Should Greece Exit the Euro?

After the American Century

Some time ago in this space I suggested that giving money to the Greeks would not solve their problems, and that it was better to let them go bankrupt if they could not reform. Now leading German thinkers have reached the same conclusion, as reported today in the New York Times.  It took them a while, and the Germans pumped billions of dollars into Greece while thinking about it.  Now some are suggesting that perhaps Greece should exit the Euro, and in effect go through bankruptcy, and then come back in when its house is in order. There is no mechanism for throwing a country out of the EU, so this would have to be a "voluntary" departure.

It would have made far more sense to refuse a bail out in the early spring. To refuse now has a different meaning than it would have then. In August a refusal says not only that the Greeks must pay their own way, but that their problems are too big for the rest of the EU. Stopping all support for Greece now looks rather like a team of fire fighters leaving a blaze that is out of control because they cannot put it out. If the fire brigade is inadequate to save Greece, what good will it be when a larger economy such as Spain or Italy gets into trouble? The EU begins to look weak, and its currency unreliable. 

In short, once the EU has gone this far to save Greece, it rather must find a way to succeed. Recently, I suggested in jest that perhaps Greece could lease some of its islands to other countries for 99 years. This idea begins to look almost serious.

Declining US Power: Standard and Poor Downgrades US Government Debt

After the American Century

The decision is a milestone on the road to decline. Standard and Poor has decided that US government debt is no longer worthy of the highest trust. It has only been downgraded slightly, but the meaning of this event is huge. The US dollar and more specjfically US government debt has been the definition of the safest place to put your money since c. 1941. No longer. A canny investor today would want to spread the risk a bit, and also would expect to be paid a bit higher interest for investing in US government securities. The AAA rating that the US has lost is retained by Germany, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the UK, so these currencies will be strengthened -- something that is good but not entirely a benefit, as it hurts their exports.

The American taxpayer suddenly has a much higher debt to pay back, as the interest rate will now rise accordingly. It will cost billions of dollars that might have been used to jump-start the economy or build green energy systems. The long free ride is over. The US taxpayer will have to learn, and then have to teach the Republican Party, that a nation must pay its debts. It has to look credit-worthy. It has to have a credible tax code that generates enough income to pay the bills.

Sadly, I predict that things will get worse before they get better. I fear that instead of raising enough revenue and/or cutting enough programs to be credible, the Democrats and Republicans will wrangle and point fingers and carry their discussions into the 2012 political campaign. If they do so, the credibility of US government securities will continue to decline.

Meanwhile, China has a huge surplus in trade and no such problems. The shift of global power is evident.

Summer Reading While Traveling: Henry James, Agatha Christie, and Thoreau

After the American Century

I did not plan it, but my short summer vacation was made even more pleasant by the reading I happened to do while on trains and planes and in idle moments when not walking around or eating in France. This was the first time I took along an entire library, via an Ipad and also a Kindle, so I did not have to doggedly plow through books that I had brought along, but rather could browse and select what suited my fancy. I ended up reading three quite different books, two of them about travel in the nineteenth century, and all set in places distant from both home and the part of France near Switzerland where we spent most of our time.

I had no intention of reading Agatha Christie, but one of her books was in the Ipad -- The Mysterious Affair at Styles -- and it turned out to be one of the early Poirot stories, quite enjoyable on two levels: as a puzzle (who did it and why?) and as a period piece whose language was redolent of another world of manners and conversation irretrievably lost. This was quite distinctly a journey in time as much as it was a whodunit, and I enjoyed it far more than I would have expected. 

Henry James wrote a short work in 1879, "A Bundle of Letters," which amused me in quite a different way. As the title indicates, it consists of a series of letters. Several different people, all of whom are staying at the same high-class boarding house in Paris, write home. Each has disparaging remarks to make about the others, but indicates preference for someone as well. There are two American young women, a young American man, an impecunious Frenchman, an Englishman and his sister, and a German who is surprised and disappointed, even irritated, that the French seem scarcely upset by the recent war in which Prussia soundly defeated the French armies and laid a successful siege to Paris. 

The two American young ladies do not get along, the English do not much like the Americans (whoseverely disapprove of inherited titles and the class system). The Frenchman gives language lessons to them all and preys upon the young ladies in his spare time, and so on. The American from Boston proves to be a ludicrous aesthete whose feet barely touch the ground. The German feels superior to all, certain his nation must triumph over such effete cultures as the others represent. Humorous stuff, but not fully worked up into a novel as it might have been. Instead, the potentially complex situation simply ends when the young American woman whose letter initiated the story decides to move on to another country. When a graduate student, I would have analyzed it as an early example Jamesian experimentation with point-of-view, and the abandonment of an omniscient narrator. But on this trip the fascination for me was how each person was defining themselves against other nationalities. Each thereby became both a voice and the "other" for several other people. To read the story with any thought forces a reader to ponder not so much national differences (as the characters do) but the process of self-definition through opposition.

Finally, I read a good bit of Henry David Thoreau's The Maine Woods, which I did read once before, but long ago. Thoreau studied the landscape from a birch-bark canoe and botanized as he went. He was also fascinated by the Native American guide, reporting carefully his dress, opinions, behavior, and admirable knowledge of the region they were passing through. My trip was not long enough to complete his journey, too, so I left Thoreau slapping at mosquitoes in a bog. He seemed happy there. Some day I may get back and get him out of woods into civilization, but then again I may just leave him there. It was 160 years ago and by now he is used to it.

This reading was not only enjoyable, but it helped me forget the tiresome administrative work I did for the last year, the book that I must rewrite by January, and much else I have now managed to repress, at least temporarily. These readings, each in a different way, offered a displacement. The first and most potent escape, or displacement, was that of going where I had not been before. But in moments of idleness, how useful and pleasant to keep the work world at bay by the simple device of reading about distant places and times. It was not a plan, but it surely worked better than the reading I did in guidebooks and histories of the places I was passing through. Such things tend not to be well written, and they usually repeat one another. As James once complained, tourist information assimilated before arrival will "annihilate surprise." Read the guide afterword, to see if you agree, not beforehand. Killing the immediate future by reading guide books is likely to push one back into the very past that one is trying to take a break from. Better to have both the surprise of novels and travel narratives, as well as the surprise of new places, freshly seen.

Moon Landing Anniversary and the Decline of Wonder

After the American Century

I vividly recall where I was and who I was with on this day, July 20, in 1969 when Niel Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. Like many Americans, I had mixed feelings: immense curiosity about what the astronauts might find balanced against the sense that the billions of dollars might better be spent on social programs. It was the heyday of the Counterculture, and like many other students I was not a fan of military spending or government science programs. The astronauts were like big boy scouts, with their crew cut hair, bland speech patterns, and conservative clothing. Richard Nixon loved them, and missed no opportunity to be photographed with them. Even so, for those who disliked Nixon it was impossible to remain unmoved by the moon landing. For the first time, human beings would walk in a place outside the earth. What might they find? Would they survive? Would there be any trace of life, perhaps a fossil?

Each subsequent visit to the moon drew less public attention. Everyone remembers Neil Armstrong, but who can name the fourth or fifth man to walk on the moon? Forty-two years later, the space program is a mere shadow of its former self, and no one has been to the moon for a long time. The space shuttle program is ending even as I write these lines. It was plagued by delays and several fatal disintegrations. It failed to become a reliable and inexpensive shuttle bus to the stars, and there is nothing to take its place.

In retrospect, the space program was driven by the Cold War. When the Soviet Union fell apart, the "space race" was over, and Congress reduced funding for high profile missions. Now the US and Russia cooperate in running and manning the space station, and the only way to get there is via a Soviet-era Soyuz rocket launched in Central Asia. Millions of Americans used to attend Apollo rocket launches in Florida and space shuttle landings in the arid west. Clearly that patriotic tradition cannot easily be transplanted to Kazakhstan.

For much of US history, Americans found various large technological projects inspiring. In the early decades of the nineteenth century canals were the rage, followed by railroads from c. 1830 to 1870. Later they embraced great bridges, then skyscrapers, then the automobile and so on down to the space program. However, as I discussed at length in American Technological Sublime, this tradition has attenuated in the last decades of the twentieth century. The ambivalent feelings I had about the space program in 1969 were part of a national trend. People no longer found big technology a compelling rallying point for the nation.

Today the technologies that excite the public are miniaturized not monumental, and they are not national but personal possessions – ipads, cell phones, portable computers, and the like. A consumer's sublime has triumphed.

As in 1969, I still would like to see more spending on social programs, including medical care, education, and the like. But I can now see that this was not to be the historical alternative to spending money on NASA. Rather, Americans deplore almost all forms of government spending and resist taxation. The money not spent on space exploration is hardly going to welfare programs.

The moon landing, that can now be viewed on YouTube, briefly united Americans in a shared wonder, but the space program no longer serves that purpose. Nor, it seems, does anything else.