I disagree with the fundamental premise of Ahmed Rashid’s article at the New York Review of Books, “Afghanistan: It’s Too Late”:

When Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, James Mattis, was called before the Senate Armed Services Committee this week to testify about the conflict in Afghanistan, he was unusually blunt: “We are not winning in Afghanistan right now,” he said. The Taliban have been on a dramatic offensive, he acknowledged, the security situation continues to deteriorate, and the Afghan government holds considerably less territory than it did a year ago. In other words, prospects for any sort of positive outcome are as remote as they have been in this sixteen-year war—the longest war in American history.

Yet Trump—and Mattis’s—solution to this unwinnable war seems to be once again to send more troops. On Tuesday, Trump announced that the military itself would be given full authority to decide how many troops it needs. (By leaving all decisions in the hands of the military, he has abandoned the usual inter-agency consultations, especially with the State Department.) And Mattis is talking about a review to be completed in July that could add as many as 5,000 troops. It may be too late.

He assumes that some alternative course of action (presumably on the part of the United States) could have led to a better outcome for the Afghan people. There is no such course of action. At least not in the near term. There never has been.

Your exercise for today is to

1. Read Richard Ebeling’s post at the Foundation for Economic Education, “How Marx Got on the Wrong Side of History”. Here’s a snippet:
   

   Now in the twenty-first century, many of the readers of the trends of history are fearing the envelopment of parts of Europe by Islamic fundamentalism, or the rise of China as the new global power with a winning model of a form of authoritarian managed, crony capitalism, or the devolution of the United States under the pressures and forces of populist socialism, fiscal bankruptcy, and “progressive” political correctness. It does not have to happen that way.

   There is no “right side of history” in the Hegelian and Marxian sense. Those on the political left who, today, continue to use this rhetoric of right and wrong sides of history merely use an attractive catch phrase that gives them a feeling of possessing a moral high ground and that can easily intimidate those who are told that “progressive” policies – a kinder and gentler use of words than “socialism,” “collectivism,” “tyranny,” or “command” – represent progress.

2. Relate that to Whig history, the belief that there is an inevitable progression to ever greater liberty and enlightenment.

There’s more than one way to be on the “wrong side of history” and one of them is to believe that history has a side. History is not determined by materialism as Marx would have had it or spiritualism or any other -ism. It isn’t determined at all.

While I think that Jason Riley’s observations, quoted from his book at the New York Post, are correct as far as they go:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was followed by large increases in black elected officials. In the Deep South, black officeholders grew from 100 in 1964 to 4,300 in 1978. By the early 1980s, major US cities with large black populations, such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia, had elected black mayors. Between 1970 and 2010, the number of black elected officials nationwide increased from fewer than 1,500 to more than 10,000.

Yet the socioeconomic progress that was supposed to follow in the wake of these political gains never materialized. During an era of growing black political influence, blacks as a group progressed at a slower rate than whites, and the black poor actually lost ground.

The story he tells is one of a black population that pursued political power rather than economic power, helping a few black office holders rather than most blacks. The story I’d tell is somewhat different.

I think that what happened is that the avenues that other groups like the Irish and the Jews used to better their economic circumstance have been systematically closed to native born American blacks. Employment of blacks in both the public and private sectors is lower relative to their numbers in the general population than it is for whites.

A case in point is the agricultural sector. Forty years ago the orange pickers, peach pickers, and other agricultural workers in the Southeast were overwhelmingly black. Through a combination of self-interest and anti-black racism those workers today are overwhelmingly from Mexico and Central America. What happened is that when they attempted to organize for better wages black agricultural workers were replaced practically overnight by Mexican and Central American workers, mostly illegal. I don’t believe it’s due to black laziness. I think that’s a canard. I think it was a combination of the wages, the organization, and racism.

Even within the black community native born American blacks haven’t prospered as they should have. It’s completely anecdotal but 40 years ago my mom had the thankless job of being responsible for what was euphemistically called “staff balancing” for the St. Louis public school system. She noticed at the time that black teachers and administrators were disproportionately African and Caribbean. She attributed it to their accents. In other words the bigotry is not just due to the color of their skins but against Standard Black English and the affect that accompanies it. Rationalize that how you will but it’s bigotry nonetheless.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal point to support for apprenticeship programs as a step in the right direction:

President Trump directed Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta last week to streamline regulations to make it easier for employers, industry groups and labor unions to offer apprenticeships. Many employers provide informal apprenticeships for new workers, but the Labor bureaucracy regulates and approves programs whose credentials are recognized industry-wide.

About 505,000 workers are enrolled in government-registered apprenticeships. The programs typically pair on-the-job training with educational courses that allow workers to make money while honing skills in fields like welding, plumbing, electrical engineering and various mechanical trades. While construction apprenticeships are common, training programs are growing in industries like restaurant and hotel management.

Nearly all apprentices receive jobs and the average starting salary is $60,000, according to the Labor Department. That beats the pay for most college majors outside of the hard sciences. Last year’s National Association of Colleges and Employers survey estimated the starting salary of education majors at $34,891 and humanities at $46,065.

How do you reconcile that with these facts?

For decades the cultural and economic assumption has been that Americans will be better off with a college degree. This is still true overall, and economic returns to education have risen. This is especially true for those with cognitive ability who acquire skills in growth industries like software design or biological sciences. Politicians have responded by subsidizing college almost as much as they do housing—with Pell grants, 529 tax subsidies and more recently debt forgiveness.

which is what I’ve been saying for decades and been writing about during the lifespan of this blog. Here’s how I would suggest reconciling those two apparently conflicting sets of facts.

First, not everyone will benefit from a college education. Just about 10% of the population will, leading to the obvious conclusion that the enormous degree to which we’re subsidizing higher education is an error.

Second, we’re not just subsidizing higher education. We also subsidize the incomes of bankers, lawyers, teachers, social workers, physicians, and many other college grads. How much would they earn without the subsidies? There’s no way to tell. We only know that presently their incomes are subsidized.

Third, we’re penalizing other workers with our education, trade, environmental, and other policies. What would the incomes of truck drivers, workers in the hospitality sectors, and other sectors be if we weren’t importing millions of workers from other countries? Again, there’s no way to tell. We can reasonably surmise that they would be higher but that’s about it.

My conclusion is that the dream that some have of all Americans getting college educations to follow high-paying jobs that don’t exist should be recognized as the fantasy that it is. We will need a varied, diverse economy for the foreseeable future, one in which the majority of people work at jobs that don’t or at least shouldn’t require college degrees.

The editors of the Washington Post cast their steely-eyed gaze on the heart of the problem with a single-payer system for the United States:

The public piece of the American health-care system has not proven itself to be particularly cost-efficient. On a per capita basis, U.S. government health programs alone spend more than Canada, Australia, France and Britain each do on their entire health systems. That means the U.S. government spends more per American to cover a slice of the population than other governments spend per citizen to cover all of theirs. Simply expanding Medicare to all would not automatically result in a radically more efficient health-care system. Something else would have to change.

With monopoly buying power, the government could tighten up on health-care spending by dictating prices for services and drugs. But the government already has a lot of leverage. A big reason it does not clamp down now on health-care spending is that it is hard to do so politically.

and

To realize the single-payer dream of coverage for all and big savings, medical industry players, including doctors, would likely have to get paid less and patients would have to accept different standards of access and comfort. There is little evidence most Americans are willing to accept such tradeoffs.

None of this should come as a surprise. Just as we spend much, much more per capita on health care than any other country in the world, mile-for-mile building and maintaining roads costs significantly more in the United States than in Germany, France, or Japan. There may be a reason that people in the United States trust their governments less than people do elsewhere. Our government is less worthy of our trust.

There are any number of explanations for health care’s high costs. Our political system. Our legal system. Our laws. Our people. Their behavior. Expectations both on the part of providers and patients. Our circumstances. If reforming health care were easy and painless we’d’ve done it already.

My view, since the failure of Bill Clinton’s attempt at health care reform has been that cost control must come first. That will require basic structural changes in our health care system well beyond changing who pays for health care. It will be fought tooth and nail by everyone with a stake in how health care is provided today. Which is everyone.

Fathers are in short supply here at Chez Schuler. Both my wife’s father and mine are deceased. I have not been blessed with fatherhood. Father’s Day here is a fairly somber affair.

I thought I’d commemorate the day by posting a picture of my dad. This is a picture of my father and three of my siblings. The occasion is either his birthday or Father’s day, the picture was probably taken by another of my siblings, and I’d guess it was taken about fifty years ago.

He was a fine and much beloved father, taken from us far too soon. Within a year or so of this picture he had died. He was formal and dignified in his speech and comportment, gave us love verbally and in his actions every waking moment of his life. I rarely heard him utter a cross word and I never heard him use coarse or profane language. He was clever, funny, wise, and courageous. He taught us how to think (like lawyers, of course). He taught us how to treat others—invariably with consideration and respect. The enormous zest he took in living was a model for us.

The reports and surmises surrounding the collision of the USS Fitzgerald with the container ship ACX Crystal in the shipping lanes south of Tokyo on Friday night are becoming increasingly bizarre. From the Wall Street Journal:

Some former military and commercial shipping captains speculate that the Fitzgerald may have failed to follow international regulations that require ships to give way to other vessels to their starboard, or right side.

“Unless the destroyer lost steering control, which is unlikely, it should have given right of way to the container ship,” said Yiannis Sgouras, a retired captain of tankers and cargo ships who worked in the world’s busiest trade route from Asia to Europe.

Others caution that there are potentially many other contributing factors to the collision. Tracking data sent by the cargo ship, the ACX Crystal, showed it reversed course around 2:05 a.m. local time, shortly before the time of the collision given by the U.S. Navy of approximately 2:20 a.m.

However, Nippon Yusen K.K . , the Japanese shipping company that operates the 728-foot-long ACX Crystal, has stated that the collision occurred around 1:30 a.m. That discrepancy hasn’t been resolved.

I don’t see how all of that can be true. We’ll need to wait until the facts are clearer before reaching any judgments.

Clausewitz wrote

“War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.”

Apparently, that dictum applies to more than war.

There’s a fun article at The Economic Times on the history and development of momos, dumplings that are a staple of Indian street food:

Whether it was invented in Tibet or in Nepal, the Indianisation of the momo is now complete. A food-loving Bengali friend’s only child is named Momo, savvy vendors have inevitably synthesised two extremely popular fastfoods to come up with the tandoori momo, a worthy addition to the expanding fusion genre that includes Chinese chaat, chilli paneer and Szechwan idlis.

I find the author’s suggestion of a Mongolian origin for the dumpling credible. However, it could also be an instance of multiple discovery.

A couple of years ago a restaurant characterizing itself as a “Nepal-Indian” restaurant opened within easy walking distance of my home. In addition to a number of staples of Indian cuisine it offers several different varieties of momos.

If you read it as I did, I suspect you’ll find this post at The Fiscal Times simultaneously interesting and depressing. Here’s its main argument:

Gallup defines the 76 million millennials as people born between 1980 and 1996 – now the largest generation in the U.S. And they are from a different planet than, say, baby boomers. Baby boomers like me wanted more than anything in the world to have a family with three kids and to own a home — a job was just a job. Having a family and owning a home was the great American dream.

Millennials, on the other hand, place “my job” equally or even ahead of “my family” as their dream. So, because their life is more focused on work, they need to draw more from their work environment. They have their best friends at work — including best friends who are customers. They want meaningful work and to stay with an organization that helps them grow and develop.

Everything has changed.

What does all of this mean for reversing world productivity trends? It means that we need to transform our workplace cultures. We need to start over.

To summarize Gallup’s analytics from 160 countries on the global workplace, our conclusion is that organizations should change from having command-and-control managers to high-performance coaches.

The change will immediately save massive costs by wiping out the wasteful practice of filling out forms and checking management boxes.

Why “high-performance coaches”? Because millennials demand development over satisfaction. They demand ongoing conversations over annual reviews. They demand strengths-based discussions over weakness-based “gap” discussions that produce zero results.

I think there is no prospect for that whatever, at least not in the near term. Among other reasons I was hired to do just that, provide high-performance coaching, by my present employer. I’m not being allowed to do it because it’s just in too great a conflict with the business’s principles and policies of operation.

The reason I don’t think there’s much prospect for it is generally weak management. Top management is generally there for the wrong reasons, jealous of its prerogatives, and its objectives are opposed to a paradigm change from work as punishment to work as collaboration. Despite being a 21st century business the company I’m working for is the most 19th century company I’ve ever worked for.