German Joys

Heidelberg Debate on 'Morality and Criminal Justice'

Here, as promised are the videos of the talk I gave with Robert Blecker in Heidelberg on 4 May 2012. The introduction is by Franz-Julius Morche, one of the organizers of the conference, and the moderation is by Dr. Markus Englerth. Many thanks to both of them, to Robert Blecker, and to the audience, who asked some good questions.

Low-Wage Workers in Germany Work 45 Hours per Week Average

Germany, once the land of the social state, has seen median wages actually decline since 2000, and the number of low-wage workers increase. A new study shows that a quarter of them work 50 hours a week or more just to keep up with expenses (g). Von Amerika lernen heißt schuften lernen!

Europe's 'Toothless' Promises of Equality

Every European constitution outlaws discrimination on the basis of religion or ethnic origin, as does Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights: 'The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status.'

A new Amnesty International report tests whether these promises have any real-life impact, and comes to unsurprising conclusions:

Women wearing headscarves have little chance of finding employment in many European countries, according to a report on discrimination by Amnesty International, which criticizes politicians for their lack of action.

In its report entitled "Choice and Prejudice," the human rights organization studied discrimination against Muslims in five European countries - Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland - and concluded that discrimination exists in a number of forms.

"There is a general consensus that discrimination on the basis of skin color is unacceptable," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International's director for Europe and Central Asia. "But this isn't the case with discrimination due to religion, especially Islam."

Actually, all European constitutions say no individual can be discriminated against because of ethnic origin and religion. The main problem in most countries, Dalhuisen said, is not a lack of anti-discrimination laws but their effective implementation, which he referred to as "toothless." Discrimination, he added, is largely tolerated.

For its part, the German 'Equal Treatment Law' (known by its German abbreviation as the AGG), has loopholes large enough to fly an Airbus through. For instance, while repeating that discrimination is a bad thing that people shouldn't do, the law doesn't attach sanctions to intentional racial discrimination by any landlord who rents fewer than 50 units (g). In fact, one could be forgiven for getting the impression that many European countries deal with social problems by passing laws that officially 'deal with' them, and then move on to the next bright, shiny object, without ever asking whether the laws, in fact, actually work.

There are three main problems:

1. First, there is no effective way of forcing employers or landlords to actually divulge relevant information about individual hiring decisions, or general patterns of employment. There's simply no equivalent of automatic, wide-ranging American-style discovery in most European countries, which means plaintiffs face burdens in proving discrimination unless employers are stupid enough to deliver them 'smoking guns' in the form of openly racists comments or memos.
2. European minorities haven't learned a culture of public advocacy and personal accountability. When there is a clear case of a qualified person being denied an apartment or job or opportunity based solely on their appearance or ethnic background, naming and shaming needs to follow. Marches, demonstrations, picketing, boycotts, and sit-ins get attention and sympathy. Just as was the case in the USA of the early 1960s, and in fact in just about all societies, mainstream majority Germans are not going to care about the rights of minorities unless they are forced to do so.
3. The financial penalties are too lax. The German law is quite vague on the subject of penalties, mainly saying that a victim of discimination should be compensated for 'losses.'  But how are you going to prove specific economic losses caused by the fact that you were denied an apartment based on the sound of your last name? To be effective, anti-discrimination laws need to permit symbolic damages for violations: behavior will only change when employers and landlords need to fear large, unpredictable money damages for acts of proven intentional discrimination. German law allows precisely this in cases of 'insult': you can be forced to pay someone thousands of Euros or even go to prison for injuring someone's honor by a nasty public insult. But the German law doesn't clearly authorize such damages (much less a prison sentence) in cases of intentional discrimination, which, one would have thought, is a direct insult to human dignity and personal honor.

If European societies are serious about effectively combating discrimination, we'll need to start seeing stories like this:

Her face framed by a white scarf covering her head and hair — considered “a private part” for Muslim women — Susann Bashir grew sad Friday afternoon recalling her final encounter with a former boss.

She said she had already endured years of harassment by co-workers and had started pursuing a religious discrimination case against her employer when the supervisor, during a routine meeting in his office, snatched her scarf and exposed her hair.

Bashir sued, and this week a Jackson County jury awarded her [$120,000 in compensation and] $5 million in punitive damages against Southwestern Bell/AT&T, where she worked as a fiber optics network builder for more than 10 years [The punitive damages will be reduced on appeal].

Bashir said she endured religious discrimination nearly every day of the last three years she worked in the company’s downtown Kansas City office.

...Thursday’s overall award appears to be the largest jury verdict for a workplace religious discrimination case in Missouri history, Coopman said.

The previous largest such verdict came in 2009, when Mohamed Alhalabi, an Arab-American Muslim, was awarded $811,949 in St. Louis County Circuit Court in a case against the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

That same year a Jonesboro, Ark., jury ordered AT&T to pay $1.3 million to two former employees fired for attending a Jehovah’s Witnesses convention.

Bashir was living in North Kansas City in 2005 when she converted to Islam. According to court documents, that’s when her troubles at AT&T began. Just months before she converted, she had been commended in the company newsletter for doing good work, she said.

In court documents, Bashir said her work environment became hostile when co-workers made harassing comments about her religion and referred to her hijab as “that thing on her head.”

“I was shocked. I thought, ‘What is going on?’ ” she said during an interview at her lawyer’s Kansas City office. “Nobody ever cared what I wore before. Nobody ever cared what religion I was before.”

Bible verses were left on her desk. Co-workers asked if she was going to blow up the building and called her a “towelhead” and a terrorist.

...Bashir said the entire incident was mentally and physically taxing for her and tore her family apart. She is going through a divorce. In October, she moved with her daughter to Anchorage, Alaska, where she is an apartment manager.

Merkel's End Game

The New York Times on growing resistance to austerity:

A German-inspired austerity regimen agreed to just last month as the long-term solution to Europe’s sovereign debt crisis has come under increasing strain from the growing pressures of slowing economies, gyrating financial markets and a series of electoral setbacks.

Spain officially slipped back into recession for the second time in three years on Monday, after following the German remedy of deep retrenchment in public outlays, joining Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. In the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Rutte handed his resignation to Queen Beatrix on Monday after his government failed to pass new austerity measures over the weekend.

...

It was only in March that leaders from 25 of the 27 European Union countries gathered to sign the fiscal compact championed by Ms. Merkel. Her plan, combined with $1.3 trillion in cheap loans injected into the banking system by the European Central Bank in December and March, raised hopes that the worst of the crisis had passed.

But those hopes have been dashed as growth has faltered and interest rates on the debt of struggling countries like Spain and Italy have shot up to dangerous levels again.

...

Another possibility, which Germany will be under renewed pressure to accept, is some form of common European debt, generally referred to as Eurobonds, which any member of the currency zone could tap. It is a step that Ms. Merkel’s conservative bloc has opposed forcefully, but with more than 17 million people in the euro zone out of work and the unemployment rate at 10.8 percent, the need for urgent steps is growing.

Marie Diron, an economic adviser to the consulting firm Ernst & Young, said Germany could slow down its own drive to balance its budget and do more to encourage domestic consumption. Other European states would benefit if Germany bought more of their goods.

“Austerity has to fit into a wider policy context,” Ms. Diron said.

...

Ms. Merkel has proved herself a masterful tactician time and again. She was adept at working with the Social Democrats as her partner in the previous German government, and Mr. Hollande might be even more amenable than Mr. Sarkozy to ceding French sovereignty in economic policy in exchange for help on growth, Mr. Vaquer from the Barcelona Center for International Affairs said.

“She will have to backtrack on austerity anyway,” Mr. Vaquer said. “Germany can now extract a much more unified Europe in terms of economic governance than it ever could have before.”

I've thought for a while that Germany was eventually going to have to back down on austerity. Vaquer's comments point to the end game: after holding out for years, bringing Europe as a whole to the brink of recession (and shoving many periphery countries over that brink), Germany will finally relent, but not without extracting major sovereignty concessions from the rest of Europe and transferring much more power over economic policy to Brussels.

So perhaps Merkel has known all along that austerity was never going to stick, and that the EU was going to have to become more of a transfer union in to survive. But she held out for years, pretending not to grasp this, in order to put the fear of Yahweh into Germany's European partners. Mildly cunning, ruthless, Machiavellian! Not words that many Germans like seeing applied to their relations with the rest of Europe, but when it comes to protecting its economic interests, Germany behaves like any other country. This episode can, of course, be added to the tu quoque list I recently threw together, when a German criticizes the United States of ruthlessly pushing its economic agenda on weaker countries.

Neo-Luddites Unite!

Stuart Staniford predicts there will be more robots than people by 2030:

He extrapolates the depressing implications:

• This trend will continue because it's in the short-term interests of societal elites.  The median influencer's life can be made better with more robotically produced consumer goods and with service robots to perform tedious chores (or human labor made cheap by competition from robots).
• The creative classes can have fun with new toys and with thinking up new uses for the technology.
• Ever larger numbers of people will continue to be made technologically unemployed by this trend.
• Managing the "class formerly known as working" will become an increasing challenge.  More and more of them will present as "criminals", "terrorists", and other undesirable labels since society is not able to provide them with a meaningful way to contribute (and people need meaning).
• The least disruptive approach to managing this is for the underclass to disappear into technologically mediated secondary universes (whatever TV & video games evolve into).
• However, the traditional cultural ethics that despise welfare/dependency etc will prevent easy/full use of this solution, and the alternative is to lock up more and more deviants and use more and more sophisticated technology to find and monitor the deviants - managing the risk that they become organized and attempt to overthrow the existing order.
• Some people will reject the automation trend and there will be an ongoing romantic/back-to-the-land/local food/anti-globalization/anti-technology movement.  To the extent it relies on resources not needed by organized global society, and doesn't oppose "progress" violently or too-effectively, it will be tolerated.
• Depending on how good the roboticists get how quickly, there's going to become a point where there really isn't enough in it for a sufficiently large fraction of humanity.  I simply see no way this trend can continue without eventually rendering almost all of us irrelevant.  People's basic survival instincts will not tolerate that.
• However, by that point, there may very well be no easy way back, and all hell will break loose.

I thought about this over the weekend, when I held a seminar for translators. I think within about 20 years there will no longer be a significant market for human translators. The only things that will really still need human translators will be high-status but low-paid literary translation, where style counts. As for technical and legal translation, algorithms will probably be good enough to generate near-perfect rough drafts, which specialists will then correct. In 2020, you'll only need 1 human translator to do the work of 100, or 1000, today.

Other jobs that have no future: air-traffic controllers (possible pilots too), auto assembly-line workers, cashiers, non-specialized nurses and caregivers, bus drivers, accountants, car mechanics, pharmacists, radiologists, the list goes on. There will still be a market for some humans to oversee the robots, but brilliant algorithms and highly sophisticated robots will do 98% of the preliminary work and handle 98% of the non-problematic cases.

So get ready for, as Max Goldt calls it, our sad technological future...

Why is Germany Giving Away Billions of Euros to a Rich Country?

Günter Grass' op-ed 'poem' was lame on many levels, but in Salon, a couple of investigative journalists praise Grass for focusing attention on a pretty stunning fact:

Germany had already given Israel two Dolphin-class submarines, and subsidized one-third of the $540 million cost of another. The Germans are planning to similarly subsidize the sale of the latest submarine.

Before the Grass poem, I'd be willing to bet that very few ordinary Germans were aware that their government was simply giving away billions of dollars in military technology to Israel. Take it away, Wikipedia:

Israel has one of the highest life expectancies in the world. It is a developed country, an OECD member, and its economy, based on the nominal gross domestic product, was the 41st-largest in the world in 2010. Israel has the highest standard of living in the Middle East.

Its GDP per capita is around 26th in the entire world, and it already receives $3 billion in yearly aid from the U.S (pdf). So why can't it simply pay for the military hardware it wants to buy? All Eastern European countries are much poorer than Israel, yet when they want German military hardware, they have to pay for it.

Historical issues aside, surely Germany has better uses for €1.5 billion in taxpayer money than giving away free military presents to a country that can easily pay for them itself. How many schools could that money  have built in Botswana?

Watching Europe Self-Destruct from the Sidelines

Today's howls of despair over EU policy come courtesy of Paul Krugman...

Consider the state of affairs in Spain, which is now the epicenter of the crisis. Never mind talk of recession; Spain is in full-on depression, with the overall unemployment rate at 23.6 percent, comparable to America at the depths of the Great Depression, and the youth unemployment rate over 50 percent. This can’t go on — and the realization that it can’t go on is what is sending Spanish borrowing costs ever higher.

In a way, it doesn’t really matter how Spain got to this point — but for what it’s worth, the Spanish story bears no resemblance to the morality tales so popular among European officials, especially in Germany. Spain wasn’t fiscally profligate — on the eve of the crisis it had low debt and a budget surplus. Unfortunately, it also had an enormous housing bubble, a bubble made possible in large part by huge loans from German banks to their Spanish counterparts. When the bubble burst, the Spanish economy was left high and dry; Spain’s fiscal problems are a consequence of its depression, not its cause.

Nonetheless, the prescription coming from Berlin and Frankfurt is, you guessed it, even more fiscal austerity.

This is, not to mince words, just insane. Europe has had several years of experience with harsh austerity programs, and the results are exactly what students of history told you would happen: such programs push depressed economies even deeper into depression. And because investors look at the state of a nation’s economy when assessing its ability to repay debt, austerity programs haven’t even worked as a way to reduce borrowing costs.

...[I]t’s hard to avoid a sense of despair. Rather than admit that they’ve been wrong, European leaders seem determined to drive their economy — and their society — off a cliff. And the whole world will pay the price.

...and Nouriel Roubini:

The trouble is that the eurozone has an austerity strategy but no growth strategy. And, without that, all it has is a recession strategy that makes austerity and reform self-defeating, because, if output continues to contract, deficit and debt ratios will continue to rise to unsustainable levels. Moreover, the social and political backlash eventually will become overwhelming.  

...

Without a much easier monetary policy and a less front-loaded mode of fiscal austerity, the euro will not weaken, external competitiveness will not be restored, and the recession will deepen. And, without resumption of growth—not years down the line, but in 2012—the stock and flow imbalances will become even more unsustainable. More eurozone countries will be forced to restructure their debts, and eventually some will decide to exit the monetary union

The Decline of Employer-Paid Health Insurance

Whenever Europeans ask me about health care in the United States, I always have to set aside some time to explain that most (non-elderly, non-poor) Americans get health insurance through their employer. Europeans find this difficult to understand, because it seems so weird and arbitrary -- getting health insurance from the company that employs you makes just about as much sense as getting vaccinations from your plumber. Yet that's the way it works for many Americans. And it creates problems largely unknown in the rest of the industrialized world -- in particular, people stuck in jobs they don't like because they can't afford to lose their health insurance.

But, as Kevin Drum reports, the situation is changing fast:

Over the past decade, the number of Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance has dropped from about 70% down to nearly 50%. Note that this is for the non-elderly only, so it's not due to the aging of society or the growth of Medicare. This is working-age people only. As Krugman says, our weird employer-based health insurance scheme is "coming apart at the seams."

Most Americans simply have no clue how bizarre it is that we rely on employers to provide health insurance for most people. We've all grown up in this sytem, so it seems completely normal. But it's not. It happened through a weird combination of historical accidents, and it makes no sense. Why should an airplane manufacturer also be in the healthcare business? Why should you lose your health insurance if you get laid off? Why should your choice of doctor be limited by your employer's choice of insurance carrier? (And why should it change whenever your employer decides to change carriers?) Why should your boss be allowed to dock your paycheck if you don't get the medical "counseling" he deems necessary? (Yes, this is real. And it's rapidly making its way to a corporation near you.)

I Debate Robert Blecker on May 4th in Heidelberg

Just to let you know in eigener Sache, I've been invited by the Heidelberger Clubs für Wirtschaft und Kultur e.V. (Heidelberg Business and Culture Club) to participate in their 24th annual Symposium (g), which will be held in Heidelberg from 3-5 May. The program is here (g).

I'll be taking part in a debate/discussion with Robert Blecker, a professor at New York Law School, on the subject of morality and the criminal law. Blecker is probably the most prominent American academic proponent of capital punishment and the retributive ethic in criminal justice, and also the main character in the film Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead (see above) which chronicles Blecker's relationship with a death-row inmate Daryl Holton. He is also the author, most recently, of Let the Great Axe Fall, a Kindle Single which you can download here.

I find debating capital punishment sort of tedious, but the discussion promises to be more wide-ranging than that. We'll be debating in English, since Blecker, as far as I know, doesn't speak German.* Should be fun!

Socialism and Swedish Bus Drivers

How Swedish bus drivers can afford two homes:

The top 1% share of the national income in Sweden and the US via Krugman: