Davos Newbies

Peter Leyden, who runs the interesting New Politics Institute, had an excellent response to my post on Obama’s coming landslide victory in November:

He is a master of the new tools of the new paradigm of politics. It will be like a fight between conventional weapons and nuclear bombs.

Microsoft’s launch of the WorldWide Telescope. I was a childhood astronomy geek, so this has something of Proust’s madeleine for me.

I read two unrelated accounts of brain drains today.

First, the Financial Times reports that Germany – Germany! – faces an acute shortage of engineers. For every 100 “old engineers” (a term not defined in the article), only 90 young engineers are being trained in Germany. Worse, many of the engineers that are being trained are leaping to Switzerland, which faces its own engineering shortages.

One of the principal reasons Germany is the world’s leading exporter is because of the excellence of its engineer-heavy manufacturers, particularly the Mittelstand companies that dominate global markets in highly specialized niches. I can’t imagine a more worrying portent for the future of Germany’s economy than a shortage of engineers.

In a very different context, Haim Watzman argues that Israel should seize the opportunity to recruit the world’s best and brightest to its universities and companies. I had a conversation this morning with someone about the chimera many regions chase of being “another Silicon Valley”. The truth, we agreed, is that there is only one Silicon Valley. We also agreed that there is one possible exception – Israel.

But as Watzman explains, Israel isn’t seeking out the world’s talent, unless they are Jewish. Like many other Jews, I take vicarious pride in little Israel’s continuing abilities to push out world-class innovations. But the blinkered strategy described by Watzman can’t last forever. There is a continuing brain drain and no reciprocal flow:

We’re draining brains because the Israeli meninges allow brains to flow only in one direction–out. It’s time to match the drain with a funnel that will bring new brains in.

I love the Financial Times, but their choices of outside columnists have frequently sent me into despair. I’m glad I didn’t break out the champagne a few years ago when they finally got rid of the ludicrous, self-important Tyler Brûlé – because they senselessly brought him back a few weeks ago.

The paper got what it deserved this weekend. Brûlé’s subject? The potency of “brand Beirut”:

Lebanon is not in need of a tourism campaign just yet as it needs to get many other rooms in its house in order first (a president perhaps?) but one day a “Liberal Lebanon” initiative could be just the slogan to bring back millions of tourists who are tired of being nannied in their home markets.

I’m sure in some circles this counts as edgy and far-sighted. I don’t see how making a newspaper a laughing stock is a good idea.

I have a 12-year old son who is fascinated by fast cars. Top of the list for him is the Bugatti Veyron. Dan Neil, the great car writer for the Los Angeles Times, wrote about the Veyron for Portfolio. I loved this quote, which shows how crazy the super rich can be:

“Our average customer already has about 30 cars.”

Gideon Rachman comments on the slightly diverting Prospect/Foreign Policy poll to pick the world’s top public intellectuals. Others have correctly noted that the list is heavily skewed to the right of the political spectrum (Chomsky is a certain kind of left, but not my kind of left), and that it largely ignores blogs as a principal medium for today’s public intellectuals. Rachman’s colleague Martin Wolf – who’s rightly on the list of 100 – makes a more important point:

I popped next door to congratulate/tease Martin about his eminence. And he made rather a good point. (One would expect no less, of course.) Today’s intellectuals are a rather unimpressive bunch compared to a similar list of “public intellectuals” you could have compiled in 1850. Martin reeled off the names of Marx, Mill and de Tocqueville. To which I would add - Dickens, Tolstoy, Darwin, Balzac.

All of the above were already well known by 1850 and I think they stack up pretty well when compared with Chomsky, Fukuyama, Kagan - or even, dare I say it, Martin Wolf.

So are we living in some sort of intellectual dark age? Or have Prospect and Foreign Policy simply overlooked the great minds of our era?

Okay, I’m a complete Obama KAD (Kool-Aid Drinker, to borrow the term used on Peter Bodo’s non pareil tennis blog). But I’m going to extend my record for political forecasting to say that Obama will win by a huge margin in November.

I know I don’t spend my time with those hard-working white Americans that Hillary favors, but I’ll cite a few strands in evidence:

• I keep meeting people who say something on the order of “I’ve voted Republican for years, but I’m supporting Obama”. People are desperate for change.
• It’s always tough to fight a movement. As Hillary discovered.
• “Losing his bearings” wasn’t about age. But part of the election will be. Every image of McCain and Obama will re-emphasize that one candidate is old and cranky, the other is young and vigorous. (To say nothing of one is tall and one is short.)
• Third term of George W. Bush. Does anything more need to be said?
• The economy stinks. The war is a disaster on truly historic scale. McCain is utterly wrong on both points and the Republicans stuck us with both. Voters want payback.
• John McCain, November 2005: “I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.”
• 100 years in Iraq.
• Obama will have an unlimited supply of money. McCain won’t. I wish that didn’t matter in politics, but it does.

I could go on and on. What about racism? Sure, there are people in the US who will never vote for the black candidate. But they are a diminishing number, and a lot of them don’t vote. Without wanting to trivialize the running sore of race in the country, the last few decades of popular culture have been as influential in changing perceptions as the heroic moments of the civil rights movement and the legislative accomplishments of the Great Society. Will Smith, Tiger Woods, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Denzell Washington, Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell and even Condi Rice have dramatically changed perceptions.

It’s a landslide.

Via the Foreign Policy Blog:

• It takes five years to get a phosphate (fertilizer) plant up and running
• Ammonia costs have tripled over the past decade
• Sulphur costs have gone from $55 to $450 in the past year
• Ocean shipping costs have gone from $35 to $100
• Morocco, “the Saudi Arabia of phosphate,” has raised phosphate prices from $55 to $250 a ton. They’re headed for $400 a ton
• China has imposed a 135 percent export tax on fertilizer
• The Indian government will dole out more on fertilizer subsidies in 2008 than it spends on its military

I knew there was a reason why I subscribe to the British Psychological Society research digest blog:

New research suggests that comparing a current situation with an even worse atrocity comes with a price - it desensitises our judgment of future moral violations.

That’s the conclusion of a study that examined the cost of thinking “it would have been even worse under Saddam”.

Gershom Gorenberg gets better and better:

Just in case I’m ever struck by the mad thought of running for political office in Israel, I’d like to set the record straight: I don’t agree with the prophet Isaiah’s political views. He doesn’t speak for me. No way.

It’s true that I’ve enjoyed some of his sermons, and I took some comfort from the spiritual stuff, like that vision of heaven, with the six-winged creatures praising God. But I attended to Isaiah strictly for the religion, not for the politics. I mean, I’m a patriotic Israeli (even if my lapel pin got lost in the wash, honestly).

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t even there the day he said,

Ah, sinful nation!
People laden with iniquity!
Brood of evildoers!
Depraved children!
They have forsaken the Lord,
spurned the Holy One of Israel,
Turned their backs on Him!

but if I was there, I slept through the sermon. Otherwise, I would have told him that I might just run for office, and therefore I cannot tolerate him cursing my country.