Quote of the Day: science denialism...

From Michael Specter's lecture at TED:

Now, the most mindless epidemic we're in the middle of right now is this absurd battle between proponents of genetically engineered food and the organic elite. It's an idiotic debate. It has to stop. It's a debate about words, about metaphors. It's ideology, it's not science. Every single thing we eat, every grain of rice, every sprig of parsley, every brussel sprout has been modified by man. You know, there weren't tangerines in the Garden of Eden. There wasn't any cantaloupe. There weren't Christmas trees. We made it all. We made it over the last 11,000 years. And some of it worked and some of it didn't. We got rid of the stuff that didn't. Now we can do it in a more precise way. And there are risks, absolutely. But we can put something like vitamin A into rice, and that stuff can help millions of people, millions of people, prolong their lives. You don't want to do that? I have to say, I don't understand it.

We own your wealth? Elizabeth Warren's flawed argument....

Harvard Law Professor and Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren on "fair taxation."

So Warren's argument is this: Nobody got rich on their own; they benefited from public services that "the rest of us paid for." She cites: roads; police and firemen; and education as public services that help out businesses. She concludes, that the business people "get to keep a big chunk" of their profits, but part of the "underlying social contract" is that you have to give some money back.

This is a terrible and terribly confused argument. On the surface, it is plausible, and for that reason, dangerous. It needs to be put to rest.

1. The fact is, businesses and rich people pay most of the income taxes in the United States. the last CBO estimate was that the top 10 percent paid about 70 percent of federal taxes. About 50 percent paid nothing. So, who is this "rest of us" that she's talking about?

2. State and local governments pay for police, fire, and roads. These are services that the government should be delivering. They are non-excludable public goods. They lower transaction costs and allow businesses to function. In that limited sense, Warren has a point. Mind you, it's a point that nobody disagrees with.

That being said, these services are a very small "fraction" of what government does. In the U.S., the main federal government budget items are: national defense (most of which doesn't benefit anyone); Medicare; Medicaid; and social security. These don't have any obvious benefit to business. If the government stuck to what it does well (police/military/roads/fire, law enforcement etc...), Warren would have a case, but taxes would be FAR LOWER as would expenses. "If all the government did was build roads, educate kids, and provide for public order, it’d be a libertarian paradise almost up to the standards of Ron Paul. Then our government could easily be funded exclusively by taxes on the rich", Rich Lowry says.


In addition: there is tons of waste. The Fed subsidies big businesses; agriculture; some exporters; bails out huge banks; creditors; saves car companies; takes on the risk of housing loans; engages in "stimulus" .

3. What about education? As my favorite economist Russ Roberts points out: despite record levels of education spending, the U.S. public system is pretty poor. The money is poorly spent, and the output is of low quality. Businesses often have to retrain workers. Should they get a refund, then?

4. What about the basic principle of the argument? Rich Lowry has a smart argument: Focusing on infrastructure as the crucial support of entrepreneurial activity is like crediting the guy who built young Bill Gates’s garage with the start of Microsoft. Yes, Gates needed a roof over his head, and garages are useful. But it was Gates who had the ambition to do more in his garage than store his car and lawn-care products. Incalculably more important than his physical surroundings were his imagination and business sense. Could Gates have done it in Mogadishu or Peshawar? Certainly not. But the goods cited by Warren as the foundation of a workable business environment are extremely minimal.

5. Furthermore, if we link taxation to benefit, there is even a case for regressive taxation. Roberts smartly notes::

The other part that's missing from Ms. Warren's narrative is that all Americans, rich and poor, benefit from the public spending she mentions. It isn't just Steve Jobs who benefits because Apple iPads come to the Apple Store on public roads. All of Apple's customers benefit too. If her argument is that taxes should be related to benefit, should we raise taxes on the poor and the middle class? Sergey Brin and Larry Page became billionaires by creating Google, but the gains to the rest of us are much larger. Messrs. Brin and Page aren't able to capture anything close to the benefits they've created for the rest of society. So should the rest of us pay a bigger share of the taxes than Google's founders?

6. In addition, Warren cites the "social contract" as a reason for higher taxation, but the argument actually has a far more predatory tone: if it were not for the police, she asks, "what would stop marauding bandits" from ransacking the factory. The state was never a social contract. As Charles Tilly once said, it was always a protection racket. In the same way, we might imagine Tony Soprano telling a local pizzeria owner: "you need me for protection. It would be a shame if something happened to your business. Go ahead, keep a big chunk though.


7. Finally, Mike Munger at KPC has a great analogy: If I buy a guard dog to protect my house - ... does that mean the dog owns the house? Sure, I have to pay the guard dog services (police etc...), I have to tolerate some dog poop (waste); but no one would make the case that the dog has some sort of claim to my wealth produced from the house.

The Paramilitarization of Mexico

Mexico's first paramilitary "self defense" group: Mata Zeta (Zeta killers).

Politics abhors a vacuum. When the state loses the capacity to provide security for its citizens, they commonly seek to provide it for themselves. This basic fact of politics plays out time after time in weak and failing states. In Colombia, for example, during the 1980s and in response a growing, drug-fuelled insurgency, a group called "Muerte a Secuestradores," (Death to Kidnappers) was formed. It quickly blossomed into a full blown paramilitary movement that in most respects is a bigger threat to the Colombian state than even the guerrillas.

Mexico is not a failed state, or even a "weak" state by most standards. This Mata Zeta group may be an isolated phenomenon, or it may be symptomatic of the decline of the state's monopoly of violence. Some might applaud the initiative of the Zeta Killers. If the latter, we might expect the movement of Mexican "self defense." Of course, armed groups do not get far without funding, organization, and followers. The temptation of any armed group would be to prey upon the drug trade, as did the Colombian paramilitaries. In the end, they became just another self-interested movement playing the politics and economics of civil war.



Of course, it still remains to be seen whether Mata Zeta is a real paramilitary group. Some speculate it could be a covert government operation; others say it might be rival drug gang.

Contentious Quote of the Day...

I came across this quote on econlog from an economist named Edward Banfield:

[U]pper- and middle-class members tend to be future-oriented, purposeful, rational, and self-disciplined. Lower-class people... tend to have a strong present-orientation, are capricious, hedonistic, purposeless, and therefore unwilling to pursue a job or a career with any consistency. People with the former values therefore tend to have higher incomes and better jobs, and lower-class people tend to be poor, jobless, or on welfare. In short, the economic fortunes of people tend over the long run to be their own internal responsibility, rather than to be determined -- as liberals always insist -- by external factors.

1. Reminds me of the age old debate in international development between dependency and modernization theory. Dependency theory: poor countries suck and it's OUR fault. Modernization: poor countries suck and its their own fault. I've always been more inclined towards modernization theory... but not sure if it works so well on the level of the individual. Poor people are poor and it's because their lazy and hedonistic; vs. Poor people are poor because society keeps them down.

2. Also reminds me of some psychological research that shows "success" is linked to the ability that people either have or don't have to defer gratification. Here is a cool Ted about the "marshmallow test."




Also, there is an excellent RSA video about perceptions of time that clearly applies. People who can defer gratification live more in the future than those that do not.



I'm not sure if this whole theory of time perspective is correct or not, but it makes more sense than "poor people are lazy."

Why it might be good to privatize stuff.... examples from Chile

Exportable economic and policy reforms from Chile:

1. Privatize social security!

This is a great idea given the many problems with government run social security. The Chilean example has been so successful that it has been adapted by other Latin American governments, and is now being studied by China.

How would it work? Jose Pinera writes about it here:

Under Chile's Pension Savings Account (PSA) system, what determines a worker's pension level is the amount of money he accumulates during his working years. Neither the worker nor the employer pays a social security tax to the state. Nor does the worker collect a government-funded pension. Instead, during his working life, he automatically has 10 percent of his wages deposited by his employer each month in his own, individual PSA. This percentage applies only to the first $22,000 of annual income. Therefore, as wages go up with economic growth, the "mandatory savings'' content of the pension system goes down.

Competition, innovation, good customer service, with some minor government oversight. Is this too hard for central planners in Canada and the U.S. to understand?


2. Privatize public transit: Santiago, and Chile as a whole, has the best system of intercity and intracity buses that I have ever seen in my, admittedly limited time travelling around Canada, the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. This is, of course, before it was usurped by a vicious and inefficient government monopoly, apparently for "making too much money". Yeah, profit is evil, right? Anyhow..

Mike Munger writes:

Hundreds of different bus lines, most of them entirely privately owned, operated freely throughout the city. Some of the lines ran on surface streets parallel to the Metro, adding transport redundancy in case the Metro was having mechanical problems or was simply overcrowded. Competition among bus lines kept fares low, and drivers were paid according to the number of passengers they transported. Other bus routes delivered riders to Metro stops, not because anyone had ordered them to do so, but because that is where passengers wanted to go. And there were several classes of service, ranging from posh express buses that charged high prices down to claptrap jalopies that charged pennies and stopped every few blocks.

Chile experienced the highest rates of growth in Latin America since instituting neoliberal reforms in the mid 1980s. It was the only country in the region (other than maybe Costa Rica) to embrace export led, free market-based economic policies. The results are clear. Chile is now a “developed country” and the first Latin American member the OECD. We could learn from some of these experiments.

Trade is good, people.

Stephen Harper defends Canada’s trade deal with Colombia.

I applaud this. Canada’s free trade deal with Colombia is a good thing. Trade, specialization, and commerce are important for economic growth. Trade agreements provide stable rules so that businesses can work in foreign countries. Trade agreements also allow people from different countries to buy and selling things freely. Barriers to trade, such as tariffs and import quotas only serve to benefit producers that cannot compete with international competition, at the expense of the economic prosperity of people as a whole. They persist only because these interests usually have powerful lobby groups that exert greater political pressure than pro-trade consumer groups.

One of the worst arguments against free trade with Colombia that i’ve seen seeks to link trade to the human rights situation in that country. The story goes that Canada should not trade with a country that has such a high level of internal violence and government corruption. Canada should, in effect, sanction the Colombian government by maintaining protectionist policies. This argument is greatly flawed for several reasons.

First, in the case of Colombia, much of the violence against the population is perpetrated by non-state actors: criminal groups that exist outside of the state with their own armies, resources, and political agendas. The Colombian state is simply too weak to hold these organizations to account. The reasons are complex, but suffice to say that this has been the case for most of Colombian history. There are large swaths of territory where official government capacity is either non-existent or very limited. To punish the country because of the actions of illegal armed groups is clearly pointless and unjust.

Second, countries and governments do not trade; people trade; businesses trade. Even if there were a strong case against the official government of Colombia, it does not follow that we should seek to restrict trade between Colombian people and businesses, and Canadian people and businesses through protectionist tariffs. It maybe a case for cutting foreign aid, or for diplomatic sanctions, but in my mind, nothing is logically served by restricting trade and commerce between the peoples of each country. Only people and businesses suffer.

Third, the case against Colombia has always been thinly veiled protectionism. While there are some poorly informed “do gooders” (anti-globalization types who just don’t get basic economics), the main sponsors of the anti-trade movement are industries and trade unions that benefit from protectionism. As Canada looks to expand bilateral trading relationships with other countries, it is important to keep in mind these realities. The groups that oppose trade are generally self-interested organizations that benefit from protectionism. As most would agree, the unfettered influence of special interest groups in the policy process rarely has positive social outcomes for countries as a whole. This is particularly true with international trade. Canada, as a country, benefits from from economic exchange with the rest of the world. Only those that would desire insulation from foreign competition will say otherwise.

Tax the Rich?

A few weeks ago Warren Buffett wrote in the NYtimes that he pays a tax rate that is lower than anyone else in his office, including his secretary. This understandably concerns anyone who believes that U.S. is supposed to have a progressive tax system. It has brought forth calls for higher taxes on the rich, a sentiment that is now gaining some political traction. But how much should we really take from the so called Buffett Rule?

The WSJ makes some excellent points:

Just to summarize: The first thing to point out is that Warren Buffett is not the average rich tax payer. The average person who makes more than $1 million pays an "average tax rate" of 23.1 percent. It's important to keep the big picture in mind. This one anecdote should not be exaggerated.

The second thing is that rich people pay "higher average tax rates" than poor people. Someone who earns 50,000 pays an average rate of 7 percent. That’s about a third of what a rich person pays. (not including payroll taxes.... )

If the top marginal tax rate is 30 percent, and the average tax rate for someone who makes more than 1 million is 23 percent, why does Buffett pay less? The WSJ notes that a large portion of his income comes from capital gains and dividends on investments. This income is only taxed at 15 percent. This fact is important for two reasons: a) capital gains are not the biggest source of income for many rich people in the U.S., and Buffett is somewhat of an outlier on this;

To quote Greg Mankiw

If your image of the typical rich person is someone who collects interest and dividend checks and spends long afternoons relaxing on his yacht, you are decades out of date. The leisure class has been replaced by the working rich.

b) This calculation does not factor in the corporate tax rate, which is 35 percent. Because corporate taxes tax “profit” (not revenue), it is also a tax on capital gains. In short, Buffett is taxed twice, but doesn’t count the 35 percent corporate tax rate in his calculation. So he probably pays way more.

It’s depressing to think that Buffett’s one anecdote could serve as the basis for U.S. tax policy. Unfortunately, it has come to that. Obama has proposed a tax on millionaires.

Is this anything more than re-election politics? Probably not;

the WSJ is predictably sanguine about the economic effects:

Well, the plan Mr. Obama unveiled yesterday along with his Buffett Rule would sock the economy with $1.5 trillion in new taxes over 10 years, or about 1% of GDP. This includes the tax increases built into the 2013 expiration of the Bush-era tax rates but not those of ObamaCare. Anyone who believes this will help an economy that is creating few new jobs and growing by only 1% probably also believes that only the rich would pay the Buffett Alternative Tax.

AM: Instead of these ad hoc reforms that just add new layers to an already complex and burdensome tax system, Obama should undertake a more fundamental reform of the tax system. Lower the rates and broaden the base. This is what every economist seems to say. How would this work in practice? Maybe consumption taxes? A flat tax? It seems to me that there is some low hanging fruit here that could be picked through tax reform, rather than this ad hoc layering. It would be nice to see some evidence based public policy one in a while, and not simple political pandering.

Also, the Federal tax rates don’t include social security “contributions” (taxes). These are regressive taxes also, that fall more on those with lower income. When they are factored in, it may be that the tax rate of someone who makes $50,000 approaches 15 percent or something close to what Buffett says he pays (minus corporate taxes). Is this another argument in favour of a more streamlined, simple tax system like a flat tax? Get rid of these regressive elements like the SS contribution? After all, it just goes into the budget, and is in no way tied to the subsidy paid out to the elderly. Might as well separate them...

The Social Security Ponzi Scheme?

During the Republican candidate’s debate on September 7th, Texas Governor and Republican nominee frontrunner, Rick Perry incited a fair bit of controversy by likening Social Security to a Ponzi Scheme.

People who are on Social Security today, men and women who are receiving those benefits today, are individuals at my age that are in line pretty quick to get them, they don't need to worry about anything. But I think the Republican candidates are talking about ways to transition this program, and it is a monstrous lie. It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you're paying into a program that's going to be there. Anybody that's for the status quo with Social Security today is involved with a monstrous lie to our kids, and it's not right.

The logic behind this argument is as follows: a Ponzi Scheme is when a fraudster collects money from new investors to pay out old investors. The old investors think that they are getting a return on their investment, but really just getting the new investors’ money. The Scheme, of course, is unsustainable, illegal, and deceptive. Eventually it collapses and everyone who did not already get a payout, loses their money.

How is SS like this? SS collects money from current contributors, and uses it to pay retirees. Critics like Perry wonder whether this is sustainable. Demographic changes, declining fertility rates + the baby boom, mean that there may not be enough new contributors to cover what is owed to the guys who are cashing out. Furthermore, there is a question of popular misperception. Most people think that they are cashing out on what they paid in, when this is clearly not the case. So in those ways Perry is right. SS looks a little like a Ponzi Scheme.

The blogosphere was predictably alight with comments on both sides. Many people on the left have proposed differences between America’s Social Security Program, and a Ponzi scheme. For example, SS is a legitimate government sanctioned program, whereas a Ponzi Scheme is an illegal Scheme; there are little differences as well, the PS is deceitful; it promises huge payouts etc..

On the other hand, some on the right say that SS is even worse than a Ponzi Scheme; (a) it’s not a voluntary agreement; (b) people don’t really know how it works and so there is some deceit involved; and (c) the government can actually use the SS funds to do other things/political projects and boondoggles. Of course, PS’s share 2/3 of these qualities.

To me, these arguments kind of miss the point of the comparison. The left is drawing semantic distinctions that are true by definition (aka, one is illegal... well, thanks...); the right is exaggerating: SS is hardly worse... Overall, the general point that SS is sort of organized like a Ponzi scheme stands. Even smart guys on the left, like Paul Krugman, agree. The entire question, it seems turns on the issue of whether SS is sustainable. As has been pointed out, unless some serious changes are made to account for the changing nature of demographics, it is not clear that it can be. These changes are pretty sensible: increase the retirement age, cut back on some of the benefits etc... After all, SS was designed to give the elderly a couple of years of comfort before they die, not to provide 20 years of income to retirees with no savings.

Finally, I think it’s important to get the language right. SS should be seen for what it is: a tax on the young and a subsidy for the old. It is a straight wealth transfer. That’s it. It is clearly not “insurance” as many people believe. The Ponzi Scheme metaphor, while somewhat accurate, is not helpful because of its pejorative connotation. It paints the current contributors as victims. They are not, they are tax payers. That’s a bit different. I think most people would agree that society should take care of the elderly somehow using tax revenue. (Or course, without taxing the economic life out of the economy). My personal opinion is that the subsidy/tax should be smaller rather than larger, but that is a matter for another day.



I wonder why it is hard for Americans to accept that SS is just a wealth transfer. As Milton Friedman points out here, SS was originally sold as insurance. It was not sold as a tax/subsidy. My intuition is that Americans don’t want to feel like they are living off other people like welfare recipients. So, they gravitate toward the theory that it they are just cashing in on insurance. That way, they don’t feel like a burden to society. Thoughts?

Immigration and the Welfare state

At Econlog, Brian Caplan makes an interesting argument about immigration and the abolition of the welfare state.

The welfare state doesn't make open borders impossible. It's open borders that makes the eventual abolition of the welfare state imaginable.

I suppose this is only works if you think the welfare state is a bad thing.

Quote of the Day... and Conspiracy Theories.

“The conspiracy theory of society... comes from abandoning God and then asking: ‘who is in his place?’

Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 1967 (pp. 123).

The anniversary of 9/11 is cause, among other things, to revisit the topic of conspiracy theories and their place in modern society.

I've always thought that there was a link between “conspiracy thinking” and religious belief. The link is not, as some might suppose, "belief without evidence". Conspiracy theorists will tell you that they have real evidence of the things they believe. Rather, link is a common “way” of thinking, a deferral, to the transcendental, which in this case, involves a common postulate of agency in nature and order in randomness. For most religions, the agency in nature is God. God orders, plans, and designs the seemingly random events and architecture of the natural world. The magnitude of the plan varies with doctrine. Creationists, for example, believe that God literally created people, animals, the earth, and the universe. (On the other end of the spectrum, some believe that God was just the ‘first cause’, not a micromanager). The logic works in such a way that even the most innocuous events can be ratcheted up to prove the bigger picture. It’s easy to justify or excuse both positive and negative events as part of Gods plan.

As Michael Shermer points out here, conspiracy theories share many of these traits. For example, they share the belief that there is agency in nature. In the case of most conspiracies, the agents are people, but they plan, control, and design the random, chaotic events, institutions, and architecture of human societies. In some cases, the agents, whether they be the global elite, the illuminati, secrete societies, or even alien reptiles, usually have some qualities that border on the supernatural. Even the more restrained conspiracy theorists ascribe to members of government the ability to plan and execute extremely complex, far reaching designs and plans. Furthermore, conspiracy theorists are very adept at using the greater narrative of agency in society to make sense of innocuous events, extrapolating from these, in a circular manner, to support the greater conspiracy picture.

The 9/11 conspiracy shares many of these traits. It’s an attempt to make sense of a series of random, chaotic events with reference to a greater plan. Of course, as Shermer points out: it really was a conspiracy, but it was a small plan executed by 19 people - that it succeeded in itself is quite remarkable given that incompetence demonstrated by other notable terrorists; the 9/11 “Conspiracy theory” of course goes beyond this: The agents in question are members of the global elite; and the plan simply follows from a greater plan of world domination. The conspiracy to fake a conspiracy is one of a much larger magnitude, and is possible only if we ascribe to the designers powers that go far beyond what we would normally think possible from any institution. Furthermore, 9/11 conspiracy theorists easily connect small events to the larger picture: OBL’s death, for example, provides evidence that the fake was even more elaborate than previously thought. OBL’s recorded claim of responsibility for 9/11 is, in the same vein, proof of an even more elaborate hoax. It is not, as some might think, confirmatory evidence for the official story. In this manner, contrary evidence is paradoxically, as evidence of an even larger conspiracy. In this respect, and like religion, conspiracy theory has certain self-referential nature. Finally, anomalies are the bread and butter of conspiracy thinking (also religion). Events that don’t make complete sense by the official account can always be explained, in a sort of ad hoc manner, by the conspiracy story. This is also a bit like religion, which in its own way thrives on anomomolies and unexplained natural events; seeking, in the modern context to position God into the gaps in scientific knowledge.

But is it necessarily wrong to assume “agency” when it comes to the order of human society? After all, society is ultimately the product of human decision making. Yes and no. The issue is not that human decisions create institutions, but how institutions and society evolve. Most social scientists agree that the current structure of society owes little to “top down planning.” Rather, things generally evolve in a more decentralized, unpredictable, and organic fashion. To quote Popper, again:

Only a minority of social institutions are consciously designed, while the vast majority have just “grown,” as the undesigned result of human actions, as I have said before; and we can add that even most of the few institutions which were consciously and successfully designed (say, a newly founded University, or a Trade Union) do not turn out according to plan – again because of the unintended social repercussions resulting from their intentional creation. For their creation affects not only many other social institutions but also ‘human nature’ – hopes, fears, and ambitions, first of those more immediately involved, and later often of all members of the society.

Ultimately, what separates conspiracy theory from society science is what separates intelligent design from natural science. Science examines the role of social and natural processes larger outcomes of interest.

It is the task of analysing the unintended social repercussions of intentional human actions-those repercussions whose significance is neglected both by the conspiracy theory and by psychologism, as already indicated. An action which proceeds precisely according to intention does not create a problem for social science....the conspiracy theory of society cannot be true because it amounts to the assertion that all results, even those which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the actions of people who are interested in these results.

When it comes to logical discussions in these matters, it is often better to diagnosis than to refute. Jonathan Kay (author of: Among the Truthers: A Journey through America’s Growing Conspiratorial Underground) noted that he did not manage to dissuade a single person who he interviewed in his travels through conspiracy websites. So I offer this diagnosis. It is not entirely original, but I’d like to make the case that Popper gets it right:

At its root, stripped of its magical thinking and logical fallacies, conspiracy theory thinking is a symptom of the inability to cope with the modern world, in the absence of God. As the Popper quote at the beginning illustrates: “The Conspiracy theory of society begins by denying God and then asking: who is in his place.” If it was the perceived randomness of the natural world, along with the fear of death, that gives rise to religion, it seems that in conspiracy thinking might play a similar role in secular, technological society.

Quote of the Day

In today's Ottawa Citizen, David Warren writes:

Malicious, to be sure, but the first line of defence against psychopaths, in any society, is psychopathic incompetence. I spoke once with an Israeli counter-terrorism expert, who told me he thought Palestinian terrorists had actually killed more of each other, than Israelis had killed.

Warren goes on to argue that both luck and security policy have combined to make us safer. While I think Warren is subtly making an argument for even more security, this actually reminds of me of Machiavelli's distinction between virtu and fortuna. People, governments, and policy can only do so much. To me, we've long exhausted the marginal benefits from security spending. We may be safer, but we cannot guard against fortune.

Does Ford's Weight Matter?

Ben Johnson at the HuffPo writes:

I believe that the fact that our mayor is fat is actually relevant to the debate about his competency to do his duties. Not only does his risk for heart disease and stroke call into question his ability to actually remain physically healthy enough to act as mayor for an entire term, I think it also speaks to a level of personal irresponsibility and short-sightedness.

While I'm no Ford fan, I can't agree with this argument.

The argument turns on the idea that personal responsibility can be inferred from health/weight. "I think it also speaks to a level of personal irresponsibility and short-sightedness", Johnson says. Ok, so if this true, and we can reliably infer these qualities from someones weight, it is clear that weight should certainly be considered as an important category of qualification for many jobs. After all, Mayor is not the only job that requires responsibility and some degree of long term vision: if weight "speaks to a level of personal irresponsibility", then many job candidates in a variety of fields should be standing on scales at job interviews. BMI tests etc.. Statement of merit criteria: "normal, healthy weight."

My point is to illustrate the Reductio ad absurdum here. If we applied this argument to normal settings, it would be absurd. The only reason that Johnson can get away with it here is because it's Ford, a guy who know one likes (at least who reads the HuffPo), and who they are happy to criticize and insult for any reason.

Immigration, Multiculturalism: the End of History or Clash of Civilizations?

In the early 1990s, two influential political science books were published that sought to make sense of the nature of global politics in the post-cold war era.

Francis Fukyuama’s “The end of history and the Last Man” argued that liberal democracy was the ideological “end point” of human history. By this he meant that there was no viable sustainable alternative to liberal democracy as a form of government. Global politics, for Fukyuama, would be the progressive realization of this end point in practice throughout the world. (globalization, free trade, liberalism etc..)

Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” put forward a radically different argument: History wasn’t over and democracy was not the final form of government, he said. Rather, the post-cold war period would be dominated by the politics of culture. There would be a new set of faultlines: global politics would be about conflict between different cultural groups, which he called “civilizations.”

While there is a lot to say about this debate, I want to focus on one key point. There is an underlying theoretical disagreement between each vision, which concerns the relationship between technology/modernity, political systems, and culture. The End of History (EoH) argument is based on a theory of history and human development that sees technological change as the fundamental driver of political change. According to the EoH theory- technological change (which is “autonomous”) leads to economic change, which in turn produces political change. (If this sounds to you like Marx, you’d be right – Marx’s vision of the “end” was just slightly different) Technology produces economic industrialization/capitalism, which eventually gives way to liberalism and democracy.

The forces behind political change may not be purely determined by economics, but there is a strong link. This is why, according to the EoH argument, North America and Europe developed liberal democracies: They experienced early industrialization and modernization. When the ‘non-west’ is exposed to the forces of globalization and modernity, the EoH theory predicts, liberalism and democracy will follow. Of course, the transition may not be pretty. As for “culture”, the EoH theory says that it will still pervade things like language, dress, religion, and food, the forces of modernization will erase “authoritarian elements”.

For Clashers, this vision of history and political change is completely wrong. Politics and culture are not driven by economics; rather, the opposite. Culture, a common set of underlying beliefs, practices, and perceptions shape political institutions, they would say. For example, Huntington would argue that the reason why the “West” is both industrialized and liberal/democratic is that liberal democracy comes from Christian culture. It just happened to be the case that the Christian part of the world industrialized first. What this means is that countries with authoritarian cultures, like Iran, Russia, and China, might not give way to liberalism and democracy just because they are becoming more economically prosperous and modern. Their underlying authoritarian cultures are not only compatible with modernity, but it is culture, and not economics, that shapes institutions and politics.

Why do I bring this up? I think these two perspectives partially underlie current debates about immigration, accommodation, and multiculturalism in the west. Take the issue of Islam and the West; Clashers, who believe in the primacy of “culture” will likely be of the opinion that the authoritarian aspects of Islamic culture can survive, and even spread, in a liberal democratic environment. EoHers, like myself, argue that liberal democracy, as the ultimate end point, will eventually put an end to the authoritarian aspects of other cultures. All the more quickly, I might add, If people from authoritarian cultures move to “end of history” countries (parts of Europe; the Anglo-West). In the long run, EoHers might believe, there is really no danger to Western culture from multiculturalism and immigration. Clashers are far less convinced. They even see multiculturalism as a threat to western civilization. Moreover, they may even see authoritarian cultural groups as particularly dangerous.

Depending on the view that one holds, different immigration policies follow. For EoHers, who believe not only in the virtues of free markets and in the inherent pull of liberalism and freedom, more immigration is better. People benefit from trade, and the exchange of ideas. Barriers to the free movement of labour persist in most places as an impediment to prosperity. In other words, more immigration will only increase the spread of liberalism and the end of history. For Clashers, immigration policies would be more restrictive in order to protect western institutions from authoritarian and illiberal influences that may eventually undermine them.