Papal Charisma

23 Aug 2013 By Susan Barsy in International Tags: bureaucracy, Catholicism, charisma, followers, leadership, Max Weber, morality, Papacy, Pope Francis, power 2 Comments

The Papacy is only as good as the person in it, at best. With the accession of the new pope and his first few dazzling gestures and appearances, the prevailing tone of Catholicism has quickened, with adherents daring to think new thoughts and regard the future more hopefully, sensing the power of a new point of view to create openings.

Whether the church on the ground can keep up with the change, Pope Francis has begun clearing paths for a global communion of followers. His response to their desire for inspiration has been direct and almost disconcertingly unmediated. There’s no question that Catholicism has entered a new era.

Francis’s stellar début marks the emergence of a charismatic leader. Weber famously defined charismatic authority as “resting on [a] devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and to the normative patterns or order he reveals or ordains.” In short, charisma exists where followers acknowledge it to. A rare in-dwelling quality, charisma is the genuine form of a sort of appeal that American politicians desperately try to acquire with the aid of polling, statistics, and consultants. In Catholic believers’ spontaneous and enthusiastic response to Francis, we see a faith in leadership largely absent from American democracy.

Charisma, however wondrous, is problematic. In Francis’s case, it remains first to be seen whether his acts and leadership justify the adulation he is receiving. For now, we see mainly the strength of the laity’s pent-up desire to repose trust in a virtuous leader. Second, as Francis’s time in the Papacy lengthens, we shall see whether his charismatic authority is powerful enough to wreak change in a vast yet morally compromised global bureaucracy. Or will his charisma be muted as he attempts to reinvigorate a hierarchy so routinized and entrenched?

Social Welfare Comes of Age

7 Feb 2013 By Susan Barsy in International Tags: entitlement reform, entitlements, Europe, Gapminder, global social welfare, global trends, government debt, health care, life expectancy, pension crisis, Social Security, visuals 2 Comments

We call them “entitlements,” the big three: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. They’ve been in the news a lot lately. We’re told that they need to be ‘fixed’ and that is scary. It’s scary because they are huge systems, huge not just by one measure but by many: huge in scope and complexity, huge in benefits conferred, huge in social consequence, huge in their impact on the federal coffers.

The entitlements possess centrality. They are a source of political and economic vulnerability, yet their future is of momentous social importance. What happens to them represents, to some extent, what will happen to us, both as individuals and as a country.

Will Americans discover the means of prudence while continuing in their commitment to providing needed medical care to the ill who are poor and elderly? Will aged Americans be guaranteed a subsistence in their 80s and 90s, or will they be draining the resources of their families, or on the street begging? Will the government sensibly modify its social-welfare programs, or will it fudge on its responsibility to “promote the general welfare,” one of the purposes of federalism evoked in the preamble to the Constitution?

Moderation and broad vision are the keys to determining how best to effect the changes these massive programs need. The crisis of social welfare is not just national but global; it follows from a long historical trajectory. The interactive graphics that Gapminder puts together furnish a global longitudinal perspective on our current situation—on our great achievement and our difficulties.

OUR ACHIEVEMENT

The entitlement programs of today were part of a great historic initiative that altered human life in the 20th century. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, many countries of the world created various sorts of social-welfare programs. As populations worldwide shifted from the countryside to cities, nations saw their citizens becoming newly vulnerable to hardships that living on the land in extended networks used to ease. As humans became more divorced from the land, they became cut off from a natural subsistence and more vulnerable to the shifts in fortune that market economies caused.

Nations were also moved by a humane desire to apply life-saving medical advances to the cruel diseases and conditions that cut short all too many lives, both here in the US and globally. Just imagine: in 1900, the average life expectancy for an American man was just 46.3 years of age; for a woman it was 48.6. Click the play button on this page to see how dramatically life expectancy for many peoples of the world has changed since then.

The creation of so-called safety-nets played an important part in improving both the health and wealth of developing nations. The graphic above suggests the strong relationship between these two qualities, with wealthiest countries of the world also enjoying the greatest life expectancies. While some countries are wealthier than the US, and others are healthier, the United States enjoys the distinction of being the largest mass society to enjoy both health and wealth to such a high degree. Wealth, especially when widely shared, is an important contributor to public health; conversely, public health is a crucial asset in determining what a nation can achieve.

Of course, many factors contribute to life expectancy: culture, environment, and genetic inheritance as well as living standards and public policy. The case of Russia, which continues to have a remarkably low life expectancy despite its considerable resources and size, shows how a nation can be dragged down when all these elements ill combine. On the other hand, the elite group of countries enjoying the greatest health and wealth include all the Western European countries, with their Cadillac safety nets, as well as many former imperial possessions of the U.K.

OUR DIFFICULTY

Now, however, the very success we have achieved in promoting health and long life is contributing to a crisis being felt worldwide. We can see it in our own country, where entitlement spending is a major contributor to our ballooning federal deficits, but it also appears in the massive debts that European governments are accruing, as well as in the sometimes violent struggles over “austerity,” pensions, and public health insurance retrenchments in countries such as Spain, Italy, France, the UK, and Greece. The underlying connections among these crises are a reminder that the problems we are facing are by no means unique. Shaped by the same historical factors and the same demographic trends, the same problems are bedeviling many other nations.

At the same time, the historic role of these programs in helping nations secure greater blessings for their people argues for their continuing importance in an increasingly competitive and precarious world. Countries that demonstrate the most prudence and creativity in reshaping the social guarantees they extend to their citizenry are those most likely to flourish and dominate in the future. The worst paths for the US and other countries are those defined by extremes. Preserving our entitlements unchanged or gutting them mercilessly are alternatives equally foolhardy. Acknowledging the great social advances we have achieved with the aid of entitlements should go hand-in-hand with discovering creative and discriminating ways to move ahead.

Click on the image to enlarge, or check out the pdf version from Gapminder.

RELATED ARTICLES:
Teresa Ghilarducci, Our Ridiculous Approach to Retirement, NYT.
Sabrina Tavernise, For American Under 50, Stark Findings on Health, NYT.

Cuba

1 Jan 2013 By Susan Barsy in International Tags: 1950s, Carol M Highsmith, communism, Cuba, Fidel Castro, Fulgencio Batista, photographers, photography 2 Comments

On this day in 1959, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista relinquished power and fled, pushed out by a Marxist-inspired revolutionary movement that Fidel Castro led. Several months later, Castro, then 32 years of age, assumed his place at the head of the government, where he remained until lately, directing Cuba’s course as a socialist state.

The beautiful collection of photographs of Cuba taken by American Carol M. Highsmith and donated to the US Library of Congress makes for poignant viewing, bringing to life a troubled place whose destiny will nonetheless always be entangled with ours. Whether Cuba will enjoy a rebirth or continue as a land of lost opportunity is surely one of the more interesting issues the future will decide. In the meantime, Highsmith’s work is commendable for the rare view it offers onto an all-too-foreign land.

Images from this source.

The European Muddle

11 Jul 2012 By Susan Barsy in International Tags: currency, European Union, eurozone, financial crisis, global debt crisis, government debt, Greece, monetary policy, overspending 8 Comments

Like many great issues of the day, the euro mess is difficult to conceptualize. Why not take a stab at it, though, since it’s something that could cause the US economy to collapse?

Here are links to a few graphics encapsulating different aspects of the European problem. A few insights can be gained by interpreting them with our own 2008 financial crisis as a point of comparison.

The European Union faces at least two complex interrelated problems. The first has to do with the condition of banks; the second has to do with the indebtedness of member countries. There is also a third problem, which is more political. It has to do with the structure of the EU itself and the poor tools it has for redressing “state-level” problems (critical weaknesses within member-nations like Greece and Spain) that threaten the euro’s value and stability.

Credit imbalances within the euro zone
The integration of nations within the eurozone encouraged capital flows within the community, while creating imbalances that threaten it, should the banks within one of the weaker countries fail.

This wonderful set of graphs published by the New York Times shows the interrelation among creditors and borrowers by country. Done in late 2011, the graphs offer a general idea of how the stronger European economies—France’s in particular—would be affected if the banks of Greece and Italy were to go down. French banks have many loans outstanding there and would incur grave losses, possibly fatal ones, were their weaker counterparts to fold.

Unlike in the US, the euro-zone lacks a mechanism like the Federal Reserve, which capably intervenes to stabilize and close or sell ailing US banks if necessary. In 2008, the Treasury and Federal Reserve averted a general financial meltdown in the US this way. They intervened directly in the affairs of troubled banks in the interest of keeping the whole banking system operating. The panic of failing banks was mitigated; otherwise, it would have spread like a contagion. Our banking system was supported, and the problem was treated as a matter quite separate from that of the federal government’s own indebtedness or patterns of borrowing.

Until recently, the European Union could not behave similarly: it could not act to help banks, it could only give money to sovereignties. On June 28th, however, the EU’s member-nations agreed to begin lending money to banks directly, a measure that untethers these two problems and allows a more flexible approach aimed specifically helping banks that might fail. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether this will be much help, as the level of capital needed to stabilize the banks is very large.

Rising sovereign debt
Which leaves the other big problem: the rampant government spending in many EU countries, illustrated in this set of maps, also published by the New York Times. The maps indicate the significant variation in the spending habits of the governments that make up the European Union. In many of the EU countries, however, including some of the strongest—such as France and Germany—sovereign debt as a portion of GDP has been growing dramatically. The difficulty of reining in spending and bringing the most profligate governments in line has led to popular unrest as well as political conflict over austerity measures and proposals for stringent fiscal reform.

It’s not clear, though, whether these disproportionately high debt burdens pose a threat to the long-term health of many of the stronger EU countries. The more that the elements of the crisis can be differentiated and handled pragmatically on a case-by-case basis, the better the prospects for amelioration will be. This is definitely a case where what’s good for the goose is NOT good for the gander–or in this case, more fitly, for the PIIGS (the acronym for Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain). Helping the most distressed banks may at least buy the EU time to address the more politically fractious issue of how to restore fiscal balance—a very different proposition in Greece than it is in France or Germany, and a more sensitive issue still for the euro zone as a whole.

RELATED:
The Sovereign Debt Exposure of the EU’s 10 Strongest Banks, Forbes.
Paul Taylor, Euro Zone Fragmenting Faster Than the EU Can Act, The Independent (Dublin).

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Papal Charisma

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