Germanization = Liberalization?

The German program for the eurozone’s southern economies has relied on austerity above all other tools. Today’s New York Times carries a story that the Germans are refusing to open up a financial lifeline to the southerners in part because of their belief that a similar lifeline to the former East Germany failed during the 1990s. Without financial transfers from Germany to the less productive countries, the alternative answer is the well-known austerity, but what the Times draws attention to is another element of the German program: liberalization.

In contrast to austerity, which is self-defeating, there is some real merit to this other part of the German program, and it seems like a legitimate tool for achieving “convergence” in the European economies. Without constant state intervention, a single currency can only work if the countries participating in the currency zone have comparable economies. Europe clearly does not, with a high-production and high-employment north propping up a low-production and low-employment south. It will require structural reform, not austerity, to make the economies of Europe converge.

Der Spiegel reports that the Germans have some concrete ideas for structural reform, namely the internal liberalization of the southern economies. A six-point draft plan includes special investment zones, divestment of state-run enterprises, education reform, and “a loosening of provisions that make it difficult to fire permanent employees and to create employment relationships with lower tax burdens and social security contributions.” The full details are not revealed – obviously these are only four items out of the six – but it gives us a sense of where the Germans are headed.

It is heartening to see the terms of debate begin to change from cutting things to growing things. Francois Hollande’s victory over Nicholas Sarkozy in the French presidential election has eliminated German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s main ally in pressing for austerity. With France flipping from pro- to anti-austerity, Germany is forced to offer up other ideas. The Germans’ relentless demand that others be like them by emulating their fiscal conservatism has been a disaster for Europe; but conversely, if others choose to adopt elements of Germany’s structural reforms, the outcome could be quite positive.

In a previous post, I defended Germany’s internal economic arrangements from criticism that the country’s service sector was inefficient and illiberal compared to its manufacturing sector. Is it hypocritical for Germany to urge service market reforms when its own service sector remains highly regulated? Yes, but unlike with austerity, they’re actually right about this, so the hypocrisy shouldn’t matter. The flexibility provided by economic liberalization can be taken too far, as it was by neoliberals who deregulated the financial markets twenty years ago, but generally speaking it is a good thing. Rejecting a generally sound economic doctrine simply because it comes from a self-serving messenger is not good policy.

Furthermore, liberalization of their own service sectors may help the southerners recover some of their own competitive advantage within the EU common market. The Germans prefer to focus on exporting manufactures while keeping services tightly regulated? All well and good – it opens up an opportunity for Spain and Italy to liberalize their service sectors for the EU market that Germany has neglected. In a way, Germany is ceding a major slice of the EU economic pie to any country enterprising enough to take advantage of it.

So it is best to ignore the messenger and focus on the message. Germany has a very successful structural model for achieving the goals it sets for itself. If southern resentment can be set aside (resentment Germany bears its fair share of the blame for stoking), the more troubled EU economies might find a way to liberalize and then grow their way out of recession. Austerity is something that has been forced on the nations of southern Europe. Liberalization is something they ought to choose.

On the Interminable Suffering of Writer’s Block

Writer’s block is a bit like lying awake at three o’clock in the morning.

The drip-drip-drip from brain to word processor is irritating enough, like a leaky faucet, but to me the real torture is the helpless immobility. When I wake up in the middle of the night, my tried and true response is to do: absolutely nothing. I will lie there for hours, waiting to fall asleep, unwilling to turn on the light and read, because if I do, that will wake me up.

Writer’s block and insomnia have their own logic like that.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the pipeline, gentle reader. A disquisition on Afghanistan, a Game of Thrones-related rumination on historical theory, and a look at the post-Facebook world of online dating. It’s all there, in “draft” status on my WordPress dashboard. Some of you may have even heard that I am working on a PhD thesis. It’s true!  But you wouldn’t know it from the current output. All of these beautiful ideas, backed up somewhere around the I-66/495 junction of my mind.

Do I regret moving from Edinburgh? I do not. But unlike Sherlock Holmes, I cannot create a “mind palace” at will. There was something to be said for having my desk and my books just so, despite the drafty apartment and crappy weather. Now I sit at the table in my new dining room, while my mind looks over my shoulder waiting to see what the next words on the screen will be.

Should I turn on the light?

The Big Move

It’s been difficult posting on a regular basis over the past few weeks. I have been trying to continue to work on my PhD dissertation while also making a big move from Scotland back to the US. I am flying down to DC tomorrow, where I hope to be settled in by the end of the week.

The big move means that I need to decide whether to update The Dome’s artwork with something American-themed or maintain the Edinburgh skyline. Leave comments – in the best tradition of tinpot dictatorship, “you vote, I decide”!

Review: Game of Thrones Season 2, Episode 2 – “The Night Lands”

Last week’s season premiere of Game of Thrones was mostly reintroduction of key characters and concepts from season one, so I’ve held off on a review until this week’s episode. The premiere episode didn’t have a ton of “historical” material, but this week’s episode introduces one of the new cultures that will be seen this season: the Iron Islands, a dependency of the Seven Kingdoms located off of Westeros’ western shore, at the midpoint between Stark and Lannister territory.

The President’s Hand

The Veepstakes are on! With Mitt Romney’s nomination as the Republican candidate for President highly probable now that Rick Santorum has dropped out, the punditocracy has switched from stoking the Romney-Santorum embers to speculating on who Romney should name as his Vice President. While the ineptitude of this year’s Republican presidential field might lead some rationalists to conclude that a party that had a hard time finding a credible candidate for President might have an even harder time finding one for Vice President, George Will has taken time out from Obama-bashing to declare that the Republicans have a deep field of talent that sat out the primary campaign, any one of whom would make an excellent Vice Presidential candidate. In particular, he names Congressman Paul Ryan and Governor Bobby Jindal as the top candidates for the job.

In between his frothings over Obama as “the Huey Long from Chicago’s Hyde Park”, a “reactionary liberal” (whatever that means), and an “intellectual sociopath”, George Will occasionally makes a good point, and indeed, the meat between the bread of his Obama hate-sandwich (flavored with a light dash of misogyny) is a decent point that vice presidential nominees don’t swing elections by carrying their home states. He points out that there is no correlation between a vice presidential nomination and winning the nominee’s home state: in the past sixteen elections, the vice presidential nominee’s home state has been carried by the overall winner six times and lost ten times. What Will urges is that Romney not take into account his eventual Veep nominee’s home state but rather what assets he will bring as a co-wielder of executive power.

America, Iceland, Scotland, and the Crisis of the Judiciary

In late March, I attended the most recent roundtable discussion by Nordic Horizons at the Scottish Parliament. As I have mentioned in a previous post, the group is dedicated to raising awareness of Nordic governance as a possible example for Scottish reforms. This week the spotlight was on Iceland’s new draft constitution, which was being debated that evening in the Icelandic parliament. Professor Thorvaldur Gylfason, one of the authors of the draft constitution, presented an outline and took questions after.

As Professor Gylfason made clear, the underlying principle of the entire draft constitution is the importance of popular sovereignty and the accountability of the parliament to the people, in a way that was lacking in the years running up to the financial crisis that nearly destroyed Iceland’s economy and led to criminal trials for its most senior leadership. For over sixty years, Iceland has been ruled under a provisional constitution passed soon after its independence during World War Two. In the opinion of Professor Gylfason and the other reformers, it was the hastiness of the constitution’s passage in 1944 that is responsible for the loopholes that allowed such abuses of power. The 2012 draft constitution seeks to correct this.

Pink Slime and All the Juicy Bits

For quite some time now, the story about the “pink slime” has been making its away around the online media. For those of you who haven’t seen it, pink slime is the sludge made from ground up animal bits that goes into such appetizing concoctions as Chicken McNuggets and public school lunches. Pink slime is made by grinding up the leftovers after an animal has been slaughtered, pureeing it, and treating it with ammonia to kill bacteria.

News coverage of the pink slime has been so negative that the company that makes it, Beef Products Inc., is now shutting down its factories. A victory for healthy eating, I suppose, although the manufacturer reports that pink slime is 97% lean, so how could anything else be more healthy? I’ll leave the question of whether fat or ammonia is more harmful to your health to a more qualified authority (perhaps a scientist?), but I am quite interested in the moral dimension. Is pink slime any more disgusting than any other processed meat, and is it at all hypocritical for food experts to denounce pink slime as a particular evil?

It seems that there are two things here that could be cause for concern: the grinding up of all the juicy, nasty bits into a usable puree, and the ammonia bath that these fine specimens receive as part of the decontamination process. Where to begin?

Let’s begin with the nasty bits. Marion Nestle, one of the experts cited in the HuffPo article as speaking against  pink slime, stated that “If this is acceptable to people, it essentially means it’s OK to eat the kind of stuff we put into pet food …. Culturally we don’t eat byproducts of human food production. It’s not in our culture. Other cultures do. We don’t.”

I’ve watched enough episodes of Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern to know that that is simply not true. What does Nestle think is contained inside a sausage? I’m unclear as to whether Nestle is being ethnocentrist (Westerners don’t eat that crap) or clueless (humans don’t eat that crap). Either way he is wrong, but I’m not clear just how wrong.

On the other hand, everyone who knows how sausages are made knows that they are not made with anything even approaching 97% lean. Pink slime is not necessarily sausage filler, although it is probably used that way sometimes, so I won’t necessarily rule out the possibility that pink slime really is majority lean, but the number of 97% challenges credulity. If the meat is so lean, why wasn’t it taken in the original cut? Either you’ve got some really inefficient slaughtering processes going on, or 97% is an inflated figure. If the figure is accurate, then slaughtering practices ought to be improved. If the figure is inaccurate, then the manufacturer shouldn’t tell lies.

Ok, on to number two: the ammonia bath. I don’t see how this can be healthy, but I also know that it and similar chemical baths are used even on whole animal parts when the animal has been raised in factory farm conditions. This is disgusting, but its not a unique evil. The solution to getting ammonia residue out of people’s diets is not to ban pink slime – the solution is to ban factory farming.

Beef Products Inc. seems to be a particularly unscrupulous company, having secured a specific exemption for itself from the US Department of Agriculture’s food safety authority. But the outrage over its practices seems misguided, both in that people like Dr. Nestle seem never to have eaten a sausage, and because the real problem with the company’s practices – the use of poisonous chemicals to treat meat raised in unsafe conditions – is much more widespread than the factories of a single company.