German Joys

Fewer Unions, Falling Wages, Rising Inequality

I was kindly invited to give a speech at the annual conference of the German American Lawyers' Association in Freiburg. I agreed, since Freiburg is a delightful place, the annual wine festival's happening at that time, and I can probably get some study time in at the Max Planck Institute for Criminal Law. The downside? I have to talk about collective bargaining. That's the theme of the conference, and although I repeatedly told the very nice lady that wasn't really my field, she was extremely persistent.

So now I'm boning up on collective bargaining. Which turns out to be a fascinating, if depressing story. The modern era of collective bargaining in the U.S. started with the National Labor Relations Act, which was supposed to set up a fair and equitable means of managing labor disputes. However, especially since the 1970s, changes in the American workplace and a concerted anti-union effort by conservative politicians and judges have effectively deprived American workers of the right to strike (for the long version of this argument see this article on how American workers have lost the right to strike).

Here are a few charts that basically tell the story. First, union membership rates:

As the article from which this was taken puts it:

In 2012, the rate of union membership in the public sector fell by more than a full percentage point, from 37 to 35.9 percent of workers, while in the private sector it dropped from 6.9 to 6.6 percent. The combined rate of American workers now belonging to a union stands at 11.3 percent, down from 11.8 the previous year and the lowest figure ever since the bureau started collecting the data in 1983, when the rate was 20.1 percent.

Strikes have also become practically non-existent:

Since the 1970s, wages and compensation for lower-middle and working class people have stagnated or dropped (the lines represent percentile rankings of the population):

Men are making less in real terms than they did in 1970, and many have therefore dropped out of the labor force entirely:

 ...and increases in productivity have increased corporate profits and the income of the top 1%, rather than funding a broad, prosperous middle-class:

How Germany will Handle the Rise of the Robots

Kevin Drum has an insightful piece predicting that artifical intelligence will be here before you think and will radically change the economy:

We've moved from computers with a trillionth of the power of a human brain to computers with a billionth of the power. Then a millionth. And now a thousandth. Along the way, computers progressed from ballistics to accounting to word processing to speech recognition, and none of that really seemed like progress toward artificial intelligence. That's because even a thousandth of the power of a human brain is—let's be honest—a bit of a joke. Sure, it's a billion times more than the first computer had, but it's still not much more than the computing power of a hamster.

This is why, even with the IT industry barreling forward relentlessly, it has never seemed like we were making any real progress on the AI front. But there's another reason as well: Every time computers break some new barrier, we decide—or maybe just finally get it through our thick skulls—that we set the bar too low. At one point, for example, we thought that playing chess at a high level would be a mark of human-level intelligence. Then, in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat world champion Garry Kasparov, and suddenly we decided that playing grandmaster-level chess didn't imply high intelligence after all.

So maybe translating human languages would be a fair test? Google Translate does a passable job of that these days. Recognizing human voices and responding appropriately? Siri mostly does that, and better systems are on the near horizon. Understanding the world well enough to win a round of Jeopardy! against human competition? A few years ago IBM's Watson supercomputer beat the two best human Jeopardy! champions of all time. Driving a car? Google has already logged more than 300,000 miles in its driverless cars, and in another decade they may be commercially available.

... True artificial intelligence will very likely be here within a couple of decades. Making it small, cheap, and ubiquitous might take a decade more.

In other words, by about 2040 our robot paradise awaits.

...This isn't something that will happen overnight. It will happen slowly, as machines grow increasingly capable. We've already seen it in factories, where robots do work that used to be done by semiskilled assembly line workers. In a decade, driverless cars will start to put taxi hacks and truck drivers out of a job. And while it's easy to believe that some jobs can never be done by machines—do the elderly really want to be tended by robots?—that may not be true. Nearly 50 years ago, when MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created a therapy simulation program named Eliza, he was astonished to discover just how addictive it was. Even though Eliza was almost laughably crude, it was endlessly patient and seemed interested in your problems. People liked talking to Eliza.

...Increasingly, then, robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.

This is a grim prediction. But it's not nearly as far-fetched as it sounds. Economist Paul Krugman recently remarked that our long-standing belief in skills and education as the keys to financial success may well be outdated. In a blog post titled "Rise of the Robots," he reviewed some recent economic data and predicted that we're entering an era where the prime cause of income inequality will be something else entirely: capital vs. labor.

So, by 2040, we will have robots intelligent enough to perform hundreds of tasks that used to be performed by humans. Let me put on my heavy, black-framed armchair-sociologist glasses and predict how these developments will be received in Germany [snark]:

• 2035: A spate of articles on American robots will all emerge at the same time in German mainstream publications with titles such as: 'A Terrifying Experiment in the "Land of Opportunity"', 'Alienation in the Post-Human Age: As American as Apple Pie', 'Turbocapitalism and the Terminator', and 'Racial Injustice, Robocop-Style'.
• 2037: Germany's leading philosopher, Hans-Jürgen Quasselkasper, pens a 35,000-word essay in Die Zeit in which he denounces the introduction of robots as an 'assault on human dignity, the very fundamental value of our Constitutional order' and calls for strict limits on robot labor. It is hailed as a 'bold intervention' by all broadsheet newspapers, and is read in its entirety by 563 people. Pope Kevin II issues an encyclical denouncing the spread of robot labor. The Evangelical Church of Germany issues a statement setting out its 'profound concern' about robots.
• 2041: German politicians from across the political spectrum, but especially the Greens, call for strict legislation regulating the use of robots and preserving 'humane values' in the workplace and society. The German parliament passes a law prohibiting the import of foreign-made robots into Germany.
• 2043: To those who complain about the protectionist law passed in 2041, German politicians and elite journalists reply that Germany is 'not going to join the chorus of simple-minded people crying Halleluja! about this promising but dangerous new technology' and that 'countries who prematurely embrace these innovations without considering the risks will one day rue their short-sightedness'.
• 2045: The European Union convenes a Working Group on Robotics and Society to draft a set of guidelines to 'harmonize the use of robots with European social values' and 'protect the dignity of the worker and patient'.
• 2035-45: German manufacturers, realizing the staggering profit potential of robots and well-prepared to compete internationally, begin manufacturing robot nurses, robot factory workers, sexbots, robot soldiers, and robot schoolteachers for export to the rest of the world. They're about 10 years behind the U.S. but they establish their niche, and billions in profits flow to Germany.
• 2043-47: The furor about robots dies down as German-made robots begin be used in Germany and Germans begin to realize just how profitable they are. The federal Parliament quietly revokes the 2041 law. Lobbying by German and other European high-tech firms ensures that the European Union Working Group's final recommendations are non-binding blather.
• 2047: In Berlin, German Federal President Jimi Blue Ochsenknecht proudly opens the high-tech exposition: 'Germany: Leader in Robotic Innovation'.

[/snark]

Austerians' Next Target: Universal Healthcare

Adam Gaffney at Dissent reports on how austerity is being used to slowly kill the institutions of of universal healthcare, arguably the most important (positive) political innovation to emerge from Europe in the 20th century:

The truly universal health care system, however, was in general a post–Second World War development and was usually the consequence of the work of labor and left-wing parties. Most Western European nations took one of two paths: gradual expansion of coverage until the system could fairly be called universal or the more abrupt creation of a truly socialized national health service. In Great Britain, the 1946 passage of the National Health Service Act brought about the British National Health Service. Financed through general taxes, it provided health care as a right, with medical services free at the point of service.

Most other nations, however, took a more incremental path. France, for instance, built upon its 1928 National Health Insurance system, passing successive pieces of legislation that covered larger and larger proportions of the population until, in 2000, the remaining 1 percent of the nation that was uninsured received coverage. Germany likewise built upon its nineteenth-century Bismarckian system to create a system of truly universal coverage. Greece was relatively late to the game. In 1934, it established a Social Security Organization that covered urban and industrial workers, which was expanded to agricultural workers in 1961. But it was the 1983 legislation of the newly elected Socialist Party that put into place a National Health Service (NHS), founded on the principles of universal access. Along similar lines, Spain built upon a 1942 health insurance law with successive expansions of coverage. This culminated in the 1980s, when through a number of measures the Spanish Socialist Party converted the health care system to a tax-based system with universal access and a largely public provision of care.

No doubt, as they entered the twenty-first century, all of these systems had their own flaws, their own inefficiencies, even their own inequities and injustices. But for the first time in human history, the poorest individuals could avail themselves of some of the most advanced medical care in the world without worry that their illness would bankrupt their family, and without the stigma of charity. A true right to health care had been legislated into existence. Universal health care, from this perspective, represented a truly massive and historical achievement.

...

[Gaffney then recounts the staggering cuts to healthcare in European periphery countries]. Although universal health care was a relatively recent achievement, it quickly came to be considered an intrinsic feature of the European welfare state. It is not, however, immutable. Universal health care everywhere arose through the process of political struggle, and it can be similarly unmade. It was generally the creation of parties of the Left, and was more likely to emerge, and to emerge earlier, in those countries with a strong tradition of labor unionism. As the balance of power shifts, it is not only possible, but indeed probable, that those elements that were fundamentally opposed to universal health care from its very conception will emerge to challenge it.

...

The right wing uses the cause of cost-containment and deficit reduction, combined with allegations of inefficiency, to chip away at the margins of these programs, to promote privatization and reductions in benefits, while at the same time avoiding a frontal rhetorical attack. Similarly, those who would undo universal health care in Europe begin by increasing the barriers to access (such as increased user fees or the denial of care to illegal immigrants), by cutting expenditures and reducing quality, by subtly changing the system away from universalism with changes in financing or benefit eligibility. Not to recognize that such measures could amount to the first step in a long process of unwinding the right to health care would be a dangerous mistake.

The 'Appalling' Peer Steinbrück

In an article on the ideological history of austerity economics, Ruy Teixiera gives Peer Steinbrück the back of his hand while misspelling his last name:

Keynes’s anti-austerity ideas had their day of course—and a very successful day it was, lasting from the mid-’30s to the mid-’70s. But austerity ideas never went away because, as outlined above, they are rooted in an entire philosophy about the state and public debt that is not subject to disproof, especially among the conservative forces and big economic interests who embrace it. As a result, when Keynesian economics appeared to falter in the 1970s, austerity-based economics came roaring back and dominated economic thinking for decades.

Now, after a brief resurgence of Keynesian economics in 2008-2010, it is back again. (See this paper by Henry Farrell and John Quiggin for a blow-by-blow description of how this happened.) Austerity dominates today’s economic discussions, this time with the chimera of “expansionary fiscal austerity”—the idea that the way out of an economic slump is to cut spending which will lead to rising business confidence, more investment and strong growth.

It is not just in conservative circles that the austerity idea remains strong. The idea also has significant purchase in progressive circles. For example, in Germany, while the social democrats offer some criticisms of austerity, their standard-bearer in the coming election, Peer Steinbruck, played a key role in undermining the brief period of Keynesian ascendancy and re-establishing the hegemony of austerity economics. Steinbruck is a particularly appalling example, but the ranks of European social democrats are full of politicians who subscribe to some variant of austerity economics or at least find it expedient not to oppose it.

...

The effects of proceeding down the current path could be devastating. Without more growth, millions of people will suffer and unemployment will remain high.² Compelling evidence of this suffering is collected in the new book, The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills, written by epidemiologists David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu. Stuckler and Basu provide a capable summary of the basic problems with austerity economics as economics, but their signal contribution in this book is to focus on the health effects of austerity. Looking at data from states during the New Deal, Asian countries in the 1990s East Asian financial crisis, and European countries in the Great Financial Crisis that started in 2008, they find that, the more austerity was practiced in a state or country, the more people got sick and the more people died.³ In short, “Austerity Kills” is more than just a slogan. Austerity doesn’t work as economics, and it kills people in the bargain. It’s time we came up with an alternative.

Locust Capitalism Made in Germany

It seems appropriate now and then to remind everyone that the leaders of Germany-- land of the gentle, caring social state (g)! protectress of human rights (g)! denouncer (g) of 'anglo-american' style turbo-capitalism! -- continues to demand policies that have led to mass human suffering in countries in Southern Europe:

The Greek economy is in free fall, having shrunk by 20 percent in the past five years. The unemployment rate is more than 27 percent, the highest in Europe, and 6 of 10 job seekers say they have not worked in more than a year. Those dry statistics are reshaping the lives of Greek families with children, more of whom are arriving at schools hungry or underfed, even malnourished, according to private groups and the government itself.

Last year, an estimated 10 percent of Greek elementary and middle school students suffered from what public health professionals call “food insecurity,” meaning they faced hunger or the risk of it, said Dr. Athena Linos, a professor at the University of Athens Medical School who also heads a food assistance program at Prolepsis, a nongovernmental public health group that has studied the situation. “When it comes to food insecurity, Greece has now fallen to the level of some African countries,” she said.

Oh, and the economic theory that German policymakers conveniently invoked as a fig leaf for their pursuit of Germany's economic interests cited as intellectual support has been largely debunked: 

To see their enormous influence on the European debate, it is worth quoting an extract from a speech by Olli Rehn, the European Commission’s economic chief, to the Council on Foreign Relations in June 2011. “Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have coined the ‘90 per cent rule’,” he said. “That is, countries with public debt exceeding 90 per cent of annual economic output grow more slowly. High debt levels can crowd out economic activity and entrepreneurial dynamism, and thus hamper growth. This conclusion is particularly relevant at a time when debt levels in Europe are now approaching the 90 per cent threshold, which the US has already passed.”

Mr Rehn presumably did not read the original papers, which were more ambivalent in their conclusions, as academic papers tend to be. Policy makers, such as Mr Rehn, are always on the lookout for economic theories that seem plausible and accord with their deep beliefs. In Europe, most of them have little exposure to macroeconomists who think out of the box. Clearly, most policy makers find it counter-intuitive that governments should spend money in a recession. It is against their own experience, especially if they come from northern European countries. They may have read the history of the Great Depression, and yet they find that a Keynesian response is less plausible than pro-cyclical austerity. If two of the world’s most respected economists then come along and tell them that their gut instincts have been right all along, this is the conservative policy maker’s equivalent of birthday and Christmas coinciding. At last, the message they always wanted to hear.

And, of course, is not even resulting in significantly lower debts, since austerity-driven economic contraction increases sovereign debt:

Though the cumulative level of government deficits fell last year, mainly because of Germany swinging into a budget surplus, many countries have continued to reel from the costs associated with recession.

Spending cuts and tax increases have helped to reduce deficits across the 17 EU countries that use the euro, but the region's debt burden rose after economic growth flatlined and fewer companies and households paid taxes.

Of the four countries that accepted financial assistance, Portugal and Spain saw their deficits swell in value terms and in proportion to the size of their economies. Portugal's deficit increased to 6.4% of GDP in 2012, from 4.4% the year before; Spain's jumped to 10.6% from 9.4%.

Greece managed to make further inroads in cutting its borrowings, but the deficit rose to 10% of its annual GDP from 9.5% as the country remained mired in a deep recession. Only Ireland, widely viewed as the poster child of austerity, saw its deficit fall under both criteria – it stood at 7.6% of GDP against 13.4% the year before.

Of course, only those ranting, irresponsible...populists* (pronounce with scorn) feel the need to continuously draw attention to these facts.

History is not going to be kind to Angela Merkel. Wait, let me qualify that: Non-German historians are not going to be kind to Angela Merkel. But then again, hypocrisy is only human:

A Moral Principle met a Material Interest on a bridge wide enough for but one.

‘Down, you base thing!’ thundered the Moral Principle, ‘and let me pass over you!’

The Material Interest merely looked in the other’s eyes without saying anything.

‘Ah,’ said the Moral Principle, hesitatingly, ‘let us draw lots to see which shall retire till the other has crossed.’

The Material Interest maintained an unbroken silence and an unwavering stare.

‘In order to avoid a conflict,’ the Moral Principle resumed, somewhat uneasily, ‘I shall myself lie down and let you walk over me.’

Then the Material Interest found a tongue, and by a strange coincidence it was its own tongue. ‘I don’t think you are very good walking,’ it said. ‘I am a little particular about what I have underfoot. Suppose you get off into the water.’

It occurred that way.

             — Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1898

(Via Futility Closet.)

The Best Reaction to Bombings: Nothing

Security expert Bruce Schneier, who has long mocked the pointless, expensive, and alienating displays of 'security theater' in airports after 9/11 (shoes, belts, fluids, fingerprints), adds his voice to the chorus of people saying that following the news is foolish and harmful:

Ezra Klein: What should people be thinking about in the aftermath of an attack like this?

Bruce Schneier: They should refuse to be terrorized. Terrorism is a crime against the mind. What happened in Boston, horrific as it is, is theater to make you scared. That’s the point. The message of terrorist attacks is you’re not safe, and the government can’t protect you — that the existing power structure can’t protect you.

I tell people if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. By definition, news is something that almost never happens. The brain fools you into thinking the news is what’s important. Our brains overreact to this stuff. Terrorism just pegs the fear button.

EK: What should policymakers do in the aftermath of this kind of event? 

BS: Nothing. This is a singular event, and not something that should drive policy. Unfortunately, you can’t prevent this sort of thing 100 percent. Luckily, terrorism is a lot harder than people think, and it happens rarely. The question people asked after 9/11 is what if we had three of these a year in the United States? Turns out there were none. People get their ideas on terrorism from movies and television.

EK: What makes terrorism so difficult? After 9/11, lots of people thought we’d see suicide bombers in malls across the country, or crude chemical weapons unleashed in subway systems. Why were they wrong?

BS: Because there are a lot of steps to pulling it off, and if you make mistakes in any of them, you go to jail. There’s not a lot of practicing you can do. The criminal mastermind is an invention of comic books; 9/11 just barely worked. They got unbelievably lucky; it was by no means inevitable.

...

EK: So what should we be afraid of?

BS: Car crashes. Global warming. It feels insensitive to say it so close to the tragedy, but it’s true. What people should worry about are things so common that they’re no longer news. That’s what kills people. Terrorism is so rare, it’s hardly a risk worth spending a lot of time worrying about.

And on that note, I'm going to do some things that are worthwhile -- stop by my local farmers' market and ride through the park to work. Spring is finally here, which means Germany has officially turned into heaven for the next 6 months.

Another Report on the Bush Administration's Torture Program

The New York Times has a preview of a report which will shortly be released by the Constitution Project on the Bush Administration's systematic use of torture. Although the fact that the U.S. routinely tortured and killed prisoners is old news (pdf), the report will likely have more impact than a typical NGO report, as the authors come from both American political parties:

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.

...The panel found that the United States violated its international legal obligations by engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions. It questions recidivism figures published by the Defense Intelligence Agency for Guantánamo detainees who have been released, saying they conflict with independent reviews.

It describes in detail the ethical compromise of government lawyers who offered “acrobatic” advice to justify brutal interrogations and medical professionals who helped direct and monitor them.

...

While the Constitution Project report covers mainly the Bush years, it is critical of some Obama administration policies, especially what it calls excessive secrecy. It says that keeping the details of rendition and torture from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security” and urges the administration to stop citing state secrets to block lawsuits by former detainees.

...

The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

The report compares the torture of detainees to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. “What was once generally taken to be understandable and justifiable behavior,” the report says, "can later become a case of historical regret."

It's worth noting that the United States is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Torture, which requires prompt investigation of claims of torture and compensation for victims. So far, none of the dozens of official architects of the torture program has been prosecuted, and that will probably remain the case, since Obama has shown no interest in accountability.

The whole thing will shortly be released on the Constitution Project's webpage.

Farewell, Inside the Law School Scam

Blogger Paul Campos of Inside the Law School Scam is giving up blogging. The message of his blog, and many others, is that American law schools (1) are unjustifiably expensive and saddle their students with huge debts; (2) send graduates into a shrinking job market, thus setting them up for unemployment and financial ruin; and (3) have been trying desperately to conceal these facts for years, using techniques that amount to a 'scam'. According to Campos, the message has been received:

19 months and 499 posts later, it turns out that the core message of this blog – that legal academia is operating on the basis of an unsustainable economic model, which requires most law students to borrow more money to get law degrees than it makes sense for them to borrow, given their career prospects, and that for many years law schools worked hard, wittingly or unwittingly, to hide this increasingly inconvenient truth from both themselves and their potential matriculants – has evolved from a horrible heresy to something close to conventional wisdom

That enrolling in law school has become a very dangerous proposition for most people who consider enrolling in one is now, if not a truth universally acknowledged, something that legal academia can no longer hide, either from ourselves, or – far more important – from anyone who doesn’t go out of his or her way to avoid contact with the relevant information.

...People have asked me how I can continue to be on a law faculty, given my views.  This question – when it isn’t simply a hostile attempt to derail conversation – is based on a misunderstanding.   I very much believe in the potential value of higher education.  And I believe that legal education can and must be reformed radically.   (On one level the most important short-term reforms couldn’t be simpler:  the cost of law school attendance must be reduced drastically, and the number of people graduating from law school must be decreased by a significant amount. In the longer term, the American legal system will need to confront whether it is either pedagogically justifiable or financially viable to continue to require the basic law degree to be acquired through postgraduate education).

I found ITLSS consistently witty and brave. And Campos is enough of a scholar to marshal evidence, not mere snark. His very long, very thorough description of the crisis facing American legal education is here.

I've followed this story with interest since I'm in legal education, and I sometimes wonder whether it has relevance to Germany, either because (1) Germany may be facing similar problems; or (2) There will be spill-over effects from the American crisis on the German legal scene.

As to #1, I doubt it. The main difference, of course, is that German law students, like university students in general, either pay no tuition fees or very low ones. One major driver of the sense of crisis in the U.S. is that the average law student graduates with something like $100,000 in debt, but jobs that pay enough to service this debt are few and far between. That is not a problem in Germany. However, I do think that some of the structural changes to the American job market -- outsourcing, temporary contract work, much more price-conscious clients -- could well begin to be seen in Germany.

As to #2, I also think the effect will be marginal, except perhaps that some American law school graduates might relocate abroad, either to find any kind of job or to make a 'fresh start' where debt collectors will find it hard to trace them. Again, though, this doesn't seem very likely. Anyone who comes to Germany or France fresh out of law school will soon face the harsh reality that an American legal education is well-nigh worthless in most European countries. Also, as non-EU citizens, Americans can be legally discriminated against in favor of EU citizens. Nevertheless, I can imagine an increasing number of law graduates -- especially ones who have cultural or personal ties to Europe -- trying to establish themselves across the pond.

What say you, commenters, especially Pageant? By the way, since comments are now moderated, you no longer face the horrible prospect of typing a long comment only to see it magically 'disappeared' because you unknowingly used a spam key-word.

The Miseducation of Annette Schavan

Yet another plagiarism scandal is rocking -- well, not really rocking, more like poking -- Germany. This time, with exquisite irony, the victim is the Education Minister of the entire country, Dr. Annette Schavan. She got her doctorate in education in 1980 from the University of Düsseldorf. Someone got a copy of her dissertation, which dealt with the development of a personal conscience, and began looking for unacknowledged quotations and uncited paraphrase of others' ideas. The results can be found on the blog Schavanplag (g), which contains a detailed listing of all the problematic pages.

The Faculty Council of the liberal arts college of the University of Düsseldorf, after lengthy review, voted 12 to 3 to withdraw her doctoral dissertation on grounds of evidence of sustained, intentional plagiarism. They held (g) that Schavan's dissertation contained (my translation): 'more than isolated instances of word-for-word copies of other texts without acknowledgement' and found that '[t]he frequency and the construction of these word-for-word copies, along with the failure to cite relevant literature in footnotes or in the bibliography have convinced the Faculty Council, after reviewing the entire work, that the doctoral candidate systematically and intentionally, throughout the entire dissertation, presented ideas as her own that were, in fact, not.'

Not precisely the sort of thing you want to read about your country's own education minister. But the withdrawing of her Ph.D. is just the beginning: the program she completed in 1980 led directly to a Ph.D without any intervening steps, so once the university withdraws it, she will have no official, earned academic title at all past high school. The final nail in the coffin is her remarks about Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the last conservative politician to have lost his job last year over plagiarizing his doctoral dissertation. Back then, she announced (g) that as someone who had a Ph.D herself and met with many doctoral candidates, she was 'ashamed, and not just privately' about Guttenberg's conduct. Schavan has pledged to challenge the Faculty Council's decision in court, and to stay in office. But Angela Merkel has professed her 'full confidence' in Schavan, which means she's probably doomed.* One German newspaper calculated (g) that any politician who earns Merkel's 'full confidence' has, on average, 18.75 days left in office.

Whenever people ask me to compare Germans and Americans, I first order them to fill me with booze. Once that's done, then I pontificate as follows: 'The average middle-class American is driven about 90% by a desire for more money, and most of these people will come right out and tell you that. A similarly-situated German will be motivated 40% by money, 20% by job security, and 40% by the desire for officially-bestowed, external signs of high social status -- especially involving education or heredity. However, they will only admit the desire for job security, and will half-heartedly deny or rationalize the other motivations'. Perhaps the ultimate status symbol is the doctoral title which, under German law, can be made an official part of your name. The sacred two letters accompany you through life, surrounding you with a diffuse aura of scholarly dignity and good breeding.

Which is often spurious, of course. The social cachet of a doctoral title (which may also entitle you to higher salaries than your co-workers) drives thousands of ambitious young Germans to seek a title. A minority of these students are genuinely intellectually talented and interested in the advancement of human knowledge for its own sake. A majority, in my experience, just wants to find some way, any way, to bolt those two little letters to the front of their name for status/signalling reasons. They may well turn to dubious 'consulting agencies' which work with shady professors (g). One step above this are people who actually write a doctoral dissertation, but do so 'outside' the university system. In the German system only one professor supervises the actual dissertation-writing process, so if you find one who's relatively lax, you don't have to work up much of a sweat to get the title.

From my inbox:

I couldn’t help reading the story on Schavan today and just thinking “reap what you sow, Germany Bildungssystem”. Years of benign neglect to plagiarism, the discouraging of originality, the lack of substantive peer rigor at the higher academic levels and deference to professors who frequently supervise topics they can’t even evaluate the originality of have just resulted in what for Germans must seem like the End of All that is Good and True. Guttenberg was a case of a ‘friendly’ degree offered to someone obviously on his way to a higher political future than the academy, and I think there is a lot of tolerance for that here (and Schadenfreude when it blows up), but Schavan just struck a crippling blow to the whole concept of there being academic merit in this whole absurd title-chasing complex. If the Ministrix of Education loses her degree, that’s as bad as the Surgeon General being found to have obtained his medical degree at the Sweetrose Nursing Academy or the Minister of Consumer Affairs having marketed Vorwerk vacuum cleaners to math club students.

That about sums it up. Schavan is clearly doomed, and her case throws light on a very weak system. The problem is that all the superficial, crappy doctoral dissertations debase the currency. I haven't thought this through, but I envision something like a 2-tier process: you can either work with one professor to write a short, workmanlike survey of a particular area in 18 months-2 years (which doesn't need to be published), or you can opt for a 'real' doctoral dissertation, which must be more substantial, and which will take 3-4 years, and be supervised by a commission of three professors. In fact, this latter option could then replace the 'Habilitation', another German academic institution which may well have outlived its usefulness. I suppose this reform would end up with the German system looking much more like the American system. But comparing the number of plagiarism and/or fake-doctor scandals each system generates, switching to something more like the US system might be just what the doctor ordered (sorry about that!).

The Love that Just Dared Speak its Name

Over the weekend, the center-left German newspaper taz published a fascinating interview (g) with Oliver Burdinski and Kurt Gehrl, two zoophiliacs. That is, men who have sex with dogs. Those are their real names. The point of the interview was to protest against a bill pending in the German Parliament which would increase penalties for bestiality. Both men are members of ZETA (g), an organization whose name roughly translates as 'Zoophiles United for Tolerance and Understanding'. The point of the interview was to remove some of the stigma and shame from their passion, and to foster understanding of the sodomite next door, so to speak. As I read the interview, I felt myself actually beginning to sympathize with their cause.

The interviewer, plainly fascinated by the opportunity to ask these men about their sex lives, goes into great detail. One of the men first realized his orientation when he became aroused by an image of a centaur from early Hercules and Xena shows and from old computer games. He then progressed to make-out sessions with dogs, and the rest was history. One of the men is actually a 'bottom' -- he lets male dogs mount him. There's plenty more fascinating detail in the interview, but I will leave it for others to discover. Let's just say that if you want to know about the details of how grown men have sex with dogs, this interview is a great place to start.

Interestingly, both of the men totally reject the thesis, put forward by a German psychologist, that zoophiles are responding to childhood experiences. They say their childhoods were just fine, it's just that as long as they can remember, they have mainly been attracted to animals. This is yet another reminder how many German psychological 'experts' are still wedded to 1960's-era notion that many adult behaviors are related to childhood experiences. I am pretty sure that zoophiles, like most homosexuals, are simply hard-wired genetically and neurologically to their preferences, and would have turned out precisely the same way no matter what sort of childhood they had. In fact, one of the men interviewed for the article says he'd be happy to be a subject of scientific inquiry.

Of course, the interviewer brings out the standard counter-arguments, to which the men have ready responses. Here's my summary:

• It's just perverse. That's what people used to say about homosexuality, consensual BDSM, single parenthood, etc. Passing laws based on generalized distaste or outdated religious notions without any proof of harm is simply legislating morality, which is foolish and unjust.
• You're cruelly exploiting the dogs. The dogs willingly engage in sexual behavior, it's hard to argue that a dog who is mounting a human has been coerced. Forcing dogs to have sex against their will or injuring them is criminal and awful animal abuse, and precisely the sort of behavior that true zoophiles abhor. In any case, the kind of dogs who are of interest to zoophiles weigh at least 70-80 pounds and up, and getting them to do anything they don't want to do is quite a tall order. Dogs like having sex as much as humans do, if not more, and don't care who they have it with.
• Isn't pedophilia next? No -- children are not sexual beings, and introducing them to sex before it's appropriate is criminal and wrong. Dogs, however, are sexual beings, as anyone who has ever owned one knows.
• How do you know they consent? Because they either initiate or tolerate lots of sexual behavior, and often visibly enjoy it. Look at our dogs: they're perfectly happy and healthy (the interviewer confirms that this seems to be so). They're objects of our love, and as such, we take excellent care of them. And how many dogs have ever consented to being spayed or neutered?
• Wouldn't the dog rather have sex with one of its own kind? After thousands of years of domestication, dogs view humans as members of the pack. Their behavior shows they don't make lots of distinctions between humans and other dogs.

I have to say, I think they make a pretty good case. I cringe in horror at the image of their sexual practices, but then again, I cringe in horror at lots of things that I don't think should be against the law, such as Bauernsülze. Why not just leave them alone?