Asymmetrical Information

Definitely a tough one. The advantages Germany and Japan had were many: An educated society, lots of experience with running a successful industrial economy, relatively homogeneous societies (and thus few reinforcing cleavages) and a large infusion of cash from the US.

Iraq has lots of money--the oil revenues will come gushing back in as soon as UN santions are lifted--and a relatively secular culture by Arab standards. But they also have the huge problem of competing Islamic cultures and the issue of Kurdish nationalism. I think it's doable, but it's going to take years of work. And it could collapse at any point if a man on horseback (camelback?) emerges as the result of one of the early elections before true democracy becomes institutionalized.

Heh. Teach me to post comments on your new posts. By the time I finished, you had added a paragraph to the post and added another long one on the same topic right above it.

I'm still not totally sure the most important need is a democracy...
They really need a strong constitution with strong controls, ensuring basic human rights.
Sure, democracy is the best vehicle for ensuring the people retain those rights, but we can let democracy develop over time. Ensure they have the rights, and it will develop a people who demand the fruits of democracy. Impose a democracy, and some jerk will hijack the process for his own benefit.
I recognize that might be too simplistic...

One thing common to all democracies is the rule of law, thus ensuring that the people elected to run the country stay in power until the next election. The rule of law is also common to capitalism, because it ensures property rights that last long enough for a return on capital investment to be realized. This is, IMHO, the main reason that capitalism and democracy work together quite well.

One very important practical side effect of capitalism is that it produces a large middle class with a vested interest in maintaining the rule of law, which as I noted above, is necessary to a functioning democracy.

Once a tradition of individual property rights becomes established in a country, democracy becomes very stable, even if the economic form of the country moves to a more socialistic model. I don't think that it accidental or snobbish behavior for our forefathers to specify that ownership of property was a prerequisite for voting.

What makes democracy work are the freedoms people enjoy. Freedom within limits of law enjoyed by all. The Iraqis will need to experience freedom first before democracy can take hold as a permanent change.
It took us a generation in Japan and Germany, the problem in Iraq is going to be more difficult, but not impossible.
How we deal with the surrounding Islamic world will be the key. An Islamic world that fights against us, and the democratic ideals we represent, whenever and wherever they face them. The Islamic neighbors will treat our presence in Iraq much like they treat Israel's presence in their midst.
The honeymoon will be short, the peace will be much more difficult to win than the war and I pray we have the resolve to see it through. Unlike Israel, we will always have the choice of packing up and going home.

The key thing to look at wrt Germany and Japan is not "democracy". It's private property rights, and to a lesser degree other individual rights. Did they, or did they not, have a history of supporting private property rights? Was there an independent judiciary, and a history of rule of law? (I am pretty sure there was in Germany. I don't have much idea about what Japan's society was like pre-WWII.)

Democracy is socialism, in a kind and gentle form. But socialism nonetheless. It is contrary to capitalism. This is why it is possible to have functioning democracy without a functional economy (India for so many years, and where Europe is going), and conversely, a non-democracy that "works" economically (authoritarian Spain, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.). What Iraq needs is not democracy, but rather, strong private property rights. And that is what it has no history of; and why a lot of libertarians are very skeptical that the USA will be able to build a functioning state in Iraq.

I worry that the USA is going to muck things up economically by trying to build "democracy". Here's hoping "we" impose a constitution with very limited delegation of power to the center, strong individual rights, and separation of powers - all anti-democratic ideas. (Sound familiar?)

You need property rights, rule of law, corporations , stocks n' bonds n' financial markets, and equal individual rights.

Strong property rights are both a blessing and a curse for a new democracy -- a blessing, because they minimize people's worry that the majority will confiscate from the minorty (cf, Weimar), a curse, because they can serve to make permanent the confiscations of the pre-democratic regime and thus leave the country with pseudo-feudal social structures that doom democracy from the starting gate.

I think therefore that however odious it may be to my libertarian sentiments, land reform and other such redistributionist schemes may be a necessary precondition for the imposition of property rights, themselves a precondition for workable democracy. Certainly land reform was a big part of the reconstruction of Japan, and various redistributionist schemes crucial to the rehabilitation of Germany.

In other words, you need to get property distribution fixed BEFORE you start on clear property rights. If you do it afterward, you set up a government too powerful to survive as a democracy. If you don't do it at all, you set up a government on top of a society built on resentment, which is sure to be unstable.

Alas, this implies a multi-step process. It took six years to rehabilitate Japan, whereas Bush has said he wants to do the work in six months and even the usually-sensible Blair sets the limit at two years. I doubt that the American-British coalition has the patience to do the job right, and will therefore fail.

Oceanguy and Leonard are showing good sense here. In the absence of freedoms enjoyed regardless of who is in power, it becomes very important who is in power. Too important to have much patience with the preferences of your rivals. Once I an confident that I can hold a job, care for my family, safely allow my children out of my sight, hold on to what I think is mine, without regard to who wins elections, then I can tolerate elections. In the early days, there will be lots of folks who have good reason to think they stand to lose much, depending on who is elected. Many property holders in Iraq, I suspect, have been Ba’ath party members of sympathizers. Do they get to remain among the wealthy? If not, does the spectacle of stripping them of their property keep citizens from trusting elected leaders (other than those they support) to respect property? A few years of somebody insuring that elective politics don’t become a winner-take-all affair will likely be needed to assure democracy flourishes, if it does. That nice Mr North who won the Nobel Prize has some things to say about people hanging on to old institutional arrangements, things often ignored in debates about fostering democracy.

And Oh, my! What will the neighbors think? I suppose this comes under law and order, but I think “foreign relations” needs a topic of its own. Iraq armed itself not only because Saddam had expansionist aspirations, but because Iraq lives in a tough neighborhood. The level of armament in neighboring countries will dictate the level of armament in Iraq as soon as foreign military forces withdraw. That means Iraq will have to rearm. Shiites may feel the gravity of Iran. The Kurdish problem (to Baghdad, Kurds are a problem, no matter what we may think of their experiment with democracy, victimization under Saddam, or national aspirations) won’t go a way. Certainly if Kurds were able to be convinced to abandon national aspirations, Turkish efforts would have sufficed. Syria’s Ba’athist politics may feed a low simmer of Ba’athism in Iraq. Iraq’s oil wealth hardly qualifies it as wealthy if a high level of debt, a big restructuring effort and rearmament all make demands on oil revenue. Jane has written already about the risks to oil-dominated economies. This is only a partial list of problems to be faced.

Now, the argument that other previously non-democratic nations have adopted democracy has some merit, but some holes, too. What those who offer that argument need to account for is why lots of nations have adopted democracy, and tend to be clustered together, while during the same period, other nations, also often clustered together, have not. The fact that previously non-democratic nations adopted democracy is as much as to say once there were no democracies and now there are some. What does that prove? The rest of the argument about how good democracy is could equally be heard from apologists for communism – once there were no communist nations, then there were some. Communist apologists claimed that as part of the proof (along with historic inevitability) that communist would sweep the earth. Oops.

For those willing to think politically incorrectly about national development, you probably should check out IQ and the Wealth of Nations. I have not read it, just the reviews. But they easily summarize the ideas in it; whether or not you believe it is, I suppose, why you might want to actually buy it. So take this simply as a pointer.

From a review of it by Steve Sailer:

The correlation between national IQ and national income is very high. For the 81 countries, the r is .73 for GDP measured in purchasing power parity terms (which makes poor nations with lots of subsistence farmers look better off than they do in standard measures of just the cash economy). In the social sciences, correlations of 0.2 are said to be "low," 0.4 are "moderate," and 0.6 are "high." So 0.73 is most impressive.

This doesn't mean that a high IQ alone is the cause of a high income. Causation probably runs in both directions, in another virtuous circle. Rich countries tend to produce enough food to stave off malnutrition, for instance, which probably leads to higher IQs, which leads to even higher food production due to more sophisticated farming techniques.

Interestingly, per capita income correlates almost as strongly with a nation's level of economic freedom as it does with its level of intelligence. But that's in large part because economic freedom and IQ correlate with each other - at the high level of 0.63.

Freedom and brains probably contribute to each other. Although there are obvious exceptions, countries with smart workers (and smart leaders) tended to find that the capitalist system generated wealth. So there was less impetus to experiment with command economies than in places where free enterprise wasn't getting the job done.

But it could also be that freedom exercises the brain - West Germans averaged 103 while East Germans scored only 95..73 correlation is indeed very impressive correlation - and in a social science no less!

The average IQ in Iraq is, according to this book, 87. Given that, one might expect them not to do particularly well economically in the modern world; though, as Sailer mentions, freedom and IQ correlate. So perhaps if we force well-designed institutions on them, they will perforce be free, and this will impact their nutrition and other environmental factors enough to raise their IQ, and they will build a powerful modern economy.

By comparison, the national IQs for West Germany and Japan: 103 and 105. Things that worked there may or may not work in Iraq.

Correlation is not causation. Perhaps it is the high incomes of Japan and elsewhere that are the cause of their high IQs, rather than the other way around. Maybe the link confronts this possibility, I dont have time to check it out right now.

Just a note: Japan did have a better history with democracy than Germany. The 1890 constitution instituted an elected legislature (the Diet) and by 1925 there was universal manhood suffrage. Militarists had gained more and more influence in the years leading up to WWII, but despite this Japan had had decades of experience with democratic institutions and increasing participation in those institutions by its populace.

Of course, Germany, which had much less exposure to democracy, did OK; so Iraq may do OK too.

The larger danger faced by Iraq is probably not their lack of experience with democracy but the fact that Iraq consists of Kurds and Arabs, Shia and Sunni. Both Germany and Japan were ethnically and religiously homogenous. Not only is Iraq heterogeneous, but its different groups are armed -- another unique and probably negative feature.

Hopefully, we can convince them all that cooperation is in their interest.

How soon we forget. Germany is a modern nation, it did not exist at the outset of the 19th century, Japan was politically united at that time, but it wasn't 'till the 20th century that a central gov't really had any power. A few decades of democracy does not a tradition make. As to the religious homogeneity of Germany: well you might take that view today, but what is really going on is not a uniformity of views but general tolerance taught by centuries religious conflict.

Iraq may be more fractious than 1950's germany or Japan, but they weren't that far ahead of the curve at the outset of their democratic experiment.

The issue of property rights is definitely more troublesome. I don't know what the Iraqi history is on that subject. Jane, anyone, can you clue us in?

John

Fair point John, but I'm not sure how you quantify "more fractious" for Iraq and not "that far ahead of the curve" for Germany and Japan.

Maybe the best thing is to look at when democracy took hold in Germany and Japan. Then see how long before this was the last significant armed internal conflict. Then compare that with Iraq.

My hunch would be that Iraq had bloodier conflicts more recently. The Kurdish armed revolt had been going on even before Hussein took power I think, though to varying degrees, up through to 1996 and (of course) today.

Is the Kurdish rebellion anti or pro-democratic? Well, it's certainly pro-democratic for the Kurds. The question is how it will interact with Sunni and Shia factions in the society.

I don't know the answer, but I'd guess that the coopting of armed, ethno-religiously distinct factions into the new democracy will be a bigger problem for Iraq than it was for Germany or Japan.

This may simply end up as a societal issue, like racism in the U.S.

But one thing to think about in relation to this issue is that Iraq has oil wealth. That oil wealth is concentrated in certian regions, and I'm sure there will be jockying among the Iraqi groups for control of the wealth from these regions and a divvying of the spoils.

I don't think Japan or Germany faced quite the same issue, though there is always advantage in controlling the state and its financial apparatus -- its just that oil is a physical resource that lends itself to capture and defense by soldiers.

Hopefully, the jockying we see will be political only. The presence of U.S. troops could certainly encourage it to remain so. The problem is that any long-term deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq has its own downside.

All of this is gloom and doom, worst case scenario stuff, but the reason to bring it up is that in relation to Germany and Japan, all the differences appear to be negative, not positive.

It's conceivable that comparing Iraq to those two countries could've revealed a bunch of differences that argued in favor of an easier transition to democracy in Iraq. As it happens, the differences between Iraq and the other two all seem to point to a more difficult transition.

(Does anyone have counter-examples?)

At any rate, more difficult doesn't mean impossible; but there it is.

The transition economy
Building civil institutions
Structuring Iraq's oil wealth
De-Ba'athification
Foreign aid
Law and order

Don't forget the most important issue:

A new Consititution

For the longterm stability and success of Iraq, it will need a fundamental law upon which to base all its civil institutions. That is one of America's great characteristics. The Iraqi constitution should be written by the Iraqi people, but America should also insist on including certain parts - human rights, property rights, governmental balance of power, subjugation of the military to the civilian government, etc. etc...

If I may venture an assessment of grafting democracy onto an Arab nation...?
The biggest problem is that Arabs are, by and large, tribal.
Loyalties are rigid. They cannot choose their loyalties. They seem to be, in order:
Loyalty to
- family
- clan
(- geographic location) not sure about this one
- race
- religion
- "nation" This is an artificial idea thrust upon them around 1920.

Loyalty to friends is also in there somewhere, I think somewhat equivalent to clan. If your friend asks you to do something to help them out, you do it. If your family tells you to take a job or go to a certain school or come home or marry someone, you do it. No choice.
That makes it problematic to teach a group of people that they actually CAN vote for someone of their own choice, that they can vote differently than their husband, elder brother, father, etc.
Luckily, Iraq is one of the more westernized nations...that may help.
Really, try to wrap your minds around the idea that are accustomed to having no choice about their loyalties. That, I think, is the true freedom of the U.S.: we can choose where we place our loyalties.
And my original post of favoring strong civil rights over democracy was merely based on the fact that Japan didn't have a democracy for however many years (6?) until the constitution was adopted. Until then, they had stability and many more rights guaranteed by the martial law. That's what I think we need first in Iraq. And even if we want to have the job finished in 6 months, we can always extend if it looks like more time would do some good.

Add to the list of challenges: dealing with the Iraqi loss of the pan-arab unity ideal. A democratic Iraq will most likely choose to seek prosperity and peace from within rather than seek a collective will across the region. What I mean by that is not that Iraq will be isolationist -- but maybe perhaps more unilateral than it was yesterday. Going the route of democracy means the people of Iraq have to psychologically withdraw from the destructive, but seductive ideal of pan-arabism -- in either its nationalist or religious form.

I'm a heavy better on Democracy in Iraq, but just as the Russians had to withdraw from a similar psychological attachment to communism, so will the Iraqis have to face their worst fear: the death of pan-arabism.

Leonard,

The notion of a "national IQ" is completely ridiculous. How would one determine such a thing? Who designs the tests? How large a sample do we have from various countries? What is the average IQ of Senegal? Of Pakistan? Of Brazil? Who can take answers seriously?

The notion that the "average IQ"of Iraq is 87 is ludicrous. That's roughly one standard deviation below the mean. The chance that a group of 23 million people have an average IQ that low is too small to be meaningful.

Bernard, you seem to assume that the standard average of 100 is set in concrete or something.
Studies have shown that the average IQ of the US has risen at least 15 points over the last 80 years. My numbers may not be exact, but the reality is.
IQ is affected by environment: not just by being exposed to ideas, but by such simple things as nutrition.
Can you not imagine that poor nutrition and lack of intellectual stimulation could result in an IQ average larger than one standard deviation below the norm? Especially when the 'norm' has been constantly revised upward based on US advances?

Nathan,

You ask whether I can imagine that poor nutrition, etc. could result in a nation the size of Iraq having an average IQ well below the mean. No, I can't.

Sure, individual IQ is affected by nutrition and other matters.

My point is that it seems to me that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to compare average IQ across nations. I'm not sure the comparison could ever be meaningful. I'm not a psychologist, so I don't know the details of the measurement, but think about it in a broad sense.

You would have to devise tests that are equally difficult for all people in the world. How could you possibly say that Ali's verbal skills in Arabic are better or worse than John's in English, assuming both are in the "reasonable" range? Which language is "harder?"

You would have to test different skill sets, of which language is only one example, since intelligence would manifest itself differently in different environments. And who administers all these tests, anyway? And if someone does, how do they do the calibration necessary to assure the results are comparable across countries? How does the average IQ of Peru compare to that of Portugal? How do you know?

Bernard,
Good point. I acknowledge the US-centricity of IQ testing.
But I do think the original idea of 'national IQ' has a point. Maybe it was taken too far.
The best way I understand it the idea of high school athletic teams. Sure, you can't really compare the best basketball teams of different states, because their is no common competition. But there are some general assumptions you can make:
People will be better basketball players in states with greater traditions of playing basketball.
People will be better basketball players if they are taller. (take 2 people with exact same skills...the taller will be more valuable)
Larger schools will have better teams than smaller schools.

In the same manner, you can make certain general assumptions about the differences between citizens of various nations. The assumptions won't be 100% correct, but that doesn't make them automatically 100% wrong, either.

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