Overestimating ourselves

Atul Gawande has a piece in The New Yorker about people who are skeptical of Medicaid but support Medicare.

"I know so many folks on Medicaid that just don't work. They're lazy," he quotes one woman. Medicare is different.

“We all pay in for that,” she pointed out, “and we all benefit.” That made all the difference in the world. From the moment we earn an income, we all contribute to Medicare, and, in return, when we reach sixty-five we can all count on it, regardless of our circumstances. There is genuine reciprocity. You don’t know whether you’ll need more health care than you pay for or less. Her husband thus far has needed much less than he’s paid for. Others need more. But we all get the same deal, and, she felt, that’s what makes it O.K.

She's partly right.

Czech Idol, politics edition

With the wave of ethno-nationalism sweeping many countries, there are a lot of places where you could ask, “Who is this country’s Donald Trump?”

The Czech Republic is fortunate in having many candidates.

There’s the Czech president himself, one of the earliest people on the international scene to support Trump’s candidacy. He seems to share the US president’s deeply held belief that women are to be judged primarily on a man’s impression of her physical attributes, with attractive women being as naked as possible, and unattractive women being kept well covered. And he loves playing to Islamophobia and xenophobia. Like Trump, he sometimes seems more comfortable with Putin than with leaders of other EU countries.

We can’t count out Andrej Babiš, the man who seems likely to emerge from the October elections as prime minister. Like Trump, he only recently moved from business to politics, positioning himself as an outsider who will shake things up and clean up corruption, while quickly getting entangled in corruption of his own. Unfortunately for his candidacy as the local Trump, he seems to actually be successful in business, with no bankruptcies to his name—a nearly disqualifying omission.

The outgoing prime minister, Bohuslav Sobotka, can stake some small claim: in the face of his party’s declining popularity he made a last-minute play to local anti-Muslim sentiment. But other than that he’s more or less typical of the center-left Social Democratic party he belongs to, so in terms of broad policy positions he’s got none of Trump’s predilection for soaking the poor while comforting the rich. And as for his xenophobia, not only is it Johnny-come-lately, you can kinda tell his heart’s not in it.

I’m starting to think the complete package might be Tomio Okamura.

Two small memorials

On Sunday we went geocaching with two other English-speaking families connected with the Prague Community of Unitarians. Towards the end of our stroll through Divoká Šárka park we passed this crucifix at a crossing of two paths.

The Czech countryside is sprinkled with little roadside shrines. The ones I remember seeing most often on my walks are about the height of an adult, a square masonry column topped by a tiny chapel, a little bigger than a human head. A place for a short prayer or moment of devotion, perhaps as you pass by on your way to or from working in the fields.

Sometimes the shrines are small crucifixes, maybe one-half life-size or smaller. I don’t remember frequently seeing them as large as this one.

Yesterday I noticed this monument on my way from my office to the bus stop coming home.

It's not a game

I’ve written a couple of times about the controversy surrounding the work of the French historian Muriel Blaive, an advisor to the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (ÚSTR) who has recently publicized findings that, she says, call into question whether the communist regime was truly totalitarian.

The core of her argument seems to be that when you look in the files of the secret police, you find far more cooperation with the government than resistance, and I wanted to look at the question of resistance to dictatorship through the lens of game theory.

For simplicity, assume you have a nice, clean division between an evil, totalitarian regime and a populace made up of good people who are the regime’s unwilling subjects.

If on bold soul refuses to comply and speaks out, he or she is easily dealt with. Arrested, killed, tortured, whatever—it is, after all, an evil, totalitarian regime unconstrained by a sense of justice.

On the other hand, if the entire populace rose as one and at 9:00 one morning simply withheld compliance, there’d be nothing the regime could do. You can’t arrest everyone. If the entire public decides, “We’re done with this,” then it’s over.

And presumably it doesn’t even take everyone acting at once. Is it 50%? 25%? There’s some critical value for the portion of the populace that needs to rise as one in order to sweep away a totalitarian regime. Above that, you’re golden. Below that, you’re in jail, or dead.

And that leads to the coordination problem. Standing up is scary, but you’re willing to do it if enough other people are as well. “I will if you will.” But how do I know you will?

Planning for it is difficult, because if the regime catches you talking about resistance, that’s almost as bad as being caught actually resisting.

And even if you could plan, how do you commit?

“I will if you will.”

“I will.”

“Good. I will too.”

“Will you really?”

“Yes. Trust me. Will you really?”

You’re taking an awfully big risk with that trust.

And it’s not just with one other person, or a handful of people, but with thousands, tens of thousands, almost all of them perfect strangers to you.

The point of an argument

In an earlier post I discussed the work of the French historian Muriel Blaive, who splits her time between Prague and Vienna and who is an advisor to the director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, or ÚSTR. Blaive is giving interviews about research she’s done in the archives which revealed more cooperation with the former communist government than resistance to it.

I discussed in that earlier post why that conclusion is potentially problematic in itself. But that raises the question of the larger meaning of her findings. In part, that relates to improving our understanding of how dictatorships work, whether we choose to call them “totalitarian” or merely criminal.

Marek Švehla suggests another factor that could be at play.

He first argues that Blaive’s work is missing the forest for the trees.

The absolute rulers didn’t need to negotiate with any of their subjects, and to the extent they did so, it was in insubstantial spheres of life in the Czechoslovak state, not in the principal matters. For that, we don’t need to pay for who knows how expensive research in a specially established institution.

For example, research into the question of why Czechs so easily came to terms with the normalization regime [the re-imposition of stricter controls on political views after the Warsaw Pact invasion of August, 1968] says a lot about us, but little about the system that ruled this country and punished the thought that things could be different. In short, a dictatorial or totalitarian (whichever you prefer) regime can’t be characterized on the basis of the privileged or satisfied members of society, but rather by those most oppressed. In other words, you can’t put on one side of the scale 10 judicial murders and on the other 10 million satisfied vacation-goers and pretend that the second of those is equally important information for the judgment—and condemnation or, perhaps, commendation—of the regime. (Marek Švehla, “How satisfied were the satisfied vactioners?” Respekt 37, 11 – 17 Sept., 2017, pp. 10-11)

Just how bad was it?

It’s taken for granted in American discourse that communist rule in Eastern Europe was bad.

It was a police state in which people were punished for criticizing the government, or sometimes even for not supporting it visibly enough.

A wide range of books and music were banned because the governments thought they were bad influences.

The “Iron Curtain” had to be made into a full-on militarized border, not to keep the capitalists out, but to keep the citizens of the Soviet-bloc countries in. Some risked their lives to get out, and some of those made it, while others ended up dead or in prison.

And while the state-run economies did manage to industrialize formerly agrarian societies, but they brought stagnation in places like the Czech lands that started the communist period relatively advanced, and they had trouble everywhere with innovation and the efficient use of labor and capital, so that by the 1980s there was an obvious gap between the Soviet bloc and the west in terms of technology and the material standard of living of the median citizen.

So to an American it’s hardly a controversial statement to say that the communist regime here was bad.

But the Czechs—or at least some of them—are having an interesting discussion about just how bad it was, and about the meanings of specific words used to describe it.

In 2007 the Czech government created the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (USTR, Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů), focused on the Nazi occupation from 1939 to 1945 and the communist period of 1948 to 1989.

Challenges of marketing

The history of this part of the world can make for unintentional irony in marketing pitches.

This morning I was watching an interview on the subject of who should be in the Pantheon of the National Museum when it is finally reopened (hopefully sometime next year) after a long-overdue reconstruction.

Should it include Julius Fučík, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Fu%C4%8D%C3%ADk_(journalist), a journalist, member of the anti-Nazi resistance, and member of the Communist Party? He was placed in the Pantheon after the war (I’m not sure whether his placement was before or after the Communists took full power in 1948), then removed in 1991.

Should it include Emperor Franz Joseph (ruled 1848-1916) and his wife? They’d been placed there sometime during the Habsburg era, then removed in 1918 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart and Czechoslovakia was created.

The interview veered onto the topic of how to handle the remains of the communist era that are sprinkled around everyday things, from decorations on building facades to names of streets.

The interviewer compared the Czech situation to Russia where, in his words, they’ve removed the greatest excesses of “socialist realism” but left a lot of things as they were. “Their attitude is, we lived through that history, we shouldn’t negate it.” But it leads to some absurd situations.

I was on the subway in Petersburg and I saw an ad for a bank: “Come take advantage of our amazing interest rate—20% on your deposits. Learn more at our branches. Investors and capitalists, come talk to us at our branch at 21 Dictatorship of the Proletariat Square.” (Rough transcription/paraphrase of part of the interview)

It reminded me of an ad I saw on the subway here in Prague in 2013. A bank was promoting its retirement account, and the text was clearly aiming at young people with perhaps a 40-year horizon until they’d be drawing on their retirement savings. The tenor of the ad was the same as retirement ads anywhere: Plan now (and save with us) so you can retire in comfort.

Who watches the watchers

As I wrote about in an earlier post about goings-on in Prague, the man who’s most likely to be prime minister after next month’s elections is also facing trial for having used fraudulent bookkeeping to get an EU subsidy to a farm/resort he owned.

Last week, parliament debated whether to strip Andrej Babiš and a colleague of parliamentary immunity so that they could stand trial. They voted pretty decisively to do that, but of course not everyone was happy with the whole situation.

Bohuslav Chalupa, a member of Babiš’s ANO party, said:

What happens once the court, say, proves or doesn’t prove Mr. Babiš’s guilt in this affair? What punishment will there be for those who falsely accused him, right before the elections, motivated by ANO’s high popularity? And I mean politically punished as well. Whether for instance the investigator will be dishonorably discharged from the Police of the Czech Republic?

As Respekt comments, Mr. Chalupa is presenting here his idea of independent policy investigation. (“Fokus agenda”, Respekt, Sep. 11 – 17, p. 22)

He’s also illustrating one of my “favorite” types of arguments, one that only works if you assume that you’re right about something else besides the thing you’re arguing. Only he’s not even doing that right.

(Don't) spread the wealth

On Friday I went for my first stroll across Charles Bridge since we got here.

Sunday noon scene on Charles Bridge

It's one of the iconic experiences of Prague--a Gothic bridge lined with Baroque statues and marked off with watch towers at each end, fabulous architecture lining both sides of the river, and presiding above it all, Prague Castle and the Cathedral of St. Vitus.

It's a key link in the main tourist path: Wenceslaus Square, past the church of St. Gall to Old Town Square with the astrological clock, winding through the twists and turns of Charles St. from Little Square to Charles Bridge, across the bridge to the Lesser Quarter and its square, then up Neruda St. to the castle.

Looking through the portal of the tower on the Old Town end of the bridge

When I lived in Pilsen 26 years ago, I occasionally made it into Prague for an afternoon/evening, and that route was a staple of mine.

Advice for the apocalypse

http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/rur/synopsis-2/

I’m finally reading Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots, the play which coined the word “robot,” from the old word “robota,” the labor that a serf owed his lord, the courvée).

The robots in the play aren’t exactly what we think of as machines—rather, they’re made out of some alternative sort of pseudo-living stuff.

But they’re conceived very much like machines. Their inventor wanted to recreate a human in every detail, but his nephew made a business out of it by leaving out everything that was considered unnecessary for work: no emotions, no interest in arts or culture, just a strong and skilled set of hands with a memory beyond the imaginings of the human mind.

The prologue gives the history and the “science” of the play, set in some indefinite future, several decades out from 1920 when Čapek was writing it.

Act I is 10 years later, and the robots are rising up. They’d been armed by humans to fight their wars for them, and now they’ve turned on their masters. On the island where the robots are made, the few men who run the factory are aware of the dire events in the wider world, but they’re trying to keep the information from Helena, the wife of Domin, who runs the factory.

She nonetheless senses something is going wrong, and she summons Alquist, the construction chief at R.U.R. He comes to her room somewhat embarrassed for his work clothes and hands covered with lime and brick dust from having been at work.

HELENA: Oh, tell me, is something going on?

ALQUIST: Nothing really. Just progress.

Babiš and the briar patch

I wrote in my initial report from here about the corruption case surrounding Andrej Babiš.

He’s one of the richest people in post-communist Europe and a member of parliament, and he was the minister of finance until her resigned under the pressure of some apparently incriminating evidence about involvement in corruption.

The police now say they have enough evidence to take him to trial, so they’ve asked the parliament to hand him over for trial by suspending his immunity as a member of that body.

It wasn’t clear whether parliament would go along, but in the end they did, by an overwhelming vote: 123 out of 134 present in favor of suspending Babiš’s immunity, with four against (and apparently 7 abstaining).

For Babiš’s colleague Jaroslav Faltýnek was handed over by a vote of 120 out of 133, with five against.

(The quotes and data here are from Lidové noviny.)

In the parliamentary debate, Babiš’s substantive defense seems to be that the money wasn’t misspent, but was all used for the intended purpose of developing The Stork’s Nest, rather than being stashed away somewhere in Panama. “If I wanted to commit subsidy fraud, there’d be nothing easier than setting up an offshore firm somewhere in Cyprus. Nobody would have traced it there.”

How do things die?

We begin this episode with a light discussion of the proper terms to use when dogs die, but then progress through the more serious topic of the burkini (trust me, as it’s being discussed here, that is a more serious topic), which leads in turn to choice of allies and ultimately, how we know anything.

The Christian Democratic – People’s Party (KDU-ČSL) is a small party with a relatively committed base among religious Catholics (unfortunately for the party, that’s an elderly and shrinking population). After their disastrous results in the 2010 elections, they chose a new head, a young guy, a veterinarian, Václav Bělobrádek.

A fresh face.

The kind of guy who will scold a woman on Facebook for posting about her sadness that her dog died.

This part gets very tricky to explain, because Bělobrádek is obsessing about the choice among many different words for the end of life, and the punch is in the connotations that each one has for a Czech speaker, because the translations more or less overlap, but I’ll do my best to render his post into English with the appropriate flavor for an English speaker.

The woman described her dog’s passing with the verb “umřít,” which slovnik.seznam.cz translates as “die / exit / decease / pass away”. From those options, let’s go with “die,” and see what Bělobrádek—a veterinarian—had to say about the matter.

He didn’t die. Only people die. Animals perish, pass on, snuff it (in the case of animals, this doesn’t have a vulgar connotation), drop dead, extinguish, are killed, are cut down … Giving animals human characteristics and applying human terms to them (die, food, eat, take a poop) is modernist, leftist, and liberal, typical of bourgeois eco-ethno-bio scrawny folks with beads around their necks, earings in their noses, belly buttons, and eyebrows, with loose-hanging skirts and drinking tea from a bowl.

Thinning the herd

This morning Kate and I went on errands, trying to wrap up some of the school supplies the boys need.

Waiting on the trolley platform with us was an older woman with a cane. When the train came she made her way to the second set of doors and started up the steep steps into the car.

Kate and I had boarded at the front door and were already on when the driver closed the door - on the woman with the cane. She was mostly in, but it seemed like maybe her leg and her cane were still sticking out.

Three or four people near her on the train immediately came to her help, prying the door open to get her the rest of the way in, freeing up the nearest seat, and helping her to it. There were a couple of scornful glances forward in the direction of the driver, but with a sense of "what the hell can you do about it."

The woman seemed to take it in stride, no outward sign of anger at the driver, and clear appreciation for the help from strangers. At first she even seemed to waive off the offer of a seat, but she did end up taking it.

I don't know that this is common, but I know it's not isolated.

This week in Prague

My family and I are spending my sabbatical in Prague for the 2017-18 academic year, as we did in 2010-11. I’ll be based for the year at Czech University of Life Sciences (in Czech, Česká zemědělská univerzita, or Czech Agricultural University).

Part of what I do when I’m here is sample from the local media to try to build a sense of what’s going on in the society. The picture that develops is, like any, incomplete and shaped not just by what I’m observing but by the biases I bring, as well as my substantial but imperfect background knowledge.

The Czech Republic, or Czechia, to use the term that the country has adopted as the official short form of its name in English, is in some sense an unimportant place: 10 million people speaking a language that few foreigners bother to learn, a country outside the “core” of the European Union, a place unfamiliar enough to Americans that after the Boston Marathon bombing, Fox News put up a map that showed the Czech Republic but labeled it “Chechnya”. (Well, that’s Fox News, so I guess that last point doesn’t prove much.)

And yet, like almost anything in the world, we can learn from it if we pay attention, and the contrasts with the U.S. can help us see our own society in a new light. The U.S. has been largely the master of its own fate for a couple of centuries; the Czech lands have been part of others’ imperia for most of the last five centuries. The U.S. has continued under the same written constitution since 1789; the Czech lands experienced seven different regimes just in the 20th century. In the 20th century U.S. culture outgrew its inferiority complex relative to Europe and became the world’s dominant cultural force, first with jazz, but then with movies, rock, rap, etc.; Czechs have a proud cultural heritage, but it’s more of a specialty taste than a mass phenomenon.

The title of this post is aspirational, expressing a hope that I will follow through on writing regularly about the political and economic scene around me. I will necessarily be writing from my own particular areas of concern, but I aim to catch the interest of an open-minded American reader.

Driving in from the airport, I noticed that the trees in the median of Europe Ave. were numbered: 23, 22, 21, … I asked the cab driver what they were for. “Just identification, maybe for gathering data. Maybe some company wants to sponsor them. Maybe it’s the EU.”

There is a high degree of euroskepticism here, and this off-hand remark by the cabby seemed part of that. Anything that has an aroma of senseless bureaucratic meddling is probably the fault of “Europe.”

This is an unavoidable topic in the run-up to October’s parliamentary elections. One of the larger parties here, ODS (Civil Democratic Party) has toyed with euroskepticism for years. Now they’re playing this interesting game of declaring themselves to be pro-EU while undercutting that by making demands about negotiating a permanent option for the Czech Republic to not join the euro currency that circulates in most of the EU countries. (Marek Švehla, “Useful idiots and Protectorate scribblers”, Respekt, 21-27 August, 2017, p. 11)