Stay In Your Lane

We have entered into a period of remarkable instability, both here and abroad.   Our political parties have been wrecked.  Traditional alliances have been shattered- Turkey, a NATO member, is now an enemy.  30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall,  one of the parties in our two-party system is about to nominate an undeniable admirer of the Soviet Union, Cuba and Daniel Ortega. And in the midst of all coronavirus is stalking the world and mauling markets.

To confront these disruptions, and have a successful outcome requires real leadership, with the West more or less on the same page, shoulder to shoulder, with each person playing their role.  In 1981, with the West in an economic funk, and the Soviet Union menacing, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Pope John Paul II each had a role in the recovery of the West and pushing back on Soviet aggression. 

The demands and challenges facing the West are even more complex than they were then.  But this time around, not only are we more divided, people and institutions are straying from their appointed roles.  I have an answer to all, if we want to navigate through this---STAY IN YOUR LANE.

·        Supreme Court.  Last week Supreme Court Justice complained about her more conservative colleagues, and accused them of a conservative bias.  Likewise, when Trump was nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg said of Trump, “He’s a faker. He has no consistency about him.  He says whatever comes into his head at the moment.  He has an ego.”  Just last week, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, presiding in the Roger Stone case, went on several rants, even going after Tucker Carlson.  Why would she even mention Tucker Carlson?  If you want to be a judge, be a judge.  If you want to be a politician or a pundit, be that.  But don’t mix the two. Stay in your lane.

·        Media.  Journalists have become the worst lane drifters.  As their business model has changed, rather than being reporters and investigators, they have become advocates and agenda pushers.   Rather than observing, questioning, and writing, they have thrust themselves in as players.  No one exemplifies this more than prima donna Jim Acosta of CNN.  Instead of reporting on news, he wants to BE the news. Media has destroyed its credibility by becoming a player on the field of play.

·        The Presidents.  Barack Obama routinely stepped into Congress’s lane. From DACA to JPCOA, Obama took over the role of a feckless Congress through the issuance of executive orders.  Donald Trump has done the same, mostly through Twitter.  He has diverted funds for border security.  His tweets about pending cases under the Justice Department purportedly Attorney General Bill Barr to contemplate quitting.  Losing Barr would be a disaster for Trump.  But he cannot resist drifting into someone else’s lane.  Again, stay in your lane.

·        The Administrative State.  Perhaps the most pernicious of all and most exemplified by ex-Ukrainian Ambassador Marie Yovanovich, who the Democrats hauled up to testify in their impeachment hearings. Yovanovich claims she “felt intimidated by the Trump administration (by his critical tweets) but offered no evidence of a “high crime or misdemeanor” in her testimony. Richard Cordray, head of the CFPA, tried to appoint his own successor, and the Trump administration was forced to go to court to remove him.  The Administrative State has, over time, become unmoored from the electorate and has taken on functions that belong to the legislative, executive and judiciary branches—accountable to no one.  The arrogance of Cordroy who believed that he could appoint a successor, and the disconnect of Yovanovich, who believed that she could make her own policy, and in each case independent of the administration, shows the contempt for the boundaries of their roles.

·        Pope Francis.  The spiritual leader of the Catholic Church has been pushing hard at climate change, open borders and international wealth redistribution. Jumping into politics and economics with both feet, Francis not only steps into other people’s lanes, he opens himself up to charges of hypocrisy by doing so.  Francis has not had inhibitions about levelling criticism at Donald Trump and other leaders that are defending national sovereignty.  Yet is noticeably silent when it comes to China, the biggest polluter and violator of religious liberty in the world.  Francis’s inability to stick to matters of spirituality has caused many Catholics (including this writer) to put their full participation in the Church on hold.

The West faces numerous difficult issues—economically, politically and militarily.   These challenges would be difficult to tackle even if there was unity and even if leaders stuck to their assigned roles.  Reporters need to investigate and report, not become an opposition party.  The legislature can’t let the president and the administrative state take over its job.  The Pope has to attend to spiritual matters, not politics.  The members of the Supreme Court can’t be out politicking.   Our problems are infinitely harder to solve when the lead players won’t stay in their lanes. 

Corona- Opportunity

The emergence of the Coronavirus or COVID19 as it is now called has caused a great deal of worry worldwide as it has spread to several  countries, including Iran and South Korea.  The contagion has inflicted a great deal of damage on the Chinese economy and interrupted supply chains.  About 800 million people in China are on travel restriction. 

And we are early in this conflagration.

But I see long term opportunity in this disruptive event. 

It’s a big wake up call.

At the same time President Xi struggles to deal with COVID19, other aspects of the Chinese regime’s rule and intentions are revealing themselves, and the picture is troubling.

First, let’s look at the Chinese response to COVID19.  The New York Times in its February 8^th edition, wrote an expansive and well-documented piece, exposing the attempts of the Chinese government to quash information about the virus, and its cloddy efforts to silence those that were warning about it, culminating in the death of Dr. Lee, who, the doctor who first rang the alarm bell.   Lee was disciplined for publicizing the illness.  This effort is ongoing as independent journalists are “disappearing” routinely.   The Beijing government knew of the problem in early December but didn’t admit to it until a month later.   We offered assistance from the CDC which offer was rebuffed and CDC officials are still being barred from Wuhan.  Most telling were the statements from the Chinese ambassador, who brushed off a question of the outbreak’s origin and the bioweapons lab as arising from xenophobia and “maybe the virus originated in the U.S.”

Emily Landon of the University of Chicago  Medical School stated: “If you could have contained really early on at the beginning when there were 20 cases, there wouldn’t be any cost. You should use a quarantine strategy.  Once it passes to the 4^th generation of transmission, you switch to a mitigation strategy.”  We’re clearly into mitigation now as the virus has spread to South Korea and Iran.  The CCP at the outset was more interested in controlling the narrative than the virus.

I was fortunate enough to have William H. McNeill as a professor as an undergrad.  One of McNeill’s major works was an epidemiological study published in 1976,  Plagues and Peoples.  In it, McNeill asserted that throughout history, plagues have had a major impact on the course of history.  Most economists are talking about the length and cost of the quarantine.  But I believe that COVID19 will have a different, and more permanent outcome.

COVID19 and its handling by the Chinese government is yet another piece of evidence that suggests that it should trigger a re-evaluation of our relationship with China. We have seen just in the past few months, just how the CCP behaves.  Its suppression of protests in Hong Kong were thuggish.  It immediately sought reprisals against the NBA for daring to question its handling of the protests.  It has coerced the Vatican into a secret deal regarding the selection of Catholic bishops in China (so secret that even the bishops in China don’t know what it entails).  It’s clear from WHO, that it, too has been coerced by the CCP.

It’s one thing when your totalitarian behavior affects your own citizens. That is bad enough.  It’s another to use economic coercion to bully your way.  But now the Chinese government’s behavior is threatening life across the globe.

This is not simply a matter of the length and cost of the quarantine.  If the West has any sense at all, the outbreak should cause a real and permanent shift in our relationship with China.  Our government, business and academic elite lulled us into an unrealistic future with the Beijing regime.  COVID19 is a slap that must sober us up.

Rebalancing the Portfolio

In my professional life, I spend a substantial amount of time advising clients on acquisitions or investments in privately held companies, especially those that are troubled or have some issues.  I am on the front lines of deciding whether and how to invest in these companies, and when to get out.

Viewed through this structure of portfolio management, we, as a nation also make choices of where to expend finite resources in time, energy and resources in developing and maintaining our global partnerships. We should have a forward looking posture with respect to future returns and dividends just as we do in the corporate world.  I believe that the coming years will see a major shift of attention away from some regions and toward others.

China.  Our fundamental premises vis-à-vis China have been badly mistaken.  As recently as four years ago, Nobel Prize winner Eugene Fama was asserting that trade with China would result in an emerging middle class that would demand more freedoms from the ruling government.  China would eventually evolve into a more responsible global citizen.  Thomas Friedman lauded China as a country that “can solve big problems.”   Since the Clinton administration welcomed China into the WTO with open arms, the exact opposite of what Fama predicted has come to pass.  China has become more authoritarian, more aggressive, and more repressive.  Through currency manipulation, dumping and intellectual property theft, our industrial heartland was eviscerated.  The Chinese stole or coerced away intellectual property, engaged in widespread corporate espionage, hacked into the government’s personnel files and its military was behind the Equifax hack.  It built a vast surveillance state, repressed the Hong Kong protesters, and coerced the Vatican into having a say in bishop selection in China.  It flouted basic notions of human rights with its operation of Muslim detention camps. It began to assert military power in the South China Sea.  Instead of becoming more democratic, President Xi n tightened his grip on power.  Its repression of information, well documented by the New York Times, of the coronavirus outbreak (even going so far as to blaming the U.S.) is just the latest example of totalitarian China’s inability to be a responsible global citizen.  The CCP has demonstrated that it is much more interested in controlling the narrative than in controlling the virus. 

After decades of deluding ourselves, we have begun to wake up under the Trump administration.  My first hard slap in the face came from University of Chicago professor John Mersheimer, who in his book tour, exclaimed boldly, “You do not want China to become rich.”  Donald Trump, to the consternation of the corporate and DC establishment urged companies to begin pulling out of China.  Although I am a free trader, I concur with the process of decoupling.  Good trading partners do not steal each other’s stuff.   What we hoped would be a good trading partner and market for our goods and services morphed into a geopolitical rival. 

Middle East. Likewise, the blood and treasure, time and attention poured into the Middle East has been staggering.  Two wars and trillions of dollars later, and we would be hard pressed to assert that there has been any appreciable progress, other than a handful of states that seem to have accepted Israel as a state and a little bit of liberalization within Saudi Arabia.  Our attempt to remake Iraq was a catastrophic failure. Trump’s characterization of Syria as “nothing but blood and sand and death” may not be too far off.  Even Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes in his essay 50 Years: The Middle East & Me in American Thinker, noted,

“And yet: reaching the half century mark, I admit to a certain ennui.  The region’s old problems (fear of modernity, hatred of the West, despotism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, conspiracy theories) remain unsolved even as new ones (Islamism, anarchy, water shortages, Chinese influence) keep growing.  When momentous change does finally come (as in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Iraq) things usually get worse.”

In his January 17, 2020 essay in the WSJ entitled The Middle East Isn’t Worth It Anymore, Martin Indyk asserted,

“Yet after the sacrifice of so many American lives, the waste of so much energy and money in quixotic efforts that ended up doing more harm than good, it is time for the U.S. to find a way to escape the costly, demoralizing cycle of crusades and retreats.”

Both the Middle East and China turned out to be bad places for us to do business. But what about future investments of time and treasure?

The region that most intrigues me is Africa.  The notion first came to me from---of all places----a weekly radio program entitled Afropop Worldwide (www.afropop.org).  Georges Collinet has hosted a weekly radio program for over 30 featuring African music but he also intersperses commentary about culture, politics and even the economies of the countries that he features. In his January 16 program on Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast, many of the artists commented on their ties to France, the improvement in the economy and the vibrancy of the culture.  One artist tried to persuade a person that wanted to immigrate to Europe, “Instead of fleeing, why don’t you stay and build a future here for your country?”

While I am not well versed in African politics or its economies, the program spurred me to think about the possibilities.  I then read an excellent article in Foreign Affairs magazine by Judd Devermont and Jon Temin, entitled, Africa’s Democratic Moment:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/africa/2019-06-11/africas-democratic-moment

In that article, Devermont and Temin acknowledge some of the challenges that sub-Saharan Africa has faced but spun out areas of real concrete progress. The emergence of key reformers in Congo, South Africa, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Angola.  The authors see real promise and progress in the region, and state that “the United States should increase its diplomatic, financial and technical support to those states doggedly reforming on their own initiative, beginning with Angola and Ethiopia.”  Unlike the Middle East, where we have attempted to beat democracy into some states with a hammer, several African states appear to be finding their own way.

I have much to learn about sub=Saharan Africa and Africa generally.  But it offers intriguing possibilities.  In addition to the factors that Devermont and Temin highlighted, Catholicism is growing in Africa (while Christianity generally is on the decline in the U.S. and Europe).   Remember that the two states that voluntarily gave up their nuclear programs – Libya and South Africa--- are on the African continent.

As we decide where to invest and where to divest, I believe it will be away from China and the Middle East, and we should consider investing more in Africa.

And besides, the music is wonderful. 

Labels

We’ve unfortunately become accustomed to labeling and name calling in public discourse.  In the Democratic party, labelling is a business model.  Identity politics makes it mandatory, and part of the lexicon.  Patriarchy, toxic masculinity, Islamophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic and the like are the words and labels used to summarily dismiss another person.  Those words are used to avoid dealing with another’s point of view and argument but to attempt to render all of their opinions unworthy of consideration.  Donald Trump also is a master labeler.  “Lyin’ Ted Cruz,” “Mini Mike,” “Crooked Hillary,” are monikers crudely designed to brand the opponent and neuter anything that person has to say.   Even Barack Obama did it.  Remember those “bitterly clinging to their guns and religion,” in which he dismissed the concerns and denigrated the culture of middle America?  We have grown to expect this from our politicians. 

But academia and public intellectuals are something different.  They are in the business not of gathering votes but of exploring ideas, and in the course of doing so, must subject them to scrutiny and questioning.  As Nassim Nicholas Taleb asserts:

Mathematicians think in proofs, lawyers in constructs, logicians in operators, dancers in movement, artists in impressions, drummers in rhythms, and idiots in labels.

But our divisions have grown so deep and rancorous now that even public intellectuals have been engaging in this kind of slandering.   And it is concerning to me.  A label is an intellectual condom, a prophylactic that prevents thinking.

First, there is Taleb himself.  Ironically, the one that posted that idiots think in labels is himself a prime offender.  Taleb is a talented writer and an original thinker.  I loved Antifragile and Skin In the Game.  But he savages other public intellectuals.  He vilified Charles Murray, “Charles Murray is considered a Galileo of the reacticists, someone provides scientific truths.  He is just an intellectual fraud.  He has referred to him as a “fake scholar.” Similarly, he tore at Steven Pinker, mocking him for teaching “Pseudo-Empiricism.”  He has skewered Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler as “nudgeboy” and labeled his theories as a “Mickey Mouse framework.”  Yoval Harari, Taleb says, “is a quack.”  Ironically, many intellectuals are skeptical of the substance behind Taleb.  One Chicago Booth professor confided to me, “Many of my colleagues think his work lacks intellectual rigor but I think he has some interesting things to say.”  Taleb, the anti-labeler, does plenty of it.

In the law, Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe has done much of the same.  Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a solid liberal and prominent Democrat.  He has taken on high profile, controversial clients, such as O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, Harry Reems and Claus von Bulow.   But Laurence Tribe last week labeled Dershowitz a “charlatan”  and said that “ he “shouldn’t be allowed to use bogus legal arguments on impeachment.”  Tribe, whose name now belies the bias in his thinking, would undoubtedly not have the same view had Dershowitz taken on Khalid Sheik Muhammed as a client, but defending Trump is an unforgivable sin.  Dershowitz replied that he made the same legal arguments that he would have made if Hillary Clinton were being impeached on the same grounds. 

Most disappointing was Deirdre McCloskey.  I have great respect for McCloskey as an economic historian and a gifted writer and have had an opportunity to have lunch with her.  I highly recommend her recent book, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All.  Yet, in her book tour, she said, “On the prospect of Bernie Sanders versus Donald Trump, I quote the former Republican consultant who you see on MSNBC a lot who says ‘don’t put up Bernie Sanders because in the United States a sociopath beats a socialist six times a week and twice on Sundays’ and that’s true.”   As much as I like McCloskey’s thinking much of the time, her labeling of Trump as a sociopath is out of bounds.  She calls Sanders a “socialist” which is a person that believes in a certain economic structure.   But by labeling Trump a sociopath, she attacks HIM with a charge that she is supremely unqualified to make.  Sociopath is a diagnosis in the DSM which only a psychiatrist can make.  McCloskey is transgender and of all people that should know better than to sling labels, McCloskey should.  Her recent book contains a well argued critique of Thomas Picketty’s Capital without sliming Picketty, so she knows how to do it.

Labeling can make for winning politics, but it is a lazy person’s game that unnecessarily and gratuitously aggravates the divisions that already exist in our society.  It diminishes the person.  I think less of Tlaib, Tribe and McCloskey when they deploy it as a weapon.  It would be more persuasive for Tribe to say  something like, “Dershowitz has a point, but here’s what I think he gets wrong, and here’s why. ”  

We should expect better from our public intellectuals, especially in this era of trolling and constant spitballing.