Thought du Jour

Critics of Barack Obama take the president’s refusal to call for “tough action” in Syria as a sign that he is a weak leader. FT columnist Gideon Rachman writes that the critics are wrong: Obama’s decision to stay out of Syria actually reveals that he is a good leader.

[S]ometimes the best presidential decisions are decisions not to act. This point is made in an excellent new book by Joseph Nye of Harvard University entitled _Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era_. Professor Nye points out that, in the 1950s, President Eisenhower resisted getting involved in the Vietnam war and reacted with great caution to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. He also “resolutely opposed numerous recommendations for the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean, Dien Bien Phu and Quemoy-Matsu crises.” As Prof Nye writes, “the result of Ike’s prudence was eight years of peace and prosperity”.

It certainly helped that – as an authentic war hero – Eisenhower had the confidence to tell his nuke-happy military advisers: “You boys are crazy.”

By contrast, President George W. Bush – with a rather less distinguished military record – felt the need to show toughness over Iraq. He referred to himself as “the decider” and liked to think of his leadership style as bold and decisive. Others might describe it as impetuous and unreflective.

Gideon Rachman, “Staying out of Syria is the bolder call for Obama“, Financial Times, 14 May 2013.

Richard Kidd, who describes himself as “a Caucasian who generally supports social democracy”, explains why he voted for Barack Obama …. twice.

[I]n 2008, I voted for Barack Obama despite knowing about his conservative policies at the Harvard Law Review, because I hoped his slogan, “change you can believe in”, meant that he wanted to terminate President George W. Bush’s unnecessary wars. I was disappointed in this and later forced to agree with a friend that President Obama’s first term was essentially “Bush’s third term”. ….

Last November, I found Mr Obama and Mitt Romney to be curiously alike – two ambitious, aloof Harvard graduates – and I reluctantly voted for Mr Obama again, notwithstanding the fact that I consider Mr Romney to be a talented and decent man, but because I considered the austerity platform of Republicans such as Paul Ryan to be bad for the country at this time. However, I insist to my friends that it was not intended as a vote for Mr Obama, but was simply a vote against the Republican programme.

Richard Kidd, (Corte Madera, CA), “So much for my allegiance as religion“, letter to the editor, Financial Times, 2 March 2013.

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Germany’s president [Joachim Gauck] has called for English to be made the language of the European Union as he appealed to the UK to stay in the EU. ….

He said that to encourage a greater sense of commonality, Europe needed a common language as well as encouraging multilingualism. “I am convinced that, in Europe, both can live side by side,” he said. “The sense of being at home in your mother tongue, with all its poetry, as well as a workable English for all of life’s situations and all age groups.”

Kate Connolly, “German president: make English the language of EU“, The Guardian, 22 February 2013.

Joachim Gauck (born 1940) is a former East German Lutheran pastor and anti-communist activist.

I fully support Gauck’s campaign to designate English the official language of the European Union. I speak three EU languages fluently, but have made little progress in my quest to speak a fourth language (German) properly. Part of this difficulty I attribute to the fact that I am no longer so young, and part to the fact that I work at an international research institute that is located in Austria, but functions only in English. English happens to be my mother tongue, but English is the preferred second language of many – if not most – non-native speakers of English, so is an excellent choice for an EU common language.

Now, if the French back the Germans on this initiative, we may see some progress!

A trained anthropologist explains why he does not trust Jared Diamond’s writings.

Jared Diamond is a master of cultural and historical bricolage. His books weave epic stories about the human condition …. In his new book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, Diamond probes the differences between modern cultures and traditional societies that subsist through hunting and gathering, and he comes to several bold conclusions about their relative merits. His examples are evocative and his narration is powerful, but Diamond ultimately fails to substantiate his arguments. By the end of the book, it is impossible to tell if one has finished reading a masterpiece of rigorous analysis or a masterfully written collection of just-so stories. ….

Diamond is a generalist and will always paint with a brush that a specialist finds too broad. The danger lies not in simplifying source material by leaving out extraneous details, but in selectively highlighting only the facts that support one’s argument and casting contravening cases aside. ….

Diamond explains why, in a break from his previous practice, he decided not to publish the names of his New Guinea informants. Publishing names, he claims, is “standard practice among journalists” and was “formerly the practice among anthropologists,” but “anthropologists now appreciate that their informants may be vulnerable and may suffer harm if their behavior and views became known.” What Diamond does not tell us here is that he was recently sued for libel by two New Guinea men who claimed that they never engaged in the violent acts that Diamond ascribed to them in a New Yorker article. I find it difficult to believe that these lawsuits did not factor into Diamond’s decision to leave out identifying information. And if Diamond omits such a key piece of information in this section, what else is he leaving out? My lingering questions about sources and framing turn what could have been a delightful and informative introduction to anthropology and human diversity into a foggy text that obscures more than it illuminates.

Bryn Williams, “Can You Trust Jared Diamond?“, The Slate Book Review, 18 February 2013.

Cultural Anthropologist Bryn Williams (Ph.D. Stanford University) is a student at Yale University Law School.

Physiologist Jared Diamond (born 1937), author of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), is a professor of geography at UCLA.

Years ago, with feigned innocence, I asked Carleton University geographer Fraser Taylor “What is geography?”. He replied “Geography is the last refuge for generalists in a world of specialists.”

[T]he moment that Britain changed from a nation that regarded olive oil as a pharmaceutical aid and garlic with deep suspicion, to a country comprised of cooking-obsessed epicureans can be traced to November 1978. This was the date when Sainsbury published a small book called Cooking for Christmas by Josceline Dimbleby, the first in a series of 56 titles published under the Sainsbury Cookbook brand between 1978 and 1994.

Polly Russell, “The history cook: The Sainsbury Cookbook series“, Food & Drink, Financial Times, 16 February 2013.

I am raising my dual-nationality children here [in Oslo] because my wife is Norwegian and wanted to come back after years abroad. Norwegians, I notice, are much like salmon. They want adventure but, when the time comes, they inevitably return to their native waters to spawn.

Derek B. Miller, “Marrying into the tribe“, FT Magazine, 16 February 2013.

Journalist Robert Cottrell explains why now is a wonderful time for those who love reading to be alive.

The amount of good writing freely available online far exceeds what even the most dedicated consumer might have hoped to encounter a generation ago within the limits of printed media.

I don’t pretend that everything online is great writing. Let me go further: only 1 per cent is of value to the intelligent general reader, by which I mean the demographic that, in the mainstream media world, might look to the Economist, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs or the Atlantic for information. Another 4 per cent of the internet counts as entertaining rubbish. The remaining 95 per cent has no redeeming features. But even the 1 per cent of writing by and for the elite is an embarrassment of riches, a horn of plenty, a garden of delights. ….

As a gross generalisation, academics make excellent bloggers, within and beyond their specialist fields. So, too, do aid workers, lawyers, musicians, doctors, economists, poets, financiers, engineers, publishers and computer scientists. They blog for pleasure; they blog for visibility within their field; they blog to raise their value and build their markets as authors and public speakers; they blog because their peers do.

Businessmen and politicians make the worst bloggers because they do not like to tell what they know, and telling what you know is the essence of blogging well. They also fear to be wrong; and, as Felix Salmon, Reuters’ finance blogger, insists and sometimes demonstrates: “If you are never wrong, you are never interesting”.

Robert Cottrell, “Net wisdom“, Financial Times, 16 February 2013.

Robert Cottrell is a former Moscow bureau chief for The Economist and the Financial Times. His main job now is to locate great pieces on the internet, and recommend them from his website, www.thebrowser.com. He also owns and manages Robert’s Books in Riga (Latvia).

Arnold Kling selects six popular economics books for your reading pleasure.

Here are some popular books from the latter half of the twentieth century that I would put in the queue ahead of many recent works. My guess is that you have not read all of them yet.

The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith, 1968. ….

The Money Game, ‘Adam Smith’ (George J W Goodman), 1969. ….

Liars Poker, Michael Lewis, 1989. ….

Microcosm, George Gilder, 1990. ….

The Work of Nations, Robert Reich, 1991. ….

Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell, 1996. ….

Arnold Kling, “If You Need Something to Read“, askblog, 12 January 20013.

Useful comments follow each recommended reading.

Arnold is one of my favourite bloggers. He left EconLog last August and started his new blog three months later. What I most admire about him is that he is careful to explain other views, and is always charitable to those with opposing views. An example of this are the comments on Galbraith’s The New Industrial State:

Galbraith actually got some things right–I agree with his take on the significance of bureaucracy within corporations, rather than viewing the CEO as an autonomous actor. But with the benefit of hindsight you can see how wrong he was about big things. He minimized the differences between the Soviet and American economies. He thought that new, small firms were insignificant. By blogging standards, his writing is gentle (if long-winded). He takes on conservatives with quips rather than base insults. But the main reason to re-read him is to see the contrast between a highly-reputed intellectual’s outlook and subsequent events. Incidentally, there is much in Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, particularly on Civil Rights, that does not hold up very well, either.