Social democracy is sometimes boring

The Theory of Social Democracy by Thomas Meyer is so boring that I spent a whole week getting through it, skimming many parts. That doesn’t mean it’s not an important book. It’s boring because it tries to do too much, giving us a literature review on every topic dealt with instead of getting to the point.

The point is, however, that it is only the model of social democracy that can provide human rights in practice. Meyer distinguishes between negative and positive liberty (freedom).

Negative freedom, mostly affiliated with neo-liberalism, interprets liberty as freedom from state intervention. The state provides for security and sets some basic rules with an emphasis on property rights, but otherwise it stays away. People would then have freedom from intervention.

Positive freedom happens when the state intervenes to provide equality of opportunities. It redistributes (some) money from the rich to the poor in order to give everyone an opportunity to find jobs or go to schools without having to depend on their family fortunes. That’s human rights.

The [negative] interpretation of freedom produces a paradoxial outcome. To safeguard the negative liberty of all citizens, liberal theory restricts positive liberty to only some of them, the owners of property.

The argument is old, but still very relevant today. It shows that we need both negative and positive freedom for the state to be a human rights provider.

For social democracy to work, Meyer rightly emphasises that individuals have a duty to ‘try’ the market before they ask for help, and that they only should receive what is necessary to continue a dignified life. Provided that the market still pays the most, it is implicit that it is both in the state and the welfare receiver’s interest to get the latter a job as fast as possible. Meyer mentions that decommodification of workers will always be problematic, but offers no particular solution to this problem. This remains the problem/cost of social democracy and I’m afraid Meyer’s dealing with it becomes a bit utopian.

Meyer also argues that education from pre- to secondary school should be a public good based on equality, but that the school should foster independent thinking and self-directed learning. He notes that children in the Scandinavian countries cognitive skills do not depend on their parents income, an indicator that the pitfall of negative freedom has been largely eluded.

While I certainly agree with Meyer’s main argument that only negative and positive liberty can secure freedom for all citizens in practice, the discussion sometimes becomes utopian, failing to deal with some of the problems inherent in social democracy. Does decommodification of workers make people less productive? Does strong workers’ rights hinder employment? What incentives do the public school have to provide quality education when it’s not competing with any other school?

A serious review would also have to deal with these important issues, asking to which degree they are trade-offs or compatible with the social democratic model. But as mentioned, I don’t like books trying to do everything.

“De” kan begge verdener

Godt foredrag av Fredrik Haren som argumenterer at Asia allerede har et overtak på den vestlige verden i kunnskap, siden “de” kan begge verdener. Den vestlige verden er for fokusert på seg selv, og vil miste konkurranseevne over tid om en ikke blir klar over hva som foregår i Asia.

Jeg er nok bare halvveis overbevist. Fareed Zakaria i the Post-American bringer fram det viktige poenget at en ingeniørtittel fra f.eks. Kina ikke er like avansert som en i f.eks. USA. Mens Haren tror at nyvinning kommer fra kvantitet, er nok sannheten at han må fokusere mer på kvaliteten av kunnskap i sin formel.

Hovedpoenget er forøvrig utvilsomt viktig: vi kan trenge mer fokus på Asia, spesielt hva som foregår i India og Kina. Disse er ekstremt viktige land allerede nå, både politisk og økonomisk, og vil ha mer innflytelse for hvert år som går. At vestlig media bør fokusere mer på disse landene er det ingen tvil om. Dette bør bli allmennkunnskap, ikke noe som er forbeholdt statsvitere.

En bør være bevisst på at Haren legger en realisme til grunn i foredraget sitt, som går ut i fra at relativt mer “kunnskap” i Asia er en trussel mot vestlige land. Det er ikke nødvendigvis tilfelle, siden mer handel og kunnskapsdeling mellom land vanligvis fører til en win-win situasjon. Det kan også være at Asia surfer på en “catch-up” bølge og at vekst og kunnskap vil komme nærmere men ikke nødvendigvis bli bedre enn vestlige land i overskuelig framtid.

(Takk for referanse)

Freedom revisited

A good feminist (?) friend gave me The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood a few weeks ago. I am, as she’s aware of, always sceptical to receiving books from others, especially my parents. But I’ve spent the last few days reading this one. I wonder if she’ll ever read the book she got from me.

While the plot is pretty straightforward, this is the kind of book that can be interpreted in thousand ways. For me, it is a book about different kinds of freedoms. Women in particular live under certain fears and constraints, including sexual violence, job discrimination and all kinds of equality issues.

The Handmaid’s tale is a story about an autocratic society evolving from a state coup that deals with these issues by forbidding women to work, take part in intellectual discussions, read or write. They are only there to bread, in a non-sexual way. The book more than hints that Christian extremists are behind the state coup. It is a society deprived of freedom for both men and women, but this has made it a society where women can be relatively safe.

Total safety has its price, because in order to be free in these extremists’ view, women get constrained as ever before. Ultimately, and this comes as no shock to anyone including the book’s characters, there has to be a balance between total liberty and total autocracy. Maybe no one can ever be totally free, but constraining people’s rights and liberties to the extreme will for sure deprive both men and women of their freedom.

I think the book would have been more exciting if this society came about as a result of democratic elections. Then people would be more confused about what went wrong. But there’s an elite class in the book, responsible for the state coup and the society they made. The elites of course, have their methods of evading the constraints.

The book, as even stated on the cover, has certain similarities to George Orwell’s 1984, that I read a few months ago. But while Orwellian societies are largely discredited, liberal feminism still fights an important struggle, and so I would say that Atwood’s book is still very valid today. it’s a book I, with my search terms, would probably never come across. And so I’m glad I received it.

Rike Høyrefolk gagner seg selv?

Dagbladet har i en typisk artikkel sett på inntekt, formue og alder til våre stortingsrepresentanter, og funnet at Høyrefolk er både rikest og eldst.

Irrelevant og slett journalistikk, sier folk i kommentarfeltet. Ja kanskje, men rational choice teorier dominerer i USA og andre akademiske miljøer. Kort sagt, folk gjør hva som gagner dem selv, og forsvarer dette med ubetydelig snakk. Bare cause og effect betyr noe i rational choice. Paul Chaffeys skifte fra rødt til blått ville passet fint inn i en slik teori.

Selv er jeg som regel mot å se ting gjennom slike briller, men Dagbladet har et poeng. Så spørs det hvor mye inntekt og formue bestemmer partitilhørighet. Jeg tror ikke korrelasjonen er vedig sterk i et land hvor folk flest har det godt.

4 more years with a social-democratic Norway – 5 main reasons

I’ve good reasons to be happy today. The four last years a social-democratic coalition (the “red-greens”) has governed Norway consisting of the Labour Party and the smaller Centre Party and the Social Left Party. Yesterday, the Norwegian people gave the government four new years.

As the graph illustrates, it’s been an exciting campaign and election. Two mandates less and the government would have been history.

Honestly, I was afraid the Red-Greens would lose. In a well functioning democracy where the press and the people usually are sceptical to power, only the fact that someone is in government makes people vote something else.

In the age of cognitive dissonance, I’m tempted to provide the following quasi-analysis for the 5 main reasons for this success.

• The government responded calmly and intellectually to the global financial crisis by introducing a comprehensive package inserting oil funds into parts of the economy where the money would have the best effect (investing in construction work has 40 times the effect on value creation than lowering taxes). We now have one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe. The main opposition parties called for lower taxes, as they always do. The financial crisis has not ended, and many voters find it absurd to fight the crisis by going more neoliberal, the very source of that crisis.
• The opposition parties were divided on important issues such as the environment and immigration policies. More importantly, they did not offer the voters a clear coalition alternative, but were rather engaged in condemning each other. One party, the Liberal Party, even guaranteed not to go into coalition with the Progressive Party. Some kind of minority government unable to take action could have been the result if the opposition had won.
• Most voters see Norwegian politics as highly polarised, and the parties’ rhetoric helps reinforcing this view. The liberal/conservative opposition talks about tax cuts, and some of them ignore the global climatic changes or want to prevent homosexuals from marrying in addition to making life tougher for immigrants. Such views are not popular among young people, but more than that, I think such opinions go against the identity of Norway as a global Good Samaritan (note, an identity doesn’t have to be true!).
• PM Jens Stoltenberg (Labour Party) has matured. He’s become a real statesman. He’s knowledgeable, pragmatic in search of good solutions. He seems like someone who knows what he’s talking about and was (to my knowledge) not caught in any factual errors or likewise during the campaign. Most importantly, he knows when to say “I don’t know” or “we have to wait until the investigative inquiry is done” when other party leaders offer the voters a yes or no (see my comment here). People appreciate that the PM doesn’t act like an omnipresent God, but has faults and problems like the rest of us.
• The Labour Party’s excellent campaign. Besides being present in all kinds of social media, they knocked on 250.000 doors and gave out around half a million red roses. Most importantly, they rhetorically made their main opponent the ’sofa’, knowing from surveys that home-dwellers on election day mostly support the Labour Party. Jens has for years in his speeches compared party politics to lovers: no one’s perfect, but you have to vote on the party that fits you best.

That said, the election was a close race. Next time will be a tough one.

(In the interest of full disclosure and if it isn’t obvious yet, I’m a Labour Party supporter.)

Universal Human Rights

Universal Human Rights in theory & practice by jack Donnelly tries to grapple with different aspects of human rights, and he does so quite successfully.

Donnelly takes a universalist, but minimalist position on human rights, arguing that human rights are universal, but that different ways of implementation leaves room for cultural impact. He denies, however, that values, such as the ‘collective Asian values’ can offer any better or alternative conception of human rights. Human rights, as he says, is something you have just because you are human, and should not depend on your worth in a community or anything else.

That said, your rights stop when violating others’ rights, by violence for instance. Rights are thus not absolute, and the state must balance this aspect.

For the regime evolution aspect of human rights, Donnelly belives that the Human Rights will eventually be implemented in all societies, but he is also a moderate realist:

Regime evolution may be gradual and largely incremental within declaratory and promotional regimes… but there seems to be a profound discontinuity in the emergence of implementation and enforcement activities… The move to an implementation or enforcement regime requires a major qualitative increase in the commitment of states that rarely is forthcoming.

Donnelly also argues that in foreign policy, human rights are trumped by economic and security concerns. I would say yes and no. He fails to make the connection that some states now are between these interests. Norway, for instance, increasingly promotes a rights-based international society as the best way to ensure their own economic and political security. Decisions must be made on a case-to-case basis considering the long-run rather than short-term interests for such rhetoric to be valuable.

The last part of the book is a collection of essays on some controversial issues regarding Human Rights. He argues here, that we should be careful listening to leaders who want to sacrifice human rights for economic development. There is not necessarily a negative correlation. While human rights require democratic government, democratic government does not necessarily foster human rights. He makes a strong appeal to Western states to stop talking about democracy if they really are talking about human rights.

Donnelly also attacks promoters of collective human rights, that is, group human rights. And he again does so very successfully. For, who decides who should have such rights? What rights should they have that are not already covered in the Universal Human Rights? Who would be their agents? And most importantly, ‘Why should we expect group rights to succeed when individual rights have failed?’ He also touches upon the danger of defining people in groups – what about those who don’t feel they belong there?

He does not find much protection in the Universal Rights for sexual orientations, except the right to privacy and decriminalisation. Here we must rely on evolutive interpretation, which Donnelly argues is more or less voluntary and something done in Europe than an absolute human right. Sadly, the Human Rights have little to contribute, but we can connect new norms of equality to human rights to make them more rigid.

Lastly he deals with humanitarian intervention much the same way as R2P does. He argues that Human Rights are still just a matter between a state and its citizens, and not ‘others.’ However, he takes recent events into account and argues that genocide may be such a serious infringement on human rights that it warrants forced intervention. As a realist, he however notes that intervention seldom take place in practice unless supported by other more selfish interests. As a conclusion however, sovereignty comes with responsibility to citizens, and that responsibility can be exercised by another state if the state cannot protect its own citizens against genocide.

Things I’ll miss about Japan #6

Sushi might be on the top of the list of what I’ll miss about Japan, but it’s become such a normal thing for me. I just remembered to include it when reading a typical Norwegian (Western?) opinion on sushi – that eating raw food is basically for barbarians. The post jokes that the Japanese are so effective and busy they don’t have time to cook their food (another common misperception, but that belongs to another post). Even more typically – the author never tried sushi himself!

I would never trade a nice sushi or sashimi meal with any beef, and particularly not cooked fish! Sushi or sashimi is maybe the most delicate food I know of, when done right. Of course, sashimi takes time to get used to, since the different tastes may be too delicate for someone used to barbeque sauce and french fries (indeed I had the same problem before!).

Sometimes I’m also enjoying raw whale, cow or horse meat, but just as a small taste. For sashimi and sushi, I can eat tons. Sushi should be perfect for Norway, with fresh ingredients… But maybe we cannot trust our kitchens well enough to serve raw food?

My favourite sushi chain in Japan is Sushi-meijin, based in Kyushu. They serve small plates with two sushis for 105 yen, or about 1$. The sushi is pretty good, and great value for the money. Otherwise, if travelling along the seaside, I like to go to those restaurants in fishing villages that serve that day’s catch.