Denmark on the Brink: The 2011 Election

After the American Century

I do not have a vote in the Danish election, coming up in 36 hours, and as it happens I will not even be in the country when the result is clear late Thursday night. Danes who read this column will already know a great deal about the election, and Americans and other non-Danes will know very little, if anything. So what follows is written to the non-Danes.

Imagine a country which is self-sufficient when it comes to energy, with its own oil fields, and a world leader in wind power as well. So energy is not a drain on the economy, but a profit center. Imagine a country that has a small military whose budget is an extremely small part of the total budget. So this is not a drain on the economy either. Imagine further that the country seldom suffers any massive disasters, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, or tidal waves, so it does not have to spend large sums on rebuilding after natural disasters. Imagine, too, that this country is a net food exporter. It gets even better. Imagine that this country, Denmark, has a positive balance of trade, year after year.

Denmark has all this going for it, yet it still has the world's highest taxes to pay for one of the most extensive and comprehensive welfare states. In many ways. it is a model for the world to emulate. But the bureaucracy just keeps growing and the top down control becomes more and more pronounced. 

All the parties seem to go in for some kind of tight controls. Some want to control the borders and keep the bloody foreigners out. Others want to control the work force and make everyone work longer or retire later. Other parties want to force anyone who is not working to go to university, which is tuition free. There are politicians calling for high taxes on foods that have sugar and or fat, to force people to eat healthier foods. Whatever the problem, at least one party has a compulsory solution. 

The focus of the election is the economy. Even though it is one of the wealthiest per capita countries in the world, with a diversified economy and its own energy supplies, the Danes are telling each other that they are on the brink of disaster. The politicians are warning them that they could soon be like Greece, a miserable bankrupt land, unless certain reforms are immediately adopted. Some parties are saying the taxes must go up, others that they must come down. All say at one time or another that education is a good idea, as we all live in a knowledge economy now. But in fact the schools and universities have been cut back for the most part. 

Does any of this make sense? If you live here and get closer to the debates, it seems to. But the problems here are strictly from Lilliput compared to what Spain or Italy is facing. Likewise, the United States should be so lucky as to have the problems the Danes have.  There are no crazies running around Denmark denying the reality of global warming or Bible thumping idiots who seem to swarm through the Republican Party these days. Abortion is not a campaign issue. No one demands that "creationism" be taught in the schools.

I am caught up in the elections here and have begun to feel my fate hangs in the balance. I am convinced that unless the present government is voted out of office, Denmark's very existence as a functioning economy may be threatened. Let me go further: keep the present government much longer and this place will become a theme park, with locals playing parts for tourists, while all the real jobs are off-shore. 

I exaggerate. But the election does matter. If the current government stays in power, it will continue the reverse Robin Hood policies that take money from unemployed and poor people and give it to the wealthiest third of society. If they stay in power, the country will become more xenophobic, which means guys like me won't want to come any more. If the present government stays in power, there will be no new ideas. They have been in power for ten years now, and haven't had a new thought since about 2005.

The polls say that Denmark is on the brink of change. So I hope.
UPDATE for non-Danish readers. The parties on the left did win, and will need more than a week to work out how to share power among the four party coalition that together has a small majority. 

The World Before (and After) 9/11

After the American Century

I now teach students who were as young as nine or ten years old in 2001. For them, 9/11 is not only a defining moment, and one of their earliest historical memories, but also the horizon of their personal historical knowledge. Few events before then registered, because they were just too young. Their world essentially is the world since that September morning, or afternoon, as it was here in Europe. 

So much has been said and written about that time, including several MA theses that I directed, that I am not going to try to say something profound in addition. But I want to recall the decade before the attacks, not to idealize it, but nevertheless to emphasize the qualities of the 1990s that were snuffed out. The decade between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 was a period of ebullience and considerable hope. There was plenty of hype, too, notably the breathless enthusiasm for the "new economy." But even so, it was a time of prosperity in the US and Western Europe and of rapid growth in many other economies. It also saw the widespread adoption of email, the advent of the World Wide Web, and the globalization of business, information, and shared experiences.

There were bad things happening in the 1990s, too, but the fundamental feel of the time was completely different than the decade that followed, the "flat decade" as I have called it elsewhere in this column. As we pass this milestone, I sense the tides of pessimism, fundamentally about economics, but contributing in turn to an undertow of right-wing or even anti-democratic politics. I hope I am wrong about that. 

In talking to my students, I realize that the 1990s are their childhood, and not much of a repository of political or historical experience. How ingrained in their fundamental sense of the world are today's often harsh political rhetoric, the fear of terrorist attack, and the continued economic uncertainty? 

How strange to think that half a century ago it seemed obvious to most people that future prosperity was assured, that most people would not work more than 25 or 30 hours a week, that they would retire early, and that the great problem of the future would be how to use all the leisure time. Now almost all economists and politicians seem to agree on just the opposite: that future prosperity is by no means assured, that people need to work 38 or more hours a week, that they should not be allowed to retire early but keep on until they are 67 or more, and that the great problem of the future will be the shortage of workers.

Quite possibly the future we read about in the newspapers will be just as inaccurate as the one imagined in 1961. Quite possibly, fifty years after 9/11, it will seem less a defining moment than an interruption in some larger arc of history. So remember it we must, but we should not let it cut us off from the hopes and dreams it has displaced.

Historical Document: A "White" Slave in 1862

After the American Century

Occasionally I find an interesting document while doing my research. Often it has nothing to do with what I am looking for. But rather than let these documents go entirely, I will now reproduce selected items from time to time. The first one is from the Davenport Daily Gazette, Iowa, during the American Civil War.  It concerns slavery, and as one can see from the accompanying map, the slave concerned was living in the cotton growing area of Arkansas.

Slave crops, 1860

Monday Morning
September 1, 1862

White Slavery.

A Correspondent writing from Helena, Arkansas, says:

I was greatly surprised the other day by the declaration of a person with whom I had been conversing in the post office of this place, when, in reply to a suggestion of mine about his loyalty, he answered, “Why, my dear Sir, I am a slave. I belong to Dr.____,” I looked in his face, unable to believe my own eyes. His complexion was whiter than my own; his eyes a blue gray; his hair and features Caucasian; his language free from Negro dialect. I asked him again, “Is it possible that you are a slave? Why don’t you go North and claim the privileges of a free man?” He answered, I have a wife and children, and I don’t want to go till I can take them with me. I have been allowed by my master to enjoy a measure of freedom, and to possess a little property of my own. As soon as I can realize something of this property I intend, while the opportunity exists, to secure the freedom of myself and family.”

Our conversation had commenced upon a written document which he had been showing me, and which he could read as well a myself. When he left me I wondered greatly that such a man, at least 40 years of age, evidently a gentleman and a Christian, could be held a slave, and another white man be allowed to take his wages for naught in a Christian community. And then I remembered that the modern doctrine of the South, as taught by the Richmond Enquirer and other expounders of the system, is that slavery is not based upon complexion or race, but that capital should own labor, and the best condition of society is that in which the entire laboring population are slaves. This is the doctrine on which the leaders of this rebellion are striving to establish a Southern Confederacy, and thousands of laboring men in the South are blindly led to give it their aid by fighting against the Government of their fathers from mere sectional hatred and prejudice.

            When the rebellion shall be crushed and the South opened to free institutions and a higher civilization, the people who will be most benefited by the change are those who are now, by conscription and ignorance, arrayed in battle against us. May God speed the day when their eyes shall be opened, and they shall be able to discern between light and darkness!

Finding James Dudley Gray in History

After the American Century

We live life forward, enjoying what moments we can, but history gets written backward, and a major event tends to be read into the years before it occurred.

I was forcibly reminded of this when beginning to read a collection of letters I have in my possession, written in the nineteenth century. They are American letters, composed by one James Dudley Gray, born in eastern Ohio. He began to write to his favorite cousin in 1842 and sent her at least one letter each year until the Civil War began. In 1850 he moved to Iowa, which was then the frontier, and settled half way between the towns of Washington and Sigourney

It is hard to read these letters today in the same spirit that they were written. The author did not know that he would go into the Civil War as an assistant surgeon and treat casualties of the fighting in Vicksburg and other battles up and down the Mississippi. Even more frustrating for me, the modern reader, the letters cease in 1861 and I have nothing more from his pen about the war or anything else, even though he lived for another thirty years.

Yet James D. Gray was a highly literate man, who quoted Thomas Carlyle and occasional poems in his letters. He spent some years working for newspapers in Ohio, and possessed an uncommonly high level of literacy and more than the usual political engagement. One of his sons, Charles Gray, was so accomplished a painter that two of his portraits hang in the halls of Congress in Washington, DC.

Charles Gray, portrait of Joseph Warren Keifer

As far as I can tell from preliminary research, James D. Gray has been completely forgotten by posterity, one of the millions of men and women who settled in the American west during the nineteenth century. Yet it seems to me inconceivable that someone who wrote over 100 pages to just one correspondent left no other records anywhere. With luck, I hope to recreate his life right up to his passing, apparently in 1894.

Students Should Worry Less about their Careers

After the American Century

The academic year is beginning again, with more students than ever seeking university education. The immediate lack of jobs and worries about careers have become a constant refrain in the media, which at the same time tell us that there are not enough young people to do all the jobs that will be vacated by retirement.

Logically, the new students should not worry, because the demographics say that there have to be jobs for every one of them. Logically, they should just study what they love, and trust that a good position will be there for them later.

But we do not live in logical times, we live in panicky times, when politicians and economists say many contradictory things. Logically, the young will be desperately needed in the European and American job markets as the baby-boomers retire. But the megaphones, loud speakers and teleprompters belong not to the young but to the middle-aged, supervised by the generation about to retire. These people are worried about both the high rate of unemployment right now and the coming shortage of workers at all levels.

The students are all in a rush to find a practical career and a safe job, as though high unemployment were a permanent situation, as though job security will be difficult to attain in the future. But logically, this should not be the case. Logically, the young should not worry so much, and instead make sure they find a career that they really will enjoy.

When I look back at my own experience, it was just the opposite. I went to college at a time of prosperity and no one worried very much about what our education would be used for. We probably should have been more worried, because we were the baby-boomers, i.e. we were too many. Even so, for the most part it worked out.

Statistically, well over 90% of people with a university education do have jobs, and on average they make good money.  The problem is not getting a job, it is getting one you like.

Spend Your Foreign Currency and Help the World Economy

After the American Century

Times are bad, so it is time to use all the resources that consumers have at their fingertips. According to a Danish news story, the average home here has about $250 in foreign currency lying around. Rather than exchange euros, dollars, and other money back into Danish kroner, people just hang on to it until they travel again. In good times, this might not seem important. But imagine the economic effect if all this money were spent right now?

Assume that the c. 100 million American homes have just $50 each in foreign currency in their desks and piggy banks. If they could be convinced to spend it all, this would suddenly pump 5 billion dollars into the economy. The government could encourage this to happen. Exhortation might not be enough, but what if banks were given an incentive to reduce their profit-making on exchange rates (into dollars, not out of dollars to other currencies) for a period of just one month. Through that window of opportunity, billions of dollars could pour into the economy.

This idea would strengthen the dollar, at least for a short while, and it would stimulate the economy. After that, we can have a worldwide search for money forgotten in old clothing or under the sofa cushions.

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.