The Economist thinks it knows how to reduce abortion . . . eh, not so much

Last updated on: December 6, 2016 at 9:00 pm By Jane the Actuary

“How to Make Abortion Rarer” — that’s the title of an article in this week’s Economist. And — no surprise — their solution if for women everywhere to “see the light” and start using hormonal contraception rather than condoms, and for governments to make these drugs and devices more widely available, and free of charge.

Before they get to that, they claim that legal restrictions on abortion have no effect, based on a Lancet study that claimed to have determined that “abortion is as common in countries where it is illegal or allowed only to save a woman’s life as it is in those where it is provided on demand.” (This study is paywalled; here’s a write up from the BBC and another from the Christian Post; near as I can tell, from memory as well as these articles, it is far too simplistic to say, “abortion restrictions have no effect” because there’s so much else going on with poverty levels, culture, etc., that you can’t simply classify every country in the world into two groups and draw conclusions from it.) They point to one country in particular, South Korea, where abortion is nominally illegal but widely available.

The article then cites various countries in which there is a strong cultural dislike of hormonal contraception. The Greeks, reportedly,

commonly believe that the pill and other hormonal contraceptives cause infertility and cancer. They also distrust intrauterine devices (IUDs), possibly because they have been taught that tampons are unhealthy.

Also,

In South Korea fewer than 5% of women use the pill because they think it is harmful to ingest artificial hormones.

and

In plenty of countries, including Ireland and Russia, more than a third of married couples who use contraceptives rely on condoms. In Japan that share is an astonishing 90%.

despite the fact that condoms have an 18% failure rate. (That is, 20% of users will fall pregnant within a year — this is slightly more pessimistic than the WHO figure of 15%.)

So step one in the Economist plan is to persuade women to overcome their cultural resistance to hormonal contraception.

Step two is to make the contraception free of charge. They write:

A Russian woman who wants an IUD has to pay for the device and for the appointment to have it inserted. Abortions in state hospitals, by contrast, are free. Half of the 16 European countries in the IPPF review provide no reimbursement for contraceptives; none fully covers all methods. Even in some countries with generous social welfare systems, including Germany and Italy, women have to pay for contraceptives, no matter how low their income.

This is despite contraception being cheap for governments to provide. England’s National Health Service (NHS) offers every type of contraceptive free to everyone (better-off people must pay part of the cost for other prescriptions). Its buying power means it can pay less than £10 ($12.50) for a year’s supply of the pill and just £18 for an IUD that prevents pregnancy for five years. England has one of the world’s highest rates of contraceptive use.

But here’s where their argument fails: they include a graphic with abortion rates in selected countries. There are no numbers, so you just have to estimate from the graph’s legend, but the abortion rate for the U.K. looks to be about 16 per 1,000 women of childbearing age. The U.S. is slightly higher on this graph, maybe 17. And Germany, which the Economist reports require women to pay out-of-pocket? Their rate is about 8.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APackage_of_Lutera_Birth_Control_Pills.jpg; By ParentingPatch (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Is Kim Kardashian white?

Last updated on: October 3, 2016 at 7:57 am By Jane the Actuary

Maybe not.

That is, according to a USA Today article, the Census Bureau is proposing adding a new racial category to the census, to cover Middle Eastern & North African-origin people, who up to now had been defined as “white.” According to the article,

Under the proposal, the new Middle East and North African designation — or MENA, as it’s called by population scholars — is broader in concept than Arab (an ethnicity) or Muslim (a religion). It would include anyone from a region of the world stretching from Morocco to Iran, and including Syrian and Coptic Christians, Israeli Jews and other religious minorities.

But the Census Bureau, which has been quietly studying the issue for two years, also has gotten caught up in debates about some groups — such as Turkish, Sudanese and Somali Americans — who aren’t included in that category. Those are issues the White House is trying to resolve before adding the box on 2020 census forms.

But, of course, if you think about it, it’s rather odd that Turks wouldn’t be included if Syrians or Iranians, say, are (the Turks are hardly European!), and the Turks and Armenians are neighbors, after all — Armenia may be its own country now, but the Armenians killed in the Genocide, and those who fled in its aftermath, were an ethnic minority in Turkey. Hence, it doesn’t seem a stretch to say that Kim Kardashian, of Armenian ancestry, could be declared non-white.

(And what about the Kurds? And Jews now living in Israel who had immigrated from Europe — but whose ancestors, millennia ago, left the Middle East? Or Jews now living in Europe, but, of course, with ancestors from the Middle East?)

And why are they making this change? For a variety of political reasons — in order to count Middle Easterners and Arabs, to determine whether a congressional district needs to be gerrymandered on their behalf, for example, or to determine if they’re being discriminated against, or measure their health outcomes or income relative to other groups. And for a feel-good reason, because many such individuals don’t like being labelled as “white.”

The impact? If nothing else, all those predictions about whites becoming a minority — that is, less than 50% of the population — come true a lot sooner. But this reclassification is likewise an indicator of the ultimate meaninglessness of these categories, and the fact that they are all about politics, not anything that has any real “truth” behind it.

But what’s peculiar about this article in particular is that this is actually old news — or, at least, Pew reported that the Census Bureau started the process of making this change over a year ago. And what’s also interesting is that they are, according to this older article, no longer using the word “race” at all, just asking, “Which categories describe [the respondent]?” Those categories are:

White
Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin
Black or African American
Asian
American Indian or Alaska Native
Middle Eastern or North African
Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander
Some other race, ethnicity, or origin

Which does’t remedy my old gripe that “Hispanic” really ought to be renamed and ought to be a matter of whether your origin is (primarily) that of the indigenous peoples of Latin America, not asking about the language of your country of origin. I suppose the new question seems to have eliminated the requirement, to be “American Indian,” that one be registered with a tribe, since the sample language in the Pew article suggests that Mayan or Aztec are possible “American Indian” categories, so that a Guatemalan, say, who identifies primarily as indigenous and not as a Spanish speaker, would perhaps be expected to check “American Indian.” (Though it’s hard to believe someone would do so.) But what about the typical immigrant from a Mexican village, of mostly indigenous ancestry?

Anyway, it’s all very silly.

Yes, there are historic uses of the concept of “race” in the United States: “black” meaning someone with dark skin color, from subsaharan African, “Oriental” referring to Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, and others with an “Oriental” appearance with characteristic eyes.

And the Census Bureau has constantly tinkered with the adjustments to its labels — see this 2012 Slate article, which describes old categories such as octoon, and incidentally observes that the “Hispanic” category can be selected by those with a strong “Hispanic” identity as well as those who feel no attachment at all but are just trying to follow the instructions.

But it does make the whole concept of the United States becoming “majority minority” pretty irrelevant, if that’s the case only because the Definers of who counts as a “minority” determinedly preserve and expand that category when assimilation and intermarriage would have otherwise moved people steadily into the “white” label.

My preference? Re-write the question as follows:

From what major geographical region do you or your ancestors originate? If your ancestors have themselves migrated from one region to another in the recent past*, use their original region. If your ancestors have come from multiple regions, use the predominant one.

(*By which I mean Argentines whose ancestors hailed from Germany, or South Africans with Dutch ancestry, or Kenyan nationals with Indian ancestry, for example; you might have a better way of phrasing this than “recent past.”)

And then you can provide choices such as Europe, North Africa, Subsaharan Africa, Middle East, Asia, North America, Central/South America, and the Pacific Islands. Heck, you can follow this up with a second box for people to mark their “secondary ancestry” in the case of biracial folks.

That gives us meaningful information, without keeping the Census Bureau in the business of defining and perpetuating concepts of “race.”

image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AKim_Kardashian_2%2C_2012.jpg; Eva Rinaldi [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Speaking of strange hyphenizations . . .

Last updated on: July 30, 2016 at 9:17 pm By Jane the Actuary

Yeah, this is more of an annoyance than anything, but I observed the other day that “Asian-American” had become, in media stylebooks, a racial descriptor rather than an identification of an ethnicity (which it couldn’t be, in so far as there is no one single “Asian” ethnicity).

(To be clear: the official Census racial label is just “Asian”, which means, “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.” Note that the Middle East doesn’t qualify: Iranians and Iraqis are officially white.)

Now there’s a little CNN slideshow that proves my point.

It purports to be a listing of Asian-American actors, as a companion to a piece objecting to their underrepresentation in the American film industry. But here’s there list (details from Wikipedia entries):

John Cho – born in Korea, move to the U.S. as a child
Lucy Liu – American born to Chinese-immigrant parents
Ki Hong Lee – born in Korea, move to the U.S. as a child
Michelle Yeoh – Malaysian-born, of ethnic Chinese ancestry, and (apparently; Wikipedia’s unclear) still living in Asia and primarily working in Asian films
Harry Shum Jr. – Costa Rican-born to Chinese parents, moved to the U.S. as a child
Ming-Na Wen – Macau-born, moved to the U.S. as a child
Steve Yeun – Korean-born, raised in the U.S.
Ziyi Zhang – a Chinese actress with some American filmography
Kal Penn – American-born to Indian-immigrant parents
Constance Wu – American-born to Taiwanese-immigrant parents
Randall Park – American-born to Korean-immigrant parents
Vincent Rodriguez – American-born
George Takei – yeah, the George Takei
Brandon Lee – son of Bruce Lee and likely the only reason he made it on this list, as he only starred in a few low-budget films before his death.

Now, the first thing that’s noteworthy is that virtually all of these actors are immigrants or children of immigrants, which is to be expected for a group that, in general, has grown fairly quickly and recently due to immigration that, really, only got underway post-1965. And it’s also to be expected that disproportionately-few children-of-immigrants would set their sights on Hollywood. And, what’s more, the entire story of “oriental” (to use the non-PC word) representation in Hollywood is complicated by the very significant film industries in such countries as India, Korea, the Philippines, and China, all of which make it likely that prominent “oriental” actors will to a certain degree come from these alternate film industries, and have name recognition there, rather than be “homegrown” talent. (Side note: the Chinese pilot portrayed in Independence Day: Resurgence was, in fact, a Chinese actress with the stage name of Angelababy.)

But look again at CNN’s list: two of these people don’t belong: according to Wikipedia, Michelle Yeoh and Ziyi Zhang are not “Asian-Americans” at all, but instead a Malaysian and a Chinese actress, respectively, who have acted in Hollywood as well as local films.

Which is the pitfall of using the label as a racial identifier.

And when neither evil is “lesser”?

Last updated on: July 22, 2016 at 6:28 am By Jane the Actuary

After 5 weeks of travelling, staying in equally-many rental apartments, and dealing with jet lag as well, twice earlier this week I woke up at night trying to remember where I was, and it took me a few minutes to realize that I was actually in my own bed. Now the vacation’s over and we’re back to real life, a mountain of mail, work projects to settle back into — and the realization that Trump 2016 is unfortunately also a part of real life, not just a bad dream.

And what a miserable convention to return home to — one speaker after then next unable to truly promote Trump for his policies and left with bashing Hillary instead. Though I have to admit I haven’t watched all too much of the speakers.

But Trump’s recent interview with the New York Times? Ugh. Makes it pretty difficult to stick your head in the sand and say, “surely he wouldn’t be that bad!”

Consider that, rather than raising the concerns that everyone else has with Erdogan’s upping up the authoritarianism in Turkey, he shrugs with an “eh, who am I to judge?” Not kidding.

SANGER: Erdogan put nearly 50,000 people in jail or suspend them, suspended thousands of teachers, he imprisoned many in the military and the police, he dismissed a lot of the judiciary. Does this worry you? And would you rather deal with a strongman who’s also been a strong ally, or with somebody that’s got a greater appreciation of civil liberties than Mr. Erdogan has? Would you press him to make sure the rule of law applies?

TRUMP: I think right now when it comes to civil liberties, our country has a lot of problems, and I think it’s very hard for us to get involved in other countries when we don’t know what we are doing and we can’t see straight in our own country. We have tremendous problems when you have policemen being shot in the streets, when you have riots, when you have Ferguson. When you have Baltimore. When you have all of the things that are happening in this country — we have other problems, and I think we have to focus on those problems. When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.

Then he discusses his attitude towards NATO: he’d discard longstanding US military commitments based on the claim that that a country under attack hadn’t been pulling its own weight by reimbursing the U.S. for our costs in maintaining military bases abroad.

If we cannot be properly reimbursed for the tremendous cost of our military protecting other countries, and in many cases the countries I’m talking about are extremely rich. Then if we cannot make a deal, which I believe we will be able to, and which I would prefer being able to, but if we cannot make a deal, I would like you to say, I would prefer being able to, some people, the one thing they took out of your last story, you know, some people, the fools and the haters, they said, “Oh, Trump doesn’t want to protect you.” I would prefer that we be able to continue, but if we are not going to be reasonably reimbursed for the tremendous cost of protecting these massive nations with tremendous wealth . . .

And he rambles on about Korea and seems to suggest that if we hadn’t had our military there, then there would have been a unified Korea or — well, to be honest, I can’t make much sense out of this rambling:

SANGER: Well, keeping the peace. We didn’t have a presence in places like Korea in 1950, or not as great a presence, and you saw what happened.

TRUMP: There’s no guarantee that we’ll have peace in Korea.

SANGER: Even with our troops, no, there’s no guarantee.

TRUMP: No, there’s no guarantee. We have 28,000 soldiers on the line.

SANGER: But we’ve had them there since 1953 and ——

TRUMP: Sure, but that doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t be something going on right now. Maybe you would have had a unified Korea. Who knows what would have happened? In the meantime, what have we done? So we’ve kept peace, but in the meantime we’ve let North Korea get stronger and stronger and more nuclear and more nuclear, and you are really saying, “Well, how is that a good thing?” You understand? North Korea now is almost like a boiler. You say we’ve had peace, but that part of Korea, North Korea, is getting more and more crazy. And more and more nuclear. And they are testing missiles all the time.

Incidentally, here’s data on military spending by NATO countries, where the target is 2%:

and, of key non-NATO countries, per the World Bank, South Korea spends 2.6%, and Japan 1.0% — but, then again, Japan’s constitution, which the US dictated to them after World War II, prohibits having a military, so they call theirs “self-defense forces.”

So Trump is nuts. He’s a wild card, he’s got no comprehension of foreign policy and just throws out crackpot ideas as if he’s been listening to Rush Limbaugh without paying much attention, and maybe that crazy history teacher that spends class time rambling on about conspiracy theories, with a dose of Bernie Sanders in there. The best case scenario is that he’s not actually interested, and delegates the whole thing to Pence.

But — I just can’t vote for Hillary.

For all that appears to be the grown-up in the room — well, it’s not as if she has a compelling foreign policy track record. As much as Trump seems to be fond of Putin, it was Hillary who came to Moscow with the infamous Reset Button. And she was part and parcel of the Iraq withdrawal and the failed Arab Spring that gave us today’s refugee crisis. As much as Trump’s seriousness in immigration enforcement is questionable, Clinton has outright said that she will not take any enforcement actions against anyone, hasn’t she? And as far as domestic policy is concerned, it’s not a selling point to tell me that she’ll manage to accomplish things that Trump won’t, since all of the things that Hillary wants to accomplish are things I disagree with.

Beyond which, the corruption issue matters. The private server shows wanton disregard for national security in order to advantage herself. The Clinton Foundation, and the money flowing into it from all manner of sketchy sources? Sure, the line repeated by Clinton supporters is that if she truly was corrupt, she’d have been caught by now, but the world doesn’t work that way.

Which leaves me hoping for — well, a miracle isn’t really the right word, but some dramatic change between now and November. It’d be wrong to say that one hopes for a sudden heart attack, so maybe instead let’s hope that Trump wakes up one morning and realizes that in no way is he ready to be president, nor does he actually want to put in the work that the job requires, and hastily calls a press conference to bow out of the race.

Of course, that’s unlikely to happen.

Which leave me with, well, not voting. Or, at least, only voting for the down-ballot races.

And don’t tell me that refusing to vote is helping to elect X; it’s not.

So if you’ll excuse me, I have a busy night lined up: walk into town to get a treat with the boys, then pull weeds until it gets too dark or buggy, then send my youngest off to bed and read until I finally suck it up and take care of cleaning up the kitchen and running a load of laundry. And, yes, I’ll check on the reports in the morning.

UPDATE:

So I read the speech late last night; nothing new or surprising in it. What I wrote pre-speech stands.

Image: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump; By Michael Vadon [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

M.A.D., 2016 edition

Last updated on: June 1, 2016 at 1:11 pm By Jane the Actuary

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AOperation_Upshot-Knothole_-_Badger_001.jpg; By Photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

You remember MAD, right? (I put the periods in the title so that it’s clearer that it’s not that I’m mad about something.) The concept that, because each of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. maintained a nuclear triad with second-strike capability, neither would launch a first-strike nuclear attack because of the certainty that the other would retailate. Mutual Assured Destruction — and it seemed to have worked pretty successfully.

I’m thinking of this because Obama’s speech at Hiroshima (see my prior post) has inspired, not just the usual “we had to do it” essays but a contrarian viewpoint, coming across my facebook news feed, making the claim that, regardless of how much longer the war would have lasted, it was still not justified to have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because it is immoral to target civilians, regardless of whether your opponent has done so first. Hence, the atom bomb was immoral. The firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden was wrong. The conventional bombing of cities across Germany and Japan was immoral — only conventional warfare, in which your army directly confronts the enemy’s army, as well as, perhaps, bombing runs limited to weapons factories, are acceptable, even if you’re the “good guy”.

Now, this almost reads as if I’m building a straw man here. But here’s some reading from a fellow Patheos blogger.

And there are two issues that I’d like to explore.

First: why, exactly, is it that we make the differentiation between civilians and military? Consider the Nazis: their civilians were as brainwashed to support Hitler’s ideology as their soldiers. And, on the other hand, their soldiers were typically conscripts, not volunteers.

Second, the entire concept of MAD relies on the retaliatory targeting of civilians. Had the unthinkable happened, there would have been no national debate, of course — a second-strike capability, if the first-strike was as large as was assumed to be, required immediate action. But in the year 2016, we’re more concerned about an attack from a rogue actor. If the North Koreans launched an attack on Seoul, would we obliterate Pyongyang? If Iran attacked Tel Aviv, would we wipe Tehran off the map? (Well, OK, in that case, the Israelis might not even need our help.) And if ISIS got their hands on a nuclear bomb, what would our retaliatory target be?

For your consideration.

Image: a 1953 nuclear bomb test. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AOperation_Upshot-Knothole_-_Badger_001.jpg; By Photo courtesy of National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

On Obama’s Hiroshima speech – and a sense of history

Last updated on: May 29, 2016 at 8:52 am By Jane the Actuary

On Friday, May 27, President Obama, in Japan for the G-7 summit, made a trip to Hiroshima and spoke at a wreath-laying ceremony.

Here’s the speech transcript from the New York Times.

That speech has been roundly criticized by the right, for instance, in this commentary calling it “one of the most repulsive speeches in history,” by Ben Shapiro. Obama, we’re told, should have told the Japanese gathered there that it was their own damn fault for starting the war, that it was no worse than the destructive power of the firebombing that leveled all the other major cities, and that these bombings saved lives by ending the war; had it not been for the atom bomb, an invasion of the mainland would have cost untold numbers of lives — the figure commonly used is a million American soldiers and unknown numbers of Japanese, who were preparing to fight with only sticks for defense, military and civilians alike, due to a “never surrender” credo.

Now, there are longstanding issues in Japan around the unwillingness, among a significant segment of the population, to acknowledge that Japan was the aggressor, and the tendency to downplay Japan’s actions, both in education (e.g., the longstanding textbook controversies) and public life, so it’s of course not ideal that Obama might have given them some support. But at the same time, it was (especially for Obama) a brief set of remarks, so not exactly well suited to a nuanced articulation of the situation.

And it’s also true that there are revisionists in the United States who hold the view that the atom bomb didn’t save any lives at all, because Russia was just about to join the war and the Japanese would have seen the reality of their situation, and the notion that the Japanese were as a society so brainwashed that they, to a person, would have held to the “never surrender” credo is just as mistaken as the fear that the Germans would have done so. Truman, in this view, dropped the bomb because he didn’t want Russia to share in the victory, wanted to keep Japan under American control, and wanted to have an excuse to demonstrate America’s new power to the world.

There are others who don’t necessarily believe this view but who still think that the atom bomb’s destructive power is of such a different magnitude that Truman should have never unleashed it on the world, and should have ordered the invasion despite the loss of American lives it would doubtless incur.

Does Obama, in his remarks, suggest that Truman was wrong, that he was either mistaken in what would have happened without the bomb, or that he was evil and unleashed death on Japanese civilians due to his depravity? That’s what various pundits are saying (e.g., here at Breitbart), but I find the speech to vague to lend credence to that accusation.

In any case, that’s a “what difference, at this point, does that make?” sort of situation, to second-guess the decision; debates about the morality of the atom bomb ought to take place in the present, and, so far as I know, there’s general agreement that a first-strike nuclear attack would be unspeakably evil, but retaliatory attacks are a different matter altogether.

What I find unfortunate about the speech is that it lacks a meaningful sense of history. It’s odd, really — Obama acknowledges that war has been a part of the human experience since the dawn of time:

Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind.

and he recognizes that the 100,000 who died at Hiroshima, and the similar numbers at Nagasaki, were only a small part of the death toll of World War II.

In the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die. Men, women, children, no different than us. Shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death. There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war, memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism, graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity.

He further acknowledges that, since the end of World War II, there have been profound changes:

The United States and Japan have forged not only an alliance but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed people and nations won liberation. An international community established institutions and treaties that work to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.

He might have acknowledged, as well, that it was (just) not the destructive power of the atom bomb that led to this desire to work for peace, and that the nations of Europe, following World War I and its destruction, itself on a scale previously unknown, had the same goals, and that the outcomes of that war were not just the punitive Treaty of Versailles but the League of Nations as well, however ineffective it proved to be in the end, and a desire for peace among the British and the French that led to the proclamation of “peace in our time” itself. (And remember that, however much World War I tends to be portrayed as a powderkeg of alliances that just, almost naturally, blew itself up, it is nonetheless the case that — sorry, Germany — the Central Powers were the aggressors, invading to the east and west.)

In short, our (comparatively) recent past is a remarkable point in time, in which attitudes about war have changed dramatically, and the civilized nations of the world have long given up the notion that war is a perfectly reasonable method of gaining territory and advantage for one’s country. The trouble, of course, is that not every country is indeed “civilized” — dictators and terrorists and authoritarian regimes the world over are still perfectly willing to do so, whether they proclaim “God is on our side” or are more open about their ambitions of conquest. And, among “civilized” countries, military intervention continues in the name of protecting the oppressed, and disputes about what’s right and what’s wrong are not simple black and white matters of morality but difficult questions about unintended consequences.

But Obama, in his speech, doesn’t seem to acknowledge that:

We must change our mind-set about war itself. To prevent conflict through diplomacy and strive to end conflicts after they’ve begun. To see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition. To define our nations not by our capacity to destroy but by what we build. And perhaps, above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.

But we have already changed our mind-set about war itself. We already strive to prevent conflict through diplomacy. We do see interdependence as requiring cooperation. In this respect we are not at a turning point. But we must also understand that it’s no easy task, when there is evil in the world, and that no amount of peaceful wishes emanating from the United States or Japan, no number of paper cranes, will prevent, for instance, a North Korean nuclear build-up, and no understanding of us as “members of one human race” will prevent such countries as Iran, Russia, and China from building up their power and influence through threats and proxy war.

Is what’s going on here a matter of Obama wanting to see himself and his role, as exceptional (“Obama exceptionalism” instead of “American exceptionalism”), so that he’s unable to acknowledge the progress of the past? I don’t know. But we can’t move forward if we don’t really understand where we are in history in the first place.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A%22Fat_Man%22_Nuclear_Bomb_Mockup_-_Flickr_-_euthman.jpg; By Ed Uthman from Houston, TX, USA (“Fat Man” Nuclear Bomb Mockup) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Is Germany an “unfair trader”? (Spoiler alert: no)

Last updated on: May 1, 2016 at 4:01 pm By Jane the Actuary

It’s like a scene out of high school, in which the slackers seek to sabotage the nerds because the class is graded on a curve, and the nerds’ success imperils the slackers “B.” But it’s playing out in international affairs instead, as the U.S. has put Germany on its new “unfair trading partners” list.

Why? Because Germany dares to be fiscally responsible.

As described by Deutsche Welle (but curiously, of much less interest to U.S. media; this cbsnews.com article was the only one I could find in American media), countries are placed on this new watchlist if they meet two of three criteria for assessing “unfair play in internatonal trade.” These are

maintaining a significant trade surplus with the United States, maintaining a current account surplus larger than 3.0 percent of the country’s GDP, and repeated intervention in the foreign exchange market to keep its currency from appreciating.

China, Japan, and South Korea join Germany on the list for meeting the first two criteria; Taiwan was added for large current account surpluses as well as “persistent purchases of foreign exchange in 2015, keeping the New Taiwan dollar low against the US dollar.”

There are no concrete penalties for being placed on this list, just “consultations” as well as a “greater threat of sanctions in the future.”

But the basis for placing Germany on the list astounds me:

the US Treasury said the country’s big trade surplus with the United States and Germany’s large budget surplus “represent substantial excess saving.”

That surplus, the Treasury reported, could be used to support German demand, and in turn reduce “the current account surplus and [contribute] markedly to the euro-area and global rebalancing.”

Yes, the German trade surplus is something to be envied. They have managed, with their industrial giants such as Siemens and Daimler, plus the vaunted “Mittelstand” companies as well as expertise in robotics, computing, pharmaceuticals, etc., to remain strong exporters even in the face of globalization and imports from China and other low-wage countries. And their budget surplus is equally impressive, especially given that not all that long ago, prior to the Hartz reforms in the early 2000s, Germany was known for high unemployment and a stagnant economy.

And their success in bringing the budget into balance is all the more impressive given the role Germany has played in the Greek bailouts and, of course, the costs they’ve absorbed in the massive refugee influx, not to mention the massive expenditures in the former East Germany in the ’90s.

So it’s embarrassing to see the U.S. criticize their success, and demand they become as profligate as the United States in order to even things out and make everything “fairer.” One hopes that the government officials tapped for these “consultations” do so with at least a bit of shame.

Image: https://pixabay.com/en/container-ship-cargo-ship-cargo-560789/ (public domain)

From the library: One Child; The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiement, by Mei Fong

Last updated on: March 30, 2016 at 8:40 am By Jane the Actuary

The title is somewhat misleading: this book is not a detailed history of the One-Child policy but addresses, instead, various aspects of the policy and its consequences, and its connection to Chinese culture, and attitudes toward family, and toward death. To be honest, with respect to China as a political entity and geopolitical force, it’s easy to feel schadenfreude about the future of the not-so-rosy country, even if you feel sympathy for actual Chinese people.

Unlike many authors of recent half-memoir, half-narratives of China, Fong is not an American transplant seeing the world through the eyes of translators, or growing in understanding of the culture as the author’s language skills grow (there were a number of such memoirs a while back); instead, she’s an ethnic Chinese who grew up in the Chinese community in Malaysia, so that she can understand the Chinese (and, importantly, can understand Chinese) more deeply, while at the same time having an extensive background in reporting on China for American readers — she was a China correspondant for the Wall Street Journal during the time frame which she chronicles in the book, centered around the 2008 Olympics. (How she made it from Malaysia to American journalism isn’t specified; according to Wikipedia, she got a graduate degree from Columbia and moved up the journalism ranks after that.)

She begins her story with the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which I recall primarily from reports of shoddy construction killing large numbers of children whose schools crumpled. But it was also an early test case for the one-child policy, and, despite the various exceptions to the policy, it had been implemented there to such a degree that 2/3rd of families are single child families (p. 3), and 8,000 families lost, not just a child, but their only child, and many attempted sterilization reversals. For these families, and others across the country whose only child dies, it is not merely a matter of being dependent on children in old age, or fearing lonliness — there is a particular shamefulness about having no children, that makes it all the more devastating.

How did the one-child policy begin? Technocrats — indeed, rocket scientists — proposed it, without the input of demographers (or actuaries!) who didn’t exist in China at the time, or were at any rate, after the Cultural Revolution, lacking in the basic tools of the trade. It was officially launched in 1980, roughly a decade after the West began fretting about population growth. (Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, the United Natoins Fund for Population Activities was launched in 1969, The Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth in 1972, and in the 70s, other Asian countries had campaigns such as forced sterilization in India, as well as campaigns in South Korea and Singapore (it seems to me that I remember Singapore having such elements as not just propaganda but limits on maternity leave and other benefits past two children).

In China, Mao for much of his time in power took a “the more the merrier” approach, and the population lept from 540 million in 1949 to 800 million 20 years later (p. 47). But in the 70s, he likewise changed his tune, and the government began a “Later, Longer, Fewer” campaign, which reduced TFR from 6 to 3 births per women over that decade. Why they they move to the more radical and coercive One-Child policy? Because planners were convinced that it was the only way to bring about economic growth — though Fong disputes the claim that it was the radical curb in birthrates that produced its economic growth in any case.

What’s been the impact of the policy? Some of the impacts are well-known, often-discussed. The “Little Emperors” — the only children of only children, who were feared to become coddled and spoiled, expecting participation trophies just for showing up, have, really, the opposite problem: their parents have invested heavily in them, and they feel the burden of those expectations weighing them down. The bachelors in rural villages, who can’t find wives because at every level of society, it’s expected that women marry up (and thus, high achieving women have the same difficulty finding husbands — all the more so because of Chinese cultural beliefs that women past their late twenties are too old to find a husband).

It’s also the case that, for all that rural women try desparately to have additional children, and are victims of forced abortion as a result, the increasingly urban population has adapted so well to the one-child norm that, even with the official announcement of a two-child policy (but nonetheless one in which those two children must be “in-plan”), these urbanites do not want more than one child: the stakes are too high, the investment too costly, in ensuring that your child succeeds (sound familiar), for families to feel that they have the luxury of more than one child. What’s more, the massive numbers of rural parents who have left for jobs in cities, children under the care of their grandparents, are not conducive to larger families, either.

And the long-term impacts? A country that will grow old, without having achieved the wealth to enable it to support its elderly. Already, the seemingly endless supply of rural young adults willing to work endless hours in factories, and be roused from their beds for double shifts when Apple makes a design change (that is, the inhumane treatment of workers that we’re told is necessary for Apple to build its devices, and the reason why this can only be done in China), is decreasing.

But here’s an element of that demographic transition that was new to me: China, for all its reputation as a place where the old are showered with respect, has had those Confucian traditions sundered by the twin forces of communism and urban migration. What’s more, discussions around end-of-life care and planning are hindered by a cultural reluctance to talk about death, and deeply-ingrained supersititions. In addition, children who have neglected their parents in their old age, often insist on every lifesaving measure possible, even as death approaches, to save face and prove that they have still done their filial duty.

For all that China has been rather successful in inculcating atheism in its people, people still look to past traditions for guidance in what to believe about what happens after death, Fong says.

But I think the reason for this abohorrence [superstitions about death] stretches beyond materialistic culture and has its roots in the Chinese system of beliefs around what happens after death. Broadly speaking, most Han Chinese hold beliefs taht are an amalgamation of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucionism, with a good dollop of folk religion and ancestor worship sprinkled in. In general, it results in a vision of the afterlife similar to this one: you still need money and crature comforts, you still have bureaucracy and hierarchy, and you must slog on in a more-or-less eternal cycle of rebirth. Unlike the Muslim and CHristian creed, there is very little vision of a soothing Eternal Rest. (p. 162)

Offering items for the dead — paper representations of goods — still continues, and families still believe they need offspring to care for them after death in this way.

Fong concludes her book with descriptions of wealthy Chinese families who, believing that it is all-important to have one’s child be as talented and successful as possible, have turned to surrogacy, in the United States, with academically-achieving egg donors; and she believes that, as techonology develops to select the “best” offspring, it will come out of China.

But — to return to my initial statement — as an ever-increasing proportion of its population moves into old age, China will have sigificant problems to deal with. Will it take the “soylent green” approach? That seems a stretch. Will they try to centrally-plan their way out of it? Or will they bumble around and simply become weaker over time?

Time for a debate!

Last updated on: February 26, 2016 at 8:20 am By Jane the Actuary

Yes! I’m having another go at live-blogging! Stay tuned for updates!

Carson’s opening statement: “we will not solve our problems by attacking each other.”

Kasich: warm and fuzzy statement about America

Rubio: are we a the Party of Reagan, or do we prey on peoples’ anger and fears?

Trump: same statement of “we don’t win anymore as a country.” Borders are Swiss cheese. We are going to start winning again, believe me, it’s going to be a big, big difference.

Immigration: Trump would allow illegals to come back in. Mod: “is that amnesty?” “We either have a country or we don’t have a country.” Some will come back — the best of them.

To Cruz: what’s wrong with letting the good ones come back? Cruz: who’s been forgotten are those Americans who are losing their jobs or seeing their wages driven down. Example of Arizona: tough laws caused illegals to flee; wages grew afterwards, and state welfare spending dropped. I’ve led fight against giving citizenship to those here illegally.

Trump: speaking of Arizona, Sheriff Joe Aripaio endorsed me.

To Rubio: repeats his “before we do anything on immigration, we’re going to secure the border, visa overstays, etc. Then we’ll see what the American people are willing to support.” Then he cites Trump’s statements supporting amnesty in the past, today’s report that Trump hires immigrants rather than Americans at his hotel.

Trump: defending his immigrant hiring, as very seasonal, couldn’t hire Americans. Rubio: no, people were interviewed who wanted those jobs and couldn’t get them.

Cross-talk on Trump’s criticism of Romney about “self-deportation.” Rubio is actually getting into Trump: “you’re the only one who’s been fined for hiring illegal workers.” Trump denies, Rubio says, “people can look it up on google. Tre haump Polish workers.” He had to pay fines. Trump’s defense is “that’s because I’ve hired people in the first place and no one elss.”

Wolf Blitzer to Cruz: what about the U.S. citizen children of deportees? Cruz says, “well, they can come back later” (that is, presumably going back to Mexico w/ Mom & Dad).

Cruz: during Gang of 8, Trump funded.

Oh, I got distracted for a minute. Now Cruz is laying into Trump: “enough with the cronyism, enough with the corruption.” Trump goes back to the claims of Cruz’s sweetheart loan.

Kasich: supports a guest worker program! Whoa! Really? Plus an easy legalization program. A promise of a 100-day agenda here. “Maybe pay a fine, maybe community service.” Carson: also supporting a “guest worker” concept, though it seems like he is considering the legalization as a transformation into guest workers, not a separate, additional guest worker program.

Back to Trump’s wall! Blitzer: everyone in Mexico says “that will never happen.” How are you going to make that happen? The wall is $10 – $12 billion. Mexico will pay for it! (I’m surprised he doesn’t say that a remittance tax will cover it, which I thought was the proposal.) A trade war? Mexico’s taking our jobs — happy to have trade wars.

Oh, now Rubio’s back but he’s only memorized a limited number of attacks. Back to the Polish workers, plus Trump clothing made in Mexico. And Trump’s bankruptcies. And Trump University.

Rubio certainly listened to everyone saying he needed to attack.

This is getting crazy. Trump calls Rubio on a real estate deal. Rubio says (shouts!) that Trump inherited millions.

OK — new topic. The Telemundo moderator (surprised at how heavy her accent is) asks Rubio about his about-face on DACA. Rubio says DACA will be cancelled, no one will be able to renew, and no new applicants. He knows people who are impacted, but it wasn’t presidential authority. And Rubio explains contradiction by saying, “no one gets deported right away, but they will with immediate effect be unable to renew permits.”

This is continuing: Rubio says that his Spanish-language interview was before he was a candidate for President; therefore, he said “DACA will have to end at some point” with more vagueness at that time because he didn’t envision being President and being able to cancel it.

Telemundo woman asks Cruz, “aren’t you missing an opportunity to reach out to Hispanics?” Cruz criticizes media definition that you can only be Hispanic if you’re liberal. Says he got 48% of the Hispanic vote. Hispanic values are faith, family, patriotism.

Rubio: we have to move past this idea that the Hispanic community only cares about immigration. They want their children to do better than themselves.

What’s her name cites the GOP report from after Romney that said the the party needed to implement legalization in order to get Hispanic voters.

Then, to Trump: new poll says 3 of 4 Hispanics don’t like him. Trump: I don’t believe anything Telemundo says. Hispanics know I’m going to bring jobs back. I’m going to bring a lot of people in: independents, Democrats. We are bringing a lot of new people into the Republican Party.

Now she’s really getting into this: Trump won among Republican Hispanic voters, but he’s doing poorly among the general population. Trump just repeats himself: “I will do very will with Hispanics.”

Blitzer: another topic! Yay, finally!

Hugh Hewitt asks about the Supreme Court, to Cruz, do you trust Obama to appoint a justice? Cruz: Democrats bat 1000 in terms of getting justices on the court who vote the way they want them to. (correction: my husband says the question was whether Trump would appoint a reliable judge.) Trump: Cruz supported Roberts, who ended up supporting Obamacare. Cruz then lays into Trump for having supported Democrats in the past.

Now we’re back to Planned Parenthood, and Trump is claiming they help women with cancer. Missed chance for Rubio or Cruz to jump in and say they don’t provide mammograms.

Now we’re into religious liberty, and Kasich saying, “sell to everyone” (ignoring the issue that it’s not simply about products).

Healthcare: Rubio says Trump supports the mandate. Rubio supports refundable tax credits, calls Obamacare a job-killer due to employer mandate producing reductions to part-time status. Trump says, “we’re going to have something better than Obamacare.” “We’re going to keep pre-existing conditions.” Dana Bash says “insurance companies say they need a mandate if they’re going to be able to cover pre-existing conditions.” Trump ignores, goes into cross-state insurance purchasing. Claims that insurance companies wanted the cross-statRubio jumps in: I led the effort to stop the bailout fund. To Trump: what *IS* your plan, besides getting rid of cross-state restrictions? Trump: that’ll be enough, because it’ll bring competition. Audience is cheering but I can’t tell if they’re pro-Trump or if this is jeering at him, and supporting Rubio’s exasperation. Rubio now lays into Trump some more: all I can here is, something like, “all he says is ‘we’re going to win, win, win!'” Bash says to Trump, “is there anything you want to add?” Trump: “No!”e restrictions, “insurance companies are making an absolute fortune” — but that’s not correct.

Kasich — has some kind of plan, but I’m not sure what it is. Now he’s being asked about the individual mandate, and his 1994 support: now he says it’s not feasible.

Carson: “health empowerment accounts” – not sure what he’s talking about except some variant on vouchers/credits, and a high-deductible plan. Now they’re getting really impatient and keep dinging the bell. “Let me just finish, ’cause I don’t get to talk that much.”

Cruz now wants to talk about Obamacare, and Blitzer lets him. Cruz: “I want to end Obamacare because it goes too far and kills jobs; Trump wants to end it because he thinks it doesn’t go far enough. He has a long history of supporting socialized medicine.”

Time for a break! What happened to commercials?

This is an immensely entertaining debate, and I’m about to the point where I have to get up and go pick my son up from driver’s ed.

Cruz pushes Trump to explain his plan: “It’s going to be private healthcare, but I am not going to allow anyone to die in the streets.” Cruz: who’s going to pay for it? Now, everyone’s just arguing!

Blitzer is desperate to get them to agree to move on. Taxes: Trump has a tax cut plan with high levels of cuts (didn’t know this!). How will he afford this? Economic growth, of course! “We will do my tax plan and it will be great.” What will you cut? Dept of education. common core. We waste money on environment protection. Blizer says that gets to 76 billion in savings. That’s not enough. Trump: waste, fraud and abuse. “We will cut so much your head will spin.” How can anyone believe him?

(here my husband took over while I ran out)

Kasich makes sense on the economy. Unfortunately, he has no chance.

On Romney’s ask for tax returns. Are accusations true? I filed statements as the first one; you learn nothing from tax returns. Filing late cost Romney “biggly”. The delay is due to him being audited right now.

Do you ask me every question? That’s ridiculous. Also: “The good news is that very few people listen to your radio show, Hugh.”

Rubio: I’ll release my tax returns tomorrow or Saturday. Nothing ineresting in there; and no audit.

Cruz: I’ll release my tax returns tomorrow; Trump being audited is a red flag.

Trump on not being liked “well, I win in the polls, can’t be that bad.”

Cruz going after Trump University. And on other issues. Trying his longest string of attacks yet.

(now I’m back)

Commercial break over. Foreign policy and national security.

To Trump: you said, “let me be a neutral guy.” how do you remain neutral when Israel is an ally? Trump: as President, there’s nothing I’d rather do than bring peace, and I think it serves no value to identify good guys and bad guys, and start demeaning the neighbors.” As a negotiator, I can’t do that if I take sides, but I am totally pro-Israel.

Cruz: I disagree with Donald and Clinton — they both want to be “neutral.” The notion of neutrality is based on “moral equivalence” but there is no moral equivalence between suicide bombers and their victims. I have led the fight to defend Israel.

Trump: I’ve been a big contributor to Israel over the years.

Kasich: I was in Congress for 18 years, on the Defense committee. The problem in foreign policy is that our allies and our enemies don’t know what we stand for. Even just now, something something North Korea (some news item that I missed).

Rubio: Trump’s position is an anti-Israel position because the Palestinians are not honest peace partners. I will be on Israel’s side every single day because they are the only pro-American democracy in the Middle East.

Trump: I am a negotiator, Marco is not. Rubio: foreign policy is not a real estate deal. More arguing. Trump goes back into making assertion after assertion.

Blitzer, onto North Korea. Kasich has supported regime change in North Korea. Would you risk war for regime change? If there was an opportunity to remove the leader. . . but I’m aware of the issues. Perhaps the Chinese can accomplish this. Weak answer.

Trump: $19 T in debt, we can no longer defend all of these countries — Japan, Germany, Korea. We have to start getting reimbursed for defending these countries. They’re selling us TVs, Mercedes.

Kasich: whoa, we are the leader of the world, we need to rebuild the military, but also reform the Pentagon’s bureaucracy.

Blitzer to Carson: how would you deal with North Korea? Oh, great. Now he’s whining about not getting called on. He wanted to say something about taxes, so he’s going to talk about taxes instead, and how he was never audited until after he spoke at the Prayer Breakfast. blah blah blah, I’m not paying attention. Let’s check the twitter feed while waiting for him to finish.

Hugh Hewitt: do you support the Syrian cease fire? Trump: it’s meaningless because no one’s adhering to it. Cruz: also skeptical. Russia’s position is strengthening b/c of Obama’s weaknesses. Problem with Rubio & Trump: both of them supported Obama’s policies, e.g., supporting regime change in Libya.

Rubio defends support of regime change: it was going to happen, if we helped, a chance of a better outcome.

I’m getting tired. More attacks: Trump bring up Cruz in Iowa, the “voter violation” and the “Carson’s dropping out” bit.

Rubio defends the FBI’s demand for Apple to comply with the court order; not a requirement to put a back door in, just a disabling of the “self-destruct” mode. Cruz agrees with Rubio here.

Q to Trump: why does Mexico need a border but Canada doesn’t? Simply not needed there and a much longer border so much harder to do. Segues into heroin in New Hampshire.

Q to Rubio on Puerto Rico: how do you explain your bankruptcy stance? Problem is it won’t solve anything. Economy isn’t growing; spending’s too high, regulation’s too high. Government has to get that in order first, then we can talk. Shouldn’t be a “first resort.”

Closing statements! Which are tiring so I’m not summarizing them.

Bottom line:

well, I wish that Carson and Kasich weren’t there; they really just distracted from the three-man main event. But Cruz and Rubio certainly listened to advisors and/or pundits who spent the entire day saying that they needed to attack Trump aggressively. I think the attacks were effective, for the most part, but, at the same time — you watch Trump repeating nothing other than “we will do this, and we will do that, and it’ll be great.” And you think, “how on earth can so many people be taken in by Trump?” Are the Trump supporters simply not watching the debates?

So there you go. A very long summary, typed in real time.

Did you watch? What did you see?

UPDATE: Reader Richard Perry says in the comments:

As aggressive as Rubio and Cruz were, they failed to tap into why Trump is clobbering them… There are a LOT of angry, upset Americans. Jobs are going overseas or immigrants are flooding the job market. The Middle East is a mess. People are tired of the Washington status quo. Cruz and Rubio offer nothing different. No matter what Trump’s positions are on the issues, he is an outsider and many voters see him as the only candidate that can shake things up in Washington….

I think that the Cruz/Rubio duo tried, at times, to do this, with Cruz justifying his “deport them all” stance with reference to Americans hurt by job loss/wage cuts, and Rubio pointing to Trump hiring guest workers for jobs Americans wanted, as proof that Trump’s just bluster. But did either of them get out a core message of “Trump is full of bluster but nothing more”? Did either of them communicate as a core message, “I want to help those who have been left behind”? Not so much.

Killing the goose that laid the golden egg, or, Culture Matters

Last updated on: September 5, 2015 at 10:15 pm By Jane the Actuary

Here’s the latest on the stream of refugee-migrants: as you may recall, upwards of 10,000 refugee-migrants from Syria as well as elsewhere, had made their way into Hungary and were determined to make their way to Germany, in order to register and seek asylum there, to benefit from Germany’s much-stronger economy; Hungary insisted instead that they register there, as the first EU country that these people had reached, following established rules, and prevented them from boarding trains to travel to Germany. After protests, demands, and a determined march, not for safety but to seek economic prosperity, Germany and Hungary both relented. As (misleadingly, but with pictures) the Daily Mail reported, they are now streaming into Germany, in chaotic scenes that are being reported as if these people are at last finding refuge, rather than moving from one safe place to another (more prosperous) safe place.

And countless bloggers, columnists, and news outlets are now reporting the situation along the We Must Do Something template, along with the It’s Unjust Not to Resettle The Refugees As They Wish storyline. (Remember, only a minority of refugee applicants in Germany in 2014 were Syrians.) Now the first thing the West Must Do is to decide what its strategy and its expectation is with respect to ISIS. Do we expect Syria to simply empty out, and do we believe that millions upon millions of Syrians must be resettled somewhere else, permanently? Or do they need only temporary refuge? Bloggers and tweeters have pointed to pictures coming from these refugee-migrants en route and arriving in Germany, and have observed that they are a very male crowd. Are the women disproportionately trapped in Syria? Or are they safe in refugee camps, but not as keen on making the trek further in hopes of furthering their economic situation? Or is this further evidence that these are economic migrants from a multitude of home countries, rather than people fleeing warzones?

At the same time, discussion has already begun on the further question of whether the rich Gulf nations should be doing more — or, rather, complaints have been stepped up, while recognizing that these countries, which already treat “guest workers” so poorly (little regard for health and safety, expulsion upon losing a job, and, with respect to poor employees working as laborers, servants, etc., unable to live together as families), are hardly going to bring in others out of the kindness of their hearts. (See yesterday’s post.)

But here’s the catch: these Gulf States are wealthy due to their natural resources. Whether any given national of those countries shares in that wealth directly, they do so indirectly via generous social welfare programs for citizens, national-ization (e.g., Saudi-ization) programs which have the effect of requiring that multinationals hire locals who may or may not show up for work, and other benefits. But the pie is fixed; for any one of these Gulf States to accept resettling refugees in a Western sense (that is, on terms other than those of guest workers) would mean sharing the pie with more people.

And I’ll state it again: the wealth of the Gulf States is due to their natural resources, not the culture of the people themselves. After all, it’s outsiders who do all the heavy lifting of transforming the oil into wealth in the first place, and (with the exception, to a limited degree, of Dubai) there’s little more than lip service given to the question of diversifying the economy.

But what about Germany? The economic strength of the country is very much due to its people. After all, its natural resources are rather ordinary: the “Ruhrgebiet,” the former economic powerhouse coalmining area, is a powerhouse no longer, and the coal mines have been closed. It’s got a decent amount of arable land, to be sure, and it’s not devoid of mineral wealth but it’s hardly been the key to its prosperity. And after World War II, despite the narrative that the Allies had learned from World War I and eschewed harsh reparations, France and Russia dismantled such factories as remained (France in the West, Russia in the East, of course), to leave an already devastated country even more so, until, in 1948, the simultaneous currency reform and Marshall Plan implementation helped them get back on their feet.

Culture matters. In Swabia, the part of Germany now largely the German state of Baden-Wurttemburg (as well as a slice now a part of Bavaria, including Augsburg, my husband’s hometown), there’s an expression, “schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue,” which is meant to express, as the Swabian’s self-conception and the stereotype the rest of Germany holds, the key characteristic of Swabians (see here for an English-language piece, or here for a German-language one): it’s generally translated as “work, work, build a house” and expresses the Swabians’ thriftiness. But it’s more than that: the word translated as “work” isn’t really that, “schaffen” means “to make” or “to create” and has more of a flavor of “do something productive” than simply “earn a living.”

Swabia is, by the way, the home of Daimler, maker of Mercedes cars as well as a whole host of other vehicle brands. And it’s the birthplace of the automobile.

As far as Germany as a whole, I will not claim special competence in describing its key cultural characteristics and how they contribute to its economic success. But it is clear to me that the culture of Germany is not the same as that of the United States. And neither is the same as that of Japan (see here for my reading of a book on the topic) or Korea, each of which, with different cultures, took different paths to prosperity (though the long-term prosperity of Japan is very much in question).

It’s practically an article of faith in the United States in 2015 that “diversity is our strength” (I voiced skepticism here), and that we have to respect all world cultures and have a certain understanding of them. But at the same time, we still gloss over cultural differences, and are too willing to resort to platitudes like “no culture is better than any other” or imagine that “culture” is limited to special foods or music or dance or celebrations, or perhaps recognize differences such as whether it’s polite to be on time or an hour later than the specified commencement of an event, but ignore the way culture is a mindset at a much deeper level.

If Germany admits 800,000 Syrians, or 8,000,000 Syrians, or some similarly huge number, this year or the next, or cumulatively over time, on top of Turks and other Muslims already living in the country, there is a very real issue of assimilation — and already-resident Turks are for the most part already poorly assimilated. It’s not about their being Muslim, per se, if they were as indifferently Muslim as most Germans are indifferently Christian. It’s about the sudden arrival of very large numbers of (mostly male) migrants who don’t speak the language and are by and large poorly educated in any language, and who, even if they learn German and become educated (and that alone is a huge task, much bigger than the simple provision of funds and social services), are unlikely to share in German culture.

It’s about more than sharing the wealth, though that’s part of it, as resettlement assistance risks overwhelming German finances. Especially considering how low Germany’s birth rate is (a steady 1.4 TFR for the past generation), a high rate of immigration (via asylum-seekers or otherwise) will change Germany, and it risks becoming merely a place name, without the culture that built up its economic power. Should this happen, the migrants who sought prosperity will have killed the goose that laid the golden egg.