I went to a preview of the movie based on Khaled Hosseini’s "The Kite Runner" this weekend (thanks for the tickets, Sandy). This from Amazon, about the book, if you need reminding:

The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir’s father’s servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and eventually cements their bond in ways neither boy could have ever predicted. Even after Amir and his father flee to America, Amir remains haunted by his cowardly actions and disloyalty. In part, it is these demons and the sometimes impossible quest for forgiveness that bring him back to his war-torn native land after it comes under Taliban rule.

The excellent Rory Stewart ("The Places In Between" and "The Prince of the Marshes") was there to introduce the film. He gave an affecting talk abut his experiences in Afghanistan, and appealed in a gentlemanly way for support for his own charity, the Turquoise Mountain Foundation (the site is worth a look for the photography alone), and for the Aschiana Foundation.

The film’s theatrical distribution has been delayed over fears for the safety of child actors involved in the film’s pivotal (and discreetly filmed) rape scene. The movie is a worthy endeavour, and I wish I could be more enthusiastic about it. I thought it was disappointing–though bear in mind that I was one of apparently very few people who did not think much of the book, either. (Towards the end, I tossed it across the room in exasperation.) I felt that book and movie both had the same two lethal defects: a psychologically vacant central character, difficult to like or believe in; and an almost comically overburdened plot, which, especially at the end, piles coincidence on message-laden coincidence. The movie, though, is admirably non-Hollywood in its casting of relative unknowns and in its low-key, entirely believable, depiction of pre- and post-Taliban Kabul. Fans of the book ought to enjoy it.   

My Monday column for the print FT:

For the Democratic party’s most energetic supporters, consensus and bipartisanship have become dirty words. In this, the party’s activists are following the lead of the Bush administration, which feels just as strongly about compromise with opponents. But it is a mistake for the left, just as it was for the right – as a matter both of intellectual vitality and of hard-nosed political calculation – to indulge this aversion to doing business with the enemy.

“Bush started it,” goes the thinking. So he did. George W. Bush was elected president, if you recall, as a “compassionate conservative”. His record as governor of Texas, he insisted, showed he could work productively with both sides: it was all about getting things done. On top of that, he won the election of 2000, putting it charitably, because of an anomaly in the way the US adds up the votes in its presidential contests and, putting it less charitably, through outright theft. All the more reason, any disinterested observer would have said, for him to govern with restraint from the centre. He subsequently embarked on one of the most divisive and partisan periods of rule in modern American history, disdainful of co-operating not only with his political opponents, but even with his allies in Congress.

Read the rest of the column here.

The historic visit of Nicolas Sarkozy to the nation’s capital, to address both houses of Congress and seal a new rapprochement ("bringing together") of France and the United States, caused no undue excitement in the New York Times and Washington Post. The Times’s front page had market jitters,  Pat Robertson’s endorsement of  Giuliani,  Musharraf, protections for gay workers, and "Ohio Goes After Charter Schools That Are Failing". The new Franco-American alliance made page 10. Not even page 3, opposite the news summary, you say? No, that was "Romanian Premier Tries to Calm Italy After a Killing".

In the Post it made page 2–albeit as an amuse-gueule ("tasty morsel") all about how Sarkozy is not Lafayette and Bush is not Washington:

Sarkozy picked up the theme yesterday. "What could possibly have brought together two men who were so different in terms of age and of origin, Lafayette and George Washington? It is their common values," he declared. Sarkozy was so eager to please his hosts that he neglected to mention a word about Iraq.

From there, the neo-Lafayette left for Mount Vernon, where the stage for the press conference was as cold as winter at Valley Forge. Fortunately, the two leaders, unlike Washington and Lafayette, had propane heaters to keep them warm as they traded platitudes.

"We want a democratic Iraq," Sarkozy said.

"Freedom’s happenin’ in Iraq," Bush said.

Bush liked what he heard from the new French leader. "I have a partner in peace," he concluded as he cut the press conference short.

Departing in Marine One, Bush and his entourage spewed dust and fumes on Sarkozy and his entourage as they took off.

It was a 21st-century end to an 18th-century day.

History in the making.

Alan Dershowitz advises the Democrats not to look soft on national security–and not to rule out torture in all conceivable circumstances. He approves of the (Bill) Clinton doctrine on the issue:

Consider, for example, the contentious and emotionally laden issue of the use of torture in securing preventive intelligence information about imminent acts of terrorism–the so-called "ticking bomb" scenario. I am not now talking about the routine use of torture in interrogation of suspects or the humiliating misuse of sexual taunting that infamously occurred at Abu Ghraib. I am talking about that rare situation described by former President Clinton in an interview with National Public Radio:

"You picked up someone you know is the No. 2 aide to Osama bin Laden. And you know they have an operation planned for the United States or some European capital in the next three days. And you know this guy knows it. Right, that’s the clearest example. And you think you can only get it out of this guy by shooting him full of some drugs or waterboarding him or otherwise working him over."

He said Congress should draw a narrow statute "which would permit the president to make a finding in a case like I just outlined, and then that finding could be submitted even if after the fact to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court." The president would have to "take personal responsibility" for authorizing torture in such an extreme situation. Sen. John McCain has also said that as president he would take responsibility for authorizing torture in that "one in a million" situation.

I disagree with that solution, for reasons I have already discussed–though Dershowitz is certainly right about the danger Democrats face if they seem soft on security. This is the Republicans’ best hope next year. But what I found most interesting about Dershowitz’s article was the paragraph that follows the ones I just quoted:

Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture, I have no doubt that any president–indeed any leader of a democratic nation–would in fact authorize some forms of torture against a captured terrorist if he believed that this was the only way of securing information necessary to prevent an imminent mass casualty attack. The only dispute is whether he would do so openly with accountability or secretly with deniability. The former seems more consistent with democratic theory, the latter with typical political hypocrisy.

"Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture…" What an extraordinary evasion. Talk about ethical dissonance. He is opposed to torture–apparently in all and any circumstances–but urges the next president not to be!  Truly, lawyers are not like the rest of us.

Ricardo Hausmann, director of Harvard University’s Center for International Development, says that biofuels can be (and maybe already are) competitive with fossil fuels at "something like current prices":

Brazil has been exporting ethanol to the US at an average delivery price of $1.45 for an amount with the energy equivalence of a gallon of petrol. It is doing so profitably and in increasing amounts, in spite of a 54 cents a gallon tariff to protect American maize-based ethanol producers. Many countries are following suit.

Ethanol is an inconvenient chemical compound that is corrosive and soluble in water, thus limiting its immediate market to that of a gasoline additive. However, this is just the Betamax phase of the industry. There is plenty of private venture capital money being poured into finding more efficient ways of extracting energy from biomass and delivering it to transport and power systems. Over time, the technology will also become more flexible, allowing more crops to be used as feedstock, not just the current choice of sugarcane, maize and palm oil. New technologies will be able to extract energy from cellulose, allowing the use of pastures such as switch grass as well as the refuse of current food production. The cheque is in the mail.

Another very striking prediction:

[The] increase in the price of agricultural land and of food will relieve governments from the current political pressure to protect the agricultural sector. Governments that, as a consequence of the land glut, have been protecting and subsidising farmers will see them grow rich either because they “plant” biofuels themselves or because other producers switch into them, lowering the supply and increasing the price of other crops.

By contrast, consumers will be less enthusiastic and demand that something be done about the price of food.

The obvious solution will be to cut back on protectionism and liberalise trade in agriculture.

Read the rest of his column for the FT here.

I wonder if agricultural protection will surrender so easily. As I noted in my previous post, Hillary Clinton is as keen as Ricardo Hausmann on biofuels–but she went out of her way to specify home-grown biofuels. There’s saving the planet and protecting farmers: it’s a question of priorities.

Hillary Clinton has been promising strong action on climate change if she is elected. Now she has made some detailed commitments. (See Edward Luce’s report of her latest speech on the subject here. Details of her proposals are here.) Her goal will be to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. She says she will negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol in double-quick time. And that’s not all. The plan also proposes:

• A new cap-and-trade program that auctions 100% of permits alongside investments to move us on the path towards energy independence;
• An aggressive, comprehensive energy efficiency agenda to reduce electricity consumption 20% from projected levels by 2020 by changing the way utilities do business, catalyzing a green building industry, enacting strict appliance efficiency standards, and phasing out incandescent light bulbs;
• A $50 billion Strategic Energy Fund, paid for in part by oil companies, to fund investments in alternative energy.  The SEF will finance one-third of the $150 billion ten-year  investment in a new energy future contained in this plan;
• Doubling of federal investment in basic energy research, including funding for an ARPA-E, a new research agency modeled on the successful Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency;
• Aggressive action to transition our economy toward renewable energy sources, with renewables generating 25% of electricity by 2025 and with 60 billion gallons of home-grown biofuels available for cars and trucks by 2030;
• 10 “Smart Grid City” partnerships to prove the advanced capabilities of smart grid and other advanced demand-reduction technologies, as well as new investment in plug-in hybrid vehicle technologies;

and more besides.

She cannot be faulted, at any rate, for lack of ambition. The plan is comprehensive (to a fault) and the target for reductions in emissions is demanding. To get there, the proposed cap-and-trade regime would have to bite very hard, notwithstanding the effort and resources she proposes putting into promoting energy efficiency. Full marks for saying that she would want all of the emission permits to be auctioned. But deduct some for failing to acknowledge what this regime would do to the price of energy.  Her policy document even cites high gasoline prices as part of the energy problem she is setting out to solve (so far as climate change is concerned, high gas prices are of course part of the solution). The strategy is win-win all the way, based on an original screenplay by Al Gore: more jobs, higher wages, faster growth, and all without greenhouse gases. She is cool on nuclear too, saying no expansion will be needed, and correspondingly keen–keen is putting it  mildly–on biofuels. Home-grown biofuels, by the way.

As I say, it is bold, with lots of detail for critics to pick apart. This is hardly the vagueness and evasion of which she is being accused by Barack Obama and John Edwards (both of whom have ambitious plans of their own for climate-change mitigation). And the contrast with the leading Republican candidates on this subject could hardly be greater. That makes her stance on the issue quite a risk, though no doubt a carefully calculated one. The polls say that voters are increasingly anxious about climate change. They want promises of action. How much they are willing to pay for those promises is something we will find out.

For those following the debate in America on school choice, a useful reading from an FT correspondent who went to school in both Britain and the Netherlands. The Dutch system combines publicly financed school choice and academic streaming.

Dutch parents can indeed choose their children’s school. The schools are good, even though the country spends less on education than the OECD average. And, crucially, Dutch schools are selective - something that Britain supposedly lost when it abolished most grammar schools in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas British kids used to be selected for life aged 11, in Dutch schools selection never stops. At any age pupils can rise or fall a track. In theory, you can enter the VMBO [schools in the lower academic tier] aged 12 and end up a professor. This flexibility is crucial, because schools are society’s best means of redressing the inequality with which children start life. "The Netherlands combines both school choice and academic selection in what many see as an ideal education system," concludes Reform, the British free-market think-tank.

The Dutch system has its problems, as the article explains, but seems more successful than most.

Robert Solow has a lengthy and very interesting review (subscription required) of Gregory Clark’s "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World" in the New York Review of Books. Anything Solow writes on growth is compulsory reading, as far as I am concerned. He summarises Clark’s main thesis like this:

According to the now traditional view, the presence of institutions with the required qualities serves to create and maintain incentives that favor innovation, enterprise, and trade. Clark claims that these prerequisites were adequately present in medieval England, China, and Japan, but without the expected result. Something must have been missing, and he identifies it as the capacity or willingness of people to respond effectively to economic incentives. You might think of these as bourgeois virtues. So why were late-eighteenth-century Englishmen able and willing while medieval Englishmen and eighteenth-century Chinese and Japanese were not?

Clark resolves the puzzle in a novel way. In England—and everyplace else —in those early days before the demographic transition, the better off had more children than the less well off. More of the well-off women married; they lived longer and survived childbirth better; they were healthier and cleaner, and more of their children survived to grow up. Clark calls this pattern of differential fertility of the well off the "survival of the richest." It is a neat phrase that may seem to have the right Darwinian overtone, though not as cute as the title of the book itself. Demographic statistics for China and Japan are not nearly as good as for England, but they seem to exhibit the same pattern. However, the pattern of differential fertility in favor of the well-off appears to have been much more pronounced in England than elsewhere

…

Clark’s pessimism about closing the gap between the successful and less successful economies may derive from the belief that nothing much can change unless and until the mercantile and industrial virtues seep down into a large part of the population, as he thinks they did in preindustrial England. That could be a long wait. If that is his basic belief, it would seem to be roundly contradicted by the extraordinary sustained growth of China and, a bit more recently, India. Embarrassingly for Clark, both of those success stories seem to have been set off by institutional changes, in particular moves away from centralized control and toward an open-market economy.

Solow concludes as follows:

Toward the end of his book Clark spends a few paragraphs in stereotypical complaint about how modern economic theory has lost touch with any reality; its endless refinements are useless for dealing with the basic problems of economic growth that engage him and the world. This amounts to a severe bite at the hand that feeds him, since much of this sometimes fascinating and thought-provoking—and sometimes irritating—book is based quite precisely on applying the insights and methods of modern economic theory.

I reviewed the book in the FT. I found it fascinating and thought-provoking throughout, not just in parts–and, unlike Solow, I never thought it irritating. But I agree with Solow in finding the main thesis unconvincing, and the more I have reflected on the book since reading it, the less convinced I am.

Stuart Taylor on the criticism Michael Mukasey, the White House nominee for attorney-general, has faced over his reluctance to say that waterboarding is torture, and hence illegal. (The whole column is here; it disappears behind National Journal’s lofty pay barrier next week.)

The surge of Democratic opposition to President Bush’s nomination of former Judge Michael Mukasey to be attorney general says a lot about certain Democrats, especially after the initial bipartisan applause for a superbly qualified man who has clearly repudiated Bush’s previous claims of near-dictatorial powers.

It is especially telling that the main congressional objection to Mukasey has been his unwillingness to declare illegal an interrogation technique that Congress itself has assiduously and repeatedly declined to declare illegal.

The technique, called "waterboarding," involves simulated drowning. Congress could seek to explicitly ban it, along with other highly coercive techniques. It has not done so, because it does not want to take the blame for any future terrorist attacks that might have been prevented by highly coercive interrogation.

The attacks on Mukasey are an exquisite example of Congress’s penchant for avoiding accountability by leaving the law unclear and then trashing the executive for whichever interpretation it adopts whenever something goes wrong.

The point about the Congressional hypocrisy is well-taken. Elsewhere in the column, however, Stuart goes further and agrees with Mukasey that waterboarding is not necessarily torture.

I look forward to hearing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and others who oppose Mukasey’s nomination because of this issue explain why the undoubted moral and diplomatic benefits of a blanket criminal prohibition of waterboarding would outweigh the possible costs, which might be zero but just might be thousands of lives.

But, one might reasonably ask, isn’t torture by CIA interrogators already a crime? And isn’t waterboarding a form of torture? The answer to the first question is yes, under a 1994 criminal law implementing the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The answer to the second question is more debatable.

Of course, being strapped to a board with a cloth over one’s face and enough water running over one’s nose and mouth to create the sensation of drowning sounds horrible and has been deemed illegal in various contexts by past administrations. But not every interrogation practice that sounds horrible or has been deemed illegal in some contexts clearly meets, in all contexts, the vague but narrow definitions embedded in the 1994 ban on "torture," or in the December 2005 McCain amendment’s ban on "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment."

The 1994 law defines torture as including only practices "specifically intended" to inflict "severe physical … pain or suffering" and certain other practices that cause "prolonged mental harm" (emphasis added). Under this definition, deliberately inflicting pain that is not quite "severe," or mental harm that is not quite "prolonged," is no crime.

To be sure, the 1994 definition is not so narrow as to justify the claim that only the pain associated with "death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions" would qualify as "severe," as the Bush Justice Department asserted in an infamous, now-repudiated August 1, 2002, memo. But the definition is certainly narrow enough to leave room for doubt whether it would be torture to waterboard a high-level terrorist for, say, 15 seconds. Indeed, U.S. military and intelligence agencies have reportedly waterboarded their own people as part of their training on how to resist interrogation.

Whether the law leaves room for doubt about whether waterboarding is torture is one thing; whether the law ought to leave room for doubt on that point is quite another. In my view, the law should be clear: waterboarding is torture, and all torture is illegal.

(more…)

I promised to revisit Robert Wade’s comments about my column on inequality. My article was mainly concerned with the causes of rising inequality within and between countries, drawing attention to recent IMF findings that liberal trade was not to blame–just the opposite in fact, liberal trade is equalising–and that the main culprit is technological change. In passing I observed that "one world" inequality–that is inequality across all the world’s people, as if there were no national boundaries–is "almost certainly" falling. Robert pointed out that this is disputed.

Unfortunately I cannot post the galleys Robert sent me of his chapter ("Globalization, Growth, Poverty, Inequality, Resentment, and Imperialism") for the forthcoming second edition of "Global Political Economy" (John Ravenhill, ed). It is good, careful, heterodox stuff (I doubt that Robert will object to the term), covering a lot of ground, but on this particular point I cannot see that the debate has advanced much from where it was when I was last paying close attention.

I’ll allow that my "almost certainly" was a little exuberant. This is a methodological maze, with patchy and unreliable statistics. According to one school of thought, one-world inequality fell during the 1980s and 1990s. According to another , looking at a shorter timespan, it has zig-zagged, rising between 1988 and 1993, falling between 1993 and 1998, and rising again to 2002. Readers who care enough to read both papers can make their own minds up. If you want a non-technical summary of the wider debate, you could read this piece (pdf) I wrote for The Economist in 2004, and this subsequent reply (pdf) (focused on poverty not inequality) by Martin Ravallion of the World Bank.

Within-country inequality is increasing in much of the world, and so is between-country inequality (because the poorest countries are growing slowly). Unlike more triumphant globalists I do not regard these trends as matters of no concern. But I take heart from the fact that the proportion of people living in extreme poverty around the world is falling fast (so far as I know, this is not disputed). And as I contemplate the economic miracles in India and China, population 2bn-plus, I continue to think it very likely, at any rate, that one-world inequality is falling too.