Wednesday, March 25, 2015
The F-35 Nightmare Could Get Even Worse
Forget the enormous cost overruns.
Excuse the epic schedule delays.
Overlook the disturbing performance limitations.
Let’s assume the Pentagon somehow comes up with enough money to pay for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Suppose further the F-35 eventually passes all its test and evaluation milestones and the appropriate authorities make the appropriate Initial Operational Capability and Final Operational Capability declarations.
Let’s imagine a future in which the various services have patiently waited long enough to finally take ownership of their respective fleets, totaling some 2400+ aircraft, allowing the Pentagon to retire the F-16, A-10, F-18 and AV-8. And maybe the F-15 and F-22, as well.
Let’s also assume our allies get their stealth fighters too, replacing whatever old jets they’re currently flying. While we’re on a roll, why not assume our adversaries don’t make any hostile moves that would require a JSF-based response before we’re ready, and that no new threats or technologies emerge which would render the JSF obsolete or irrelevant.
Let’s assume everything works out in JSF-land and things go as well as they possibly can.
Despite these optimistic assumptions, this best case scenario for the F-35 still contains a rather significant flaw, an elephantine turd in the proverbial punchbowl. It comes down to a single word — hypoxia.
See, the U.S. Air Force grounded its F-22 stealth fighter fleet in May 2011 because pilots were displaying strangulation-like hypoxia symptoms at a rate nine times higher than the crews of other fighter jets. The grounding lasted for four months, during which time “the most capable aircraft in the world” was unflyable.
Then the secretary of defense stepped in and lifted the grounding while establishing tight restrictions on how pilots could fly the jet — not because engineers had isolated and solved the problem, but because if the situation had lasted much longer, the pilots would have lost their certifications, leaving the Air Force with a fleet of unusable aircraft and a cadre of unqualified pilots.
That sounded like a bad idea to everyone, so officials allowed the pilots to return to flight despite the lingering problem. In February, 2012 the Air Force grounded the fleet again — for the fifth time.
The good news is that repeatedly grounding the Raptor had virtually no impact on America’s defense posture, because the jet was not relevant to the military’s operations in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya — at least according to then-secretary of defense Robert Gates.
The non-impact of the F-22’s non-availability surely reveals something about the value of that particular jet, but that’s a topic for another day. Instead, let’s consider what will happen when we discover a similar flaw in the F-35, some malfunction that renders the JSF unable to fly safely … and necessitates a fleet-wide grounding or five.
The key phrases here are “when” and “fleet-wide,” although “five” is a pretty significant number as well. It may be worth noting that the groundings have already begun.
Excuse the epic schedule delays.
Overlook the disturbing performance limitations.
Let’s assume the Pentagon somehow comes up with enough money to pay for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Suppose further the F-35 eventually passes all its test and evaluation milestones and the appropriate authorities make the appropriate Initial Operational Capability and Final Operational Capability declarations.Let’s imagine a future in which the various services have patiently waited long enough to finally take ownership of their respective fleets, totaling some 2400+ aircraft, allowing the Pentagon to retire the F-16, A-10, F-18 and AV-8. And maybe the F-15 and F-22, as well.
Let’s also assume our allies get their stealth fighters too, replacing whatever old jets they’re currently flying. While we’re on a roll, why not assume our adversaries don’t make any hostile moves that would require a JSF-based response before we’re ready, and that no new threats or technologies emerge which would render the JSF obsolete or irrelevant.
Let’s assume everything works out in JSF-land and things go as well as they possibly can.
Despite these optimistic assumptions, this best case scenario for the F-35 still contains a rather significant flaw, an elephantine turd in the proverbial punchbowl. It comes down to a single word — hypoxia.
See, the U.S. Air Force grounded its F-22 stealth fighter fleet in May 2011 because pilots were displaying strangulation-like hypoxia symptoms at a rate nine times higher than the crews of other fighter jets. The grounding lasted for four months, during which time “the most capable aircraft in the world” was unflyable.
Then the secretary of defense stepped in and lifted the grounding while establishing tight restrictions on how pilots could fly the jet — not because engineers had isolated and solved the problem, but because if the situation had lasted much longer, the pilots would have lost their certifications, leaving the Air Force with a fleet of unusable aircraft and a cadre of unqualified pilots.
That sounded like a bad idea to everyone, so officials allowed the pilots to return to flight despite the lingering problem. In February, 2012 the Air Force grounded the fleet again — for the fifth time.
The good news is that repeatedly grounding the Raptor had virtually no impact on America’s defense posture, because the jet was not relevant to the military’s operations in places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya — at least according to then-secretary of defense Robert Gates.
The non-impact of the F-22’s non-availability surely reveals something about the value of that particular jet, but that’s a topic for another day. Instead, let’s consider what will happen when we discover a similar flaw in the F-35, some malfunction that renders the JSF unable to fly safely … and necessitates a fleet-wide grounding or five.
The key phrases here are “when” and “fleet-wide,” although “five” is a pretty significant number as well. It may be worth noting that the groundings have already begun.
by Dan Ward, Real Clear Defense | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Balikbayan Boxes
Paris - The box was the first thing I noticed when I stepped into Hermie Lagpao’s cramped bedroom in her apartment outside Paris. It sat in the center of a room that was cozy by default, because of its size, and made homey by years’ worth of pictures stuck in the edges of the dresser mirror.
Lagpao had spent months, using whatever money she could spare, collecting the food, gadgets, and clothing she now packed carefully into the box. She laid the cereals on top, arranging packets of biscuits and other snacks around them. She stood back to study her handiwork. She had filled every little space in the balikbayan (which literally translates to “return to your country”) box, which would now travel for at least a month by sea before reaching its destination: her children in the Philippines. “Heavy items like canned goods and shampoo go at the bottom, clothes in the middle, and the most delicate food items go on top so they don’t get crushed,” Lagpao explained.
In the 25 years that Lagpao has been working as a nanny and domestic helper in the French capital, she has packed many of these balikbayan boxes. The care packages have become something of a symbol of the Filipino diaspora as millions of women like Lagpao have gone abroad for work while their children remain at home. As of the latest estimates in 2012, there were more than 10 million Filipino migrant workers around the globe—some 10 percent of the Philippines’ population—making the country one of the world’s largest labor exporters.
It’s a distinction the Philippines has gained over four decades of state-encouraged labor migration. In what was meant to be a temporary measure to address growing unemployment, in the 1970s the Philippine government began promoting the export of its workers, particularly young men, who found jobs in the booming construction sectors of the Gulf. Today, migrant workers send back some $24 billion in annual remittances, around 8 percent of the country’s GDP. And nearly half of these workers are women, many of them in the caregiving industry. This often means they have left their own children behind to look after the children of others.
Lagpao left the Philippines for Paris in 1989 with her husband, Arnel. The two had decided to try their luck abroad after finding only sporadic work and low pay at home. They left their son Tristan, then nine years old, in the care of relatives. When their daughter Aira was born in Paris a few years later, they sent her back to the Philippines with a friend. “We had no choice,” Lagpao explained. “We had no [work] papers, and it was a precarious time for undocumented migrants then.” The girl was only five months old. “When I think back to my failures as a mother,” Lagpao said, “that moment was one of them.”
The Commission on Filipinos Overseas, the Philippine government agency that deals with the diaspora’s affairs, estimates that there are more than 50,000 Filipino migrant workers living in France—some 80 percent of whom are undocumented.
Many have to wait as long as 10 years to regularize their status and get a work permit. During this period, they cannot go home to their families for fear of not being allowed back into France. For Lagpao and her husband, this meant raising their children from a distance, through monthly remittances and at least one balikbayan box a year, marking the passage of time through the gifts inside.
Lagpao had spent months, using whatever money she could spare, collecting the food, gadgets, and clothing she now packed carefully into the box. She laid the cereals on top, arranging packets of biscuits and other snacks around them. She stood back to study her handiwork. She had filled every little space in the balikbayan (which literally translates to “return to your country”) box, which would now travel for at least a month by sea before reaching its destination: her children in the Philippines. “Heavy items like canned goods and shampoo go at the bottom, clothes in the middle, and the most delicate food items go on top so they don’t get crushed,” Lagpao explained.In the 25 years that Lagpao has been working as a nanny and domestic helper in the French capital, she has packed many of these balikbayan boxes. The care packages have become something of a symbol of the Filipino diaspora as millions of women like Lagpao have gone abroad for work while their children remain at home. As of the latest estimates in 2012, there were more than 10 million Filipino migrant workers around the globe—some 10 percent of the Philippines’ population—making the country one of the world’s largest labor exporters.
It’s a distinction the Philippines has gained over four decades of state-encouraged labor migration. In what was meant to be a temporary measure to address growing unemployment, in the 1970s the Philippine government began promoting the export of its workers, particularly young men, who found jobs in the booming construction sectors of the Gulf. Today, migrant workers send back some $24 billion in annual remittances, around 8 percent of the country’s GDP. And nearly half of these workers are women, many of them in the caregiving industry. This often means they have left their own children behind to look after the children of others.
Lagpao left the Philippines for Paris in 1989 with her husband, Arnel. The two had decided to try their luck abroad after finding only sporadic work and low pay at home. They left their son Tristan, then nine years old, in the care of relatives. When their daughter Aira was born in Paris a few years later, they sent her back to the Philippines with a friend. “We had no choice,” Lagpao explained. “We had no [work] papers, and it was a precarious time for undocumented migrants then.” The girl was only five months old. “When I think back to my failures as a mother,” Lagpao said, “that moment was one of them.”
The Commission on Filipinos Overseas, the Philippine government agency that deals with the diaspora’s affairs, estimates that there are more than 50,000 Filipino migrant workers living in France—some 80 percent of whom are undocumented.
Many have to wait as long as 10 years to regularize their status and get a work permit. During this period, they cannot go home to their families for fear of not being allowed back into France. For Lagpao and her husband, this meant raising their children from a distance, through monthly remittances and at least one balikbayan box a year, marking the passage of time through the gifts inside.
by Ana P. Santos, Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Stephanie/Flickr
Following Seattle's Lead
Andre Witherspoon was a hair stylist before he became addicted to crack cocaine and heroin.
He tried plenty of treatments, many of them forced on him by social services and law enforcement, but none helped. He was selling drugs to fuel his own habit. He spent time in prison. He became homeless, sleeping on his feet, unable to go to shelters for the night because that would prevent him being able to find the next morning’s fix.
Two and a half years ago, at about 8pm in downtown Seattle, he was getting ready to sell some heroin when he was caught by a police officer on a bicycle. Witherspoon had been arrested, he told me, “about 65 times” before that. But this time was different.
The cycle cop was part of a new pilot program called Law-Enforcement Assisted Diversion – Lead – where police officers work closely with case managers to bring non-violent drug offenders into treatment, rather than booking them into a criminal justice system that often just makes things worse.
The officer told Witherspoon that he had a choice; either be arrested and go to jail, or enrol in the Lead program.
“I was rescued that day,” he said.
The concept of pre-arrest diversion – especially the part where police officers work closely with caseworkers and have a stake in the recovery, not just the capture and punishment of offenders – is new and unusual, but is making waves in criminal justice circles across the US.
It is still a pilot program, but several cities, including Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore and Santa Fe, are all now actively exploring exporting similar programs, and a team from New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s office visited Seattle on a fact-finding mission in January.
One of the key figures in the Lead program’s success is Lisa Daugaard. A public defender by trade, and deputy director of the Seattle Public Defender Association, she makes no secret of the belligerence which often exists between defenders like herself and prosecutors and law enforcement.
In 2001, Daugaard’s office started what became known as the Racial Disparity Project: a data-driven focus on drug-law enforcement as a driver of racial inequality in the justice system, which led to a legal challenge against Seattle police department.
“There was a lot of disproportionality,” admitted Jim Pugel, the chief deputy sheriff of King County. The situation continued, with the police defending themselves and the prosecutors’ office from the lawsuit, and continuing to arrest people, who would return to the same area as soon as they were released.
“No-one was getting anywhere, and we were spending all this money,” said Pugel. Finally, he said, exhausted, they sat down for a face-to-face meeting with Daugaard. “We don’t agree with you,” they said to her in exasperation, but if they were willing to consider doing drug enforcement differently, they wanted to know – what should they do?
In 2008, that meeting led to a deal. Daugaard would stop suing the department, and in return her organisation would come on board to build a pilot program, exploring ways that defense attorneys, social services, local communities and crisis centers and – crucially – police and prosecutors could all work together.
Out of that deal, the Lead project was born.
He tried plenty of treatments, many of them forced on him by social services and law enforcement, but none helped. He was selling drugs to fuel his own habit. He spent time in prison. He became homeless, sleeping on his feet, unable to go to shelters for the night because that would prevent him being able to find the next morning’s fix.
Two and a half years ago, at about 8pm in downtown Seattle, he was getting ready to sell some heroin when he was caught by a police officer on a bicycle. Witherspoon had been arrested, he told me, “about 65 times” before that. But this time was different.The cycle cop was part of a new pilot program called Law-Enforcement Assisted Diversion – Lead – where police officers work closely with case managers to bring non-violent drug offenders into treatment, rather than booking them into a criminal justice system that often just makes things worse.
The officer told Witherspoon that he had a choice; either be arrested and go to jail, or enrol in the Lead program.
“I was rescued that day,” he said.
The concept of pre-arrest diversion – especially the part where police officers work closely with caseworkers and have a stake in the recovery, not just the capture and punishment of offenders – is new and unusual, but is making waves in criminal justice circles across the US.
It is still a pilot program, but several cities, including Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore and Santa Fe, are all now actively exploring exporting similar programs, and a team from New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s office visited Seattle on a fact-finding mission in January.
One of the key figures in the Lead program’s success is Lisa Daugaard. A public defender by trade, and deputy director of the Seattle Public Defender Association, she makes no secret of the belligerence which often exists between defenders like herself and prosecutors and law enforcement.
In 2001, Daugaard’s office started what became known as the Racial Disparity Project: a data-driven focus on drug-law enforcement as a driver of racial inequality in the justice system, which led to a legal challenge against Seattle police department.
“There was a lot of disproportionality,” admitted Jim Pugel, the chief deputy sheriff of King County. The situation continued, with the police defending themselves and the prosecutors’ office from the lawsuit, and continuing to arrest people, who would return to the same area as soon as they were released.
“No-one was getting anywhere, and we were spending all this money,” said Pugel. Finally, he said, exhausted, they sat down for a face-to-face meeting with Daugaard. “We don’t agree with you,” they said to her in exasperation, but if they were willing to consider doing drug enforcement differently, they wanted to know – what should they do?
In 2008, that meeting led to a deal. Daugaard would stop suing the department, and in return her organisation would come on board to build a pilot program, exploring ways that defense attorneys, social services, local communities and crisis centers and – crucially – police and prosecutors could all work together.
Out of that deal, the Lead project was born.
by Nicky Woolf, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Seattle.gov
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
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Terrified
It may be hard to fathom or remember, but in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the American public responded with an increased level of acceptance and support for Muslims. President Bush—who had successfully courted the Muslim vote in 2000—went out of his way to praise American Muslims on numerous occasions in 2001 and 2002. However, the seeds were already being planted that would change that drastically over time. Within a few short years, a small handful of fringe anti-Muslim organizations—almost entirely devoid of any real knowledge or expertise, some drawing on age-old ethno-religious conflicts—managed to hijack the public discourse about Islam, first by stoking fears, grabbing attention with their emotional messaging, then by consolidating their newfound social capital, forging ties with established elite organizations, and ultimately building their own organizational and media infrastructure.
How this all happened is the subject of a fascinating new book, “Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream,” by sociologist Christopher Bail, of the University of North Carolina. The book not only lays bare the behind-the-scenes story of a momentous shift in public opinion, it employs cutting-edge computer analysis techniques applied to large archives of data to develop a new theoretical outlook, capable of making sense of the whole field of competing organizations struggling to shape public opinion, not just studying one or two the most successful ones. The result is not only a detailed account of a specific, significant, and also very pernicious example of cultural evolution, but also a case study in how to more rigorously study cultural evolution more generally in the future. In the process, it sheds considerable light on the struggles involved, and the difficulties faced by those trying to fight back against this rising tide of misdirected fear, anger and hatred.
For those perplexed by the explosive spread of anti-Mosque hysteria, or legislation to combat the non-existent threat of Sharia law, Bail’s account provides an in-depth view of how the broader cultural landscape has been reshaped in ways which make such panics possible, if not virtually inevitable. For those who want to fight back, there are no easy answers here. But there is a very fruitful starting point for beginning to ask the right sorts of questions. (...)
In the book, you talk about your theory as being both ecological and evolutionary. What do those terms mean more concretely and specifically?
I use the term “ecological” to counter the tendency for academics to focus on individual organizations, instead of vast fields of organizations. I think it’s a big problem because when you focus on one organization, particularly a successful organization, you tend to get a very myopic perspective on how that organization succeeded in creating cultural change. In fact, you only probably come to study the organization precisely because it’s created some sort of cultural change, and so you begin to confuse the characteristics of a successful organization with the causes of an organization becoming influential.
This is where I think evolutionary ways of thinking are really important. A big story in my book is the tendency for media rich [organizations] to shape a lot of outcomes outside the media. So, for example, when these anti-Muslim fringe groups develop a high profile after September 11, they use their privileged position to forge ties to other organizations, service groups, and so on. And this enables them to effectively create a sea change not only in how Islam appears in the media, but how people think about Islam outside the media. And so we see this kind of sounding board effect, where the more a rumor is repeated, in them more and more high profile and official setting, the more it becomes true.
So much of the story of the book is about the evolution of this fringe narrative, from a group of kind of hawkish neocons whose careers are mostly over, to a point where nearly every candidate in the 2008 Republican election is warning about the advance of Sharia law, and the looming threat of Islamism for the future of Western civilization. And now more recently, of course, we see the spread of this to people like Bobby Jindal, again, very high profile, very mainstream, public figures, reproducing this message of so-called “no go zones” in Paris.
So the idea is really to think about cultural change, about the tendency for media coverage of fringe groups to set in motion a chain of processes that allows them to rise to public prominence precisely because of the efforts of mainstream organizations to prevent them from doing so. So it’s sort of a story about the unintended consequences of media coverage, I suppose, to put it simply
Maybe it would help to break that story down a bit in terms what the main turning points of your story. You talk first about how the fringe first gained disproportionate attention and then how the response to them backfired, and then led to the splintering of the mainstream. Could you sketch that out a bit?
Prior to the September 11 attacks, what I call mainstream Muslim organizations, or those that produce common messages about Muslims—and these are mostly pro-Muslim messages, both before and after September 11—enjoyed pretty substantial public influence, both within the media, but also in elite political circles. So Muslims voted for Bush, 3-to-1 in the 2000 election, they enjoyed private audiences with Bush, and Cheney, and of course all this “changed,” the thing that didn’t change was people continue to produce overwhelmingly pro-Muslim messages about Islam, but the media gravitated to the small group of fringe organizations, because—I argue—because of the emotional tenor of their messages.
Sociologist and social psychologists have long recognized that during periods of crisis people tend to look for sources of information that validate their feelings, and this is both an individual level, and also in the societal level, so journalists searching to figure out the true meaning of Islam may be more likely to gravitate to towards the crazy person waving a sword rather than the rather more calm, measured, dispassionate person giving a lengthy theological explanation of the tenets of Islam.
This really has two functions: one it attracts a lot of attention, and then to get your second question, it also provoked a pretty significant response from the mainstream.
For example, one popular claim was that Muslim extremists had infiltrated the White House, the more mainstream Muslim organizations became very angry about those accusations, along with a lot of other accusations about Islam being inherently violent or so on and so forth. They shifted their style from this dispassionate discourse, trying to use technical language from the Koran to distinguish the true nature of Islam from what’s promoted by groups like Al Qaeda, and they switch to a much more angry tone. So, in other words, the amplification of the emotional fringe discourse promotes an equally emotional response in the mainstream, that had the unintended consequence of a further increase in the profile of the fringe.
This is what I call the riptide in the book. This is in keeping with the environmental metaphor I use throughout the book, of kind of flowing waters. This pulls mainstream organizations further out to sea, precisely as they struggle against the current that’s drawing them out there. This not only increases the profile of the fringe organizations, but it also begins to create internal tensions within the mainstream organizations that will ultimately lead to the breakdown of the mainstream.
For example, you may recall from the book, there is a series of debates within mainstream organizations about whether and how to engage [anti-Muslim] fringe organizations, and one side of the argument is people who say we don’t stand up to them that will leave them to define Islam to the American public because at the time at least they were dominating the public discourse about of Islam. On the other hand, there are those who realize that in engaging them, they risked increasing their profile, and moreover that Muslims should not be forced to apologize for the type of terrorist groups that they believe were not inspired by Islam. And so this creates a rift within, particularly within mainstream Muslim organizations about whether Muslims need to do more to denounce terrorism.
Now, of course, they are denouncing terrorism. I have this line from a world leader in the book; he denounces terrorism so often that he could “do it in his sleep.” But you know, the media is not covering it because he’s not doing it in an angry sensational way that causes the celebrity of the fringe. Instead the medias amplifying this angry response, which in turn feeds into this narrative of the fringe groups that Muslim organizations are not peaceful moderate organizations they proclaim themselves to be, instead they are secretly terrorist sympathizers who you don’t see condemned terrorism because they secretly condone it.
And so, by this point, the rift within the mainstream Muslim community comes to, kind of substantiate some of the claims being made by the fringe groups, the anti-Muslim fringe groups. So that’s kind of the series of events in the evolutionary process that I was talking about earlier.
How this all happened is the subject of a fascinating new book, “Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream,” by sociologist Christopher Bail, of the University of North Carolina. The book not only lays bare the behind-the-scenes story of a momentous shift in public opinion, it employs cutting-edge computer analysis techniques applied to large archives of data to develop a new theoretical outlook, capable of making sense of the whole field of competing organizations struggling to shape public opinion, not just studying one or two the most successful ones. The result is not only a detailed account of a specific, significant, and also very pernicious example of cultural evolution, but also a case study in how to more rigorously study cultural evolution more generally in the future. In the process, it sheds considerable light on the struggles involved, and the difficulties faced by those trying to fight back against this rising tide of misdirected fear, anger and hatred.For those perplexed by the explosive spread of anti-Mosque hysteria, or legislation to combat the non-existent threat of Sharia law, Bail’s account provides an in-depth view of how the broader cultural landscape has been reshaped in ways which make such panics possible, if not virtually inevitable. For those who want to fight back, there are no easy answers here. But there is a very fruitful starting point for beginning to ask the right sorts of questions. (...)
In the book, you talk about your theory as being both ecological and evolutionary. What do those terms mean more concretely and specifically?
I use the term “ecological” to counter the tendency for academics to focus on individual organizations, instead of vast fields of organizations. I think it’s a big problem because when you focus on one organization, particularly a successful organization, you tend to get a very myopic perspective on how that organization succeeded in creating cultural change. In fact, you only probably come to study the organization precisely because it’s created some sort of cultural change, and so you begin to confuse the characteristics of a successful organization with the causes of an organization becoming influential.
This is where I think evolutionary ways of thinking are really important. A big story in my book is the tendency for media rich [organizations] to shape a lot of outcomes outside the media. So, for example, when these anti-Muslim fringe groups develop a high profile after September 11, they use their privileged position to forge ties to other organizations, service groups, and so on. And this enables them to effectively create a sea change not only in how Islam appears in the media, but how people think about Islam outside the media. And so we see this kind of sounding board effect, where the more a rumor is repeated, in them more and more high profile and official setting, the more it becomes true.
So much of the story of the book is about the evolution of this fringe narrative, from a group of kind of hawkish neocons whose careers are mostly over, to a point where nearly every candidate in the 2008 Republican election is warning about the advance of Sharia law, and the looming threat of Islamism for the future of Western civilization. And now more recently, of course, we see the spread of this to people like Bobby Jindal, again, very high profile, very mainstream, public figures, reproducing this message of so-called “no go zones” in Paris.
So the idea is really to think about cultural change, about the tendency for media coverage of fringe groups to set in motion a chain of processes that allows them to rise to public prominence precisely because of the efforts of mainstream organizations to prevent them from doing so. So it’s sort of a story about the unintended consequences of media coverage, I suppose, to put it simply
Maybe it would help to break that story down a bit in terms what the main turning points of your story. You talk first about how the fringe first gained disproportionate attention and then how the response to them backfired, and then led to the splintering of the mainstream. Could you sketch that out a bit?
Prior to the September 11 attacks, what I call mainstream Muslim organizations, or those that produce common messages about Muslims—and these are mostly pro-Muslim messages, both before and after September 11—enjoyed pretty substantial public influence, both within the media, but also in elite political circles. So Muslims voted for Bush, 3-to-1 in the 2000 election, they enjoyed private audiences with Bush, and Cheney, and of course all this “changed,” the thing that didn’t change was people continue to produce overwhelmingly pro-Muslim messages about Islam, but the media gravitated to the small group of fringe organizations, because—I argue—because of the emotional tenor of their messages.
Sociologist and social psychologists have long recognized that during periods of crisis people tend to look for sources of information that validate their feelings, and this is both an individual level, and also in the societal level, so journalists searching to figure out the true meaning of Islam may be more likely to gravitate to towards the crazy person waving a sword rather than the rather more calm, measured, dispassionate person giving a lengthy theological explanation of the tenets of Islam.
This really has two functions: one it attracts a lot of attention, and then to get your second question, it also provoked a pretty significant response from the mainstream.
For example, one popular claim was that Muslim extremists had infiltrated the White House, the more mainstream Muslim organizations became very angry about those accusations, along with a lot of other accusations about Islam being inherently violent or so on and so forth. They shifted their style from this dispassionate discourse, trying to use technical language from the Koran to distinguish the true nature of Islam from what’s promoted by groups like Al Qaeda, and they switch to a much more angry tone. So, in other words, the amplification of the emotional fringe discourse promotes an equally emotional response in the mainstream, that had the unintended consequence of a further increase in the profile of the fringe.
This is what I call the riptide in the book. This is in keeping with the environmental metaphor I use throughout the book, of kind of flowing waters. This pulls mainstream organizations further out to sea, precisely as they struggle against the current that’s drawing them out there. This not only increases the profile of the fringe organizations, but it also begins to create internal tensions within the mainstream organizations that will ultimately lead to the breakdown of the mainstream.
For example, you may recall from the book, there is a series of debates within mainstream organizations about whether and how to engage [anti-Muslim] fringe organizations, and one side of the argument is people who say we don’t stand up to them that will leave them to define Islam to the American public because at the time at least they were dominating the public discourse about of Islam. On the other hand, there are those who realize that in engaging them, they risked increasing their profile, and moreover that Muslims should not be forced to apologize for the type of terrorist groups that they believe were not inspired by Islam. And so this creates a rift within, particularly within mainstream Muslim organizations about whether Muslims need to do more to denounce terrorism.
Now, of course, they are denouncing terrorism. I have this line from a world leader in the book; he denounces terrorism so often that he could “do it in his sleep.” But you know, the media is not covering it because he’s not doing it in an angry sensational way that causes the celebrity of the fringe. Instead the medias amplifying this angry response, which in turn feeds into this narrative of the fringe groups that Muslim organizations are not peaceful moderate organizations they proclaim themselves to be, instead they are secretly terrorist sympathizers who you don’t see condemned terrorism because they secretly condone it.
And so, by this point, the rift within the mainstream Muslim community comes to, kind of substantiate some of the claims being made by the fringe groups, the anti-Muslim fringe groups. So that’s kind of the series of events in the evolutionary process that I was talking about earlier.
by Paul Rosenberg, Salon | Read more:
Image: Princeton University Press
Diary of a Surgery
Two years ago I wrote about my choice to have a preventive double mastectomy. A simple blood test had revealed that I carried a mutation in the BRCA1 gene. It gave me an estimated 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer. I lost my mother, grandmother and aunt to cancer.
I wanted other women at risk to know about the options. I promised to follow up with any information that could be useful, including about my next preventive surgery, the removal of my ovaries and fallopian tubes.
I had been planning this for some time. It is a less complex surgery than the mastectomy, but its effects are more severe. It puts a woman into forced menopause. So I was readying myself physically and emotionally, discussing options with doctors, researching alternative medicine, and mapping my hormones for estrogen or progesterone replacement. But I felt I still had months to make the date.
Then two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor with blood-test results. “Your CA-125 is normal,” he said. I breathed a sigh of relief. That test measures the amount of the protein CA-125 in the blood, and is used to monitor ovarian cancer. I have it every year because of my family history.
But that wasn’t all. He went on. “There are a number of inflammatory markers that are elevated, and taken together they could be a sign of early cancer.” I took a pause. “CA-125 has a 50 to 75 percent chance of missing ovarian cancer at early stages,” he said. He wanted me to see the surgeon immediately to check my ovaries. (...)
The day of the results came. The PET/CT scan looked clear, and the tumor test was negative. I was full of happiness, although the radioactive tracer meant I couldn’t hug my children. There was still a chance of early stage cancer, but that was minor compared with a full-blown tumor. To my relief, I still had the option of removing my ovaries and fallopian tubes and I chose to do it.
I did not do this solely because I carry the BRCA1 gene mutation, and I want other women to hear this. A positive BRCA test does not mean a leap to surgery. I have spoken to many doctors, surgeons and naturopaths. There are other options. Some women take birth control pills or rely on alternative medicines combined with frequent checks. There is more than one way to deal with any health issue. The most important thing is to learn about the options and choose what is right for you personally. (...)
It is not possible to remove all risk, and the fact is I remain prone to cancer. I will look for natural ways to strengthen my immune system. I feel feminine, and grounded in the choices I am making for myself and my family. I know my children will never have to say, “Mom died of ovarian cancer.”
Regardless of the hormone replacements I’m taking, I am now in menopause. I will not be able to have any more children, and I expect some physical changes. But I feel at ease with whatever will come, not because I am strong but because this is a part of life. It is nothing to be feared.
by Angelina Jolie Pitt, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Luke Macgregor/Reuters
I wanted other women at risk to know about the options. I promised to follow up with any information that could be useful, including about my next preventive surgery, the removal of my ovaries and fallopian tubes.
I had been planning this for some time. It is a less complex surgery than the mastectomy, but its effects are more severe. It puts a woman into forced menopause. So I was readying myself physically and emotionally, discussing options with doctors, researching alternative medicine, and mapping my hormones for estrogen or progesterone replacement. But I felt I still had months to make the date.Then two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor with blood-test results. “Your CA-125 is normal,” he said. I breathed a sigh of relief. That test measures the amount of the protein CA-125 in the blood, and is used to monitor ovarian cancer. I have it every year because of my family history.
But that wasn’t all. He went on. “There are a number of inflammatory markers that are elevated, and taken together they could be a sign of early cancer.” I took a pause. “CA-125 has a 50 to 75 percent chance of missing ovarian cancer at early stages,” he said. He wanted me to see the surgeon immediately to check my ovaries. (...)
The day of the results came. The PET/CT scan looked clear, and the tumor test was negative. I was full of happiness, although the radioactive tracer meant I couldn’t hug my children. There was still a chance of early stage cancer, but that was minor compared with a full-blown tumor. To my relief, I still had the option of removing my ovaries and fallopian tubes and I chose to do it.
I did not do this solely because I carry the BRCA1 gene mutation, and I want other women to hear this. A positive BRCA test does not mean a leap to surgery. I have spoken to many doctors, surgeons and naturopaths. There are other options. Some women take birth control pills or rely on alternative medicines combined with frequent checks. There is more than one way to deal with any health issue. The most important thing is to learn about the options and choose what is right for you personally. (...)
It is not possible to remove all risk, and the fact is I remain prone to cancer. I will look for natural ways to strengthen my immune system. I feel feminine, and grounded in the choices I am making for myself and my family. I know my children will never have to say, “Mom died of ovarian cancer.”
Regardless of the hormone replacements I’m taking, I am now in menopause. I will not be able to have any more children, and I expect some physical changes. But I feel at ease with whatever will come, not because I am strong but because this is a part of life. It is nothing to be feared.
by Angelina Jolie Pitt, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Luke Macgregor/Reuters
Monday, March 23, 2015
The Most Embarrassing Private Jet Flight Of All Time
[ed. Hard to imagine, but another story is even worse - 11 on the gross meter (scroll down).]
Before a company goes public, the highest level executives embark on a multi-city tour with their investment bankers to drum up support for the upcoming IPO. This trip is called a roadshow and since the group will typically visit dozens of cities on a tight schedule, a private jet is the preferred means of transportation. During a roadshow, it's not unusual to visit two or three cities in a single day so work starts at the crack of dawn. That doesn't mean the group goes to bed early. Every night, the bankers treat their clients to a wild night out in whatever town they are in, complete with thousand dollar dinners and endless alcohol. No matter how hard the group parties the night before, the private jet will lift them off to their next destination very early the next morning.
Just for a minute, pretend you're an investment banker traveling with some very important clients on one of these roadshows. Now imagine that you spent the previous night drinking way beyond your limit only to be startled out of bed by a piercing 6:30 am wake up call. In an attempt to get your head and body feeling remotely human again, you scarf down some waffles, eggs, bacon and at least two glasses of coffee at the hotel's breakfast buffet before jumping on the shuttle to the private airport. Within a few minutes of arriving at the airport, your entire group is seated and the plane begins to taxi down the runway. At this point you might feel a bit of relief as the morning's blur subsides. All you have to do is sit back and relax for the one hour flight to the next city.
There's just one problem. In your rush to get out of the hotel, down to breakfast and onto the plane you forgot to do one very crucial thing. Go to the bathroom. And I'm not talking about peeing. You have a stomach full of dinner, desert, drinks, eggs, waffles and coffee churning around your lower intestine at 30,000 feet. But that's not the worst part. True horror sets in when you realize you're not on a spacious 20 person G5 with couches, beds, lay-z boys and a fully tucked away private bathroom. No, on this day you are traveling on a six-person puddle jumper sitting shoulder to shoulder with your clients and co-workers. But wait, somehow the story gets even worse…
Before a company goes public, the highest level executives embark on a multi-city tour with their investment bankers to drum up support for the upcoming IPO. This trip is called a roadshow and since the group will typically visit dozens of cities on a tight schedule, a private jet is the preferred means of transportation. During a roadshow, it's not unusual to visit two or three cities in a single day so work starts at the crack of dawn. That doesn't mean the group goes to bed early. Every night, the bankers treat their clients to a wild night out in whatever town they are in, complete with thousand dollar dinners and endless alcohol. No matter how hard the group parties the night before, the private jet will lift them off to their next destination very early the next morning.
Just for a minute, pretend you're an investment banker traveling with some very important clients on one of these roadshows. Now imagine that you spent the previous night drinking way beyond your limit only to be startled out of bed by a piercing 6:30 am wake up call. In an attempt to get your head and body feeling remotely human again, you scarf down some waffles, eggs, bacon and at least two glasses of coffee at the hotel's breakfast buffet before jumping on the shuttle to the private airport. Within a few minutes of arriving at the airport, your entire group is seated and the plane begins to taxi down the runway. At this point you might feel a bit of relief as the morning's blur subsides. All you have to do is sit back and relax for the one hour flight to the next city.There's just one problem. In your rush to get out of the hotel, down to breakfast and onto the plane you forgot to do one very crucial thing. Go to the bathroom. And I'm not talking about peeing. You have a stomach full of dinner, desert, drinks, eggs, waffles and coffee churning around your lower intestine at 30,000 feet. But that's not the worst part. True horror sets in when you realize you're not on a spacious 20 person G5 with couches, beds, lay-z boys and a fully tucked away private bathroom. No, on this day you are traveling on a six-person puddle jumper sitting shoulder to shoulder with your clients and co-workers. But wait, somehow the story gets even worse…
by Brian Warner, Celebrity Networth | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Idle Threads
In The Devil Wears Prada, the 2006 rom-com starring Meryl Streep as a cartoonish version of the notoriously icy Vogue editor Anna Wintour, Streep delivers a speech about the importance of the fashion industry. “You think this has nothing to do with you,” Streep says to her new assistant (Anne Hathaway), who wishes she were doing hard-hitting investigative work rather than fetching coffee for an arbiter of high-end taste. “You go to your closet and you select . . . I don’t know . . . that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.”
And yet, Streep explains, her assistant’s sweater is this particular shade of blue because a designer featured it on the runway a few years ago, a decision that then trickled down through the fashion food chain all the way to the shopping-mall clearance racks. “It’s sort of comical,” she concludes, “how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.” You think you choose to wear things because you like them, because they’re special, or maybe because you’re special. But in fact, you’re not special, and neither are your choices. You’re just an angora-clad cog in a great capitalist wheel.
The real Anna Wintour would never put it so bluntly, even behind closed doors. Hers is an industry that depends on all of us continuing to believe that our choices are special and that our senses of style are unique. At a White House event for aspiring fashion designers this year, Wintour said, “Fashion can be a powerful instrument for social change. It allows us to think about who we are as individuals and as a society.” She did not say, “A handful of luxury designers and a few major clothing brands decide what you will like and, in turn, buy and wear.” Why would she? The modern fashion industry wants consumers to think that we are not consumers at all, but curators instead. If the midcentury mantra was “Dress to impress,” and the roaring-’80s catchphrase was “Dress for success,” the directive now is “Dress to express.”
This approach to fashion is at the heart of Women in Clothes, a thick new book based on a survey that writers Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton circulated to more than six hundred women asking them what they wear and how they feel about it. The women offer hyperspecific thoughts about their every sartorial choice, but only a few admit that they are influenced by trends or marketing. They are much more likely to lay the blame on their own bodies. “A woman is never thin enough,” writes Vedrana Rudan. “I have a double chin, I shove my tits into minimizers that minimize nothing, I get into Levi’s designed to flatten the tummy and lift the ass, but my ass and stomach are immune to the intention of the jeans. I am a cow!”
The survey responses are shot through with the hollow promises of the fashion industry—that with the right combination of trousers and shirts and dresses and skirts, cut in the right way and worn just so, women can be more glamorous, more powerful, more desired, more respected. “I dress to withstand the elements,” says one woman. “I dress to be as interesting as the Tate. I dress to insert myself into social strata, to be accepted, to pass.” One five-year-old respondent says, in an aside designed to break every would-be earth mother’s heart, “I am always conscious of what I’m wearing.” Another woman offers a detailed journal of every high-end item she covets, from a Kenzo silk-crepe shirt to an “amazing Gudrun & Gudrun multi-coloured dream sweater.” Even unattainable fashion goals start to sound like they’d be great fun to pursue—a repudiation, somehow, of the grim, dictatorial vision of sexism as an obliging handmaiden of capitalism. There are, however, a few brief hints to the contrary: a Muslim woman who wears a jilbab writes, “When I see what the women on billboards, commercials, and game shows are wearing, it really aches my heart. I mean no offense to anyone, but it hurts me to see the bodies of these innocent women being used to sell products. And they are made to believe that this is freedom.”
Women, the book implies, are not sheep who will buy whatever they’re told is on trend or anything H&M stocks for less than $39.50. They are thoughtful and careful about what they wear and why. Fast fashion barely exists in the world of Women in Clothes; its carefully edited accounts of self-declared style preferences seem, indeed, to be the sartorial equivalent of the “slow food” revolution that Michael Pollan jumpstarted in 2006 with The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In response to a survey question about shopping, women express discomfort, embarrassment, or outright denial before the suggestion that they, as a group, buy a lot of new clothes. They describe shopping as an activity for which they must adopt a battle plan—or that, at the very least, they avoid on an empty stomach. “To hell with the whole concept of shopping,” says one respondent. “Who needs clothes?”
This professed aversion to the rigors of acquiring clothing doesn’t match up with the manifest joy that many of the women take in describing what ends up in their closets. It’s also an awkward fit with the book’s own apparent marketing strategy. Since it first appeared last fall, I’ve seen Women in Clothes on display in several women’s clothing shops, for sale alongside small leather goods and gold jewelry. It’s safe to assume that the owners of these boutiques don’t see the book as an antidote to the psychological pain endured by female shoppers, but as yet another fashionable accessory.
There’s a lot of whimsy in Women in Clothes—an artist’s rendering of various stains as they appear on women’s clothing, Lena Dunham’s description of her mother’s sartorial vibe as “bejeweled ventriloquist dummy,” a photo series cataloging each pair of black underwear a woman owns—but its main revelation is how serious women are about what they wear. They’ve so thoroughly infused their wardrobes with their hopes, dreams, and aspirations that the anthology could just as easily be titled Women as Clothes. “Because I resist the ephemerality of clothing, I make grandiose demands of it: a garment must touch on all that I have ever been and will be,” writes Ida Hattemer-Higgins in an essay about how a secondhand store in Athens helped her get over a breakup. “The irony is that, for all my grasping at eternity, in the end, I almost never wear any item for more than a few months.”
Out of context, such grandiose pronouncements seem over the top, but they’re right at home in a book about fashion and the female self. While J.Crew and GQ can still get away with acting as though it’s utterly modern for men to care about style, women have long been culturally saddled with the knowledge that they are how they look, and that therefore they are what they wear. The pursuit of stylishness is not something they opt into, but rather something they must opt out of at great social cost. Hattemer-Higgins tells herself she is resisting the ephemerality of clothing—and with it the dictates of the fashion industry—by carefully selecting each piece she wears from a pile of thrifted cast-offs.
But to scour the racks, secondhand or otherwise, for the makings of self-expression is only to double down on the importance of fashion. The truly transgressive choice—to dress purely for utility—never seems to cross the minds of the women featured in the book. I don’t blame them. Utility isn’t much fun. If you can’t control the fact that you’re going to be judged on your appearance, why not derive what pleasure you can from conveying to observers how you wish to be judged? The inadequacy of clothes—their inability to express the depth and complexity of female experiences—probably explains both why women invest their wardrobes with so much significance and why their clothes so often fail to satisfy them.
It can be hard to tell why women are overburdening their wardrobes with mystic powers of signification: Is it in spite of the fashion industry or because of it? If you were to ask Streep’s Wintour-like character, she would say the answer hardly matters. Whether you are an avid follower of fashion or studiously ignorant of what appears on the runways, you’re still affected by the prevailing style that’s set, in part, by clothing companies. Even secondhand shoppers are not immune; even the disenchanted can’t leave their houses naked.
And yet, Streep explains, her assistant’s sweater is this particular shade of blue because a designer featured it on the runway a few years ago, a decision that then trickled down through the fashion food chain all the way to the shopping-mall clearance racks. “It’s sort of comical,” she concludes, “how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when in fact you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room.” You think you choose to wear things because you like them, because they’re special, or maybe because you’re special. But in fact, you’re not special, and neither are your choices. You’re just an angora-clad cog in a great capitalist wheel.The real Anna Wintour would never put it so bluntly, even behind closed doors. Hers is an industry that depends on all of us continuing to believe that our choices are special and that our senses of style are unique. At a White House event for aspiring fashion designers this year, Wintour said, “Fashion can be a powerful instrument for social change. It allows us to think about who we are as individuals and as a society.” She did not say, “A handful of luxury designers and a few major clothing brands decide what you will like and, in turn, buy and wear.” Why would she? The modern fashion industry wants consumers to think that we are not consumers at all, but curators instead. If the midcentury mantra was “Dress to impress,” and the roaring-’80s catchphrase was “Dress for success,” the directive now is “Dress to express.”
This approach to fashion is at the heart of Women in Clothes, a thick new book based on a survey that writers Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton circulated to more than six hundred women asking them what they wear and how they feel about it. The women offer hyperspecific thoughts about their every sartorial choice, but only a few admit that they are influenced by trends or marketing. They are much more likely to lay the blame on their own bodies. “A woman is never thin enough,” writes Vedrana Rudan. “I have a double chin, I shove my tits into minimizers that minimize nothing, I get into Levi’s designed to flatten the tummy and lift the ass, but my ass and stomach are immune to the intention of the jeans. I am a cow!”
The survey responses are shot through with the hollow promises of the fashion industry—that with the right combination of trousers and shirts and dresses and skirts, cut in the right way and worn just so, women can be more glamorous, more powerful, more desired, more respected. “I dress to withstand the elements,” says one woman. “I dress to be as interesting as the Tate. I dress to insert myself into social strata, to be accepted, to pass.” One five-year-old respondent says, in an aside designed to break every would-be earth mother’s heart, “I am always conscious of what I’m wearing.” Another woman offers a detailed journal of every high-end item she covets, from a Kenzo silk-crepe shirt to an “amazing Gudrun & Gudrun multi-coloured dream sweater.” Even unattainable fashion goals start to sound like they’d be great fun to pursue—a repudiation, somehow, of the grim, dictatorial vision of sexism as an obliging handmaiden of capitalism. There are, however, a few brief hints to the contrary: a Muslim woman who wears a jilbab writes, “When I see what the women on billboards, commercials, and game shows are wearing, it really aches my heart. I mean no offense to anyone, but it hurts me to see the bodies of these innocent women being used to sell products. And they are made to believe that this is freedom.”
Women, the book implies, are not sheep who will buy whatever they’re told is on trend or anything H&M stocks for less than $39.50. They are thoughtful and careful about what they wear and why. Fast fashion barely exists in the world of Women in Clothes; its carefully edited accounts of self-declared style preferences seem, indeed, to be the sartorial equivalent of the “slow food” revolution that Michael Pollan jumpstarted in 2006 with The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In response to a survey question about shopping, women express discomfort, embarrassment, or outright denial before the suggestion that they, as a group, buy a lot of new clothes. They describe shopping as an activity for which they must adopt a battle plan—or that, at the very least, they avoid on an empty stomach. “To hell with the whole concept of shopping,” says one respondent. “Who needs clothes?”
This professed aversion to the rigors of acquiring clothing doesn’t match up with the manifest joy that many of the women take in describing what ends up in their closets. It’s also an awkward fit with the book’s own apparent marketing strategy. Since it first appeared last fall, I’ve seen Women in Clothes on display in several women’s clothing shops, for sale alongside small leather goods and gold jewelry. It’s safe to assume that the owners of these boutiques don’t see the book as an antidote to the psychological pain endured by female shoppers, but as yet another fashionable accessory.
There’s a lot of whimsy in Women in Clothes—an artist’s rendering of various stains as they appear on women’s clothing, Lena Dunham’s description of her mother’s sartorial vibe as “bejeweled ventriloquist dummy,” a photo series cataloging each pair of black underwear a woman owns—but its main revelation is how serious women are about what they wear. They’ve so thoroughly infused their wardrobes with their hopes, dreams, and aspirations that the anthology could just as easily be titled Women as Clothes. “Because I resist the ephemerality of clothing, I make grandiose demands of it: a garment must touch on all that I have ever been and will be,” writes Ida Hattemer-Higgins in an essay about how a secondhand store in Athens helped her get over a breakup. “The irony is that, for all my grasping at eternity, in the end, I almost never wear any item for more than a few months.”
Out of context, such grandiose pronouncements seem over the top, but they’re right at home in a book about fashion and the female self. While J.Crew and GQ can still get away with acting as though it’s utterly modern for men to care about style, women have long been culturally saddled with the knowledge that they are how they look, and that therefore they are what they wear. The pursuit of stylishness is not something they opt into, but rather something they must opt out of at great social cost. Hattemer-Higgins tells herself she is resisting the ephemerality of clothing—and with it the dictates of the fashion industry—by carefully selecting each piece she wears from a pile of thrifted cast-offs.
But to scour the racks, secondhand or otherwise, for the makings of self-expression is only to double down on the importance of fashion. The truly transgressive choice—to dress purely for utility—never seems to cross the minds of the women featured in the book. I don’t blame them. Utility isn’t much fun. If you can’t control the fact that you’re going to be judged on your appearance, why not derive what pleasure you can from conveying to observers how you wish to be judged? The inadequacy of clothes—their inability to express the depth and complexity of female experiences—probably explains both why women invest their wardrobes with so much significance and why their clothes so often fail to satisfy them.
It can be hard to tell why women are overburdening their wardrobes with mystic powers of signification: Is it in spite of the fashion industry or because of it? If you were to ask Streep’s Wintour-like character, she would say the answer hardly matters. Whether you are an avid follower of fashion or studiously ignorant of what appears on the runways, you’re still affected by the prevailing style that’s set, in part, by clothing companies. Even secondhand shoppers are not immune; even the disenchanted can’t leave their houses naked.
by Ann Friedman, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Eleanor Shakespeare
Sunday, March 22, 2015
France’s Baby Boom Secret
Over the past 10 years the offices of France’s National Institute for Demographic Studies (Ined) have seen a steady stream of Korean policymakers and Japanese academics, determined to crack the mystery of French fertility. Scientists present their birthrate graphs and explain the broad lines of French public policy. “In the past four or five years we’ve had over 10 Korean delegations,” says demographer Olivier Thévenon with a smile. Haunted by the threat of population decline, these Asian experts are keen to understand the recipe that has given France the highest fertility rate in Europe, alongside Ireland.
Since the early 2000s France has consistently topped European rankings. After two decades of decline, in the 1970s-80s, the fertility rate started picking up again in the late 1990s. Since then the country has registered scores just short of the mythical threshold of 2.1 children per woman, which would secure a steady population. Its fertility rate in 2014 was 2.01. “For the economy Germany is the strong man of Europe, but when it comes to demography France is our fecund woman,” says demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences and emeritus professor of Brussels Free University.
Much of central and southern Europe has subsided into a strange demographic winter. Fifty years after the postwar baby boom, the fertility rate in the European Union has fallen in recent years to 1.58 live births per woman. Year in, year out the Mediterranean countries contradict the clich̩s about Roman Catholic culture. In recent years Spain, Portugal and Italy have witnessed a dramatic fall in the number of births (registering 1.4 or even 1.3 births per woman). German-speaking countries РGermany and Austria Рhave fared scarcely any better, much as most former eastern bloc countries РPoland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. Policymakers all over Europe are concerned about such decline.
Yet there is nothing mysterious about the approach that is working in both France and Scandinavia. It combines the idea of a modern family based on gender equality and powerful government policies. “Nowadays, both ingredients are needed to sustain the population,” Lesthaeghe asserts. “At first sight it seems a simple recipe, but it’s far from easy to put into practice: it takes a lot of time to design and establish a new family model.”
There is nothing straightforward or natural about “the family”. It is a very complex world based on social norms, what the American sociologist Ronald Rindfuss calls the “family package”. “In Japan, for instance, this package involves many constraints,” says Ined demographer Laurent Toulemon. “A woman entering into a relationship must also accept marriage, obey her husband, have a child, stop working after it is born and make room for her ageing in-laws. It’s a case of all or nothing. In France the package is more flexible: one doesn’t have to get married or have children. Norms are more open and families more diverse.”
Most countries in southern Europe are based on something akin to the Japanese package, with fairly rigid family norms in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Malta and Greece. There is social pressure on women not to work while their children are still young, just as it is ill-thought of to live with someone or have a baby outside wedlock. In all these countries the proportion of births outside marriage is below 30%, whereas in France, Sweden and Norway it exceeds 50%. In Japan the traditional family package clearly has a dramatic impact on fertility, with fewer than 1.4 births per woman.
The picture is very different in Scandinavia and France. “In these countries the family norm is much more flexible, with late marriages, reconstituted families, single parents, much more frequent births outside marriage and divorces than further south,” Toulemon adds. “People are far less concerned about the outlook for the family [as an institution].” The positive impact of this open-ended approach to families on fertility is borne out by the statistics, at more than 1.8 children per woman in Sweden, Norway, Finland and France.
The principle of gender equality and the necessary corollary of women being free to work are the key factors in this family model that emerged at the end of the 20th century. Yet in the 1960s-70s advocates of traditional family values claimed that the birthrate would be the first thing to suffer from this trend. Fifty years on it seems they were mistaken: fertility in Europe is higher in countries where women go out to work, lower in those where they generally stay at home. “Women’s freedom of decision is essential to this system,” Toulemon asserts.
Since the early 2000s France has consistently topped European rankings. After two decades of decline, in the 1970s-80s, the fertility rate started picking up again in the late 1990s. Since then the country has registered scores just short of the mythical threshold of 2.1 children per woman, which would secure a steady population. Its fertility rate in 2014 was 2.01. “For the economy Germany is the strong man of Europe, but when it comes to demography France is our fecund woman,” says demographer Ron Lesthaeghe, member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences and emeritus professor of Brussels Free University.
Much of central and southern Europe has subsided into a strange demographic winter. Fifty years after the postwar baby boom, the fertility rate in the European Union has fallen in recent years to 1.58 live births per woman. Year in, year out the Mediterranean countries contradict the clichés about Roman Catholic culture. In recent years Spain, Portugal and Italy have witnessed a dramatic fall in the number of births (registering 1.4 or even 1.3 births per woman). German-speaking countries – Germany and Austria – have fared scarcely any better, much as most former eastern bloc countries – Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. Policymakers all over Europe are concerned about such decline.Yet there is nothing mysterious about the approach that is working in both France and Scandinavia. It combines the idea of a modern family based on gender equality and powerful government policies. “Nowadays, both ingredients are needed to sustain the population,” Lesthaeghe asserts. “At first sight it seems a simple recipe, but it’s far from easy to put into practice: it takes a lot of time to design and establish a new family model.”
There is nothing straightforward or natural about “the family”. It is a very complex world based on social norms, what the American sociologist Ronald Rindfuss calls the “family package”. “In Japan, for instance, this package involves many constraints,” says Ined demographer Laurent Toulemon. “A woman entering into a relationship must also accept marriage, obey her husband, have a child, stop working after it is born and make room for her ageing in-laws. It’s a case of all or nothing. In France the package is more flexible: one doesn’t have to get married or have children. Norms are more open and families more diverse.”
Most countries in southern Europe are based on something akin to the Japanese package, with fairly rigid family norms in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Malta and Greece. There is social pressure on women not to work while their children are still young, just as it is ill-thought of to live with someone or have a baby outside wedlock. In all these countries the proportion of births outside marriage is below 30%, whereas in France, Sweden and Norway it exceeds 50%. In Japan the traditional family package clearly has a dramatic impact on fertility, with fewer than 1.4 births per woman.
The picture is very different in Scandinavia and France. “In these countries the family norm is much more flexible, with late marriages, reconstituted families, single parents, much more frequent births outside marriage and divorces than further south,” Toulemon adds. “People are far less concerned about the outlook for the family [as an institution].” The positive impact of this open-ended approach to families on fertility is borne out by the statistics, at more than 1.8 children per woman in Sweden, Norway, Finland and France.
The principle of gender equality and the necessary corollary of women being free to work are the key factors in this family model that emerged at the end of the 20th century. Yet in the 1960s-70s advocates of traditional family values claimed that the birthrate would be the first thing to suffer from this trend. Fifty years on it seems they were mistaken: fertility in Europe is higher in countries where women go out to work, lower in those where they generally stay at home. “Women’s freedom of decision is essential to this system,” Toulemon asserts.
by Anne Chemin, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Corbis
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