Does this New York Times headline bother you as much as it does me? Here’s the headline: “Exodus of Syrians Highlights Political Failure of the West”. And here’s the supporting squib:

“The migrant crisis in Europe is essentially self-inflicted,” said Lina Khatib, a research associate at the University of London and until recently the head of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “Had European countries sought serious solutions to political conflicts like the one in Syria, and dedicated enough time and resources to humanitarian assistance abroad, Europe would not be in this position today.”

Got it? Nobody in the Middle East is ever responsible for anything. How patronizing can you possibly be?

Quite to the contrary I think the flood of refugees highlights the extraordinary political and economic success of the West while the desire of so many people in the Middle East to flee highlights their abject political and economic failure.

Meanwhile, Russia appears to be expanding its military commitment to Syria:

The numbers are small, but Moscow may be looking at its own version of mission creep in the treacherous Middle East.
The end of summer. It means back-to-school shopping, tearfully ended beach-borne romances, Labor Day barbecues—and, it would seem, the increased likelihood of new Russian adventurism. As if Moscow weren’t satisfied with the game in Ukraine, the last month has seen a flurry of reports about its ever-expanding military involvement in Syria.

One report has even alleged that Russian pilots are gearing up to fly missions alongside the Syrian air force, dropping bombs not just on ISIS but on anti-Assad rebels who may or may not be aligned with the United States or its regional allies.

There have been several good posts on this subject at Pat Lang’s place. The Russians aren’t that nuts about Assad but they’re really unwilling to lose their last remaining ally in the Middle East. Call it the “post-Qaddafi syndrome”. And Assad was never going to leave power peaceably. Dictators of his stripe never have retirement plans.

when seen in the rear view mirror than she does when looming ahead. At least that’s what I take away from her most recent favorable/unfavorable ratings from Gallup:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Dogged by continued scrutiny of her email practices as secretary of state, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s favorability with the American public has sunk to one of its lowest levels in Gallup’s 23-year trend. Currently, 41% of U.S. adults say they have a favorable opinion of the Democratic front-runner, while 51% hold an unfavorable view.

The graph attached to the post is interesting. She hasn’t had this low a favorable rating since 1993.

After a dozen or so paragraphs of throat-clearing John Cassidy finally gets to the point:

During the past decade or so, however, a number of things have happened that don’t easily mesh with that theory. If college graduates remain in short supply, their wages should still be rising. But they aren’t. In 2001, according to the Economic Policy Institute*, a liberal think tank in Washington, workers with undergraduate degrees (but not graduate degrees) earned, on average, $30.05 an hour; last year, they earned $29.55 an hour. Other sources show even more dramatic falls. “Between 2001 and 2013, the average wage of workers with a bachelor’s degree declined 10.3 percent, and the average wage of those with an associate’s degree declined 11.1 percent,” the New York Fed reported in its study. Wages have been falling most steeply of all among newly minted college graduates. And jobless rates have been rising. In 2007, 5.5 per cent of college graduates under the age of twenty-five were out of work. Today, the figure is close to nine per cent. If getting a bachelor’s degree is meant to guarantee entry to an arena in which jobs are plentiful and wages rise steadily, the education system has been failing for some time.

And, while college graduates are still doing a lot better than nongraduates, some studies show that the earnings gap has stopped growing. The figures need careful parsing. If you lump college graduates in with people with advanced degrees, the picture looks brighter. But almost all the recent gains have gone to folks with graduate degrees. “The four-year-degree premium has remained flat over the past decade,” the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland reported. And one of the main reasons it went up in the first place wasn’t that college graduates were enjoying significantly higher wages. It was that the earnings of nongraduates were falling.

My view, as should be clear by now, is that the signalling effect of a college degree has been the most important factor in the college pay differential and the influx of so many college graduates over the period of the last thirty years has resulted in that effect becoming increasingly attenuated. Now it’s on to post-graduate degrees and when that no longer serves a signalling function it will be post docs. As Mr. Cassidy points out, in an arms race the only ones who really benefit are the arms dealers.

Ever since the lastest figures showing an increase in labor productivity and the subsequent battlespace preparation articles came out I’ve been waiting for a riposte. It has arrived in the form of this post from Evan Soltas. His rejoinder, essentially, is that when viewed properly compensation actually has kept pace with increases in productivity. Here’s the meat of his post:

Between 1987 and 2013, changes in sector-level labor productivity explain almost all of the changes in sector-level hourly labor compensation. And almost all of those productivity increases were paid as compensation to labor.

If you really want to know, 74 percent of the variance in the change between 1987 and 2013 in sector-level log hourly labor compensation is explained by changes in log labor productivity over the same period. A one-percentage point increase in productivity generated a 0.81-percentage-point increase in compensation. I’ve used 1987 and 2013 because this data was collected starting in 1987 and much of the data is still missing for 2014. As always, you can find my cleaned dataset here for your own analysis.

I have some problems with his analysis. For example, this:

If workers aren’t compensated for their productivity, it seems, they’ll switch firms or industries.

That process has been impeded for the last 30 years by all sorts of things including two-income households, slow job growth, increasing specialization, and the rise of credentialism. It might be that under circumstances of perfect elasticity there would have been considerably more job-hopping.

At any rate it’s an interesting post.

I think that the editors of the Washington Post may have taken the wrong conclusion from the study the article describes when they gave it this headline: “Millennials have low opinion of themselves, compared to boomers”. Here’s the section that caught my eye:

Millennials are also more likely to give themselves low rankings in categories such as patriotism, responsibility, willingness to sacrifice, religiousness, morality, self-reliance, compassion and political activism. Fully 59 percent say “self-absorbed” is an apt description of their bunch.

But, hey, they’re young.

Boomers, however, tend to have relatively healthy self-regard, giving themselves better scores in patriotism, responsibility and so on. Only the silent generation — those born between 1928 and 1945, who are between 70 and 87 years old – gave themselves an even bigger pat on the back.

Wouldn’t a more descriptive caption be “Baby Boomers have inflated view of themselves, compared to Millennials”? But I guess that would be a “dog bites man” story.

The United States is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Germany and Sweden are. While I agree with the NYT op-ed writer that riots and burning the habitations of refugees in Germany villages are signs of hate, I don’t agree that the “Dublin mechanism”, which makes a practical distinction between refugees, who under the Convention are owed shelter and care, and economic migrants who aren’t. When a migrant arrives in Greece from Turkey, as European law reckons it, they may claim refugee status. They must present themselves to local authorities, have their names, countries of origin, fingerprints, and justification of their refugee status taken. When, in full knowledge of the law, they make their away across five countries, shopping for the best economic conditions and benefit packages, thinking of the migrants as refugees begins to strain credulity.

As an offhand guess I’d say that something like a third of humanity can qualify for refugee status. Certainly the populations of many Middle Eastern sub-Saharan African countries can. Is not wanting to pay for the upkeep of the migrants, who in many cases reject your language, culture, habit, religion, and liberal values hatred? Or is it just being mugged by reality?

Here’s a little puzzle for you. Can you match the countries with their per capita GDPs? The countries illustrated in the graph are Australia, Canada, Euro area, Japan, New Zealand, U. S., and U. K. Click on the graphic for the answer.

This morning the editors of the Wall Street Journal came very close to explicating a good theory of China for an American audience:

China’s laws forbids storing explosive chemicals within one kilometer of residences. Regulations on how dangerous chemicals should be stored were also violated. Chinese state media reported that the owners of the warehouse, now under arrest, admitted using ties to government officials to skirt the law. Such corruption is a major contributing factor to China’s poor safety record.

The Tianjin disaster also exposes a major fault line in Chinese society. A growing middle class largely signed on to the Communist Party’s post-1989 social contract: You don’t question our power, and we will make you prosperous and secure.

For more than two decades the Party has largely kept its side of the bargain. But an economic slowdown and the costs of official corruption could shake its legitimacy. As people become more prosperous, they value more highly the benefits that come from an accountable political system.

By contrast, China’s state capitalist system can’t root out corruption and other abuses of official power, no matter how hard President Xi Jinping tries. That’s because the central tenet that can’t be questioned is that the Communist Party is above the law.

but, sadly, they fell short of the mark. China does not have a robust system of civil law. In the final analysis it doesn’t matter what the laws say—those are just for the rubes. Corruption is not an aberration of the system; it is the system. What the heck good is party power if you can’t throw money the way of your friends and family?

Another thing they missed which you can hardly avoid realizing. You only need to listen to the survivors of the explosions: nothing happens that the authorities didn’t intend. I don’t believe that’s the case but it’s obvious that the Chinese people believe it. It was an obvious takeaway from the market crashes they’ve sustained. There was interview after interview with poor sods who’d lost their life savings who said “Why did the government do this to me?”

I think it was George Santayana who characterized fanaticism as redoubling your efforts when you’d lost sight of your goal and nowhere is that truer than in the contest over who will become the next president. Conor Friedersdorf explains why Hillary Clinton has never made much sense as a Democratic presidential candidate:

As Hillary Clinton loses ground to Bernie Sanders in Iowa, where her lead shrinks by the day, it’s worth noticing that she has never made particular sense as the Democratic Party’s nominee. She may be more electable than her social-democratic rival from Vermont, but plenty of Democrats are better positioned to represent the center-left coalition. Why have they let the former secretary of state keep them out of the race? If Clinton makes it to the general election, I understand why most Democrats will support her. She shares their views on issues as varied as preserving Obamacare, abortion rights, extending legal status to undocumented workers, strengthening labor unions, and imposing a carbon tax to slow climate change.

But most Democrats hold similar positions on those issues. So why are Democrats supporting her in a primary bid? She’s awful on other issues they’ve deemed hugely important.

Maybe it’s just the pursuit of power for its own sake. It will be interesting to see how Sec. Clinton continues to wrap herself in her husband’s legacy while repudiating his policies. Interesting in a grim sort of way, I mean.