More on Ukraine

 This week's post has been published here.

A remarkable book

 Charles Murray is a self-described libertarian who is best known for one extremely controversial and dubious book, The Bell Curve, which he co-authored with the late Richard Herrnstein.  Not long ago I looked at some of Murray's most recent book, Facing Reality, after listening to a long a provocative discussion he had with Coleman Hughes about it.  Last week, for reasons that I shall eventually explain--it's a very long story--I decided I should read another Murray book, Coming Apart, which appeared in 2012.  According to Wikipedia it was a best-seller, but I don't think it has had much influence since with either political party.  That's because it falls outside both of the ideological frameworks of our two political parties.  It is about changes in the lower third of our population--but unlike most such books, it focuses entirely on white people. And it is most definitely not a book about how wonderful our nation would be if everyone could be like them.

Murray begins the book with a fascinating comparison of American on November 21, 1963 and America in 2012, with particular attention to prices and incomes.  The American upper class in those days, he shows with the help of constant 2009 dollars, was much less rich than today's.  Its life differed much less from the bulk of the population then than now, and more importantly, it did not have a separate culture, or a completely separate educational system, or a separate consumer economy catering to its particular tastes.  It grew much larger in the next 46 years, and more distant.  Belmont, Massachusetts--whose border is less than a mile from my house--serves both as an example of it and as a metaphor for what has happened.  Nationwide, Belmont represents the top 20% of our income distribution.   Fishtown, Pennsylvania--a blue-collar, nearly all white Philadelphia suburb--represents the bottom 30%.  It too has changed, but while Belmont has gotten richer, it has gotten poorer, in many ways.  This leads us to Murray's interesting framework for analyzing our society--a cultural one.

Traditionally, Murray argues, four virtues defined the United States.  They were a commitment to the institution of marriage; "industriousness," by which he means mainly a willingness, sometimes obsessive, to work and work hard; honesty, referring mainly to obeying the law; and religiosity, which is self-explanatory.  Using census data, Murray devised simple measurements to discover what had happened to those virtues both in Belmont (again, now the top 20% of white people) and Fishtown (now the bottom 30%) since 1960. The results are striking.  Looking only at adults aged 30-49, Murray found that in Belmont (again, used metaphorically to refer to a particular class nationwide), 96% of them were married in 1960.  That figure fell to about 88% by 1990 but it has been stable at that figure ever since.  In Fishtown the 1960 figure was 86% in 1960, 70% in the early 1980s, 60% in 1990, and 50% in 2010.  On the other side of the coin, divorced people in Belmont rose from about 2% in 1960 to 7% in 1980 and has stayed there ever since, while in Fishtown it rose from 5% to 33%.  And children living with a never-married, separated or divorced parent increased from less than 1% in 1960 to about 2.5% in 2010 in Belmont, and from 2% to 22% in Fishtown. The unmarried  proportion of new mothers among white women, Murray notes, rose from about 2% in 1960--where it had been since 1920 at least--to about 30% in 2010.  That, by the way, is higher than the nonwhite proportion of out-of-wedlock births in 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan set off a firestorm with The Moynihan Report, a study of black unmarried birth rates and their consequences.  And the vast majority of that increase is among white women who have never been to college or never finished high school. 

Turning to "industriousness," Murray found that in Belmont (all uses of these names will be metaphorical from here on), 98% of prime-age (30-49) males were in the labor force in 1960 and about 88% in 2010.  In Fishtown the same figures were 5% in 1960 (and 3% in 1970) and 12% in 2010.  Meanwhile, unemployment among all Fishtown males was about 40% higher than the national average by 2010, while in Belmont it was about 70% lower.  20% of Fishtown males with jobs worked less than 40 hours in 2010, nearly double the number in 1960.  (Belmont males, interestingly enough, are working longer hours than they did in 1960).  Meanwhile, female labor force participation has essentially doubled among married women in both groups, with Belmont women working at only a slightly higher rate. 

Crime shows the most dramatic differences of all.  Arrests for violent crimes rose from about 100 per 100,000 population to 700 in Fishtown from 1960 to about 1995, falling to about 600 in 2010.  Property crimes, which are about four times more common, followed a similar path.  All this time the crime rate in Belmont was negligible. And as for religion, the General Social Survey began counting non-believers in 1970, when Murray finds that they comprised about 8% of the Belmont population and just 3% of the Fishtown population.  By 2010 they composed about 20% of both.

What all this means is that the United States has for quite a while now had a white underclass--the bottom 20% of its population--which is similar in almost all respects to its nonwhite underclass, and which is larger, since the white underclass is about the same size as the entire black population.   Murray blamed this on changing values and the welfare state; I am much more inclined to blame it on changes in our economy which have robbed the uneducated of good job opportunities, and a grave decline in our educational system at all levels.  Yet in either case, the fact remains: there is no problem that blacks and other minorities have in the United States that a greater number of white people do not have as well.  The one exception is the number of people in prison, where whites trail blacks by a small number of inmates, with Hispanics (many of whom identify as white) in third place.   Murray found that when he added data on black Americans in the bottom 30% of our income distribution to his figures, the percentages for his key variables--marriage, labor force participation, etc,--hardly changed at all.

Now it is true, of course, that higher percentages of blacks and Hispanics are in that bottom 30% than the percentage of white people--even though the total number of white people is higher.  Yet that obviously cannot mean that blacks and Hispanics find themselves there because of racism while white people find themselves there because of character flaws--nor does it mean that the white predicament is less serious.  The Republican Party has been essentially ignoring the growth of inequality for 40 years now, while the Democratic Party increasingly views it as a racial problem.  Neither of those views in my  opinion offers any hope of a solution.  If we want to fix inequality we have to change the shape of our economy, its wage system, and its tax structure, just as we did from 1933 until about 1970, when the entire lower half of the population benefited a very great deal.  (I shall present figures on that at another time.)  Emphasis on the problems of any particular group only divides us more politically without bringing us any nearer to a real solution.

Ukraine and Our Failure of Imagination

 [As it turned out, normal life returned to Watertown earlier than I had anticipated and I have a chance to do this post.]

This week I listened to this streamed discussion from the Quincy Institute about the Ukraine situation.  It features a Russian and an American academic, Fyodor Lukyanov and Thomas Graham, and Lukyanov in particular was very informative.  Putin, he argued, does not want to invade Ukraine, but he does want to alter the balance in the European security situation, both by barring Ukraine from joining NATO and by persuading NATO to take other steps to reduce its presence in Eastern Europe.  The United States, Putin apparently believes, created that situation to fill the vacuum left behind by the collapse of the USSR and its eastern European empire, and it should now give way to something new reflecting a different balance of power.  Putin has mobilized more than 100,000 troops, Lukyanov argued, because nothing less had succeeded in getting NATO's attention and starting any serious negotiations.  I thought Graham was less interesting because he immediately fell into the trap that ensnares most contemporary academics, talking about what should happen instead of what is happening or is likely to happen.  I thought however that both of them might be too optimistic, because Putin's aims cannot, in my opinion, be reconciled with the thinking of the US foreign policy establishment, which includes all Biden's senior aides.  Here I will return to some issues I addressed a few weeks ago, but with a sharper focus.

Until early in the 20th century the government of the United States, mindful that it had different domestic principles and institutions than most of the great powers, pursued policies based on legal principles in international relations.  It pledged fidelity to treaties and international law, tried to resolve any disputes by negotiation, and simply sought compensation when Americans abroad or on the high seas suffered damages.  Under Theodore Roosevelt and especially Woodrow Wilson, the United States began involving itself in overseas quarrels--but with the specific goal of making the international community adopt new principles of conduct, and even new domestic institutions, that would allow US principles to prevail worldwide.  That led to the creation of the League of Nations, but when the Senate refused to approve it, subsequent administrations returned to the previous, strictly legalistic approach.  When dictatorshps threatened the peace in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt warned the nation that it could not stand aloof, and by the time the United States entered the Second World War he had committed us to a new world organization. The United Nations resulted.

It fell to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to explain to the American people that the UN could not play the role of the arbiter of international conflict because the Soviet Union would not cooperate.  By 1949 Truman had helped create NATO, an alliance of the US, Canada and western European nations to defend their territory against Communism.   West Germany joined NATO in 1955.  Twice, in 1950 and 1991, the UN has authorized wars in defense of aggression, first in Korea (because the USSR was boycotting the Security Council at the time of the attack) and then to liberate Kuwait.  In general, however, it has failed to serve as a mechanism for implementing American principles.  In response, the Eisenhower Administration repeatedly insisted that it could not undertake any serious political negotiations with the Soviet Union until the Soviets accepted NATO's goals. Those included the unification of Germany via free elections, with the new Germany remaining in NATO if it desired, and the end of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.  The Soviets, not surprisingly, refused.  Not until 1975, in the détente era, did NATO and the Warsaw Pact accept one another's existence and the existence of two German states.  Even then, the Helsinki Agreement was merely a political agreement, not a treaty with the force of law. 

The collapse of Communism in 1989 allowed the West Germans and Americans to realize their 40-year old dream of a reunified Germany within NATO.  Unfortunately, dazzled by dreams of "the end of history" and worldwide US hegemony, the Clinton and Bush II administrations went further, adding most of the states of Eastern Europe to NATO, including three former Soviet Republics, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. NATO also fought a brief war to liberate Kosovo from Serbia in 1999--a war which the UN would not authorize.  And in 2008 the Bush Administration invited both Georgia, in Central Asia, and Ukraine to join NATO.  This, Russia immediately made clear, it would not accept, starting a brief war with Georgia.  Russian and the United States competed for influence in Ukraine in the next two decades, and Russia in 2014 annexed Crimea and began supporting a separatist war across the Ukrainian border.

Putin has now asked not only for promises that Ukraine will never withdraw NATO, but for a broadly defined pullout of NATO from Eastern Europe.  This could mean anything from a restriction on what kind of weapons NATO would station there, to a complete withdrawal of US and western European troops from the region, to insisting that some of these states must leave NATO.  Of those three options I do not think there is the slightest possibility of the US and its allies accepting any but the first--in exchange for some Russian restrictions on armaments aimed at western Europe.  Such a deal could not be negotiated very quickly.

President Zelensky of Ukraine has now made clear that he feels NATO is being too alarmist about the troop build-up and pushing the risk of confrontation too far.  I think that he probably can do the most to avoid war, simply by announcing that Ukraine has no intention of joining NATO. That would enable NATO leaders to affirm that they understand his position and that the issue is no longer live.  NATO could also agree to multilateral talks with Russia on new European security arrangements, without committing itself to any result.

Alas, I would have to agree that Putin would use any deal he would agree to to try to extend Soviet influence, and perhaps even Soviet sovereignty, further west.  NATO would find itself in a new Cold War, parallel in many ways to the immediate post-1945 period, in which the contest was largely political, with the winning victories in Austria and partially in Finland while the Soviets took over in Hungary and Czechoslovakia by political means.  This might be an opportunity for the United States, at long last, to turn European security over to the western and Central Europeans and let them take the political initiative, at least, while remaining within the alliance.  That in fact was Eisenhower's dream, and he was willing to give the Europeans nuclear weapons to help achieve it.  I think the American people are more than ready for that, but the foreign policy establishment is not, and Donald Trump is the only President in the post-1945 era who has ever really challenged the assumptions of the foreign policy establishment.  

That establishment continues to believe that we must take maximum political positions on issues like Ukraine and Taiwan and use all means short of war, including economic sanctions, to try to secure our goals--whether they are likely to work or not.  For the time being there seems to be no possibility of either Russia or China accepting our view of the world and our proper role in it.  That calls for some kind of accommodation of the kind that the Nixon administration achieved with those nations in the 1970s, but I don't see the leadership that would attempt it now.

Boeing and us

In late 2018 and early 2019, in Indonesia and Ethiopia, two new Boeing 737 Max airplanes crashed right after take-off, killing 346 people.  In Flying Blind, journalist Peter Blind relates this horror to the broader decline of American industrial capitalism, tracing the catastrophe to the relentless focus on "shareholder value"  that has wrecked one part of American life after another.   That in turn raises broader questions. Two years ago, in a post about the superb HBO miniseries about the Chernobyl disaster, I speculated that our institutions, for different reasons, might be as rotten as those in the USSR in its later stages.  Checking that post just now, I see that I referred to a new story (in January 2020) about one of the key mistakes that led to the Boeing disaster.  Now, reading a much more thorough account, I'm inclined to believe that we have further disasters ahead.

The story of Boeing is long and complicated, involving a large cast of characters, and I do not plan to mention many names.  The one crucial name appears to be that of Jack Welch, the late former head of General Electric and corporate superhero who emerged in the 1990s and 2000s as the Henry Ford or Lee Iacocca of a new era.  Welch transformed GE by moving away from manufacturing and into financial services, the major US growth industry, of course, of the last thirty or forty years.  The downfall of Boeing began, oddly, i 1997, when it absorbed another once-leading but now-failing airplane manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas, in a merger.  The terms of the merger gave much of the control of Boeing to veteran McDonnell Douglas executives, who began destroying the culture of Boeing, that had been based on the skills of its engineers.  A later generation of corporate leaders drew heavily on GE proteges of Jack Welch.  They moved Boeing's headquarters from Seattle, its manufacturing center, to Chicago, so that top management would not become emotionally involved with the production process.  They began selling divisions of the country off and forcing the new owners to do the same jobs ore cheaply, largely by downsizing or hiring cheaper labor.  Eventually they built a new plant in South Carolina, where they would not have to deal with unions, to build a different new aircraft, the 787 Dreamliner.  By the 2000s it was losing significant ground around the world to Airbus, the European consortium.  The company's new management decided to produce a new generation of its medium range workhouse, the 737, and named it the 737 Max.

The key to the 737 Max was a new pair of more powerful engines that would increase fuel efficiency, raising profits directly for airlines and indirectly for Boeing.  But rather than spend billions and several years to design a whole new airplane, Boeing decided to put those engines on an existing version of the 737, while making the minimum necessary modifications.  Those older versions had fallen well behind in key areas.  While newer aircraft now had new computer screens in the cockpit which would immediately inform the pilots of any problem and tell them what to do about it, the 737 pilots had do some of their own diagnosing, and take several minutes, if not more, to find the appropriate response in a large manual.  This would obviously impose enormous pressure upon the pilots in any emergency situation, especially since most emergencies occur during takeoff or landing when they have a great deal more to worry about.   Then, working out the design and testing it in wind tunnels, the engineers found a serious problem.  The new, larger engines, mounted differently than in older generations of planes, could suddenly force the plane to pitch upward during a tight turn.  They decided to rely on a software program called MCAS--already in use in Air Force tankers--that would compensate by forcing the stabilizer in the tail to correct for the upward pressure. This decision became an example of the potential for catastrophe growing out of the use of what amounts to artificial intelligence to handle complex problems.  The last, fatal design mistake involved the sensor that would tell MCAS that the plane was pitching dangerously upward and had to correct.  Such sensors were vulnerable to damage and malfunction, and some engineers pressed for backup sensors, but without result. Two other Boeing decisions made the problem much worse.  They cut back severely on planned test flights that might have revealed the problem to pilots, and they decided not to tell regulators and buyers about the new use of MCAS because it might make it harder and take longer to get the plane certified.

Meanwhile, the industry had co-opted the regulatory process.  The Federal Aviation Agency experts who were supposed to evaluate safety independently now worked for Boeing, which could even influence the size of their annual bonuses.  (I used to receive small annual bonuses as a federal employee myself, but they were simply portions of unspent funds that were divided evenly among staff.)  There was no one willing, or probably able, to play the role of Dr. Frances Kelsey of the FDA in the early 1960s, who singlehandedly stopped the approval of thalidomide in the United States while it was leading to the births of thousands of severely disabled children in Britain and elsewhere.  Such a person might have insisted on building a simulator for the new plane and making every potential pilot spend some time in it--but Boeing didn't want to spend the money on one, and no one made them do it.  The pilots who had to face the fatal malfunction on the two aircraft that crashed had no idea of what they were dealing with and no quick way to find out. 

All this is shocking enough, but even worse was the failure to ground the new plane after the first crash--as had been done in 1979 when a DC-10 crashed--until a thorough investigation could find out what had happened.  Partly because the first failing plane belonged to an Indonesian airline, Boeing found it easier to blame the airline or the pilot.  And thus, a few months later, the same thing happened again, in Ethiopia.  Then began a long story of attempted damage control, recorded in detail by Robison, in which Boeing tried to get the planes in the air again as soon as possible while denying any responsibility among the higher ups.  Like the Perdue Pharma executives who addicted hundreds of thousands of Americans to opiods, the Boeing executives will clearly never face criminal prosecution.   The grounding of the planes cost the company far more money than it would have cost either to design and build a new aircraft or to provide for adequate testing and training.  What saved Boeing was the pandemic.  Initially it looked like the last, fatal blow to the corporation and the industry, but the federal government stepped in to bail it out.  Yet the company's future remains far from bright.  The corporation also benefited from an interlocking network of lawyers, one of whose hubs is the firm of Kirkland and Ellis, who are extremely strong within the Republican Party and have penetrated the regulatory establishment.

Corporate America's new philosophy, pioneered by Jack Welch, has been disastrous for everyone else in the short run, and for American business, I believe, in the long run.  In the short run it puts relentless downward pressure on wages and benefits as more and more jobs are outsourced.  It also encourages corporations not to spend money on the development of better new products as long as they can make consumers buy the same older ones.  Profits go into stock buybacks, which enrich investors and executives, instead of investments in new equipment which would create jobs and better products.  For two years now, the pandemic has made issues like this almost invisible--even in health care, where they are also very important.  I do not know where real change is going to come from.

 

What the nation is reading

 Looking at Amazon today, I noticed the link for the 100 best-selling books on the site.  I decided to check it out to see what the USA is reading.  I'll confine myself to the top 50--anything more would be too complicated to assess. I have looked at nos. 51-100 and they wouldn't change the pattern significantly.

The top seller on Amazon right now is The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of 21st Century Fascism, by the radio personality Glenn Beck.  Only four of the top 50 deal with current politics, and two of the others are right-wing propaganda: The Real Anthony Fauci (4) by the anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and American Marxism by Mark Levin.  (Conservatives can choose between analyses of Democrats as either Communists of Fascists.)  The only liberal book about politics is Unthinkable by Congressman Jamie Raskin (22), which combines the story of his personal trauma with an account of January 6, 2001. Some balance is provided, however, by the only work of political history in the top 50, The 1619 Project, about which I have already said plenty in previous posts. It ranks 39th, even though it ranks at the top of the Times combined nonfiction best-seller list this week.  This list includes just one more work of miscellaneous non-fiction, The Office BFFs, an insider history of the TV show of the same name. 

Second on the overall list is a self-help work by James Clear, Atomic Habits.  It's the first of 14 self-help books in the top 50, including Atlas of the Heart  by Brene Brown (6), The Four  Arguments by Don Miguel Ruiz (7), The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, (10) A Little Closer to Home by ABC weatherwoman Ginger Zee (11), and an earlier classic of the genre, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (47).  

Leading the fiction category at (4) is It Ends With Us, by the extraordinarily popular young adult/romance author Colleen Hoover.  Hoover has five books in the top 50, far and away the most of any single author, and nearly 1/3 of the 17 novels on the list.  The only classic among them is Orwell's 1984.  Ten of the entries are children's books,  led by My Little Golden Book About Betty White (12). Lastly, there are three cookbooks.

I was hoping this weekend to review Flying Blind, a history of the disastrous decline of Boeing--culminating in two fatal crashes--by Peter Robison.  That will have to wait until next week. It's a very important book, showing how the newly dominant trends of corporate America are wrecking the quality of products on which we depend.  It ranks  #10,491 (hardcover) on Amazon.  I have been living with the impact of the same corporate trends on publishing for the last 20 years in particular.  Their impact is clear from the amazon top 50.   Within another 20 years, serious non-fiction will have become a hobby.