Animal Farm is one of the most famous tracts of the 20th century. It’s a prescient warning against totalitarianism. Its influence is such that phrases such as “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” are still used today.

Yet for several years before its publication in the United Kingdom, Animal Farm was censored. Why did this happen? Well, the answer is quite simple.

It criticized the Soviet Union.

Animal Farm may have been about animals, but the farm was quite obviously the Soviet Union. Napoleon, the dictator pig, was obviously Stalin. It was in the midst of World War II at that time, and the Soviet Union was bearing the brunt of the Nazi attack. The Russians were a vital ally of the United Kingdom.

No reputable publishing organization was willing to lay hands on a text which tarred the Soviet Union so blatantly. One publisher wrote:

I mentioned the reaction I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think … I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.

George Orwell, in protest, included an introduction arguing for the need for free speech. He wrote a preface to the novel which can be found here. The preface included the argument that:

At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Every-one knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to criticize the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticize our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals…

Stalin is sacrosanct and certain aspects of his policy must not be seriously discussed. This rule has been almost universally observed since 1941, but it had operated, to a greater extent than is sometimes realized, for ten years earlier than that…You could, indeed, publish anti-Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly the whole of the highbrow press. Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ‘not done’. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ‘inopportune’ and ‘played into the hands of’ this or that reactionary interest. This attitude was usually defended on the ground that the international situation, and the urgent need for an Anglo-Russian alliance, demanded it; but it was clear that this was a rationalization. The English intelligentsia, or a great part of it, had developed a nationalistic loyalty towards the USSR, and in their hearts they felt that to cast any doubt on the wisdom of Stalin was a kind of blasphemy.

Times were different back then. It takes a very different frame of mind to think of a world in which this “nationalistic loyalty towards the USSR” exists amongst the British intellectual elite. The censorship of Animal Farm would probably not have happened in the United States, where anti-communism sentiment was much greater. Yet it happened in the same world we live in, albeit one different in surprising ways.

–inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

Japan is one of the world’s most advanced economies. In some ways, however, its economy is quite isolated. This is a result of both geography and history. Japan is both an island alone and a former colonial power heartily disliked by its immediate neighbors.

Isolationism leaves the West behind on smartphone technology while Japan continues to rely on relics like the fax.

This is different from most other advanced economies. Any Western country has close links with the rest of the West. Take the United States. American culture is fairly similar to Western culture, and there is a deep degree of mixing between the Anglosphere, the United States, and Western Europe. In that sense the market for American companies is not just 300 million people, but rather 800 million people.

Japan is different. Japan should have just as close a connection with East and Southeast Asia as the United States has with Western Europe and the Anglosphere. But due to its colonial past, it doesn’t. In a sense Japan is like Israel, surrounded by hostile neighbors. The irony is that there are a lot of similarities between Japan’s culture and its path of development compared to those of its neighbors. But its neighbors would rather pretend that this similarity doesn’t exist.

So Japan is left isolated. But Japan is also a big and wealthy country, with well over 100 million people. It can afford to remain splendidly isolated. Japanese companies can market to the 125 million Japanese consumers and ignore the rest of the world.

This is bad for both Japan and the rest of us. Japan, in its isolation, has developed a number of unique practices and products. Some are better than the rest of the world’s; some are worse. In an ideal world we would copy what Japan does well, and Japan would copy what we do well.

This happens, but not enough. For instance, Japan has incredibly advanced cellphones. Long before Apple came up with the iPhone, you could check your e-mail, pay for your groceries, surf the web, and watch TV on a Japanese cellphone. In fact, in the United States you still can’t do some of these things with the iPhone! Unfortunately, consumer tastes in the West were too different for Japanese electronic companies to penetrate. The natural thing for them to do would have been to market to China and Korea, and from there spread the technology to the rest of the world. Too bad China and Korea hate Japan.

The opposite story holds true with something surprising, the fax machine. Today faxing is almost a relic in most of the world. Few young people even know how to use a fax machine, and I am not one of them. In their splendid isolation, however, Japanese companies are still highly dependent on the fax machine. An enormous amount of energy, paper, and time is wasted faxing in Japan. Here Japan would do well to copy from the rest of the world and abandon this increasingly unique Japanese practice.

In an ideal world, Japanese companies would have spread the smart-phone to us years before Apple came up with the idea, and our advances in technology would have convinced Japanese companies to abandon the wasteful fax machine years ago. Both sides would have been better off. Alas, this hasn’t happened. Instead, Japan and the rest of the world continue to remain too far apart, to the detriment of both.

–inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

Read the rest of this entry →

Hillary Clinton's Polling data shows a major gender gap in many states.

By: inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

Four years before the 2016 presidential election, and before we even know who is running, some enterprising pollsters have released polls matching Hillary Clinton against an assorted group of potential Republican candidates. Clinton does well; she leads in a number of red states.

In these polls, one interesting constant is the massive gender gap that Hillary Clinton opens up.

Here are as many 2016 polls that I could find. They show the gender gap in hypothetical match-ups between Clinton and various Republicans.

Comparatively, in 2012 women gave Barack Obama 55% of the vote, compared to the 45% that he won amongst men. The gender gap in that year was 10 points. In 2008 it was 7 points (Obama won 49% of males and 56% of females). The largest ever gender gap in recorded exit polling occurred in the 2000 presidential election, when Al Gore won only 42% of men but 54% of women.

It appears that Clinton would open a huge gender gap. The largest gender gap in this table (25 points) comes when she goes head-to-head against Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey. Christie’s brash style is very popular amongst men but much less so with women.

One point of caution is that the vast majority of these polls come from just one polling firm: Public Policy Polling (PPP). It’s possible that this gender gap is simply due to a mistake in the way PPP is polling. Interestingly, the two results with the lowest gender gaps (of two and four points) came from a national poll by McClatchy-Marist. So take caution in interpreting these results.

Nevertheless, as potentially America’s first female president, Clinton appears to be able to count strongly on the support of women.

P.S. Since the full table was too wide, I took out a couple of sections. The full table is below.

Read the rest of this entry →

North Korea has been in the news in the past few days and weeks. Most of the attention has been negative; tensions have risen between North Korea and the United States. Not that this is new. The two countries have had bad relations – to say the least – for many decades now.

I was recently writing a post on how news organizations still haven’t updated their election results. As part of that post, of course, I tried to track down the “real” popular vote. That is, how many votes did President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney actually win, in reality?

I ran into a problem. Apparently nobody knows.Different organizations are reporting different numbers. To find reliable election results, most analysts go to Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. However, Dave’s numbers differ from those of Wikipedia. Unfortunately, Dave doesn’t provide a source of how he got his numbers. Wikipedia does; it derived its numbers from the Federal Election Commission Report. Ironically, however, Wikipedia’s numbers are actually different from the report’s numbers. Then there is Dave Wasserman, who with great labor added uncounted ballots to the numbers as they were counted. His numbers are slightly different as well. Here’s a table:

Votes Won According to…	Barack Obama	Mitt Romney
Dave Leip	65,909,451	60,932,176
Dave Wasserman	65,909,191	60,932,015
Huffington Post	65,899,660	60,932,152
Federal Election Commission Report	65,899,660	60,932,152
Wikipedia	65,907,123	60,931,767

The vote counts by private individuals such as Dave Leip are probably the most accurate. Unfortunately, these people don’t say how they got their numbers.

In addition, there is the fact that uncounted ballots are still being discovered and added to the official count. For instance, a stack of ballots was found in New York City in March, after the completion of the Federal Election Commission Report. So the report is probably wrong. Dave Wasserman also has stated that the official certified results in some states are wrong; apparently the states incorrectly added up all the official county numbers.

The best way to find the popular vote is probably to add up individually all the official certifications of the vote by each state, which I may or may not do. Of course, we also have to be aware of the fact that some of these official certifications may be wrong.

We may never actually know how many votes Barack Obama and Mitt Romney won in the 2012 presidential election.

–inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

Photo from League of Women Voters of California licensed under Creative Commons

By: inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

I recently had the opportunity to watch a presentation by the State Department. Making the presentation was an intense, broad-shouldered diplomat. He talked about his recent posting in Pakistan and the department’s attempts to improve America’s image in a country where it’s less popular than Osama bin Laden. He showed pictures of events he’d held, full of smiling Americans and Pakistanis. The pictures were similar to the one above.

I couldn’t help but notice one thing. In all these events the only language that appeared was English. There would be a presentation of awards given by the American government, for instance. On the background there would be a seal of the American government and signs like “furthering our partnership with Pakistan” or “a gift from the United States.” In English.

I asked the diplomat about this. Surely it would be better to write all this in the language(s) Pakistanis actually use. He stiffened. Well, he responded, Pakistan is a former British colony, so there’s a lot of English-speakers. Sometimes he would go to a local television station and say “Hello, it’s nice to be here” in Sindhi, which is a local language. He didn’t actually know anymore Sindhi than that phrase, but then the local television would be kind enough to subtitle the rest of what he said in English during the interview.

Perhaps using English-only written materials can work if you want to get Pakistanis to love America. Whether or not this is true, it’s also evident that America’s government is really bad at foreign languages. During the Iranian Revolution, for instance, the United States had four CIA officers at its American embassy. Not one spoke Farsi. Then there is the famous “reset” incident with Russia. In 2009 Hillary Clinton presented Russia’s foreign minister with a red button titled “reset.” The aim was to reforge relations with the country after the war with Georgia. Except they used the wrong word: peregruzka (перегрузка) instead of perezagruzka (перезагрузка). Apparently nobody in the State Department knows Russian grammar. Not as if Russia is important or anything.

Which is probably the problem, in fact. I highly doubt that this individual agrees with American policy directed towards Pakistan. He’s probably a ferocious opponent of the drone strikes. Therein lies the problem for the State Department. The truth is that American policies are bad for many countries. The people most familiar with the country aren’t willing to represent American policies. The people willing to defend American policies know nothing about the country.

This is also why the State Department rotates its diplomats every few years. If a diplomat stays too long in a country and becomes too familiar with it, said person might start disagreeing with American policies towards said country. The classic loyalty problem. The State Department avoids the trap by moving its diplomats around. Unfortunately, this ensures that American diplomats never end up with more than a shallow understanding of the country they’re sent to. You end up with diplomats in Pakistan who try to change Pakistani opinion by putting up posters everywhere in English.

It appears, for better or worse, that this is the price that the United States is willing to pay in order to ensure the loyalty of its diplomats. If so, maybe America should invest some time into making sure somebody at the State Department knows the difference between “overcharge” and “reset” in Russian.

Does California live up to its socially liberal reputation? Statistics suggest otherwise.

California is generally thought of as a very liberal place. The Democratic Party is certainly doing well; Republicans are at an all-time low almost everywhere in the state.

In many ways Pope Benedict XVI has not been as influential as his predecessor Pope John Paul II. John Paul II was highly loved and good at playing with the media. Benedict XVI, not so much.

Yet if Benedict XVI sets a precedent with his resignation, it may be he who is more remembered by history. Future popes may choose to follow his path, handing the reigns to another rather than holding office until death. In fact, this seems like an eminently sensible thing. A person who’s dying probably would be unable to uphold and fulfill the momentous responsibilities of the papacy. It leaves a chasm in the Catholic Church. It’s actually kind of a mystery why it hasn’t been done before.

The counterargument is that politics may eventually come into play. Popes may be pressured to resign by their detractors or internal enemies. This is a good argument. Yet I think that the benefits outweigh the negatives when a Pope unable to fulfill his duties resigns.

Finally, it has been somewhat shocking to hear the criticism of Pope Benedict XVI by news organizations such as the New York Times. Of course Pope Benedict XVI is a very conservative person; in many ways his views are the exact opposite of your typical journalist. So journalists inherently don’t like him, nor the Catholic Church as an institution. For instance, there’s been a lot of criticism of the Pope with respect to child sex abuse scandals. Yet the Pope has apologized and the local churches have handed out compensation; what more do you want him to do? The Catholic Church is vast, and Rome often has very little control or knowledge about much of what happens in faraway countries like the United States. One ought to give more respect for the Pope during this time. After all, this is a very brave decision for him to make. It’s deserving of respect, not criticism.

– inoljt, http://mypolitikal.com/

The previous post looked at the economic history of the United States over the past two centuries. In that post, what stood out most was the fact that the economy of the United States has always been one of the strongest in the world.

There are three defining moments of American history after 1800, and this post will examine them. They are the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. How did these events affect the economy?

The Civil War

Before the Civil War, in 1860, this was how America was doing:

Economically and socially speaking, the United States was better than the vast majority of other countries in the world. The only two countries wealthier than the United States were Australia and the United Kingdom.

The Civil War was a devastating event. It killed more Americans than any other war in history and destroyed the South’s economy. How did that affect the United States?

Well, here’s the United States in 1865. In fact, the population and the economy of the United States has grown. The latter is in large part due to the effective economic policies of the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln. It is true that living standards have grown slower than elsewhere. Still, the United States is very wealthy and very healthy after its worst war in history.

One ought to ignore the life expectancy statistic here, however. The previous post noted:

…the life expectancy data comes from several sources. From 1989 to the present, gapminder uses US Census Bureau data. From 1933 to 1988 the Human Mortality Database is used. From 1901 to 1932 the Human-Life Table Database is used. From 1880 to 1900 Professor James Riley’s compilation of life expectancy estimates (from over 700 sources) is used.

And what about from 1800 to 1879? Well, here the authors use a simple model. A very very simple model. They assume that all countries go through a health transition, and that the United States had not undergone this transition from 1800 to 1879. So gapminder sets United States life expectancy as 39.41 years for this entire 80-year period.

Obviously this model fails during the Civil War.

The Great Depression

The Great Depression was the worst economic crisis in the history of the United States. Here’s the United States in 1920, before the Great Depression:

The United States is the richest country in the world in 1920, although in terms of health it isn’t doing as great.

Let’s take a look at what happened afterwards.

By 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, the American living standard is actually worse than almost a generation ago. The good news is that Americans are a lot healthier. So the Great Depression was really as bad as it was advertised.

Look at the other countries, however. As badly as the United States is doing, livings standards are still the world’s best. Only Brunei (due to its oil), Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom have a higher GDP per capita adjusted to inflation and purchasing power parity.

World War II

World War II was good for the United States and bad for most of the rest of the world. In a sense, the United States was more powerful than at any other time in its history in 1945. Let’s take a look at the effect of WWII, beginning in 1940 at the start of the war:

In 1940 Germany and the United Kingdom are almost at par with the United States. As is typical, however, America is slightly ahead of the First World in terms of livings standards but just above-average in terms of life expectancy.

Here’s what five years of war did:

The destruction of World War II does enormous damage to the rest of the world, which falls behind. Only Brunei and Kuwait, due to oil, have higher GDP per capitas adjusted for inflation and purchasing power parity; their low life expectancy shows that this isn’t really an accurate reflection of their true economic strength at this time. At this time, the biggest countries behind the United States are Canada and the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom has a GDP per capita (adjusted for inflation and purchasing power parity) of $9,931; the United States $17,615.

Of course, this nice situation for the United States couldn’t have lasted forever. Absent a nuclear attack against the Anglosphere, the rest of the world would have started to catch up with the United States again. And, indeed, this is what happened.

Conclusions

It’s quite interesting how relatively little affect these great historical events had on American livings standards and life expectancy. Unlike other countries, the United States just keeps on a slow and steady growth path. It remains near the top or at the top. It would take quite a change – something far worse than the Civil War or Great Depression – to destroy this equilibrium.

–inoljt