationship between the United States and China will unfold in the years to come. Most are pessimistic. Some of their views are diametrically opposed; they cannot all be right. For example, China permabear Gordon Chang believes that conflict between the U. S. and China is inevitable:

We call China “revisionist,” but “revolutionary” is more precise. Chinese state media outlets these days, like in the 1950s and 1960s, carry revolutionary statements. China’s media now fawn over Xi Jinping’s “unique views on the future development of mankind.”

What is so unique about the views of the regime’s supremo? In September 2017, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in Study Times, the Central Party School newspaper, wrote that Xi’s “thought on diplomacy” has “made innovations on and transcended the traditional Western theories of international relations for the past 300 years.”

Wang’s 300-year reference was almost certainly to the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, now recognized as the basis of the current international system of sovereign nations. Wang’s use of “transcended” indicates Xi is contemplating a world without states other than China, especially because Xi himself often uses language of the imperial era, when Chinese emperors maintained that they—and they alone—ruled tianxia or “all under heaven.”

This tianxia worldview, increasingly evident in Xi’s and Beijing’s pronouncements, is, of course, fundamentally inconsistent with the existence of a multitude of sovereign states. The Chinese view, breathtakingly ambitious, unfortunately drives many of Beijing’s belligerent actions.

I do not see how that view can be reconciled with Kishore Mahbubani’s:

Unlike America, China is not aiming for global primacy. It only wants to secure peace and prosperity for its 1.4 billion people. As a result, even after China becomes number one, it will not try to dislodge America from its claim of primacy. China is quite happy to uphold the rules-based international order that America and the West have gifted to the world. As Xi Jinping said in Davos in 2017, “We should adhere to multilateralism to uphold the authority and efficacy of multilateral institutions. We should honor promises and abide by rules.”

They cannot both be right.

I didn’t find that any of the experts’ views mirrored my own particularly well. I think the U. S. has bungled its handling of the relationship with China over the period of the last 30 years bringing us to the point where we are now. We have not insisted that China live up to its commitments; we have let it get away with outrageous behavior; we have insisted on playing by rules that benefit the Chinese authorities. We were in too great a hurry to grant China Most Favored Nation trading status. When the Chinese forced a U. S. military aircraft down in 2001, President Bush reacted with intolerable weakness. He should have closed all Chinese consulates, whittled China’s embassy staff in Washington down to an ambassador and a stenographer, and insisted that the Chinese ambassador enter public buildings via the tradesman’s entrance. Instead he offered a mumbled apology.

We have been tolerating Chinese military, political, and industrial espionage far too leniently for far too long. We have accepted Chinese extortion as the normal cost of doing business. We should be leading a movement to oust China from the WTO for its failure to live up to its commitments.

The latest outrage is that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, former chair of the Intelligence Committee, and present Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee had a Chinese spy as her driver and gofer over the period of the last 20 years. Heads should roll. His handlers and their superiors should be ousted from the U. S. The Chinese San Francisco consulate should be shuttered. My bet is that we’ll respond with characteristic weakness if at all.

I don’t think the present bad situation was inevitable. I think that the relationship between China and the U. S. could have been collaborative but not so long as the Chinese authorities view diplomacy and business as a zero-sum game which they very obviously do.

I’ve mentioned the neighborhood we lived in when I was very young before. We lived just south of a major street in North St. Louis. On the southwest corner was a brothel. On the southeast corner was a tiny grocery store, Penny’s. Penny’s was perhaps 15′ X 15′ with shelves from floor to ceiling containing canned, bottled, and boxed goods. I do not recall whether Penny’s carried perishables—we’ve talking nearly three-quarters of a century ago.

If you walked east from our street, in six or eight blocks you reached another vaguely north-south thoroughfare. Just south of the intersection was the barber shop where I got my first haircut. Next door to the barber shop was a drugstore. I don’t recall its name.

By the time I was seven or eight years old every so often I would walk down to the drugstore, purchase a comic book, and sit at the small counter at one side of the drugstore, drink a cherry coke, and read my comic book. Cherry cokes were not the noxious drinks then that the stuff you buy in a can are. They were made by squirting cherry syrup into Coca Cola. A coke was a nickel; the cherry syrup cost an extra penny. It was a small luxury but a luxury nonetheless.

Drugstore soda fountains are just memories now, happy memories from my childhood. In many ways they served the same function as fast food restaurants do now but without the commercial, industrial quality that today’s fast food restaurants have. Just as was the case with fast food in the 60s and 70s, many young people got their first paying jobs working at drugstore soda fountains.

The debate over “Medicare for All” goes on and, presumably, will through the 2020 presidential election. Today I’ve found a debate of sorts, an affirmative and negative argument. The affirmative is taken by economist Jeffrey Sachs at CNN. He states his case succinctly:

M4A would reduce health care costs for three reasons. First, Medicare pays hospital and doctors at lower rates than private insurers. Second, drug prices would be lower. And third, there would be administrative savings.

The negative is taken by physician Marc Siegel at The Hill. His arguments aren’t quite as clearly stated as Dr. Sachs’s but they boil down to a) it will inevitably result in rationing; b) there are other, less expansive means of addressing the problems with our present system and c) it will be opposed by physicians, insurance companies, and, in all likelihood, voters.

For 30 years I supported a single-payer system for the United States but over the last 20 years I have become skeptical. Without a commitment to cost control a single-payer system will be unaffordable and the singular lesson of Congress’s ritual of passing “doc fixes” to override their own affordability criteria is that there is no commitment to cost control.

I also find the arguments of both sides dismaying—facetious and laden with sophistry. There is no free market system here to defend. If costs are to be controlled some form of rationing will be necessary—we already have rationing. The savings in administrative costs are likely to be much lower than proponents of M4A suggest. The assumptions that produce savings under M4A are unlikely to materialize.

Most importantly, current proposals for “Medicare for All” are not really comparable with any system anywhere in the world other than, possibly, British National Health, because there is an explicit requirement for no cost-sharing measures.

Take Canada’s system, for example. Canada’s system is administered by the provinces, paid for through personal and corporate income taxes, and there are many things that Canada’s Medicare system does not cover, notably pharmaceuticals. Private hospitals, whether for profit or not, are something of a rarity. Furthermore Canada has much tighter immigration law than we do. In the absence of tight immigration controls there is a risk of underwriting the health care of the entire world.

France’s system by comparison is administered by the national government and covers even less of total expenses than the Canadian system does.

Germany’s system is tremendously different and administered by hundreds of insurance companies.

In other words there is no singular “single-payer” system to emulate. Every country has its own. That’s what makes pointing to the savings of single-payer facetious. Which system? And, importantly, they are systems. You cannot treat their features as a cafeteria.

The United States is vastly larger in population, enormously larger geographically, and not only more diverse than any European country it is more diverse than Europe. It is less centralized and far more individualistic. Those factors affect the politics of health care. It also affects the cost of administration since the cost of bureaucracies do not increase linearly but at n log n.

More Americans have private insurance than did in any European country when they adopted their social insurance-based systems. That affects the politics, too.

Health care was much cheaper when European countries adopted their systems and began controlling costs. And they do control costs and they do ration.

Finally, everything the government does is more expensive here than anywhere else. We pay more for every foot of bridge constructed and every foot of road built. Not to mention that our military costs more than any other.