It’s always interesting to read a smart person’s intelligent yet devastating take-down of an argument, partly because it’s so difficult to do. The intellectual scene is littered with personal attacks, sweeping generalizations, or humorless nitpicking that leave even agreeable readers feeling sympathetic for the person on the other end.

If you want an example of a professional, thoughtful, detailed, and nonetheless devastating critique of a thesis, read Jon Chait’s review of Naomi Klein’s bestselling book The Shock Doctrine in the New Republic. It does what a lengthier book review is supposed to do which is contextualize the book before reviewing it. Read the whole thing. For those who don’t know, the Shock Doctrine’s thrust is that free marketers hunt for crisis and disaster so that, while chaos reigns, they can impose free market doctrines on an unsuspecting populace.

It used to be the “conversation” about an issue would stop here, or perhaps make its way onto the word count-constrained “Letters to the Editor” pages. In the era of blogs, however, subjects of criticisms can offer their own reply to higher profile critiques. Naomi Klein is no different. Here’s her response to Chait. Oh man.

Her response comes off to me as amateurish, partly because, in a usual sign of insecurity, she concedes almost nothing and instead styles herself (and her heroic research assistant) as underdog truth bearers saying the things we don’t want to hear but must. Amusingly, despite the fact that one of Chait’s complaints is she too quickly treats disparate ideas as a single entity, Klein decides to lump Chait’s essay in with another critique that came from Cato and address them together.

She opens her response by insisting that Milton Friedman did, in fact, support the Iraq war, by citing an interview conducted in German by the magazine Focus. Klein translates the German back to English to reach her conclusion about Friedman — a libertarian who does not support nation building and called the Iraq war an act of aggression. He’s also not fluent in German. Klein doesn’t find her charge remarkable. Had she a better understanding of the different strands of conservatism and the one to which Friedman belongs, she would know that her claim needs more evidence than a translated sentence which, even then, is rather ambiguous as to what Friedman is trying to say. The incoherence of her summary of conservative think tanks both in the book and her reply proves Chait’s point that she does not care to be bothered by nuance (such as libertarianism), preferring instead the simple explanation that the Chicago School (or that lovely evil catch-all “neo-cons”) ruins whatever it touches.

She stammers her way forward. Later, in a revealing sentence, she says only one significant error in the book has been discovered relating to Cheney’s profit potential in Halliburtun. To me, this is like conceding you misspelled a word and misses the point that it’s not only the facts she assembles but the way she assembles them that cause complaint. In one last flourish, she says, “We invite you to explore these documents, send us ones we missed, and come to your own conclusions.” Truly, is there a more cliched line among essayists straining to appear dispassionately even-keeled?

My take on Klein is that she is as surprised as anyone at her meteoric rise in influence. Without advance notice she’s been thrust into a spotlight that precludes backpedaling, retroactive clarifying, or “grey.” It’s a shame. As Chait says, there is merit and data to support some of her ideas. Unfortunately, the substance and complexity of these ideas seem to have been lost in the towering figure of the Naomi Klein logo and brand, and her new role as the unwavering flag bearer of the anti-globalization moment.

This op/ed in the LA Times a few days ago is an excellent follow-up to my post last week on identity.

Two sentence summation of the op/ed: America loves to talk about its melting pot ideal, but the reality is that in most places identity — particularly ethnic identity — is not something whipped out and celebrated on multicultural day at school. It’s something to die for. Key excerpts:

As a nation and as individuals, we tend to view the world through the prism of our own experiences. Over the last few weeks, Russians, Georgians, Abkhazians and South Ossetians have reminded us that ethnic nationalism and secessionism are on the rise around the globe. I worry that the American experience leaves the United States and its citizens unprepared to confront it….

And just because one may not want to “believe” in identities — ethnic groups and ethno-religious groups — that doesn’t mean that they somehow disappear from the world.

We pride ourselves on a successful history of incorporating immigrants and assume that other nations should or can do the same. Sure, we have our militias, white Christian identity movements, campus-based race warriors, ethnic and racial street gangs, but these groups generally exist on the margins and don’t play a significant role in national politics in the way that the “Basque question” does in Spain or the Kurdish, Tamil, Igbo, Palestinian, Kosovar or South Ossetian questions do elsewhere.

Our elites are so steeped in the melting-pot idea that they don’t even recognize that they see the world through the bias of the majority….Americans who feel they’ve transcended group membership have a hard time understanding the power of blood, culture and belonging….

For too long, the march of modernity around the globe, and our own sense of great power hubris, led us to believe that the world would only become more like us over time. But the events of the last decade should convince us that this is clearly not the case. If for no other reason than to understand emerging threats, Americans will have to stop pretending that for most people around the globe, identity is something not just to celebrate — once a year, at a street fair or during fill-in-the-blank history month — but to die for.

I’ve been in Costa Rica the past two weeks, so language (Spanish and English) is on my mind. Wired has an interesting, short piece on how Chinese is affecting the English spoken around the world. Here’s Slate’s helpful one paragraph summary:

The "likely consequence" of growing numbers of Chinese learning English without "enough quality spoken practice" means that "more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese." Already, nonnative speakers far outnumber native speakers, and in the next decade, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of those who use the language. English is "on a path toward a global tongue—what’s coming to be known as Panglish." And, "[s]oon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they’ll have to learn may be their own."

This seems to be the fundamental question about the future of Japan’s competitiveness. Japan, the world’s second largest economy, remains the largest exception to the argument that many have made (such as yours truly, in this mini-essay) which is that entrepreneurship is a critical component to a country’s economic growth. Japan lacks an entrepreneurial culture; is dominated by big firms; has little tolerance for risk-taking and failure; etc etc. Can it survive this way? Probably not.

The FT today re-surfaces this issue, emphases my own:

The Japanese government has accordingly announced a Y100bn venture fund to invest in fledgling technology businesses. The idea is to encourage more private and institutional investors to pump their money into start-ups too.

However, there are formidable barriers to injecting some of the pep of Silicon Valley into the commercialisation of new technology in Japan. The biggest is that Japan does not have an Anglo Saxon-style enterprise culture. Would-be entrepreneurs have few role models apart from Masayoshi Son, founder of communications group Softbank. Aspiring to become very wealthy is regarded as faintly unJapanese.

Equally, "business failure is seen as shameful in Japan, though that perception is beginning to erode", says Seiichi Yoshikawa of Nippon Keidanren, Japan’s powerful business lobby. When new technology ventures fail, it tends to be as units of large corporations, rather than as standalone companies. This cushions the impact. The downside of the system is that it can suppress maverick talent.

At Japan’s ministry of economy, trade and industry, Yuji Tokumasu, who works on science and technology policy, is fretting over a parallel problem. According to a chart he brandishes, even as Japan’s spending on research and development has soared in the past 20 years, value added in the manufacturing sector has stagnated.

Japan already spends more than 3 per cent of its gross domestic product on R&D – more than any other country. One way of reading the chart is to surmise that diminishing returns have set in, that every extra yen spent on R&D goes to employ less talented researchers, who study less promising approaches to the same problems. Japanese universities’ poor record on turning research funding into results published by top scientific journals suggests that government money can be more efficiently spent. It could be that rather than spending too little on R&D, Japan spends too much.

However, Mr Tokumasu and others in the technology establishment take heart from R&D expenditure data. If only Japan could convert all of this spending into scientific breakthroughs, new businesses and saleable products, they argue, it would prove a powerful source of economic growth.