Lennart Regebro

Professor R J Rummel is complaining about IFPRIs Global Hunger Index, because they exclude "developed countries" from their data, simply because there is no hunger there. I agree with him, it makes the data much harder to use. It also, more specifically, makes it hard to know if a country missing from the data is there because they don't think the country is big or significant enough to be in there, or because they have decided that it is a "developed country".

However, I may make Professor Rummel happy by noticing that it doesn't matter when it comes to showing what he wants to show. Even though developed countries (and thereby most democracies) are excluded, the data that exists are still so overwhelmingly clear that it is almost scary.

"Hunger" in this graph measured on the IFPRI hunger index and "Democracy" is a measure on how free/democratic countries are on a scale from one to twelve, with the data coming from Freedom house. I simply grouped all countries that had a particular democracy level, and took an average of the hunger index for these countries.

So, simply speaking, if a country is extremely totalitarian or just averagely oppressive doesn't matter, people will still starve. But when countries are moving out from what Freedomhouse calls "Partly Free" into what they call "Free" countries (8-12 on my scale above) we see a significant drop in hunger, that directly follows the level of freedom!

It couldn't be much clearer than that, really. Freedom, baby, yeah.

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Kanske intressanta bloggar om: politik, demokrati, svält, rummel

In Florida, a school voucher system that already have given seven hundred students from poor areas with poor schools a chance to get an education has been shot down by the Florida supreme school. Why? Well, you see, Florida's state constitution guarantees a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system of free public schools”. Now, the schools in poor areas are neither efficient, safe, secure or high quality, meaning that the states system is in no way uniform. The are however, free and public. A voucher system can give kids access to uniform, efficient, safe, secure, high quality, free private schools. And the Florida supreme court evidently decided that it's OK to sacrifice all the other parts of that sentence, just to make sure the schools remain public.

Anybody else smell a tail wagging a dog here?

Voucher systems basically mean that kids that normally would be forced to go in public schools get the possibility to go in private schools. Sweden has had a general voucher system for everyone since the start of the 90s, and the result has been a general increase in school quality (in Florida too). Also, since more schools now are privately owned, it means teachers now have a choice of employer, which has increased tecaher salaries a bit, and increased teacher freedom a lot. By letting people choose their schools, the bad schools have to either get good, or get lost. Most problem schools in Sweden (in Sweden the problem schools are in the suburbs and the nice schools in the inner city) has cleaned up their act. And it costs very little. It's a win-win scenario.

At least, things are looking up in the rest of th US. Although Florida now will shut down their voucher system, six other states are extending or introducing systems of their own. We can either hope for better judges or an amendment to the Florida constitution.

The French Prime Minister and presidential hopeful, Dominique De Villepin was interviewed on CNN yesterday. It was a brilliant display of how to not say anything substantial, something French politicians and philosophers excel at. Most significantly, De Villepin avoids all kinds of answers. He avoids answering questions, and he ducks any answers to the French problems. I can only hope that France will not reward his unsubstantial bullshitting by making him a president.

His statements on what do do are either platitudes, like "we want to make a very special effort in direction of the young people of these neighborhoods"; or saying that he will do the same thing as before (i.e. nothing), "we have created tax free zones, we want to increase the numbers of these tax free zones"; and most significantly, more state meddling: "we've decided to have our national agency of employment to receive all the young people in these neighborhood during the next month".

De Villepin can also not resist blaming others. The immigrants themselves get a little blame, of course; "we also want the people of these neighborhoods being able to accept the jobs outside of these neighborhoods". I personally am pretty sure they are very able to accept jobs outside the suburbs. The problem is that they aren't offered any. And the primary scapegoat of French politicians come up; "whatever happened in France can happen as well in other countries, in Europe or else where. It is a part of a new phenomenon of globalization." No, it's not a part of globalization. Many countries that have embraced globalization have no such problems. In fact, the problems are rather a direct effect of protectionism.

The attitude is "these people need help". No, they don't. They need jobs.

The answers that De Villepin is avoiding are not even particularily painful. France comes in 142nd place out of 154 countries when it comes to ease of hiring and firing people. Yes, France is the 12th most difficiult country in the world, only 11 other countries make it more difficult to hire people. How exactly does Dominique De Villepin expect poorly educated, muslim, black immigrants to get a job in that situation? Hiring somebody takes a lot of effort. Firing them if you made a misjudgment (either about how much work was needed or about the person) is even harder. Would you be willing to take a risk in that situation? Of course not. You'll hire somebody with the same education, looks and values as you, because that is what you trust. Preferrably somebody that has recommendations from somebody you know.

The result is that getting a job relies almost solely on contacts. You can't get a job, unless you know somebody who knows somebody. And poor kids in the suburbs don't.

There is only one solution to the problems France has; get the economy running so more jobs are created and simplify the process of hiring and firing people. A lot. Most of the difficult in doing this is hidden in a notoriously complicated French bureaucracy. This bureaucracy is full of people whose only interest is in creating more job for themselves.

Here is a completely true story about how you get a paper from the French goverment:

1. You go to the sécurité social and ask for the paper. After one hour of waiting, they give you a completely different paper. When you point out that this is not the paper you asked for, they say the computers are broken, and ask you to come back another day.
2. You come back another day and ask for the paper. They tell you that they can't give you this paper at your normal office, and that you need to go to a special office.
3. You go to the special office. After one hour of waiting, they refuse to give you the paper, and say you should not have it.
4. You print out the european regulation on the matter, and read through it, making sure you should have the paper.
5. You go back, and ask for the paper again. This time, when they refuse to give you the paper, you read the law to them, having highlighted the required parts of the law with a handy flourescent pen. They agree that you should have the paper, and then as for a list of 10 different papers you have to give them, first, to prove that you should have the paper, several of which comes from other parts of the French administration.
6. Rinse, repeat.
   

All this requires not only knowledge of French, of course, but knowledge of French and european law. And you need to know it better than the French administration knows it.

Do you really want to hire anybody in those circumstances? I know of several young europeans who came to Paris for a year, to have fun and see the world. Most of them work. Few of them pay any taxes. It's easy to see why, and it's not because the taxes are high. It's just too darn difficult to pay them.

The only painful part of this solution, is that the unions are running France, and French unions will stop anything that sounds like "liberalisation" or "deregulation". We need, therefore, to come up with an alternative name for these policies. Suggestions are welcome.

The integrated and the rejected. The whole fucking universe is split into two...

So, it seems I was wrong. I thought this whole debacle would not end until the French minister of interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, resigned. But he has played high political stakes and won before, and he seems to do that this time around as well. He first put more fuel on the fire by calling rioters "rabble" and telling the police to arrest more, and coming with obviously bogus claims that the riots were centrally organized. But then, he pulled a card from his sleeve: The state of emergency. This has never been used on mainland France before. Not even during the riots of 1968, which took place in central Paris.

Let us ponder that again. France is in a state of emergency. This feels rather bizarre. States of emergency is something usually used by oppressive governments to shut up the opposition. And when you go about your shopping, where is the emergency, you say? It is slightly otherworldly. But it seems to have worked, the riots are cooling down. The Parisian suburbs are reportedly back to normal. The sickly stench of burning rubber that blanketed the nights of Parisian suburbs are gone, no doubt thanks the the drop in car burning. During the riots several hundred cars were torched every night. Yesterday, the number was 76, which according the police is “almost normal”.

So, it might be time to sit down and look at what really happened. And I will start with a whole host of selected statistics to show the situation in France.

• In France, only 24% of the youth works. Compare to for example Sweden, where the number is 46%.

• 10% of all who lives in France are born outside France. But only 6.2% of the workforce is born outside of France.

• The unemployment rate for university graduates is 5%. The unemployment rate for university graduates of north-African origin is 26.5%

• Around 40% of the unemployment in France is long-term.

The non-working class

Frances unemployment is as you see, big. And it's long-term, for the most part. People who for years and years go without a job, and live on unemployment. And remember, this numbers only include those who actively look for work. If you, after looking for job for a couple of years, give up, you are no longer counted as being unemployed. The result is obvious. France has become a modern class-society. But instead of the working class struggling against the oppression of the bourgeoisie, we now have a society split along the lines of the workers and the unemployed. France has a large group unemployed youths of mainly non-French origin. They don't feel French. They feel excluded and alienated from society. If you are a young north-African in France, no matter if you were born here or immigrated, you chance of ever getting a job is desperately close to zero.

How come unemployment, and especially longterm unemployment is such a problem in France? Here we come into more statistics.

• On average, startup companies in the US 1992-97 expanded their staff by 161 percent within two years. During the same time, the much fewer French startups expanded their staff by 13 percent.

• On a scale from 0 to 100, the difficulty of hiring people in France is rated as 78, which places them as the 10^th most difficult country, out of 151 (tying the place with Iran, Iraq, but also Greece). This can be compared to Sweden, with a difficulty index of 28, or Denmark and UK with a difficulty index of 11, or Hong Kong, Switzerland, Australia and US, who together with 24 other countries ties the first place as the country that is most easy to hire people with 0 as the index.

• The share of low-skilled jobs dropped from 28% to 20% between 1983 and 2000. This is partly because:

• The minimum wage in France was in 1997 52% of the median wage i France. It has since then risen to 61%.

In short, it is very difficult to hire people in France, at it makes no sense in hiring somebody unless you know for sure that this somebody is going to be able to make you quite a lot of money. French companies will only hire people if they are desperate. This makes for a slow moving market, where the best way to get a job is to already have one. If you don't have a job, and have no education, you are in big trouble. If you in addition to that are not French, well, then you are completely out of luck, and can look ahead at a long life on handouts from the government.

Add a dose of prejudice

The French work market is highly segregated. Go into a McDonald's, and you see a French boss, arab or asian people behind the counters and black people making the hamburgers. You might see a security guard as well. He is always black, unless he has a dog, in which case he is French. I assume that black security guards are seen as scarier. In a bank or any other kind of office environment, arabs and blacks are simply missing. They are allowed on the streets, but not in an office.

When I took a night train in southern France a couple of years ago, a group of three pick pockets of French or Arab origin combed the train for sleeping passangers with their wallets in reach. The train personell was alerted and the police boarded the train, quickly arrested three black africans and left. The pick-pockets continued to walk around the train, until they jumped off in Marseille.

What should be done?

People, especially immigrants and their kids, need to get jobs. Now. French politicians will look stern and take a deep gaze into the TV cameras where they say that the work market is the most important problem in France now, which is correct. Then they will continue with that it is important to protect the work market from a diverse set of horrors, from the 150 polish plumbers that work in France, to the evils of the immigrants in the suburbs. And this is a political lie.

The most important thing France can do is to create new jobs. And doing that is not magic. It's easy. And here is the recipie:

1. Scrap the 35 hour work week. This is already happening in France, but the process can be sped up. People working less is not good for the economy. The idea of a 35 hour work week is that the unemployed were to fill up the missing 5 hours. Of course, that doesn't happen. Instead, people work less, less money gets created, and the country actually get poorer. The best would be if we could create a work market with a large flexibility and individual choice, so everybody could work as much or as little as they liked, but that is difficult.

2. Remove the minimum wage laws. France already have a social security net, and a minimum income rule that gives unemployed the money they need to live. This is all the minimum wage law you need. Nobody is going to take a job if it earns less money than being on the dole.

3. Remove all the bureaucratic obstacles to hiring people. Hiring somebody should just be a case of signing a paper.

4. Remove all efforts of “protecting” the work market. The only thing you protect by that is the unemployment.

These are the most important parts. If necessary, I'd like to see more efforts towards minimizing the racism when hiring, but that is a difficult question. These four are easy and effective.

Sources:
http://www.cerc.gouv.fr/rapports/summary-cserc6.PDF
http://www.cerc.gouv.fr/rapports/report1cerc.pdf
http://www.insee.fr/en/indicateur/smic.htm
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/23/47/34641829.xls
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/24/2/34642361.xls
Olaf Gersemann: Cowboy Capitalism, p 198, via Johan Norberg
Jennifer Buckingham, ed. State of the Nation, 2004, p 112, via Johan Norberg

The sickly smell of burning rubber blankets the Paris suburbs as you ride through them. The day is calm as police wander around and large groups, but during the nights the twinkling parisian streetlights has an old companion back for a visit: The fires of riots.

For those who has read any french modern history, this is all very familiar. A large part of society gets neglected and ignored, and feels left out. Frustration and anger rises. Demonstrations and protests are held, which leads to nothing, and finally some more or less unrelated event sparks riots amongst the frustrated. This is pretty much what has happened in Paris, over and over again. The last time it was this big was 1968.

The state reacts in the same way every time: By denouncing the rioters as nothing more than simple criminals, a well organized mob who is only out to fight. The reaction is therefore to throw the police-force at the problem and arrest loads of people. But of course, just as 1789 and just as 1968, one of the problems is that the angry youth sees the police as their enemy, and one of the things that make them angry is that they are being treated as criminals, even if they aren't. So that type of tactics will only make them more angry, and will only increase the riots. Which is of course exactly what happened this time to.

In 1968 the rioters had the luck of getting the unions on their side, sparking a general strike. But that requires connection in the unions, and the rioters this time is not well educated socialist youth, but low-educated immigrant youth. They have no connections to the unions. They can not grind France to a halt. On the other hand, the only way Sarkozys tactic can work, is if he succeeds in arresting almost all of the rioters.

This will probably end with Sarkozy resigning. I sure can't see any other way out of this now. The big question is if the rest of the french goverment will learn something from this, and realize that France can not go on trying to exlude it's immigrants from society. Somehow, I don't have high hopes.

Nobody should complain that immigrants in France don't act French. They have picked up that most French of all traditions: Street riots. I thought at first that it was just a one-off clash between police and some angry youth, Gothenburg-style, but now it's been going on for for almost a week, in true french government-vs-people-standoff. Interestingly enough, nobody in France seems to care much. I think the French sees rioting as a type of extra interesting rugby.

Often, what distinguishes non-doctorates from doctorates in the psychology, the social sciences, and humanities is common sense versus incomprehensible or empty rhetoric.
- R.J. Rummel

Niklas Hedell lives in Stockholm since 1988. When he studied in Uppsala he wanted to sublet his apartment and stay in Uppsala until he had finished the studies. However, the Rent and Tenacies Tribunal, a special court that decides issues of who is right in conflicts regarding rented apartments, and therefore in many cases decide who gets to live where, decided that he was not allowed to do this, because it is traveling distance to Uppsala. With public transport, it would take Mr Hedell more than an hour. Each way. Every day.

Now he is finished with the studies, and he works in Stockholm. He is married, and his wife works and lives in Uppsala. They have a daughter, but they work in different cities, and hence have not yet moved together. His wife also has only a project based job, nothing says that her next job will be in Uppsala. So all is fine with the tribunal?

Hardly. Remember, the tribunal has decided that Uppsala and Stockholm is within the distance you should travel every day to work, so they think that Mr Hedell should move in with his wife in Uppsala, and the have decided to evict Mr Hedell. Yes, the Swedish government is telling Mr Hedell that he is not allowed to live in Stockholm, he should live in Uppsala with his wife.

Do you think this is absurd? Yes, it is. But it's also just another day in Perfectly Planned Sweden. I'm so happy I don't live there.

I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me. -- Björk

Ref: http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=1298&a=459554

One of our times most interesting fighters for peace and democracy is R. J. Rummel. In his blog today he has drawn a curve of the global level of democracy. Happily it is increasing in a steady pace, and Rummel comes to the conclusion that it is quite likely that we will achieve global democracy in less than 40 years. That indeed is happy news for me, who had expected it to take much longer. I have now the hope of seeing a free world in my life time. Assuming I start going to the gym and eat better. :)

Via Johan Norbergs blog I encountered an article where Fredrik Erixon argues that foreign aid to developing countries doesn't work. In fact he says that it actually is hurtful to the recipient countries. It's food for thought, and actually quite a scary idea.

But I think he is wrong. Because he looks only on how much aid has been given, but not what type. Much of the aid given during the 70s was grandiose, massive and industrial. It aimed to kick the countries into the industrial world by building factories. Much of the money ended up in corrupt pockets, and the industries seldom gave the desired effect.

In the 80s the aid was focused more on small scale healthcare and educational projects. These existed during the 70s too, but made up a small part of the relatively large sums spent on foreign aid during this decade. And the curves show no sudden increase in prosperity when the large scale aid stops, at least showing that aid does not need to be hurtful.

So I suspect that aid can help, if it is aimed at strengthening the basic needs of society. Aid should help in building a countries legal system, healthcare, schools and democracy. That together with economic freedom provides the basis for a country to get out of poverty.

Building big industries help with nothing of this, in fact, it often acts contrary to the economic freedom. But, although big industry aid is useless, it does not mean all aid is useless. I think this is Fredrik Erixons mistake.

Ex-President Bill Clinton, and his wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, have been among those to call for an inquiry. "It's the least he can do", sais Senator Clinton, "After all, my husband made an inquiry into Monica".

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