Election Day U.S.A.

Today is the last day Americans can cast ballots for the 2012 general election.

As I avoid all media reports since they only irritate me right now, I am instead thinking about a conversation that Gore Vidal reported (in Inventing a Nation) having had with John Kennedy one fine day.  Kennedy asked how a "backwards country like this, with only three million people, could have produced the three great geniuses of the 18th century - Franklin, Jefferson and Hamilton.

Excellent question.  Allow me to update it.  How is it that an advanced country like this, with nearly 315 million people, does not seem to have produced even one political genius on the same level as a Franklin, Jefferson or Hamilton in the early 21st century?

And that is all I will say about it.

For those of  you who would like a 20-minute break away from the election madness may I suggest this excellent Ted talk by Michael Sandel who has some suggestions for how to raise the level of discourse in American politics.  Useful regardless of who wins tomorrow. And one of his examples is same-sex marriage which ties in nicely with yesterday's Flophouse post.

Gay Marriage In France

One of the weirder stereotypes I've encountered in my Franco-American life is this idea that the French are super progressive and completely cool with everything to do with sex and the Americans are a bunch of homophobic puritans.  The truth is so much more complicated.

A case in point:  gay marriage.    This is a hotly debated topic in both the U.S. and France.  The fundamental issues are very similar but the contexts are different.  In the U.S. it is a state by state battle for the most part with different legislation depending on the region. Some U.S. states outright prohibit same -sex unions while others allow civil unions but not marriage and finally there are a few states that now permit same-sex marriage on the same terms as heterosexual couples.

So what is the situation in France?   Unlike the U.S. marriage law is not the domain of regional government - a département in France simply does not have the same autonomy as a state and does not have the authority to vote the marriage laws it likes.  So the debate over marriage laws is one for the national (not local) government.

Another important difference is who has the authority to preside over a legal and binding marriage.  In the U.S. states permit religious representatives (rabbis, priests and others) to legally marry a couple.  This means that a church wedding is legal and binding in the U.S.  This not true in France.  In France the only marriage that counts is the one in the mayor's office.  This means that legal marriage in France is already divorced from religion.  You can still get married in the church or the temple or the synagogue but that is a purely private matter.

French national law as it stands today recognizes same-sex unions under a regime called the PACS (un pacte civil de solidarité) but does not permit same-sex couples to marry. Does that make a difference?  Well, yes, it does.  The PACS was progress but it does not confer the same rights as marriage and while heterosexual couples have a choice between marriage or the PACS, same-sex couples can only have their union recognized under the latter.  For some very interesting statistics about PACS unions see this INSEE report.  They say that only 6% of PACS unions involve same-sex couples.

Francois Hollande, the new French president, vowed during his campaign to change this and make marriage accessible to same-sex couples.  There is a "projet de loi" to that effect making its way to the Assembly this week.  The law is called "le mariage et l'adoption pour tous" (marriage and adoption for everyone).   The Socialists are essentially killing two controversial birds with one stone here by attempting to make both gay marriage and gay adoption legal.

So how is that playing with the French public?  The polls show that there is a clear majority in favor of gay marriage:  58% in favor and only 41% against.  Support for marriage equality however does not necessarily translate into support for gay adoption - the French are split 50/50 for and against.

I would not pretend that the people I know here are representative of the entire French nation but the polls seem to accurately reflect the views they have shared with me.  The idea of gay marriage does not seem to bother most of my friends all that much - it just seems fair to them that gays should be able to make the same legal unions as straight people.  Where they get reticent is when it comes down to a gay couple creating a family through adoption - a situation where the non-biological parent would have rights and parental authority over a minor child.

And now the Church is getting involved.  The Cardinal/Archbishop of Paris André Vingt-Trois  came out against the law recently and that seems to have been a signal that the Church is mobilizing.  Yesterday I went to Mass and the priest made the Church's position on the matter crystal clear:  against homophobia and against gay marriage.    I found at least one point in his sermon rather intriguing - he said that while many French seem to think that the Protestant Christians are much cooler than the Catholics in matters related to sex (Is that really true?  Do the French really think that?) even French Protestants are against the law.  Turns out that he was right - the president of the Fédération protestante de France, the pastor Claude Baty, came out against the law as well as representatives of the Moslem and Jewish faiths in France.

The appeal from the pulpit this weekend was a call to arms against the law.  The Cardinal is asking Catholics to send letters to, and to put pressure on, lawmakers.  He is also encouraging Christians and other like-minded denominations to hold public demonstrations against the law though he denies that he or the Church is getting directly involved in politics:

"C'est la responsabilité des associations et des mouvements de savoir s'ils doivent agir ainsi, précise l'archevêque de Paris. Je ne suis pas responsable d'un mouvement politique. Je suis responsable d'une Église. Ma fonction n'est pas de mener l'action politique. Elle est d'éveiller les consciences et d'alerter mes concitoyens.»

(It is the responsibility of the associations and movements to discern if they should act in this regard, said the Archbishop of Paris.  I am not responsible for a political movement.  I am responsible for a Church.  My role is not to lead a political action. It is to awaken consciences and to alert my fellow citizens.)

I strongly suspect that there will be demonstrations over the "mariage pour tous."  Will this prevent the law from being passed?  No idea but I do think it's going to be a very bitter fight.   This is one to watch very closely.  The Catholic Church in France usually prefers (as nearly as I can tell) to work behind the scenes but every once in awhile she takes a very public stand and roars.  This may be one of those times. 

Le Domaine de Madame Elisabeth

The younger Frenchling and I made a deal this morning after I came home from mass.  She has one week of vacation left and I have one week before my radiotherapy begins and neither of us really wants to spend that time sitting at home.   So starting today we are going to find at least one thing (monument, park, museum, exhibition) we've never seen before in Paris or Versailles and go there together.

Today's choice was pathetically easy.  We've lived across from the Domaine de Madame Elisabeth for over 5 years now and no one from our family has so much as put one foot inside the gates.  This afternoon we rectified that.

The Domaine de Madame Elisabeth (also called the Domaine de Montreuil) is a property of around 8 hectares (about 19 scres)  that was acquired by the king, Louis XVI, in the late 18th century from a noble couple in financial difficulty.  The king gifted it to his younger sister, Madame Elisabeth, in 1783 when she was 19 years old.  Which meant, as the younger Frenchling pointed out, she didn't have much time to enjoy it.

When the Revolution began she refused to go into exile and was imprisoned with her brother and his wife and followed them to the scaffold in 1794.


Today the Domaine is a public park and entry is free to the public.  It would probably be best to visit in the summertime but today was a cool sunny autumn day and it was perfect for a walk.  Here are a few pictures:

That American Library in Paris

Earlier this week I marched myself down to 10, rue du Général Camou and purchased an annual membership  in the American Library.

Last time I had a membership we were living just across the river near Trocadero and the Frenchlings were still in elementary school.  We had a family membership and I used to force them to walk over with me to attend English-language story time in the children's section.  (My children who are very happy to be bi-lingual today have amnesia about how much they hated speaking English back then.)

The American Library in Paris was founded in 1920 just after World War I with the books that libraries in the U.S. sent over for the soldiers to read - about 1.5 million of them.

Since then the library has had quite a history. While I was on the premises I picked up an information sheet called "A Short History of the Library. " Here are a few interesting events from the past:

1923 - Library launches a review called Ex Libris. Early contributors were Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.

1933 - Literary evenings are launched at the library. Guest authors are Colette, Andre Gide and Ford Madox Ford.

1941 - The library director is sent home to the U.S. for her safety but library board member Countess Clara de Chambrun arranges for the library to remain open under the occupation. Library staff operates an underground lending service for Jewish members.

1953 - Two investigators for Senator McCarthy in a mission to root out communist literature are turned away from the library by the Director.

Today the library is located in the 7th district very close to the Eiffel Tower.  It was renovated in 2011 and they did a beautiful job - lots of room to settle in and read.  Their catalog is on-line so you can search from home and then stop by and pick up the books you selected.

Why was I inspired to renew my membership?  It was a combination of the limitations of my Kindle and our upcoming move to Porchefontaine.   I love my Kindle but not all the books I want to read exist in electronic format and perhaps never will.  I still purchase quite a few regular (made out of dead trees) books and that has become a problem now that we are moving.  Our new house is much smaller than our old apartment and I have over 200 books that I must either give away or throw away.   I think it makes a great deal more sense for me to subscribe to the library for the books I want for research instead of purchasing copies that I risk having to throw out later.


I had not planned on using my subscription that day but I unexpectedly had a few minutes to cruise the new book collection and the catalog.  To my delight, they had a copy of a book I've wanted to read for some time:   Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany by Rogers Brubaker. A Kindle edition is now available (it wasn't last time I looked) but for around 20 USD.   I also picked up William Pfaff's The Irony of Manifest Destiny and Peter Sahlin's Unnaturally French.

I had forgotten how lovely it was to be in a library:  the smell of books, the quiet and the bounty spread before in a visual feast that Amazon just can't match.  Feeling a little like drug addict in a crackhouse, I forced myself to stop at 3 books (all I could carry really) and walked out of the library flush and happy.

I will be back.

As I trekked back up the street to the RER station for the ride home I came across this building which I have certainly passed by before but it was only the day I visited the library that I really saw it.  It's one of the most stunning buildings I've seen in Paris. 

Google and the French Fisc

Once past the headlines about the hurricane in the U.S. there is another interesting article in this morning's Le Monde about Google's effort to "optimiser leur fiscalité" (optimize their tax burden) and the French tax authorities' attempts to do something about it.  

Le Monde picked up the story from another French weekly called Le Canard enchaîné.  Google's sales in France, according to estimates, were on the order of 1.25 to 1.4 billion Euros but Google only ended up paying about 5 million Euros in taxes to the French government. Now how did they manage that?  Looks like it was a combination of fancy accounting and shipping the money out of the country to a place that was a bit more fiscally friendly.  That doesn't seem to have sat well with the French government.

Le Canard enchaîné claimed that the French now want 1 billion Euros from Google for a series of transactions they identified where the company took money allegedly earned in France, declared that revenue in Ireland and then transferred it to Bermuda, a "paradis fiscal."

It's headlines like these that fuel public anger over "tax evaders" be they companies or individuals. The average French citizen reading that article is going to find that grossly unfair and his/her feelings will only be exacerbated by the fact that it's an American company doing the dodging.  (Hell, I'm only a resident of France and my visceral reaction was pretty negative too).

It's worth, however, taking a step back and widening the lens through we we see and judge Google's actions.  There are actually three actors here:  France, the U.S. and the countries that facilitated the transactions.  All three have very different interests.  France wants her tax money and that doesn't seem an unreasonable demand.  The U.S. also has an interest here because it is a U.S. company and there are a lot of Americans who think the money earned abroad by companies like Google ought to be brought back to the United States to create jobs and fill the American government's coffers in a time of fiscal crisis.  As for the countries that serve as intermediaries, well, they want revenue too and have every interest in encouraging businesses to move money to their jurisdictions where they can take a slice before it's invested locally or ends up in the Caymans or any other fiscal paradise.  One international company doing cross-border business and three sets of interests to either satisfy, work around or work with in accordance with its interests.

Is this kind of competition between different countries for foreign investment, and the use of tax regimes to encourage it, a good or a bad thing?  It kind of depends on where you sit, doesn't it?  If you live in a country that is eager for foreign investment, the tax code is one way to encourage it and that is something that benefits everyone in that country, citizens and government alike.  The U.S. has done this for years with very favorable terms for foreigners who place their money in U.S. banks.  France certainly doesn't complain when foreigners decided to place substantial amounts of money in French banks or businesses.  According to the France Diplomatie website France was  "the third-leading recipient of foreign direct investment in the world in 2009, according to UNCTAD, receiving US $65 billion in foreign investment flows, second only the United States (US $136 billion)."  For a country that is relatively small compared to the United States that's a lot of foreign money coming in.

Do the French use their tax code to encourage this?  You bet they do.  This article entitled The French Tax System: Promoting Competitiveness and Investment describes a system of tax credits and exemptions that make France a very warm and welcoming environment for outside investors.   That money didn't come out of thin air - it came from other countries who were probably not terribly happy about the outbound flow of capital since it reduces the amount available for local investment and is no longer around to be taxed in the country of origin.

The point I want to make here is that one country's welcome foreign investors are quite often another country's evil "tax evaders" - highly sought after job creators and entrepreneurs in one jurisdiction, unpatriotic villains in another.

Does this mean that I think Google should get away with paying only 5 million Euros in French taxes? Not at all.  If the French authorities think that Google did something shady to wiggle out of the cost of doing business in France, then of course Google has to face the music.  Le Monde implies that there will be a negotiation between Google and the French government and I'm sure they will work it out.  As for the US and its interests in Google's revenue, Americans would do well to recognize that the company (which is not really an American company anymore) is already paying taxes locally (though perhaps not enough according to the local tax authorities) in the countries where it operates which means that if the US really wants a piece of that action, it's going to have to stand in line.

But it is a bit hypocritical for either country to complain too loudly about other countries using their tax codes to promote a positive incoming flow of capital. If it's good for France and good for the U.S. why shouldn't countries like Ireland or Bermuda play the same game?  If you don't want other countries doing this to you, mes amis, then perhaps you need to stop doing it to them.

Or, and here's a radical idea, perhaps tax competition and the chase for foreign investment among nations is actually a good thing.  Some people do make that argument and clearly both the US and France have been beneficiaries of this competition.  The citizens of both just might want to take that into account before getting too enthusiastic about tax harmonization or worldwide taxation schemes.

House Works

The signing for our house went off without a hitch.  Only casualties were my left hand (every page of the deal had to have my and my spouse's initials and there were a lot of pages) and my peace of mind (oh my goodness my bank is going to own me for the next 13 years - what was I thinking?)

Do I still love the house?  Absolutely.   But with legal ownership comes responsibilities (real or imagined).  For an example of the latter, I went over to the house yesterday, looked at the state of the garden and almost immediately started channeling my long-deceased American grandmother who liked to say, "No one is ever too destitute to pick up his yard and mow the lawn."  I then proceeded to weed the front garden until it was a bit better and I was weak, sick and completely exhausted.   After the fact it did occur to me that Grandma probably would have given me a pass - coming out of five months of chemotherapy is after all a perfectly legitimate excuse for having an untended yard.  But such is the insanity of the new homeowner. 

After having regained my mental stability, I went down this afternoon to drop off the key and talk to the contractor who will be doing the work inside the house.  Let's face it, maybe in a few weeks I will be able to work on the garden but I'm simply incompetent when it comes to rewiring the house, fixing the roof or redoing the hardwood floors.  Here are a few pictures of some of the basic stuff that needs to be done before we move  some time in mid-December.

 Heat was the first priority.  The house is set up for gas but it was never switched over from the original oil burning system.  This meant having to contact someone to check the oil tank, the water tank and all the radiators and then turn it on (and show us how to turn it on).  

We were in luck - all the radiators except one work and boy do they give off a lot of heat.  These ones are old but I think they are kind of pretty myself. The marble slabs on top will be the favored places for the cats to sleep.

For me the heating system is positively luxurious.  You see, in our apartment building the heat is central and we don't have any control over when it is turned on or off.  The idea that I can turn on my own heat whenever I like is going to change my life. 

Next up is the roof and what is just under the roof  There is water damage in two rooms so there must have been leaks at one point.  We were also concerned about the state of the insulation.  We were warned that this house is expensive to heat. Since most of the heat escapes via the roof it seemed wise to see what we can do right away to make it better.  EDF (Electricité de France) gave us a company to call and they had a look.  Roof is basically fine but it needs to be cleaned up and sealed.  As for the insulation, well, we need some.  

Finally, the electrical system has to be completely redone.  It's not bad enough to actually prevent us from moving in but it's not to code and we will have problems with the insurance company if we don't get it fixed.

One wonderful things the former owners did for us was to leave us the old light fixtures:  the little chandelier in the living room and the old-fashioned hanging light fixtures in the hallway and kitchen.  They will come down during the renovation and then they are going right back up.

Right there is enough to keep us busy for the next month or so.  After that comes the more cosmetic stuff:  floors, walls and the fireplace.  And then there's also little matter of the chimney we want to bump up and, of course, the kitchen.  I'll post a few more pictures of the state of things - I like the idea of having "before" pictures - and I'll also post a few of the work as it advances.  

The whole business may have me a bit giddy but, hey, it's exactly what I need right now:  a future-oriented project.

The Economics of Citizenship

Citizenship is a very emotional topic.  It defines one's membership in a political community and one's relationship to a nation-state.  It's not surprising that people feel very strongly about it - everyone has an opinion.

I came across this paper recently while researching another topic.  It's called The Economics of Citizenship and it came out of a workshop on citizenship acquisition held in Sweden in 2004.  I found it interesting because most of what I have read about citizenship models comes from social scientists, folks like Patrick Weil and Peter Spiro, and focuses on issues of identity, law and globalization.  The essays here take a different approach - they are an effort to apply the principles of economics to explain why migrants do or not choose to become citizens.  Their analyses start with these questions:

What are the economic determinants animating an immigrant’s choice to acquire citizenship?
What are the economic consequences of choosing citizenship for the foreign-born worker?

Each essay in the paper takes these questions and then looks at the state of citizenship acquisition in a country:  Canada, Sweden, The United States, The Netherlands, Norway.  Africa, Asia and South America are noticeably absent here.  Each essay is prefaced with a short narrative by an immigrant explaining where he/she came from, why he chose a particular destination country and why he stayed and decided to become a citizen.

Since I am not an economist, I can't vouch for the models the authors used but I did find some of their conclusions interesting.  I'll let you read the paper for yourself but here are my comments on their data and conclusions:

Home Country, Host Country, and the Rest of the World:  There is the original citizenship, the second citizenship and the pull of the wider world and other citizenships.    Sometimes it make all kinds of sense for a migrant to move on to yet another country.  Just because a migrant has come to one and become a citizen, there is nothing stopping him from packing up and moving to a Third Place.   In fact it may make a lot of sense for a migrant to seek citizenship in one host country as a prelude to moving on or moving back to the home country. And many do.  It's a kind of insurance that he/she can always go back to that country no matter what happens.  

It can also be a stepping-stone to other countries.  Becoming a Canadian means access to North America.  Becoming Belgian gives access to the European Union.  Becoming Spanish can ease entry into certain Latin American countries.  These citizenships confer an important economic advantage (access to multiple job markets) that may have very little to do with the country where it is acquired and everything to do with access to other countries.

Dual Citizenship:  There is no limit really on the number of citizenships an individual can acquire provided that all the countries involved accept dual citizenship or they don't try to enforce their own laws against it.  Most countries these days do rather grudgingly allow it.  No reason, for example that someone cannot be British, French, and Canadian.  

Does the acceptance of dual citizenship by the home country have an important impact on the decision to acquire citizenship in that state?  Clearly, it does have an impact.  In the essay on Canada the model is described this way:

Both the acquisition of subsidized human capital and the prospect of receiving public goods (citizenship and a passport) now increase the probability that this immigrant will ascend to citizenship, if the expected earnings stream in country B net of costs of citizenship acquisition exceeds the option of returning home. However, if country A does not recognize dual citizenship, this will raise the cost of possible return migration and reduce the probability of ascending to citizenship in country B.

However, it doesn't seem to be a determining factor in all cases.   What might cause a migrant to decide to become a citizen of another country in spite of the fact that he/she will lose his original citizenship?

The Type of Migrant:  One answer is who that migrant is and where he or she came from.  Refugees tend to become citizens as soon as possible and when you think about it that makes a lot of sense.  Economic migrants from poorer countries also have high rates of naturalization though not as high as refugees.  

But, and I found this very interesting, the migrants from relatively rich countries (OECD versus non-OECD) with good qualifications who move to another country have much lower naturalization rates.  

If a German leaves Europe for the United States, the difference in living conditions, and the attractiveness of return, will be quite different compared to a Burmese refugee fleeing political persecution and economic misery in her homeland. All the chapters in this volume suggest that the citizenship calculations of migrants from highly developed countries differ from others.  

This has important implications for immigration and citizenship law in developed countries competing for the small pool of highly-qualified migrants.  If the intention of these states is to get those migrants to come and stay then two sets of incentives have to be designed:  the first to draw them in and the second to keep them around.  This means that "stapling a Green Card to a diploma" is only half the battle and even then a path to citizenship is no guarantee at all that they will remain.  In fact their most judicious strategy may be to stay long enough to acquire a second citizenship in order to increase their options while looking at maximizing their economic potential by moving on to another state that likes their skills and offers interesting opportunities. As for nation-states, the editors of this paper suggest that the most successful strategy for rich countries who want skilled people who stay is to target the entrepreneurs, university graduates and skilled labor from developing countries.  

The Economic Advantage:   Does citizenship confer a real direct advantage in terms of increased wages and better employment opportunities?  Again, it depends on the migrant.  Destination country, country of origin, skill level and even gender are important variables.  The essay on Canada reports:

For our general sample of employed immigrants, we detected a wage differential of 15% between citizens and non-citizens. Moreover, as shown in table 4, human capital endowments are relatively more important for males than females. In general, immigrant citizens from non-OECD countries enjoyed a greater wage advantage than non-citizens from OECD countries (28.9% vs. 9.8%)

On the other hand look at the data on employment for Swedish immigrants who become citizens:

...those immigrants who have been naturalized tended to see a modest increase in the probability of having full-time employment in 1990. Some nationalities, particularly the Scandinavians, Chileans and Germans, saw almost no difference between the naturalized and non-naturalized groups. The Czechoslovakian men saw the greatest increase in probability of almost 24 percentage points, while American men and Greek women experienced considerable negative effects of citizenship.

And for the U.S.?

...citizenship acquisition alone does not have a statistically-significant effect on the log of annual wages of developed country immigrants. however, a larger and statistically significant effect of citizenship acquisition on the log of annual wages is found in case of immigrants arriving from developing countries. 

So there is an impact on wages and employment but it ranges from a negative or nearly no effect (how interesting) to a big positive.  It looks like (and that makes sense) the biggest effect will consistently come when the migrant is from a developing country.  It also demonstrates that migrants that move from one developing country to another are probably seeking more intangible benefits - it's much less likely that they will see a direct economic advantage to migrating in the first place much less bothering to become a citizen.  This means that countries that seek to encourage migration from one developed country to another need to put the emphasis on the intangibles as they "market" their nation's advantages over the competition.  Positive things like "quality of life,"  good government services, support for families, and safety.

These are certainly reasons to go live in another country but they don't necessarily translate to a desire to seek citizenship.  They can usually be had without it.  The question I have (assuming that countries are interested in having those highly-qualified migrants from developed countries become citizens as often as other classes of migrants) is this:  what would developed countries have to offer to tip the scales in favor of citizenship acquisition for this class of migrant?  

For an example of an interesting "offer" have a look at the Working in Sweden site.  Their pitch is a combination of tangible and intangible benefits:  a high standard of living, vacation, child care, pensions, universal healthcare and security.  "Despite relatively little spending on prison systems and law enforcement, life in Sweden is very safe."