Archimedes’ Hot Tub

I spoke this spring with John Williamson, an economist at the Institute of International Economics who created the idea of ‘The Washington Consensus’ as a set of expected reforms for dealing with economic crisis (a term since hijacked for other purposes).

We talked about currency issues in the global economy, and the growing pressure created by the gigantic surpluses China and other nations have built with the U.S. His big worries were that the U.S. trade deficit could send the economy into recession or cause a retreat from free trade. There is no quick fix for the deficit, but he thinks that with quick action, it might be halved in four years.

Despite his worries, he kept his sense of humor.

People tend to break down into two types, those who say we’ve called it as it is and wish the official world would start doing something about it, and others who say we’ve heard you calling wolf before, and nothing’s happened. And that of course is true (laughs). But it doesn’t mean there isn’t a real problem there just because disaster hasn’t happened yet.

The interview as I submitted it to Shukan Daiyamondo is here.
World Voice: John Williamson

The U.S. gets widely accused of cultural imperialism, a phrase that has support from the rise of Western history, where the West’s technological superiority and penchant for conquest has forced much of the world’s culture to change. It turns out that one of those cultures, Japan, has modified Western culture in its own way, and now exports things like manga back at the West.

I interviewed Susan Napier late last summer, for the Japanese magazine Shukan Daiyamondo. The interview only recently was published, but Napier’s observations remain timely. For instance, she notes that Japanese culture has long fascinated the West, but now elements of it are almost mainstream.

The question is why Japanese stuff so popular now? I think it’s a combination of things: it’s different enough to be very interesting, and it’s an alternative to American culture. That seems to have hit a chord in today’s world.

At the same time, I just went to see the Transformers, which was all done with computer animation and live actors. In Japan, it would almost certainly have been completely animated. Napier isn’t sure that will ever catch on in the U.S., despite a general increase in interest in animation on television, in movies and elsewhere.

Americans still expect animation to be funny. Look at The Simpsons, the Family Guy, South Park. These are very witty and clever and imaginative, but in a way they’re circumscribed, they’re not dealing with the big theme. Japanese animation is like Hollywood, it covers everything. I do wonder when we’ll see serious cartoons in America. There seems to be a real huge kind of block about that.

The full interview is here.

World Voice: Susan Napier

Shukan Daiyamondo recently ran my interview with Michael Izady,  a historian of the Middle East who teaches at Pace University in New York. Izady and I talked in late February by phone about the situation over there, and what might happen. He was, as one might expect, rather grim about the short term.  But he was surprisingly optimistic about America’s role in the Middle East in the longer term, noting that America’s failure in Vietnam did not stop democracy and capitalism from succeeding in other parts of Southeast Asia. In fact, he sees a continuum in American foreign policy since World War II, which has led to capitalist democracies in Western and Eastern Europe, Japan and much of Southeast Asia. That push will continue, he expects. As he put it,

We lost the battle of Vietnam but won the war of Southeast Asia.  In the next 10 to 15 years we will see a large wave of democracy in the Middle East. It may seem like we only have one choice, succeed in Iraq or the whole thing will collapse. But not necessarily.

World Voice: Michael Izady

I talked with Paul Saffo in December about whether capitalism had a future. His answer suggests that different forms of capitalism will emerge. We also talked about the next big consumer technology trend and the shift from mass media to personal media.
World Voice: saffo

Ted Halstead heads the non-partisan thinktank New America Foundation. This interview was conducted in the wake of the November 2006 elections, but before the last Senate races were decided, giving the Democrats control of both branches of Congress. It was obvious that in Washington people were already looking towards 2008. It is suprising in retrospect to see that there was hope the Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq would provide a dignified way to alleviate our issues there.

World Voice: Halstead

Ezra Vogel, the Harvard sociologist, is legendary in Japan. His 1979 book Japan as No. 1 set sales records in Japan when it was published; no other foreigner’s non-fiction book has ever sold as well in Japan

I interviewed him by telephone; the septuagenarian was in China doing research. Japanese seem to feel their old advocate Vogel is more interested in China than Japan these days, a blow to Japanese pride.

World Voice: Ezra Vogel

Robert Shiller is both a thoughtful macroeconomist and a clever entrepreneur. I interviewed him on both aspects of his working life for Diamond Weekly on Labor Day 2006. Among other things, he was pessimistic about the U.S. economy, and suggested that it might well enter recession by 2008. But he was also clear that the U.S. housing market of the last decade has no parallel in our history — and that Americans will always look for the next quick buck.

Our surveys show that people expect to get rich from some investment. It does tend to alternate between stocks and housing, and that’s been true for a long time. The stock market boom of the 1920s ended in 1929. Then there was a boom from 1933 to 1937, and that was followed by a housing boom in the ‘40s and early ‘50s. Then it was back to the stock market in the mid-1950’s.

World Voice: Robert Shiller

As a college student, I was interested in writing and in business.  Being at Chicago, an economics major seemed to make sense.  Only I was not good at economics, to the chagrin of my mother, who feared I would follow in her English-major footsteps and become a ne’er-do-well (she was not much happier with my actual major, history, even when I noted that it wasn’t considered humanities, but social science. It didn’t help when I told her she wasn’t a ne’er-do-well, either). I did well in things like sociology classes, so when I interviewed the brilliant and much-lauded Chicago economist Gary Becker, I was quite surprised that he thought sociology was harder than economics.

I interviewed Becker for Diamond Weekly last August,  though the magazine didn’t run the interview until late January of ‘07.  We sat in the bar at Boston’s Copley Fairmont, sipping bottled water and talking about his recent interests, like the economics of suicide, which he is researching along with Richard Posner.

My vision of economics is not just talking about dollars and cents.  It’s much broader.  It’s a method of sort of interpreting what goes on in the world, the social world, the political world, the market world. So when we talk about the economics of suicide, we mean, can we say anything about and under what conditions it would be better to not live than living? Can you give any components of that that you can understand?  Like, they lose their job or they get divorced or they get a disease. That’s what we’re trying to analyze.

Our interview interested the waiter, who after a certain point became quite deferential to “Mr. Becker.” Later, the waiter told me he’d heard enough to find Becker through Google at a computer behind the bar.

At the end, I asked Becker what advice he gave his grandkids about school. Study the liberal arts, he said.

World Voice: Gary Becker

While in Chicago in July 2006 I also went up to the top of the Dirksen Building, where Judge Richard Posner has his chambers. He was crisp and funny and displayed a voluminous memory for facts, which must be part of the reason why he can write so prolifically.  One thing he didn’t know much about was Japanese manga.  A book based on the blog he shares with Gary Becker had just come out in Japan, and it ran his picture in manga style, which he hadn’t heard of.  I was amused by the idea of this serious jurist, whom I’d been interviewing about deficiencies in U.S. intelligence gathering, being turned into a manga character.

World Voice: Richard Posner

In July 2006, I attended an excellent writer’s conference in Chicago, Writers and Editors One-on-One. After it wrapped up, I spent a day interviewing some thinkers in the area for Diamond Weekly. One of them was John Mearsheimer, who was immersed in crafting a response to criticisms of the paper he and Stephen Walt had co-authored, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” I was more interested in his perspective on world politics five years after his book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, which was published just before the September 11th attacks.

Mearsheimer started teaching at Chicago in my first year at the school, but I never took a class with him. His framework for offensive realism is well-developed and it seems clear to me that U.S. foreign policy since World War II hews closely to it. The question is whether we as a nation might be in a better spot in places like the Middle East if we hadn’t. But then, Mearsheimer didn’t put tragedy in his title for nothing.

World Voice: John Mearsheimer