This week's home experiment

Here's this week's home experiment: Bury your car at the beach. Leave it there a month, then dig it up and try to start it. Didn't work, did it? Neither would the ancients' machines.

From Were ancient tombs really booby-trapped?

THE PHANTOM MENACE

The Myth Behind China's Miracle By George J. Gilboy

Irrational exuberance about the country's economic future has prompted investors to gobble up shares of Chinese firms with little understanding of how these companies actually operate. Meanwhile, overestimates of China's achievements and potential are fueling fears that the country will inevitably tilt global trade and technology balances in its favor, ultimately becoming an economic, technological, and military threat to the United States. These reactions, however, are equally mistaken: they overlook both important weaknesses in China's economic "miracle" and the strategic benefits the United States is reaping from the particular way in which China has joined the global economy. Such misjudgments could drive Washington to adopt protectionist policies that would reverse recent improvements in U.S.-China relations, further alienate Washington from its allies, and diminish U.S. influence in Asia.

In fact, the United States and China are developing precisely the type of economic relationship that U.S. strategy has long sought to create. China now has a stake in the liberal, rules-based global economic system that the United States worked to establish over the past half-century....

China's own choices along the road to global economic integration have reinforced trends that favor the continued industrial and technological preeminence of the United States and other advanced industrialized democracies. In its forced march to the market, Beijing has let political and social reforms lag behind, with at least two critical -- and unexpected -- consequences. First, to forestall the rise of a politically independent private sector, the Chinese government has implemented economic reforms that strongly favor state-owned enterprises (SOEs), granting them preferential access to capital, technology, and markets. But reforms have also favored foreign investment, which has allowed foreign firms to claim the lion's share of China's industrial exports and secure strong positions in its domestic markets. As a result, Chinese industry is left with inefficient but still-powerful SOEs, increasingly dominant foreign firms, and a private sector as yet unable to compete with either on equal terms.

Second, the business risks inherent in China's unreformed political system have bred a response among many Chinese managers -- an "industrial strategic culture" -- that encourages them to seek short-term profits, local autonomy, and excessive diversification. With a few exceptions, Chinese firms focus on developing privileged relations with officials in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hierarchy, spurn horizontal association and broad networking with each other, and forgo investment in long-term technology development and diffusion. Chinese firms continue to rely heavily on imported foreign technology and components -- severely limiting the country's ability to wield technological or trading power for unilateral gains.

...rather than lapse into shortsighted trade protectionism that could undermine current favorable trends, Washington should pursue a policy of "strategic engagement." Not simply engagement for its own sake, strategic engagement would explicitly acknowledge the advantages of U.S. technological, economic, and military leadership and seek to reinforce them, in exchange for increased prosperity and more security for China -- the more so now that China has a compelling economic interest in domestic political reform.

...

According to Morgan Stanley, low-cost Chinese imports (mainly textiles, shoes, toys, and household goods) have saved U.S. consumers (mostly middle- and low-income families) about $100 billion dollars since China's reforms began in 1978. (Cheaper baby clothes from China helped U.S. families with children save about $400 million between 1998 and 2003.) U.S. industrial firms such as Boeing, Ford, General Motors, IBM, Intel, and Motorola also save hundreds of millions of dollars each year by buying parts from lower-cost countries such as China, increasing their global competitiveness and allowing them to undertake new high-value activities in the United States. In an effort to save 30 percent on its total global sourcing costs, Ford imported about $500 million in parts from China last year. General Motors has cut the cost of car radios by 40 percent by building them from Chinese parts. And although global sourcing can cause painful employment adjustments, the process can also benefit U.S. workers and companies. A recent independent study sponsored by the Information Technology Association of America found that outsourcing to countries such as China and India created a net 90,000 new U.S. jobs in information technology in 2003 and estimated that outsourcing will create a net 317,000 new U.S. jobs by 2008.

...

Unlike other U.S. trading partners in Asia, such as Japan and South Korea, which spurned U.S. imports and investment for decades, China is also a large, open market for U.S. products. Although total U.S. exports have stagnated in recent years, U.S. exports to China have tripled in the last decade. They increased by 28 percent last year alone (whereas overall U.S. exports went up by only 5 percent). In particular, China has become a staple market for advanced U.S. technology products....

Furthermore, China allows foreign firms to invest in its domestic market on a scale unprecedented in Asia. Since it launched reforms in 1978, China has taken in $500 billion in FDI, ten times the total stock of FDI Japan accumulated between 1945 and 2000. According to China's Ministry of Commerce, U.S. firms have invested more than $40 billion in more than 40,000 projects in China. Given its openness to FDI, China cannot maintain its domestic market as a protected bastion for domestic firms, something both Japan and South Korea did during their periods of rapid growth. Instead, it has allowed U.S. and other foreign firms to develop new markets for their goods and services, especially high-value-added products such as aircraft, software, industrial design, advanced machinery, and components such as semiconductors and integrated circuits.

Thanks to this appetite for imports, powerful domestic coalitions, particularly China's growing ranks of urban consumers and its most competitive firms, will continue to favor trade openness. Chinese consumers pride themselves on driving foreign-brand cars and using mobile phones and computers with circuits that were designed and manufactured abroad. Many Chinese firms resist protectionism, because they need to import critical components for their domestic operations and fear retaliation against their exports. For example, in the 1990s, China's machine tool and aircraft industries failed to secure effective state protection in the face of opposition from domestic firms that preferred imports, and they suffered significant decline as a result.

As an open economy and a large importing country, China could be an ally of the United States in many areas of global trade and finance. Already, Beijing has displayed a willingness to play by WTO rules. It has charged Japan and South Korea with unfair trade practices -- markets the United States has also long sought to crack open. China initiated 10 antidumping investigations in 2002 on products with import value of more than $7 billion, and another 20 investigations in 2003. China is now a leading promoter of regional trade and investment regimes, including a free trade zone with ASEAN and a bilateral free trade agreement with Australia, one of the United States' closest allies in the Pacific region. Already, Beijing's proposals on regional economic cooperation seem far more relevant to most Asian nations than do Washington's.

The final benefit the United States enjoys from China's global economic integration is in the long-term, patient battle to promote liberalism in Asia. Foreign trade and development have spurred advancements in Chinese commercial law, greater regulatory consultation with Chinese consumers, slimmed-down bureaucracies, and adherence to international safety and environmental standards. Although it is still limited, the people's freedom to debate economic and social issues has increased, especially in the robust financial media. This process of liberalization is incomplete and uneven, but it is in the interest of both China and the United States to see it continue.

Despite these benefits, business and political leaders in the United States now fear that China's growing share of world exports, especially of high technology and industrial goods, signals the rise of yet another mercantilist economic superpower in northeastern Asia. But these concerns are unwarranted, for three reasons. First, China's high-tech and industrial exports are dominated by foreign, not Chinese, firms. Second, Chinese industrial firms are deeply dependent on designs, critical components, and manufacturing equipment they import from the United States and other advanced industrialized democracies. Third, Chinese firms are taking few effective steps to absorb the technology they import and diffuse it throughout the local economy, making it unlikely that they will rapidly emerge as global industrial competitors.

...

...another trend that reinforces China's dependence on foreign investment and the growing gap between FFEs and domestic Chinese companies. In the 1990s, Beijing permitted a new FDI trend to develop: a shift away from joint ventures and toward wholly owned foreign enterprises (WOFEs). Today, WOFEs account for 65 percent of new FDI in China, and they dominate high-tech exports. But they are much less inclined to transfer technology to Chinese firms than are joint ventures. Unlike joint ventures, they are not contractually required to share knowledge with local partners. And they have strong incentives to protect their technology from both domestic and other foreign firms, in order to capture a greater share of China's domestic markets. As a result, according to the most recent Chinese government statistics for high-tech industries (pharmaceuticals, aircraft and aerospace, electronics, telecommunications, computers, and medical equipment), FFEs increased their total share of high-tech exports from 74 percent to 85 percent between 1998 and 2002. But perhaps more significant, in the same period, they increased their share of total domestic high-tech sales from 32 percent to 45 percent, while the share of that market held by China's most competitive industrial firms, SOEs, fell from 47 percent to 42 percent.

Finally, the data in the figure reveal that China's private firms are not yet significant global players. Despite more than two decades of economic reform, China's leading domestic industrial and technology companies are still primarily SOEs. Although they remain inefficient and dependent on government-subsidized loans, they account for the bulk of advanced industrial production in China, boast the country's best research and development (R&D) capability, and spend the most resources to develop and import technology. Their preferential access to markets and resources has blocked the rise of private industrial firms. Likewise, collective firms owned by provincial and local governments have failed to emerge as major players in China's advanced industrial and technology sectors.

...

Developing technology is a difficult and uncertain process. Neither large capital investments nor a significant stock of existing science and engineering capability can guarantee success. To create commercially viable products and services, firms must monitor and access new forms of knowledge, understand evolving market trends, and respond rapidly to changing customer demand. Firms that can develop strong links to research institutions, financiers, partners, suppliers, and customers have an advantage in acquiring, modifying, and then commercializing new technology. Such horizontal networks are essential conduits for knowledge, capital, products, and talent.

Yet China's unreformed political system suppresses such independent social organization and horizontal networking and instead reinforces vertical relationships. China remains a fragmented federal system, its fractious regions unified by a single political party. The CCP controls all aspects of organized life, including industry associations, leaving few avenues for firms to work together for legitimate common interests. This structure drives business leaders to focus on building relationships through CCP officials and the bureaucracy. Although market reforms have brought more rules to the Chinese economy, without institutional checks and balances or direct supervision, CCP officials still exercise wide discretion in defining and implementing those rules, especially at the local level. They can, and often do, manipulate economic policies to pursue particular local goals. Some engage in this "particularism" because they are corrupt, others because they directly own or operate firms. Most, however, do it because the political elite encourages them to: understanding that local economic growth promotes social and political order, the CCP tolerates, and even rewards, officials who use any means to produce local investment and employment. But this often results in fragmented national industries and wasteful overlapping investment.

Chinese business leaders at both public and private firms recognize that an economy dominated by particularism is a risky business environment. Markets are fragmented; rules constantly shift under manipulation by government officials; and political obstacles prevent firms from associating, sharing risk, and taking collective action. To cope with these uncertainties, Chinese business has developed a distinctive industrial strategic culture over the past two decades -- a set of values or guidelines about what strategies "work" in this environment. First, in response to the "particular" application of policy, Chinese firms routinely focus on obtaining "exceptional" treatment from key officials: special access to markets or resources, exemptions from rules and regulations, or protection against predation by other officials. Second, to maximize these exceptional benefits, as well as to avoid entanglements with other firms and their patrons, many Chinese companies shun collaboration within their industry, especially if such collaboration crosses regional or bureaucratic boundaries. Third, they generally favor short-term gains over long-term investments. Finally, Chinese firms tend to engage in excessive diversification in order to mitigate the potential damage of fratricidal price competition created by excess production capacity and overlapping investments.

This industrial strategic culture is rational and effective given the current structure of politics and business environment in China.... But China's industrial strategic culture weakens the competitiveness of Chinese firms and it may have damaging economic repercussions down the road. Most Chinese industrial firms focus on short-term gains and, despite increasing operational efficiency, sales revenues, and profits, have not increased their commitment to developing new technologies. Their total spending on R&D as a percentage of sales revenue has remained below one percent for more than a decade. R&D intensity (R&D expenditure as a percentage of value added) at China's industrial firms is only about one percent, seven times less than the average in countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Focusing on short-term returns has also guided China's imports of industrial technology. Chinese firms tend to import technology by purchasing foreign manufacturing equipment, often in complete sets such as assembly lines. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, hardware accounted for more than 80 percent of China's technology imports, whereas licensing, "know-how" services, and consulting accounted for about 9 percent, 5 percent, and 3 percent, respectively.

...

Rather than thinking of China as yet another Asian technological and economic "giant," it may be more useful to regard it, like Brazil or India, as a "normal" emerging industrial power. Thanks to the interaction of political structure and industrial culture, China's twenty-first-century technological and economic landscape looks like a pattern of "nodes without roads" -- a few poorly connected centers of technological success. Burdened by these peculiarities, China has yet to lay the domestic institutional foundations for becoming a technological and economic superpower. Without structural political reforms, its ability to indigenize, develop, and diffuse technology will remain limited. And most of its industrial firms will struggle to realize exiguous margins at the lower reaches of global industrial production chains.

STRATEGIC ENGAGEMENT

Given these limits on China's potential to threaten the global balance of economic power, the United States should resist the false promise of protectionism, whether in the form adopted by the Bush administration (rhetorical jabs at the Chinese currency peg) or that recommended by the AFL-CIO labor federation (calls for tariff protection in the guise of better rights for Chinese workers).

...

The paradox of China's technological and economic power is that China must implement structural political reforms, not simply freer markets or greater investment, before it can unlock its potential as a global competitor. But if it were to undertake such reforms, it would likely discover even greater common interests with the United States and other industrialized democracies. Pursuing strategic engagement is thus a way for the United States to hedge its bets: to preserve its competitive edge while encouraging China to continue developing its economy and liberalizing its politics. Chinese political reform is in the long-term interest of both Beijing and Washington. Unfortunately, the burden of a long history of fragmentation and authoritarian rule weighs heavily against China's successfully completing this final modernization.

Another Kind of "intelligent design"

I was thinking of converting to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, and insisting it be taught in schools along with "intelligent design", when I was struck by the resemblance between the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Cthulhu, so I was ready to join the Cult of Cthulhu, and howl "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!" And what does Cthulhu look like?

The Thing cannot be described -- there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God!...The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars....

or more specifically,

a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. ...[A]n octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.... A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings...the general outline of the whole...shockingly frightful.

--The Call of Cthulhu

But anyway Cthulhu wasn't a creator god! That is Azathoth, of whom it has been said,

...that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity--the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

--The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

I dunno. Once the classroom door is open to religion, don't we have to let these guys in?

Wasteful China

Electrical Inefficiency A Dark Spot for China By Peter S. Goodman

...austerity side by side with state-mandated extravagance -- reveals another reason this country now scours the globe for energy: China has become among the world's most wasteful users of power, its growth in demand exacerbated by its striking inefficiency, say energy analysts and economists.

"A lot of China's energy security problem could be solved if you improved our domestic efficiency," said Yan Maosong, an industrial engineering expert at Shanghai University who advises the central government. "From generation to transmission to power usage, in every link of the chain, our energy industry is not very efficient. Top government leaders have not paid enough attention."

By the government's own reckoning, China's economic growth is absorbing energy at a higher rate than many large economies. To produce $1 million in gross domestic product, China needs 2 1/2 times as much energy as the United States, five times that of the European Union, and nearly nine times that of Japan, according to the state Energy Research Institute.

Making steel in China in 2003 consumed 10 percent more energy per unit than in the United States, according to state statistics. China's electrical generators consume one-fifth more energy per unit of output than American plants, said Long Weiding, an expert at Tongji University in Shanghai. Chinese air conditioners -- now the fastest-growing draw on power -- are roughly one-fifth less efficient than the world average, Long said.

High and inefficient energy use may seem normal for poor nations going through industrialization and rapid economic growth. According to state statistics, China is more energy-efficient than fast-growing India. But much of China's wastefulness stems from the hybrid nature of its economy, which is caught between its communist roots and a free-market future, experts say. More and more of the demand for energy comes from companies that operate on market principles, but the majority of the supply is generated by state-owned monopolies forged in the time of central planning and with little incentive to increase efficiency.

...progress lands on top of a wasteful legacy -- an industrial base that includes power plants and factories built in the 1950s, when the Communist Party government pursued national development at any cost. The smog blanketing most Chinese cities and the black smoke spewing from factory stacks testifies to the continued role of low-grade coal and antiquated technology in powering China's industry.

The addition of power-conserving lights at office buildings could cut consumption needed for lighting by as much as 80 percent, said Shi Mingrong, a former official at the Shanghai Power Bureau who now serves as a consultant to the local government. Modern machinery at factories could cut energy demand by one-fifth, he said. But Chinese companies -- grappling with fierce competition and tiny profit margins -- tend to view new technology more as a cost today than savings tomorrow.

"Most companies are shortsighted," said Hu Zhaoguang, chief economist at the State Power Economic Research Center in Beijing, a government think tank. "They are reluctant to upgrade their equipment to improve energy efficiency."

Waste also continues to plague the generation and transmission of power, experts say. Power plants operated by municipal and provincial governments face pressures to buy coal from local mines -- even when costs are higher than other sources -- to support jobs and local taxes. Provinces and cities have sunk billions of dollars into new power plants to help alleviate shortages, leaving governments or even individual officials on the hook to pay off loans to state banks.

Guangdong province, a booming industrial territory near Hong Kong, now absorbs roughly one-sixth of China's overall electricity supply. State-owned factories and electricity distributors have been buying from local plants, paying triple the price of electricity that could be brought in from Guizhou and Yunnan provinces, where hydropower is plentiful.

The involvement of provincial governments has also deterred the creation of rational generation and transmission grids, experts say. State officials have erected one white elephant after another -- huge power plants that absorb great quantities of coal -- while neglecting to develop smaller, gas-fired plants that could adjust loads to meet demand more precisely. That has forced the big plants to stay on line even when their full capacity is not needed.

"Everybody goes for the big plants," said Yan, the Shanghai University expert, who reckons that this problem accounts for one-tenth of the energy wasted in eastern China.

The transmission grid is poorly coordinated and saddled with old technology, with as much as one-tenth of the load disappearing along the way, experts say. While the state has allowed private and foreign investors into the power generation business, the grid remains controlled by two giant state firms.

The worst waste is found in the state-owned distribution companies that carry power to homes and businesses. They have traditionally kept a percentage of their revenues and handed the rest to the local government, limiting their incentive to upgrade.

For the past three summers, this outdated system has lagged behind China's growing needs, forcing local governments to ration power in 24 of 32 provinces. This summer, in Shanghai's industrial suburbs, officials have ordered factories to cease operations for a full week at a time.

"Of course it hurts our business," said Dai Hongdi, the general manager at the Honghua garment factory. "It's impossible for our factory to just stop a whole week, so what we do is work at night and hope the officials don't notice."

Across the river in the Lujiazui district, landlords seethed over the opposite problem: Since 2001, the city government has decreed that 40 skyscrapers in four districts must keep their lights on until 11 o'clock during the summer.

"It's about building Shanghai's image as an international city," said Guo Hua, director of the city's Appearance and Environmental Sanitation Administrative Bureau.

Lighting the skyscrapers along the Bund from 7 to 11 p.m. during the summer months consumes enough energy to power 30,000 home air conditioners during the same period, according to experts. The city pays about one-third the cost of this extra lighting, but landlords complain that is inadequate.

"We have no choice," said an official at Jin Mao Group Co., which owns and manages Shanghai's tallest building, the 88-story Jin Mao Tower, estimating that the cost of the extra lighting runs more than $3,000 a month. "It is a government regulation."

Woo Hoo!

A nugget from Household Spending Facts and Figures: with a Ph.D. (in Liberal Arts), I make the same as the average college graduate.

Agatha Christie?

Detainees under Harry Potter's spell By Rowan Scarborough

Harry Potter's worldwide popularity is so broad-based that it has become favorite reading for Islamic terror suspects at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Lori, who for two years has overseen the detention center's library, said J.K. Rowling's tales about the boy wizard are on top of the request list for the camp's 520 al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, followed by Agatha Christie whodunits.

Which is not to say they don't read another book.

The Guantanamo library also has drawn interest because of a separate investigation into how guards handle the Koran, which is given to any prisoner who requests it under Pentagon policy. The investigation found five cases of mishandling the sacred book, but no evidence that personnel flushed a copy down a toilet, as one press report -- since disavowed -- said.

The prison initially ordered 1,600 Korans in various languages for $23,000 and since has put in orders for more than 200 more.

"After a period of time, they start to fall apart because they read them constantly," Lori said.

I'm not surprised they're interested in a best-seller. But Agatha Christie? She's been dead a few years, and not the sort of thing I'd expect a bunch of young rowdies to read. I guess it's a post-colonialist thing.

Sweatshops are good

Don't get into a lather over sweatshops By Benjamin Powell and David Skarbek.

People often oppose purchasing uniforms and other clothing made in "sweatshops" in the belief that they're helping oppressed workers. In fact, the reverse is true.

North American unions, such as Unite Here, the apparel and housekeeping workers' union, often lobby to impose working standards for developing countries similar to San Francisco's proposed ordinance. Though these efforts are intended to help poor workers in the third world, they actually hurt them.

We use "sweatshop" to mean those foreign factories with low pay and poor health and safety standards where employees choose to work, not those where employees are coerced into working by the threat of violence. And we admit that by Western standards, sweatshops have abhorrently low wages and poor working conditions. However, economists point out that alternatives to working in a sweatshop are often much worse: scavenging through trash, prostitution, crime, or even starvation.

...

People choose what they perceive to be in their best interest. If workers voluntarily choose to work in sweatshops, without physical coercion, it must be because sweatshops are their best option. Our recent research - the first economic study to compare systematically sweatshop wages with average local wages - demonstrated this to be true.

We examined the apparel industry in 10 Asian and Latin American countries often accused of having sweatshops and then we looked at 43 specific accusations of unfair wages in 11 countries in the same regions. Our findings may seem surprising. Not only were sweatshops superior to the dire alternatives economists usually mentioned, but they often provided a better-than-average standard of living for their workers.

The apparel industry, which is often accused of unsafe working conditions and poor wages, actually pays its foreign workers well enough for them to rise above the poverty in their countries. While more than half of the population in most of the countries we studied lived on less than $2 per day, in 90 percent of the countries, working a 10-hour day in the apparel industry would lift a worker above - often far above - that standard...

In 9 of the 11 countries we surveyed, the average reported sweatshop wages equaled or exceeded average incomes and in some cases by a large margin. In Cambodia, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras, the average wage paid by a firm accused of being a sweatshop is more than double the average income in that country's economy.

...

Antisweatshop activists - who argue that consumers should abstain from buying products made in sweatshops - harm workers by trying to stop the trade that funds some of the better jobs in their economies.

...

By purchasing more products made in sweatshops, we create more demand for them and increase the number of factories in these poor economies. That gives the workers more employers to choose from, raises productivity and wages, and eventually improves working conditions. This is the same process of economic development the US went through, and it is ultimately the way third-world workers will raise their standard of living and quality of life.

For what it's worth

China didn't make it onto the Failed States Index.

The marginal product of war

Tyler Cowen writes,

The correct marginal question...compares the current badness to the badness which would have resulted after the reign of Saddam (or his sons? grandsons?) ended, however that might have happened. Today we see many signals that things are going badly. But most of those signals also imply that things would have gone very badly under the alternative scenario for Saddam's fall. A civil war, for instance, may well have happened anyway, albeit later.

(emphasis his)

Old news

Let a Thousand Licensed Poppies Bloom By Maia Szalavitz

EVEN as Afghanistan's immense opium harvest feeds lawlessness and instability, finances terrorism and fuels heroin addiction, the developing world is experiencing a severe shortage of opium-derived pain medications, according to the World Health Organization...

The United States wants Afghanistan to destroy its potentially merciful crop, which has increased sevenfold since 2002 and now constitutes 60 percent of the country's gross domestic product. But why not bolster the country's stability and end both the pain and the trafficking problems by licensing Afghanistan with the International Narcotics Control Board to sell its opium legally?

The Senlis Council, a European drug-policy research institution, has proposed this truly winning solution. Adopting it would improve the Afghan economy, deprive terrorists of income and keep heroin away from dealers and addicts, all while offering pain relief to the third world.

The United Nations estimated that Afghanistan produced more than 4,200 tons of opium last year; cultivation jumped to 323,701 acres from 197,680 acres in 2003. Ten percent of the Afghan population is believed to be involved in the trade, which supplies nearly 90 percent of the world's illegal heroin. Clearly, this drug war is not being won...

Senlis estimates that meeting the global need for pain medications would require 10,000 tons of opium a year - more than twice Afghanistan's current production...

Because farmers aren't the ones who make the big bucks in the illegal drug trade, purchasing their poppies at competitive rates should be possible. But even if we paid exactly what the drug lords do, the entire crop would cost only about $600 million - less than the $780 million the United States planned to spend on eradication in Afghanistan this year.

Besides, eradication efforts have never eliminated a drug crop. Cocaine continues to be widely available, despite the roughly $3 billion that the United States has spent on coca eradication in Colombia over the last five years.

The Bush administration has criticized Mr. Karzai's "leadership" on opium (despite his call for "jihad on drugs") but refuses to support measures beyond eradication. Responding to the Senlis proposal, one former State Department official who had been working on narcotics and law enforcement told The Christian Science Monitor: "Anything that went about legalizing an opiate in that market would send exactly the wrong message. It would suggest that there is something legitimate to growing."

But there is: countries like India are licensed by the International Narcotics Control Board to grow opium because modern medicine cannot find anything better than opioids to relieve pain. And think of the goodwill such a gesture could produce, a message that we literally want to assuage the world's suffering - not to mention that of the 30 million to 50 million Americans who endure chronic pain.

A Sign of Robert F. Gossett, Jr.'s Incompetence?

Yesterday I received an envelope marked "time sensitive". It was the 2003 (sic) Annual Report of Corporate Realty Income Fund I, L.P., signed by Gossett. The last sentence of his "message to the unitholders" (dated July 12, 2005) reads:

"As the year progresses, we will keep you fully informed of all important developments."

Yeah, right.

The terror of clothing on a fence

Graham Farmelo's Was Dr Dolittle autistic? mentions things that scare farm animals, including sparkling reflections in puddles, hissing and high pitched-noises, moving pieces of plastic and even a piece of clothing hanging on a fence. I can see that; the terror of ordinary things.

Putting Science Into Scripts

Pentagon's New Goal: Put Science Into Scripts By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Exactly how the national defense could be bolstered by setting a few more people loose in Los Angeles with screenplays to peddle may be a bit of a brainteaser. But officials at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research spell out a straightforward syllogism:

Fewer and fewer students are pursuing science and engineering. While immigrants are taking up the slack in many areas, defense laboratories and industries generally require American citizenship or permanent residency. So a crisis is looming, unless careers in science and engineering suddenly become hugely popular, said Robert J. Barker, an Air Force program manager who approved the grant. And what better way to get a lot of young people interested in science than by producing movies and television shows that depict scientists in flattering ways?

Don't forget to write one about intelligent design, and another about alternative medicine. That's what passes for science these days.

Not that kind of "cake"

A propos of nothing: I've just discovered the phrase "the cake of custom". One of the OED's (subscription only) definitions of "cake" is "A mass or concretion of any solidified or compressed substance in a flattened form, as a cake of soap, wax, paint, dry clay, coagulated blood, tobacco, etc." It goes on to give the figurative usage, "1872 BAGEHOT Physics & Pol. (1876) 27 To create what may be called a cake of custom. 1879 H. GEORGE Progr. & Pov. X. i. (1881) 433 A body or 'cake' of laws and customs grows up."

Update

In Physics and Politics, Bagehot also wrote of "breaking the cake of custom"

What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a fixed law, but getting out of a fixed law; not of cementing (as upon a former occasion I phrased it) a cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching some-thing better.

Yuck

"Look at these people! They suck each other! They eat each other's saliva and dirt!"

--Tsonga people of southern Africa on the European practice of kissing, 1927 (cited in Keith Thomas' Put your sweet lips . . .)

Lunacy of the first order

John Cole rightly describes the teaching of intelligent design as sheer stupidity.

To have the leader of the country, the leader of the party, and the person who proclaims that he wants to be known as the 'education president' to state, even casually, that he thinks intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution is lunacy of the first order.

It's about fanaticism

How to Stop the Contagion By Fareed Zakaria

Like all ideologies, radical Islam is a phenomenon of the educated class. From Muhammad Atta to Mohammed Sidique Khan, almost all suicide bombers have been men who read and write. In V. S. Naipaul's book "A Million Mutinies Now," the author interviews a young Hindu fanatic. The man explains his fascistic views, and then Naipaul asks the man's father, who happens to be sitting there, what he thinks. The old man explains that he works at a factory from morning till night and doesn't really have time for these kinds of ideas. Extremist ideology is a leisure-time pursuit.

Nor can foreign policy really explain such rage. The invasion of Iraq clearly has greatly enraged many Muslims, radicalizing some deeply. But can a disagreement over foreign policy really make a Briton like Germaine Lindsay, who had never even visited Iraq, kiss his pregnant wife and child goodbye and go out and blow himself and others up? There is something deeper at work here. Last week Egypt, which sent no troops to Iraq and condemned the invasion, was targeted. Turkey and Indonesia—which are both opponents of the war—have also been attacked. (Besides, the demands keep changing. Osama bin Laden's primary one was that American troops leave Saudi Arabia, which they have done. Bin Laden seems not to have noticed.)

What this is about, as Tony Blair has argued, is fanaticism. Radical ideologies of hate and violence have often seduced disaffected young men searching for some great cause. Forty years ago they would have embraced Leninist revolutionary dogma, with Che Guevara as the bin Laden of his day. Today, for Muslims, it is a violent interpretation of Islamic fundamentalism. Born in the Middle East, it has spread like a virus across the Muslim world and into the Islamic diaspora in the West.

Old news

One Young Man's Concern on Extremism By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI

"The evil programs on TV, the music, the literature, the magazines ... are all responsible for the terrorist attacks. People are becoming rebellious because they are against fornication, gambling, alcohol," Fazel said.

"Until they get rid of Eminem and Marilyn Manson, they can't get rid of our preachers," he added.

Fazel called himself a former "kafar," Arabic for an infidel who did not fear God, and said he once enjoyed drinking with his friends and the company of young women.

Then, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, he read about al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden.

Images of the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsing, he said, fueled his curiosity about the faith of his ancestors.

"Allah pointed me to him (bin Laden)," said Fazel, dressed in a white shalwar kameez, the traditional loose tunic-and-trouser common to men in South Asia.

Three years later, he said, an angel spoke to him.

"I needed change. Drugs and alcohol did me no good," he said.

The young man denied that he was confused about his faith and asserted just as vehemently that he did not "give a damn about the world."

Fazel said he has not told his parents about turning to his deepest Islamic roots. Like many of his peers who also were born of immigrant Muslim parents, Fazel has found difficulty integrating into British society and expresses a sense of displacement and alienation.

And then, via Donald SensingThe Truth About Jihad By Max Rodenbeck:

In Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, Olivier Roy, one of France's leading scholars of modern Islamism, notes striking parallels between today's jihadists and Europe's radical left of the 1960s and 1970s. The two movements have drawn from similar social pools of alienated, dislocated youth. They have chosen similar symbols (beards and guns and sanctified texts: the Koran substituting for Marx, Sayed Qutb, the Egyptian whose theories inspired the Muslim Brotherhood, for Gramsci) and targets ("imperialism," "globalization," "Americanization"). The jihadists' notion of a pan-Islamic Ummah, or nation, says Roy, recalls the Trotskyists' idea of the proletariat: "an imaginary and therefore silent community that gives legitimacy to the small groups pretending to speak in its name." The triumph of Islam is held to be, as the triumph of socialism once was, "inevitable."

It Still Makes Sense

"Clearly, a civilisation that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."

-- Jean-François Revel, during the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism

Let them drive

Imams, Academics Against Allowing Women to Drive by Raid Qusti. The reasons they offer?

• Women driving cars is not permissible because the ruling of 'closing doors that leads to corruption' applies to it directly.
• If the act facilitates misbehavior, then it is not permissible.
• The ownership of several cars in one family instead of just one being used by the driver.
• The frequent purchase of new cars "since women are known to like everything new".
• The burden on the government of having to open special female sections in all Traffic Departments.
• No Islamic scholar "or good figure in society" has called for women to drive.
• All those who have been calling for women to drive are people who want to damage the image of Islamic women.

Blogesque compares this to prohibitions against female Saudi college students' owning cellphones, and notes,

"Closing all doors leads to corruption" can be translated into Western parlance as "Forbidden fruit is always the sweetest." Instead, they're twisting it to justify their stance by claiming that driving leads to "corruption," so it should be forbidden to women.

And as for the other points:

• As for facilitating misbehavior, what about male misbehavior? And anyway, one could argue an awful lot of things makes bad behavior easy.
• If you think the ownership of cars is a bad thing, how about a blanket prohibition against car ownership; make people take public transport.
• Why not let male traffic officials deal with women?
• Just because Islamic scholars haven't called for something doesn't mean it's bad. And what's their definition of "good figure[s] in society"?
• People who call for women to drive are people who want them to have more opportunities. How does that damage their image?