Soccer as a Metaphor for Racism in Europe

My older son, John, is Professor of Organizational Behavior at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, and has been attentively following the European Soccer Championship. A couple of days ago, as the Germany-Italy game was about to start in Warsaw, he tweeted that "the teams walked out on the field carrying big flags saying 'Respect Diversity' (in English) and representatives from each team read a statement about why we should respect diversity." As I have noted here several times before, Europe has had an uncomfortable time integrating its increasingly large immigrant population and racism is a big issue in the region. Soccer games have, unfortunately, been scenes of racism and xenophobia and so it was encouraging to see this plea for restraint on the part of the players.


In case you missed the score, Italy beat favored Germany 2-0, and both goals for Italy were scored by Mario Balotelli. He sounds pretty Italian, right? The New York Times brings us the story:

Born in Palermo from Ghanaian parents but raised by an Italian family in Brescia who legally adopted him when he was 18, Balotelli has become an icon of a country still struggling with notions of citizenship and legal rights.

Even as fans and commentators have cited Balotelli as a symbol of Italy’s new multiethnic society, there are some Italians who still believe that nationality is a question of color.

 Yet while he was still playing in Italy, Mr. Balotelli, like other black athletes who play here, was subject to racist episodes. When newspapers reported that he had revealed in June after a visit to Auschwitz that one of his adoptive parents was of Jewish heritage, an Italian extreme right group posted unprintable slurs on its Web site.

“This past year there were 59 racial incidents during the Italian soccer championship, almost all of them linked to color,” said Mauro Valeri, a sociologist and expert in racism in sport. Fines of more than €400,000 were issued, he said. “Even though measures have been implemented to halt the violence, the fact racism persists should make you think.”

Equally telling of Italy’s unresolved issues with immigration has been the resistance among lawmakers to change citizenship legislation, which currently confers birthright citizenship to the children of Italian citizens and not to children born in Italy of foreign parents.

Since Europeans had historically seen much more emigration than immigration until just a few short decades ago, dealing with "strangers" in their midst has proven to be a very hard adjustment, but we can hope that soccer may move things forward. Italy plays Spain tomorrow in Kiev for the championship. Stay tuned--update: Spain won 4-0 and Balotelli thus did not score.

Contraception is Not Controversial

As I have noted before, on 11 July 2012, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is helping to organize a Family Planning Summit in London. This is really important, in my opinion. Melinda Gates is an obviously very influential person in the world, and as a Catholic, her views on contraception are bound to sway opinions. She clearly understands this and has made available on the internet a lecture that she gave in April in Berlin at the TEDxChange. Here is her setup for the talk:

My argument is simple:
1. Birth control is an uncontroversial idea (practiced by a billion people) that has unfortunately become controversial.

2. As a result, hundreds of millions of the poorest families in developing countries don’t have access to contraceptives that can change their lives—and their children’s lives.

3. If we all start talking about how transformative birth control can be—and how important it has been in our own lives—we can help poor women and men empower themselves and spur large-scale economic development.

I loved getting ready for the talk over the past several months, reading up on the literature and talking to experts from several continents. It was a thrill to deliver it, finally, after so much preparation.

Keep in mind that the talk is 25 minutes in length, so if you are using this in class, you will essentially have Melinda Gates as a guest lecturer!

Show Me the Generation Me

As a colleague of mine here at SDSU regularly reminds us, Generation Me is usually thought of as referring to people born in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and among their key characteristics is a concern for themselves, perhaps at the expense of others. David Frum, however, a columnist and novelist, has implicitly called the elderly to task for this same set of attitudes. In essence, he is blaming the older American population for the problems that younger people are having finding a job and getting ahead in life.

In 2011 Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan proposed a plan to balance the U.S. federal budget over the next two decades. House Republicans adopted a version of the plan as their budget, and it has since been (nervously) endorsed by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

The essence of the plan? A gigantic off-loading of budget pain from old to young. Medicare and Social Security will be protected exactly as they are for Americans now over age 55. Younger Americans, on the other hand, will find Medicare progressively less generous, with the heaviest burden of adjustment falling on the youngest of all.

In the past, such pay-it-forward economics could be justified on the premise that—thanks to economic growth—the next generation would be richer than its predecessors. But that assumption has been breaking down as the benefits of economic growth have been claimed by fewer and fewer Americans. Virtually all of the productivity gains since 1979 have flowed to the top 1 percent of income earners. As a result, today’s 20-somethings face a future in which most of them may well fail to attain the living standards of their parents.

Is it fair to blame the older population for the economic straits of the young? Not really. What is conspicuously missing from Frum's discussion is the role played by population growth in the rest of the world. Young people in America and Europe no longer have access to well-paying manufacturing jobs because those jobs are in less developed countries (China's economy is big because of this, but the average worker in China is vastly less well off than workers in America or Europe). At the same time, we have to remember that if everything we consumed was manufactured in the rich countries by well-paid workers, we could afford a lot less stuff. In essence, our standard of living would be considerably lower. So, the aging of the populations in rich countries is a problem, to be sure, but let's not blame that on the older population itself.

US Supreme Court Rules on the Arizona Immigration Law

Yesterday the Supreme Court handed down its ruling on the Arizona Immigration Law. If you saw nothing more than the headline in the New York Times, you might agree with the Arizona Governor Jan Brewer that this was a victory for Arizona.

The court unanimously sustained the law’s centerpiece, the one critics have called its “show me your papers” provision, though they left the door open to further challenges. The provision requires state law enforcement officials to determine the immigration status of anyone they stop or arrest if they have reason to suspect that the individual might be in the country illegally.

However, on issues like this I defer to my son, Greg, who had a slightly different take on the ruling in his blog today:

So expect more lawsuits. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer calls that victory, but I doubt she really believes that. Despite all the rumors that the court seemed sympathetic to Arizona, this decision says that Arizona overstepped its constitutional bounds by a lot. Every state that copied SB 1070 will have to go back to the drawing board.
For North Carolina, where I live, I would guess this means the legislature will not move forward because the legislative leadership was waiting for a SCOTUS ruling before doing anything.

There are many other lawsuits against this Arizona law, and against similar laws in other states, that are still in the legal pipeline, so yesterday's ruling is not even close to being the last word.

Population "Fun" at Nigeria's Expense

If you read The Onion even occasionally, as I do, you know that the insight and wit is wicked--on a par  with John Stewart's "The Daily Show" or the "Colbert Report." Rarely, however, does population growth emerge as a topic to be played with. Earlier this month, however, The Onion did just that, taking on Lagos, Nigeria in a piece called "Thousands Feared Born in Nigerian Population Explosion." You have to read the whole thing to appreciate it, but here's a taste:

Nigeria's population, already the highest in Africa, is believed to have increased by eight percent in the wake of the explosion. With hundreds still clinging to life, that number is only expected to rise.

UN officials remain unsure what caused the population explosion, but point out that border disputes with neighboring Chad and Niger have temporarily cooled heroin and cocaine trafficking, and mass slaughter at the hands of a traditionally military government has fallen to its lowest levels in 18 years.

The tragedy, of course, is there is nothing funny at all in this. It is, rather, a witty way to bring these issues back to our attention.