Obsidian Wings

It's Your Brain Against My Mind

by Eric Martin

Megan McArdle, to her credit, makes a go at an updated mea culpa for her position on the Iraq war.  One of the reasons cited for her, admittedly, flawed decision to support the war seems a bit odd, however:

I erroneously believed that I could interpret the actions of Saddam Hussein.  He seemed to be acting like I'd act if I had WMD.  Whoops!  I wasn't an Iraqi dictator, which left huge gaps in my mental model of Hussein.

First of all, since McArdle is not a lot of things (well, she isn't anything other than what she is, to state a tautology), this is a dubious standard to employ for someone who is in the business of providing analysis from the august pages of The Atlantic.  To put it another way, her mental model presumably has huge gaps about most things using the criteria of "actually being like what is being observed," and, thus, this is either a poor excuse or a fair warning about the quality of analysis forthcoming on most issues.  Let's assume the former.

That general comment aside, there is also the issue of "interpreting" the actions of Saddam, which was a wholly unnecessary exercise considering the fact that we had actual UN weapons inspectors in Iraq for months preceding the invasion, and those inspectors were following leads from the best intelligence that the US and Britain could provide (the countries whose leaders assured us repeatedly that Saddam had WMD and that "we know where they are").

Thus, interpreting Saddam's actions should have been low on the list of evidence for WMD, or the lack thereof, with "what are the inspectors who are there following our best intel finding" placing much, much higher.  To excerpt an article that was recently discussed on this site in a similar context:

Hans Blix told the BBC that his teams followed up US and British leads at suspected sites across Iraq, but found nothing when they got there. [...] 

In a BBC interview...Mr Blix said he had been disappointed with the tip-offs provided by British and US intelligence.

"Only in three of those cases did we find anything at all, and in none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction, and that shook me a bit, I must say."

He said UN inspectors had been promised the best information available.

"I thought - my God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?"   

This, of course, leaves aside the fact that WMD is a nebulous term that obscures more than it illuminates, especially when used the way it was in the run-up to the Iraq war.  While nuclear weapons are extremely destructive (much, much moreso than chem and bio weapons in almost all contexts), the consensus was that Saddam did not have an active nuclear program, let alone a weapon, let alone a weapon capable of being delivered to the United States, let alone a desire to use such weapon should he develop the delivery system, let alone a willingness to hand such a deliverable weapon off to al-Qaeda - a group whose raison d'etre is toppling insufficiently pious regimes such as Saddam's Baath regime in Iraq.

The chem and bio weapons that Saddam allegedly had were old, decaying and incapable of proving more destructive than conventional weapons in just about any setting outside of a battlefield (and he still had not displayed an inclination to use same against Western targets, or an affinity for his enemies, al-Qaeda).  In other words, his "WMD" were really only suitable for use - or likely to be used on - a battlefield had we chosen to invade.

Which makes a terrible casus belli, regardless of whether or not the particular advocate of going to war is herself a 20th century Iraqi dictator.

M-m-m-my Sharia

by Eric Martin

Edward E. Curtis IV has a useful summary of facts/myths surrounding mosques in the United States (via).  In one portion, he comments on Sharia law (a topic of some concern on this site in recent weeks):

In Islam, sharia ("the Way" to God) theoretically governs every human act. But Muslims do not agree on what sharia says; there is no one sharia book of laws. Most mosques in America do not teach Islamic law for a simple reason: It's too complicated for the average believer and even for some imams.

Islamic law includes not only the Koran and the Sunna (the traditions of the prophet Muhammad) but also great bodies of arcane legal rulings and pedantic scholarly interpretations. If mosques forced Islamic law upon their congregants, most Muslims would probably leave -- just as most Christians might walk out of the pews if preachers gave sermons exclusively on Saint Augustine, canon law and Greek grammar. Instead, mosques study the Koran and the Sunna and how the principles and stories in those sacred texts apply to their everyday lives.

Curtis on the history of mosques in America:

Mosques have been here since the colonial era. A mosque, or masjid, is literally any place where Muslims make salat, the prayer performed in the direction of Mecca; it needn't be a building. One of the first mosques in North American history was on Kent Island, Md.: Between 1731 and 1733, African American Muslim slave and Islamic scholar Job Ben Solomon, a cattle driver, would regularly steal away to the woods there for his prayers -- in spite of a white boy who threw dirt on him as he made his prostrations.

The Midwest was home to the greatest number of permanent U.S. mosques in the first half of the 20th century. In 1921, Sunni, Shiite and Ahmadi Muslims in Detroit celebrated the opening of perhaps the first purpose-built mosque in the nation. Funded by real estate developer Muhammad Karoub, it was just blocks away from Henry Ford's Highland Park automobile factory, which employed hundreds of Arab American men.

In fact, there is a mosque in the Pentagon itself - though few, if any, are complaining that its presence is "insensitive" to the 9/11 victims that perished at that site (insensitive, presumably, because having Muslims praying near such a site reminds the victims of terrorists because all Muslims are terrorists?). 

Meanwhile, it is worth pointing out that the recent spate of anti-Muslim violence, vandalism of mosques and terrorizing of mosque-attendees risks to upturn the traditional advantage that the US has had over Europe in terms of limiting the number of home grown terrorists. 

As previously discussed on this site, individuals that end up being radicalized and joining terrorist causes tend to share some common traits and experience. 

For one, they tend to straddle worlds (second or third generation Muslims living in the West), and become increasingly alienated from their adopted homeland - this, usually due to the host country's lack of assimilative tendencies, as well as overt hostility to, and rejection of, foreign cultures. 

In this regard, it is widely assumed in counterterrorist circles that the United States (with its immigrant history and melting pot dynamic) has enjoyed some insulation where European nations (that tend to emphasize a historical, nationalist identity) have been exposed. 

However, the Republican Party's demagoguery in recent years has taken the form of an indiscriminate hostility toward all Muslims and Islam in general - thus helping to alienate young Muslim Americans that would otherwise feel a part of American culture and society.

In addition, many of those that are eventually radicalized experience some traumatic, violent incident of hatred, either directly or to loved ones. Those would be the same type of incidents as are beginning to pop up across the country - a logical, and inevitable, result of the dangerous anti-Muslim animus being whipped up by key Republican pundits, politicians and journalists.

To repeat, this anti-Muslim hatred being stoked for short term political gain is as reprehensible morally as it is risky in terms of national security.

Return of the Macs

by Eric Martin

Yet another post-mortem of the housing bubble and subsequent bank meltdown that debunks the conservative theory that loans to poor minorities/Fannie and Freddie was the culprit in any meaningful way:

The wave of housing price increases was kicked off by changes in private label securitization. These changes left Fannie and Freddie with a smaller market share and lower absolute level of securitizations. Fannie and Freddie attempted to adjust their basic business practices to stay competitive in bubble markets and among aggressive borrowers.

These adjustment left Fannie and Freddie exposed to a large decline in housing prices. This is exactly what happened and Fannie and Freddie reaped enormous losses because of their exposure.

Had Fannie and Freddie stuck to their traditional role of guaranteeing low value traditional loans rather than trying to stay competitive in bubble areas their losses would have been substantially less.

In short, attempting to subsidize the American dream for low and moderate income families may be a fundamentally bad policy. However, it does not appear to be either the origin of the housing bubble or the source of Fannie and Freddie’s trouble.

Unfortunately, post-mortems don't apply to Zombies.

(via)

The Whole Wide World Doesn't Mean So Much to Me

by Eric Martin

The New York Times has a piece highlighting one aspect of the pointlessness of our ongoing slog in Afghanistan:

The aide to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to Afghan and American officials.

Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.

Mr. Salehi’s relationship with the C.I.A. underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with American officials simultaneously demanding that Mr. Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.

While this is, indeed, damning in a general sense, it should also be noted (as it is here and here), that being on the CIA payroll is itself corruption!  Although the article does not seem to acknowledge this reality, note the language: "It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money [from the CIA], whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both."

All of which fit, neatly, under the rubric of corruption - or worse, espionage on behalf of a foreign power.  Along these lines, it is remarkable how our foreign policy establishment and establishment media seem incapable of conceptualizing the fact that America is, itself, a foreign power when occupying both Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Whether it be, in the present example, ignoring the fact that having our spy agency keep top Karzai adminsitration officials on the payroll is itself a blatant and corrosive form of corruption (and worse), or General Odierno claiming that we must stay in Iraq to prevent interference from foreign powers, the obvious is missed. 

The myopia of exceptionalism strikes again.

What's the Opposite of a Slam Dunk?

by Eric Martin

Now that the dust has settled regarding Jeffrey Goldberg's much anticipated, and much discussed, article on Israel's plans to launch a war with Iran (or, better yet, have the United States do the favor), I must say that despite the charges leveled against Goldberg - even from myself on occasion (propagandist, likudnik, warmonger, etc.), I had a similar reaction to Goldberg's piece as Robert Wright* and Jim Henley.

Bottom line: if Goldberg's article, The Point of No Return, was supposed to be a stirring call to war, despite the attendant sound and fury, there is barely a ripple.  As Wright notes:

Indeed, what’s striking is that, for all the space given to the views of hawkish Israeli officials, they don’t wind up looking very good, and neither does their case for bombing Iran. The overall impression is that, as Paul Pillar, a former C.I.A. official, put it after reading Goldberg’s piece, Israel’s inclination to attack Iran is “more a matter of the amygdala and emotion than of the cortex and thought.”

While Wright's piece is more methodical and thorough, Henley offers a concise summary:

At the same time, in Goldberg’s article, all on its own, Israel’s policy-makers condemn themselves out of their own mouth. If all you had was “The Point of No Return” and a brain, you would have everything you need to judge Israel’s case for bombing Iran as unjustified and immoral. In fact, there are truths in Goldberg’s article that appear almost nowhere else in the USA’s establishment media:

* Netanyahu has no intention whatsoever of implementing a two-state solution – at best he might take steps in that direction once his revanchist Daddy is dead;
* Netanyahu regrets the few partial steps he took under American pressure to comply with any smidgen of the spirit or letter of the Oslo agreements;
* Hardly anybody important in the Israeli government really believes that Iran would use nuclear weapons if Iran in fact develop them;
* Many don’t even worry that Iranian nukes would make it impossible for Israel to respond conventionally to Iranian “provocations” – rather, they want to go to war against a foreign country* for extremely speculative concerns about “brain drain” that are so time-dilated one suspects Iran might be deploying its nukes in near-orbit around Cygnus X-1;
* And by the way, as a child of the MAD Era in 20th-Century history, I feel qualified to say, “Grow a pair, Senior Israeli Dudes.” Brain drain. Sheesh.

Like Henley, I found it oddly refreshing to have the Likud position on the peace process and two state solution confirmed, in print, in a US media source, by a journalist sympathetic to the Likud view, in such a blatant fashion.

That, and the fact that few at the top in Israel actually fear a strike.  It really boils down to an elaborate, if unconvincing, fear of brain drain inspired by the looming specter of an Iranian nuke.  As Wright explains:

One “existential” threat that Israel’s policy elites do seem to take seriously is that a nuclear Iran might render Israel such a scary place to live as to induce a brain drain. “The real threat to Zionism is the dilution of quality,” defense minister Ehud Barak tells Goldberg. Here again, I think the threat is overstated. After a year or two, Iran’s possession of nukes would become background noise for the average Israeli, less salient than periodic flurries of missiles from Lebanon or Gaza — flurries that so far have failed to noticeably drain Israel of intellectual capital.

The “brain drain” issue illustrates what weak “propaganda” much of Goldberg’s piece is: America is supposed to support — or even conduct — a military attack designed to keep talented people from immigrating to America? If I were Israel, I’d hire a new propagandist.

This is especially true when one considers that Goldberg, to his credit, sets forth an extensive list of significant costs and negative outcomes likely to flow from an attack by either the US or Israel (even if a bit understated).  All that death, destruction, destabilization and economic turmoil to back a policy espoused by irrational actors in defense of a vague fear?  To quote Wright: I’d hire a new propagandist.

(* Full disclosure: I work for Robert Wright, in a paid capacity, as Senior Editor of The Progressive Realist)

Make It a Double

by Eric Martin

This should come as no surprise, despite the heated rhetoric: the stimulus bill...stimulated the economy!  Alas, though it was not big enough, it was better than the alternative (as offered by the GOP, which was no stimulus, or a much smaller package consisting entirely of tax cuts):

The oft-criticized stimulus plan boosted the economy in the second quarter by as much as 4.5%, the Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.

In a report published the same day as Minority Leader John Boehner's criticism of President Obama's economic policy, the CBO said the stimulus law boosted the economy by between 1.7% and 4.5%, lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points and increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million.

In practice, that means the stimulus plan is the main reason the U.S. economy grew during the second quarter. The Commerce Department estimates the economy grew 2.4% in the second quarter, a figure most economists expect to be sharply revised lower in a report due Friday.

Right.

(via)

You Have Been The Victims Of A Terrible Swindle

by Jacob Davies

This letter from Berkeley professor Michael O'Hare to his students is so good I'm just going to include it in full here:

Welcome to Berkeley, probably still the best public university in the world. Meet your classmates, the best group of partners you can find anywhere. The percentages for grades on exams, papers, etc. in my courses always add up to 110% because that’s what I’ve learned to expect from you, over twenty years in the best job in the world.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that you have been the victims of a terrible swindle, denied an inheritance you deserve by contract and by your merits. And you aren’t the only ones; victims of this ripoff include the students who were on your left and on your right in high school but didn’t get into Cal, a whole generation stiffed by mine. This letter is an apology, and more usefully, perhaps a signal to start demanding what’s been taken from you so you can pass it on with interest.

Swindle – what happened? Well, before you were born, Californians now dead or in nursing homes made a remarkable deal with the future. (Not from California? Keep reading, lots of this applies to you, with variations.) They agreed to invest money they could have spent on bigger houses, vacations, clothes, and cars into the world’s greatest educational system, and into building and operating water systems, roads, parks, and other public facilities, an infrastructure that was the envy of the world. They didn’t get everything right: too much highway and not enough public transportation. But they did a pretty good job.

Young people who enjoyed these ‘loans’ grew up smarter, healthier, and richer than they otherwise would have, and understood that they were supposed to “pay it forward” to future generations, for example by keeping the educational system staffed with lots of dedicated, well-trained teachers, in good buildings and in small classes, with college counselors and up-to-date books. California schools had physical education, art for everyone, music and theater, buildings that looked as though people cared about them, modern languages and ancient languages, advanced science courses with labs where the equipment worked, and more. They were the envy of the world, and they paid off better than Microsoft stock. Same with our parks, coastal zone protection, and social services.

This deal held until about thirty years ago, when for a variety of reasons, California voters realized that while they had done very well from the existing contract, they could do even better by walking away from their obligations and spending what they had inherited on themselves. “My kids are finished with school; why should I pay taxes for someone else’s? Posterity never did anything for me!” An army of fake ‘leaders’ sprang up to pull the moral and fiscal wool over their eyes, and again and again, your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph.

Now, your infrastructure is falling to pieces under your feet, and as citizens you are responsible for crudities like closing parks, and inhumanities like closing battered women’s shelters. It’s outrageous, inexcusable, that you can’t get into the courses you need, but much worse that Oakland police have stopped taking 911 calls for burglaries and runaway children. If you read what your elected officials say about the state today, you’ll see things like “California can’t afford” this or that basic government function, and that “we need to make hard choices” to shut down one or another public service, or starve it even more (like your university). Can’t afford? The budget deficit that’s paralyzing Sacramento is about $500 per person; add another $500 to get back to a public sector we don’t have to be ashamed of, and our average income is almost forty times that. Of course we can afford a government that actually works: the fact is that your parents have simply chosen not to have it.

I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat (though your children will be even worse off if you don’t take charge of this ship and steer it). Your education was trashed as California fell to the bottom of US states in school spending, and the art classes, AP courses, physical education, working toilets, and teaching generally went by the board. Every year I come upon more and more of you who have obviously never had the chance to learn to write plain, clear, English. Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively! You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.

Many of your parents took a hike as well, somehow getting the idea that the schools had taken over their duties to keep you learning, or so beat-up working two jobs each and commuting two hours a day to put food on the table that they couldn’t be there for you. A quarter of your classmates didn’t finish high school, discouraged and defeated; but they didn’t leave the planet, even if you don’t run into them in the gated community you will be tempted to hide out in. They have to eat just like you, and they aren’t equipped to do their share of the work, so you will have to support them.

You need to have a very tough talk with your parents, who are still voting; you can’t save your children by yourselves. Equally important, you need to start talking to each other. It’s not fair, and you have every reason (except a good one) to keep what you can for yourselves with another couple of decades of mean-spirited tax-cutting and public sector decline. You’re my heroes just for surviving what we put you through and making it into my classroom, but I’m asking for more: you can be better than my generation. Take back your state for your kids and start the contract again. There are lots of places you can start, for example, building a transportation system that won’t enslave you for two decades as their chauffeur, instead of raising fares and cutting routes in a deadly helix of mediocrity. Lots. Get to work. See you in class!

Please the Press in Belgium

by Eric Martin

A few weeks back, Bret Stephens took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to issue the latest iteration of what is a recurring hawkish argument in favor of continuing the war du jour (in the present example, Stephens is arguing for prolonging the longest war in US history - the war in Afghanistan):

The U.S. cannot remain a superpower if the suspicion takes root that we are a feckless nation that can be stampeded into surrender by a domestic caucus of defeatists.

To which I am tempted to merely quote George Kennan and leave it at that:

[T]here is more respect to be won in the opinion of the world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant and unpromising objectives.

The fact that Kennan felt the need to respond to a version of the same argument that Stephens repeats today is a testament to its longevity, if not persuasiveness.  Stephens' nostrum is fundamentally flawed in that it puts too much stock in the power of perceptions, and not enough into the actual state of affairs in a given country as a determinant of its strength.  As if our status as a superpower were determined by the fickle whims of the viewing public, and not actual tangible factors such as military, economic and cultural strength.

After all, the Soviet Union did not crumble because it withdrew from Afghanistan, thus losing face on the world stage, but rather because it was a corrupt, unsustainable, inefficient system that was decaying systemically and was attracting few, if any, admirers and imitators.  Put another way, if the Soviets had stayed in Afghanistan for three decades past their actual date of departure, would the world still perceive the Soviets as a superpower?  Obviously not. 

If anything, the fact that the Soviets dug in and stayed for as long as they did served to hasten their demise by further bleeding a tattered empire of dwindling resources that were already spread thin. 

Not that I would put the US in Soviet shoes in terms of relative strength, but certain warning signs should sound somewhat familiar.  At present, America has severe infrastructural needs due to decades of neglect and deterioration. Estimates put the price tag in the trillions, and that's just for upkeep, which does nothing to address the fact that we are not pushing ahead with new innovative technologies and infrastructural advancements that will ensure a position of dominance for our commercial sector for decades to come. On the contrary, other nations and regions are spearheading developments in green technology, faster information systems/connectivity and transportation efficiency.

At least part of this neglect is due to the fact that, while our tax base is relatively low when compared to other Western industrial nations, our defense budget is comparatively enormous. Despite this imbalance in favor of militarization, Stephens worries that we might stop spending hundreds of billions pursuing the unrealistic goal of remaking Afghan society through military means.  That money, and other resources dedicated to the Pentagon vortex, could do more to improve our prospects for remaining a superpower if put to actual productive use, rather than as part of a grandiose enterprise comprised of "pounding sand" in the name of something or other. 

But Stephens and his ilk act as if the actual decline brought on by such expensive adventurism and hyper-militarization was a minor trifle, secondary to "what will the neighbors think" writ large if we abandon one or more wars (or forgo the commencement of yet another).  However, the real question is what will become of our global reputation if key facets of our society are in obvious states of decline - and what of our ability to compete without first rate education, health care, transportation, connectivity and other vital expedients?

Paul Krugman recently documented the many startling ways in which we are regressing in the face of economic hardship, and the realities of an atrophied tax revenue stream.  We are, depending on the region, shortening the school year, unpaving roads, turning out street lights, passing on trash collection, cutting back on the number of teachers, etc.  A recent New York Times piece has more (via):

When Emily Cooper headed off to first grade in Moody, Ala., last week, she was prepared with all the stuff on her elementary school’s must-bring list: two double rolls of paper towels, three packages of Clorox wipes, three boxes of baby wipes, two boxes of garbage bags, liquid soap, Kleenex and Ziplocs.

“The first time I saw it, my mouth hit the floor,” Emily’s mother, Kristin Cooper, said of the list, which also included perennials like glue sticks, scissors and crayons.

Schools across the country are beginning the new school year with shrinking budgets and outsize demands for basic supplies. And while many parents are wincing at picking up the bill, retailers are rushing to cash in by expanding the back-to-school category like never before.

Now some back-to-school aisles are almost becoming janitorial-supply destinations as multipacks of paper towels, cleaning spray and hand sanitizer are crammed alongside pens, notepads and backpacks.

Which prompted Natasha Chart to add: "Because nothing says 'superpower' like when your public schools can't afford toilet paper." 

And yet two wars drone on (or one war, and, in the other venue, an end to major combat operations that still requires 50,000+ troops in-country for some time) to the tune of billions of dollars each month, and Bret Stephens frets about what other countries might think of us if we eventually end one (which, presumably, we might do on unfavorable grounds even if we muddle through for another decade).

Not to mention the fact that, as Matt Duss notes, goading us into a stubborn campaign where pyrrhic victories are the only ones that can be hoped for, eventually, with a lot of luck, might be a victory in and of itself in the eyes of our adversaries: 

I’ve always found it interesting how, for pro-war types like Stephens, these sorts of “reputation” arguments always only go one way: Toward more war. The only way we can show enemies and allies what we’re made of is to continue fighting, continue expending vast resources, even as the strategy is failing, even as our own economy is in crisis. It just never seems to occur to them that ensnaring the U.S. in hugely expensive, open-ended military interventions could also be a goal of our enemies, or that persisting in an intervention that has begun to prove counterproductive is itself a form of fecklessness.

It’s true that in his 1996 fatwa, Osama bin Laden mocked the U.S. for withdrawing from Somalia. But more recently, in November 2004, he also mocked the U.S. for how easy it was for Al Qaeda “to provoke and bait” the U.S. into military action...

Despite the fact that, according to Stephens' law of "global reputation preservation," once engaged in an armed conflict, we cannot disengage short of clear and decisive victory lest we imperil our status as a superpower (no matter how much that war drains us of the vital resources normally used to burnish superpower credentials), he nevertheless would counsel that we start yet another war, this time with Iran. 

Maybe for that one, we can have our GIs bring their own toilet paper, bandages, bullets and rucksacks. 

Hope I Get Old Before I Die

by Jacob Davies

There was a long and widely-discussed piece in the NY Times Magazine on Sunday about the increasing tendency of 20-somethings to move back in with their parents, to fail to find a solid job, and to delay getting married or having children.

The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men.

Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child. In 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men had, by the time they reached 30, passed all five milestones. Among 30-year-olds in 2000 fewer than half of the women and one-third of the men had done so.

Much of the story ends up talking about brain development in 20-somethings, which is interesting but hardly explains why things have changed recently. I don't know that it's the whole story, but surely one important factor was the great increase in cost and risk for first-time home buyers in the last 15 years.

In America, respectable middle-class people get married, buy a house, and then have kids. That's the norm, and it's a strong one. A married couple renting is a bit off; renting with kids - well, why don't you just turn them loose on the street to be raised by wolves if you care that little?

And buying a house was a good deal for a long time. You bought a capital asset with a lot of leverage, but it was pretty safe; you got to be your own landlord, live without the restrictions of rental housing, and were forced into saving a lot of your income. Later in life you'd own the house outright and enjoy substantially reduced living costs over renting. And through inflation and your increased earnings potential later in life, what might be a burdensome mortgage payment at 25 would be much less so at 50. In other words, buying a house was respectable because it indicated that you had made sensible financial choices.

That was before the bubble. This NYT article about the end of housing wealth talks a lot about how great it was that existing homeowners could tap into increasing home values:

The wealth generated by housing in those decades did more than assure the owners a comfortable retirement. It powered the economy, paying for the education of children and grandchildren, keeping the cruise ships and golf courses full and the restaurants humming.

There is no mention of affordability, or any concern for first-time buyers. For those who owned houses and were reasonably responsible, the bubble era was in fact a pretty good time. HELOCs allowed people to roll credit card debt onto their houses and obtain both lower interest rates and a tax advantage. As long as you didn't go crazy, it might not have been free money, but it was certainly cheap money. Even if you needed to buy a new house at an inflated price, at least you got to sell your existing place at an inflated price too.

For first-time buyers, though, the bubble was the worst of times. Not only were houses exceptionally expensive, but if you bought after (roughly) 2003, you're likely to have lost all the equity from your down payment and quite possibly more. Put down your life savings for a 20% deposit? Sorry about that. If you were sold an inappropriate "affordability" product like an option-ARM or a neg-am loan, maybe you wound up defaulting. Hardly the environment to make the transition to adulthood practical on a 20-something's salary.

And there is a further perversity to all of this. The "wealth" generated by house price appreciation didn't come from work, or even from a productive capital asset. (Houses don't make anything except housing, and they were doing that at a far higher cost than renting.) The result was an economy with an increasing percentage of spending coming from phantom income, unconnected to any productive activity, with the unavoidable result that a decreasing share of economic output accrues to those who work or invest in productive enterprises. The article cheers the "cruise ships and golf courses", but what that really means is that we got cruise ships and golf courses instead of things that would benefit (among others) young couples with kids.

I'm not saying all of this because we are a young couple with a kid. We do okay because of the particular career I ended up in, and we're renting by choice (because I think house prices still have a significant distance to fall) and not by necessity. But a lot of my early-30s friends do still live like college students (no offense, guys), and in large part it's because of the cost of housing and the generally miserable salaries on offer. I don't think intergenerational warfare is a good idea, but I do think we need to understand the degree to which the comfort of (many) boomers came at the direct expense of subsequent generations.

Paranoid Intolerance

by Eric Martin

Nicholas Kristof is very good on the Park51 project, and the strategic, historical and cultural significance of the wider controversey:

Is there any doubt about Osama bin Laden’s position on the not-at-ground-zero mosque?

Osama abhors the vision of interfaith harmony that the proposed Islamic center represents. He fears Muslim clerics who can cite the Koran to denounce terrorism.

It’s striking that many American Republicans share with Al Qaeda the view that the West and the Islamic world are caught inevitably in a “clash of civilizations.” Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who recruits jihadis from his lair in Yemen, tells the world’s English-speaking Muslims that America is at war against Islam. You can bet that Mr. Awlaki will use the opposition to the community center and mosque to try to recruit more terrorists.

In short, the proposed community center is not just an issue on which Sarah Palin and Osama bin Laden agree. It is also one in which opponents of the center are playing into the hands of Al Qaeda.

These opponents seem to be afflicted by two fundamental misconceptions.

The first is that a huge mosque would rise on hallowed land at ground zero. In fact, the building would be something like a YMCA, and two blocks away and apparently out of view from ground zero. This is a dense neighborhood packed with shops, bars, liquor stores — not to mention the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club and the Pussycat Lounge (which says that it arranges lap dances in a private room, presumably to celebrate the sanctity of the neighborhood).

Why do so many Republicans find strip clubs appropriate for the ground zero neighborhood but object to a house of worship? Are lap dances more sanctified than an earnest effort to promote peace?

And this is an earnest effort. I know Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan — the figures behind the Islamic community center — and they are the real thing. Because I have written often about Arab atrocities in Darfur and about the abuse of women in Islamic countries, some Muslim leaders are wary of me. But Imam Feisal and Ms. Khan are open-minded and have been strong advocates for women within Islam.

The second misconception underlying this debate is that Islam is an inherently war-like religion that drives believers to terrorism. Sure, the Islamic world is disproportionately turbulent, and mullahs sometimes cite the Koran to incite murder. But don’t forget that the worst brutality in the Middle East has often been committed by more secular rulers, like Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad. And the mastermind of the 1970 Palestinian airline hijackings, George Habash, was a Christian.

Remember also that historically, some of the most shocking brutality in the region was justified by the Bible, not the Koran. Crusaders massacred so many men, women and children in parts of Jerusalem that a Christian chronicler, Fulcher of Chartres, described an area ankle-deep in blood. While burning Jews alive, the crusaders sang, “Christ, We Adore Thee.”

My hunch is that the violence in the Islamic world has less to do with the Koran or Islam than with culture, youth bulges in the population, and the marginalization of women. In Pakistan, I know a young woman whose brothers want to kill her for honor — but her family is Christian, not Muslim.

Precisely because Palestinian violence has roots outside of Islam, Israel originally supported the rise of Hamas in Gaza. Israeli officials thought that if Gazans became more religious, they would spend their time praying rather than firing guns. [...]

For much of American history, demagogues have manipulated irrational fears toward people of minority religious beliefs, particularly Catholics and Jews. Many Americans once honestly thought that Catholics could not be true Americans because they bore supreme loyalty to the Vatican.

Today’s crusaders against the Islamic community center are promoting a similar paranoid intolerance, and one day we will be ashamed of it.

Right.