Reason Magazine - Staff > Kerry Howley

The Politics of Exclusion

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:00:00 EDT

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What Women Want

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:30:00 EDT

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Tyranny of the Old

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) info@reason.com (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:15:00 EDT

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Striking Distance

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In the tough-on-crime wave of the ’90s, more than 20 states passed “three strikes” legislation, which subjects repeat offenders to increasingly harsh penalties. Few enforced the law with as much zeal as California, which has slapped more than 40,000 residents with a strike or two. But thanks to perverse incentives built into the legislation, the law may encourage some of those offenders to commit more-violent crimes in the future.

California criminals receive their first strike by committing an “aggravating offense,” which covers a broad range of crimes, including burglary and rape. After that first strike, any felonies count as second and third strikes, with the latter carrying three times the normal sentence. To determine how the law affects criminal behavior, Harvard economist Radha Iyengar compared criminals who had committed the same crimes in a different order. He concluded that people who commit the aggravating offense first, triggering the law, behave differently than those who commit the aggravating offense after a series of other crimes.

Iyengar found that the law had a significant deterrent effect, just as intended; criminals were less likely to reoffend after they triggered the law. But those who did reoffend, she found, were motivated to commit more-violent crimes. Criminals eligible for a third strike face the same punishment whether they simply rob a man or rob and kill him. Because the penalty for that third strike is equally severe whether a criminal commits a nonviolent or a violent crime, Iyengar hypothesizes, offenders opt for the latter.

Prosecutors might argue that the law’s deterrent effect more than compensates for the violent crimes it encourages. But even if Californians are happy with the outcome, Nevadans may beg to differ. Iyengar found that criminals with prior convictions are more likely to cross state boundaries before they strike again.

Rent-a-Pet

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Massachusetts state Rep. Paul K. Frost (R-Auburn) owns two dogs—Reese’s and Snickers—and they’re not for rent. Frost is a co-sponsor of An Act Prohibiting the Rental of Pets, now in committee in the state legislature, and he has the support of many members of Boston’s animal welfare community in his fight to render part-time pet ownership illegal.

Frost authored the bill after discovering that Flexpetz, a dog rental service that caters to wealthy professionals, planned to expand to Boston. From its current locations in Los Angeles, San Diego, and New York, Flexpetz adopts dogs from shelters and from families who say they can no longer care for them, and it rents them out for hefty fees.

How much is that doggy in the window? Clients pay $280 a month for the privilege of spending four days a month with the rescued canine of their choice. The service caters to dog-loving urbanites who, for a variety of reasons, cannot take care of a dog full-time, and the dogs are also available for adoption to renters who eventually want to commit.

Company founder Marlena Cervantes wants to bring Flexpetz to D.C. and London as well as Boston, but opponents are galvanizing in the Bay State. “Renting encourages us to think of all pets—rented, adopted or purchased—as ‘things’ we enjoy till they’re no longer cute, fun or convenient, then return, like DVDs or cars,” writes Brian Henderson at the webzine DogBoston. For his part, Frost told the Worcester Telegram that he normally “sides with the free market” but feels this is different. “I know what kind of bond there is with a dog. You don’t rent out members of your family.”

Baby Bust!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Dr. Love is struggling. Oh, the business side of things is going well. There’s the couples cruise, the magazine, the singles nights, the self-authored sex ideology he calls “bio-communication.” And the international media still can’t get enough of him: A few years back, seemingly every wire service in the world had a story on the young gynecologist’s forthcoming “super baby making show,” which would pit 10 couples against one another to see who could conceive first in a public assault on Singapore’s shockingly low fertility rate. As a government-backed baby booster for the island city-state, Wei Siang Yu just wants couples to work less and fornicate more. But try as he might, the good doctor can’t seem to coax Singapore’s child-free twentysomethings into bed.

Ask young women about Dr. Love, and you’ll get derisive giggles. Ask for his allegedly widely available pro-sex DVD at the local entertainment megastore, and the seller won’t have a clue. Ask one of the assistants at his home office whether young lovers actually rent out his bally-hooed procreation pad, which is dominated by a complicated looking “sex swing” and other accoutrements of venturesome lovemaking, and he’ll change the subject.

Dr. Love’s allies in the war on childlessness have fared no better. The Singaporean government’s official matchmaking agency, the SDU—the initials stand for Social Development Unit, but it’s known to snarky islanders as “Single, Desperate, and Ugly”—is situated just off the city-state’s main shopping thoroughfare, and it doesn’t seem nearly as popular as the nearby Emporio Armani.

These days the official slogan of Singapore’s baby-making campaign is “Three or More.” But Singaporeans of childbearing age grew up listening to an altogether different appeal: “Stop at Two.” As in much of East Asia, the tiny island’s population exploded after World War II—by more than 90 percent between 1957 and 1970 alone. In the Age of Aquarius, billboards and posters warned young couples “the more you have, the less they get” and “girl or boy, two is enough.” Parents who agreed to be sterilized after having two children got priority placement for their kids in elementary school.

Since then, demographic conditions have changed radically, but the state has maintained its intense interest in procreation. Singapore’s “total fertility rate,” a crude prediction of how many children a woman will bear in her lifetime if current patterns persist, is among the lowest in the world at 1.07, but the baby bust is not a future the island faces alone. From Hong Kong (0.98) to Italy (1.29) to Russia (1.39) to Canada (1.61), most of the world’s population will soon live in nations where the fertility rate is below the “replacement” level of 2.1. Governments far less authoritarian than Singapore’s are intruding into childbearing choices. After 200 years of exponential population growth, and just four decades after overpopulation doomsaying began filling the bestseller lists, the First World is suddenly gripped with underpopulation hysteria.

And everyone has an explanation for it.

“Europe is facing a demographic disaster,” said quondam Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in his February concession speech. “That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life, and eroded morality.”

The late Pope John Paul II agreed with America’s most famous Mormon, speaking of a “crisis of births.” On the liberal side you can find demographic thinkers such as Phillip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle, and the Australian demographer Peter McDonald, who argue that we’re headed for a dark future unless governments begin bestowing mothers with some serious baby shower gifts.

Books like P.D. James’ 1992 novel The Children of Men (made into a bleak film in 2007) join Mark Steyn’s America Alone in depicting a harsh and violent babyless landscape. Even in the United States, where population growth remains uniquely irrepressible among wealthy nations, ideologically driven concerns about demography have crept into the national conversation. They appear in the 2004 science fiction comedy Idiocracy, in which intelligent women and men, by failing to produce children, have doomed the world to collective mental incapacity by the 26th century (when the U.S. president is a porn star and the most popular TV show is Ow! My Balls!). They appear in the hysterical 2008 documentary Demographic Winter, in which we can watch a lone, naked boy shivering in an empty warehouse.

The developed world is experiencing a wave of pro-natalist sentiment that threatens to bully the childless, tax the single, and reorient states toward the production rather than the protection of citizens. In most developed nations with below-replacement fertility, governments are attempting to align incentives so that women will use their bodies for the purpose of childbirth. In the U.S., right-wing religious groups are calling for a rollback of contraceptive freedom and a return to patriarchal arrangements, all in the name of something called “demographic balance.”

It may sound like a movement of sorts, but it is far from cohesive. Although pro-natalists share an obsession with procreation, they are driven to this anxiety by a host of different fears. As a group, they worry that their countries are admitting too many immigrants, and too few; that we have liberated women too much, and not enough; that welfare states are too strong, and too weak. Pick any divisive social issue—a lack of religiosity, say, or an excess of the same—and you can find someone to draw the connection to demographic decline.

Modern fertility panic stems from a desire to reshape polyglot cultures, to regain control over women’s reproductive choices, and to locate a single, easy-to-understand culprit for disparate social problems. As they have for hundreds of years, societies are projecting their deepest anxieties onto empty wombs.

Bye-Bye Baby
If you’re a woman of childbearing age in a developed country, there’s a good chance your government will pay you to reproduce at the currently desirable rate. Russian women who opt for a second child receive a lump sum of 250,000 rubles ($9,200)—not bad compared to Poland’s going rate of a measly 1,000 zloty ($460) per kid. France and Sweden combine pro-natalist incentives with more traditional social welfare schemes. Fecund couples in Sweden, for instance, receive a combined 13 months of parental leave, 11 of which can be taken by one parent, and during which the government provides 80 percent of a parent’s former income. Parents collect 900 euros ($1,410) per year; bosses then must allow their employees to work part time for prorated pay once they become parents.

In May 2004 the Australian government tried to boost its birthrate of 1.76 by announcing that the parents of children born after July 1, 2004, would receive 3,000 Aussie dollars ($2,800). As Australian economists later noticed, pregnant women due in June did not leave it up to nature whether the maternal stipend would come to them; more babies were born on July 1, 2004, than on any day in the previous 30 years.

Singapore’s SDU offers a free government dating adviser who interviews young singles about themselves and their ideal partners. The adviser chooses a match, and the eligible bachelors watch videos of one another before agreeing to the date. Before the big night, both are offered makeovers, and the SDU gives free lectures on personal grooming. “Personal hygiene doesn’t end with a shower and clean clothes,” reads a helpful dating guide. “For close encounters between the sexes, oral hygiene cannot be ignored.…Extreme halitosis may require medical attention.” The largesse extends well past date night. First and second children bring in baby bonuses of 3,000 Singapore dollars ($2,200) each, while third and fourth children garner 6,000 Singapore dollars ($4,400) each. The government also matches parental investment in special children’s savings accounts, which can be used for day care or other child-related expenses, dollar for dollar.

In Singapore and elsewhere, the shift from baby boom to baby bust effected a remarkable role reversal among those obsessed with procreation. Pro-family conservatives went from reliably urging calm in the face of books like William Paddock’s Famine 1975!, which proposed a system of triage for dealing with inevitable mass starvation; to fanning the flames of birth-rate fear. Allan Carlson, the head of the World Congress of Families and long one of the most virulent opponents of United Nations population control policies, began telling audiences that “the demographic problem facing the twenty-first century is depopulation, not overpopulation.”

Of all the possible American narratives to explain fertility decline, none seems to hold more power than a story of leftist values leading inexorably to extinction. In March the Illinois-based Family First Foundation released a documentary called Demographic Winter: The Decline of the Human Family. As a variety of experts explain our descent into extinction, the producers lay out their hypotheses in bullet points: Divorce, Working Women, Prosperity, The Sexual Revolution, and what’s termed “Ideologies.” Frolicking children fade and disappear into nothingness—a rapture of sorts visited upon us repeatedly throughout the film. Cohabitation, feminism, and pop culture do not fare particularly well. Our economies will fall apart—“Who will man the factories?” asks a tag line, a thought that should keep you up at night only if you suspect producers will die off while consumers live on. The Fall of Rome is invoked, the rise of “the East” mentioned more than once. Kay Hymowitz, a conservative social critic, describes the advent of the “man-child,” more interested in Maxim than procreation, as the film cuts to a man playing his Wii intently, his presumably childless wife looking on gloomily from the side.

Across the Atlantic, the British press is full of self-loathing op-ed pieces about a people too self-absorbed to reproduce. Representative articles include a Sunday Times article headlined “Sorry, baby, but our lifestyles come first” and a Daily Mail piece more directly entitled “Why ARE We Too Selfish to Have Children?”

Are lad mags and the Nintendo corporation responsible for a global decline in birthrates? Broadly, nations that are more developed (and therefore more likely to produce video games and men’s magazines) produce fewer children than less developed nations. But while Demographic Winter uses Europe as the ultimate cautionary tale, Europe’s current demographics largely contradict the idea that more socially conservative societies tend to produce more children.

Religion? It is the most religious European countries, such as Italy, that have the continent’s lowest fertility rates; secular Norway is just under replacement level. Working women? European countries with the highest work force participation rates, such as Sweden and Norway, tend to have higher fertility than those with a comparatively small percentage of women working, such as Greece.

Cohabitation? France, where shacking up is a social norm, has a higher fertility rate than any of its immediate neighbors. Family instability? In a forthcoming book, Demographic Challenges for the 21st Century, the demographer Tomas Sobotka argues that divorce rates in Europe might be positively correlated with birthrates. “Many countries which have advanced furthest in the decline of traditional family and the spread of less conventional and less stable living arrangements,” he writes, “record relatively high fertility when judged by contemporary European standards.” Low levels of economic development coupled with social conservatism may well produce high fertility levels; but in modern Europe, it seems that the combination of a modern economy and social conservatism may produce some of the lowest fertility levels on Earth.

In the first half of the 20th century, demographers generally held that urbanization, industrialization, and education were the chief determinants of fertility decline. Later, neoclassical economists hypothesized that the rate of decline would correlate with the rates of increase in the opportunity cost of women staying out of the work force and in the relative cost of raising children.

The latter theory is useful “as a way to structure thinking,” according to the American Enterprise Institute demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, but, as with nearly every theory of fertility, there is much that it fails to explain. The relative cost of having children is indeed very high in Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States, but these countries have markedly different birth rates. Nor does it explain why the birthrate is lower north of the Canadian border than south of it.

Strangest of all, total fertility rates are dropping most rapidly in predominantly rural countries with low female literacy rates and few work force opportunities. Dramatic drops in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, absent much economic development, have come as a surprise to economists and demographers alike. In 1970, according to the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, Bangladesh’s total fertility rate was 6.4. In 2006 it was 2.9. Zimbabwe’s rate dropped from 7.4 to 3.3 during the same period.

The theory that economic development leads to fertility decline breaks down at the very first demographic data point on record. The first country to enter a sustained fertility decline was not England, the cradle of the industrial revolution. “It was France!” exclaims Eberstadt. “France was rural and poor and was very largely illiterate and, not to put to fine a point on it, it was Catholic. That kind of confutes a lot of things we think are supposed to connect between modernization and fertility change.”

The Baby-Welfare State
The conservative narrative of fertility decline is part of the right’s culture war weaponry, engineered to find praise in the pages of Human Events and criticism in the pages of The Nation. But it’s more nostalgia than political program, a generalized condemnation of progress rather than a plan for the future. After a screening of Demographic Winter at the Heritage Foundation, a socially conservative D.C. think tank, a panel of enthusiastic commentators was asked how to achieve the massive cultural rollback required to stop collective extinction. Judging by the film’s logic, this would involve reversing the sexual revolution, bringing women back into the home, curtailing an ethic of individualism, and ending the welfare state. Most of the panelists had little to say. One piped in with “virtues education.”

Practically speaking, on the policy level, demographic panic is only useful for one purpose: the promotion of social welfare programs many social conservatives would oppose. From France to Poland to Singapore, governments are responding to low fertility with policies social democrats have always favored. Almost any aspect of the welfare state can be construed as encouraging procreation; more to the point, low fertility can be blamed on the lack of any particular social welfare program. A dearth of pregnancies is evidence that protections for workers are too few, social welfare allowances too small, public school days too short, mandated maternity leave too limited. Women want to fulfill their natural roles as mothers, goes the assumption, but dog-eat-dog capitalism stands in the way.

“Evidence reveals that, in most countries, most young people aspire to an enduring intimate relationship and to having children,” wrote Peter McDonald in an influential 2005 paper on fertility policy. “However, faced with the realities of the new social and economic world, many do not achieve these aspirations.” McDonald blames deregulation and “neoliberalism” for an environment hostile to procreation. “States,” he concludes tidily, “must be principal players in restoring the social balance.”

The contention that women aren’t having as many children as they’d like to is rooted in “desired fertility,” or the number of children women say they want as they enter their childbearing years. In Europe, as women increasingly choose to go childless, they continue to tell surveyors that they want two children. That disparity is sometimes deemed “unmet demand”; governments, goes the theory, must assist women in the quest to produce the children they say they want.

When the concept is framed this way, most of us have “unmet demand” for any number of goods—flat-screen televisions, yachts, MacBooks—that taxpayers fail to help us acquire. No one doubts that it is possible to structure incentives such that more women will use their bodies in the way politicians prefer, which is why many liberal arguments for pro-fertility policies are suspiciously self-affirming. Offered millions of dollars per birth, women would indeed go into labor more often. Pregnant women can then be cast as responding rationally to incentives or as “achieving their aspirations” to become a mother. The more relevant question, and the one rarely broached, is whether women who choose not to have children should be forced to subsidize those who do.

There is an alternative explanation for the behavior of young women who declare a desire for two children yet go on to have one or none: Women may be telling pollsters what they think the pollsters want to hear, or simply reciting lines memorized from cultural scripts. “The answers may reflect mere stereotypes,” wrote the demographers Gustavo De Santis and Massimo Livi Bacci in a 2001 study, “and not constitute any reliable guide of people’s true preferences or intentions for the future.” The two-child norm, they add, “generally prevails in our times.” Men and women may continue to idealize the nuclear family—one boy, one girl—well beyond its heyday.

At the moment, small cash handouts do not appear to be doing much to increase birthrates across Europe and Asia. More-sophisticated attempts to reduce the burdens of working mothers, such as subsidized day care or regulations regarding the status of part-time workers, may raise birthrates very slightly, but there is no consensus on whether they are effective. Birthrates rise and fall, and it’s difficult to establish causality even when fertility rates shoot up after a policy goes into effect.

Michael Teitelbaum, a historian of demography, says he knows of only two places where pro-natalist policies have achieved real long-term results. One was communist East Germany, where wages were kept so low that the government could afford to pay baby bonuses that amounted to one-third of what a woman would have made working that year. The other was communist Romania, where dictator Nicolae Ceausescu outlawed contraception and abortion in October 1966 without warning. The resulting spike in birth rates was the largest in recorded history. That worked for about a decade, says Teitelbaum, “until people reconstructed their illegal ways of controlling their fertility.”

Birthrate Pangs
Depopulation panic isn’t new. It’s merely making a comeback after a long, anomalous period of overpopulation panic. Waves of birthrate anxiety swept through France at the beginning of the 19th century and the United States between the world wars. Today’s developed-world worries are in one sense very understandable: No one alive today can remember a time when the global population was not on the rise. Growth has become the norm, and that norm may change in the foreseeable future. “When [growth] goes negative even a tiny amount,” says Teitelbaum, “some people immediately say, well, this is a quantum, dramatic shift in what it means to be a human society.”

Quantum or otherwise, a demographic shift does require adjustment, notably of pension programs that are built on faulty assumptions of endless expansion. Fertility declines alter the basic age structure of a society, much as the baby boom did a half-century ago. Neither gradual declines nor gradual increases in population need be destructive, but the former will require concrete changes in redistribution schemes and a reshuffling of resources.

For those who, with good reason, worry about the solvency of transfer programs in an age of population decline, replacement immigration looks like a partial solution, and therefore xenophobia is part of the problem. But for many if not most of the people preoccupied by fertility rates, immigration is no solution at all. The question isn’t about whether the United States, Singapore, or France will be without people in 2100; it’s about what kind of people will populate those countries: what they will look like, what they will teach in their schools, what God they will bow before. Mark Steyn’s America Alone warns that within a few generations Europe will be a Muslim continent. When Pat Buchanan discusses depopulation in The Death of the West, he does not proceed to suggest we replace children of European descent with Mexican laborers. Pro-natalist policies in Quebec, Singapore, and until recently Israel implicitly target a preferred ethnic group, attempting to fill the future with the demographics desired by the current political class.

Michael Teitelbaum and Jay Winter have another explanation for the current fertility panic. “Such worries seem to crop up at predictable moments,” they wrote in a response to Phillip Longman in the September 2004 Foreign Affairs, arguing that “when a dominant political or economic power begins to feel unsure of its mastery and uncertain about the future, many thinkers turn to demography for an explanation of its plight.”

In times of collective insecurity, empty wombs are cast as either a cause or a symptom of a state supposedly in decline. In their 1985 book The Fear of Population Decline, Teitelbaum and Winter say pro-natalism became a French obsession after Germany invaded France in the late 19th century. Emile Zola’s 1899 novel Fecondite is a 19th-century version of Demographic Winter, no less subtle in its message or gentle in its warning. Zola tells the story of a factory worker named Mathieu Froment and his wife, Marianne, who reproduce at a rate that alarms their individualistic, selfish, and more prosperous neighbors. A bourgeois accountant at the factory equates fertility with poverty. Naturally, his wife dies during a botched abortion. Mathieu’s employer mocks the highly fertile, avoids reproduction, and espouses neo-Malthusianism; his single son becomes a murderer and his wife goes mad and dies. The Angelins, a pair of individualists, decide to put off parenthood; Mme. Angelin dies childless, penniless, and thoroughly disgraced. Through it all, the noble Froments continue to multiply. “At one point,” Teitelbaum and Winter note, “Marianne delivers at the rate of one child every two pages.”

Fear of invasion is a theme running straight through the historical narrative of fertility alarmism. It’s no coincidence that the first great wave of American immigration coincided with a period of heightened maternalist rhetoric. President Theodore Roosevelt was particularly concerned about the “race suicide” of white Protestants. “The severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility,” he said in 1910, shortly after his second term had ended. “The first essential in any civilization is that the man and woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease.”

Periods of anxiety over “race suicide” are rarely good times for women. Protestants who were worried about the rising tide of foreign Catholics passed anti-abortion laws in the 1880s that endured until 1973, when Roe v. Wade limited their scope. Embracing historical continuity with the nativists who came before him, Mark Steyn takes time in America Alone to blame women for aborting the generation that might have stood between us and the coming Islamification of the West. It’s not surprising at all that the single greatest social anxiety of our time has been reduced to crude demographic projections that pin the blame on empty wombs.

Slippery Science
In 1960 Princeton demographers sought to buttress current population theory in one of the most ambitious demographic projects ever. The European Fertility Project, led by Ansley Coale, collected massive amounts of data from city registers and church basements and mapped fertility rates in 600 European provinces.

The problem: No extant theory would hold the disparate results together. “They ran into a lot of brick walls,” says Eberstadt. “This pattern of diffusion of fertility decline didn’t make a lot of sense to labor force specialists or to industrialization specialists. Then some specialist said, ‘Oh! I see what you have there; you have a map of the language families of modern Europe.’” People who spoke the same language, the researchers found, tended to enter fertility decline at around the same time. Women were having fewer children because their friends were having fewer children. It’s a completely fascinating and utterly question-begging conclusion. What domino sets off the cascade of childlessness?

“The problem,” the historian Charles Tilly writes in the introduction to Historical Studies of Changing Fertility, “is that we have too many explanations which are individually plausible in general terms, which contradict each other to some degree, and which fail to fit some significant part of the facts.”

The result is a plethora of explanatory narratives, some with more predictive power than others but none totally satisfying. What’s more, the “ideal fertility rate” itself is a matter of ideological preference. “It’s not obvious to me what the ‘right’ level for birthrates is for any country,” says Eberstadt. “It is obvious to me what the right direction for mortality is. The right direction is down. But fertility is a much more complicated story.” There isn’t even a consensus about the relationship between population growth and economic growth. Theoretically, individual incomes can continue to rise as the population falls.

The answer is likely to be a complex combination of theories we already have—sociological, anthropological, and economic. In the midst of so many plausible causes, it’s tempting to search for a narrative that conforms to previously held convictions or confirms long-held anxieties. The search for a valueless science of demography continues to be conducted in vain, and the very language we use to discuss falling birthrates is loaded with unscientific judgment. Nations are not just depopulating; they are “dying,” “decaying,” even “autogenocidal.” Fertility rates don’t just decline; they “collapse.” Our future is “barren,” a “demographic winter” marked by “sterility” and “senescence.”

Bogus fears about fertility decline don’t preclude justified ones, and current rates of fertility pose real, though not obviously catastrophic, challenges. In a shrinking society that refuses to welcome more immigrants or reform population-dependent social programs, something will have to give. Cash handouts for kids are a far cry from the more coercive pro-natalist policies of Ceausescu and Mussolini, and pro-fertility policies will cease to provoke charges of totalitarianism when they are wrapped into larger social welfare policies. Many changes sold as supportive of working women, such as extending the public school day to conform with work hours, are often defended on their own merits as well.

But as pro-baby policies are inevitably sold as pro-mother, and by extension pro-woman, it’s worth recalling the sentiment behind the Australian birth premiums and Singaporean matchmaking schemes. At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change.

There is a reason we speak of “Mother Russia” and “Mother India.” Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the “boundary markers” of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

In times of great social anxiety, we see new calls for women to return to home and hearth—calls alternately cast as a return to tradition and as a progressive leap forward, but efforts, nonetheless, to enlist women in a national project while defining the boundaries of national inclusion. Depopulation is not a given, but ideologically fraught and scientifically questionable debates about gender, race, and culture will be with us no matter which way the population swings. “To know what demography is, we need to know what a population is,” the French social scientist Herve Le Bras wrote in The Invention of Populations. “That is where the trouble begins.”

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at reason.

'Our Flag Is Hip-Hop'

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Kids' Stuff

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

...

Kidneys for Sale

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

“What can Iran teach us about good governance?” is not a question often posed in Washington. But according to Benjamin Hippen, a transplant nephrologist in North Carolina, the Iranians have managed to do something American policy makers have long thought impossible: They’ve found kidneys for every single citizen in need.

As Hippen explains in a March report for the Cato Institute, the Iranian government has been paying kidney donors since 1988. To avoid potential conflicts of interest, donors and recipients work through an independent organization known as the Dialysis and Transplant Patient Association. Donors approach the association on their own; they cannot be recruited by physicians or referred by brokers with financial incentives. They receive $1,200 and limited health coverage from the government, in addition to direct remuneration from the recipient—or, if the recipient is impoverished, from one of several charitable organizations. The combination of charitable and governmental payments ensures that poor recipients are treated as well as wealthy ones.

Critics of organ markets often claim that where payments are permitted, altruistic donation will drop off. Hippen found this is not the case in Iran. The country’s deceased donor program, started in 2000, has grown steadily alongside paid donation. (Posthumous donations are not remunerated.) During the last eight years, deceased donations have increased tenfold.

Data on the long-term health of Iranian kidney doors is mixed and inconclusive, so Hippen recommends that any U.S. system closely track donors and provide them with lifelong health care. Since many potential kidney recipients are currently surviving on vastly more expensive dialysis treatment (paid for by Medicare), providing donors with long-term health care is probably more cost-effective than the status quo.

American critics continue to lament that Iran failed to adopt the U.S. policy of banning payment for organs in the mid-1980s. “Carrying this reasoning to its conclusion,” writes Hippen, “would entail admitting that in so doing, Iran would have also incurred our current shortage of organs, our waiting list mortality, and our consequent moral complicity in generating a state of affairs that sustains an international market in illegal organ trafficking.” No other country has managed to eliminate its kidney waiting list; the U.S. has a list 73,000 patients long. Who should be advising whom?

Collectivist Genes

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Are bullying, haranguing, collectivists just expressing adaptive evolutionary behavior? A new paper in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B suggests that when societies are hostile to individualism, sexual selection may be to blame.

Jumping off a growing body of research linking cultural traits to disease risk, the study’s lead author, University of New Mexico biologist Corey L. Fincher, hypothesizes that collectivist behaviors evolved to protect populations from illness. Both ethnocentricism, which discourages contact with disease-carrying outsiders, and conformity, which encourages the transmission of risk-averse behaviors, can serve as buffers against disease. Individualism may be adaptive in that it encourages innovation, but safe, wary behavior could prove more important where pathogens are prevalent.

Fincher and his three co-authors compared data on individualist vs. collectivist values across the globe with data on historical and contemporary measures of disease transmission. Controlling for other factors that may cause cultures to become more individualistic, such as income and urbanization, the researchers found that “worldwide variation in pathogen prevalence substantially predicted societal tendencies toward individualism/collectivism.” In other words, societies living in regions where infectious diseases historically have posed the biggest threats were most likely to discourage individualism. Societies most open to contact with outsiders live in regions where such contact poses the least threat of infection.

The correlation doesn’t explain how these behaviors are passed along through generations. Transmission may be cultural, as with methods of food preparation that guard against infection, or heritable, as a selection process weeds out anti-collectivist tendencies. Either way, the effect is likely to weaken as medicine reduces the risk of infection—good news for individualists, or anyone who dares stray from the tribe.

Cyclones and Sanctions

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:00:00 EDT

In the mid 1950s, denizens of Burma, Thailand, and South Korea were about equally wealthy, but one nation seemed especially likely to prosper. In contrast to the others, Burma was already an exporter of rice and oil, had a relatively high literacy rate, and seemed well on its way toward a parliamentary system of government. It was full of teak, gems, and rich soil. As David Steinberg points out in Burma: The State of Myanmar, any observer “would have pointed to Burma as the potential economic and political leader of the three.” War-torn, resource-poor South Korea “would not have been a contender in anyone’s imagination.” In 2006, South Korea’s GNP per capita was $24,500; Burma’s was $1,800.

Look closely enough at the pictures of destruction wrought by Cyclone Nargis, and you begin to realize how very little there was to destroy. There, a bamboo house in shambles; here, a thatch roof torn off; there, a dirt road obscured by scattered palm fronds. When the cyclone struck, tens of thousands of people had no solid structure to cling to, and the cyclone’s ghastly death toll is as much a function of the country’s poverty as is the storm’s strength. Had the same cyclone hit the prosperous Burma that might have been, the death toll would have been far less dramatic.

The South Korea comparison matters because Burmese poverty is so often treated as an inevitability rather than a byproduct of bad governance. The imprisonment of activist Aung San Suu Kyi is well known and roundly denounced; the junta’s punishing monetary policy, which maintains an official exchange rate 200 times lower than the market rate in order to benefit state-owned businesses, is less often noted. Burma’s banking system is barely functional, and the government tightly controls trade. According to the Progressive Policy Institute, Burmese rice exports have dropped by 99 percent since 1950. The junta says it is committed to a market-oriented economy, but it has reversed most of the gestures it has made in that direction.

No one is nominating Than Shwe, Burma's military leader, for Administrator of the Year, and it’s not news that the junta has been the cause of suffering. But Burma’s poverty, and the deaths it causes in the best of monsoon seasons, is at the center of a significant debate about the way the West should approach Myanmar. The most extreme advocates of Burmese sanctions, among them Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), tend to assume that the lives of Burmese people cannot improve without regime change. Economic development is being held hostage to political reform, but there is little reason to expect political reform any time soon.

“I am new to work on Burma, but in my eight weeks of involvement to date I am finding the world of Burma advocacy rigid and doctrinal,” writes Joel Charny, Vice President for Policy at Refugees International, on the organization’s blog. “There is just one overarching narrative: the struggle of the Burmese democracy movement, led by Nobel Peace Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, against the repressive Burmese generals.”

Based on the assumption that Burma must change politically before it can engage economically, American Burma activists support sanctions and isolation, and many are skeptical of independent humanitarian work. “The Burma solidarity adherents often evoke ‘the courageous Burmese people’ to support the aid embargo,” Charny continues. “This is an easy rhetorical device, and may sound plausible, but it is based on discussions with a narrow set of political actors, most of them outside the country.”

On the flip side, development advocates claim that sanctions and aid restrictions have had no discernible benefit for the Burmese, the majority of whom make less than $200 a year. The National League for Democracy is weak and disorganized, and so dependent on Suu Kyi that it seems unable to operate when she is under house arrest. Our refusal to trade with the Burmese has brought democracy no closer to realization.

Sanctions are a sacrifice we make on behalf of other people; we have volunteered the Burmese to undergo painful economic deprivation in the hope that poverty will drive them to a better future. It hasn't worked, whether because Burma's neighbors have rejected the U.S. approach or because the United States never had much economic leverage in the first place. An alternative approach, one that does not assume the Burmese people’s assent in a scheme to impoverish them, involves coaxing the regime toward basic economic reforms that would at least allow Burma’s rice farmers to move out of their bamboo-and-thatch homes in preparation for the next monsoon season.

Cyclone Nargis is no longer just a natural disaster, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared on May 17^th as the junta continued to refuse to allow food and medical supplies to reach victims: “It is being made into a man-made catastrophe.” But Cyclone Nargis was a “man-made catastrophe” the moment the first shoddily built shack was swept out to sea. Burma is poor because it has been made so, and the military has been isolating and impoverishing the country for 45 years now. Why are we helping them?

Kerry Howley is a reason senior editor.

Sin Tax Creep

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:45:00 EDT

Led by the state’s Sierra Club, New Mexico’s “No Child Left Inside” movement aims to provide school kids with a variety of outdoor education programs. Since the fund will need money, environmental groups are looking to taxpayers for support. And since public health programs are increasingly funded through sin taxes, states have gone fishing for a sin.

Instead of piling on the usual culprits, alcohol and tobacco, the coalition wants to impose a 1 percent tax on television sets and video games, agents of vice that presumably leave children inside. (Other politicians want to use such gimmicks to require kids to stay inside. In December a Wisconsin state senator proposed a video game tax to fund a juvenile detention program.)

Supporters of the proposed New Mexico tax say it will raise $4 million, which would go toward busing students to state parks and training teachers to integrate outdoor learning into their lesson plans. The boost in visitor numbers would be conveniently timed for state parks, where attendance has been waning nationwide. Kids are a captive audience during school hours, which means they’re available to boost meager attendance numbers—and park budgets. Prying them from their video games after hours, though, will be a tougher sell.

Data: Arrivals Down, Panic Up

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

A new report from the Immigration Policy Center reminds us that immigrant arrivals have been down since well before the current eruption of nativist sentiment. The annual flow of immigrants to the United States was at its height in 2000. The Census Bureau and Social Security Administration predict it will continue to decline until at least 2015.

According to the study’s author, University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers, “proponents of the negative story of the immigrant future have ignored this recent leveling and decline. Instead, they have averaged data from the last 12 to 14 years and concluded that immigration is continuing at record levels.” Myers notes that the flow to gateway states like California is way down. Immigrants are instead heading straight to places such as Missouri and the Carolinas, where they’re finding jobs and forming small communities.

Walls of Paper

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

“There is a smart way to protect our borders, and there is a dumb way to protect our borders,” Hillary Clinton explained at a February debate in Austin. Obama agreed. The smart way, he added, involves “deploying effective technology.” The “dumb” way, which both Obama and Clinton voted for, involves building a hideous steel barrier on land taken from inconveniently situated Texans.

Thus has advanced our immigration debate since the great failure of comprehensive reform in 2007. Walls are for neanderthals. Civilized people do not try to keep poor, entrepreneurial, much-needed workers out of the country with bricks and mortar; rather, they achieve this through the use of technology. On this, all three prospective presidential candidates agree. Each supports an expanded employment verification program, which would involve a hugely expensive surveillance apparatus and bureaucracy in order to monitor the employment choices of every American and foreign national. What an appalled ACLU calls “a permission slip to work” has come to represent the middle ground, though it’s likely to be far more devastating than any fence.

A bill known as the SAVE Act (Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act of 2007) represents an extreme version of this fantasy, a barrier built of paper and databases rather than mere concrete. The bill’s co-sponsors, Democrat Heath Shuler and Republican Tom Tancredo, are currently attempting to force a vote on the issue by collecting signatures for a discharge petition. If they succeed, they’ll force reluctant legislators into the awkward position of voting on an unworkable bill that seems, at first glance, a reasonable attempt to enforce the law.

Fewer than one percent of American employers currently use the E-verify system, which checks the immigration status of American and foreign workers against imperfect federal databases. By all accounts, the Social Security Administration is struggling under this burden; SAVE would increase the number of users by around 13000 percent (pdf). Every employer would be forced to send information about every potential hire, citizen or otherwise, to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which would send the information on to the Social Security Administration, which would send the information back to USCIS. In cases where either agency finds a discrepancy, USCIS will issue a “temporary non-confirmation” that the worker can in theory contest within eight days. Given the 4.1 percent error rate of the SSA database, millions of legal workers may have to fight for the right to accept a job. According to the agency, 17.8 million of its records contain discrepancies, and most of those pertain to citizens.

Employers are not supposed to act when presented with a “temporary non-confirmation”; they’re supposed to relay information to employees, allow employees to contest the finding, and wait for another response from DHS. But the costs of E-verify are significant even when it functions properly, and waiting around while potential hires wrestle with data snags is even costlier. From the perspective of an employer with a bunch of interchangeable potential hires, it's most efficient to simply run everyone through the system and fail to hire people with problematic records. Pre-employment screening is illegal, but a study commissioned by the DHS last year found that nearly half of participating employers were ignoring at least some mandated worker protections.

While undocumented workers probably contribute more in federal taxes than they consume in federal services, no one doubts that they pose some fiscal burden to border communities where they arrive. Still, you’d have to take an improbably extreme view of these costs to deem the SAVE Act fiscally rational. According to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf), the act would decrease federal revenues by $17.3 billion between 2009 and 2018 as formerly tax-paying workers go underground. The costs of expanding E-verify and a bunch of other goodies stuffed into SAVE (thousands more border agents, a program to recruit former members of the armed forces to join the border patrol, more SUVs and unmanned aerial vehicles, hundreds of full time immigration investigators, expanded immigration detention centers) come to $23.4 billion in discretionary spending during the same period. And that doesn’t touch the cost to individual employers, who are being slapped with a huge regulatory burden in the midst of impending recession.

No presidential candidate has come out in favor of Schuler’s bill, most likely because the bill includes no avenue for undocumented workers who wish to become legal. Herein lies the ambitious stupidity of SAVE: If the bill works as intended, it will instantly turn the population of 12 million undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal into 12 million unemployed undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal. For a political constituency constantly worried about “anarchy,” this does not appear to be an ideal situation.

The SAVE Act may or may not come to a vote this session, but employment verification will almost certainly be a part of future compromise legislation on immigration reform. That's worrying. Walls offend us aesthetically and symbolically; they’re clumsy and primitive and cruel. But they’re also easy to tear down; far easier than a slowly metastasizing system of total employment surveillance, of growing databases and expanding bureaucracies.

In the end, E-verify will not “turn off the tap,” “dry up the pool of jobs,” or “turn off the magnet.” It will simply encourage workers underground, where they will be more vulnerable to abuse and less likely to pay taxes. But SAVE’s supporters may be doing more than they know to slow the flow of willing workers into the United States. Rises and falls in the flow of undocumented immigrants do not track enforcement efforts; they track the state of the U.S. economy. If legislators manage to quicken the onset of recession by reducing the flexibility of American employers, draining billions in tax revenue, and preventing Americans from going to work, they'll get exactly what they've been wishing for.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor of reason.

"Our Flag is Hip Hop"

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

At the beginning of the documentary Planet B-Boy, as several hip-hop veterans offer a breezy history of breakdance, a not-to-be-messed-with French street dancer describes a transformational filmic experience. “Flashdance,” he says, and pauses to hold back tears, “It’s personally emotional for me.” A Japanese b-boy, recalling his first viewing of the film, is reduced to “wow.” An earnest German promoter confirms that the 1983 film, which includes scenes with the breakdance pioneers Rock Steady Crew, had pan-European influence. In bringing an urban American art form to Seoul, Paris, and Capetown, Flashdance planted the seeds of a subculture all over the map. Jennifer Beals, apparently, is an effective conduit for the culture of the South Bronx.

The term b-boy identifies hip-hop-obsessed dancers who have devoted themselves to breakdancing. Today, that word holds currency in a number of languages, and Benson Lee’s Planet B-Boy follows French, Japanese, Korean and American dance crews from their home countries to a global competition in Braunshweig, Germany. Whereas The Freshest Kids, another recent documentary on b-boy culture, located the history and early evolution of breakdancing in the black and Puerto Rican communities of the South Bronx, Lee is less interested in where that culture came from than where it has gone. New York figures only as a dusty museum for the form’s history.

Instead of New York’s Rock Steady Crew, then, we meet Phase-T, a crew from the working class suburb of Chelles, France. The crew includes nine solid French North Africans and one tiny white kid dubbed “Lil’ Kev,” a freakishly talented dancer whom they toss around like a beach ball. Sitting beside her son, Lil’ Kev’s mother explains what she first thought of his new friends in hip-hop: “noir, noir, noir!” As he cringes beneath a cocked baseball cap, she explains that she’s not as racist anymore, and she no longer fears his friends or his chosen life trajectory. But she and her husband would be “very proud” if he decided to be a fireman instead.

Battle of the Year, the competition that grounds the film, forces a post-national phenomenon into a nationalized framework. Preliminary competitions take place at the country level, so each team bears the responsibility of representing its respective country. Phase-T is a team of chiefly African descent that has mastered an American art form to perform under a French flag. As charming a story of globalization as that might be, there is something profoundly incongruous about performing as anti-authoritarian and expressive an art as breakdancing under any flag at all. That tension emerges throughout the film, as b-boys alternately embrace the competitive playbook handed them and struggle under its weight. “We can’t say the phrase ‘French culture’ really represents us,” says one of Phase-T’s dancers. “Our flag is hip-hop.”

Cho Sung Gook knows something about national pride; his disapproving, working class father works as a flag distributor for the Korean government “to help establish our national identity.” And for Cho's crew, Last for One, the burdens of national identity are something like a ticking clock. Each will have to serve Korea’s required two years of military service, and like any athletes at the top of their form, they won’t be able to simply pick up where they left off. “You lose everything you work for when you go to the army,” explains a crew member, “so we have to take it to the extreme before we go.”

The crew feels dismissed and ignored by mainstream Korea, by parents who think they are “cleaning the floor or something” when they’re handspringing through subways. And given their living conditions—six to a room in Seoul—cleaning floors might seem a safer financial strategy than hoping that Korea suddenly starts paying to watch its breakdancers.

Ambivalent as the dancers are, they’re clearly brimming with national pride as they gear up to compete with Japan. When the film was shot, the Koreans were the reigning world champions, a showy Korean crew called Gamblerz having won the year before. The Gamblerz 2005 show may qualify as the oddest performance in the history of hip-hop. The crew splits into two groups and reenacts “the history of Korea” through six minutes of b-boy battling, one side representing the South and one the North. In the end, the sides are reconciled, and the crew springs into the eerily perfect synchrony that only the Koreans seem able to pull off.

Cho's father is deeply worried about his son’s financial prospects as a dancer; an American crew member’s father, by contrast, simply advises him to “rip that shit.” The locus of American breakdancing has shifted to Las Vegas—arguably where natural born showmen belong—and most of the crew is Hispanic. The Americans, too, feel the pull of national pride, and their relationship to national identity is no less complex. They don’t seem to register any dissonance when one of them argues that “we created this thing” and “it’s time to bring it back to the U.S.” Nor should they: That the descendents of Hispanic immigrants from the Southwest are defending the mantle of a culture developed by blacks in the Bronx of the 70s makes a kind of sense.

Like any great, populist dance film, Planet B-Boy ends with a battle. For nearly two decades, unremarkable Braunschweig has been home to the “battle of the year,” where crews from 20 or so nations fling themselves across a stage in tightly choreographed interpretations of American street battle. All share a superhuman athleticism; they’re as comfortable windmilling around on the palms of their hands as on the soles of their feet, jumping backward onto their forearms and springing forward in synchronized slow motion. The French, in the words of one promoter, have an unmatched sensitivity for music and flow. The Japanese dream up the most innovative, conceptually complex show. The Americans have a knack for individualizing their dancers, shaping characters out of movement. The Koreans dominate the competition with a combination of robot-like synchrony and gymnastic prowess. And the founder of the competition, the guy in charge of the logistics? German.

Clearly, Americans no longer own the dance. Some of the most poignant moments of the film come as Korean crew perform in Germany and the camera lingers on the Vegas crew’s faces. Their eyes are tinged with fear, their mouths slightly open. Afterward, one manages to offer a half-hearted pep talk. Their show is just “different,” he explains, “Hopefully the judges don’t just want to see…some amazing shit.”

The judges do want to see some amazing shit, which is why the Korean team "Last for One" emerges victorious. A first place finish at the competition at last gives Cho's crew some commercial viability, and in the film’s last scenes, the crew is shown flipping its way through shows in front of Korean crowds, at the World Cup, and—improbably—in a commercial for Korean tourism.

Planet B-Boy starts out as a film about the postnational flag of hip-hop, but its avatars are too adaptive to let a tidy narrative of global unity win the day. In the end, they manage to stretch the boundaries of old identities, finding room for a bastardized version of an American ghetto art form in the very definition of contemporary Korean culture. It’s surely possible to argue that a once-defiant art form is really and truly dead when it has been vetted by the Korean tourism board. But as one of breakdancing’s pioneers describes hip hop’s early days, “We were naming moves on the spot, making up the rules as we went along.”

When the old moves go stale, new ones emerge. There will be more b-boys, from more cultures, to dream up new rules in post-national street battles to come.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor of reason.

Cigar Bar

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:48:00 EST

In 2003 President George W. Bush ordered the Department of Homeland Security to tighten enforcement of the U.S. embargo against Cuba. Now the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the effort going into policing Cuban cigars might be reducing the security of the homeland.

A November GAO report finds that Miami International Airport personnel are so occupied by seizing “small amounts of Cuban tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical products” that they have little time left to look for “terrorists, criminals, and inadmissible aliens.” While only 3 percent of non-Cuban international arrivals are subjected to secondary inspections at the airport, 20 percent of Cuban arrivals wait in line to be searched again. The eight daily flights from Cuba demand most Homeland Security resources at the airport, one of the busiest in the nation.

Yet the Bush administration keeps demanding tighter controls, worsening the strain on Miami’s airport. In addition to the 2003 order requiring additional inspections, the administration broadened the scope of the embargo in 2004. Permitted family visits were slashed from once every 12 months to once every three years. Americans visiting family in Cuba were required to obtain licenses to travel and were told they could spend only $50 per day. A special license allowing extra family visits in case of humanitarian need was eliminated. A $100 limit on the importation of Cuban products for personal consumption was cut to $0. The new restrictions increased the chances of embargo violations, creating more work for Homeland Security.

It’s not that officials aren’t finding plenty of contraband. In a six-month period between 2006 and 2007, they seized small amounts of tobacco and other Cuban goods on 1,500 occasions—three times the number of non-Cuban seizures. One reason for the widespread noncompliance is what the GAO diplomatically calls “divided public opinion” about the increased restrictions.

But the administration doesn’t seem concerned about objections to its policies. Fifty-five years into the Cuban embargo, it is now exploring ways to further tighten the trade and travel ban.

Huzza for Commerce!

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:10:00 EST

Demon Seed

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In May 2002, in the midst of a severe food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa, the government of Zimbabwe turned away 10,000 tons of corn from the World Food Program (WFP). The WFP then diverted the food to other countries, including Zambia, where 2.5 million people were in need. The Zambian government locked away the corn, banned its distribution, and stopped another shipment on its way to the country. “Simply because my people are hungry,” President Levy Mwanawasa later said, “is no justification to give them poison.”

The corn came from farms in the United States, where most corn produced—and consumed—comes from seeds that have been engineered to resist some pests, and thus qualifies as genetically modified. Throughout the 90s, genetically modified foods were seen as holding promise for the farmers of Africa, so long as multinationals would invest in developing superior African crops rather than extend the technology only to the rich. When Zambia and Zimbabwe turned away food aid, simmering controversy over the crops themselves brimmed over and seeped into almost every African state. Cast as toxic to humans, destructive to the environment, and part of a corporate plot to immiserate the poor, cutting edge farming technology is most feared where it is most needed. As Robert Paarlberg notes in his new book, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa (Harvard University Press), in 2004 the Sudanese government “took time out from its genocidal suppression of a rebellion in Darfur to issue a memorandum requiring that all food aid brought into the country should be certified as free of any GM ingredients.”

Starved for Science includes forwards by both Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug, the architect of Asia’s Green Revolution and the man credited with saving more human lives than anyone else in history. Paarlberg, a Professor of Political Science at Wellesley and a specialist in agricultural policy, wants the West to help small African farmers obtain promising technologies just as it helped Asia discover biological breakthroughs in the 60s and 70s. Instead, he says, a coalition of European governments and African elites are promoting a Western vision of rustic, low-productivity labor.

reason: Was there a particular experience with African farmers that led you to write this book?

Robert Paarlberg: Partly it was the strong impression made on me by my own visits to rural Africa, working with African organizations, working with USAID, working with International Food Policy Research Institute. I started visiting small farms in Africa 15 years ago. I’d seen a lot of poor farmers in Asia and Latin America but absolutely nothing like this. There was simply no uptake of any modern productivity-enhancing technologies at all in some cases. And I wondered why I hadn’t been aware of this. And then, when I saw more and more narrative in the NGO community and the donor community that was frankly hostile to science, I thought “I have to put this down and write a book for younger people in the donor community who may not remember the importance of technology uptake in Asian agriculture 40 years ago.”

reason: You suggest that your understanding of modern ideas about food production arises from interactions with your students. What is it that they want?

Paarlberg: My students know just what kind of food system they want: a food system that isn’t based on industrial scale monoculture. They want instead small farms built around nature imitating polycultures. They don’t want chemical use; they certainly don’t want genetic engineering. They want slow food instead of fast food. They’ve got this image of what would be better than what we have now. And what they probably don’t realize is that Africa is an extreme version of that fantasy. If we were producing our own food that way, 60 percent of us would still be farming and would be earning a dollar a day, and a third of us would be malnourished. I’m trying to find some way to honor the rejection that my students have for some aspects of modern farming, but I don’t want them to fantasize about the exact opposite.

reason: Can you give an example of a genetically modified seed or organism, something in use today?

Paarlberg: Bt crops have been engineered to contain a gene from a naturally occurring soil bacterium that expresses a certain protein that cannot be digested by caterpillars. Mammals can digest the protein with absolutely no problem, but caterpillars cannot. When the caterpillars eat the plant, they die.

What’s wonderful about this is that it’s so precisely targeted at the insects eating the plant. The other insects in the field aren’t affected. Using conventional corn instead of Bt corn, you have to spray the whole field and you end up killing a lot of non-targeted species. With this variety, you don’t have to spray.

reason: That sounds less scary than “Genetically Modified Organism.”

Paarlberg: The book makes the argument that the overregulation of this technology in Europe and the anxieties felt about it in the United States are not so much a reflection of risks, because there aren’t any documented risks from any GM crops on the market. I explain that reaction through the absence of direct benefit. The technology is directly beneficial to only a tiny number of citizens in rich countries—soybean farmers, corn farmers, a few seed companies, patent holders. Consumers don’t get a direct benefit at all, so it doesn’t cost them anything to drive it off the market with regulations. The problem comes when the regulatory systems created in rich countries are then exported to regions like Africa, where two thirds of the people are farmers, and where they would be the direct beneficiaries.

reason: How pervasive are genetically modified foods in the U.S.?

Paarlberg: Roughly 90 percent of the cotton and soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. Fifty or 70 percent of the corn is genetically modified. If you look at the products on a retail store shelf, probably 70 percent of them contain some ingredients from genetically modified crops. Mostly corn or soybeans.

reason: Are there documented safety risks that merit caution?

Paarlberg: There aren’t any. It’s like the first ten years of aviation without a plane crash.

reason: What about environmental risks? Don’t GM crops affect surrounding plantlife?

Paarlberg: The only impacts they have different from conventional crops are beneficial to the environment. They allow you to control weeds and insects with fewer sprayings of toxic chemicals. And they don’t require as many trips through the field with your diesel tractor, so you burn less fossil fuel. And there is more carbon sequestered because you’re not tilling the soil the way you otherwise would.

There are environmental impacts; there is gene flow. The pollen from a genetically modified maize plant will flow into a neighboring field and will fertilize the crops in that neighboring field. Some of the seeds, as a consequence, will contain the transgene, but that’s no different from pollen from a conventional maize plant flowing into the next field. It’s only if you decide arbitrarily to define gene flow from genetically modified crops as “contamination” and flow from all other crops as natural. Only then does it start to become describable as an adverse effect.

The worst environmental damage ever done by American agricultural was the dustbowl of the 1930s, when we plowed up the southern plains to grow wheat, and all the topsoil blew away. The way we increased production back then was to expand crop area, which was environmentally disastrous. It was a calamity. That was the way we tried to increase production before we had high yielding crops, before we had high yielding wheat varieties, before we had hybrid maize, before we learned to increase the productivity of the land already under cultivation.

reason: Can you give us a sense of what an average African farmer in, say, Zambia, is currently working with?

Paarlberg: It would be a woman and her children primarily, and they would plant not a hybrid maize, but a traditional openly pollinated variety, and they would time the preparation of the soil and planting as best they could for when they thought the rains would come. But the rains might not come in time, or they might be too heavy and wash the seeds out of the ground. It’s a risky endeavor. They can’t afford fertilizer, and it’s too risky to use fertilizer because in a drought the maize would shrivel up and the fertilizer would be wasted. They don’t have any irrigation. As a consequence, even in a good year their yields per hectare will be only about one third as high as in Asian countries, 1/10 as high as in the United States.

reason: Just as it used to be in Asia.

Paarlberg: Everywhere!

reason: Right, everywhere. But Asia has moved on in recent memory. The Green Revolution introduced new biological breakthroughs to Asian agriculture to the point where no one today thinks of South Korea as a rural backwater. Why was Africa not a part of this?

Paarlberg: One reason is that Africa is not easily irrigated. The big irrigated crops like rice aren’t to be found in Africa and the big investments in the Green Revolution went into improving Asian crops like rice. The crops Africans grow weren’t the crops that were being improved during the green revolution.

But I don’t blame it all on the Asia-focus of the original green revolution; we have had plenty of time to invest in scientific research for Africa’s crops, and to make investments in rural public goods like roads or power to make it affordable for African farmers to purchase fertilizer. But African governments have not done that job. In my book I show that typically African governments will spend less than 5 percent of their budget on agriculture even though that’s where two thirds of their citizens work. And if you don’t have larger public sector investments than that, there is just not going to be any uptake in the countryside. But then I go around and show that you can’t blame African governments, entirely, because prosperous donor countries are no longer supporting agriculture in Africa.

reason: No African government other than South Africa’s has made it legal to plant GMOs. You call this “out of character” for the same governments.

Paarlberg: They have not yet enacted the law, set up the biosafety committee, and granted approval, which is the laborious process that [the United Nations Environmental Program] and the European governments have coached them into adopting.

It’s interesting. In no other area are governments in Africa particularly concerned about hypothetical environmental risks. They know better than to invoke the precautionary principle when it comes to unsafe food in open air markets. They know that they need to first get rid of actual food shortages and raise income; then and only then can they afford to impose the same extremely high standards of food safety on open air markets that are imposed on supermarkets in Europe. Yet curiously when it comes to GMOs they adopt the highly precautionary European standard, which makes it impossible to put these products on the market at all. I take that as evidence that this is not an authentic African response, it’s a response imported from Europe.

reason: So the romanticization of bucolic farm landscapes unmarred by scientific advance has an American and European pedigree.

Paarlberg: It’s not what we do at home—only two percent of agricultural products in the US are organically grown. And many of those that are organically grown are grown on industrial scale organic farms in California that don’t bear any resemblance to small bucolic farms. But it’s the image we promote in our new cultural narrative. It’s something that affects the way we give foreign assistance.

reason: Many of the anti-agricultural science gurus you mention in your book have a spiritual dimension. Can you talk a bit about Sylvester Graham?

Paarlberg: Sylvester Graham, the father of the modern graham cracker, was opposed to the modern flour milling industry. He didn’t like the industrialization of bread production, and he wanted women to go back to grinding flour. He was a religious man, a minister, and he had all of the narrow minded prejudices we might associate with a New England clergyman from the 19^th century. He thought that women should stay in the home, he believed people should be vegetarians because that would keep their sexual appetite back. We sometimes forget what goes along with the food purist zealotry. It’s often zealotry about more than just a certain kind of food to eat.

In Zambia today there are expatriate Jesuits from the United States who have come to believe genetic engineering is against God’s teaching, though this is not a belief that is embraced by the Vatican. They believe that all living things, including plants, have a right not to have their genetic makeup modified. Of course we have been modifying the genetic makeup of plants ever since we domesticated them 10,000 years ago, but these particular fathers are focused only on genetic engineering.

reason: Isn’t it paternalistic to blame Europeans for the decisions of African governments? Is this something African elites are at least as complicit in?

Paarlberg: It’s a codependency. The African elites depend upon Europe for financial assistance, they depend upon European export markets, they depend on NGOs for technical assistance, it’s just easier for them to follow the European lead than to go against that lead. And to some extent the European governments depend upon having dependents in Africa that will, despite the difficult experience of colonization, continue to imitate and validate and honor European culture and taste.

reason: What exactly have European NGOs done to discourage productivity in farming? You quote Doug Parr, a chemist at Greenpeace, arguing that the de facto organic status of farms in Africa is an opportunity to lock in organic farming, since African farmers have yet to advance beyond that.

Paarlberg: Some of it is well intentioned. The organic farming movement believes this is an appropriate corrective to the chemical intensive farming that they see in Europe. In Europe, where prosperous consumers are willing to pay a premium for organic products, it sometimes makes sense to use a more costly production process. So they think, “Well it’s the wave of the future here in Europe, so it should be the future in Africa as well.”

So they tell Africans who don’t use enough fertilizer that instead of using more they should go to zero and certify themselves as organic. That’s probably the most damaging influence — discouraging Africans from using enough fertilizer to restore the nutrients they mine out of their soil. They classify African farmers as either certified organic, or de facto organic. Indeed, many are de facto organic. And their goal is not to increase the productivity of the organic farmers, but to certify them as organic.

I just find that to be lacking in moral clarity.

reason: But there are functioning organic farms. If I decide to buy only organic food from Africa, what will I be buying?

Paarlberg: It wouldn’t be grown by small fair-trade-type poor farmers. It would be grown through a vertically integrated, probably European, company that would bring in the machinery, bring in the seeds, bring in the fertilizers, set up a production system that would more nearly resemble a colonial-era plantation than a small independent African farm.

reason: We’ve seen similar resistance to GMOs in India and Brazil, both of which now have legalized the use of genetically modified crops. What happened?

Paarlberg: Farmers were planting them illicitly before the final approval—that’s one reason they were forced into the approval. The technology worked so well that farmers were planting them on their own and you couldn’t criminalize all Brazilian soybean growers so you had to approve them. Similarly in India, Bt cotton spread on its own and performed so well that the government was eventually shamed into approving it.

reason: You aren’t just calling for people to get out of the way. You want increased aid for agricultural research. But why would any of this require aid? If it’s going to prove profitable, shouldn’t the incentive for private investment be there?

Paarlberg: The farmers who need the technology in Africa don’t have enough purchasing power to be of interest to private companies. Or they’re growing crops that aren’t a part of a commercial seed market that would interest private seed companies. The only way to reach them, really, is to consider the crops that they grow, for example tropical white maize or cassava. It’s a little bit like the orphan disease problem. It’s really something that has to be done as a public good by the public sector.

That’s how the green revolution proceeded in India in the 1960s. It was a wonderful success, and it wasn’t really driven by the private sector. It was driven by philanthropic foundations and public investment. Also you need not just seed improvement, but more rural farm-to-market roads, electrification, and things that really governments and only governments are incentivized and capable of doing.

There was a time, before scare stories about technology spread, when the concern was a much more legitimate one: that we’ve handed this technology over to private companies to develop, and they won’t have any incentive to get it to Africa. And to some extent that’s still a legitimate concern. There was never any fear that Brazilian farmers or Canadian farmers wouldn’t be able to get the technology, because they’re big commercial growers. The concern was originally that Africans would want the technology but wouldn’t be able to get it because they didn’t have the purchasing power or the investment climate that could attract private companies.

reason: The book is 200 pages of frustration. Are there any glimmers of hope ahead?

Paarlberg: Just last week in Nairobi the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that they would be going forward with the drought-tolerant maize project that I describe in chapter 5 of my book. I’m very pleased that the Gates Foundation has seen the opportunity that this new technology provides. It would be too bad if drought tolerant corn were being grown in Iowa in 2010 and not available to the farmer who really needed it in Africa.

Drought in Africa pushes small farmers back into poverty whenever it strikes. They have to sell off all their household possessions to buy the food their families need until the next season. It blocks the escape from poverty that they might otherwise achieve. Anything that puts a safety net under crop yields is going to protect small African farmers from that periodic decapitalization and let them start accumulating assets for a change.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at reason.

The Great Healthcare Robbery

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EST

Is Ephraim Dagadu stolen goods? The Ghana-born and trained physician, who runs a successful family practice in Maryland, does not speak like a man who has been ripped from his rightful home and forced to toil in the Baltimore suburbs. His visage appears on no milk cartons; no cross-continental Amber Alert calls for his return. But according to a recent piece [registration required] in a prominent British medical journal, a caring U.S. would have done more to keep Dagadu from encountering opportunity abroad. He, goes the argument, belongs to Ghana.

Read the entire article at the Los Angeles Times.

Vuitton Values

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:19:00 EST

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, by Dana Thomas, New York: Penguin Press, 373 pages, $27.95

In September 2005, following the worst natural disaster in American history, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) began distributing $2,000 debit cards to Hurricane Katrina’s neediest victims. The cards carried a note saying they were not to be used for alcohol, tobacco, or firearms. But the cards said nothing about $800 monogrammed handbags.

“We’ve seen three of the cards,” an employee of a Louis Vuitton store near Atlanta, Georgia, told the New York Daily News soon after the cards were issued. “This has been since Saturday.”

Opinion pages and blogs tore into the Vuitton fans like outlet shoppers at a bargain bin. The Daily News called them “profiteering ghouls,” and the syndicated columnist La Shawn Barber dubbed them “on-the-taxpayer-dime drunks.” Apparently, some things were OK to buy with the recovery money, such as bottled water and TV dinners. And some things were not OK, such as purses priced at 13 times production cost.

Clearly these women had an elastic definition of need, one that arguably abused the public’s generosity. But the bag ladies of Katrina should take heart; these days it’s tough for anyone to be a virtuous consumer. Among the excesses of our age is a plus-sized literature on the vast wasteland of human consumption, of full closets and empty souls. Titles such as Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need, and Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic point to an insatiable market for books that berate us for buying them.

To her great credit, Newsweek fashion writer Dana Thomas is not at all interested in inoculating her readers against the all-consuming epidemics that plague our shopping malls and threaten our children. In Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, Thomas takes it as given that the purchase of a hand-stitched crocodile leather Hermès Birkin bag is an experience ennobling to buyer and seller, a triumph of taste over vulgarity and artistry over philistinism. Thomas never once speaks of a mythical, pre-consumerist past of communitarian solidarity and material equality.

Instead, she has penned her own mythical history of consumerism, a history that emphasizes a purer, more elegant experience of material consumption. Thomas pines for the day when luxury was “simply about creating the finest things that money can buy,” when there was a place for “humble artisans who created the most beautiful wares imaginable.” Thierry Hermès started as a lowly harness maker with a shop in Paris, Louis Vuitton as the son of farmers who scored an apprenticeship with a Parisian trunk maker. By the late 19th century, both were master craftsmen who served the French aristocracy.

By Thomas’ account, some time in the 1980s, a decade she describes with all the nuance of a chainsaw-wielding Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, our humble artisans were replaced with bloodthirsty capitalists ripped from the pages of a Naomi Klein polemic. Fashion tycoons, Thomas reports, “hyped their brands mercilessly,” adopting “the luxury equivalent of the American military’s ‘shock and awe’ approach to war.…Luxury was no longer about creating the finest things money could buy. It was about making money, a lot of money.”

Strip this narrative of its self-sacrificing royal artisans and cigar-smoking fat cats, and it’s not implausible; something surely was lost as luxury went corporate in the late 1980s. The heirs of artisans who had dressed the French royal court started opening stores in airports. The House of Gucci, which began as a small saddlery shop in Florence, started selling its leftovers in suburban outlet malls; you could now buy last year’s It Bag on your way to Pretzel Time. Fashion houses licensed their names to lesser designers, an idea they’d gotten from, of all places, the Disney Corporation.

But for a reporter who covers the economics of fashion, Thomas seems surprisingly unacquainted with the concept of a tradeoff. Just as surely as something was lost when Gucci started stamping its name on cheap T-shirts, something was gained when the men and women working the sales counters could buy into the brands they were selling. The story of the last 30 years in fashion is one of democratization and proliferation, of a middle class and an elite becoming increasingly indistinguishable.

Undeniably, it’s also a story of filthy rich men getting richer. French businessman Bernard Arnault is fashion’s most famous guru and, to some, an embodiment of all that has gone terribly wrong with high fashion. Arnault was a rapacious real estate mogul living in America who one day, Thomas writes, “called his counsel Pierre Gode and instructed him to find a company to buy.” Gode pointed to Christian Dior, then part of a larger textile empire known as Agache-Willot.

Arnault had no roots in fashion. The way Thomas tells it, he could hardly dress himself. He spent $80 million on Agache-Willot and fired 8,000 workers. “Until the 1980s,” writes Thomas, “business in France was a gentleman’s game, governed by scruples and politesse.” Arnault “was a new breed of French executive, the sort whose goal was to succeed at any cost.”

Today Bernard Arnault is the seventh richest man on Earth. He has amassed the world’s largest luxury goods conglomerate, Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton S.A., known as LVMH. Arnault has collected brands like his customers collect handbags: LVMH now owns Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, Fendi, Marc Jacobs, and dozens of other names.

This monster of a company heralded a transition in the way luxury was bought and sold. Just as middle- class consumers reached up toward aspirational brands in the ’80s, the same brands were reaching down to meet them. Fashion houses refocused on smaller items accessible to middle-class consumers, such as handbags, wallets, and key chains. In the golden age of couture, clothes were the be-all and end-all. Today Parisian fashion shows sporting Louis Vuitton couture simply reinforce the brand that sells bags, wallets, and perfumes to lawyers and investment bankers. Clothing accounts for a mere 5 percent of Vuitton’s sales.

Nowhere is this blurring of class lines more evident than in Las Vegas, where luxury retailing meets everyman in some of the most profitable retail space in the world. “In New York I feel so uncomfortable walking in a store, like I don’t belong there,” a Vegas tourist tells Thomas. “Las Vegas is much more relaxed, casual.” There’s a reason for that, as a retailer later explains: “You cannot be judgmental in Las Vegas. The person in the cutoffs and a holey T-shirt can open up a money belt and pull out $100,000 in cash.”

Seen one way, the converging consumer experiences of the rich and middle class are a signature triumph of a thriving market economy. “The capitalist achievement,” Joseph Schumpeter wrote in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, “does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens, but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.” But for Thomas and a number of designers she quotes throughout Deluxe, something is seriously wrong when a half-dressed tourist pulls a wad of money from a fanny pack and buys into the cherished heritage of Thierry Hermès. “In order to make luxury ‘accessible,’ ” argues Thomas, “tycoons have stripped away all that has made it special.”

It’s not just the denigration of what economists call positional value (that is, how the items you buy signal status) that worries Thomas, but what she argues is a decline in objective quality. Bags and wallets are mass produced, sometimes sloppily. Dresses are less durable and less likely to be lined. Well-known European designers have licensed their names liberally and outsourced production to China. Thomas takes us into these bag-making ateliers with all the sobriety of Upton Sinclair in a slaughterhouse, but here the cows are long dead. The cruelty is inflicted upon the fine leather, which deserves better than to be machine-stitched in a Guangdong factory.

And yet people continue to pay more, in ever greater numbers, for the goods Thomas says are worth less and less. The luxury bug hasn’t just spread down the class hierarchy; it also has spread over the map. Paris’ best customers are now the Japanese and by a long shot. Deluxe informs us that the Japanese buy half of all luxury goods and that 40 percent of Japanese people own at least one Louis Vuitton product. “Their impact on the business is immeasurable,” writes Thomas. “Their travel habits dictate where brands expand, and their exigencies affect how stores are run.”

Actually, it’s not quite clear whether Japanese travel habits dictate where brands go or luxury megastores dictate where Japanese people travel. About 1.5 million of Hawaii’s 7 million annual tourists are Japanese, and no one thinks they’re there for the beaches. Since the mid-1980s, the Hawaiian neighborhood* of Waikiki has slowly morphed into one immensely profitable mall for Japanese travelers; at the famous Duty Free Store on Kalakaua Avenue, known as DFS, much of the signage isn’t translated into English. Chanel was the first luxury brand to figure out there was money to be made selling to the Japanese on American soil, and today most of its sales in Hawaii are to Japanese customers.

When polled, Japanese say they prize luxury goods for their “durability,” a curious response given the ease with which one could find a wallet of the same or better quality as a Louis Vuitton billfold for significantly less. Japanese consumers probably prefer the LV-stamped version for the same reason everyone does—status signaling—but they voice this preference in an unusually conformist and superficially classless culture. In a milieu not always kind to individualist expression, luxury brands are a socially acceptable mode of signaling. “By wearing and carrying luxury goods covered with logos,” says Thomas, “the Japanese are able to identify themselves in socioeconomic terms as well as conform to social mores. It’s as if they are branding themselves.”

This self-branding may be most evident among the luxury-soaked Japanese, but the impulse is universal. As Tom Wolfe documented in his 1976 essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” a society whose material needs are met is one that turns its focus to individuation. Luxury goods, while accessible to greater numbers of people, still signal heightened status, elevated taste, and mastery of a system of tacit rules that govern consumer choices. They allow consumers to buy into idealized identities. Thomas is right that the role of luxury is changing as conglomerates focus more on branding and less on quality, but she is far too hasty to assume that this shift amounts to a loss for consumers.

Arnault, probably more than anyone in the business before him, actually understood what he was selling. Buying into a dream has always been part of high fashion’s allure, but never has storytelling been so central and quality so peripheral to the business. As Francois-Henri Pinault, the CEO of the conglomerate that owns Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, and Balenciago, tells Nancy Hass in the September Portfolio, “People have to realize that what we are selling is an experience, from beginning to end.”

Pinault should know. Gucci was failing and floundering in the ’80s before Pinault’s father, then CEO, picked up designer Tom Ford and rescued the brand. Ford was a sexually charged high-society type who could craft a persona as well as a line of clothing. He wasn’t just Gucci’s designer; he was Gucci, period. He gave interviews and wormed his way into gossip columns. “Soon,” Thomas writes, “Ford and Gucci became synonymous for a hedonistic lifestyle.” And that sold handbags.

The success of luxury conglomerates like LVMH depends partly on their ability to keep their many brands distinct, their story lines intact. To buy Prada is to buy into a vision of sleek urban sophistication; to buy Versace is to buy into a vision of sexual liberation. Whatever you are buying, it is not a piece of leather. “It is not meaningless,” the University of Florida advertising expert Jim Twitchell writes of luxury in his 2002 book Living It Up. “If anything it’s too meaningful.”

The luxury industry, says Thomas, “has sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history, and hoodwinked its consumers.” Perhaps. But it seems that what Arnault and others have done is to sell something that unprecedented numbers of people very much want to buy. The Elle and W ads are, as always, ethereal and suggestive. They offer to take aspirational consumers to a place they’ve never been, a place where they perhaps feel they don’t belong. The ads might well intimidate the very people they’re supposed to attract, were it not for ego-stoking media outlets that at once elevate fashion’s gods and pull them back to earth.

Fashion is more celebrity driven than it used to be, and the editors at US Weekly never tire of revealing how celebrities are “just like us.” Pictures of Renee Zellweger taking out the garbage are as important as pictures of her on the red carpet. You can pull off a Carolina Herrera dress too, or at least a wallet. You both do chores. You’re practically twins.

It’s not only actresses who are newly human. We now know that models are just like us, thanks to Tyra Banks’ America’s Next Top Model, and designers are just like us, thanks to Heidi Klum’s Project Runway. It’s all a bit much, and it smacks of some kind of coming luxury apocalypse, as Thomas senses. There must be an end to all of this celebrity/schlub intimacy; luxury goods, after all, are supposed to signal status and distinguish their owners from the hoi polloi in some particular, definitive way. At some point, the brands will lose their mojo, as famously happened to Burberry the moment Britain’s working class “chavs” decided the brand was part of their identity. Zaftig belly-baring mothers on the dole carrying a baby in one arm and dangling a Burberry purse in the other did little for the brand’s image, and by 2004 the association between delinquency and Burberry was so complete that clubs across the country starting turning away customers sporting the signature plaid. Democratization is a dangerous game, and the executive who misjudges the balance between accessibility and positional value can destroy a brand’s cachet in a single season.

But it’s a risk worth taking. Luxury moguls have built fortunes tapping into something deeper than the desire for well-crafted textiles. To follow fashion is to watch billionaire businessmen like Bernard Arnault tremble before the spasmodic whims of 27-year-old urban women, who are in turn jockeying with one another, throwing out signals like crazed fireflies, waiting for another designer to present another story they can manipulate.

With material like this, Dana Thomas could have told a profound psychological drama about consumer identity in a time of great demand. Instead she has written a bizarre conspiracy story about capitalist tycoons shattering an elite’s claim on haute couture. Deluxe has much to say about what goes on behind closed doors in Paris and Milan, at the factories of Guangdong and the retailers in Las Vegas. But high-end trivia doesn’t explain the psychology of consumers, who seem to need the stories and aspirations LVMH is selling far more than the well-crafted objects for which Thomas longs. Deluxe is a fascinating read, but it doesn’t begin to explain why a woman who has lost everything would spend $800 on a bag.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at Reason.

*This article originally identified Waikiki as an island rather than a neighborhood in Honolulu. We regret the error.

Artifact: The World Needs Citations

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Wikipedia’s detractors criticize the online, user-written, constantly changing encyclopedia’s sometimes dubious sourcing, which they say makes it unreliable. Wikipedia’s defenders counter that the site’s mutable, fluid nature engenders a valuable skepticism toward all manner of too-trusted authorities. Nothing conveys Wikipedia’s openness to revision quite like “[citation needed],” the bracketed phrase sprinkled throughout its pixellated scrolls.

Now some sourcing enthusiasts have liberated the “[citation needed]” tag from its cyber origins. Blogger Matt Mechtley began by printing up 250 stickers and handing them out to friends. Irked, perhaps, by the lack of fact-checking rigor on billboards and bathroom stalls, they have splashed the stickers across advertisements and noncommercial public pronouncements. “In true wiki fashion,” Mechtley writes, “the final placement of the stickers is a collaborative effort, now distributed and anonymous.”

The caveat lector guerrilla campaign is chronicled online, where the dubious claims of cell phone marketers and placard-wielding politicians are treated with equal suspicion. You can check this article’s sourcing, and print up some citation-hungry stickers for yourself, at Mechtley’s blog, biphenyl.org.

We're British

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:02:00 EST

In 1990 the Tory politician Norman Tebbit proposed the “cricket test” as a way of discerning the loyalty of British immigrants and their progeny. Loyal Brits, he suggested, would root for the home team.

Alan Manning and Sanchari Roy, two economists from the London School of Economics, recently came up with another, rather novel way of determining how closely immigrants identify with British society: They listened to what immigrants said when asked.

Using data from the Labor Force Survey, a quarterly sample survey of households in Great Britain, Manning and Roy found that groups often considered resistant to integration were in fact more likely to identify as British than were other immigrants. In response to the question, “What do you consider your national identity to be?,” foreign-born Pakistanis and Bangladeshis were more likely to claim a British identity than their counterparts from Canada, Western Europe, and Japan. The immigrants most eager to refuse the British label were Irish Catholics.

Religion had a small effect overall, but the results again defied stereotypes. “Muslims are more likely than any other religious group,” Manning and Roy write, “to think of themselves as British.” With religion, as with nation of origin, all differences in the responses disappear by the third generation.

The authors suggest that immigrants who experience a greater culture clash, such as those from poor nondemocratic countries, have the most incentive to become British. “The data on national identity,” they write, “do not support alarmism about the effects of immigration in general or Muslims in particular on national identity.”

Soundbite: Myths of Sexual Slavery

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:20:00 EST

The U.S. State Department has long claimed that between 600,000 and 800,000 women are trafficked worldwide every year. But in a 2006 report, the Government Accountability Office concluded that estimate was riddled with “methodological weaknesses, gaps in data, and numerical discrepancies,” and had been “developed by one person who did not document all of his work.”

The State Department also has proclaimed that there are 50,000 trafficked women in the U.S. Yet despite a $150 million search effort and 42 Justice Department task forces, the government has located nowhere near that number. Anonymous sources told The Washington Post the widely cited numbers came from a single CIA analyst who relied mainly on clippings from foreign newspapers.

In Sex at the Margins (Zed Books), the independent sociologist Laura María Agustín asks why we are so eager to believe wildly exaggerated reports of a serious but limited problem, and so eager to cast young female migrants as helpless, vulnerable, and sexualized. Contrasting the ways immigrants describe their experiences with the ways aid workers and theorists describe them, Agustín presents the radical idea that poor women who migrate are autonomous, rational beings with motivations as complex as any wealthy tourist’s.

Senior Editor Kerry Howley spoke with Agustín in December.

Q: What are we missing when we assume all migrants are simply desperate?

A: It’s not the most desperate, like famine sufferers, who manage to undertake a migration. In order to go abroad you have to be healthy and you have to have social capital, including a network that will get you information on how to travel and work. You need some money and some names and addresses; you have to have at least some official papers, even if they’re false.
People may feel under the gun, but people who end up leaving home to work abroad have mixed motives. They are normal human beings who have desires and fantasies.

Q: How are worries about migration related to the idea that women shouldn’t be leaving home in the first place?

A: Women are sometimes called “boundary markers.” When states feel threatened, women’s bodies become symbols of home and the nation. This is a common sexist idea in patriarchal societies. The idea that women are domestic and symbolize home and hearth—but also that they should stay home and be home—is deeply entrenched all over the world. And while richer countries might favor gender equity for their own women, they often “domesticate” women from poorer contexts.

Q: What do you make of the claim that 800,000 people are trafficked each year?

A: Numbers like this are fabricated by defining trafficking in an extremely broad way to take in enormous numbers of people. The [Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons] is using the widest possible definition, which assumes that any woman who sells sex could not really want to and, if she crossed a national border, she was forced.

Q: Are anti–human trafficking activists preventing the liberalization of prostitution laws?

A: Probably. But I don’t think the obsession with trafficking is solely about women and sex. It has become a cultural phenomenon up in the stratosphere with fears of terrorism. Governments are making it an issue of policing the borders, and I believe they are less concerned about women “victims” than male “perpetrators.” It’s the same as the terrorism story, the idea that bad guys don’t respect states and will set up their own societies, go where they want, and disobey all laws. The borders will not hold; the Martians are invading. Everything is falling apart.

Q: What policies would you recommend to people concerned about genuinely coercive situations?

A: I’m trying to get people to slow down on the rush to determine a definitive policy. The diversity of experience is enormous. There isn’t going to be a single social policy that will work for everyone.