That is because I’m disappearing for two months, to finish a book. (About international politics, amazingly enough). To ensure maximum concentration, I am abandoning not just the column – but also the blog. I will return to normal duties at the beginning of January.

In the meantime, a group of my colleagues have kindly agreed to take over my blogging duties. Over the next couple of months, this will become a group international affairs blog – drawing on the resources of the FT’s network of foreign correspondents. Among the people who have promised to blog at least once a week are Geoff Dyer, Roula Khalaf, James Blitz, Alan Beattie and Victor Mallet. (The last two will start around November 10th.) And other correspondents will chip in, every now and then. It promises to be really good – but, I hope, not too good, or I could be out of a job in 2010.

For most of the past twenty years, high levels of unemployment in Europe have been a source of shame and concern for European policymakers. Conversely, the Americans have revelled in the extraordinary job-creating US economy. Whenever Europeans defended their welfare states, or poined to inequality in the US, the Americans had a ready riposte – at least our people are at work.

But, without exciting much comment, things have now changed. American unemployment is alarmingly high – 9.8% according to the tables at the back of The Economist. By comparision, Britain is 7.9%, Germany 8.2%, the Netherlands 5.1%, Denmark 3.7%. The euro-zone as a whole is at 9.6%, just below the States – but the average is dragged up by Spain’s outstandingly poor performance, with unemployment of 18.9%.

Now it could be that America’s bad unemployment figures are just the flip side of its famous “flexible labour markets”. Lots of jobs are created in good times, and lots of jobs are lost in recessions. And, if that is “all” it is, I don’t think it will necessarily change the debate about the relative merits of the US and European economic models. But if America really is staging a “jobless recovery – as some pundits have begun to call it – that will have broader implications for international politics and “globalisation”.

Related reading:

Ralph Atkins: Eurozone feels benefit of short-time work schemes

For those of you who have not yet made it to p.24 of the second section (UK edition) of today’s FT, may I bring your attention to what seems to the single most amusing/interesting fact in today’s paper.

Paul Betts in his European View notes that, during the French EU presidency, France hosted a three day “Union of the Mediterranean summit” that cost 16.6m euros. He goes on – “On the occasion of that summit, a shower was specially installed in the Grand Palais in Paris at a cost of €245,000 for the personal use of the president. Mr Sarkozy never used it.”

Following Sarkozy’s happiness commission, the latest effort to come up with a broader measure of national well-being than mere GDP has been made by the London-based Legatum Institute. Legatum’s  ”Prosperity Index” sounds like it is weighted towards economics. But, in fact, the institute tries to take into account a great many factors in producing its national rankings, these include health, entrepeneurship, democractic governance etc. The Finns are apparently the best-off people in the world, according to this measure. Strange then, that they are so catatonic.  Maybe that is the secret of their success.

In the manner of these reports, Legatum tries to come up with ten “key findings”. These include “freedom cannot be divided”, “good governance is central to life satisfaction” and most sweeping of all, “History is not destiny.” Blimey. Who said it was? And what would it mean if history was destiny?

It seems to me there is an interesting sub-text to the whole Legatum exercise, which becomes clearer when you read this blog by the institute’s director, William Inboden. who is an ex-official in George W.Bush’s National Security Council. The whole report could be seen as a riposte to the “Asian values”, “China will take over the world” crowd. For example, it ranks India as more “prosperous” than China. You clearly would not get this result if you simply ranked countries by GDP-per-capita; but once you put measures like democratic governance into the mix – hey presto.

It’s an interesting exercise, but also slightly circular. First set up a set of criteria that explicitly include liberal political values. Then come up with your “prosperity rankings” which reveal that democracies do better than authoritarian regimes. And then announce as a key finding that “freedom is indivisible” and that “good governance is central”. Makes me almost nostalgic for dodgy dossier.

There seems to be a general sigh of relief in western capitals that President Karzai has agreed to a second round for the Afghan elections on November 7th. But my reaction was different. The whole things looks increasingly absurd to me. Do we really believe that the second round is going to be so much cleaner than the first round? Do we really think that – in the war-torn areas of Helmand – thousands of people are now going to have the confidence to turn out to vote, when they were too intimidated to do so the first time around? Above all, do we really think that the Afghans are going to feel terribly different about the continuation of President Karzai’s rule, just because there has been a second round of voting?

But then I don’t think this decision to go to a second round really has much to do with what the Afghans think. It is all about making western governments feel more comfortable. We already know that our efforts to ram the square peg of democracy into the round hole of Afghan society are in serious trouble. President Obama has said that Afghanistan is not going to be a “Jeffersonian democracy”. But the first round of elections were so flawed, that we need something that looks just a little better. Which would be fine – except that it is very likely that lots of people are going to die – western soldiers and Afghan voters – in trying to pretty up “Afghan democracy”.