Empathy and the social contract

First, read the following excerpt:

It is impossible to imagine Bill Gates’s wealth without Bill Gates’s ingenuity and effort. But it is far easier to imagine Bill Gates’s wealth being produced by someone other than Bill Gates within the institutions of modern American economic society than it is to imagine Bill Gates generating Bill Gates’s wealth in a different time and place – in France in the 1700s, or in the Central African Republic today – in which society was or is less tolerant of entrepreneurial capitalism and the accumulation of personal billions, and where the community of engineers that gave rise to and became America’s tech sector is absent. Indeed, at some point in Microsoft’s history it was Microsoft the information-processing organism that was more critical to Bill Gates’s wealth accumulation than Bill Gates himself. People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the creation of economic value, a very large chunk of which the founder can then capture for himself.

That paragraph can easily be used as some kind of an ideological  Rorschach test.  Upon reading that, one can get pissed off and defend Gates's gazillions, or one might applaud in agreement that Gates has been unfairly hogging it all, or ... whatever.

To me, what makes that paragraph standout is this: The author, Ryan Avent, is senior editor and economics columnist at The Economist.  You might remember him from one of my earlier posts?  One of the many reasons why I have been a long-time reader of the Economist is this: It is not an ideological outfit.  It is not like the Nation or the Wall Street Journal.  There is a sensibility that reflects a much broader understanding, which Avent also displays in his essay.

In the essay from which I had excerpted that paragraph, Avent makes an argument that will certainly make one sit up:

The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn’t rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.

His follow-up sentence?  "That is not a radical statement."

After quoting Adam Smith and the wonderful advantages of trade and specialization, Avent writes:

Secure in the knowledge that societal growth would not reduce redistribution (and could indeed increase the value available for redistribution by increasing global output) the incentive to draw the borders of society tightly would be curtailed. The challenge, of course, is to create the broad social interest in an encompassing redistribution. How to do that?

Isn't that the challenge that I have been struggling with all my adult life!  How do we create the broad social interest in redistribution that is needed along with the open borders, trade, and specialization?  How do we develop a social contract that will include redistribution, which the ideologues from the right hate, while also allowing for free trade that the ideologues from the left hate?

Avent writes that Adam Smith the philosopher wrote about that too.  "The force of human empathy can be made to serve either openness or societal mercantilism."  Here again the problem is that we are far more empathetic to people like us, but not towards people completely unlike us.  We conveniently forget that deep down we are all humans, but only view each other through nationalistic or religious or ethnic, or whatever divisive lens we want to use.

There is a better answer available: that to be ‘like us’ is to be human. That to be human is to earn the right to share in the wealth generated by the productive social institutions that have evolved and the knowledge that has been generated, to which someone born in a slum in Dhaka is every bit the rightful heir as someone born to great wealth in Palo Alto or Belgravia. ...
Rich societies can find ways to justify their great wealth relative to others: their members can tell themselves stories about the great things they did that others could not have done that made them wealthy beyond imagination. Alternatively, they could recognize the wild contingency of their wealth, cultivate human empathy, and do what they can to extend the wealth of humans to everyone.

If only we had more empathy.  If only we spent at least as much time thinking about what it means to be human as we spend on entertaining ourselves.  If only ...

Do I deserve this face? Really!

One of the many wonderful things about reading the Economist is this: the correspondents bring in quotes that are just charming.

The trigger for such a post is this: the latest issue of the Economist has a special on Singapore, to mark the city-state's fiftieth birthday.  The lead essay begins with:

At 50, according to George Orwell, everyone has the face he deserves. Singapore, which on August 9th marks its 50th anniversary as an independent country, can be proud of its youthful vigour.

It took me a while to get past the opening sentences.  After all, it was not too long ago that I crossed the five-oh.  "everyone has the face he deserves"?  I don't deserve to look better than this?  I don't deserve to look like George Clooney or a Bradley Cooper? ;)

Here's the unfortunate aspect of it all--Orwell himself did not live to look at himself in the mirror and decide whether he deserved that face.  He was only 47 years old when he lost the battle against tuberculosis.

I wonder whether Nabokov thought he deserved the face that he had when he wrote Lolita; he was a little over fifty at that time.  He was in Oregon when he finished writing that novel.  In Ashland.  And he apparently wrote a poem, titled "Lines written in Oregon."  Guess where it was published?  Yep, the New Yorker!  This is all way too fascinating how the different things are inter-connected ;)

Esmeralda! now we rest
Here, in the bewitched and blest
Mountain forests of the West.
Here the very air is stranger.
Damzel, anchoret, and ranger
Share the woodland’s dream and danger.
And to think I deemed you dead!
(In a dungeon, it was said;
Tortured, strangled); but instead –
Blue birds from the bluest fable,
Bear and hare in coats of sable,
Peacock moth on picnic table.
Huddled roadsigns softly speak
Of Lake Merlin, Castle Creek,
And (obliterated) Peak.
Do you recognize that clover?
Dandelions, l’or du pauvre?
(Europe, nonetheless, is over).
Up the turk, along the burn
Latin lilies climb and turn
Into Gothic fir and fern.
Cornfields have befouled the prairies
But these canyons laugh! And there is
Still the forest with its fairies.
And I rest where I awoke
In the sea shade – l’ombre glauque –
Of a legendary oak;
Where the woods get ever dimmer,
Where the Phantom Orchids glimmer –
Esmeralda, immer, immer.

But this means that I have to now struggle to figure out what the poem is really about!  No wonder Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew didn't care about poems and feelings;  in that same essay in which it quoted Orwell, the Economist notes that Lee's maxim was "poetry is a luxury we cannot afford,”

I wonder whether Lee deserved his face when he was fifty! ;)

What a way to end! Well, nobody's perfect!

Relax, this post ain't about death! ;)

The trigger for this post was simply an ending line in an essay that I read.  It was in the Economist.  One of the few magazines that I love to read, for the content and for the writing style as well.  (I even put my money where my mouth is, in this case--I am a subscriber!) Those wonderful writers, who always have that Economist way of writing.  In a magazine that is staunchly pro-individual rights and capitalism, the writers remain anonymous:

Why is it anonymous? Many hands write The Economist, but it speaks with a collective voice. Leaders are discussed, often disputed, each week in meetings that are open to all members of the editorial staff. Journalists often co-operate on articles. And some articles are heavily edited. The main reason for anonymity, however, is a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it. As Geoffrey Crowther, editor from 1938 to 1956, put it, anonymity keeps the editor "not the master but the servant of something far greater than himself. You can call that ancestor-worship if you wish, but it gives to the paper an astonishing momentum of thought and principle."

Kind of ironic, right, that the emphasis is on the whole, the product, with no spotlight on the individual writer?  Almost like one of those leftist collectives ;)

Anyway, the ending sentence that impressed me was in a report on China building a new "silk road" via Kazakhstan. 

There are many ways a train can derail.

How awesome!  You need to read the entire essay in order to understand why it is such a wonderful line.

We might remember many opening sentences, like Tolstoy's "all happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" in Anna Karenina.  Or, Melville's "call me Ishmael" in Moby Dick. Or, of course, Dickens' "it was the best of times it was the worst of times" in A Tale of Two Cities.   But, the final lines don't always get that applause.

My favorite last line is from a movie. From an old movie.  No, not from Casablanca, though that is phenomenal as well.  The one I love, love, as an ending is from Some Like It Hot.  A marvelous final line! ;)

I am in good company!

When I was a kid, the elders often appreciatively commented about the quality of writing in the newspaper that we subscribed to--The Hindu.  After coming to the US, however, I have always been shocked at the atrocious grammar there and wonder whether it was the case even back then, or whether the quality has really deteriorated over the years.

Here in the US, I have often commented to students about the wonderful writing styles in the New Yorker and The Economist.  But, recently, I have been noticing grammar issues in The Economist.  A few weeks ago, I even wrote a sarcastic letter to the editor:

Dear Editor:
I reckon the distinguished newspaper loves the word reckon so much that it reckoned it would make for an interesting reading by using four reckons in the Saudi America piece--two of those reckons in consecutive sentences in the same paragraph.
Who woulda reckoned that!
Sincerely

Of course, the magazine newspaper did not publish that letter.  If they had, you, dear reader, would have known about it by now!

Why write about some old story today?  Glad you asked.

I picked up the mail and the latest issue was in.  On the cover was the image of India's most powerful bachelor (ok, married but living separately.)  Over dinner, I read that lead article, and then glanced through the pages and ended up reading this piece on digital disruption on the farm.  Not really a new story, but a neat commentary that ties a few pieces together.  Which is when my brain caught a spelling mistake.  Do you see what I saw?

Yes, I checked the online version.  Thankfully, that error does not show up there.

Wait, are you still searching for the error?  Tsk, tsk! And I  thought the readers of this blog were incredibly smart people! ;)  Oh well, there is more to life than grammar, right?

BTW, don't even attempt to poin out the writhing problems that you find alot in this blog.  Their not paying me fur this ;)

The best thing you can do: choose your parents well

President Harry Truman apparently asked for a one-handed economist because he was tired of the "on one hand" and "on the other hand."  Economists, even the Nobel laureates, rarely seem to agree on the issues of the day, which makes the rest of us--practically the entire population--wonder if there is any science at all behind the conclusions that economists reach.

Here in the US, we are now getting into discussions and debates and yelling matches on whether we ought to increase the minimum wage.  And, often, related to this is the larger context of rising income and wealth inequality.  Economists being economists, well, you can pick and choose any one leading scholar who might support your own gut feelings on this, which might also make you wonder whether you can always then pick the correct answer to questions in economics simply based on your own gut feelings and later have it legitimized by quoting a leading economist!

The Economist--not the person but the magazine that calls itself a newspaper--offers, or attempts to offer, an explanation for why some economists oppose minimum wages.  Read the entire piece and decide for yourself whether you get it or whether you need to move to Colorado or Washington in order to inject some dope into your system and then read it!  The comments are the most interesting there, and say a lot about personal feelings leading to conclusions no different from what a real economist might have. This comment by a A. Andros summarizes it:

I am not a trained economist but can, like Beatrice, see a church by daylight.

So, ok, academic economists do not have their personal money at stake, right?  What if you had to think about it as a real investor, entrepreneur, business owner?  Here is Bill Gates (who is, of course, not a trained economist):

You have to be a bit careful that if you raise the minimum wage, you’re encouraging labor substitution, that you’re going to go buy machines and automate things or cause jobs to appear outside of that jurisdiction.

Which is true. The labor substitution via automation happens all the time. At the most basic levels too.  Think about this small piece--we now have plenty of grocery and box stores that have self-checkout lanes. That means a couple of checkout clerk positions, which might have paid minimum or near-minimum wages, have disappeared. And, of course, outsourcing is nothing but jobs appearing outside of the jurisdiction.

Now, one thing is for real--the growing inequality. I followed up on Greg Mankiw's post and tried to read this paper.  But, it had way too much technical discussions for my preference. I liked this there:

income inequality increased over time in our sample, consistent with prior work. Hence, the consequences of the “birth lottery” – the parents to whom a child is born – are larger today than in the past. A useful visual analogy is to envision the income distribution as a ladder, with each percentile representing a different rung. The rungs of the ladder have grown further apart (inequality has increased), but children’s chances of climbing from lower to higher rungs have not changed (rank-based mobility has remained stable).

Yep, make sure you choose your parents well!

This finding is not a real surprise to me because Branko Milanovic wonderfully articulated the importance of the parents' background as a predictor for economic success.

The New Yorker's John Cassidy summarizes the study, and writes:

the new study doesn’t mean that the effects of inequality aren’t more serious than they used to be. With inequality rising, particularly at the top, the rewards for clambering up the income distribution are greater, and so are the costs of getting stuck at the bottom. “The consequences of the ‘birth lottery’—the parents to whom a child is born—are larger today than in the past,” the paper notes. Or, as Saez said to the Times, “The level of opportunity is alarming, even though it’s stable over time.”

So, will increasing the minimum wage do anything to this inequality?  Will that help with evening out the uneven levels of opportunity?  You know what will happen when you ask two economists, right?  So, yes, do not ask them--unless it is a one-handed economist!

Play ball! Obama v. Romney

BTW, notice that the magazine newspaper cover says "excluding UK" .... so, what is the cover for the UK version you ask?

I wish the UK cover had been a cricket version of the Obama v. Romney caricature :)

Details on the Arab Spring in a series of graphics

The Economist uses technology better than most publications that I care to read.  This one here is really cool (except for the annoying part that it doesn't begin with "1 of 40" and you have to manually go to the beginning!):

The State of the Union in a map

:(

But, ... wait, it is the same magazine newspaper that had the following map only a week ago:

:)

The Economist Envy

The magazine, that is, not the profession.  (Though, it might work as well.)

More than a year ago, the Atlantic (itself suffering from the very envy!) observer this in the context of Time and Newsweek trying to compete against this magazine newspaper from Britain:

The Economist is truly a remarkable invention—a weekly newspaper, as it calls itself, that canvasses the globe with an assurance that no one else can match. Where else, really, can you actually keep up with Africa? But even as The Economist signals its gravitas with every strenuously reader-unfriendly page, it has never been quite as brilliant as its more devoted fans would have the rest of us believe. (Though, one must add, nor is it as shallow as its detractors would tell you it is.) ...
Repositioning your brand today is so much harder than it was in the old days, especially when you’re destined to be seen as a copycat product.

Fast forward a few months. Newsweek has been sold, and is fast disappearing. US News decided to become a web-based arbiter of everything from best hospitals to universities, and the Onion has a great satire on  Time:

TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults

"I came, I saw, I withdrew"

... from Iraq, that is.  The British publications, like the Economist, always have "punny" headlines :)
In this case, it is the Economist, in which Lexington begins the report on the US beginning the withdrawal process with an apology:

The Economist was a strong supporter of the invasion (see here, for example), not because we thought Saddam Hussein had anything at all to do with 9/11 but because we were afraid that he was going to break out of the box that was built to contain him after the Gulf war of 1991, with hugely dangerous consequences for the region. But we were wrong about his WMD programmes. And we were terribly wrong about the human cost of the war. Had we foreseen that the country would collapse into such bloody mayhem after the invasion we would not have supported it.

Had we foreseen .... blah, blah, blah.  As my grandmother used to say, "if my aunt had balls, she will be my uncle" ... I tell you, every cheerleader for the Iraq War needs to pay a hefty dollar penalty, and the collections can go into a Iraq reconstruction fund of sorts.

And at the end of it all?

Mr Obama's priority is to extricate American forces as smoothly as possible by the end of next year without doing anything that risks rocking the fragile boat. He has Afghanistan to focus on, not to mention his own re-election. And after all the miserable unintended consequences of George Bush's "freedom agenda" in the Middle East, discretion may indeed be the better part of valour: time to get out while the going is reasonably good. But how tragic, and tantalising, to have come so close to establishing a moderately accountable form of government in Iraq, only to slip away before the job is done.

Nothing tantalisingly close!  It is too bad, though, that this utter chaos and failure of the Iraq invasion and thereafter will morph into Obama's legacy. 

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed

The founder of BRAC, by some measure the world's biggest NGO:

Why I like The Economist--it is darn socialist :-)

I have been a regular reader of the Economist for years. For a good reason. It is a magazine that makes sense most of the time. No wonder the rest of the magazine world has a serious case of "Economist envy." They can try for all they want to be like the Economist, but there will always be only one. The real McCoy!

The blogs at The Economist are equally interesting--the same measured tone, without any histrionics, and with that slight sarcasm every once in a while. Exhibit A:

IF, WITH Barack Obama's acquiescence, Senate Democrats drop the public plan from their health-care reform bill, that measure will likely end up looking very much like The Economist's vision for health-care reform in America. Which is odd, because I never considered this paper a bastion of socialist thought.

Anyway, on the subject of healthcare reform, the same blog entry has this note:

Perhaps it's a matter of perspective. If you like the status quo, then these changes (and any change that seriously addresses the flaws in America's health-care system) are probably going to seem radical to you. But if you believe that the American system is not functioning as it should and, therefore, needs to be reformed, the changes currently on the table are actually quite moderate. Or maybe, just maybe, we're all socialists.

After all this name calling, I wonder whether the few remaining socialists--mostly in American universities--will end up disassociating from that name? That will be funny to watch :-)

Usain Bolt

Watch out for "False dawn".... "green shoots" not to celebrate

It is one thing to talk up the economy in order to build up consumer and producer confidence. It is another to start celebrating the end of the Great Recession.

Krugman wrote about it. And so did a couple of others; I blogged about it a week-plus ago.

The Economist expands on this warning, and provides an assessment that is less rah-rah, and more pragmatic:

The worst is over only in the narrowest sense that the pace of global decline has peaked. Thanks to massive—and unsustainable—fiscal and monetary transfusions, output will eventually stabilise. But in many ways, darker days lie ahead. Despite the scale of the slump, no conventional recovery is in sight. Growth, when it comes, will be too feeble to stop unemployment rising and idle capacity swelling. And for years most of the world’s economies will depend on their governments.

Consider what that means. Much of the rich world will see jobless rates that reach double-digits, and then stay there. Deflation—a devastating disease in debt-laden economies—could set in as record economic slack pushes down prices and wages, particularly since headline inflation has already plunged thanks to sinking fuel costs. Public debt will soar because of weak growth, prolonged stimulus spending and the growing costs of cleaning up the financial mess. The OECD’s member countries began the crisis with debt stocks, on average, at 75% of GDP; by 2010 they will reach 100%. One analysis suggests persistent weakness could push the biggest economies’ debt ratios to 140% by 2014. Continuing joblessness, years of weak investment and higher public-debt burdens, in turn, will dent economies’ underlying potential. Although there is no sign that the world economy will return to its trend rate of growth any time soon, it is already clear that this speed limit will be lower than before the crisis hit.

The rise of the middle class

Every time I visit India, I am simply amazed at the sheer number of people who have transitioned into a middle class life.

(Though, it equally depresses me that there are millions who are "slumdogs")

So, reading the following in the Economist is not a surprise to me:

By the 1960s they comprised just under a third of the world's population. Nowadays the chance that you are a memeber yourself is high—57% of the globe count as middle class, according to Surjit Bhalla, an Indian economist.

"Faith-based" economics?

In expressing his frustration with the inability of economists to give a single bottom-line, President Truman asked for a one-handed economist. President Obama sarcastically noted that these days everybody think they are economists.

As I have noted earlier, it is all because while economists pretend that their field of study is as scientific as is physics, the reality is that economics is nothing but a game of intelligent estimates. Best guesses, that come out of critical thinking and evidence. That is all.

So, it was quite fun to read the following in the Economist:

Economics (parts of it, at least) is broken, and mathematicians, sociologists, psychologists, and a bevy of other armchair -ologists are trying to fix it. At the Times, Anatole Kaletsky describes just a few of the ongoing attempts to bring knowledge from other disciplines into the dismal science. He mentions work done by students of aerodynamics and behavioural scientists, among others. But the most intriguing idea in the piece is that while it's possible our ideas are failing to accurately describe the economy, it could also be the case that the economy is failing because it's built on our inaccurate ideas:

[R]ational investors can find it very profitable to act on false premises - for example that credit will always be available without limit - if these false ideas become so widely accepted that they change the way the economy actually functions, at least for a time...

[T]he challenge that existing economic orthodoxy may find most disconcerting is Imperfect Knowledge Economics (IKE), the name of a path-breaking recent book by Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg, two American economists. Building on ideas of Edmund Phelps, one of the few Nobel Laureate economists who rejected the consensus view on rational expectations, IKE uses similar tools to conventional economics to generate radically different results. It insists that the future is inherently unknowable and therefore that there is always a multitude of plausible models of the way the economy works.

Which model is right may well depend upon which model is the current dominant paradigm. This is quite headache-inducing. It suggests that economics may be plagued by observer effects; by investigating one aspect of a system and solidifying knowledge about it into widely held principles, we reinforce those principles, which proceed to work until they don't.

This is the inherent risk in studying a complex system constructed on the aggregated decisions of billions of creatures who base their actions on the actions of everyone else. The science contributes to feedback, which biases the science. Ideally, some brilliant individual will discover a way around this hurdle. In any case, the first lesson economists may learn in the wake of the crisis is that they actually know much less than they think they do. Or rather, they know what they know, only so long as other people continue to know it.

carbon emissions, and how to bypass them :-(

So, the Economist made me think about something that should have been pretty obvious to me, given that one of the topics I teach is the economic geography of resources. All these years I have been explaining to students how there is lots of oil under the North Sea, and how Norway is a huge oil exporter. And an exporter of natural gas too.
In other contexts, I have also talked about how Scandinavians value and cherish clean air, water, ....

Yet, I had completely failed to note the contradiction in Norway's image of cleanliness with its tremendously profitable exports--oil and natural gas--which are one hell of a polluter! What a moron, eh? Writes the Economist:

Yet for all its environmental piety, Norway is also a prodigious polluter. Its greenhouse-gas emissions have grown 15% since it adopted the carbon tax. They are still rising, and are likely to continue to do so until 2012, according to Mr Stoltenberg. As it is, Norway spews out more emissions per head than many other countries in Europe. And, in the eyes of many environmentalists, these statistics understate the damage Norway is doing to the atmosphere. It is the world’s third-biggest exporter of gas and fourth-biggest exporter of oil. The process of extracting these fuels from below the North Sea releases some greenhouse gases within Norway itself. But when the oil and gas Norway exports are burned abroad, they generate far more emissions.

Maybe Norway's situation is more a philosophical challenge than an economic one. It does remind me of accusations that Mother Teresa was accepting large donations from people who were renowned crooks. Her argument was that she didn't care who dropped what in the donation box!

But seriously, is it ethical to advocate for caring for the environment when the country exports a gazillion barrels of oil every year?

Well, that was a couple of days ago. And that was from a publication that is center-right. Another British publication, the Guardian, which never leans to the right, has an interesting news report--that

Britain's biggest polluting companies are abusing a European emissions trading scheme (ETS) designed to tackle global warming by cashing in their carbon credits in order to bolster ailing balance sheets.
The sell-off has helped trigger a collapse in the price of carbon, making it cheaper to burn high-carbon fossil fuels and leading to a fall in the number of clean energy projects.

The report adds:

The EU's emissions trading scheme was set up as a market solution to cut greenhouse gas pollution from industry. Polluters were issued with permits that can be traded between companies and countries as a way of encouraging an overall reduction in carbon output. However, companies are now cashing them in for their own financial benefit.

Up to €1bn-worth of carbon emissions permits are said to have been sold off in recent months as industrial companies see an opportunity to bring in funds at a time when their carbon output is expected to fall due to lower production.

Nothing makes sense anymore :-(

Three reasons for Sanjay Gupta

Leave it to the Economist to succinctly summarize three reasons why Sanjay Gupta is a good choice for the Surgeon General position:

First of all, he is not merely a pretty face. He is a qualified neurosurgeon who practises his craft and holds a post at Atlanta’s Emory University. Second, doctors with roots in the subcontinent are greatly over-represented among the country’s medical establishment but have long felt neglected. Elevating a prominent Indian-American may help Mr Obama court America’s medical lobby, which has traditionally been hostile to reform.

But the biggest reason to think Dr Gupta may succeed is the fact that the only real power the surgeon-general has is the use of his bully pulpit to promote public health goals, such as healthy eating and stopping smoking. Some previous holders of the post were vocally so clumsy that they lost their effectiveness or their jobs: Joycelyn Elders was sacked by Bill Clinton for encouraging the teaching of masturbation. Others have been grey men who failed to get media attention. That, at least, is a problem Dr Gupta is unlikely to have.

Figting over land: Gaza, and Eelam

The conflict (war?) in Gaza is to the Israeli government the final push to silence Hamas and its acts of terrorism.  Meanwhile, in another part of the planet, the Sri Lankan government is in what might be the final stages of the push to silence the Tamil Tigers and put an end to the civil war that started in 1983.

Land, as we all know, is finite, and a good example of what economists describe as a private good--owning a piece of land means that the owner can exclude somebody else from owning it.  Of course, we could also peacefully co-exist ....

The Economist points out:

The Jews and Arabs of Palestine have been fighting off and on for 100 years. In 1909 the mostly Russian socialist idealists of the Zionist movement set up an armed group, Hashomer, to protect their new farms and villages in Palestine from Arab marauders. Since then has come the dismal march of wars—1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 and now 2009—each seared by blood and fire into the conflicting myths and memories of the two sides. The intervals between the wars have not been filled by peace but by bombs, raids, uprisings and atrocities. Israeli settlers in Hebron today still cite, as if it were yesterday, the massacre of Hebron’s Jews in 1929. The Arabs of Palestine still remember their desperate revolt in the 1930s against the British mandate and Jewish immigration from Europe, and the massacres of 1948.

The slaughter this week in Gaza, in which on one day alone some 40 civilians, many children, were killed in a single salvo of Israeli shells, will pour fresh poison into the brimming well of hate (see article). But a conflict that has lasted 100 years is not susceptible to easy solutions or glib judgments. Those who choose to reduce it to the “terrorism” of one side or the “colonialism” of the other are just stroking their own prejudices. At heart, this is a struggle of two peoples for the same patch of land. It is not the sort of dispute in which enemies push back and forth over a line until they grow tired. It is much less tractable than that, because it is also about the periodic claim of each side that the other is not a people at all—at least not a people deserving sovereign statehood in the Middle East.

That is one reason why this conflict grinds on remorselessly from decade to decade.

The tragedy in Congo