Parties as business ventures

An article in this week's issue of the magazine Respekt brought me up short. (See the full translation here.) The passage that really brought me up short was this one:

ODS is quickly turning into a party whose membership card is a good thing to have in your pocket when you're competing for public purchases or subsidies from the European Union. Cynical managers and entrepreneurs are joining, who will tell you in informal conversation that that's their only interest in it.

(ODS is the Občanská demokratická strana—Civic Democratic Party, a European-Liberal party (i.e. conservative in U.S. Terminology) that arose out of a split of the Civic Forum. The Civic Forum was created in the course of the overthrow of communism in November-December of 1989, and it formed the first post-communist government that took shape in January 1990. ODS is also the leading member of the coalition government that was formed after the parliamentary elections in June.)

It was reminiscent of the days of communism, when certain careers absolutely required membership in the communist party. So while the party ideology portrayed the members as the most idealistic people in society, many people joined as a practical necessity for doing what they wanted to do in life.

One day during my Moscow semester in the fall of 1988, a few of my American classmates and I sat a table with a couple of Russian students at lunch. One of the Russians asked if there were many communists in the U.S. "Well, we have a communist party, but very few people are actually members of the party. Then there are others who simply believe in the ideals." "Yes," she responded, "we have a few of those too," and her tone made clear that the believers and the party membership were generally not the same people.

So here we are 20 years on from the fall of communism and at least in some circles people view parties not as means of governing the country in one way or another, but as a sort of necessary business expense. It's different, of course, in that you get to choose which party to use as your vehicle for access to taxpayer funds, whereas before the Communist Party monopolized this role. But it's a far cry from the heady dreams of democracy that accompanied the Velvet Revolution.

And it raises questions about how much our own politics in the U.S. is operated on the same basis--the K-Street Project comes to mind, where lobbyists would be shut out of important legislative discussions if they didn't direct their contributions exclusively or predominantly to the G.O.P.

Kids on trains

I don't know whether this is more a difference between the U.S. and other places, or between rural/suburban and urban places.

I live in a small town in upstate New York. Elementary-school kids walk or bike to school, or their parents drive them. A 6-year-old might walk with her 11-year-old sister, but wouldn't walk by herself. And the 11-year-old is only as independent as she is because it's a small town where we know a lot of our neighbors and the traffic is very mild.

It's rather different from this article flagged here by Atrios. At the end of the schoolday the kids are gathered in the gym. The parents, in their cars, line up like airplanes waiting to land. As they pull in one by one to the single pick-up point, a staffer outside radioes in which kid to send out. The kid "is grabbed from the gym, escorted to the sidewalk and hustled into the car as if under enemy fire. His mom peels out and the next car pulls up. 'Sydney's mom is here!'"

Greensboro N.C. has about 260,000 people, so it's obviously not directly comparable to our laid-back town of 12,000. We and our neighbors probably wouldn't let 11-year-olds travel clear across town on their own, but neither would we treat the distance between the school door and the curb as if it were somebody else's free-fire zone.

But then consider Prague. This is a city of 1.2 million, and we see kids who are probably 10 or 12 years old, traveling solo through the subways, on the trolleys, walking along busy roads.

Some of this has to do with changes over time. When I was perhaps 9, my mom would send out a pack of kids bracketed by my 12-year-old sister on the old end and me on the young end. We would ride the MBTA from the suburbs, through downtown Boston, to the Science Museum. I was the navigator, my sister was the all-around Responsible Party. At age 12. Anecdotal evidence says that Americans don't do that anymore, and people chime in all over the place with stories of "when I was a kid." But in Prague, people still do send their kids off through the big city all on their lonesome.

And it's not that it's perfectly safe. Thinking about this question this morning on the trolley as we took the boys to school, I remembered an ad I saw in a newspaper not long after we got here, saying something to the effect of, "XX,XXX people were injured at crosswalks last year. School starts in a week. We'll be out in force ticketing drivers who break traffic laws." So people (including kids, some of them unchaperoned by an adult) get hurt on the streets, and presumably some of them die. But Czech parents still send their kids off into the city on their own.

If I get around to it, I'd be curious about some statistics comparing relative traffic injury rates here vs. the U.S.

Highways and railroads

An article in today's online Finanční noviny (Financial Times) is pessimistic about the future of highway funding in the Czech Republic.

"At a press conference after a cabinet meeting, Transportation Minister [Vít] Bárta announced that if future budgets are kept at the level proposed for 2011, the country's highway and railroad corridors will take at least 100 years to build out. 'My predecessors built more than they had money for. In this way citizens maintained vain hopes," reiterated Bárta, who today received from premier Petr Nečas the task of working out a strategy for completing highways and railroads 'under the new budgetary conditions.'" (Emphasis added)

A few things caught my attention here. First of all, there's the unclear sense of what it means for the corridors to be done, or to be built out. It's as if there were some platonic ideal of highway and rail corridors which one might wish to have immediately, but that under budgetary realities will actually take 100 years. But it's really just a figure of speech; imagine the absurdity of not looking around every 10 years or so to see if what you're building is still what your economy needs.

Second, there's the issue of building more than you have money for, which is unsettlingly like the housing bubble in the U.S. One narrative of that catastrophe is that we built more houses than we had money for, and there's something to that explanation. And yet the houses got built, and so did the roads here in the Czech Republic. They may not have had the money, but they apparently had the labor and machinery and concrete-making capacity--if they didn't, the building that actually happened would have been physically impossible. And the workers got paid, and spent that money, and the construction firms made profits and spent that money, and roads got built. Move away from thinking about money and think just about the physical reality of workers, machinery, resources, and the question is whether the society is better off with those inputs having been used as they were than under the alternative. And the tricky thing is that it's hard to know whether the alternative would have been having those inputs used for some other purpose, or having them not used at all.

Third, there's the particular perspective that comes from my concern about the future availability of inexpensive energy, particularly oil. The communist period had a lot of negative legacies for the Czech Republic, but one positive one (probably unintentional) was the greater emphasis on rail transportation than on highways (though the rail system did need some serious upkeep and improvement after 1989). After the fall of communism the body politic clearly made a decision to follow the west European pattern (not quite as extreme as the U.S. pattern). I'm aware of the possibility that readers (if there are any) would see me coming from the country that leads the world in making everything nice and convenient for drivers, and say, "Sure, a huge highway system is good enough for him, he just doesn't want 'others' to enjoy what he's got at home." But that's really not it.

Under "normal" conditions the Czech highway plan is probably a pretty good one. In a world where people expect to get around by car and companies find it most convenient to move goods by truck, you can really handicap yourself by having an antiquated road system with almost no 4-lane, controlled-access highways. But if we're heading for another energy squeeze, you want a society that is less dependent on road transportation than the west European norm, not to mention the American one. From the perspective of transportation and settlement patterns, the legacy of communism, with its relative poverty and its imposed separation from the west, was a relatively low dependence on the private car (even if it wasn't as low as, say, in the USSR). In the understandable impatience since 1989 to make up for lost time, the Czechs are increasing their dependence on the internal combustion engine. If the energy-price situation of 2008 returns, this will turn out to be a sad misinvestment of money the country apparently doesn't have.

This is my blog for the class I'm co-teaching with my colleagues Zsuzsanna Balogh-Brunstad (Geology and Chemistry) and Mark Davies (Education) at Hartwick College. It's intended initially as a place for comments flowing out of that class (January 11 - February 5, 2010), but I may keep it going longer.