Ernest Gellner thought that Islam of all monotheisms was the closest to modernity:

I like to imagine what would have happened had the Arabs won at Potiers and gone on to conquer and Islamise Europe. No doubt we should all be admiring Ibn Weber’s The Kharejite Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which would conclusively demonstrate how the modern rational spirit and its expression in business and bureaucratic organization could only have arisen in consequence of the sixteenth-century neo-Kharejite puritanism in northern Europe. In particular, the work would demonstrate how modern economic and organizational rationality could never have arisen had Europe stayed Christian, given the inveterate proclivity of that faith to a baroque, manipulative, patronage-ridden, quasi-animistic and disorderly vision of the world. A faith so given to seeing the cosmic order as bribable by pious works and donations could never have taught its adherents to rely on faith alone and to produce and accumulate in an orderly, systematic and unwavering manner. Would they not always have blown their profits on purchasing tickets to eternal bliss, rather than going on to accumulate profits and more? … Altogether, from the viewpoint of an elegant philosophy of history, which sees the story of mankind as a sustained build-up to our condition, it would have been far more satisfactory if the Arabs had won. By various obvious criteria—universalism, scripturalism, spiritual egalitarianism, the extension of full participation in the sacred community not to one, or some, but to all, and the rational systematisation of social life—Islam is, of the three great Western Monotheisms, the one closest to modernity.

Be ready for a surprise:

This year, 84% of Chinese citizens polled agreed the free market is best. That was the highest approval rating among all countries polled. China. (...) India, too, long a bastion of Third-Way economic planning and regulation, gave the free market a 79% approval rating.

The market has fans everywhere in the emerging economic superpowers: In Brazil, 75% of those polled expressed their approval; in Nigeria, 82% (where all those oilspills are, Ivan). (...) (T)he highest approval rating ever, 96% in 2002, was recorded by Vietnam, i.e., what we used to think of as Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam but maybe should be rethought of as Adam Smith’s Vietnam (even if 96% is the kind of majority Ho Chi Minh elections used to produce). In the Palestinian territories, the free market polls a vigorous 82%. (...)

(...)

It seems there’s also strong popular support for international trade. Growing trade and economic ties with other countries get 93% approval in China, 90% in India, 87% in Brazil, 84% in Britian, Poland and Nigeria, and so on. (...)

In the United States, worryingly, support for trade is only 66%, which puts that country between Egypt and Mexico in terms of openness to the world. That score is up from a disastrous 53% in 2008. Even so, for the first few decades after the Second World War, the United States was the main engine for worldwide trade liberalization. (...)

Here are the results.

Does anybody ever resign over this?

Big oil spills are no longer news in this vast, tropical land. The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless.

 

(...)

 

The oil spews from rusted and aging pipes, unchecked by what analysts say is ineffectual or collusive regulation, and abetted by deficient maintenance and sabotage. In the face of this black tide is an infrequent protest — soldiers guarding an Exxon Mobil site beat women who were demonstrating last month, according to witnesses — but mostly resentful resignation.

Small children swim in the polluted estuary here, fishermen take their skiffs out ever farther — “There’s nothing we can catch here,” said Pius Doron, perched anxiously over his boat — and market women trudge through oily streams. “There is Shell oil on my body,” said Hannah Baage, emerging from Gio Creek with a machete to cut the cassava stalks balanced on her head.

(...)

As many as 546 million gallons of oil spilled into the Niger Delta over the last five decades, or nearly 11 million gallons a year, a team of experts for the Nigerian government and international and local environmental groups concluded in a 2006 report. By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 dumped an estimated 10.8 million gallons of oil into the waters off Alaska.

Keynes, meet Hayek:

1. Try not to think of macroeconomics in terms of equations or in terms of aggregate demand. Try to learn to think in a new language, rather than translate from the Recalculation language to something you are used to.

2. "Economic activity consists of sustainable patterns of specialization and trade." That is the mantra of the Recalculation Story.

3. Note how difficult it is to squeeze patterns of specialization and trade into a model of a single representative agent. Robert Solow has more good points.

4. If you cook for yourself and I cook for myself, that is not economic activity. If we eat at each other’s restaurants, that is economic activity. This is true in the national income accounts, and it is justifiable. It is better to have millions of people working for you to produce your food, computers, health care, and so on than to produce them for yourself.

5. Part of the challenge of creating sustainable patterns of specialization and trade can be described as a matching problem. Think of two decks of cards, one with a list of workers with specialized skills and one with a list of occupations that utilize specialize skills. If you draw two cards at random, the chances are that they will not match. The skills of the worker will not match the skills required in the occupation. In that case, the marginal product of the worker in that occupation is very low, and the worker is unemployed.

6. The economy’s calculation problem is to sort the two decks in ways that match workers to occupations in which they have value. This problem becomes more complicated with each increment of technological progress. The number of occupations has increased, because even as some occupations become obsolete, even more occupations emerge as useful. Also, the amount of human capital needed for many occupations has increased.

7. The patterns of specialization and trade are interdependent. In some instances, there is negative feedback. A new pattern that involves automobile production has negative impact on horseshoe makers. In other instances, there is positive feedback. A new pattern that involves automobile production has a positive impact on gasoline refiners.

8. Economic profits are what indicate a sustainable pattern of specialization and trade. Ultimately, the way that we know that we have a good set of matches of workers and occupations is that employers are not losing money.

9. The sustainability of patterns of specialization and trade is always changing. New opportunities emerge, and some older patterns become obsolete.

10. A danger in the economy is that an unsustainable pattern will go unrecognized for a long time. In the recessions of the U.S. between the end of World War II and the 1980’s, excess inventories were accumulated. In the most recent episode, excesses in housing construction and mortgage finance went unrecognized for a long time.

11. If the excesses are merely short-term inventory problems, the old patterns of specialization and trade can be restored once the inventories are worked off.

12. However, if the old patterns of specialization and trade are not sustainable, the economy faces the Recalculation Problem. New patterns of specialization and trade need to be created. While the economy is creating new patterns even in good times, when it faces a Recalculation Problem it cannot create new patterns rapidly enough to prevent widespread unemployment.

13. Government can create temporary jobs for the unemployed. However, that is not the same thing as creating sustainable patterns of specialization and trade. For example, if the government subsidizes a firm that builds solar panels and those solar panels are not efficient, then this does not really represent a sustainable pattern of specialization and trade.

14. The more that patterns of specialization and trade involve government direction of resources, the greater the risk that those patterns are not sustainable.

15. It is possible that lower real wages will help to solve the Recalculation problem. However, generally speaking, when you pick a card from the worker deck and a card from the occupation deck, the match is either a good one or it isn’t.

16. The production process has become more roundabout over the years. Fewer workers are engaged in hands-on production of output. Instead, they are engaged in building what Garett Jones calls organizational capital, as indicated by functions such as marketing communications, management reporting systems, or corporate training. This means that the relationship between output and employment has become looser. It means that patterns of specialization and trade reflect not just what goods and services are produced but how they are produced.

The Recalculation Story does not exclude government stimulus. Paul Seabright writes:

This account, to which I am very sympathetic, also suggests a reason for favoring tax cuts over government spending in fiscal policy interventions (other things equal, of course). This is that private spending is somewhat less likely to freeze existing patterns of specialization, since individuals do not face political lobbying from insiders over how to spend their money, and since individuals benefit from distributed private information about their likely future needs. Of course, if they save the tax cuts they don’t make use of that Hayekian advantage, and their potential contribution to Recalculation evaporates.

(However I don’t mean it is) necessarily a bad thing if the savers saved the tax cut; it’s just that they don’t then make this Hayekian contribution to recalculation, by signaling to the market the kinds of goods they are saving up to buy. Actually almost nobody signals to the market in advance what kinds of goods they are hoping to buy; the market normally does a pretty good job by presuming that the demand for each good tomorrow will be predicted by the demand for it today. When there’s a big recession that mechanism is no longer so reliable. That’s a Keynesian point in Hayekian garb.

Gene Healy (vice-president of the solidly right-wing Cato Institute) on the circus that is al Qaeda, and the clown show that was the Bush-administration:

Last week, federal jurors in Brooklyn heard tapes from an undercover informant in what one prosecutor called one of "the most chilling plots imaginable," a 2007 Islamist plan to detonate underground fuel tanks at JFK International Airport.

On the tapes, defendant Russell Defreitas promised "high-tech," "ninja-style" tactics that included releasing rats in the main terminal to distract security. "We got to come up with supernatural things," he told the informant.

Despite his bluster, Defreitas seemed unaware of the technical difficulties involved in igniting hardened underground pipelines, and he never secured explosives.

The JFK plotters’ trial follows May’s attempted Times Square bombing, in which Faisal Shahzad -- trained in explosives at an al Qaeda camp in Pakistan -- failed to set off a bomb made of gas cans, propane tanks, fireworks and nonflammable fertilizer.

You ever get the feeling that some of these guys aren’t the sharpest scimitars in the shed?

If so, you’re not alone. The notion of "savvy and sophisticated" Islamist supervillains is "wildly off the mark," Brookings’ Daniel Byman and Christine Fair write in Atlantic magazine.

Many Afghan suicide bombers "never even make it out of their training camp," thanks to the jihadi tradition of the pre-martyrdom "manly embrace": "the pressure from these group hugs triggers the explosives in suicide vests." (Theological question: Do you get fewer virgins for an own-goal?)

On the American home front, al Qaeda and its sympathizers often don’t look much brighter:

»  In 2006, an FBI sting rolled up the "Liberty City Seven," whose ringleader, the Washington Post reported, "wanted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, which would then fall into a nearby prison, freeing Muslim prisoners who would become the core of his Moorish army. With them, he would establish his own country." Sounds like a plan!

»  2007 saw the arrest of six Islamists who planned to launch an armed attack on New Jersey’s Fort Dix, but were rounded up after they "asked a store clerk to copy a video of them firing assault weapons and screaming about jihad."

»  In 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed associate Iyman Faris went to jail on charges involving a plan to topple the Brooklyn Bridge by severing its suspension cables with a blowtorch.

»  The 2005 Jose Padilla indictment revealed that some Islamic terrorists haven’t quite mastered speaking in code. One of Padilla’s co-defendants insisted he was just talking about sporting goods on the surveillance tapes, but couldn’t explain why he’d asked his co-conspirator if he had enough "soccer equipment" to "launch an attack on the enemy."

Lest you think I’m just cherry-picking particularly incompetent jihadis, recall that the Bush administration once considered Padilla, an American citizen, too dangerous for a civilian trial, and cited Faris’ capture as the crown jewel of successes with its warrantless wiretapping program.

The fact that many terrorists are morons doesn’t mean all are, and even morons get lucky sometimes, so vigilance remains essential.

But the myth that al Qaeda is 100 feet tall has fed dramatic government growth since 9/11. The Washington Post’s new series on "Top Secret America" shows that D.C. has erected vast pyramids in the name of homeland security, with some 1,200 agencies and 850,000 people trolling through e-mail and clear-cutting forests to produce mounds of useless, redundant intelligence reports.

We’ve given al Qaeda power over us they don’t deserve. When we recognize that they’re often inept and clownish, we weaken their ability to sow terror. For the sake of our liberty and security, it’s prudent and patriotic to allow an occasional smirk to cross your stiff upper lip.

From the Washington Post:

Lucas Davis, an energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley, has published a study showing that after getting high-efficiency washers, consumers increased clothes washing by nearly 6 percent. Other studies show that people leave energy-efficient lights on longer. A recent study by the Shelton Group, which advocates for sustainable consumer choices, showed that of 500 people who had greened their homes, a third saw no reduction in bills.