A serious look at the effectiveness of military peacekeeping

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Jason

Essay by Eric Mvukiyehe and Cyrus Samii, Department of Political Science, Columbia University. Read the whole essay, here.

Mvukiyehe and Samii examine tons of past evidence and dig deep with hair splitting analysis to find a way to judge micro-level effects with improved macro-level peace in a country or region. In other words, “peacekeeping deployments create a security environment that enables autonomous socioeconomic and political recovery processes.” vs “socioeconomic and political improvements are a result of direct assistance (e.g. material assistance, sensitization on human rights issues or democracy) provided through peacekeeping operations.”

We [Mvukiyehe and Samii] use original survey data and administrative data to test a theory of the micro-level impacts of peacekeeping. The theory proposes that through the creation of local security bubbles and also through direct assistance, peacekeeping deployments contribute to economic and social revitalization that may contribute to more durable peace. This theory guides the design of current United Nations peacekeeping operations, and has been proposed as one of the explanations for peacekeeping’s well-documented association with more durable peace.

Our evidence paint a complex picture that deviates substantially from the theory. We do not find evidence for local security bubbles around deployment base areas, and we do not find that deployments were substantial contributors to local social infrastructure. In addition, we find a negative relationship between deployment basing locations and NGO contributions to social infrastructure.

Nonetheless, we find that deployments do seem to stimulate local markets, leading to better employment possibilities and substantially higher incomes. The result is something of a puzzle, suggesting that more work needs to be done on other types of direct assistance by peacekeeping contingents–e.g. the impact of mission procurement and routine spending by those associated with the mission. Also, the findings with respect to NGO activities suggest that this is an important factor that past case studies and cross-national studies have not taken into account sufficiently.

I haven’t finished reading it all myself, but I have the remaining pages printed out for tomorrow. My immediate thoughts are this: is peacekeeping judged by preventing another war and peacekept or is it better judged by transforming the affected country/region socially, economically, and politically? Apparently there are more than just a few ways to reach each conclusion.

H/T to Andrew Gelman.

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Bureau of Labor Statistics: August Unemployment reaches 9.6%

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Mike

The latest jobs report has been released and here are the numbers. Here is the overview from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nonfarm payroll employment changed little (-54,000) in August, and the unemployment rate was about unchanged at 9.6 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Government employment fell, as 114,000 temporary workers hired for the decennial census completed their work. Private-sector payroll employment continued to trend up modestly (+67,000). [...] (Source…BLS)

According to the Bureau there were a total of 1.1 million marginally attached to the workforce who had not been counted in the survey. Discouraged workers are persons who are available for employment but have quite looking for work because they feel there are no jobs for them. The actual number of the marginally attached is more like 2.4 million, but the remaining 1.3 million, who are also not counted,  have not looked for work due to “school attendance or family responsibilities.”

Another disturbing trend that caught my eye was the number of part-time workers–8.9 million. I was curious about the last report for unemployment before the bubble popped. I used 2007 as the last metric of a reasonably healthy economic situation since in 2008 employment was up and down. Seasonally adjusted, in Aug. 2007 there were 1.7 million part-time employees. In little over two years we have seen a significant increase of 7.2 million in the part-time ranks. While politicians and pundits are wrapped up in the quantification of the employment situation my attention is starting to also include its quality. Although, part-time work is better than no work,  it hardly keeps the quality of life on even keel. The numbers are indicating a significant addition of workers added to part-time rolls and that is not a good trend at all.

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Hells Bells. Is President Obama considering ‘dreaded’ tax cuts?

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Jason

The Democrats are faltering, collapsing really, ahead of midterm elections. Job reports remain far below expectations and each passing month is a depressing reminder that recovery is still off in the distance. The only thing that has increased in the way of economic news is the Obama administration’s rhetoric about recovery.

Now that  Senate Republicans and a growing number of Democrats are over stimulated, President Obama is seeking to head them all off and call for tax cuts to small businesses in the form of payroll tax cuts and expanding the research and development tax credit. This is expected to be enacted before the midterm elections; however, the bill will have little effect on the economy before voters turnout in November.

Administration officials have struggled to develop new economic policies and an effective message to blunt expected Republican gains in Congress and defuse complaints from Democrats that President Obama is fumbling the issue most important to voters. Following Obama’s vacation and focus on foreign policy in recent weeks, White House advisers have arranged a series of economic events for the president next week, including two trips to swing states and a news conference.

This is the same sort of measures that Republicans have been calling for since last year. Obama and his team of economic advisers inability to jump start the economy – at least put a floor under it — with spending and wild deficits is a failure too big to ignore. This being the case, Obama is forced, however grudgingly, to offer businesses support in the form of tax cuts.

Businesses need the ability to hire, and unemployed workers need confidence that they will be hired. Those are the two main ingredients needed for recovery.

Lefty economists might generally believe that increasing spending is a more efficient way of stimulating consumption than reducing taxes, but they’d almost certainly accept a big tax cut as an almost-as-good substitute. And tax cuts have two big advantages over spending. On the substantive side, they work faster. Spending takes time to work its way through the economy, but a tax cut (for example, a payroll tax holiday) boosts the economy almost immediately. And on the political side it’s quite doable. Republicans would be persuadable because they love tax cuts and Democrats would be persuadable because it would help the economy. For Obama, then, it would be the best of all worlds: a fast stimulus that gets bipartisan support, something that boosts the economy while dampening the inevitable criticism he’d get for blowing up the deficit.

Let’s just hope they hold off on cutting the Bush tax cuts. By cutting them, this would negatively offset any gains or relief offered from payroll tax cuts. Small businesses would simply be hit with another obstacle when they need to be loosened and allow them to ignite a spark towards recovery.

The numbers are clear. According to IRS data, fully 48% of the net income of sole proprietorships, partnerships, and S corporations reported on tax returns went to households with incomes above $200,000 in 2007….

It’s clear that business income for large and small firms will be hit by the higher tax rates. And in point of fact, firms of all sizes contribute to the nation’s prosperity. So it’s a mistake to focus only on the impact of increased tax rates on small business. But will the higher rates actually cause a significant reduction in business activity?

Economic research supports a large impact. A pair of papers by economists Robert Carroll, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Harvey Rosen and Mark Rider that were published in 1998 and 2000 by the National Bureau of Economic Research analyzed tax return data and uncovered high responsiveness of sole proprietors’ business activity to tax rates. Their estimates imply that increasing the top rate to 40.8% from 35% (an official rate of 39.6% plus another 1.2 percentage points from the restoration of a stealth provision that phases out deductions), as in Mr. Obama’s plan, would reduce gross receipts by more than 7% for sole proprietors subject to the higher rate.

Of course this is good news — any sign of life from Obama on the economy is good news – but why wait until September? The summer failed to enter a pro-growth stage despite the promises and predictions from Team O. Is Obama clearing a ideological hurdle? Is he admitting that his firm belief in government guidance has failed? For the sake of the country let us hope so.

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What Alan Simpson really said

Posted on September 3, 2010 by Jeff

The dishonesty of Keith Olbermann is so obvious. He really has become the buffoon of the left.

Exhibit one:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As he so often does, Olbermann ignores the inconvenient context in order to push his left wing politics. The basis for Olbermann’s comments come from an AP piece by Mike Baker. Here’s exhibit two, the relevant part of Baker’s piece, that puts Simpson comments in proper context:

The system that automatically awards disability benefits to some veterans because of concerns about Agent Orange seems contrary to efforts to control federal spending, the Republican co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s deficit commission said Tuesday. Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson’s comments came a day after The Associated Press reported that diabetes has become the most frequently compensated ailment among Vietnam veterans, even though decades of research has failed to find more than a possible link between the defoliant Agent Orange and diabetes.

Of course Olbermann leaves out the point that Simpson was making a fair point. He’s not against vets, he’s against unsubstantiated claims of government responsibility. Baker continues in a follow up:

More Vietnam veterans are being compensated for diabetes than for any other malady, including post-traumatic stress disorder, hearing loss or general wounds. Tens of thousands of other claims for common ailments of age, such as erectile dysfunction, are getting paid as well because of a possible link to Agent Orange. The VA said yesterday it will add heart disease, Parkinson’s disease and leukemia to the list of Agent Orange-related conditions. The new rules will go into effect this fall unless Congress intervenes and could cost $42 billion over the next 10 years.

If we wish to have an honest debate then it will take people like Alan Simpson to point out the obvious: That there’s a good possibility the government is paying compensation benefits that it shouldn’t be paying, and we must stop.

The U.S. government is in a sea of red. If we want to avoid a desperate situation, forced on us by an extreme and necessary fiscal austerity, then we’ve got to remove unjustified spending by the government. This needs to be done across the board and it needs to be done now. Where there’s a legitimate claim the government should fulfil its obligations, especially in those cases with our men and women in uniform. But if honesty plays any part in this debate we’ve got to be willing to call a spade a spade and just say “no.” And this must include veterans who’s claims cannot be substantiated.

While there’s no limit to Olbermann’s dishonest bufoonery there is a limit to how long the government can go on spending money it doesn’t have.  

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Christina Romer admits policy recommendations guided economic analysis

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Jason

Way back when campaign-Obama was assembling his dream team of advisors and his team of rivals, the media was in awe of his choices. The soundness and level headedness of his selections — from academia to hard nosed battle tested policy pols —  supposedly proved that campaign-Obama was to lead a pragmatic, solution-first administration. The choices would lead to the actual working mechanics of his campaign rhetoric in which he would rise above the “smallness of our politics” and take America with him.

Departing chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, unwittingly, and oh so subtly spilled the beans on her real job as an economic “adviser.”

“I will never regret trying to put analysis and quantitative estimates behind our policy recommendations.“ (my emphasis)

So here we see Obama was not leading a pragmatic, solution-first agenda. He had his policy “recommendations” and his economic agenda in the form of the stimulus package that was supposed to buy support and pay for political patronage at least for the next decade.

But the problem is not that Romer did a quantitative analysis; the problem is that the quantitative analysis was wrong.

The outcome should not be at all surprising. When policy preferences lead the agenda, then professional analysis is there only to make sure the policy looks attractive and ready for sale. Equally unsurprising in all of this is Romer’s admission that she and her team were clueless to the causes and fundamentals of the recession and the still yet elusive recovery.

She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn’t have much of an idea about how to fix things.

What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: “Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare.”

The simple reason behind this revelation is this was never her job. The Obama administration and his merry league of Congressional Democrats had a different take on the recession. Mainly, how best to use its negative impacts as away to boost government expenditures,  taxes on energy, takeover of health care, and move government closer, its involvement deeper to Wall Street, unions, and production.

Most of us didn’t need to hear Romer’s truth-telling hour to see how disastrous this administration has been in just a short while.

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Washington Post sees lack of resolve and confidence

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Jeff

Excellent editorial in today’s Washington Post about President Obama’s recent Oval Office speech to the nation.  A must read. As many of us noticed the President’s speech was full of contradiction.

The president sought to assure Iraqis that the United States will remain a committed partner — but he reiterated that “all U.S. troops will leave by the end of next year.” He said that “no challenge is more essential to our security than our fight against al-Qaeda” and vowed to prevent Afghanistan “from again serving as a base for terrorists” — but promised to begin withdrawing troops next August, because “open-ended war serves neither our interests nor the Afghan people’s.” He insisted that “America intends to sustain and strengthen our leadership in this young century” — but then explained that “that effort must begin within our own borders.”

It’s almost as if the President had his speech written by two speech writers entirely opposed to each others views. This confused rhetoric may seem the reality of a post-modern world to the President and his speech writers, but it leaves the rest of us wondering if the President really has any idea what direction he taking us. Can anyone honestly say they’re more confident after the President’s speech? Not if you were paying attention.

At the conclusion of his address, Mr. Obama said that U.S. troops “are the steel in our ship of state” who “give us confidence that our course is true.” But that’s only half-right. The troops may well be “the steel,” and Mr. Obama was more than justified in paying tribute to their accomplishments and sacrifices, in his speech and earlier Tuesday at Fort Bliss, Tex. But the troops don’t set the nation’s course. Resolve and confidence have to come from the top.

 

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Good government should equate to ‘background noise.’

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Mike

Jeff’s latest post provoked a little thought in my otherwise dormant brain bucket. His basic premise was that the our little tinkerers in DC, with all their grandiose ideals, have pushed us to the brink of financial oblivion due to copious amounts of pandering and constant interference. They either lack the ability to reason or are making a conscious choice to ignore the fact that their litany of failed attempts to legislate our way to utopia has been derailed.

This still leaves the question, “What should good governance equate to?” For me it is the equivalent to background noise, quietly existing and constant. What it is not is in your face, screaming, agitating, judging, and trying to be the soundtrack of your life.

Just a thought.

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How trying to social engineer ruined the economy

Posted on August 31, 2010 by Jeff

Did trying to right inequalities in our society bring on the recent financial crisis? Raghuram Rajan, a University of Chicago Professor of Finance, makes a good argument that it did.

Therefore, the political response to rising inequality – whether carefully planned or the path of least resistance – was to expand lending to households, especially low-income households. The benefits – growing consumption and more jobs – were immediate, whereas paying the inevitable bill could be postponed into the future. Cynical as it might seem, easy credit has been used throughout history as a palliative by governments that are unable to address the deeper anxieties of the middle class directly.

Politicians, however, prefer to couch the objective in more uplifting and persuasive terms than that of crassly increasing consumption. In the US, the expansion of home ownership – a key element of the American dream – to low- and middle-income households was the defensible linchpin for the broader aims of expanding credit and consumption.

Professor Rajan captures the issue perfectly. He goes on:

In the end, though, the misguided attempt to push home ownership through credit has left the US with houses that no one can afford and households drowning in debt. Ironically, since 2004, the homeownership rate has been in decline.

The problem, as often is the case with government policies, was not intent. It rarely is. But when lots of easy money pushed by a deep-pocketed government comes into contact with the profit motive of a sophisticated, competitive, and amoral financial sector, matters get taken far beyond the government’s intent.

We have all heard the story now. Our government made credit easy so more low-income people could have homes. In the process our government ruined our economy by extending billions of dollars in government backed loans to people who really couldn’t afford the loans in the first place. All in the name of social engineering. It was the typical mistake of politicians trying to pander and politic instead making the hard, sometimes unpopular, choices that leading requires.

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Republicans take 10 point lead on Gallup’s generic ballot.

Posted on August 30, 2010 by Mike

Is Gallup’s new poll cause for excitement among the ranks of the GOP or just an eyebrow raiser? I am not sure.

Republicans lead by 51% to 41% among registered voters in Gallup weekly tracking of 2010 congressional voting preferences. The 10-percentage-point lead is the GOP’s largest so far this year and is its largest in Gallup’s history of tracking the midterm generic ballot for Congress.[...] (Source…Gallup)

If you’re numerically challenged, like I am sometimes, this tallies to a 10 point Republican lead. According to Gallup this is the highest GOP lead ever. The second was on twin occassions when the GOP went up with a five point lead, taking place in the 2002 and 1994 mid-terms.

Either way, Gallup’s last anomaly–which had the Dems up by six last month–was strange enough. So, forgive me if I don’t jump on the celebratory bandwagon and choose instead to walk a little further under my own power.

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More Mosque Mania

Posted on August 29, 2010 by Jason

It’s everywhere! It’s everywhere! Ground Zero is not nearly the battlefront many suspected. It only garnered the most press considering the location. It has not generated the only reaction. Glenn Greenwald explains: Anti-mosque sentiment rages far from Ground Zero

See my thoughts on the Mosque debate, here.

Arson suspected at Tennessee Mosque

Special Agent Andy Anderson of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told CBS News that the fire destroyed one piece of construction equipment and damaged three others. Gas was poured over the equipment to start the fire, Anderson said.

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Signs the boss may be lying

Posted on August 29, 2010 by Jeff

Jeff Skilling, former president of Enron, had a name for the investor who impolitely questioned Skilling’s optimistic account of Enron’s financial health, and that was “asshole!” Well besides the fact that we now know who the ass really was, we can also, thanks to a recent study by David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina, say such responses may give us some reason to question the boss’s veracity.

In a study for Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Larcker and Zakolyukina examined 30,000 conference calls by American CEOs from 2003 to 2007. As President Obama would say, “words matter,” and so the boss’s (and the President’s) choice of words appear to indeed matter and do tell us something important about the boss.

Consider the following. Does the boss make very general statements about knowledge, such as “as you know,” instead of being more specific? Does the boss use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words,” such as instead of using “good” he uses “fantastic” or maybe, I’ll add, “outstanding.” These emphatic words seem, at least to the boss, more persuasive even if their absolutely BS. Does your boss avoid the use of “I” and opt for the passive voice? Does their speech have fewer tics to it, such as the typical “um” and hesitations and repetitions of casual speech? In other words, does it seem practiced?

Well if your boss has some or all of these benchmarks he may be trying to deceive you. Not that that may be anything new to you. It’s just that now you may have some idea of what to pay attention to. And of course your boss can now read this report and practice maintaining his stumbling, passive, over emotional bloviating in order to more thoroughly deceive you.

Read the Larcker and Zakolyukina study.

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New Orleans Educational Reform: A possible model for the rest of the country.

Posted on August 28, 2010 by Mike

Since the mid to late seventies, and possibly further back, the city of New Orleans’ educational system was one of the most atrocious debacles in America. Obviously, a number of reasons were causal in this development ranging from incompetent politicians,  poverty, to a broken and corrupt educational system.

Reason Magazine just recently presented a video highlighting the successes of the voucher and charter schools presently dominating the educational landscape in NOLA.

If New Orleans keeps up its successful run this could be an effective and successful model for education reform which the rest of the country might be able to look towards for guidance.

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