This is the second article in a mini-series on US intervention in Liberia that began earlier this week. The first installment set out a case for such intervention, hedged carefully . . . above all, on the condition that we adhere to the successful US role in East Timor in 1999, when a multilateral force contributed to by regional states in the Pacific region around Indonesia intervened and effectively stabilized the turmoil within the country as it re-established its independence from Indonesia. The US role in that UN-sanctioned intervention was important but limited: our military forces were confined to air-lift capabilities and logistic support for the Australian and Asian peacekeepers on the ground. The outcome was a big success. Elections were help in East Timor; independence established; the turmoil disappeared.

That initial article, recall, noted that there were legitimate concerns voiced by the critics of any US intervention in Liberia, even a limited one along the lines of East Timor . . . the model that does seem to be the guide for the Bush administration right now, at any rate in intent. Four stand out in particular:

[1] The intervening regional states in West Africa aren't nearly as stable or efficient or their militaries as disciplined and professional as was the case of Australia and the Southeast Asian countries that saw a clear interest in sending troops to East Timor.

[2] A small country of fewer than a million, East Timor had and has a degree of ethnic unity and shared history that isn't present in Liberia, just the opposite. (As against this, though, note that the armed militias and what passes for the Liberian army are weak, rag-tag forces, with scarcely any effective discipline or training.)

[3] US military forces are already spread thin on the ground in a dozen other countries, with a huge presence in Iraq.

Should We Intervene in Liberia: Yes, But …

To foreshadow the conclusion here, the buggy prof supports an active US role, diplomatically and militarily, in dealing with the Liberian civil war --- being waged off-and-on for 2 decades now, while more recently helping to destabilize much of tropical West Africa in the north --- but with a twist: our guide for intervening should be the US role in the UN-authorized peace-keeping mission in East Timor, formerly part of Indonesia, that began in 1999 and was a clear success. (To add something important, note that the buggy prof's analysis here draws on the research of a Ph.D. candidate, Chris Cook, whose dissertation on various US humanitarian interventions in the post cold-war era I happen to have the honor of directing. Chris, an outstanding classroom teacher and very promising young scholar, spent several months carrying out extensive interviews in Washington D.C. with former Clinton officials; and his dissertation combines unusual information with a clearheaded analytical framework. He has been very generous in giving me some pointers about the complex Liberian labyrinthe.)

What distinguishes that East-Timor precedent is that the big military burdens of peace-keeping were carried out by states in South Pacific region: Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand. And the US role? An effective, if limited one. Mainly we provided logistic support for the regional forces, including air-lift transportation . . . as well as active diplomacy and morale-boosting. The outcome, as we just noted, was a successful resolution of a vicious crisis that had its roots in the mid-1970s, when Indonesian military forces overran East Timor and forcibly annexed it . . . marked, at the time of the invasion and ever since until East Timor's independence in late 1999, by mass-murdering atrocities and repression on a large scale practiced by Indonesian military forces and local Timorian allies.

 

The Bush Strategy In Line With This

Fortunately, that seems to be the model that the Bush administration ---- itself internally divided on how to intervene for humanitarian purposes in a country like Liberia, where there are no immediate US security interests (possibly some ambiguous or outrightly vague ones at best) ---- has decided to adopt in the last month, ever since President Bush's visit to Africa.

Along with the rest of the archives in the weeks between April 18th and July 2nd, the current article has disappeared into some dismal Black Hole of Cyberspace-Purgatory, its final fate not yet known. Originally published on June 7th, it now appears here as a re-run, revised and updated . . . part of the mini-series on the US economy that began in May and June here.

John Allen, a visitor to the buggy site, has kindly sent us the following observations and queries:

In thinking about the slow response of the US economy to its recession, what role has the loss of industrial competitiveness had to do with this? I read that Boeing will have the wings on its new jet design made in Japan. This is one of the critical technologies in the aerospace industry that another US company is strengthening overseas. Do you have any particular insight on why Fingleton is either right or wrong?

I am referring to this article in Insight Magazine ; Samizdata; unsustainable ; and again unsustainable

It seems despite all the billions that were put in R&D investment during the bubble in the 90s, our economy did not reach a new plateau in terms of technologically driven economic activity that competitively revitalized strength of the economy.

Initially published on June 18th as part of a mini-series on the short-term prospects of the US economy --- the original itself, along with the missing buggy-prof archives, still languishing restlessly somewhere in interstellar cyberspace --- the current article has been revised and thoroughly updated and now links more tightly to the first 3 parts in this series. Another two or three articles will follow soon, with the whole series of articles adding up to a coherent argument . . . at any rate in principle, subject as always to any outbursts of screw-loose buggy stuff.

This is the fourth installment in a mini-series on the likely fate of the US economy over the next year or so. In the previous three installments, recall, a trio of big things stood out:

[1] Since the end of the shallow, short-lived recession of 2001, GDP growth has been disappointing . . . not enough to prevent unemployment from rising in the 18 months since then, up from 4.2% or so to over 6.3% this spring.

[2] Of the various reasons for this jump in joblessness, the pivotal one seems to be a big output gap between the economy's Aggregate Demand --- private consumption, private investment, and government consumption and investment, plus exports-imports --- and the economy's new, higher Potential Output . Aggregate Demand, in effect, explains the actual performance of real GDP from year to year as it tracks Potential Output, the economy's sustainable long-term growth rate . . . itself equivalent to a fully employed labor force without any inflationary pressures present. Sometimes actual GDP is exactly at Potential Ouput. Other times it falls short, and hence recessions; other times still, it exceeds Potential Output --- and hence booms and inflationary pressures.

Another name for these ups and downs of actual GDP year by year? The business-cycle . . . with two recessions since 1982 in the US, roughly one every decade since. Between 1945 and 1981, by contrast, there was a recession in the US economy about every four to five years. Both times since 1982, the recession proved shallow and short-lived; both times, GDP growth in the initial upswing of the business cycle turned out to be weak for the next two years or so. As for Potential Output --- the long-term growth trend --- it's a strictly supply-side phenomenon and reflects a quartet of influences:

This is a re-run of an article, revised and updated, that came to life originally on the buggy site May 28th, 2003 --- the original itself, three weeks after the hacker attack of July 1st, still a long lost stray wandering haplessly in the Blue Nowhere like the rest of the archives for the weeks between April 19th and July 2nd.

A follow-up of the previous article, this one deals with Nelson DeMille's Up Country and the wider implications it highlights brilliantly about the US war in Vietnam during the late 1950s, 1960s, and on into the early 1970s . . . along with the continued fall-out on American life today, for good or bad. It's a dazzling novel, and on all levels. Later, the article then deals with probably the best film ever on the war, Go Tell the Spartans, set in Vietnam and dealing with an American advisory group in 1964 --- a year before the war was escalated and we sent 500,000 men to fight and die there

First published on June 6th, 2003, with the original still lost in cyberspace, this article --- which draws on the philsophical argument by Professor Keith Burgess-Jackson at the University of Texas --- appears here again and seems more relevant than ever . . . what with the shrill nature of the criticisms launched at the Bush-Blair policy of destroying a brutal regime that ruled by deceit and mass-terror for decades and was in violation of 17 UN Security Council resolutions.

Keith Burgess-Jackson, a professor at the University of Texas --- a philosopher in the dominant philosophical school that has prevailed in the English-speaking world and Scandinavia for decades and is now making big inroads on the Continent of Europe, both in the western and eastern halves --- turns out to have produced a provocative, mentally astute argument about Bush's motives and the moral justification for going to war and smashing Saddamite Iraq. The buggy prof's own comments are heavily influenced by that argument. A good place to start then is to identify Burgess-Jackson's overall philosophical approach and to clarify it against its frequent opposite, Continental philosophy.

First published June 9th as part of a mini-series on the short-term prospects of the US economy --- that original, along with the missing buggy-prof archive, still drifting aimlessly in cyberspace like the unplugged psychopathic computer Hal in Kubrick's 2001: Space Odyssey --- the current article that unfolds here has been revised and thoroughly updated and now links more tightly to the first two parts in this series. Another three or four are destined to follow soon, the whole series of articles adding up to a coherent argument . . . at any rate in principle, subject as always to bugged-out quirks and aberrations.

Note the sub-title here: "Reasons for Optimism." In reality, to imitate Alan Greenspan's comments in early June, "cautious" optimism would be more appropriate . . . the Fed Chairman warning us that the US economy might be facing the danger of deflation, a persistent, self-reinforcing decline in the general price level. Is this danger at all probable? Hard to know. Coy as ever in his oracular way, Greenspan was hinting, it seems, that the Federal Reserve was ready to do what it had to in order to keep deflation at bay: if need be, presumably, by flooding the economy with dollars. A few days later, in another speech that he gave, the "cautious" qualifier was absent: what now struck the Fed chief was the remarkable resiliency of the US economy, considering how it had quickly absorbed several sequential shocks to GDP growth in the three year period from early 2000 to early 2003 . . . above all, the ballooning stock-market collapse, then the auditing scandals that have scared off investors ever since, then the jarring destruction of the 9/11 attacks, then the surge in oil prices, and more recently the Iraq war and the other geopolitical uncertainties that cut short, for several months, the stock market rally of last fall. Just two decades ago, these shocks would have been more than enough, the Fed chief noted, to send the US economy into a huge recessionary plunge, not the brief and shallow one of 2001. Under pressure of such dislocating turmoil, our economy's ability to bounce back and sustain effective growth, however disappointing on the job market --- 2.4% last year, with the EU growing a mediocre 0.7% that same year and lucky to grow half that this year, and Japan still stuck in its endless slump (with a few brighter spots now appearing) --- was and is impressive, a point that Greenspan made in that speech, and one we can agree with, no?

Originally published June 5, 2003, this is a revised, updated article on the prospects of the US economy. It replaces that earlier version, which is still missing and will continue to elude us until the buggy prof's web-manager is able to retrieve and then install the archives between April 19th and July 2nd.

Like its first six or seven predecessors, this article is an ongoing installment in a series on the economics profession and the US economy's prospects, this year and in the future, that began in May 2003. More to the point, consider the article as part II of a mini-series on those short-term prospects. Part I was published yesterday, July 20th . . . an updated version, essentially, of the original article and mini-series that started in early June. Part III will materialize tomorrow. All in all, there'll be about 5 or 6 parts here.

Remember, the short-term's our current preoccupation. Later on, in a new series of articles, we'll deal with the long-term future of the US economy --- say, the next two or three decades. Hard to foresee with any reliability any farther into the future. And when we finally get around to that new series in a couple of weeks or so, our perspective, it's worth stressing now, will be increasingly comparative. The primary aim? To tease out the ways in which economic growth and technological dynamism across countries, especially potential great powers that could rival the US --- China, maybe a unified EU, possibly a revived Japan --- will likely affect the global distribution of power.



THE MAIN PROBLEM: SLOW RECOVERY AND A DETERIORATING JOB MARKET

As the previous article noted, Part I of this two-part mini-series, the US economy's recovery from the recession of 2001 has been OK in terms of GDP growth --- which is why most analysts think the recession itself ended by the start of 2002 --- but has been disappointing in creating jobs, whether for laid-off workers or new entrants looking for work. The two growth rates, of course, are interconnected, with the causal influence running from faster rising GDP to eventually faster job growth.

Thanks to J.F.'s kindness, the buggy prof has been left jumping up and down with crackling elation the last hour now that he has a nearly full-fledged list, saved as HTML files on his hard-drive, of all the articles published after April 18th this year on this site . . . but missing, you'll recall, ever since a hacker managed to shut down a downstream server at the start of July and keep us out of business for nearly two weeks. One by one, no more than a couple a day, these missing articles will be republished here with a "re-run" in the title, then archived under one of the categories that you'll find in the sidebar to the left here.

Prof bug is especially grateful because almost all the articles on the US and global economy --- its near-term prospects, with long-run implications --- that were being unfolded in a lengthy, fairly cohesive manner, one after another, throughout June are now back in his busy-bee hands. There were, as I recall, about 9 or 10 in all. J.F.'s own p.c. crashed for a few days in late June, the victim of a power-shutdown that lightning caused. (Is there no end to the woes of us poor Internet users?) You'll find the first two of these reprinted here.

One caveat: you'll see reformatted-versions at the end of these re-runs, which refer to the fact that they have to be reformatted again in HTML manner that the published version doesn't show, alas. For instance, the article just published below isn't fully reformatted. It takes time, and a "final reformat" will be tagged on when that's done.

With a few updated comments and new data, this article --- a re-run of one originally printed on June 6, 2003, but still missing thanks to the incomplete buggy archives --- is the latest in a series, started in May, that deal with the US economy's prospects. Thanks to the earlier theoretical work, we can now take up a host of more practical matters --- particularly the problems and opportunities now facing the economy.

 

Economic Performance the Last Year and a Half. A Strange Jobless Recovery

Officially, the recession of 2001 came to a halt in the fall of that year, with economic growth picking up rapidly in the fourth quarter after the 9/11 attacks, and then surging off and on throughout 2002. In the end, overall GDP growth --- real, after adjusted for inflation --- was a disappointing 2.4% last year: not enough to reverse the job losses that the recession caused, and in fact, not enough to stop unemployment from rising throughout 2002 and through the winter and spring of 2003. In more concrete terms, since March 2001, the US economy has experienced a loss of 2.1 million jobs: that leaves the official unemployment rate at around 6.0%, compared to the low-point of 3.9% at the end of the 1990s --- the least unemployment we've had since the mid-1960s. That 6.0% in April was actually slightly worse than the 5.8% recorded for March of this year. (In May, the level of unemployment climbed, it turns out, to 6.2%). A longer-term perspective might be helpful here.

In May and June --- before the hacker-attack and the buggy shutdown --- several articles, close to ten or so, were published here that dealt with the economy and economics as a discipline: among them, whether economics is or can be a science, and then several on the prospects of the US economy . . . short- and long-term. These articles, alas, aren't available yet. Their reappearance here depends on WebXpertz, the buggy prof's web management firm, getting permission from biggie.com (its ISP) to use biggie's server and fetch the buggy archives missing after April 16th. These articles on the economy formed a logical sequence that, over the weeks, unfolded a lengthy analysis of a coherent sort --- in principle anyway, subject to buggy brain-lame aberrations --- so that you needed to read the earlier articles to make sense of the latest.

Toward the end of June, the articles were narrowing in focus to concentrate on the US economy's immediate prospects ---- most of them bright enough (not all) --- and on four theoretical obstacles, it's said, that might impede a much better growth record the remainder of this year and into the next couple of years . . . roughly the short-term. Two of the obstacles --- [1] deflation and [2] a liquidity trap --- were dealt with at length just before the July 1st attack; and both, to say the least, turned out to be noticeably hyped-up dangers. Japan, it's true, might be suffering from deflation, a general fall of the price level; by contrast, there's almost zero probability that it will materialize here. As for a liquidity trap --- first identified theoretically by Keynes in the 1930s Great Depression, in which key nominal interest rates are at or near zero, yet are unable to stop deflation and kick-start economic growth --- it's not clear it ever existed even in those depressing days, let alone hovering as a real threat to the immediate future of the US economy.

 

TWO OTHER DANGERS

That leaves two remaining obstacles, singled out in both economic theory and journalism as potential dangers to more vigorous US economic growth, that we want to deal with in the days to come:

Amazingly, my web-management firm WebXpertz continues to be stonewalled by biggie.com in the matter of my full archives and program files. It claims, apparently, that it still has legal right to investigate the hacker-attack that brought its server down temporarily on July 1st, and on that legalese basis, it still refuses access to WebXpertz to a downstream server where the buggy archives and other files are located. WebXpertz itself isn't blameless. As visitors here now know, the archives for all the articles published between the buggy prof's start in late January and April 16th were backed up by WebXpertz on yet another computer, and have been installed and are available here at this site. Click on any of the archive links in the sidebar to the left. You'll see what I mean. Don't ask what happened after April 16th. It's a long bewildering story. Caveat Emptor! Or, more pedantically expressed and loosely translated: Caveat emptor, quia ignorare non debuit quod jus alienum emit. "Buyer, beware! Don't be a dummy and overlook what a seller might be up to."

So, given these obstacles, it seems wise to ask forthrightly whether any of you might have kept copies of the articles published after April 16th until the July 1st hacker attack --- either as a file on your hard-drive or in print-out form. If you did, please contact me. You'd make the buggy prof elated if you were to send him the files by email, or --- if they're print-outs --- kindly email me: it goes without saying that I would compensate you for all postage-costs. (Be sure to email me first: prof bug will be bugged out if hundreds of postage receipts suddenly arrive in his mail box.)

 

Sooner or later, biggie.com will stop its investigations and the archives accessed. Until then, I'm particularly keen to get all the articles on the economy --- about 8 or 9 lengthy ones (including a humongous one on whether economics is or can be a science) --- published in May and June. They formed, you see, a logical sequence that set out a lengthy analysis of a coherent sort --- in principle anyway, subject to buggy brain-lame aberrations --- so that you needed to read the earlier articles to make sense of the latest.

More specifically, toward the end of June, the articles were narrowing in focus to concentrate on the US economy's prospects ---- most of them bright enough (not all) --- and 4 theoretical obstacles to a much better growth record the next year and on into the future: the alleged dangers of [1] deflation and [2] a liquidity trap, both dealt with at length in final form just before the July 1st attack. And both found, to say the least, to be hyped-up dangers. It's not even clear whether a liquidity trap --- first identified theoretically by Keynes in the 1930s Great Depression --- ever existed even in those days.

That leaves two other obstacles that have to be consid . . . Hang on! The buggy commentary that began to unfold here turned out to be longer and full of some hopefully tantalizing points that prof bug has decided to publish it in a separate article. Right now (Santa Barbara time, 5:20 P.M., July 18th).

Our thanks to Ralph, a visitor, for leaving this comment at the end of the previous article. It seems sufficiently important to deserve being singled out in a stand-alone article, followed by the buggy response.

Note that Ralph's comment has a link to a Los Angeles Times article. The background here? Essentially, an observation made by prof bug in our previous article to the effect that two prominent Democrats, about 3 weeks or so ago, had written an op-ed article in that paper --- or maybe the New York Times --- warning Democrats to be wary of supporting Presidential candidates who are mainly appealing to party activists, themselves far to the left of Democratic voters on key issues . . . not least security and foreign policy ones. The buggy prof lamented that he couldn't find that article with either a google search or a more direct effort at The N.Y. Times or L.A. Times. Tried; tried again. No luck. Prof bug himself, recall, is a registered Democrat and naturally concerned about the behavior and future prospects of his party. He worries that pc-radicals and Paleoliberals --- the hard-core of the party activists around most of the country (not all) --- will overwhelm the Clintonite moderates and force the party back into near Presidential-oblivion: save for the ill-starred Carter years of the late 1970s, its fate between 1968 and 1992.



Buggy Prof:

Regarding the article in question, check out (an L.A. Times web page address). It's a column by Lawrence J. Haas and Richard Klein titled, "Democrats Will Have To Hop Onto Security Wagon." I'm not certain if it's the same one that ran in the NYT or not, but it's at least quite similar in theme and in the credentials of the writers. If the link isn't good any more, let me know and I can email you a PDF copy.

Keep up the great blog.



 

THE BUGGY REPLY:

Ralph, many thanks for the comments and the link to the L.A. Times. That article is no longer available there, but (thanks to a google search ) a good summary exists on this web page.

Alas, despite a good argument, it's not the article we need. Not to despair. That elusive literary will-o'-the-wisp, it turns out after more snooping with Google, was written by Bruce Reed and Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council and appeared originally in the L.A. Times earlier this month: see From and Reed. The Democratic Leadership Council? What's that? Well, established in the 1990s, the DLC, a Clintonite group, has sought to move the Democratic Party beyond futile left-right ideological debates and situate it as a moderate reform party with a broad-based appeal . . . something absent in the party between 1968 and 1992, with Republicans winning firmly all the presidential elections save for Jimmy Carter in 1976. The Progressive Policy Institute, note, is the intellectual powerhouse for centrist, intellectually informed policies of the sort the DLC champions. Not the only one to be sure; but one of the better.

Now down to business here: do Presidents habitually lie and deceive the US public about big security issues, especially decisions that lead to war or its prosecution?

Three lengthy articles were published by the buggy prof on this site in June, just before it crashed on July 1st, on the problem of finding Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in post-Saddamite Iraq: biological, chemical, and nuclear. Unfortunately, until we get the archives back, you won't be able to access these articles. One dealt at length with the practical side of intelligence --- US, UK, German, French (it doesn't matter: all were and are convinced that Saddam had WMD in violation of 17 UN Security Council resolutions) --- and two were systematic study of the moral rights and wrongs of the Bush's and Blair's strategy to go to war and the alleged motives and subsequent moral and political justification for destroying the cruel, mass-murdering system that Saddam, his family, and his Tikrit tribal clan had imposed on 25 million Iraqis for decades . . . complete with a secret-police state that ruled by means of pervasive fear and systematic terror. When we get back our archives, we'll return to the moral side of the US-UK strategy here.

For the moment, concentrate on the charges now being raised around the world --- including in the US and UK (with greater shrillness there than here) --- that Bush and Blair deliberately doctored intelligence reports and then systematically lied to their publics and the world in order to launch a war against Saddam's regime. "Yes, yes, we know how cruel and destructive the regime was", the critics say . . . including now the French government, whose President, Jacques Chirac, told the New York Times reporter who interviewed him in February that he had no doubt Saddam loved the Iraqi people. "But the weapons of mass destruction, old man: where are they? Or . . . or did you lie to us from the start? Eh, where are they, the weapons? Come come Bush! Come come, Blair! Fess up, like men. Look everybody: Liar! Liar! Pants on Fire . . . naughty, naughty boys!."

What, Bush and Blair lied, and repeatedly? Then in that case, we must be dealing with two uncommonly naïve and very stupid men.

 

To Clarify, Consider the Logical Implications of the Charge

[1] Bush and Blair, no doubt in tete-a-tete eye-winks with one another in meetings here and there the last year or so, must have agreed to coordinate their deliberate deception, including doctored intelligence and publicly declared lies, in order to attack Saddam and his regime for their own reasons. Bush wanting to get revenge for daddy's sake. Or because of a neo-conservative cabal in the Defense Department. Or because of oil --- even though the Houston oil magnates were frightened of a war. As for Blair, what could have been his ulterior motives?

You won't, alas, be able to find any of the articles that are --- were --- archived when you click on the archive categories on the left sidebar; at any rate, for the time being. For an explanation, please see the previous article near the very end. And for similar reasons, you won't for the present be able to find any articles published since April 18th.

Soon --- or so prof bug expects, fingers crossed tightly and with appropriate meditation sounds and thoughts to appease the gods of blue-nowhere cyberspace --- the archives and missing articles will all be back on the site and available at a click. In the meantime, welcome to all visitors: old and new alike.

Should there still be any visitors left to the Buggy Prof site --- at one time, almost 2000 a week, lots of academics, grad and undergrad students, and the general public --- please be assured that you are a very welcome presence. (The archives, please note, are now updated and working properly: August 20, 2003.)

What happened on July 1st, the day of the buggy shutdown, and what kept it down for the next 13 days?