James Fallows

Five years ago, when the housing market and the stock market were still both going strong, the Atlantic ran as a cover story my article "Countdown to a Meltdown." It was an imagined history of the Presidential Election of 2016, and the "MacGuffin" of its plotline was the big (and at the time also imaginary) housing/financial crash of the late 2000s. The idea was that prolonged economic chaos discredited both of the main political parties and cleared the way for a third, "let's cut the crap" party to take the White House six years from now. It's written in the form of a "What do we do now?" memo from the new party's Karl Rove equivalent to the candidate destined to win in 2016.

Obviously a lot of the details and color in the story are out of date now. I was, after all, writing it early in 2005, soon after George W. Bush had been sworn in for a second term. But some of the patterns will not seem so outdated. I think it's worth a look.

And while I'm at it, I might as well add an even older item from the archives, "How the World Works," from 1993, about the mismatches between the U.S. economy, as influenced by its political values and prevailing ideology, and the export-related economies of Asia. Japan, which was a main focus of that story, differs in very significant ways from today's emerging China. But there are similarities too. The article then became part of my book Looking at the Sun. FWIW.

During Bob Edwards's many years as host of NPR's Morning Edition, I was often doing commentaries for the program and sometimes had the chance to talk with him on air. In his current incarnation as host of an interview show on Sirius/XM, I had an extended discussion with him recently. It was broadcast this weekend and is available on podcast here. 

We talked China, future of journalism, politics, the role of blog-versus-print, and so on. At least from my point of view, it was interesting to have the chance for back-and-forth on these topics and exploration of angles I hadn't expected. FYI.

1) 'Mosque' speech. Last year I mentioned that, off the top of his head, Barack Obama gave an answer about "American exceptionalism" that would be very hard to improve on even if you had weeks to edit and refine.

Obama's successive answers about the New York Cordoba House/"mosque" controversy, by contrast, could very easily be improved on. Proof is here, from Clive Crook, who writes the perfect paragraph that should have come out of the President's mouth. Too late to correct the earlier answers, but let this be a guide for the future.

2) US News Rankings. This is too snarled a topic for me to do more than mention at the moment. I speak as a one-time editor of US News who wrestled with "improving" those rankings through two annual cycles. (Locus classicus on this topic, by Amy Graham and Nicholas Thompson, here.) I always was impressed by Reed College's idiosyncratic and brave refusal to participate in the process. If more schools had done that early on, the ranking system could never have taken off. Now it's way too late for that strategy, and the only alternative is to encourage so many varied rankings that no one list has disproportionate effect.

Here on our site, Reed's current president, Colin Diver, explains how the process has gone from Reed's point of view. This is a reprise from a college-special issue of the magazine a few years ago, but the themes are evergreen. Bonus note: fans of J. Anthony Lukas's may-it-be-read-forever book Common Ground will recognize the name of Reed's president. In an entirely different life, Diver and his family were central figures in that book, which describes the political, racial, cultural, and class politics of the Boston school-desegregation battles of the 1970s.

3) Back to the "mosque." Out of nowhere, the controversy over Cordoba House near the World Trade Center site has become a defining, which-side-are-you-on matter. As I said from the start: I am on Mayor Bloomberg's side. People are taking sides now that will, and should, be remembered for a long time. I am impressed, among other entries on this site, by the clarity of Michael Kinsley's view on the topic, and the various voices recently at the Daily Dish (eg this), and Jeffrey Goldberg (!), here and here and many other times. As he mentions in that first linked item, this is a moment that cries out for George W. Bush's voice. (Not a sentence I imagined myself ever writing.) Seriously, and by surprise, people's values are really being clarified by this issue. Keep track of where they are lining up, or declining to be counted.

4) We Are Number Two. Many people, including me, have mulled over the question of what it means that China has now overtaken Japan as the second-largest economy in the world. Just now on our site, Damien Ma advances the analysis considerably.

5) Dreaming in Chinese. Today Jennie Rothenberg Gritz of our staff has put up a short video interview with one Deborah Fallows, author of the forthcoming Dreaming in Chinese. I am a biased source on this topic so I'll just say, if it's good enough for Oprah and Nat Geo Traveler it's .... probably the ideal book. At left, opening "B roll" shot from the interview, on the Bund in Shanghai.

On Thursday night, Jay Ackroyd interviewed Bruce "Mr. Sanity about Security" Schneier and me in an hour-long discussion session on Second Life. Web cast available here. Gentle hint to other radio and TV producers: Ackroyd has really figured out a nice way to promo his guests' books and other writing! You'll see what I mean.

In this discussion, Schneier from his expert standpoint and I from my journalistic perspective are both pretty down on the one-way ratchet* of modern "security theater." It is easy to throw on new measures that seem as if they will make us "safe." For instance, the [moronic and indefensible] "current security level is Orange" announcements we have all heard so many times that they no longer even register on our eardrums. But it is practically impossible for an elected official to discuss the balance between security and liberty in a mature way, because the political risk of being blamed for some future attack, large or small, vastly outweighs the political risk of accepting the mounting costs in efficiency, freedoms, and general public IQ of security theater. See Schneier for more, or the webcast. Or this. (Past items from this site will be linked when our "categories" function returns.)

On the other hand, once again there's a high-level job opening at the TSA. I am in a General Sherman mode regarding my own future public service. But I'll testify for Schneier as the new head of TSA when he is nominated.
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* Pedant alert: yes, I do realize that "one-way ratchet" is redundant, the salient feature of a ratchet being that it moves in only one direction. There are times when an addition that might literally be redundant can be helpful in clarification, in an "of course everyone already knows this, but just to speed the discussion I'll supply this extra clue" sense. Just trying to forestall those "gotcha" notes before they arrive!

For the record, this afternoon I was on a live 90-minute Book Salon session on Firedoglake.com.  Transcript of 100-odd comments is here. Topics included Ralph Nader, Senate reform, my "going to hell" article, the desirability of a new American revolution, and the fact that many FDL denizens were not sold on my premises or conclusion in that article.

Interview with Federal News Radio this afternoon about the Chinese military, China-US relations in general, and the cyber menace -- description here, MP3 file here.

From the airport hotel in SF, two phone interviews today, on the "going to hell" article:

     - With Marty Moss-Coane of "Radio Times" on WHYY in Philadelphia, this discussion, with MP3 file here. 

     - With Doug Fabrizio of RadioWest on KUER in Salt Lake City, this discussion, with embedded audio file.

 A point I think I made in passing on both shows: how different the modern American news ecology would be without NPR.

For the record:

- Discussing China-v-Google on Tom Ashbrook's On Point show today, with an array of Chinese and American tech and politics reporters;

- Discussing the State of the Union after Obama' first year, plus American capacity for renewal, with Kevin Connolly on the BBC's Americana program today, here. (On line for next seven days.)

- Discussing "America in decline" - infrastructure, renewal, security -- etc along with Stephen Flynn of the Center for National Policy on the Diane Rehm show, WAMU/NPR, tomorrow 11am EST.  

For the record:
- Last night's panel discussion with Jim Lehrer on the News Hour about China, Obama, et cetera, here;

- Also last night on BBC America with Matt Frei, also about Obama and China, here;

- This morning on CSPAN Washington Journal, with Bill Scanlan, also about Obama and China, not on line at the moment but I will find it at some point (here);
 
- Interview last week on The Kindle Chronicles, with Len Edgerly, about e-reading devices, here;

- Radio interview two weeks ago, when I was in Australia, with Margaret Throsby of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation -- closest U.S. counterpart would be Terry Gross -- here. Her interviews are Fresh Air-like in combining policy and personal info. Also discussing my upcoming collaboration with the U.S. Studies Centre at the University of Sydney on future-of-media issues, a topic for another day.

- Just to round this out, plan to be on KQED "Forum" with Michael Krasny at 9:30am PST / 12:30pm EST today. (Audio here.)

- Charlie Rose this evening, with Elizabeth Economy and Nicholas Burns.

Last week Tim O'Reilly held his debut "Gov 2.0" conference in Washington. All the parts I saw were interesting and provocative. For a list of clips, podcasts, and so on, go here. For the record, here is a clip of a session I did with John Podesta, former Clinton White House chief of staff and now head of the Center for American Progress. We decided to do it as a split-shift Q-and-A: first, improbably, he asked me questions, and then I asked him some. We ran out of time before I could get many details on something I really wanted to know about: what it was like to spend time with Kim Jong Il, when Podesta accompanied Bill Clinton to North Korea this summer.

 

Seriously, the conference was a valuable series of presentations, worth perusing especially if you're feeling blue about the general tone of American political "discussion" these days and the fecklessness of many public efforts.

A nice place to start is with this presentation by Carl Malamud, whose efforts to open public data to (gasp) the public I've often noted over the years. I return to the theme: we take our encouragement where we can find it.

The new issue of the Atlantic is worth reading cover to cover -- and IMHO better read on paper than on line. For sometime soon: talking systematically about what kind of material is best read, scanned, absorbed, enjoyed in what kinds of media - handheld, computer screen, "real" print, Kindle-style reader, and so on.

For the moment, a mention of my own very short article in this issue: a profile of an American family that has ended up in one of the most beautiful parts of China, trying -- against considerable odds -- to put together a coalition of local residents, Communist party officials, businesses, and NGOs to preserve traditional Chinese culture against the onslaught of kitsch-style development otherwise transforming the country's look. Their adopted home town is Xizhou, in the lush, southerly Yunnan province, and this is one view of their "Linden Centre," with local kids biking by.



More on Brian and Jeanee Linden and their ambitions here, and a four-minute narrated slideshow of the town, the center, the family, and the challenge is below (or here). That is Brian Linden, who first became known in China 25 years ago when cast in a movie about a famous and tragic US-Chinese interaction, in blue jeans and white shirt in the opening shot below.
 


If you can make your way to Yunnan, this is very much worth a visit. Below a look at "downtown" Xizhou this spring, with the bean harvest being threshed.


From a terrace in the Linden Centre.

A week ago, when for unrelated house-reconstruction reasons I was comatose from no sleep, I had a very enjoyable hour-long visit with the staff of the Motley Fool, at their stylish HQ in Alexandria, Va. This was part of their Motley Fool Conversation series. A podcast of the result is available here. I realize that I may have been snarkier-sounding about the future of Twitter than reasoned analysis would support. But, hey, I was only half awake! And it was at the Motley Fool. Most of the talk was about China, with side notes about Microsoft, speechwriting, the Future of the Atlantic, and so on.

Seriously, most TV and radio talk shows could take useful interviewing tips from these guys. A very enjoyable exchange, at least from my point of view.

... as mentioned by Richard Cohen in the Washington Post today, it's here.

More another time on that article, its circumstances, its aftermath, and its era -- and its applicability, or not, to current circumstances.
 

A number of China and technology issues in the queue (plus frogs), but for the moment, a few extra references on the "does GDP really matter anyway?" front. Previously here and here.

1) A group in Nova Scotia called GPIAtlantic has applied a "Genuine Progress Indicator" to social and economic developments in its region. The idea of GPI rather than GDP has a long history; for further information, see here, here, and here. (Yes, there are a variety of other "sustainability indexes" or measures of overall welfare; more info at sites above, plus here for another "can money buy happiness?" study.) Below, a sample GDP/GPI comparative graph from the Redefining Progress site.




2) Another in the ever-expanding cadre of first-rate Atlantic online Correspondents is Ben Heineman Jr., who has this very valuable post on the perils of paying attention to statistical indicators of any sort. Part of living in the modern world is accepting that opposite-sounding principles can both be true. (Hey, living in China makes such acceptance easy! The country is rich -- and it is poor. It is open - and it is closed. It is one ancient culture -- and it is a thousand little baronies. But I digress.)

In the area we're talking about now, the contradictory principles are: a) "big data" can reveal truths that would escape normal human reasoning power. Easiest illustration: hundreds of millions of people, all creating links among web pages, can together produce a vast and nuanced guide to what is where on the web, which Google put to use through its "PageRank" system.  b) numerical data can lead to incredibly stupid mistakes, if users forget that numbers and models inevitably oversimplify real, messy reality. Easiest illustration: the apologia from Robert McNamara in Errol Morris's The Fog of War.

In his post Heineman talks about how the "idolatry of numbers" -- worship of the spurious precision of mathematical models -- can lead to terrible real-world misjudgments. This was a powerful lesson I took from my time in graduate school studying economics: the formulas were so neat and powerful, yet their connection to the real world was so hit-and-miss. In a way this is also a theme of Liaquat Ahamed's outstanding book Lords of Finance, about the way financial "experts" helped bring on the Great Depression. They had great faith in their models; unfortunately, the models and principles didn't match reality.

3)  While I'm at it, here is my article "How the World Works" from the early 1990s, which was an attempt to explain the mismatch between the nice, clean models of Anglo-American economic textbooks and the brand of economics believed in by many governments in East Asia. Mainly Japan in those days and China now. Japanese and Chinese economic strategies differ from each other in very important ways, but in both countries governments have often applied a "strategic development" model of economics, not just the "consumer welfare" approach that arises from textbooks in Ec 101. More explanation in that article -- and for a bonus, this one from 2005, "Countdown to a Meltdown," about the imbalanced economic growth that the financial models of the "derivatives / subprime" era were creating and why it would end in tears.

I will be on KUOW's Weekday program today, 9am-10am PDT, talking with Steve Scher about (guess!) China. I was supposed to do this one week ago, but had such a paralyzing case of laryngitis, based on having yelled over the noise of jet engines at the Oshkosh air show earlier that week, that I couldn't say a word and had to bail out.

Update: audio of show is available here. It was a lot of fun. Got to talk about my visit to the Shanghai Skin Diseases and Sexually Transmitted Diseases clinic, as a patient.

Side note: again I notice as a recent arrival on American shores the value that NPR public-affairs talk shows around the country bring. When I lived in Seattle, I often listened to Scher's show -- or to Michael Krasny's Forum on KQED when I was living in Berkeley,  or Larry Mantle's AirTalk on KPCC when I was visiting my parents in southern California, or Kathleen Dunn on Wisconsin Public Radio when I'm in that part of the country. And of course in many cities you can hear Tom Ashbrook's On Point from WBUR in Boston and  Diane Rehm on WAMU in DC. I'll stop with the list before getting into the risk of "offense by omission"; the point, again, is that at a moment of justified concern about the chaos and deterioration of the media, it's worth noting that this particular kind of program -- locally-run NPR talk shows -- is an area of increasing quality and strength.

I am sorry to hear of the death yesterday of Corazon Aquino -- former president of the Philippines, widow of the assassinated senator Benigno Aquino, heroine of the "EDSA Revolution" of 1986 that drove Ferdinand Marcos from power.

In 1987 I wrote an article about Aquino and the Philippines arguing that the removal of Marcos was sadly not likely to correct the deeper problems of political corruption and economic inequality in the country. The article was called "A Damaged Culture" and was extremely controversial in the Philippines at the time, and to a degree still now. The article as originally published is available here. Some if its references from 22 years ago now seem dated. Unfortunately many others do not. And in any reference to the Philippines, it is always important to mention the works of the great Filipino novelist F. Sionil "Frankie" Jose, whom I wrote about in the Atlantic in 1995 here and visited in Manila early this year, as described here.

From the original article, about Corazon Aquino's prospects:

"Because previous changes of government have meant so little to the Philippines, it is hard to believe that replacing Marcos with Aquino, desirable as it doubtless is, will do much besides stanching the flow of crony profits out of the country. In a sociological sense the elevation of Corazon Aquino through the EDSA revolution should probably be seen not as a revolution but as the restoration of the old order. Marcos's rise represented the triumph of the nouveau riche. He was, of course, an Ilocano, from the tough, frugal Ilocos region, in the northwest corner of Luzon. Many of those whom he enriched were also outsiders to the old-money, old-family elite that had long dominated the country's politics. These elite groups, often referred to in shorthand as Makati (the name of the wealthy district and business center of Manila), regarded Marcos the way high-toned Americans regarded Richard Nixon: clever and ambitious, but so uncouth.

"Corazon Aquino's family, the Cojuangcos, is part of this landowning elite...."

RIP.

- On the Media interview with Bob Garfield, here, about the media-politics of health care reform. Back in 1995, I wrote this Atlantic article about the way the Clinton health-care proposal fell apart -- including the damaging role played by a hugely misleading article by Elizabeth "Betsy" McCaughey. Interview covers whether it could happen again.

- Online Q-and-A with the Stanford Review's Bellum project, here.

- Interview last week about China with Brian Lehrer of WNYC, here. These all for the record.

Also for the record, let me join others congratulating the Atlantic's Megan McArdle for what she has reported about Edmund Andrews' gripping account of his descent into deadbeat hell.

Having had some experience with writing confessional, "here's a mistake I made, and what I learned from it" articles, I understand the fundamental premise of the tell-all bargain. You're asking for the reader's trust and, if not forgiveness or respect, at least forbearance because of your brave candor in facing unflattering truths. But in those tell-all circumstances, you really do have to tell it all. There would ordinarily be no reason whatsoever for Andrews to embarrass his wife by talking about her past financial problems (two declarations of bankruptcy) -- unless he undertook to write a warts-and-all book about how his household got into financial trouble. This is also connected to the first item, above, about the health care debate. For all the mixed effects of the internet on mainstream journalism, there is a fast-feedback loop now that can correct errors that would otherwise have stood.

In an item yesterday about the distinguished Filipino novelist F. Sionil "Frankie" Jose, I mentioned that I'd taken a road trip with him to the northern reaches of Luzon and written about it in the Atlantic in 1991. Thanks to our web team, especially Cotton Codinha, that article is now online, here.

I hadn't looked at the article in a very long time and was disconcerted to find that the comparison I used yesterday to describe Jose's gusto was the very same one that came to mind 18 years ago. I hope that this unintended self-plagiarism says as much about the rightness of the comparison as it does about the limits of my imagination. It comes at the end of this part of the original article:

José is a short, plump, nearly bald man of sixty-six, who would not look out of place wearing the baggy shorts and basketball-style undershirt of the typical Chinese shopkeeper in Southeast Asia. When I see him, I am reminded of a little boy--in the way he carries his body, in his quick and unconcealed switches from desolation to glee. On our five-day trip last summer, when he was driving me and a young Soviet academic to see the sights of his youth, we passed a railroad siding where the teenage José had been held by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. "I was so scared," he said, his face clouding like a ten-year-old's. "I was so little and skinny then--ho ho ho!" he roared, slapping his round belly. We stopped every few miles so that José could see whether the cane-sugar sweets, or the little roasted birds, or the other regional delicacies were as tasty as he recalled. When he was not planning the next meal, he sat watching women with a blissful look. "Ah, I tell you, Jim, the eye never dulls!" he said in a restaurant after four stunning young women walked by our table "Only the flesh becomes weak--ho ho ho!"

Eventually I asked him how his wife, Tessie, whom he married forty-two years ago, after both had been students at the University of Santo Tomas, in Manila, feels about the adoring descriptions of young women that fill his work. "She knows I am devoted to her," he said, serious for a moment. "And she forgives me my pecadeeeeyos!" A rich roar of laughter. This, I thought, is what it must have been like to be on the road with Rabelais.

Because Frankie Jose has been so centrally involved in debates about the effects of Philippine culture on the country's political and economic destiny, for the record I include a link to my 1987 article "A Damaged Culture," which also cites Jose's works. This article generated a lot of heat, and some support, in the Philippines. From what I can tell similar debates still rage.

Ten days ago, in what seems a different lifetime, I was at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston for one of its "Kennedy Library Forum" presentations. Dr. Lincoln Chen, founder of Harvard's Global Equity Initiative, led an hour-long discussion about China and America (just before he went to the airport for a trip to China himself), followed by half an hour of Q-and-A from the audience.

Webcast of yesterday's interview on Fresh Air available online here.

After we'd discussed the People's Bank of China, RMB/$ exchange rates, the "financial balance of terror" between China and the US, and similar worthy topics, Terry Gross asked me in the closing moments about the deaths of my parents. Specifically, why I'd written on this site about my father's death two months ago today. (My mother died unexpectedly, and relatively young, in her sleep nearly five years ago.)

I didn't know she would ask this but in retrospect am glad that she did. As I fumbled to explain in real time, part of my instinct in making a private matter public was the sense that people with the virtues of my parents -- talented, loving, curious, hopeful people who poured their heart and effort into the betterment of their small community and the well-being of their family -- deserve more celebration than they typically get, precisely because they have chosen not to operate on a broad public stage. My parents were very well known in our home town but unknown outside of it. It gave me heart to think that people who had never encountered them might hear something about the lives they led.
 
As my siblings have taken turns cleaning out our dad's house, they have come across hundreds of pictures that none of us had ever seen before. Parents are always old to their children. When parents have lived to an objectively advanced age and then physically run down, as my dad did, it is startling to be reminded how vigorous and, yes, beautiful they had once been. My mom and dad's youth is what we are discovering after their deaths.

Thus, and as the real end to this commemorative series, three pictures I had never seen while my parents were living, part of a huge collection that my brother-in-law Bryan Neider is digitizing from old, brittle prints. The first are of my parents in the late 1940s, around the time of their wedding when she was 20 and he was 23. (His wedding ring is visible in the second shot.) Then, one of the rare pictures of my dad in which he's not smiling. Here he is wearing his game face, as the four-quarters, every-play offensive and defensive lineman known as Tiger Jim. These are people we never knew and are meeting now.