What's going on in Hong Kong right now is a very big deal,

Read why in the VOX article here.

Excerpts:

Protest marches and vigils are fairly common in Hong Kong, but what began on Friday and escalated dramatically on Sunday is unprecedented. Mass acts of civil disobedience were met by a shocking and swift police response, which has led to clashes in the streets and popular outrage so great that analysts can only guess at what will happen next.

What's going on in Hong Kong right now is a very big deal, and for reasons that go way beyond just this weekend's protests. Hong Kong's citizens are protesting to keep their promised democratic rights, which they worry — with good reason — could be taken away by the central Chinese government in Beijing. This moment is a sort of standoff between Hong Kong and China over the city's future, a confrontation that they have been building toward for almost 20 years.

You have to remember that this is Hong Kong: an affluent and orderly place that prides itself on its civility and its freedom. Hong Kongers have a bit of a superiority complex when it comes to China, and see themselves as beyond the mainland's authoritarianism and disorder. But there is also deep, deep anxiety that this could change, that Hong Kong could lose its special status, and this week's events have hit on those anxieties to their core.

Hong Kong police try to retake downtown Central (Anthony Kwan/Getty)

So these protests aren't just about Beijing's plan to hand-pick candidates for the 2017 election, they're about whether Hong Kong will remain fundamentally free, an ongoing and open-ended question that will continue for years no matter how these protests resolve.

The other thing you have to understand is that the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, in which the Chinese military mowed down 2,600 peaceful pro-democracy protesters in Beijing and other cities, looms awfully large in Hong Kong. While Hong Kong was unaffected by the massacre (it was under British rule at the time), the city holds an annual vigil in memory of the event, which has been so heavily censored in China itself that many young people have never heard of it.

Hong Kongers feel they have a responsibility to keep memory of Tiananmen for the fellow Chinese who cannot, but they also earnestly fear that it could happen to them. So that is a big part of why Hong Kong's residents are so upset to see their police donning military-like uniforms and firing tear gas this weekend; it feels like an echo, however faint, of 1989's violence.

This crisis comes in the middle of a political division among the citizens of Hong Kong, who embrace their freedoms but also tend to be conservative, over their future as part of China. Some are okay with integrating with the rest of China, or at least accept it as inevitable and don't want to kick up too much of a fuss, while some want to fight for democracy and autonomy. (There are other layers to this debate, such as Chinese nationalism versus Hong Kong exceptionalism; there's also a strong law-and-order constituency.)

In other words, both the pro-democracy protesters and Beijing are hoping to force Hong Kong's public to choose whether or not to accept, at a fundamental level, China's growing control over Hong Kong politics. If the public tacitly accepts Beijing's terms for the 2017 election, it will likely be taken as a green light for more limits on Hong Kong's democracy and autonomy, however subtle those limits end up being. But if Hong Kong residents join the protesters en masse, they will be rejecting not just the 2017 election terms, but the basic terms of Hong Kong's relationship with the central Chinese government.

Gerrymandering in Alabama

The New Republic has a very interesting article on the "new racism" and the Civil Rights movement in the south of the US, with a focus on Alabama. The article mentions two instances of gerrymandering.

The first one illustrates very well how Democrats lost their 136 year old (!) majority in the Alabama legislature by making sure that black Senators were (re)elected, even at the expense of their white colleagues of the same party:

"It was the Democrats themselves who helped Hubbard realize his goal. During the 2001 legislative redistricting process, Joe Reed and other prominent black leaders were eager to further protect black incumbents. They successfully pushed to fill the House’s 27 majority-minority and the Senate’s eight majority-minority districts with even more black voters. In the process, they endangered the seats of white Democrats, who increasingly relied on African Americans to make up for the growing number of whites defecting to the GOP. James Blacksher, a civil rights attorney who advised Democrats on redistricting, is still stunned by the shortsightedness of this plan. It wasn’t so much a gerrymander, he told me, as a “dummymander.”

(...)

The transformation of Alabama politics was nearly instantaneous. Prior to the 2010 election, the Alabama House had 60 Democratic members, 34 of them white and 26 black. Afterward, there were 36 Democrats—ten white, 26 black. Meanwhile, in the Alabama Senate, the number of black Democrats remained seven, while the number of white Democrats fell from 13 to four."

This story nicely complements the one usually told about voters, who have been more and more aligned (especially in the South) according to race than to class, with poor white voters voting along with their richer white brethren for the Republicans, even at the expense of their economic interests.

But the story of gerrymandering does not end there. It was now the Republicans' turn to enjoy redistricting:

"After targeting white Democrats in 2010, Alabama Republicans then used the redistricting process to cement their supermajority by a tactic Democrats refer to as “bleaching.” The method involves even further increasing the African American percentage of voters in Alabama’s majority- minority districts and, by the same token, further decreasing their share of the vote in majority-white districts.

All it took was a little statistical tinkering. In past rounds of Alabama redistricting, which Democrats controlled, the mapmakers allowed for what’s known as a 5 percent maximum population deviation restriction—meaning that a given district had to fall within 5 percent of the ideal population size (137,000 for Senate districts; 40,000 for House districts). After 2010, however, Republican mapmakers chose to work under a 2 percent maximum population deviation. This was a key distinction. Many of Alabama’s rural districts are underpopulated, and so in order to meet the 2 percent deviation, the mapmakers had to add tens of thousands of voters to them. Since many of those districts are majority-minority, and since Republicans sought to maintain the same number of majority- minority districts, that usually meant taking black voters from districts represented by white Democrats and moving them into districts represented by black ones. Bradley Davidson, the former executive director of the Alabama Democratic Party, says, “The Alabama Republican Party wants it so that, whenever you see a person with a D next to his or her name on TV, that person is black.”"

The result has been striking:

"According to research by David Bositis, in 1994, 99.5 percent of black state legislators in the South served in the majority. By 2010, the percentage had fallen to 50.5. Today, it’s a mere 4.8 percent."


Beyond gerrymandering, the article also provides a nice nutshell of political development in the South since the end of the Civil war:

"The Southern historian C. Vann Woodward famously described the civil rights movement as the Second Reconstruction. The First Reconstruction, of course, began at the conclusion of the Civil War and led to the election of hundreds of black politicians across the South. One of those black politicians, a South Carolina legislator named Thomas Miller, later described the era with great pride: “We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb ... rebuilt the bridges and reestablished the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity.”

But in 1877, the Republican Party agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in exchange for putting its presidential candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, in the White House, and the period of biracial democratic government came to an end. White “Redeemers,” as they were known, undid all the Reconstruction-era reforms they could. (...) A mere dozen years after it began, the First Reconstruction was over."

Then, in the 1960ies, came the Civil Right movement and the Voting Right Acts:

"Political scientists distinguish between descriptive representation and substantive representation. The former focuses on the number of, say, African Americans who are elected to a legislative body, while the latter focuses on the effect of those African American representatives on the legislation passed by that body. It was easy to see, by the early ’80s, that the Voting Rights Act had successfully achieved descriptive representation for African Americans in the Southern state legislatures. But, as time went on, it began to achieve substantive representation, as well. “There was a thirty-year period in the South, from about 1980 to 2010, where there really was biracial collaboration and cooperation in politics,” says Bositis. “And it was a genuine biracial politics—more genuine than in some northern states.”"

This blessed period has then come to an abrupt end.

Economic Freedom Indices

CESIfo has an amazing graphical interface here, where you can chart the evolution of various indices of economic freedom (including property rights, rule of law, openness of markets) over time and space.

On most if not all measures, Canada is doing extremely well and France is at best average, often worse. This fits my experience so far in Québec, where I am spending a few months in Montréal... Montréal feels like a North American town (with all the efficiency it implies in terms of public transport, public services, etc) populated by Europeans (with all the warmth in interpersonal relationships). So far, so good!