Author: telegraph

Learning To Love A MultiPolar World

Posted on December 29, 2016

The only sane way forward for the US is vigorous global cooperation to realize the potential of twenty-first-century science and technology to slash poverty, disease, and environmental threats. The rise of regional powers is not a threat to the US, but an opportunity for a new era of prosperity and constructive problem solving.

American foreign policy is at a crossroads. The United States has been an expanding power since its start in 1789. It battled its way across North America in the nineteenth century and gained global dominance in the second half of the twentieth. But now, facing China’s rise, India’s dynamism, Africa’s soaring populations and economic stirrings, Russia’s refusal to bend to its will, its own inability to control events in the Middle East, and Latin America’s determination to be free of its de facto hegemony, US power has reached its limits.

One path for the US is global cooperation. The other is a burst of militarism in response to frustrated ambitions. The future of the US, and of the world, hangs on this choice.

Global cooperation is doubly vital. Only cooperation can deliver peace and the escape from a useless, dangerous, and ultimately bankrupting new arms race, this time including cyber-weapons, space weapons, and next-generation nuclear weapons. And only cooperation can enable humanity to face up to urgent planetary challenges, including the destruction of biodiversity, the poisoning of the oceans, and the threat posed by global warming to the world’s food supply, vast drylands, and heavily populated coastal regions.

Yet global cooperation means the willingness to reach agreements with other countries, not simply to make unilateral demands of them. And the US is in the habit of making demands, not making compromises. When a state feels destined to rule – as with ancient Rome, the Chinese “Middle Kingdom” centuries ago, the British Empire from 1750 to 1950, and the US since World War II – compromise is hardly a part of its political vocabulary. As former US President George W. Bush succinctly put it, “You’re either with us or against us.”

Not surprisingly, then, the US is finding it hard to accept the clear global limits that it is confronting. In the wake of the Cold War, Russia was supposed to fall in line; but President Vladimir Putin did not oblige. Likewise, rather than bringing stability on US terms, America’s covert and overt wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, South Sudan, and elsewhere created a firestorm stretching across the greater Middle East.

China was supposed to show gratitude and deference to the US for the right to catch up from 150 years of abuse by Western imperial powers and Japan. Instead, China has the audacity to think that it is an Asian power with responsibilities of its own.

There is a fundamental reason, of course, for these limits. At WWII’s end, the US was the only major power not destroyed by the war. It led the world in science, technology, and infrastructure. It constituted perhaps 30% of the world economy and formed the cutting edge of every high-tech sector. It organized the postwar international order: the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the Marshall Plan, the reconstruction of Japan, and more.

Under that order, the rest of the world has closed much of the vast technological, educational, and infrastructural gap with the US. As economists say, global growth has been “convergent,” meaning that poorer countries have been catching up. The share of the world economy represented by the US has declined by roughly half (to around 16% currently). China now has a larger economy in absolute terms than the US, though still only around one-fourth the size in per capita terms.

None of this catching up was a perfidious trick against the US or at its expense. It was a matter of basic economics: given peace, trade, and a global flow of ideas, poorer countries can get ahead. This tendency is to be welcomed, not shunned.

But if the global leader’s mindset is one of domination, the results of catch-up growth will look threatening, which is how many US “security strategists” view them. Suddenly, open trade, long championed by the US, looks like a dire threat to its continued dominance. Fear-mongers are calling for the US to close itself off to Chinese goods and Chinese companies, claiming that global trade itself undermines American supremacy.

My former Harvard colleague and leading US diplomat Robert Blackwill and former State Department adviser Ashley Tellis expressed their unease in a report published last year. The US has consistently pursued a grand strategy “focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals,” they wrote, and “primacy ought to remain the central objective of US grand strategy in the twenty-first century.” But “China’s rise thus far has already bred geopolitical, military, economic, and ideological challenges to US power, US allies, and the US-dominated international order,” Blackwill and Tellis noted. “Its continued, even if uneven, success in the future would further undermine US national interests.”

US President-elect Donald Trump’s newly named trade adviser Peter Navarro agrees. “Whenever we buy products made in China,” he wrote last year of the US and its allies, “we as consumers are helping to finance a Chinese military buildup that may well mean to do us and our countries harm.”

With just 4.4% of the world’s population and a falling share of world output, the US might try to hang on to its delusion of global dominance through a new arms race and protectionist trade policies. Doing so would unite the world against US arrogance and the new US military threat. The US would sooner rather than later bankrupt itself in a classic case of “imperial overreach.”

The only sane way forward for the US is vigorous and open global cooperation to realize the potential of twenty-first-century science and technology to slash poverty, disease, and environmental threats. A multipolar world can be stable, prosperous, and secure. The rise of many regional powers is not a threat to the US, but an opportunity for a new era of prosperity and constructive problem solving.

Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal And Gas Across Much Of The United States

Posted on December 20, 2016

For the second year in a row, wind and solar accounted for roughly two-thirds of new U.S. generating capacity, while natural gas and nuclear made up most of the rest.

That’s because right now, in much of the United States, wind and solar are the cheapest form of power available, according to a new report from investment bank Lazard.

Analysts found that new solar and wind installations are cheaper than a new coal-fired power installation just about everywhere even without subsidies. The cost of renewables continues to fall rapidly.

Solar and wind are getting really, really cheap.

Since just last year, the cost of utility-scale solar has dropped 10 percent, and the cost of residential solar dropped a whopping 26 percent and that is coming after years of price declines. The cost of offshore wind declined by 22 percent since last year, though it still remains more expensive than onshore wind.

The Lazard report is just the latest chapter in the success story of renewable energy. Since 2009, the cost of solar has been cut nearly in half. The cost of wind has fallen by two-thirds. The precipitous drop in price is reminiscent of shrinking costs for personal computers. Wind and, particularly solar, have yet to level off. New technologies and cheaper materials will continue to drive down costs in the years ahead.

 

 

The chart below shows the total cost per megawatt-hour of different forms of power. Lazard added up the lifetime cost of parts, fuel, labor, and other expenses and divided by the number of megawatt-hours generated. From this, they produced a range for the levelized cost of energy (LCOE).

This figure does not include energy subsidies nor the cost of environmental impacts. For instance, if a solar panel costs $100 without subsidies and $70 with subsidies, the LCOE would still be $100. On the other hand, if a gas turbine costs $100 without accounting for the social cost of carbon, and $130 after accounting for the social cost of carbon, then the LCOE stays at $100.

(Researchers use different methods to calculate levelized cost. Trump’s transition team, for example, has hinted that it wants to change the way the federal Energy Information Administration calculates the levelized cost of renewables to make wind and solar appear more expensive.)

 

 

By and large, wind and solar are going up in locales with an abundance of wind and sunshine. Wind is most cost-effective in the windswept states in the middle of the country — such as Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. Solar is most cost-effective in the sun-drenched Southwest — states like Nevada, Arizona, and California. Natural gas is still the cheapest option in much of the rest of the country — but keep in mind that the levelized cost does not account for the environmental cost of burning fossil fuels.

A new tool from the Energy Institute of the University of Texas shows the cheapest kind of new power plant by county, accounting for land available to deploy a particular technology. (For instance, the site notes, “it is not likely that one could build a power plant in a national park.”) The map below shows which technologies are most cost-effective without subsidies.

 

 

It’s clear why solar, wind, and natural gas are taking over the country. In light of these trends, some may be asking why we need subsidies at all.

Subsidies account for the costs of air pollution and climate change.

Given the pace of technological progress, it would be fair to ponder whether, left to its own devices, the market would take care of climate change. Low-emissions natural gas is rapidly displacing coal. Solar, wind and battery storage are getting cheaper every day. The power grid is decarbonizing itself, right?

hange demands the rapid transformation of our energy system. That means we can’t just build new, low-carbon power plants at the rate of replacement. We also have to shutter existing carbon-intensive power plants. Thus, while natural gas may offer an attractive way to curb emissions in the short-term, a gas-fired plant built today may need to be closed before the end of its operating life if we are to meet our emissions goals.

One remedy is to account for the cost of climate change — make polluters pay for polluting, or offer tax breaks for renewables. These policies can help expedite the transition to clean energy by making zero-carbon power more cost-competitive.

The chart below shows how federal tax credits impact the cost of renewables. The effect is modest, but it is important in helping wind and solar compete with coal and gas in much of the United States. Fossil fuels, it should be said, have benefitted from decades of federal support.

 

 

If you applied a modest fee to carbon pollution — rather than a tax credit for clean energy — that would discourage the construction of new coal- and gas-fired power plants. Wind, solar and nuclear would become the cheapest kind of new power plant across a broader swath of the country, as shown in the map below.

 

The cost of power, of course, is only half the battle. There is also the matter of intermittency — the fact that wind and solar only generate power when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

Solving the intermittency problem
One key finding from the Lazard report is that renewables can’t meet the “baseload generation needs of a developed economy for the foreseeable future.” For that, grids must continue to turn to other power structures. There are a couple of tools to deal with this, and we’ll likely need to use each. These include, but are not limited to:

  • Energy storage. Solar panels frequently churn out surplus power during the middle of the day. That surplus power can be stored, for example, in a lithium-ion battery and used later. As the Lazard reports notes, storage costs are dropping fast.
  • A national power grid that can carry surplus electricity generated in one part of the country to power-hungry cities in other parts of the country.
  • Nuclear power. Nuclear power can provide a baseline level of electricity, but as the Lazard report shows, nuclear remains too costly to be practical in much of the country. However, scientists are developing new kinds of reactors that could prove cheaper and more efficient than today’s nuclear plants.

Improved infrastructure (a possibility) and cheaper energy storage (an inevitability) will make wind and solar more attractive. As costs continue to fall, expect another banner year for renewables in 2017.

Giving Voice To Millions Of Americans – End US Wars Of Intervention

Posted on November 30, 2016

I recently met with President-elect Donald Trump to give voice to the millions of Americans, including my fellow veterans, who desperately want to end our country’s illegal, counterproductive war to overthrow the Syrian government. We had an hour-long, meaningful, back-and-forth discussion about the problems with current US policy in Syria and where to go from here.

I felt it critical to meet with him now, before warmongering neocons convince him to escalate this war that has already taken more than 400,000 lives and left millions of Syrians homeless and in search of safety for themselves and their families.

I conveyed to the president-elect how the post-9/11 neocon agenda of interventionism and regime change has left US foreign policy absurdly disconnected from our actual security interests. Our actions to overthrow secular dictators in Iraq and Libya, and attempts now to do the same in Syria, have resulted in tremendous loss of life, failed nations, and even worse humanitarian crises while strengthening the very terrorist organizations that have declared war on America.

Since 2011, the United States—working with Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Turkey—has been providing support to “rebel groups” fighting to overthrow the government and take over Syria. A recent New York Times article reported that these “rebel groups” supported by the United States “have entered into battlefield alliances with the affiliate of Al Qaeda in Syria, formerly known as Al Nusra.” How the United States can work hand-in-hand with the very terrorist organization that is responsible for the killing of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 boggles my mind and curdles my blood.

This absurd alliance has allowed terrorist groups like Al Qaeda to establish strongholds throughout Syria, including in Aleppo, where they are now using the civilian population as human shields and their deaths as propaganda tools.

Additionally, escalating this regime-change war by implementing a “no-fly/safe zone” in Syria would not only be ineffective, it would put the United States in direct military confrontation with nuclear-power Russia, require tens of thousands of ground troops and a massive US air presence, and commit us to yet another endless war in the Middle East that does not serve American or Syrian interests.

In short, even if the US-Saudi alliance were successful in overthrowing the Syrian government, we would be saddled with the responsibility of building a new nation in Syria. Trillions of US taxpayer dollars, and who knows how many American lives, will be lost, and there will be little to show for it. As was true in Iraq and Libya, the United States has no credible government or leader able to bring order, security, and freedom to the people of Syria if Assad is overthrown. To maintain order after Assad’s fall would require at least 500,000 troops in a never-ending occupation.

The most likely outcome of this regime-change war is that it will open the door for ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other terrorist groups who are the most powerful fighting forces on the ground, to take over all of Syria, amass powerful weapons (many of which will have been provided to them by the United States), and pose a far worse threat to the Syrian people, religious minorities, and to the world.

The crux of my advice to President-elect Trump was this: We must end this ill-conceived, counterproductive regime-change war immediately. We must focus our precious resources on investing in and rebuilding our own country and on defeating Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups that pose a threat to the American people.

Dr. Cornel West And Robert George Discuss Liberal Arts Education

Posted on November 30, 2016

While they are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, Princeton Professors Robert George and Cornel West have spent the past several years teaching and lecturing together to accomplish a common goal: the provision of a true liberal arts education to their students. Through their courses and their friendship, they have served as examples of how, when two knowledgeable and principled individuals come together in an honest and non adversarial pursuit of truth, the competition of ideas deepens their own understanding of that truth.

 

The Fate Of The Earth

Posted on November 16, 2016

Sponsored by The Nation Institute, The New School, and the Tishman Environment and Design Center, environmentalist and author Bill McKibben delivered the first annual Jonathan Schell Memorial Lecture Series on the Fate of the Earth.

 

4 Possible Reasons The Polls Got It So Wrong This Year

Posted on November 14, 2016

If you followed the presidential polls at all closely, chances are that you expected Hillary Clinton to win last week. So did all of the major prediction models that use polls to game out election outcome probabilities. So perhaps everyone should have expected that in a year when all political norms were broken, the polls that the political world fixates upon would also prove to be flawed.

Pollsters will be digging for months (at least) to figure out how exactly their results may have been off. The American Association for Public Opinion Research is convening a committee to study this year’s polling, but answers will be a long time coming, as the committee won’t wrap up until May 2017. Until then, here are a few ways to think about what was wrong — and right — with the polling in the 2016 election.

1. The national polls weren’t that off — they did predict more people would vote for Clinton. That’s what happened.

Donald Trump did win the most electoral votes. However, at latest count, Clinton is up by a little over half a percentage point over Trump in the popular vote (or about 725,000 votes).

That’s around 2.7 points off of Real Clear Politics’ final polling average estimating Clinton’s lead over Trump.

Is that big? Not compared with 2012. That year, Obama beat Romney by around 3.9 points. RCP’s final estimate was 3.2 points below that (this was in two-way polling; polls including third-party candidates were rare that year). But then, in 2008, the results were remarkably close, only a few tenths of a point away from the final poling average.

So this year’s national polls were off a bit, but not outlandishly so (and, again, they did predict the popular vote winner). However, we have an Electoral College, and so it’s state polls that matter in predicting who will win the presidency.

Many swing-state polls weren’t terribly far off either, as the noted Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies pointed out in a memo last week. However, something was still clearly off in those polls.

After all, in those nine swing states Public Opinion Strategies cited, the polls were all wrong in the same direction. All of them predicted a better performance for Clinton than she ended up having. What exactly may have caused systematic problems is what many people are questioning.

2. Some people just don’t answer the phone.

Many pollsters that do phone polling conduct it via random digit dialing. That means they should theoretically get a pretty representative sample — after all, they’re reaching out to people randomly.

It’s possible that some pollsters managed to miss Trump supporters in a big way, explains Claudia Deane, vice president of research at the Pew Research Center.

“The problem is if you get what pollsters call nonresponse bias, people are less likely to take your call or stay on the phone with you,” she explained.

She told NPR this is one of three big ways in which polling may have been off. Some populations, like people with less education, are less likely to answer when pollsters call, Deane said. Less-educated whites heavily supported Trump — far more even than they supported Romney in 2012 or McCain in 2008. And when Trump constantly beat the drum against the media (many of whose organizations conduct polling) and polling (when they showed him losing), then perhaps this nonresponse factor among his supporters isn’t so surprising.

That’s just one example. The point is that if the groups of people who are less likely to answer pollsters’ calls also happen to be the demographic groups that are more likely to support Trump, that may have thrown polls off.

3. Did people lie to pollsters?

The idea of the “secret Trump vote” popped up throughout the election — the theory being that voters didn’t want to tell a stranger on the phone that they were voting for Trump, who said and did so many controversial things on the campaign trail. This is what is called “social desirability bias” — the idea that voters give polling answers that for whatever reason they think will reflect well upon them, and it’s the second reason Deane listed that polls could have been off.

A week ahead of the election, a panel of GOP insiders told Politico that they believed this was happening.

“I personally know many Republicans that won’t admit that they are voting for Trump,” one Virginia Republican told Politico. “I don’t like admitting it myself. It won’t matter if Hillary is up more than 5 points, but we might be in for a surprise if Hillary’s lead is less than 5 points on Election Day.”

Her lead on Election Day was indeed smaller than 5 points, and the nation most definitely was in for a surprise (but presumably not that Politico insider).

Still, there’s reason to be skeptical that this really threw off polls much.

“If that was true, that really should apply in phone versus online polls, and for the most part we didn’t see that,” Deane said, pointing out that Trump should have performed better in online polls than in phone polls, if social desirability bias was a factor, as online polls don’t involve talking to a live person.

4. It’s hard to capture enthusiasm (or lack thereof).

Pollsters talk to a lot of people, and they try to predict which ones will, in fact, turn up at the polling place. That’s harder than it sounds.

“Way too many people tell you they’re going to vote,” Deane said.

What may have happened is that the usual models of predicting simply didn’t work this year, she explained. After all, lots of other things about the election were unusual: high levels of anger and two candidates with high unfavorability ratings, for example. That may have made this year unique in terms of figuring out which of those people were motivated to vote (or were ambivalent enough to stay home).

“We know polls do a poor job with emotion/enthusiasm/commitment,” Evans Witt, head of Princeton Survey Research and president of the National Council on Public Polls, emailed NPR. “And that appears key to Trump support.”

To the extent that pollsters overestimated Clinton supporters’ willingness to vote — or underestimated Trump supporters’ willingness — that could have thrown things off.

To be clear, these are all possibilities — pollsters will have plenty of work to do to figure out what they didn’t capture this year.

“Lots of polls this year and a lot of cutting corners to save money — a reality, but at a cost,” said Witt, who is also on the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s committee that is doing a post-hoc analysis of the accuracy of polling in the presidential election.

“It will be months before this can be sorted out,” Witt added. “Lots of data to be examined, lots of hard questions to ask and answer.”

Come 2018 and 2020, many Americans will likely find themselves taking poll numbers with an extra grain of salt or three.

Investment For Sustainable Growth

Posted on October 31, 2016

When the 2008 financial crisis hit, outlays on both consumption and housing plummeted, yet the investment that should have picked up the slack never materialized. It is time to usher in an era of high investment in sustainable development.

The big disappointment in the world economy today is the low rate of investment. In the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, growth in high-income countries was propelled by spending on housing and private consumption. When the crisis hit, both kinds of spending plummeted, and the investments that should have picked up the slack never materialized. This must change.

After the crisis, the world’s major central banks attempted to revive spending and employment by slashing interest rates. The strategy worked, to some extent. By flooding capital markets with liquidity and holding down market interest rates, policymakers encouraged investors to bid up stock and bond prices. This created financial wealth through capital gains, while spurring consumption and – through initial public offerings – some investment.

Yet this policy has reached its limits – and imposed undeniable costs. With interest rates at or even below zero, investors borrow for highly speculative purposes. As a result, the overall quality of investments has dropped, while leverage has risen. When central banks finally tighten credit, there is a real risk of significant asset-price declines.

As monetary policy was being pushed to its limits, what went missing was an increase in long-term investments in high-speed rail, roads, ports, low-carbon energy, safe water and sanitation, and health and education. With budget austerity restraining public investment, and major uncertainties concerning public policy and international taxation hampering private investment, such spending has generally declined in the high-income countries.

Despite US President Barack Obama’s promises of investment in high-speed rail and other modern infrastructure, not one mile of fast rail was built during his eight years in office. It is time to translate words into action, in the United States and elsewhere, and usher in a new era of high investment in sustainable development.

There are three challenges facing such a strategy: identifying the right projects; developing complex plans that involve both the public and private sectors (and often more than one country); and structuring the financing. To succeed, governments must be capable of effective long-term planning, budgeting, and project implementation. China has demonstrated these capabilities in the last 20 years (though with major environmental failures), whereas the US and Europe have been stymied. The poorest countries, meanwhile, have often been told by the International Monetary Fund and others not even to try.

Today, governments will have some help in overcoming at least one of the key challenges. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Climate Agreement will help to guide them toward the right projects.

The world needs , and an end to the construction of new coal-fired power plants. And it needs massive investments in electric vehicles (and advanced batteries), together with a sharp reduction in internal combustion engine vehicles. The developing world, in particular, also needs major investments in water and sanitation projects in fast-growing urban areas. And low-income countries, in particular, need to scale up health and education systems.

China’s “one belt, one road” initiative – which aims to link Asia to Europe with modern infrastructure networks – will help to advance some of these goals, assuming the projects are designed with a low-carbon-energy future in mind. That initiative will boost employment, spending, and growth, especially in the landlocked economies across Eurasia. It should even deliver new dynamism to economic and diplomatic relations among the European Union, Russia, and China.

A similar program is needed urgently in Africa. Although African countries have already identified priority investments for electrification and transport, progress will remain slow without a new wave of investment spending.

African countries’ combined spending on education alone should increase by tens of billions of dollars per year; combined infrastructure spending should surge by at least $100 billion per year. These needs should be covered mostly by long-term, low-interest-rate loans from China, Europe, and the US, as well as by mobilizing African countries’ long-term savings (through, for example, the introduction of new pension systems).

The US and Europe also need . The US – where the last big infrastructure project, the national highway system, was concluded in the 1970s – should emphasize investment in low-carbon energy, high-speed rail, and the mass uptake of electric vehicles.

As for Europe, the European Commission’s Investment Plan for Europe – dubbed the “Juncker Plan,” for Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker – should become the EU’s SDG program. It should focus, for example, on creating a Europe-wide transmission grid for low-carbon energy, and on a massive increase in .

To help finance such programs, the multilateral development banks – such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the African Development Bank – should raise vastly more long-term debt from the capital markets at the prevailing low interest rates. They should then lend those funds to governments and public-private investment entities.

Governments should levy gradually rising carbon taxes, using the revenues to finance low-carbon energy systems. And the egregious loopholes in the global corporate-tax system should be closed, thereby boosting global corporate taxation by some $200 billion annually, if not more. (American companies are currently sitting on nearly $2 trillion in offshore funds that should finally be taxed.) The added revenues should be allocated to new public investment spending.

For the poorest countries, much of the needed investment should come through increased official development assistance. There are several ways to generate that extra aid money via a reduction of military spending, including by ending the wars in the Middle East; deciding firmly against a next generation of nuclear weapons; cutting back on US military bases overseas; and avoiding a US-China arms race through enhanced diplomacy and cooperation. The resulting peace dividend should be channeled toward health care, education, and infrastructure in today’s impoverished and war-torn regions.

Sustainable development is not just a wish and a slogan; it offers the only realistic path to global growth and high employment. It is time to give it the attention – and investment – it deserves.

The Fatal Expense Of American Imperialism

Posted on October 30, 2016

The single most important issue in allocating national resources is war versus peace, or as macroeconomists put it, “guns versus butter.” The United States is getting this choice profoundly wrong, squandering vast sums and undermining national security. In economic and geopolitical terms, America suffers from what Yale historian Paul Kennedy calls “imperial overreach.” If our next president remains trapped in expensive Middle East wars, the budgetary costs alone could derail any hopes for solving our vast domestic problems.

It may seem tendentious to call America an empire, but the term fits certain realities of US power and how it’s used. An empire is a group of territories under a single power. Nineteenth-century Britain was obviously an empire when it ruled India, Egypt, and dozens of other colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. The United States directly rules only a handful of conquered islands (Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands), but it stations troops and has used force to influence who governs in dozens of other sovereign countries. That grip on power beyond America’s own shores is now weakening.

The scale of US military operations is remarkable. The US Department of Defense has (as of a 2010 inventory) 4,999 military facilities, of which 4,249 are in the United States; 88 are in overseas US territories; and 662 are in 36 foreign countries and foreign territories, in all regions of the world. Not counted in this list are the secret facilities of the US intelligence agencies. The cost of running these military operations and the wars they support is extraordinary, around $900 billion per year, or 5 percent of US national income, when one adds the budgets of the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, homeland security, nuclear weapons programs in the Department of Energy, and veterans benefits. The $900 billion in annual spending is roughly one-quarter of all federal government outlays.

The United States has a long history of using covert and overt means to overthrow governments deemed to be unfriendly to US interests, following the classic imperial strategy of rule through locally imposed friendly regimes. In a powerful study of Latin America between 1898 and 1994, for example, historian John Coatsworth counts 41 cases of “successful” US-led regime change, for an average rate of one government overthrow by the United States every 28 months for a century. And note: Coatsworth’s count does not include the failed attempts, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

This tradition of US-led regime change has been part and parcel of US foreign policy in other parts of the world, including Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Wars of regime change are costly to the United States, and often devastating to the countries involved. Two major studies have measured the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. One, by my Columbia colleague Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes, arrived at the cost of $3 trillion as of 2008. A more recent study, by the Cost of War Project at Brown University, puts the price tag at $4.7 trillion through 2016. Over a 15-year period, the $4.7 trillion amounts to roughly $300 billion per year, and is more than the combined total outlays from 2001 to 2016 for the federal departments of education, energy, labor, interior, and transportation, and the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

It is nearly a truism that US wars of regime change have rarely served America’s security needs. Even when the wars succeed in overthrowing a government, as in the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Moammar Khadafy in Libya, the result is rarely a stable government, and is more often a civil war. A “successful” regime change often lights a long fuse leading to a future explosion, such as the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government and installation of the autocratic Shah of Iran, which was followed by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. In many other cases, such as the US attempts (with Saudi Arabia and Turkey) to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the result is a bloodbath and military standoff rather than an overthrow of the government.

What is the deep motivation for these profligate wars and for the far-flung military bases that support them?

From 1950 to 1990, the superficial answer would have been the Cold War. Yet America’s imperial behavior overseas predates the Cold War by half a century (back to the Spanish-American War, in 1898) and has outlasted it by another quarter century. America’s overseas imperial adventures began after the Civil War and the final conquests of the Native American nations. At that point, US political and business leaders sought to join the European empires — especially Britain, France, Russia, and the newly emergent Germany — in overseas conquests. In short order, America grabbed the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Panama, and Hawaii, and joined the European imperial powers in knocking on the doors of China.

As of the 1890s, the United States was by far the world’s largest economy, but until World War II, it took a back seat to the British Empire in global naval power, imperial reach, and geopolitical dominance. The British were the unrivaled masters of regime change — for example, in carving up the corpse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Yet the exhaustion from two world wars and the Great Depression ended the British and French empires after World War II and thrust the United States and Russia into the forefront as the two main global empires. The Cold War had begun.

The economic underpinning of America’s global reach was unprecedented. As of 1950, US output constituted a remarkable 27 percent of global output, with the Soviet Union roughly a third of that, around 10 percent. The Cold War fed two fundamental ideas that would shape American foreign policy till now. The first was that the United States was in a struggle for survival against the Soviet empire. The second was that every country, no matter how remote, was a battlefield in that global war. While the United States and the Soviet Union would avoid a direct confrontation, they flexed their muscles in hot wars around the world that served as proxies for the superpower competition.

Over the course of nearly a half century, Cuba, Congo, Ghana, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Namibia, Mozambique, Chile, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and even tiny Granada, among many others, were interpreted by US strategists as battlegrounds with the Soviet empire. Often, far more prosaic interests were involved. Private companies like United Fruit International and ITT convinced friends in high places (most famously the Dulles brothers, Secretary of State John Foster and CIA director Allen) that land reforms or threatened expropriations of corporate assets were dire threats to US interests, and therefore in need of US-led regime change. Oil interests in the Middle East were another repeated cause of war, as had been the case for the British Empire from the 1920s.

These wars destabilized and impoverished the countries involved rather than settling the politics in America’s favor. The wars of regime change were, with few exceptions, a litany of foreign policy failure. They were also extraordinarily costly for the United States itself. The Vietnam War was of course the greatest of the debacles, so expensive, so bloody, and so controversial that it crowded out Lyndon Johnson’s other, far more important and promising war, the War on Poverty, in the United States.

The end of the Cold War, in 1991, should have been the occasion for a fundamental reorientation of US guns-versus-butter policies. The occasion offered the United States and the world a “peace dividend,” the opportunity to reorient the world and US economy from war footing to sustainable development. Indeed, the Rio Earth Summit, in 1992, established sustainable development as the centerpiece of global cooperation, or so it seemed.

Alas, the blinders and arrogance of American imperial thinking prevented the United States from settling down to a new era of peace. As the Cold War was ending, the United States was beginning a new era of wars, this time in the Middle East. The United States would sweep away the Soviet-backed regimes in the Middle East and establish unrivalled US political dominance. Or at least that was the plan.

The quarter century since 1991 has therefore been marked by a perpetual US war in the Middle East, one that has destabilized the region, massively diverted resources away from civilian needs toward the military, and helped to create mass budget deficits and the buildup of public debt. The imperial thinking has led to wars of regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, across four presidencies: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The same thinking has induced the United States to expand NATO to Russia’s borders, despite the fact that NATO’s supposed purpose was to defend against an adversary — the Soviet Union — that no longer exists. Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev has emphasized that eastward NATO expansion “was certainly a violation of the spirit of those declarations and assurances that we were given in 1990,” regarding the future of East-West security.

There is a major economic difference, however, between now and 1991, much less 1950. At the start of the Cold War, in 1950, the United States produced around 27 percent of world output. As of 1991, when the Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz dreams of US dominance were taking shape, the United States accounted for around 22 percent of world production. By now, according to IMF estimates, the US share is 16 percent, while China has surpassed the United States, at around 18 percent. By 2021, according to projections by the International Monetary Fund, the United States will produce roughly 15 percent of global output compared with China’s 20 percent. The United States is incurring massive public debt and cutting back on urgent public investments at home in order to sustain a dysfunctional, militarized, and costly foreign policy.

Thus comes a fundamental choice. The United States can vainly continue the neoconservative project of unipolar dominance, even as the recent failures in the Middle East and America’s declining economic preeminence guarantee the ultimate failure of this imperial vision. If, as some neoconservatives support, the United States now engages in an arms race with China, we are bound to come up short in a decade or two, if not sooner. The costly wars in the Middle East — even if continued much less enlarged in a Hillary Clinton presidency — could easily end any realistic hopes for a new era of scaled-up federal investments in education, workforce training, infrastructure, science and technology, and the environment.

The far smarter approach will be to maintain America’s defensive capabilities but end its imperial pretensions. This, in practice, means cutting back on the far-flung network of military bases, ending wars of regime change, avoiding a new arms race (especially in next-generation nuclear weapons), and engaging China, India, Russia, and other regional powers in stepped-up diplomacy through the United Nations, especially through shared actions on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, including climate change, disease control, and global education.

Many American conservatives will sneer at the very thought that the United States’ room for maneuver should be limited in the slightest by the UN. But think how much better off the United States would be today had it heeded the UN Security Council’s wise opposition to the wars of regime change in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Many conservatives will point to Vladimir Putin’s actions in Crimea as proof that diplomacy with Russia is useless, without recognizing that it was NATO’s expansion to the Baltics and its 2008 invitation to Ukraine to join NATO, that was a primary trigger of Putin’s response.

In the end, the Soviet Union bankrupted itself through costly foreign adventures such as the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and its vast over-investment in the military. Today the United States has similarly over-invested in the military, and could follow a similar path to decline if it continues the wars in the Middle East and invites an arms race with China. It’s time to abandon the reveries, burdens, and self-deceptions of empire and to invest in sustainable development at home and in partnership with the rest of the world.

Facing Up To Income Inequality

Posted on October 2, 2016

The Census Bureau recently announced a heartening 5 percent gain in the median household income between 2014 and 2015, the largest one-year gain on record. Yet a look at the longer-term trends offers a sobering perspective. The jump in household income merely helps to make up for lost ground; the median earnings in 2015 were actually lower than back in 1999 — 16 years ago.

While household median incomes have stagnated since the late 1990s, the inflation-adjusted earnings of poorer households have stagnated for even longer, roughly 40 years. Meanwhile, households at or near the top of the income distribution have enjoyed sizeable increases of living standards. The result is a stark widening of the gap between rich and poor households.

There is perhaps no issue in America more contentious than income inequality. Everybody has a theory as to why the gap between rich and poor has widened and what should be done — if anything — to close it. A full explanation should help us understand why the United States stands out for having an especially high and rising inequality of income.

There are three main factors at play: technology, trade, and politics. Technological innovations have raised the demand for highly trained workers, thereby pushing up the incomes of college-educated workers relative to high-school-educated workers. Global trade has exposed the wages of industrial workers to tough international competition from workers at much lower pay scales. And our federal politics has tended, during the past 35 years, to weaken the political role of the working class, diminish union bargaining power, and cap or cut the government benefits received by working-class families.

Consider technology. Throughout modern history, ingenious machines have been invented to replace heavy physical labor. This has been hugely beneficial: Most (though not all) American workers have been lucky to escape the hard toil, drudgery, dangers, and diseases of heavy farm work, mining, and heavy industry. Farm jobs have been lost, but with some exceptions, their backbreaking drudgery has been transformed into office jobs. Farm workers and miners combined now account for less than 1 percent of the labor force.

Yet the office jobs required more skills than the farm jobs that disappeared. The new office jobs needed a high school education, and, more recently, a college degree. So who benefited? Middle-class and upper-class kids fortunate enough to receive the education and skills for the new office jobs. And who lost? Mostly poorer kids who couldn’t afford the education to meet the rising demands for skilled work.

Now the race between education and technology has again heated up. The machines are getting smarter and better faster than ever before — indeed, faster than countless households can help their kids to stay in the job market. Sure, there are still good jobs available, as long as you’ve graduated with a degree in computer science from MIT, or at least a nod in that direction.

Globalization is closely related to technology and, indeed, is made possible by it. It has a similar effect, of squeezing incomes of lower-skilled workers. Not only are the assembly-line robots competing for American jobs; so too are the lower-waged workers half a world away from the United States. American workers in so-called “traded-goods” sectors, meaning the sectors in direct competition with imports, have therefore faced an additional whammy of intense downward pressure on wages.

For a long time, economists resisted the public’s concern about trade depressing wages of lower-skilled workers. Twenty-two years ago I coauthored a paper arguing that rising trade with China and other low-wage countries was squeezing the earnings of America’s lower-skilled workers. The paper was met with skepticism. A generation later, the economics profession has mostly come around to recognize that globalization is a culprit in the rise of income inequality. This doesn’t mean that global trade should be ended, since trade does indeed expand the overall economy. It does, however, suggest that open trade should be accompanied by policies to improve the lot of lower-wage, lower-skilled workers, especially those directly hit by global trade but also those indirectly affected.

Many analyses of rising income inequality stop at this point, emphasizing the twin roles of technology and trade, and perhaps debating their relative importance. Yet the third part of the story — the role of politics — is perhaps the most vital of all. Politics shows up in two ways. First, politics helps to determine the bargaining power of workers versus corporations: how the overall pie is divided between capital and labor. Second, politics determines whether the federal budget is used to spread the benefits of a rising economy to the workers and households left behind.

Unfortunately, US politics has tended to put the government’s muscle on behalf of big business and against the working class. Remember the Reagan revolution: tax cuts for the rich and the companies, and union-busting for the workers? Remember the Clinton program to “end welfare as we know it,” a program that pushed poor and working-class moms into long-distance commuting for desperately low wages, while their kids were often left back in dangerous and squalid conditions? Remember the case of the federal minimum wage, which has been kept so low for so long by Congress that its inflation-adjusted value peaked in 1968?

There is no deep mystery as to why federal politics has turned its back on the poor and working class. The political system has become “pay to play,” with federal election cycles now costing up to $10 billion, largely financed by the well-heeled class in the Hamptons and the C-suites of Wall Street and Big Oil, certainly not the little guy on unemployment benefits. As the insightful political scientist Martin Gilens has persuasively shown, when it comes to federal public policy, only the views of the rich actually have sway in Washington.

So in the end, the inequality of income in the United States is high and rising while in other countries facing the same technological and trade forces, the inequality remains lower, and the rise in inequality has tended to be less stark. What explains the difference in outcomes? In the other countries, democratic politics offers voice and representation to average voters rather than to the rich. Votes and voters matter more than dollars.

To delve more deeply into the comparison between the United States and other countries, it is useful to measure the inequality of income in each country in two different ways. The first way measures the inequality of “market incomes” of households, that is, the income of households measured before taxes and government benefits are taken into account. The second measures the inequality of “disposable income,” taking into account the taxes paid and transfers received by the household.

The difference between the two measures shows the extent of income redistribution achieved through government taxation and spending. In all of the high-income countries, the inequality of market income is greater than the inequality of disposable income. The taxes paid by the relatively rich and the transfers made to the relatively poor help to offset some of the inequality of the marketplace.

The accompanying chart offers just this comparison for the high-income countries. For each country, two measures of inequality based on the “Gini coefficient” are calculated. The Gini coefficient is a measure of income inequality that varies between 0 (full-income equality across households) and 1 (full-income inequality, in which one household has all of the income). Countries as a whole tend to have a Gini coefficient of disposable income somewhere between 0.25 (low inequality) and 0.60 (very high inequality).

In the figure, we see the two values of the Gini coefficient for each country: a higher value (more inequality) based on market income and a lower value (less inequality) based on disposable income (that is, after taxes and transfers). We can see that in every country, the tax-and-transfer system shifts at least some income from the rich to the poor, thereby pushing down the Gini coefficient. Yet the amount of net redistribution is very different in different countries, and is especially low in the United States.

Compare, for example, the United States and Denmark. In the United States, the Gini coefficient on market income is a very high 0.51, and on disposable income, 0.40, still quite high. In Denmark, by comparison, the Gini coefficient on market income is a bit lower than the United States, at 0.43. Yet Denmark’s Gini coefficient on disposable income is far lower, only 0.25. America’s tax-and-transfer system reduces the Gini coefficient by only 0.11. Denmark’s tax-and-transfer system reduces the Gini coefficient by 0.18, half-again as high as in the United States.

How does Denmark end up with so much lower inequality of disposable income from its budget policies? Denmark taxes more heavily than the United States and uses the greater tax revenue to provide free health care, child care, sick leave, maternity and paternity leave, guaranteed vacations, free university tuition, early childhood programs, and much more. Denmark taxes a hefty 51 percent of national income and provides a robust range of high-quality public services. The United States taxes a far lower 31 percent and offers a rickety social safety net. In the United States, people are left to sink or swim. Many sink.

So, many Americans would suspect, Denmark is miserable and being crushed by taxes, right? Well, not so right. Denmark actually comes out number 1 in the world happiness rankings, while the United States comes in 13th. Denmark’s life expectancy is also higher, its poverty lower, and its citizens’ trust in government and in each other vastly higher than the equivalent trust in the United States.

So herin lies a key lesson for the United States. America’s inequality of disposable income is the highest among the rich countries. America is paying a heavy price in lost well-being for its high and rising inequality of income, and for its failure to shift more benefits to the poor and working class.

We have become a country of huge distrust of government and of each other; we have become a country with a huge underclass of people who can’t afford their prescription drugs, tuition payments, or rents or mortgage payments. Despite a roughly threefold increase in national income per person over the past 50 years, Americans report to survey takers no higher level of happiness than they did back in 1960. The fraying of America’s social ties, the increased loneliness and distrust, eats away at the American dream and the American spirit. It’s even contributing to a rise in the death rates among middle-aged, white, non-Hispanic Americans, a shocking recent reversal of very long-term trends of rising longevity.

The current trends will tend to get even worse unless and until American politics changes direction. As I will describe in a later column, the coming generation of yet smarter machines and robots will claim additional jobs among the lower-skilled workers and those performing rote activities. Wages will be pushed lower except for those with higher training and skills. Capital owners (who will own the robots and the software systems to operate them) will reap large profits while many young people will be unable to find gainful employment. The advance in technology could thereby contribute to a further downward spiral in social cohesion.

That is, unless we decide to do things differently. Twenty-eight countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have lower inequality of disposable income than the United States, even though these countries share the same technologies and compete in the same global marketplace as the United States. These income comparisons underscore that America’s high inequality is a choice, not an irreversible law of the modern world economy.

 

The State Of Women’s Representation On The Eve Of The 2016 Election

Posted on October 1, 2016

Hailed by some as a second “Year of the Woman,” the 2014 election was a positive — but by no means watershed — election for the advancement of women’s representation. For the first time, over 100 of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress were women. Additionally, New Hampshire became the first and only state to reach gender parity in elected office according to Representation 2020’s Gender Parity Index. Yet, only five female governors were elected in the 36 gubernatorial races held in 2014 and Americans elected fewer female state legislators than in 2012.

Let’s reflect on where women’s representation is at in the lead up to the 2016 elections.

Measuring women’s representation: Representation 2020’s Gender Parity Index

In order to quantify progress toward gender parity in elected office, Representation 2020 developed the Gender Parity Index. Each year, a Gender Parity Score is calculated for the U.S. and each of the 50 states. The Gender Parity Score measures women’s recent electoral success at the local, state and national level on a scale of 0 (if no women were elected to any offices) to 100 (if women held all such offices). A state with gender parity in elected office would receive a Gender Parity Score of 50 out of 100.The key advantage of the Gender Parity Score is that it enables comparisons over time and between states.

Only five states were more than three-fifths the way to parity in the lead up to the 2016 election

Overall, progress toward parity was made in 2016. The median Gender Parity Score in the 50 states increased from 18.1 at the end of 2014 to 18.7 in October 2016. However, only five states received a Gender Parity Score of more than 30 points: Arizona, California, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Washington. An additional seven states are one fifth or less of the way to gender parity in elected office: Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah and Virginia.

The Gender Parity Index shows that we are less than halfway to gender parity

Both the first “Year of the Woman” election in 1992 and the 2014 election advanced women’s representation. It is important, however, to keep those advances in perspective. Current strategies to advance women’s representation have gotten us less than two-fifths of the way there — 96 years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing suffrage to women. We can’t wait another 96 years (or longer) to reach gender parity in elective office. Representation 2020 understands that it is important to train and fund more women candidates. In addition, however, we need structural reforms — of candidate recruitment practices, electoral systems, and legislative rules — that level the playing field to hasten our progress toward gender parity in elected office.

New Hampshire leads the nation

New Hampshire ranks highest in our 2016 Parity Index with a score of 55, slightly above gender parity in elected office. The state scored 9.9 points higher than the second-placed state (Washington). In 2012, New Hampshire was the first state in the nation to elect an all-female delegation to Congress — and currently 3 of its four-member congressional delegation are women. The current governor is female (Maggie Hassan, who is running for U.S. Senate in 2016), 29% of its state legislators are women, and the mayor of the state’s fifth largest city, Dover, is a woman. New Hampshire was also the first state in the nation to have a majority-female state legislative chamber (state senate from 2009 to 2010).

Mississippi ranks last

Mississippi received the lowest Gender Parity Score in the nation with just 6.4 points. As we head into the 2016 election, Mississippi is the only state that has never elected a woman to the governor’s mansion or to the U.S. Congress. The 2016 election will not change that: there are no female major party candidates running for the U.S. House, and no races for U.S. Senate or governor. Only four women have ever served in statewide elective office in Mississippi, 2 of whom are in office today. None of Mississippi’s 9 cities with populations greater than 30,000 people currently have female mayors.

Regional Trends: The Northeast and West excel, while the South lags behind

The West and the Northeast outperform the Midwest and the South in gender parity in elected office. Eight of the 10 states with the highest Gender Parity Scores in July 2016 were in the Northeast or West (Arizona, California, Hawaii Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Washington). By contrast, seven of the 10 states with the lowest Gender Parity Score are in the South (Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia).

The disparity between the South and other regions has widened in the past few decades. In 1993, two southern states (Maryland and Texas) ranked in the top 10 states for gender parity, while six (Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia) ranked in the bottom 10.

 

 

No state legislative chambers are at parity

In the lead up to the 2016 election, not a single state has gender parity in its state legislature. The legislative chamber closest to parity in the nation is the Colorado House of Representatives, with 46.2% female legislators. In November 2014, 50 female candidates ran for the 65 seats in the Colorado House of Representatives, according to the Center for American Women and Politics, and 30 were elected. Not surprisingly, Colorado ranked first for the proportion of women in its state legislature, with 42.0% female state legislators in July 2016. Ranked lowest was Wyoming at 13.3%. In 1993, the range was from 39.5% (Washington) to 5.1% (Kentucky)— showing advances for the lowest-ranking states, but less improvement for states at the top.

 

 

Fewer women in state legislatures

The proportion of women state legislators actually declined slightly as a result of the 2014 election. Currently, 1,791 (24.3%) state legislators are women. If we take a broader view, we can see that the progress toward gender parity in state legislatures is slowing down from the 1970s, which is worrying. Without new initiatives, progress may stall completely.