Tag-arkiv: Europa

Genetisk lighed i Europa

Af Christian Bjørnskov · Udgivet 17. august 2008 · 5 svar

Punditokraterne skriver mest om økonomi og politik, men hvis noget er tilstrækkeligt spændende, dækker vi det selvfølgelig også. Og i lørdagens Dagens Nyheter var der netop sådan et emne. Under overskriften ”Svenskar genetiskt närmast nordtyskar” kunne DG fortælle, at et hold på 21 forskere havde undersøgt, hvor genetisk ens, europæerne i virkeligheden er. Artiklen, der er udkommet i tidsskriftet Current Biology, kan læses her.

Svaret på spørgsmålet er selvfølgelig, at vi er vældigt ens, men de forskelle der er, følger ikke altid almindelige landegrænser. Holdet har set på 3 millioner pladser i DNA-sekvensen, og konkluderer allerførst, at forskellene mellem europæerne bliver større, når man bevæger sig i syd-nord retning, end hvis man bevæger sig øst-vest. Så ja, lige så vel som ‘vi’ i Nordeuropa er kulturelt forskellige fra sydeuropæerne, er vi også genetisk anderledes, selvom de forskelle er små. Forskerholdet konkluderer også i fagtermer, at ” mean  heterozygosity was larger, and mean linkage disequilibrium smaller, in southern than in northern European subpopulations”, hvilket betyder noget i retning af, at de sydeuropæiske befolkninger også internt har større genetiske forskelle end vi har.

Den mest bemærkelsesværdige forskel, forskerne finder, er at finnerne genetisk er markant anderledes end resten af europæerne – ungarerne inklusive, som de ellers deler sprogstamme med. Den sjoveste forskel – i hvert fald i svenske øjne – er derimod at svenskerne genetisk er tættere på nordtyskerne end på danskere og nordmænd. Så på den pudsigste vis kan man lidt groft sige, at svenskerne ikke bare kulturelt synes at være Nordens tyskere – lidt stivere, lidt mere alvorlige og med lidt anderledes humor end danskere og nordmænd – men at de faktisk er lidt mere anderledes end de af os, hvis forfædre hyggede sig på de britiske øer og i Frankrig for tusinde år siden. Det er da lidt sjovt.

Europe’s Philosophy of Failure

Af Niels Westy Munch-Holbek · Udgivet 6. januar 2008 · 4 svar

På baggrund af sin forskning i amerikansk, fransk og tysk skolebogsmateriale og curricula, konstaterer Stefan Theil – tidligere Fellow ved the German Marshall Fund og nuværende economic editor ved Newsweek – i en artikel fra det seneste nummer af Foreign Policy , at:

“In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe’s economies prosper or continue to be left behind”

I Franske gymnasier lærer eleverne f.eks. at:

”Globalisation implies subjugation of the world to the market, which constitutes a real cultural danger”

mens tyske børn undervises i, at

”The worldwide call for more deregulation in reality means a grab for the material lifeblood of the modern nation-state”

Og hvad skal man sige til følgende opgave i en tysk matematikbog:

”a bread roll cost 40 cents. For the wheat that went into it, the farmer received less than 2 cents. What do you think about that?

Desværre kender jeg ikke det autoriserede tyske svar på ovenstående ligning – det ville ellers være interessant.

Franske gymnasieelever kan også muntre sig med at

“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,”

0g

“The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues. Because the 21st century begins with “an awareness of the limits to growth and the risks posed to humanity [by economic growth],” any future prosperity “depends on the regulation of capitalism on a planetary scale.”

Som det tørt bemærkes er eksemplerne fra skolebøger pupbliseret i 2005 og ikke 1972.

Så mens europæerne hovedrystende kan følge med i, at man i USA slås om hvorvidt der skal undervises i Darvins lære, og om creationisme skal indgå i biologi undervisningen, så undervises der samtidig i den særlige europæiske version af creationisme, hvor markedet er ugudeligt, staten er god og individuel velstand er til fare for ikke kun menneskeheden, men hele kloden.

Herhjemme er økonomi primært et undertema i samfundsfag, og der er næppe grund til at tro, at niveauet adskiller sig i synderlig grad fra de tyske og franske eksempler – men det er nok næppe heller særligt overraskende.

Skolesystemet har jo fra start af haft en vigtig opgave i at indoktrinere eleverne – i gamle dage rettet mod at opretholde idealerne om Gud, konge og fædreland, nu om dage måske mere om at opretholde idealer som økonomisk lighed, velfærdsstat og demokratiske processer som det eneste sagliggørende.

Stefan Theil bemærker andetsteds i sin artikel, at

“French students, on the other hand, do not learn economics so much as a very specific, highly biased discourse about economics. When they graduate, they may not know much about supply and demand, or about the workings of a corporation. Instead, they will likely know inside-out the evils of “la McDonaldisation du monde” and the benefits of a “Tobin tax” on the movement of global capital. This kind of anticapitalist, antiglobalization discourse isn’t just the product of a few aging 1968ers writing for Le Monde Diplomatique; it is required learning in today’s French schools”

Og selv om det måske ikke står helt så galt til herhjemme, så er det næppe langt fra. Det er de færreste danske børn der stifter bekendtskab med begreber som udbud og efterspørgsel, betydningen af økonomiske incitamenter og andre “væmmelige” begreber fra den “stygge” økonomiske videnskabs værktøjkasse for begyndere – ja, hvis børnenes viden alene kommer fra deres skolegang er det ikke engang sikkert at de er klar over,hvor staten har dens indtægter fra.

Liberalisér eller forfald!

Af Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard · Udgivet 26. november 2006 · Skriv et svar

Den kendte italienske økonom, Harvard-professoren Alberto Alesina er nu (sammen med kollegaen Francesco Giavazzi) på banen med en bog, der ser spændende ud og forhåbentlig vil blive læst, The Future of Europe: Reform or Decline.  Jeg har ikke selv læst den, men sammenfatningen ser ihvertfald lovende ud:

“This work presents a provocative argument that unless Europe takes serious action soon, its economic and political decline is unavoidable, and a clear statement of the steps Europe must take before it’s too late. Unless Europe takes action soon, its further economic and political decline is almost inevitable, economists Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi write in this provocative book. Without comprehensive reform, continental Western Europe’s overprotected, overregulated economies will continue to slow – and its political influence will become negligible. This doesn’t mean that Italy, Germany, France, and other now-prosperous countries will become poor; their standard of living will remain comfortable. But, they will become largely irrelevant on the world scene. In “The Future of Europe”, Alesina and Giavazzi (themselves Europeans) outline the steps that Europe must take to prevent its economic and political eclipse. Europe, the authors say, has much to learn from the market liberalism of America. Europeans work less and vacation more than Americans; they value job stability and security above all. Americans, Alesina and Giavazzi argue, work harder and longer and are more willing to endure the ups and downs of a market economy. Europeans prize their welfare states; Americans abhor government spending. America is a melting pot; European countries – witness the November 2005 unrest in France – have trouble absorbing their immigrant populations. If Europe is to arrest its decline, Alesina and Giavazzi warn, it needs to adopt something closer to the American free-market model for dealing with these issues. Alesina and Giavazzi’s prescriptions for how Europe should handle worker productivity, labor market regulation, globalization, support for higher education and technology research, fiscal policy, and its multiethnic societies are sure to stir controversy, as will their eye-opening view of the European Union and the euro. But their wake-up call will ring loud and clear for anyone concerned about the future of Europe and the global economy.”

Omvendt kan man jo også blot sige som dagbladet Politiken og et par hundrede danske akademikere (eller flere): Hvorfor lave om på noget, der går så godt, som det gør–vi lider jo ikke af amerikanske tilstande … ;-)

Har Europa en fremtid?

Af David Gress · Udgivet 30. oktober 2006 · 15 svar

Blandt andre store emner er om Europa (i genkendelig forstand og defineret som noget værdifuldt) har en fremtid.  Vores allesammens Mark Steyn har netop udgivet en bog, der siger nej (europæere formerer sig ikke og er hastigt på vej til at erstattes af muslimer), som jeg vil vende tilbage til.

Her vil jeg lægge ud med at henvise til en diskussion fra tidlige iår på Cato Unbound, hvor Theodore Dalrymple (= Anthony Daniels) bl.a. havde dette at sige:

a pall of doom does currently overhang Europe. In retrospect, the Twentieth Century may be considered Europe's melancholy, long withdrawing roar (to adapt Matthew Arnold's description of the decline of religion) … Europe's loss of power, influence and importance continues to this day; and however much one's material circumstances may have improved (just take a look at photographs of daily life in France or Britain in the 1950s and compare them to daily life there today), it is always unpleasant, and creates a sense of deep existential unease, to live in a country perpetually in decline, even if that decline is merely relative.

Combined with this is the fact that most European populations experience a profound feeling of impotence in the face of their own immovable political elites … This feeling of impotence is not because of any lack of intelligence or astuteness on the part of the populations in question: if you wanted to know why there was so much youth unemployment in France, you would not ask the Prime Minister, M. Dominque de Villepin, but the vastly more honest and clear-headed village plumber or carpenter, who would give you many precise and convincing reasons why no employer in his right mind would readily take on a new and previously untried young employee. Indeed, it would take a certain kind of intelligence, available only to those who have undergone a lot of formal education, not to be able to work it out.

Så kommer han til sagens kerne som jeg fremhæver a propos mit tidligere indlæg idag om tryghed og risiko.  Altså, at Jacob Hacker kan have ret, men svaret er ikke "flexicurity" eller velfærdssamfundets illusion af tryghed kombineret med spild og dårlig, dårlig værdi for pengene:

The principal motor of Europe's current decline is, in my view, its obsession with social security, which has created rigid social and economic systems that are extremely resistant to change. And this obsession with social security is in turn connected with a fear of the future: for the future has now brought Europe catastrophe and relative decline for more than a century.

What exactly is it that Europeans fear, given that their decline has been accompanied by an unprecedented increase in absolute material well-being? An open economy holds out more threat to them than promise: they believe that the outside world will bring them not trade and wealth, but unemployment and a loss of comfort .. the more … other nations advance relative to themselves, the more necessary does protection seem to them. A vicious circle is thus set up.

In the process of course, the state is either granted or arrogates to itself (or, of course, both) ever-greater powers. A bureaucratic monster is created that takes on a life of its own, that is not only uneconomic but anti-economic, and that can be reformed only at the cost of social unrest that politicians naturally wish to avoid. Inertia intermittently punctuated by explosion is therefore the most likely outcome …

The dependent population does not like the state and its agents, indeed they hate them, but they soon come to fear the elimination of their good offices even more. They are like drug addicts who know that the drug that they take is not good for them, and hate the drug dealer from whom they obtain their drug, but cannot face the supposed pains of withdrawal. And what is true of Britain is true, with a few exceptions, everywhere else in Europe.

In the name of social justice, personal and sectional interest has become all-powerful, paralyzing all attempts to maximize collective endeavor … The goal of everyone is to parasitize everyone else, or to struggle for as large a slice of the economic cake as possible …

But there are other threats to Europe. The miserabilist view of the European past, in which achievement on a truly stupendous scale is disregarded in favor of massacre, oppression and injustice, deprives the population of any sense of pride or tradition to which it might contribute or which might be worth preserving …

This loss of cultural confidence is particularly important at a time of mass immigration from very alien cultures … If the host nation is so lacking in cultural confidence that it does not even make familiarity with the national language a condition of citizenship (as has been until recently the case in Great Britain), it is hardly surprising that integration does not proceed very far.

The problem is multiplied when a rigid labor market is capable of creating large castes of people who are unemployed and might well remain so for the whole of their adult lives. To the bitterness caused by economic uselessness will then be added, or rather be multiplied by, the bitterness of cultural separation. In the case of Islam this is particularly dangerous, because the mixture of an awareness of inferiority on the one hand, and superiority on the other, is historically a very combustible one.

Anne Applebaum forsøgte i sit svar at finde nogle lyspunkter:

I'm going to .. list three factors which could, over the next decade, help reverse Europe's course …

The first, and probably most serious problem Europe faces is a dearth of political leaders who have not only identified the source of the economic problems—the regulation, the over-extended state, the absence of entrepreneurship—but also have ideas about how to fix them, and know how to sell those ideas to the public. To put it differently: Most of Europe is still waiting for its Margaret Thatcher. Most of Europe still doesn't have serious, economically liberal, center-right political leaders who win elections, and who present economic opportunity, economic choice, and economic freedom as positive, not terrifying.

This is not to say that there could never be such leaders. Portugal—not a country known for its libertarianism—did recently produce a free-market government (or freer-market government; these things are relative). So did Denmark.

(Pause.  Kynisk latter, som går over i frustreret gråd).

…

The second thing missing in "old" Europe is an acknowledgment of the possibilities presented by the new members of the European Union … But—as with everything else—the expansion of Europe has led not to a sense of victory, or a perception that Western ideals were vindicated, but more fear: The Polish plumbers will take our jobs, the Lithuanian construction workers will put ours out of business …

Maybe the rapid expansion of European markets for goods and labor will jump-start the flagging economies of the West. Or maybe—alas it's possible—Western Europe will bribe the best easterners with EU jobs and scholarships, and convert them into negative, fearful Euro-statists before anyone has even had a chance to notice that it's happening.

Finally, Europeans need to ditch their increasingly bizarre obsession with the evil United States. I realize that the current virulence of European anti-Americanism is in some senses an accident, the product of the election of G
eorge W. Bush (whom Europe
ans hated even before Iraq), the events of Sept. 11, the war, and truly terrible American diplomacy. But it's becoming a problem for Europe now too. Relatively mild free-market reforms—privatization, lower taxes, de-centralization—can be skewered, in Europe, if opponents simply refer to them as "too American." Without a sense of solidarity among Western countries—all of the Western countries—it's impossible to construct a coherent response to Islamic radicalism either.

Det er der sgutte megen trøst i.

Hvad mener I?  Er vi enige med Henryk Broder i Berlin, som ligeud siger, at "den der elsker friheden må forlade Europa"?   Hvad anbefaler vi vore børn?  Eller tror vi for alvor og dybt inde, at vi og de stadig har et nogenlunde fungerende rets- og velfærdssamfund (i ordentlig forstand, ikke i Foghs) om 20 år?  30?

Litteraturen om dette emne vokser eksplosivt, og jeg vil fra tid til anden bringe indlæg om den.  Intet forekommer mig faktisk vigtigere.

EU's plan: Undgå nye forhandlinger

Af Christian Bjørnskov · Udgivet 20. september 2006 · 12 svar

I juli brød frihandelsforhandlingerne i Verdenshandelsorganisationen WTO endeligt sammen. Og selvom man selvfølgelig kan skyde skylden for det på mage forskellige lande – ingen er udskyldsrene – var EU hovedskurken i det spil (se her). Da forhandlingsrunden fra starten så lovende ud for en række fattige lande – og forbrugere over hele verden! – forsøger flere lande for tiden at redde den såkaldte Doha-runde ved at file på egne og andres forslag.

Med Australien i spidsen har Cairns-gruppen – en gruppe af 18 både rige og fattige fødevareeksporterende lande – foreslået at USA skærer fem milliarder dollars af deres landbrugsstøtte, og at EU forbedrer deres udspil på toldområdet med fem procent. WTO-chefen Pascal Lamy har bredt set støttet forslaget offentligt, som er blevet kendt under navnet "the five and five idea".

Og hvordan reagerede EU så? Unionens chefforhandler og handelskommissær Peter Mandelson afviste planen som 'undoable' og sagde i et interview med The Australian Financial Review, at det ville være at kræve for meget af EU, der allerede – efter hans mening – har gjort mere end man kunne forvente. I en tale i Berlin den 18. september forleden forklarede Mandelson derimod, at EU er stærkt positiv overfor det multilaterale handelssystem i WTO, og således forsøgte at lave flere frihandelsaftaler. Pudsigt nok er de alle bilaterale – altså aftaler mellem et meget stærkt EU og enkelte ulande eller smågrupper af dem. Hvor er det multilaterale i det? Og man kan spørge, hvor frihandelen er? De aftaler, jeg har set indtil videre, er i hvert fald fulde af undtagelser og skjulte barrierer, så det 'frie' i 'frihandel' er til at overse.

For en der har fulgt forhandlingerne siden de gik i gang i 2001, er det i stigende grad klart, at EU's plan i første omgang var, at Doha-runden ikke skulle føre til noget konkret. Den plan lykkedes i og for sig da runde brød sammen. Nu er planen så åbenbart at forhindre, at der kommer nye forhandlinger i gang til fordel for fattige lande og forbrugere overalt. Verden er virkelig af lave for tiden, når en franskmand står i spidsen – og gør et godt job der – for at liberalisere verdenshandlen, mens en brite agerer talsmand og forsvarer for et planøkonomisk system, der havde gjort Beria stolt.