Was America’s Prosperity an Accident of History? By Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

The Blip. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells. New York Magazine, July 21, 2013. Also here.

What if everything we’ve come to think of as American is predicated on a freak coincidence of economic history? And what if that coincidence has run its course?

 

Why Innovation Won’t Save Us. By Robert J. Gordon. Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2012.

Robert Gordon: The death of innovation, the end of growth. Video. TED. Filmed February 2013, posted April 2013. YouTube. Summary by Ben Lillie.




Erik Brynjolfsson: The key to growth? Race with the machines. Video. TED. Filmed February 2013, posted April 2013. YouTube. Summary by Kate Torgovnick.




Debate: Erik Brynjolfsson and Robert J. Gordon at TED2013. By Thu-Huong Ha. TED, February 26, 2013. Video at YouTube.




Are robots hurting job growth? Video. 60 Minutes. CBS News, January 13, 2013. YouTube. YouTube.




Excerpts from Race Against the Machines. By Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. The Atlantic, October 24- 26, 2011. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

The Jobs Crisis: Bigger Than You Think. By Walter Russell Mead. NJBR, May 10, 2013.

The Jobs Question: Work Is a Human Right. By Walter Russell Mead. NJBR, May 16, 2013.

Job Creation in the Information Technology Age. By Walter Russell Mead. NJBR, May 22, 2013.


Gordon:

For more than a century, the U.S. economy grew robustly thanks to big inventions; those days are gone.

 

Nothing has been more central to America’s self-confidence than the faith that robust economic growth will continue forever. Between 1891 and 2007, the nation achieved a robust 2% annual growth rate of output per person. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests to me that future economic growth will achieve at best half that historic rate. The old rate allowed the American standard of living to double every 35 years; for most people in the future that doubling may take a century or more.

 

The growth of the past century wasn’t built on manna from heaven. It resulted in large part from a remarkable set of inventions between 1875 and 1900. These started with Edison’s electric light bulb (1879) and power station (1882), making possible everything from elevator buildings to consumer appliances. Karl Benz invented the first workable internal-combustion engine the same year as Edison’s light bulb.

 

This narrow time frame saw the introduction of running water and indoor plumbing, the greatest event in the history of female liberation, as women were freed from carrying literally tons of water each year. The telephone, phonograph, motion picture and radio also sprang into existence. The period after World War II saw another great spurt of invention, with the development of television, air conditioning, the jet plane and the interstate highway system.

 

The profound boost that these innovations gave to economic growth would be difficult to repeat. Only once could transport speed be increased from the horse (6 miles per hour) to the Boeing 707 (550 mph). Only once could outhouses be replaced by running water and indoor plumbing. Only once could indoor temperatures, thanks to central heating and air conditioning, be converted from cold in winter and hot in summer to a uniform year-round climate of 68 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

As the impact of the late-19th-century inventions faded away around 1970, the computer revolution took over and allowed the economy to remain on our historic path of 2% annual growth. Computers replaced human labor and thus contributed to productivity, but the bulk of these benefits came early in the Electronics Era. In the 1960s, mainframe computers churned out bank statements and telephone bills, reducing clerical labor. In the 1970s, memory typewriters replaced repetitive retyping by armies of legal clerks. In the 1980s, PCs with word-wrap were introduced, as were ATMs that replaced bank tellers and bar-code scanning that replaced retail workers.

 

The climax was the marriage of communications to the computer as the Internet arose in the 1990s. Amazon.com was founded in 1994, Google  in 1998 and Wikipedia in 2001. Since 2002, though, most computer-related inventions have resulted not in fundamental transformation but in miniaturization, as with hand-held devices like the iPhone, which combines the pre-2002 functions of laptops and early cellphones.

 

Innovation continues apace today, and many of those developing and funding new technologies recoil with disbelief at my suggestion that we have left behind the era of truly important changes in our standard of living.

 

The first response from skeptics always involves health care. They believe that medical research, especially on the genome, promises to achieve enormous advances in the treatment of diseases. But the new techniques often fail to deliver. One recent study, for instance, demonstrated that high-cost proton-beam treatment for prostate cancer yields no better results than old-fashioned radiation therapy.

 

Pharmaceutical research appears to be entering a phase of diminishing returns. Developing new drugs is increasingly expensive, and the potential pool of beneficiaries is ever smaller, mainly people with esoteric types of cancer. Few of the medical optimists acknowledge a stark historical fact: The rate of improvement in U.S. life expectancy was three times higher in the first half of the 20th century than in the second.

 

The fracking revolution and soaring oil and gas production have also excited optimists. But this isn’t a source of future economic growth; it merely holds off future economic decline. Over the past decade, the economy has been burdened by oil prices between $50 and $150 per barrel, which have sapped purchasing power available for nonenergy consumption. Holding these prices at bay is progress, to be sure, but it can’t compare to the 1960s, when “See the U.S.A. in your Chevrolet” became ever more possible along an expanding interstate highway system when gasoline cost 25 cents a gallon.

 

Another claim by the growth optimists is that 3-D printing and micro-robots will revolutionize manufacturing. This is an old story, told in one form or another since the first industrial robot was introduced by General Motors in 1961. Manufacturing productivity, driven by robots and other machines has been healthy throughout the postwar era, even in the past half-decade. But manufacturing’s share of the economic pie has inexorably shrunk, from 28% in 1953 to 11% in 2010. That sector of the economy is performing a marvelous ballet, on a shrinking stage.

 

Can economic growth be saved by Google’s driverless car? This is bizarre ground for optimism, but it is promoted not just by Google's Eric Schmidt but by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Erik Brynjolfsson. People are in cars to go somewhere, whether from home to work or from home to shop. Once they are inside the car, there is relatively little difference between driving the car on their own or having it drive itself. Greater safety? Auto fatalities per million miles traveled have already declined by a factor of 10 since 1950.

 

In setting out the case for pessimism, I have been accused by some of a failure of imagination. New inventions always introduce new modes of growth, and history provides many examples of doubters who questioned future benefits. But I am not forecasting an end to innovation, just a decline in the usefulness of future inventions in comparison with the great inventions of the past.

 

Even if we assume that innovation produces a cornucopia of wonders beyond my expectations, the economy still faces formidable headwinds. The retirement of the baby boomers and the continuing exodus of prime-age males from the labor force, sometimes called the “missing fifth,” are reducing hours worked per member of the population. American educational attainment continues to slide ever-downward in the international league tables, due to cost inflation at our universities, $1 trillion in student loans, abysmal test scores and large numbers of high-school dropouts.

 

And inequality in America will continue to grow, driven by poor educational outcomes at the bottom and the rewards of globalization at the top, as American CEOs reap the benefits of multinational sales to emerging markets. From 1993 to 2008, income growth among the bottom 99% of earners was 0.5 points slower than the economy's overall growth rate. If future output grows, as I expect, at a rate of just 1% a year, that means the overwhelming majority of Americans will see their incomes grow just 0.5% annually.

 

The future of American economic growth is dismal, and policy solutions are elusive. Skeptics need to come up with a better rebuttal.

The Decline of the Civil-Rights Establishment. By Shelby Steele.

The Decline of the Civil-Rights Establishment. By Shelby Steele. Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2013. Also here.

Black leaders weren’t so much outraged at injustice as they were by the disregard of their own authority.

Shelby Steele: Zimmerman Verdict Demonstrates How the Civil-Rights Establishment Has Lost Its Juice. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, July 22, 2013.


Steele:

The verdict that declared George Zimmerman not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin was a traumatic event for America's civil-rights establishment, and for many black elites across the media, government and academia. When you have grown used to American institutions being so intimidated by the prospect of black wrath that they invent mushy ideas like “diversity” and “inclusiveness” simply to escape that wrath, then the crisp reading of the law that the Zimmerman jury displayed comes as a shock.

 

On television in recent weeks you could see black leaders from every background congealing into a chorus of umbrage and complaint. But they weren’t so much outraged at a horrible injustice as they were affronted by the disregard of their own authority. The jury effectively said to them, “You won’t call the tune here. We will work within the law.”

 

Today’s black leadership pretty much lives off the fumes of moral authority that linger from its glory days in the 1950s and ’60s. The Zimmerman verdict lets us see this and feel a little embarrassed for them. Consider the pathos of a leadership that once transformed the nation now lusting for the conviction of the contrite and mortified George Zimmerman, as if a stint in prison for him would somehow assure more peace and security for black teenagers everywhere. This, despite the fact that nearly one black teenager a day is shot dead on the South Side of Chicago—to name only one city—by another black teenager.

 

This would not be the first time that a movement begun in profound moral clarity, and that achieved greatness, waned away into a parody of itself—not because it was wrong but because it was successful. Today’s civil-rights leaders have missed the obvious: The success of their forbearers in achieving social transformation denied to them the heroism that was inescapable for a Martin Luther King Jr. or a James Farmer or a Nelson Mandela. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did in 1965, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a maelstrom of police dogs and billy clubs. That America is no longer here (which is not to say that every trace of it is gone).

 

The Revs. Jackson and Sharpton have been consigned to a hard fate: They can never be more than redundancies, echoes of the great men they emulate because America has changed. Hard to be a King or Mandela today when your monstrous enemy is no more than the cherubic George Zimmerman.

 

Why did the civil-rights leadership use its greatly depleted moral authority to support Trayvon Martin? This young man was, after all, no Rosa Parks—a figure of indisputable human dignity set upon by the rank evil of white supremacy. Trayvon threw the first punch and then continued pummeling the much smaller Zimmerman. Yes, Trayvon was a kid, but he was also something of a menace. The larger tragedy is that his death will come to very little. There was no important principle or coherent protest implied in that first nose-breaking punch. It was just dumb bravado, a tough-guy punch.

 

The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon’s cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America’s inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural “truth” that is the sole source of the leadership’s dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership’s very reason for being.

 

The purpose of today’s civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism. This idea of victimization is an example of what I call a “poetic truth.” Like poetic license, it bends the actual truth in order to put forward a larger and more essential truth—one that, of course, serves one’s cause. Poetic truths succeed by casting themselves as perfectly obvious: “America is a racist nation”; “the immigration debate is driven by racism”; “Zimmerman racially stereotyped Trayvon.” And we say, “Yes, of course,” lest we seem to be racist. Poetic truths work by moral intimidation, not reason.

 

In the Zimmerman/Martin case the civil-rights establishment is fighting for the poetic truth that white animus toward blacks is still such that a black teenager—Skittles and ice tea in hand—can be shot dead simply for walking home. But actually this establishment is fighting to maintain its authority to wield poetic truth—the authority to tell the larger society how it must think about blacks, how it must respond to them, what it owes them and, then, to brook no argument.

 

The Zimmerman/Martin tragedy has been explosive because it triggered a fight over authority. Who gets to say what things mean—the supporters of George Zimmerman, who say he acted in self-defense, or the civil-rights establishment that says he profiled and murdered a black child? Here we are. And where is the authority to resolve this? The six-person Florida jury, looking carefully at the evidence, decided that Mr. Zimmerman pulled the trigger in self-defense and not in a fury of racial hatred.

 

And here, precisely at the point of this verdict, is where all of America begins to see this hollowed-out civil-rights establishment slip into pathos. Almost everyone saw this verdict coming. It is impossible to see how this jury could have applied the actual law to this body of evidence and come up with a different conclusion. The civil-rights establishment's mistake was to get ahead of itself, to be seduced by its own poetic truth even when there was no evidence to support it. And even now its leaders call for a Justice Department investigation, and they long for civil lawsuits to be filed—hoping against hope that some leaf of actual racial victimization will be turned over for all to see. This is how a once-great social movement looks when it becomes infested with obsolescence.

 

One wants to scream at all those outraged at the Zimmerman verdict: Where is your outrage over the collapse of the black family? Today’s civil-rights leaders swat at mosquitoes like Zimmerman when they have gorillas on their back. Seventy-three percent of all black children are born without fathers married to their mothers. And you want to bring the nation to a standstill over George Zimmerman?

 

There are vast career opportunities, money and political power to be gleaned from the specter of Mr. Zimmerman as a racial profiler/murderer; but there is only hard and selfless work to be done in tackling an illegitimacy rate that threatens to consign blacks to something like permanent inferiority. If there is anything good to be drawn from the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy, it is only the further revelation of the corruption and irrelevance of today’s civil-rights leadership.

Seven Reasons There’s Hope for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. By Ben Birnbaum.

Seven Reasons There’s Hope for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. By Ben Birnbaum. The New Republic, July 21, 2013.

Netanyahu Could Save the Two-State Solution. By Ben Birnbaum. NJBR, July 9, 2013. With related articles.

The End of the Two-State Solution. By Ben Birnbaum. NJBR, March 12, 2013. With related articles.

Salam Fayyad: The Visionary. By Ben Birnbaum. The New Republic, May 24, 2012. Also here.

Why Salam Fayyad Cannot Deliver. By Khaled Abu Toameh. Gatestone Institute, April 20, 2010.

The Middle East, Where Happiness Goes to Die. By Jeffrey Goldberg.

The Middle East, Where Happiness Goes to Die. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, July 18, 2013.

Goldberg:

OK, here’s today’s geopolitical challenge: Go find one scrap of positive news out of the Middle East. Just one. Good luck.

 

Yes, I’ve heard the reports that Secretary of State John Kerry may manage to restart peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis, but since I give those talks a near-zero chance of succeeding, I don’t count this as positive news, especially because failed peace talks have often led to increased violence in the past.

 

I put this challenge to a couple of my regular Egyptian interlocutors – people on the non-misogynistic, anti-anti-Semitic, non-Christian-hating, pro-modernity side of the political ledger, which is to say, people who are provisionally happy with the recent turn of events in Cairo.

 

They just saw their enemy, the hapless Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood, removed from office by millions of demonstrators (and quite a few tanks), and they cast this coup – and yes, it was a coup, though a popular one – as an unalloyed victory for freedom and progress. The Middle East only has four things in abundance: oil, sand, hummus and totalitarian leadership cults, and it’s never a bad thing to see the fascists on the run.

 

Except: They’re probably coming back. Even my liberal friends in Egypt admit that the Muslim Brotherhood has a wide base of support, and some of the stalwarts look to fulfill the promise of the group’s motto: “Jihad is our way, and death for the sake of Allah is our highest aspiration.” Many Egyptian soldiers, too, would like to help the Brothers reach their celestial goal. My friends couldn't quite convince me that the coup was unalloyed good news.

 

It’s hard to imagine a happy short- or medium-term outcome for Egypt. The army will continue to make and break governments, the liberals will continue to be disorganized and the Brotherhood will find someone cleverer than Mursi to serve as its public face.

 

Things are so bad in Egypt that even William J. Burns, the deputy secretary of state who visited Cairo earlier this week, issued what was for him – the most soft-spoken and decorous of U.S. diplomats – an apocalyptic warning: “It is hard to picture how Egypt will be able to emerge from this crisis unless its people come together to find a nonviolent and inclusive path forward.”

 

Burns is a Middle East expert (he is, among other things, a former ambassador to Jordan). He knows that “inclusive paths” aren’t a prominent feature of regional politics.

 

Neither, of course, is nonviolence. There have been many violent incidents over the past week or two that I could cite, but here is maybe the most consequential: The fight, last weekend, between rebels of the Free Syrian Army and the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant for control over a key checkpoint in Aleppo. It was only a matter of time before different members of the fractious coalition – if that is even the word anymore – of forces arrayed against the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, began to kill each other. The rebellion is now being driven in large measure by al-Qaeda sympathizers and affiliates, not by the more moderate Free Syrians.

 

The rebels haven’t been effective in battling Assad, his Iranian sponsors and his Hezbollah foot soldiers. Don’t expect this to change. I’ve been critical of President Barack Obama for not providing the rebels with adequate weapons fast enough, but this weekend’s news makes the administration’s hesitancy more understandable.

 

And finally – I could go on, but I’m trying to keep these posts digestible – there was this Twitter message (of all things) from the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a few days ago: “The will to win and the ability to break the opponent and instill in him a fear of death at the decisive moment – this is how battles are won.”

 

There are at least four ways to interpret this statement. The first is that it’s a brush-back pitch aimed at Assad, who has suffered through several mysterious explosions recently that the world thinks were caused by the Israelis. The second is that Netanyahu has decided to forgo striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, and instead plans to wage war against the ayatollahs via social media. The third is that he’s telling the Israeli public, and the Obama administration, that he’s ready to strike, should Iran cross the red line on uranium-enrichment he described last fall. And the fourth is that he’s upset that the concurrent chaos in Egypt and Syria is drawing attention away from the matter he thinks is most urgent: a nuclear Iran.

 

In addition to taking to Twitter (which is really an undignified way to start a preventive war against a near-nuclear regime that has threatened the annihilation of your country), Netanyahu told Bob Schieffer on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” that he “won’t wait until it’s too late” to act, adding, “We have our eyes fixed on Iran. They have to know that we’re serious.”

 

This last statement suggests that his Twitter message was directed as much at Obama as it was the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Netanyahu is worried that the White House has lost focus, and he is even more worried that the newly elected president of Iran, Hassan Rohani, who has been touted as a “moderate,” will convince the West that there is no cause to worry. Rohani isn’t in charge of the nuclear portfolio – that is the preserve of the supreme leader – nor has he expressed a pronounced desire to see Iran move off the path of nuclearization.

 

It’s hard to blame the Obama administration for putting some distance between the U.S. and the Syrian rebellion. It’s somewhat easier to blame the administration for creating conditions in Egypt that have led both the Islamists and liberals to share a profound mistrust of the U.S. It will be much easier still to blame the administration if, in a fit of fatalism or inattention, it allows Iran to cross the nuclear threshold.

 

Because if it does, well, then the Middle East will be an exponentially unhappier place, as hard as that is to imagine at the moment.

The Zimmerman Trial as Rorschach Test. By Peter Wehner.

The Zimmerman Trial as Rorschach Test. By Peter Wehner. Commentary, July 18, 2013.

Deconstructing Reality and Zimmerman. By Peter Wehner. Commentary, July 16, 2013.

The Rolling Stone Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Article. By Janet Reitman.

Jahar’s World. By Janet Reitman. Rolling Stone, July 17, 2013.

He was a charming kid with a bright future. But no one saw the pain he was hiding or the monster he would become.

Explaining the Rolling Stone Cover, by a Boston Native. By Matt Taibbi. Rolling Stone, July 19, 2013.

Why the “Rolling Stone” Cover Has Angered People. By John Podhoretz. Commentary, July 18, 2013.

Rolling Stone’s New Heartthrob. By Bethany Mandel. Commentary, July 18, 2013.

Baby Steps on Israel/Palestine. By Walter Russell Mead.

Baby Steps on Israel/Palestine. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 20, 2013.

Kerry merits support, and a new strategy. By Rami G. Khouri. The Daily Star (Lebanon), July 20, 2013.

PA’s hesitance to jump at Kerry deal reveals Arab League’s loss of clout. By Herb Keinon. Jerusalem Post, July 19, 2013.

Palestinian leadership displays grassroots mindset that time and world opinion is on their side, and will eventually wear Israel down.

Kerry’s Illusion of Momentum. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, July 17, 2013.

The High Price of Kerry’s Pyrrhic Victory. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, July 19, 2013.


Mead:

There appears to be some movement on the Israeli-Palestinian issue due to the efforts of Secretary of State John Kerry late this week. The New York Times is reporting that face-to-face negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians may resume soon pending the release of several Palestinian prisoners by Israel’s government—a deal Kerry apparently reached with Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu late Friday night. This agreement, however, is far from set in stone:

But officials who have been briefed on the negotiations, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to do otherwise, said the prisoner release — and the larger agreement to resume talks — depends on a vote in the coming days by an Israeli leadership that has been bitterly divided over the issue.

 

In announcing Friday that Israelis and Palestinians had established “a basis” for resuming direct peace negotiations, Mr. Kerry included a caveat. “If everything goes as expected,” he said, chief negotiators for each side will convene in Washington “within a week or so.”

While some might scoff at these developments as inconsequential, it is on balance good news as far as it goes. All things being equal, the US benefits when Israelis and Palestinians are talking, and the collapse of the peace process when President Clinton turned it into an “all or nothing” choice in the closing months of his presidency was a major setback to US foreign policy. Ever since then, we’ve been trying to recreate what Clinton—who to his credit had brought it along for many years—threw away.

 

The cold hard truth is that a final peace between the two sides remains very far off. But that doesn’t mean that developing a political framework through negotiations between the two sides is useless. Concessions and agreements can improve living conditions for people in both groups, chip away at the big problems that continue to block a final agreement, and help build the knowledge and trust that could one day be the basis for a final agreement.

 

But to get to that elusive final agreement, two things have to happen. First, there needs to be a framework that gets the two sides sitting down at the table at all. And then there needs to be a way to keep that framework viable even as it becomes impossible to ignore the reality that the two sides aren’t ready for a final deal. Kerry is getting close to the first, but is still far from the second. We’re glad it’s happening and we applaud the skill that is at work.

 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far from the biggest problem the Middle East currently faces: the metastasizing Sunni-Shiite war, the failure of political and economic development in much of the Arab world, the Iranian nuclear challenge are all bigger issues. But this is still a good step and very much in US interests. It’s also a sign of how much both Netanyahu and President Obama have learned about working with each other since the tumultuous beginning of the administration. The two leaders need each other and both have gotten better at managing the relationship.


Tobin (Pyrrhic Victory):

After weeks of looking silly chasing his tail in what appeared to be a futile attempt to revive Middle East peace talks, Secretary of State John Kerry is looking like a winner this afternoon as he was able to announce that he had been able to “establish a basis” for a new round of negotiations of between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Assuming the Palestinians actually show up next week in Washington as Kerry thinks they will, this will be something of a victory for a secretary who has gone from humiliation to humiliation during his brief term in office. Even if all it amounts to is a photo op, Kerry can claim it is evidence of the diplomatic prowess he thinks he possesses. But before he starts writing his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech (if it isn’t already composed at least in his head), we need to understand that it is highly unlikely that anything good may come of this initiative. Even worse, the price the United States has paid for getting even this far may be far higher than any possible good that could come from this event.

 

It should be understood that the tentative and highly conditioned agreement to return to negotiations was only won by an American agreement to accept Palestinian preconditions that President Obama had already rejected and that would, in no small part, tilt the diplomatic playing field against Israel:

Ahmed Majdalani, a PLO executive committee member, told the Associated Press that Kerry has proposed holding talks for six to nine months focusing on the key issues of borders and security arrangements. He said Kerry would endorse the 1967 lines as the starting point of negotiations and assured the Palestinians that Israel would free some 350 prisoners gradually in the coming months.

This came after President Obama phoned Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday to pressure him to cooperate with Kerry. Israel had already agreed to talk without preconditions, but apparently the president wanted Netanyahu’s assurance that he would not protest the way the secretary had buckled to PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’s conditions. But having arrived at negotiations in this manner, neither Kerry nor Obama seems to have considered what comes next. The Palestinians have already made it abundantly clear that they won’t actually negotiate in good faith but will only show up expecting the U.S. to deliver Israeli concessions to them on a silver platter. Even if he wanted to sign an accord, Abbas hasn’t the power to speak for all Palestinians. Since that is a certain formula for failure, it is incumbent on Washington to understand that another breakdown in talks could serve as a new excuse for Palestinian violence.

 

The reason why rational observers have been so wary of Kerry’s initiative is not just the fact that the Palestinians had no interest in returning to negotiations they’ve been boycotting for four and a half years. Both Israel and the Palestinians didn’t wish to obstruct Kerry’s desire for talks. He might have left off once the Palestinians demonstrated their lack of interest, but since he persisted in this manner, they felt they had no choice but to show up.

 

But Abbas and the PA are too weak to agree to any deal that would conclusively end a conflict that neither Hamas nor much of Fatah actually wants to end. Recognizing the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be drawn, is something that no Palestinian leader can afford to do at this point in history. The culture of Palestinian politics that has revolved around the delegitimization of Israel and Jewish history makes it impossible. That’s why they’ve already rejected three Israelis offers of a Palestinian state including almost all of the West Bank and a share of Jerusalem. So even if Netanyahu were foolish enough to agree to withdrawals that would, in effect, recreate the independent Palestinian terror state that already exists in Gaza in the West Bank, Abbas still can’t say yes.

 

But by forcing this confrontation at a time when conditions simply don’t exist for a resolution of the conflict, Kerry is not just occupying himself with an issue that is clearly less pressing that the other crises in the Middle East like Egypt, Syria or the Iranian nuclear threat. Since failure is foreordained and the Palestinians are likely to bolt the talks at the first opportunity, what will follow will be far worse than merely a continuation of the present stalemate. The Palestinians will treat any outcome—even one created by their intransigence—as an excuse for either an upsurge in violence against Israel or an effort to use their status at the United Nations to work to further isolate the Jewish state.

 

Just as damaging, by again putting the U.S. seal of approval on the Palestinian demand for the 1967 lines as Israel’s borders, Kerry and Obama have also worsened Israel’s position once the talks collapse. Any outcome other than total Israeli acquiescence to Palestinian demands would also serve as justification for more European Union sanctions on Israel, even, as is likely, if such a surrender were to fail to be enough to entice the Palestinians to take yes for an answer.

 

Netanyahu will be criticized by many in his party for going along with what is likely to be at best, a farce, and, at worst, a dangerous trap. But having already rightly said that he was willing to negotiate with Abbas under any circumstance, he must send representatives to Washington. But neither he, the people of Israel, nor the Jewish state’s friends in this country should be under any illusions that what will ensue from Kerry’s diplomatic experiment will be helpful.

 

As much as Israel wants and needs peace, the conflict is at a stage when the best that can be hoped for is that it be managed in such a way as to minimize violence and encourage Palestinian development. Though Kerry is offering the PA lots of cash, there is little chance it will be used appropriately or get the desired result.

 

Next week’s talks may be heralded as an unprecedented opportunity for peace, but the odds are, we will look back on this moment the way we do foolhardy efforts such as President Clinton’s Camp David summit in 2000 that set the stage for a bloody intifada that cost the lives of over a thousand Jews and far more Palestinians. The agreement to talk about talking is a pyrrhic victory for Kerry. Those who cheer this effort should think hard about who will bear the responsibility for the bloodshed that could result from Kerry’s folly.

Paul Krugman’s Nasty and Inane Attack on “Libertarian Populism.” By Nick Gillespie.

Paul Krugman’s Nasty and Inane Attack on “Libertarian Populism.” By Nick Gillespie. The Daily Beast, July 19, 2013.

U.S. Meritocracy Has Given Way to Aristocracy. By Erick Erickson. NJBR, May 30, 2013. With related articles.

The Libertarian Populist Agenda. By Ben Domenech. NJBR, June 6, 2013. With related articles.

The Beltway Burkeans vs. Heartland Populists. By Ben Domenech. NJBR, July 2, 2013. With related articles.

Paul Krugman’s Delusions About the GOP and Populism. By Robert Tracinski. NJBR, July 16, 2013. With related articles.

Fear of Rand Paul’s Rise. By Ben Domenech. NJBR, July 20, 2013.


Gillespie:

The Times columnist no longer bothers to engage with his opponents, writes Nick Gillespie, but simply calls names and makes sweeping declarations.


It’s got to be a pretty good gig to be Paul Krugman. He’s rich enough to bitch to The New Yorker about not being able to afford a home in St. John so, sigh, St. Croix has to do. He’s got tenure at the second-best college in New Jersey, an equally secure gig at the second-best newspaper in New York, and he’s even copped a Nobel Prize (economics, but still). He’s asked for his opinion on pop bands in a way that I’m pretty sure Milton Friedman or John Kenneth Galbraith never experienced (thank god for small favors). “The New Pornographers are probably technically better than Arcade Fire,” he’s solemnly sworn to Playboy. “But what the hell? It’s all good.”

 

The man also known as Krugtron the Invincible is able to utter such fallacious conventional deep thoughts as “the Great Depression ended largely thanks to a guy named Adolf Hitler” and that the 9/11 attacks were just the ticket to goose the soft early-’00s economy in lower Manhattan (“All of a sudden, we need some new office buildings,” he actually wrote in the Times on September 14, 2001) and still be taken seriously. He’s repeatedly called for a bogus alien invasion that occasions even more super-stimulative spending than we’ve seen already in this awful 21st century—an idea presumably lifted, unacknowledged, from the Watchmen comic books.

 

Best of all, Krugman has attained that rare level of eminence where he doesn’t even have to engage the very opponents he dismisses as beneath contempt. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, he just needs to wave his hand, mumble vague abjurations, and rest assured his devoted minions will finish his work for him.

 

Krugman’s latest target is “libertarian populism,” which he summarizes thus: “The idea here is that there exists a pool of disaffected working-class white voters who failed to turn out last year but can be mobilized again with the right kind of conservative economic program—and that this remobilization can restore the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes.”

 

This ain’t gonna happen, chuffs Krugman, because . . . because . . . because . . . Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)! Despite the fact that the former Republican vice-presidential nominee and marathon-time amnesiac is nobody’s idea of a libertarian or a populist, Krugman insists that libertarian populism is doomed precisely because  to “the extent that there was any substance to the Ryan [budget] plan, it mainly involved savage cuts in aid to the poor. And while many nonwhite Americans depend on these safety-net programs, so do many less-well-off whites—the very voters libertarian populism is supposed to reach.”

 

Had Colonel Krugman ventured outside his ideological compound, he might have happened upon the writings of Tim Carney of The Washington Examiner. To the extent that libertarian populism has a policy agenda, it’s mostly thanks to Carney, who likes to write books attacking right- and left-wing crony capitalists. He’s libertarian in that he consistently believes that freer markets function more fairly and more efficiently, and he generally thinks people should be left alone when it comes to economic and personal freedom (he’s not an absolutist on most things). He’s populist in that he is basically obsessed with what he sees as concentrations of power and wealth among elites who rig markets, status, and more against the little guy.

 

Unsurprisingly, Carney’s libertarian-populist policy agenda has precious little to do with starving poor people to death or stoking white working-class resentment against dusky hordes (Carney is pro-immigration). Unless by dusky hordes, you mean Wall Street banksters and well-tanned pols such as Speaker John Boehner.

 

For better or for worse, it’s filled with prescriptions such as “cut or eliminate the payroll tax” (that’s the one that hurts low-wage earners the most); “break up the big banks and/or place stricter safety and soundness rules on them” (hmm, how does that help the Rothschilds again?); and “end corporate welfare” (Carney specifically name-checks the awful Export-Import Bank and subsidies to Big Sugar, which both receive bipartisan congressional support).

 

You can take or leave some or all of Carney’s libertarian populism—what sort of crazy, pie-eyed dreamer not only thinks that “second homes shouldn’t get a mortgage deduction” but that the deduction for first homes “should be capped at $500,000” and then reduced more in the future?!?!—but to confuse it with Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity is a sign that Krugman needs to get out more often. Intellectual shut-ins are a dime a dozen these days, and they all stink just as bad as the next one.

 

Earlier this year, in fact, Krugman managed to offend some of his staunchest ideological confreres. In a blog post meditating on why he is always right (a curse, really, I’m sure), Krugman briefly considered the remote possibility that he was stacking the deck by either unfairly cherry-picking data or opponents to his own advantage. Naw, the super-scientist concluded, before offering up this irrefutable hypothesis: “Maybe I actually am right, and maybe the other side actually does contain a remarkable number of knaves and fools.”

 

Such pompous jackassery moved one of Krugman’s biggest fans, Bloomberg’s Clive Crook, to declare, “A line has been crossed when the principal spokesmen for contending opinions have no curiosity whatsoever about their opponents’ ideas and radiate cold, steady contempt for each other . . . This is America’s biggest political problem—and Krugman’s not part of the solution.”

 

I think Crook is a being a bit melodramatic (especially for a Britisher), but he’s on to something that Krugman exemplifies perfectly when it comes libertarian populism, the possible benefits of a fake alien invasion, and, to be honest, the relative merits of Arcade Fire. In opting out of engaged conversation in favor of an extended monologue in the theater of his mind, Krugman and all other similarly self-blinkered public intellectuals of whatever bent or camp or ideology do us all a real insult.

Archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel Announces Discovery of King David’s Palace at Khirbet Qeiyafa.

Khirbet Qeiyafa, a Judahite fortress in the Elah Valley, where the Bible says David slew Goliath. Excavations by Yosef Garfinkel unearthed a multichambered gate, artifacts, and now a palace dating to David’s time in the early 10th Century BC. Greg Girard/National Geographic.

King David’s Palace at Khirbet Qeiyafa? By Noah Wiener. Bible History Daily, July 18, 2013.

Excavations uncover 3,000-year-old palace, believed to be that of King David. By Nir Hasson. Haaretz, July 18, 2013.

King David’s Palace was Uncovered in the Judean Shephelah. Israel Antiquities Authority, July 2013.

Archaeologists say they’ve found one of King David’s palaces. By Lazar Berman. The Times of Israel, July 18, 2013.

Archaeological claims that King David’s palace was discovered may be overstated, prof says. By Erin Roach. Baptist Press, July 19, 2013.

King David’s Palace Discovered? Archaeologists Find Huge Palace, Storeroom At Khirbet Qeiyafa Site. By Meredith Bennett-Smith. The Huffington Post, July 19, 2013.

3,000-year-old palace in Israel linked to biblical King David. By Alan Boyle. NBC News, July 19, 2013.

Khirbet Qeiyafa: An Unsensational Archaeological and Historical Interpretation. By Israel Finkelstein and Alexander Fantalkin. Tel Aviv, Vol. 39, No. 1 (May 2012).

The Birth and Death of Biblical Minimalism. By Yosef Garfinkel. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 37, No. 3 (May/June 2011).

The keys to the kingdom of David. By Assaf Shtull-Trauring. Haaretz, May 6, 2011. Also here.


Wiener:

The Israel Antiquities Authority’s (IAA) July 18, 2013, press release is crowned with an extraordinary headline: “King David’s Palace was Uncovered in the Judean Shephelah.” At the close of the seventh season of excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, the Hebrew University Professor Yosef Garfinkel and IAA archaeologist Saar Ganor announced the discovery of “the two largest buildings known to have existed in the tenth century B.C.E. in the Kingdom of Judah” with great fanfare. One of these buildings is a centrally located 100-foot-long palatial structure decorated with elegant imported vessels. Garfinkel told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “there is no question that the ruler of the city sat here, and when King David came to visit the hills he slept here.” The other structure, a pillared storeroom, features hundreds of storage jars “stamped with an official seal as was customary in the Kingdom of Judah for centuries,” according to the IAA press release.

 

Khirbet Qeiyafa has produced numerous exciting and controversial finds (see links below) that have kept the Biblical archaeology world buzzing. Overlooking the Valley of Elah in the Judean foothills, the fortified Judahite site of Qeiyafa, on the border with the Philistines, has produced persuasive evidence to support the kingship of David at the beginning of Iron Age II, when the Bible says he ruled. The unique presence of two gates at the site has led Garfinkel to identify it as Biblical Sha’arayim, which means “two gates” in Hebrew.

 

However, some scholars are skeptical of Garfinkel’s claims. Garfinkel has used evidence from Qeiyafa to argue that David and Solomon ruled over a well-organized and fully urbanized Judahite state in the tenth century B.C.E. Last year, Tel Aviv University’s Israel Finkelstein and Alexander Fantalkin published the article “Khirbet Qeiyafa: An Unsensational Archaeological and Historical Interpretation” critiquing Garfinkel’s methods, chronology and interpretations, and Foundation Stone codirector David Willner published an immediate response after today’s press release calling the announcement “unabashed sensationalism.”

 

The dramatic headline is sure to elicit a great deal of debate. Khirbet Qeiyafa is an undoubtedly important site, and we look forward to an imminent archaeological discussion on the newly uncovered palatial structure.


Hasson:

Two or three rows of stones stretching across 30 meters. That is what remains of what is believed to be King David’s palace, or at least the palace of a senior district governor that served the king some 3,000 years ago, according to scholars from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Israel Antiquities Authority.

 

These vestiges have been excavated in recent weeks at Khirbet Qeiyafa on the Judean foothills, not far from Beit Shemesh, and they are expected to rekindle the stormy debate about the existence of the Kingdom of David. In the meantime, some archaeologists are fighting to prevent a new neighborhood from being built on this hill, which they claim constitutes proof of the biblical account.

 

This is not the first time that the excavators at Khirbet Qeiyafa, Prof. Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University and Saar Ganor of the Antiquities Authority, make waves in the Israeli archaeological community. In recent years the two claimed that their findings from the biblical site poke holes the minimalist approach to Israeli archaeology. This approach, which is identified with several leading scholars from Tel Aviv University, asserts that archaeological research disproves what is written in the Bible, and that the Bible cannot be used as a reliable historical source.

 

The debate centers mainly on the question of the existence and the power of the United Monarchy – the joint kingdom of David and Solomon in the 10th century BCE. The minimalists claim that there was no such kingdom, and if it did exist it was limited to Jerusalem. Jerusalem itself, they claim, was no bigger than an average village. The opposing camp, comprised of archaeologists who propone the maximalists or the biblical approach, claims that the Bible faithfully reflects the situation in the region during that period, with emphasis on the existence of a strong and significant kingdom with Jerusalem as its capital.

 

This debate, which has occupied Israeli archaeologists for decades, occasionally finds itself another arena for the battle. In the past, the scholars have argued over the city gates at Hatzor, Megiddo and Gezer, and later the findings in the City of David in Jerusalem. In recent years, Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fairly low hill south of Ramat Beit Shemesh, has become the focus of the debate.

 

On Thursday, Garfinkel and Ganor completed the excavation at Qeiyafa after seven years. Their findings attest to the fact that this was an important district capital that was subordinate to Jerusalem and ruled its surroundings, and that the culture was Judahite-Israelite rather than Canaanite or Philistine. They suggest that Qeifaya be identified with the city of Sha’arayim that is mentioned in the Bible. “And the wounded of the Philistines fell along the road to Sha'arayim,” relates the book of 1 Samuel, describing the pursuit of the Philistine army immediately after David’s glorious victory over Goliath. According to Garfinkel and Ganor, Qeiyafa discredits the minimalist approach and proves the existence of the United Monarchy.

 

Garfinkel and Ganor raise several arguments. First pertains to Qeiyafa’s location, opposite Philistia, on a hill that controls its surrounding and the major road that crosses the Elah Valley. Garfinkel believes that the Kingdom of David was a medium-sized principality rather than a regional power, but also far from the insulting minimalist description as a village. He believes that this kingdom had three centers: Jerusalem, Hebron and Qeiyafa, each a day's walk from the other. A few years ago he and Ganor walked from the City of David in Jerusalem to Qeiyafa in order to prove this claim.

 

Second, they point to the fact that no pig bones or statuettes of goddesses were found at the site. “It’s clear than neither the diet nor the ritual here were Canaanite. The entire material culture here is Judahite,” says Garfinkel. An ancient inscription found at the site is written in proto-Canaanite script, one of the predecessors of Hebrew script, and therefore strengthens their claim that the ethnic identity of the site was Judahite. The power of the kingdom is indicated by ceramic artifacts originating in Cyprus and Egypt, which are evidence of international commerce. All that has led the archaeologists to conclude that Qeiyafa was a district capital in the Kingdom of David.

 

The newest discovery, which was excavated in recent weeks, consists of remnants of the low wall at the top of the hill. It is 30 meters in length, and is unusually thick and strong. The two men estimate that this is the last vestige of a luxurious public building that was about 1,000 square meters in size, far larger than the private homes. Judging by the thickness of the wall, the palace was at least two stories high, if not more, the archaeologists say.

 

“There is no question that the ruler of the city sat here, and when King David came to visit the hills he slept here,” says Garfinkel. They also excavated the remains of another structure that they identify as a storage building, which they say is evidence of regional tax collection.

 

Unfortunately, most of the palace was destroyed 1,400 years after it was built, and replaced by a large Byzantine building.

 

The meager traces leave fertile ground for a continued debate among the archaeologists. Garfinkel’s minimalist opponents raise questions about the dating of the palace and its importance, as well as about its links to the kingdom in Jerusalem and to King David.

 

First, claim the critics, the ethnic identity of the inhabitants of the site has not been proven. Some, like Prof. Shlomo Bonimovitz and Dr. Zvi Lederman of Tel Aviv University, claim that these are the remnants of a small Canaanite kingdom that existed in the Judean foothills between the Kingdom of Judah and the Philistines. Even if it is Jewish, it is possible that this was a settlement that was actually connected to an Israelite kingdom that was located father north, in the Ramallah region, and predated the Kingdom of David. The critics also want to see evidence of the dating of the large stone wall, since only few vestiges of it remain.

 

But the main argument against many of the biblical archaeologists is that they are biased by the biblical text – a text that was written hundreds of years after the events, and by a writer with a clear political and religious agenda.

 

“I haven’t been at the site during the past season,” says Finkelstein, “so I can't judge the nature and date of the structure. There’s no question that this is an interesting and important site. The excavators attribute it to Judah. Alexander Fantalkin and I suggested that it should be seen as a border fortress of an Israelite unit whose center was on a mountain north of Jerusalem. In any case, I would be careful about uncritical links to biblical traditions that were written down hundreds of years after the site was abandoned.”

 

Prof. Aren Maeir of Bar Ilan University is digging not far from Qeiyafa on Tel Zafit, which during that period was the Philistine city of Gath – a city far richer and larger than Qeiyafa. He agrees that it is a Judahite site, “that’s the simplest and most logical explanation. But does that mean that we can raise arguments about the kingdom of David and Solomon? That seems to me a grandiose upgrade,” says Meir. He believes that this is an attempt by “an ancient Judahite entity” to draw a border for itself vis-a-vis the Philistine city of Gath. “The destruction of the site demonstrates that this experiment didn't last for long, and how does that accord with the biblical explanation of the victory of the United Monarchy?”

i24, Israeli 24-Hour News Channel is Launched. By Ruth English.

Israeli 24-hour news channel launches, with eyes on the world. By Ruth English. Washington Post, July 18, 2013.

i24 News website.

i24 News English Promo. Video. satkrak, June 2, 2013. YouTube.




i24 English News Launch. Video. Seb Jec, July 17, 2013. YouTube.