海角大神

The euro: doomed again

Just a few weeks ago it looked like Europe鈥檚 single-currency deal was beginning to settle down.

The Greeks had elected a new government that was willing, finally, to negotiate and chip away at all of their expensive social benefits (and deal with their debt). The French had elected a government that was popular and would have the mandate to make tough choices.

Now, Europe is back to 鈥渋magining the unthinkable,鈥� as Germany鈥檚 Der Spiegel magazine puts it. German central bank officers are starting to think that the collapse of Europe鈥檚 common currency, the euro, is a 鈥渧ery likely scenario.鈥�

That鈥檚 bad not just for 鈥渙ld Europe,鈥� but for America and anyone else who might have wanted the global economy to pull out of the current doldrums. As Der Spiegel puts it:

American values, revisited

Thankfully, our Founding Fathers had the foresight to put a very large and deep body of water (the Atlantic Ocean) between us and Europe. Newspaper pundits periodically remind us that the American values that built this country into the resilient economic power (hard work, faith, self-sacrifice) will carry America through even rough economic waters.

海角大神 change, of course, and a recent poll by The Atlantic magazine and the Aspen Institute shows us how much.

In the survey, two thirds of respondents said the country was going in the wrong direction, 70 percent said that people鈥檚 values were getting worse, and 46 percent thought that American values were likely to decline even further in the future.

Here鈥檚 my question: Did the respondents think that their own values were getting worse, or that the values of all those other bad people out there were getting worse?聽The survey suggests the latter.

Half of the respondents admitted that they rarely attend church. But more than 62 percent said they believe they are more tolerant of other people's values than their parents were.

The problem with America, it appears, is other Americans.

More than 77 percent believe that people are generally motivated by self-interest, 71 percent believe elected officials reflect the values of the wealthy (rather than the middle class), and 89 percent believe the values of American executives on Wall Street are worse than those of ordinary Americans, because they are just plain greedy.

The future generation

This is the point in time when politicians usually talk about the promise of the future generation. Times are tough now, a politician might say, rolling up his sleeves, but at least we know we are preparing our children to meet the challenges of tomorrow. But what if the future generation is, well, spoiled?

In this week鈥檚 New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert looks the anthropological work of Carolina Izquierdo and Elinor Ochs, comparing the values of children in the hunter-gathering tribes of the Peruvian Amazon and back home in the Los Angeles area. While Peruvian children often volunteered to make themselves useful, sweeping up the hut or gathering leaves for roofing material, American children seemed to lack even the capacity to set the table or to tie their own shoelaces.

It鈥檚 a fascinating study, and provides food for thought.

Dearest Pakistan

For the past decade, American politicians and military planners have complained about the perfidious nature of its frontline ally, Pakistan, in the global war on terror. Pakistan was playing a double game, columnists wrote, by openly supporting the American fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda on one hand, but quietly supporting those very same groups as a way to serve their own regional interests.

Excuses have been made for Pakistan鈥檚 apparent inability to deal with its internal demons, including weak or corrupt leaders, ill-educated citizens, messianic mullahs, and double-dealing generals.聽Now, in this week鈥檚 edition of Foreign Policy, Robert Kaplan has given us another excuse: geography.

With its unmanageable terrain, following the drainage of the Indus River from the unreachable Himalayan mountain range, past the hostile Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan on one side and the hostile Indian population on the other side, Pakistan is a nation that is practically designed for failure, Mr. Kaplan asserts.

Agree or disagree, there is a lot to learn in Kaplan鈥檚 piece.