Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Miscellaney Page 2 of 13

Obvious Predictions For 2023

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On January 2, 2023

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Covid will not miraculously end. New variants will continue to be born, and they will generally be optimized for immune escape and damage. Hospitals in most countries will continue to be under high strain, because governments will keep pretending Covid is over when it is not and that it doesn’t ravage people’s immune systems. I find this chart of Canada’s Covid experience applies to most countries in spirit.

This will likely be the warmest year on record, but the coldest year of the rest of your life and if it isn’t, it’ll be in the top 5 on both lists. Same with extreme weather events. These will combine with water shortages to cause more problems with the food chain and there will be serious food price fluctuations, though how serious will depend on where you live and who gets hit hardest by climate events. Frequency and severity are increasing, but predicting exactly what where is in most cases impossible, which is part of the problem.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write next year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Nothing of significance will be done about climate change or ecological collapse, though some agreements may be signed which will have no teeth and no noticeable effects on the top line numbers.

The US will continue to pile sanctions on China in an attempt to stop it from challenging the US. Those sanctions will be damaging in the short run, but nothing the US sanctions will be something China can’t genuinely learn to make themselves because they aren’t racially or culturally inferior, and they have the largest industrial base in the world.

Cold War will continue to develop, with the BRICS at the heart of the other side, and movement towards an alternate financial system which bypasses the dollar will likewise continue. China will not allow Russia to be strangled by Western sanctions. Countries outside the developed core will continue to sway towards China, which offers cheaper loans and goods and is their primary trade partner, and also, with a few exceptions, interferes less in their internal politics.

A continued movement towards vertical integration in companies and to countries trying to be able to produce more of their own key goods. People are figuring out that as the cold war develops and neoliberalism collapses, you can’t, actually, trust the supply chain and the poorer you are, or the more the US dislikes you, the more that is true. This will play into countries choosing sides, as well. China does produce more of what most countries need than the US does now and that is going to become more, not less, true, especially when you add in Russia.

Europe will continue to lose industry to America and other low-energy cost nations. I rather doubt they’ll prioritize protecting their industrial base over being American satrapies and anti-Russia, so the EU’s decline as a great power will continue even as they militarize under US guidance and control, using US weapon systems and thus making their dependence higher.

I’d like to be wrong about this one and there’s a small chance I might be, since as the economic consequences become worse, the population may become desperate enough to realize that the cost to anti-Russianism may be a bit too high.

Join in with your dead-obvious predictions in the comments. The best way to be right about things is just to accept the blindingly obvious. Oddly, most people are really bad at that.

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Merry Christmas

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On December 25, 2022

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I hope you’re having a good one, and if you aren’t, consider my thoughts with you, for they are.

Part III Of My Interview: Twitter and Reasons For Hope

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On December 22, 2022

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Last of three parts.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

 

Interview on Climate Change, the New Cold War and the Rise of China

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On December 15, 2022

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I did an interview few weeks ago with Chris Oestereich, which he’s putting up in three parts. I listened to part three today and, while I rarely say this, I thought it was quite good and if you’re interested in any of these topics, probably worth your while. It clocks it at under 24 minutes.

 

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Listen to the podcast here.

Happy Thanksgiving

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On November 24, 2022

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To American friends. I  hope you have a good one.

Lazy V.S. Uninterested & Quiet Quitting

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On September 14, 2022

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Being lazy and being uninterested are two different things. When I was a kid I was usually reluctant to do most farm work, because it was boring, but would go for 10 miles runs or long runs, or read multiple books in a day (which many people who love farm work would hate doing.)

Most of what passes for lazy is uninterested in drag.

The old maxim: “work is what you wouldn’t do for free” is part of it, but there are four types of activities on this spectrum.

  1. “I enjoy doing it for itself and would do it even if I wasn’t getting anything from doing it.”
  2. “I enjoy it, but wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t getting anything from doing it.”
  3. “I don’t enjoy it or dislike it, but I’m willing to do it because I’m getting something from it.”
  4. “I don’t enjoy it or dislike it, and I won’t do it even if I get something from it absent coercion.”

One is your hobbies, vacations and so on. Two is work you like, which doesn’t also fall into the hobby category. Three is most people’s jobs. Four is things you do because if you don’t do it something bad will happen, usually because someone else will make it happen.

When I was a kid most (not all) farm work fell into category four, and most of the rest fell into category 3. I didn’t ever get paid for any of it, but I used to spend some holidays on an Uncle’s farm, and I liked him, and we’d do the farm work then go do something fun. I was getting something from it.

Most of my jobs have been in category 3: I did them because I needed the money. I’m not working construction or baking or being a bike courier, or painting houses or doing life-insurance back-end administration if someone doesn’t pay me.

Blogging and writing fluctuates between category 2 and 1. Some of it I’d have done (or do) even if I wasn’t getting paid , but some falls into “this pays my bills and I enjoy it, but I wouldn’t write this article if it wasn’t my job.” From about 2004-early 2009 the category 2 blogging also fell into “getting something for it” in the sense that I believed in the Netroots, and that we might get enough political power or influence to make good things happen politically. I would never have worked 70-80 hour weeks at FireDogLake just for the money (which was liveable, but only just), I did it because I believed in the mission and when it became clear just how awful Obama was and that the Netroots was falling apart, I quit, because I hadn’t been doing it mostly for the money.

I’m not entirely sure that laziness exists much. So-called “Quiet Quitting”, where workers refuse to stay late or do extra work is just enforcement of what moderns call “boundaries”, and classifying work as category 3. “I’m not doing more work than you pay me for, because I don’t enjoy it.” High wage workers understand that implicit to their high pay is doing more than is “on spec”, but doing more as a low paid worker, unless you think there’s a chance of meaningful promotions and wages is stupid.

When the people at or near the top get a 100x what the people in the middle get, and 200x what the people at the bottom get, and when most people know they’re never getting to the top and most won’t even get to the middle, and when they don’t share in profits, why should they work hard at jobs they don’t enjoy, or wouldn’t do for free?

I had a friend who, for years, had a rule that he wouldn’t do anything for money he wouldn’t do for free. It eventually broke down because if he’d kept the rule he’d have wound up homeless and then dead. His problem wasn’t super-fussiness, he wanted to do jobs that helped people and used his skills, but our society pays best for doing things that don’t help people. Since helping people is sort of an intrinsic reward (you get to feel good about yourself), we think people should do that form almost nothing, or nothing.

The weird thing is that getting people to do what they enjoy means they do more and better work, and that helping people has strong (econo speak) positive externalities. The more your society is focused on doing things that actually help others in some way, the better it is.

But our society concentrates on negative sum games (we are doing more harm than good, overall) and uses money primarily as coercion, rather than using it to allow people to do good things that they want to do, or are at least willing to do.

I don’t like farm work, but I have known many people who love it and do it for almost no money because they want to be farmers. We take advantage of that sort of impulse, in nurses and care workers and increasingly in teachers. Things that are good are done for cheap, and by less people than want to or than we need doing them, so that we can pay other people well to do things that are bad.

What you want to do absent excessive compensation or e is often a good guide for what you should be doing (not always) is often a good guide not only to what is good for you, but what is good for society and we need more of it, not less.

Many people think this means that important things that need to be done like garbage collection, janitorial labor and sewage work wouldn’t get done, but when Graeber did his research for “Bullshit Jobs” he found many people actually preferred that work because it felt useful, even when it paid less. I recently talked to a woman who works for a real-estate company which runs low-end housing. She used to make much, much more working for high end hotels, but she prefers this, because it feels like she’s helping people. “I’d rather clean someone’s shitty toilet after they’ve moved out than do any more of that bullshit.”

Incentives work, but they work best at getting people to do things which shouldn’t be done in the first place.

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Mini Electronic Vacations

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On September 1, 2022

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All right, this off-topic and not the sort of thing I usually write, but may be of use to some people.

Oddly despite being “very online” I’m sort of a luddite about certain things. I didn’t have a smart phone till 2015 (and at the time had no cell phone). A friend gave me my first one, and my second is a very nice hand-me down Pixel 4 from another friend.

As a rule I don’t take my phone with me when I go out. I get by on cards. Of course, sometimes I need my phone or a laptop, especially when traveling, but otherwise, they’re not on me.

I do this because I want periods when I’m not online, and not available to anyone. In particular, I often hang out at coffee shops and unless I have specific work I want to do, I don’t take any electronic devices with me except my e-reader. I often pack some paper books and a writing pad, and that’s it. I take notes on paper, and keep the notebooks.

I find this relaxing. It’s nice to not be online and it’s easiest if the device isn’t even with me: if it is, I may think “I should check…” and get sucked in. It’s simply a matter of making a habit unavailable. There’s rarely anything in my life so urgent it can’t wait a few hours.

Of course, I’m in my 50s. I grew up before cell phones. I remember before answering machines, even, and when pagers were rare and only truly essential, 24 hour on-call workers carried them.

I’m used to being out of touch. In a sense, I’m used to being alone. You can be very alone, even when surrounded by people in a big city, if you want to be, and I often do.

The studies are clear: social media is bad for you, and the more you do the worse it is. Being constantly connected, I’m almost certain, is likewise bad for you. You need space, you need time with your own feelings and thoughts when they’re not being jerked around. And if you want to think well, you need time to think alone as well in addition to time to think with other people.

This is, I guess, more of the sort of article written in lifestyle magazines and sections “how I spent 1 week unplugged” and whatnot, but I really do believe it’s healthy and if you can do it, you’ll find, once you get over the twitchy need to constantly check your phone or watch videos, or whatever you do, that it’s relaxing. It’s also a necessity for any sort of deep thinking.

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Weberian Meaningful Action & Why It Matters

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On August 22, 2022

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Weber was concerned with ideal types. An ideal type is an extreme: a person who is entirely rational, a society that is entirely traditional. Ideal types don’t exist in the world, but they are useful for analysis. A society may be primarily traditional, and one can look at where it is traditional and where it isn’t. (For example, a lot of Dark Ages society was traditional, but there was also a lot of value rational action.

The four types are goal rational, value rational, affection/emotional, and traditional.

Goal rational is “I want to accomplish X, so I do Y. You want to lose weight, so you diet. But this is a good example of how goal rational can be mixed up: how you achieve the goal is dieting, but whey you want to be thin could be because you think fat people are bad, or you want to look better, or because people in your organization are usually thin (ascetics, for example.)

Value rational is similar to virtue ethics. You tell the truth, even if it’s bad for your other goals, perhaps. You give money, because charity is a value you follow. You stand and fight because you believe in bravery or discipline, even though the fight is helpless. Classical Greek ethics is heavily value rational, and so was a lot of Victorian ethics and society. When someone says we should give everyone health care or no one should be in poverty, because everyone human deserves dignity, that’s value rationality. When you say that everyone deserves health care because it costs society less and because it makes the spread of plagues and disease less likely, that’s goal rational.

Affective/emotional is when you act based on your emotions. You’re sad and you cry, you’re angry and you hit someone or scream at them. You might hit someone even though you believe in non-violence, and you might cry even though you believe “real men don’t cry.” You might hit someone even though that will get you in prison, and that would interfere with your various goals in life. Your emotions are in charge.

Traditional is when you do it that way because that’s how your group or society does it. Dark Ages and Medieval society was very traditional: your forbears had certain rights, it’s traditional, and thus you get them too. Correct action is the action which has always been taken. Religions are often torn between value rationality and traditions, but so are nations. Whenever someone says, “this is how we’ve always done it” you’re dealing with traditional action. Traditional action has a bad reputation post-enlightenment, but it’s not all bad: unwritten constitutions are traditional constitutions, “we do it this way because we’ve always done it this way.”

Traditional isn’t necessarily irrational: if something has been done for a long time, it may be because it has worked, and making changes could have unforseen effects. If you keep doing what you’ve always done, things will keep going as they have. Of course, it doesn’t always work: burning fossil fuels because we’ve been doing so for 250 years is a good way to create radical change: not what someone who genuinely values tradition usually wants.

All types of action have value. Goal oriented is often the best way to actuate the other three, but it’s amoral. The Nazi bureaucrats making the trains and furnaces run on time mostly did so not out of any real belief in the holocaust, but because their primary value was to do what they were told to do in the most efficient and effective way. Confucius emphasized that if you do a traditional ritual without feeling the appropriate emotion (sorrow at the death of your parents, for example) you have failed the ritual, since the purpose of rituals is to create emotions in specific circumstances: and those circumstances and emotions are based on values, such as reverence for your parents.

So when you try to analyze actions using Weber’s classifications, what you’re looking for is how the types of action fit together. If traditional actions aren’t maintaining the society or group, traditional action is undercutting itself, for example. Is a goal based action leading to a goal supported by one of the other three types of action? Are your value based actions undercutting the larger goals, and if they are do the values or the goals need to change?

But also, if you know why someone is doing something, you can talk to them effectively. Saying the only way to save our society is to burn less fossil fuels works with a traditional actor. Saying that burning fossil fuels hurts more people than it helps may work with someone value oriented who thinks compassion, kindness and charity are important. And to activate people who are primarily emotional, pictures and stories of animals and humans being hurt might work best.

Without an understanding of the type of action, the type of rationality, you can’t understand others’ actions or influence them effectively, especially if they are acting from a type of rationality you don’t respect and you can’t predict their actions.

People are different; societies and groups are different, and understanding the the ways in which they are different opens up the world for you.

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