A Corrective: The CAS in a Better Light

The report lampooned in the previous post is not typical of the CAS, which has done some very good work, a correspondent tells me: for example, this on urban violence (h/t Justin).

Où sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

A mention in Le Monde of a report by the prime minister's Centre d'Analyse Stratégique sent me to the CAS Web site. I didn't find the report I was looking for, which apparently argues that the French fear a loss of class status by their children more than the statistics warrant. I did find another report, however, whose method astonishes me more than its results. This one, entitled "La crise d'après les mots, les mots de l'après-crise," attempts to evaluate French attitudes toward the crisis by asking respondents to state their feelings toward a corpus of 210 key words. This so-called "semiometric analysis" is then used to create a typology of responses to the crisis: "fighters," "retreaters," "train wrecks" (sinistrés), "reformers," and "rebuilders."

To take just one of these categories, "rebuilders" are people with "voluntaristic" and "dynamic" personalities, as exemplified by their positive evaluation of words such as "construct," "effort," "ambition," and "commerce," while they tend to distance themselves from "anxiety-generating threats so as to construct a serene and reassuring framework," signified by their favorable rating of words such as "tenderness," "feminine," "blue," "intimate," and "sublime."

May I venture to suggest that France's First Rebuilder is its president, who has always been voluntaristic and dynamic and who, since his remarriage, is in closer touch with his previously suppressed tender, feminine, blue, intimate, and sublime instincts?

If this were the United States, I would nominate this study for the late Sen. Proxmire's "Golden Fleece" Award. But this is France, so I will simply suggest that the work is probably an employment support scheme for jobless sociologists. It's a good example of the way in which crises not only make it profitable to dig holes in order to fill them up again, as Keynes suggested, but also provide their own holes, there for the filling by anyone with a personality dynamic enough, or shameless enough, to seize the day.

Misoverestimated

Mon pauvre Bernard! Kouchner seems to have pronunciation problems of George W. Bush magnitude. Here he refers to Uighurs as "Yoghourts." Danone should sue. Well, at least he didn't call the Hans "Huns" (though the Uighurs might). There are times when I think Kouchner has been "misoverestimated," to adapt a well-known Bushism.

Bernard Kouchner confond Ouïgours et yoghourts
by rue89

The European Social Model and the Long Run

Mark Thoma thinks Ken Rogoff has Europe's future wrong because he has Europe's past wrong.

Ranked

To see how this blog stacks up against other blogs that take some aspect of French life as their subject, see these rankings. We're no. 54 out of 75 in the overall sweepstakes, but since the competition includes Le Monde, L'Equipe, and Le Figaro (1, 2, and 3 respectively), that's not bad for a 1-man operation! And in some of the subrankings, we're doing even better.

McDo Sponsors the Bac

Get your bac results on-line, courtesy of McDonald's. Polly-Vous Français (to whom I tip my hat for this reference) doesn't know whether to be more astonished by the French propensity to strip citizens of their right to be humiliated in private or by McDonald's readiness to help in the stripping.

Maybe this can help us understand attitudes toward the burqa. In America we can cover our faces in public and keep our SAT scores to ourselves, if we so choose. In France, both your face and your scores must be available for public scrutiny. (Insert smiley face here.)

The Oil Market

Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy have jointly called for government supervision of the petroleum futures markets. And the Obama administration is calling for limits on the ability of financial companies to speculate on oil futures. This ain't your father's neoliberalism. We await China's reaction to these moves.

A400M

Should EADS pull the plug on the troubled A400M military transport? The New York Times thinks so. Indeed, if the A400M goes down, Europe can simply buy its heavy-lifting capability from the US, and in return Congress and John McCain might, in their infinite wisdom, relent in their opposition to buying aerial tankers from the Europeans. Win-win. But if, as the Times notes, the A400M was "always a political airplane," that hardly distinguishes it from every other military aircraft project on record, so caution is in order. Still, Europe's bargaining position is weak: the A400M doesn't fly (yet), and without more money to fix its problems, it probably never will.

And as everyone knows, the only thing stopping Europe from getting right in there and mixing it up with bad guys around the world is the lack of a heavy-lifting capability ... right? Of course depriving oneself of capabilities with the potential to make trouble down the road is also "always a political" matter. Remember Ulysses and the Sirens? Europe has perhaps tied itself to the mast lest the Sirens tempt it into unleashing the dogs of war.

Hénin-Beaumont

In the end, the Front National did not win in Hénin-Beaumont, but it came close. This narrow escape has emboldened some in the Front Républicain ("ripou-blicain" according to FN ticket leader Steeve Briois, who shares Le Pen's liking for puns in bad taste) to see a continuation of the party's decline. I prefer to see a warning of the kind of electoral trouble that could arise in other places if the economic downturn continues to worsen.

Business Failures

The rate of failure of small and medium businesses in France is skyrocketing.