Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Month: September 2022
Queen Elizabeth II in 1959
I was born in 68, and I remember the middle-aged Elizabeth and the era before the Commonwealth became meaningless. There was a post-war world where people traveled freely & often between the ex-Empire nations, and where economic ties between those nations and Britain were still primary. It came to an end when Britain went into a financial crisis so serious it required IMF intervention and then joined the EU to get a real bailout. Once Britain was in the EU, its focus became European, not ex-Imperial.
It was, in a way, a betrayal of the ex-colonies, but Britain didn’t have much choice. I’ve always found it ironic that British elites are such loyal dogs for the Americans, because the US did everything it could to hasten the fall of the Empire and then to put the boots to Britain. The US understood it was taking over the old Empire in a new form (less direct killing, but the boot was still there), and wanted to make sure Britain not only didn’t get back on its feet, but went from on its knees to on its belly.
It succeeded in this. Leading Brits in the late 40s and 50s knew this was what was happening, but could see no way out, given how relatively powerful the US was (and how Europe and Britain were garrisoned by US troops).
I can’t, offhand, think of a “good” Empire; they’re always bad, though in some places, some relative good can be done. (Hong Kong started out with a population under 1,000, and Chinese fled there. Though the Brits were bastards, they were better than the late Manchu, however.)
From Ireland to India and most parts in between, the British Empire did plenty of evil, as one would expect from the largest Empire to ever exist. (The Mongols come in second, though they had the largest land empire. The US? It’s a bit hard to count. Might be that post-USSR collapse they could be seen as eclipsing the UK.)
Elizabeth ceremonially presided over the dismantling of the British Empire. She worked hard to try and keep the Commonwealth together, but post-70s, even that disintegrated step by step. She died, I would say, mercifully, before the United Kingdom itself (the union of England and Scotland) broke up, and before Northern Ireland was lost. For a person in her position, she seems to have done less harm than one would expect.
The sun set on the British Empire decades ago. Soon, it will set on the UK. Europe is no longer the center of the world, but a collection of satrapies conquered by its old colony, the US.
In the normal order of things, the next Empire would rise in China — but we no longer exist in the “normal order,” but rather the end of a climate which has existed for thousands of years.
Elizabeth is lucky to miss the end of that order as well.
Note: Yesterday’s article was incorrect. A month after publication, the scientists clarified that the Antarctic sea-shelf collapse would not raise the sea level quickly, and that sea level rise (from this collapse) could take a century. I apologize for the error, and thank commenter David for catching it. The article is still up, with the error noted, but will be deleted after a bit. This note will stay.
Recently read a smart lad who noted a few simple things:
- Biden’s been releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).
- The SPR has basically two types of oil: sour and sweet.
- Biden has been releasing almost all sour since that’s what most US refineries need.
- At the current rate of release, the SPR runs out of sour crude to release around March.
OilX, a consultant, estimates that by the end of October, the SPR will hold only 179 million barrels of medium-sour crude. To put that into perspective, during the period June 2021 to October 2022, the US is likely to sell about 180-190 million barrels of medium-sour crude from the reserve. Clearly, Washington is running out of firepower to repeat that exercise.
Of course, when Biden stops releasing oil, either because he’s out or because he chooses to stop after the election or the holidays are over, then prices are going to spike if sanctions are still in place against Russia and/or Russia is unwilling to sell to the West. As a bonus, the government will need to buy oil itself to stock the reserve back up.
This means you have to ask yourself whether or not the Ukraine war will still be going on thru the winter. It’s hard to say, but unless the US tells the Ukrainians to give Russia enough of what it wants to get peace, the answer appears to be yes, especially as winter is the best time to wage war in Ukraine, as it is when the ground is most solid and many rivers are likely to iced over. Putin needs a decisive, obvious win and if he can’t get it diplomatically, he has to get it on the ground.
Putin’s happy with slowly grinding forward militarily in part because he’s also aware of what sanctions are doing to the West. The most rabid anti-Russia country outside of Eastern Europe has been Britain, and energy price increases which are often 500% or more are taking Britain apart. More of this later, and I want to see what new PM Truss’s plan is, but if Britain doesn’t get its act together soon, this could be the year its descent into 2nd world status becomes unstoppable.
Russia can get most of what it needs from sources other than Western nations, but energy and inflation issues are kneecapping much of the West. Why not drag things out and see how much damage is done?
Remember that the entire previous post-war order was essentially destroyed by stagflation caused by oil price shocks back in the 70s (that gave us neoliberalism.) This order can be destroyed the same way.
What this means for Americans is that there’s a very good chance of a big inflation spike after the election. It might hold off for as long as spring, it might start a few weeks after the election. It won’t just hit gas prices, oil is important for much more than driving cars, so it’ll rip thru the entire economy. Stock up on what you need before the election if you can.
And let this be a lesson that GDP means very little when the chips are down. Who cares if you have Hollywood and lots of fast food stores and Google and FaceBook? What matters is what you grow, dig up, refine and make.
Russia has enough energy and food and can buy the manufactured goods it needs from India and China.
The West, with a few exceptions, does not have enough energy and the primary manufacturing power is China. In certain ways we’re in a weaker position than we were during the last oil shocks.
So, Chile wound up rejecting a new left wing constitution, and by a significant margin: about 2:1. This is interesting, because Chileans also wanted the old constitution replaced at about the same ratio.
Apparently a big issue was that indigenous people were given rights and status and that struck many as wrong.
It’s easy to see this as simple racism and colonialism, and no doubt that motivated many, but there’s something important here that should be teased apart because it’s important far beyond Chile.
Egalitarianism is defined by Oxford as:
relating to or believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.
This leads to the first principle of egalitarianism:
No one should be treated differently in ways that matter based on who their parents are.
Notice that I’ve changed this around a bit. Slavery, while not always based on birth, is a violation of egalitarianism in essentially the same way that aristocracy is: someone being treated differently in an important way based on something they had no control over: who their parents are.
This leads to the second principle of egalitarianism:
No one should be treated better or worse than anyone else unless they’ve earned that treatment in a legitimate fashion.
So, the ideal is that no one should lose rights unless they’ve committed a crime. No one should be treated better unless they’ve earned that better treatment.
In democracy, you earn power by being chosen by your fellows for it. In capitalism you earn power and thus better treatment by having money, since it’s assumed that if you have money you or someone else did something people were willing to pay for, and if they were willing to pay it provided them utility. Utility is assumed to identical to “good”, so you’ve done lots of good and deserve better treatment. (This is obvious bullshit, but it’s how the system is justified.)
Let’s bring this back to Chile: indigenous people’s have been badly treated and deserve restitution, but to give them permanent rights that others in Chile don’t have based on their ancestry means that some people have rights that they didn’t earn legitimately from an egalitarian point of view.
Now, egalitarianism isn’t the only value, and more societies post-agriculture (and possible pre-agriculture) have been based on in-egalitarianism than on egalitarianism. Some of them have run relatively well. But there’s no question that creating status-anything based on birth is not egalitarian.
For this to work it would have to be a legitimate way for people without the ancestry to gain the status, and a legitimate way for people wit the status to lose it.
If it was based on ancestry combined with “you’ve been treated badly”, then the harm would have to be quantified, and the status lost when the harm has been rectified. “The harm has been made substantially whole.” People could join the status by proving similar harm had been done to their ancestors and/or them and was still effecting them.
If, on the other hand, the status is justified by “indigenous people are better stewards of the land” then a duty would have to be set up to take better care of the land, and those who did not do so would lose the status, while those who are willing to do so (and to learn indigenous methods) would be allowed to gain the status.
#vanre @DouglasTodd “The Tsawwassen Nation business arm ‘completely paved over’ Delta farmland & migratory bird habitat…to build a mall, Amazon warehouse and market housing…surprised environmentalists and ‘the progressive left’ never complained.” https://t.co/N9XQNDwXw1
— Hutchyman (@Hutchyman) September 6, 2022
There are more rules to egalitarianism than the two mentioned, but these two, though not one person in a million could state them clearly, are, I suspect at the heart of some legitimate opposition to “rights” for various groups. They are also why the rich always like to claim they earned their money legitimately and why the 2008 bailouts damaged capitalist legitimacy so badly (because going bankrupt is how the rich are supposed to lose their special treatment in capitalism.)
Most of history has been about different status groups, with different legal rights, whether those rights were positive (nobles, charter city townsmen) or negative (serfs and slaves, women in many places and times.) The revolution against older forms was about getting rid of explicit status groups, and there is often resistance to creating new ones.
But ultimately it’s about legitimacy, and legitimacy of status rests on “you got it thru approved means and there are ways for you to lose it.”
Deal with those two issues in a way which seems fair and opposition to indigenous status is likely to diminish significantly. Base it on ancestry, and not current and future behavior or welfare, and many will object.
Members of the G7 have agreed to impose a price cap on Russian oil in a bid to hit Moscow’s ability to finance the war in Ukraine.
Finance ministers said the cap on crude oil and petroleum products would also help reduce global energy prices. The cap will be set at a level based on a range of technical inputs.
“We will continue to stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes,” the G7 said.
Russia said it would stop selling oil to countries that imposed price caps.
Well, so the price cap is effectively a “we won’t buy it because you won’t sell it” policy.
There’s long been a delusion that commodities like oil are global. They operated almost as if they were for a while, but oil is produces in certain places, refined in certain places and shipped in specific pipelines, ships, trucks and trains. It has different qualities and not all refineries can handle all types of crude.
To the extent, however, that oil or natural gas or coal or whatever is subject to boycotts, it becomes less of a global market and that won’t generally decrease prices, rather the reverse, at least in the early phases of a breakdown of a global market. (In the late phase prices will diverge significantly in different countries, with extensive measures or realities in place to prevent arbitrage.)
So (2)…
UK Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi said the G7 were “united against this barbaric aggression”, adding the price cap would “curtail Putin’s capacity to fund his war”.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said a cap would also help fight inflation, which is on the rise in many of the world’s economies.
The price cap helps achieve “our dual goals of putting downward pressure on global energy prices while denying Putin revenue to fund his brutal war in Ukraine”, she said.
Sanctions have not reduced Russia’s income, they have increased it. This won’t be an exception because most of the world isn’t onside with sanctions, including India, China, virtually all of Africa and most of South America, but by fragmenting the market it will increase prices, especially in specific areas like Europe which need to get their hydrocarbons (remember, this is not a virtual good, it has to be extracted, refined and shipped), through specific infrastructure links.
The “price cap” is thus largely a symbolic measure, which will if anything increase prices somewhat. That’s not to say it’s useless, if the plan is a new long Cold War with Russia (and almost certainly China), getting off supplies from those two countries needs to be done and done in stages.
But it sure isn’t going to decrease prices or empty Putin’s treasury. In fact, in the short to middle term it’s likely to hurt Europe, again, far more than Russia.
by Tony Wikrent
Strategic Political Economy
US Life Expectancy Continues To Plunge Below China’s
[ZeroHedge, 9-1-2022]
Life expectancy in the US has fallen for the second consecutive year as Covid-19 and overdoses increased mortality rates. An empire’s death may start with its people, and as the world shifts, China, an emerging power, has a life expectancy that is above the US and widening.
According to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans’ life expectancy fell .9 years to 76.1 years in 2021 – the lowest since 1996.
The year prior, life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years. The combined figures were the largest two-year decline since the 1920s.
EU can’t let Putin set energy costs – Austria
[azerbaycan24.com, via Mike Norman Economics 8-28-2022]
“Electricity prices across Europe are tied to the price of gas, which now costs around ten times what it did last year. However, while some EU countries are heavily dependent on Russian gas for heating and industry, they use alternate fuels to generate electricity. Austria, for example, generates more than three quarters of its electricity from renewables, per 2020 figures from the International Energy Agency. [Austrian Chancellor Karl] Nehammer argued that decoupling electricity and gas prices would result in a fairer bill for consumers that more accurately reflects electricity production costs.”
Zachary D. Carter [In The Long Run, via Naked Capitalism 9-1-2022]
In the United States, a college degree is about much more than securing a higher wage. People without college degrees aren’t just excluded from a lot of jobs that pay well. They’re more likely to be laid off and less likely to be hired during recessions. They’re less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to have a disability (the causal arrow there probably points both ways, but the combination is particularly cruel). People who do not graduate from college even have shorter life expectancies than people who do. Higher education is perhaps the single most important factor in determining who has access to a financially secure lifestyle and the leisure to pursue intellectually interesting activities. A college degree confers respect and prestige.
In a better world, the simple fact of being human would command equal respect for everyone. That is not our world, but we can imagine such a place and work toward realizing it. Prestige, by contrast, is inherently exclusive….
After World War II, millions of new college students arrived on campuses around the country to receive an education funded by the G.I. Bill. Suddenly, an experience that had once been restricted almost exclusively to the very rich became open to infantrymen. And though the vast majority of colleges and universities continued to exclude Black students, millions of white people who had never dreamed of going to college eventually earned degrees. For many prior graduates, this step toward democratization was threatening. Their credential was being diluted….
Student debt allows a certain kind of prestige-hoarder to pay lip service to the ideal of universal education, while also looking down on some graduates as, well, not quite the real thing. “Technically, you have a degree, but we all know you don’t truly belong up here, dear.” Erase that debt, and this distinction disappears. College graduates are all just college graduates again. A little bit more equality has entered the picture, and a little bit of prestige has departed.
I suspect this is what most people really mean when they say student debt relief is “unfair.”
[TW: As I excerpted last week from Forrest A. Nabors’ book, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, quoting West Virginia Senator during the Civil War, Waltman Willey, explaining why the South had no system of free public education: “Sir, the true reason of this hostility to popular education is hostility to democratic institutions.” ]
[YouTube,
Historian Nicole Hemmer’s latest book “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s” focuses on the conservatives who remade U.S. politics in the 1990s. Hemmer speaks with Walter Isaacson about how that decade’s politics paved the way for Donald Trump’s presidency.
From the transcript:
You grow up believing … the thing that everyone believes… Democracy as a form of government. What you begin to see over the course of the 1990s is a real questioning of that… Not just of whether democracy is the best form of government, but whether everyone in the U.S is actually fit for democracy…. In the 1960s, when the United States really opened up in terms of voting rights, in terms of immigration, and by the 1990s you have books like The Bell Curve, that argue for genetic differences in intelligence based on race; books like Alien Nation that say that only white people should be allowed to immigrate to the United States because only they are fit for democracy…
Why Obama-Era Economists Are So Mad About Student Debt Relief
Lindsay Owens, David Dayen, August 31, 2022 [The American Prospect]
Moments after the announcement, former Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jason Furman took to Twitter with a dozen tweets skewering the proposal as “reckless,” “pouring … gasoline on the inflationary fire,” and an example of executive branch overreach (“Even if technically legal I don’t like this amount of unilateral Presidential power.”). Brookings economist Melissa Kearny called the proposal “astonishingly bad policy” and puzzled over whether economists inside the administration were “all hanging their heads in defeat.” Ben Ritz, the head of a centrist think tank, went so far as to call for the staff who worked on the proposal to be fired after the midterms.
Histrionics are nothing new on Twitter, but it’s worth examining why this proposal has evoked such strong reactions. Elizabeth Popp Berman has argued in the Prospect that student loan forgiveness is a threat to the economic style of reasoning that dominates Washington policy circles. That’s correct. But President Biden’s elegant and forceful approach to tackling the student loan crisis also may feel like a personal rebuke to those who once worked alongside President Obama as he utterly failed to solve the debt crisis he inherited.
Let’s be very clear: The Obama administration’s bungled policy to help underwater borrowers and to stem the tide of devastating foreclosures, carried out by many of the same people carping about Biden’s student loan cancellation, led directly to nearly ten million families losing their homes. This failure of debt relief was immoral and catastrophic, both for the lives of those involved and for the principle of taking bold government action to protect the public. It set the Democratic Party back years. And those throwing a fit about Biden’s debt relief plan now are doing so because it exposes the disaster they precipitated on the American people.
Global power shift
The China-ASEAN rail map takes shape
[Asia Media Centre, via Naked Capitalism 9-2-2022]
China’s plan to build a pan-regional railway is gaining speed. This unfolding story combines infrastructure investment, trade logistics and strategic diplomacy with travel, tourism and potential challenges for shipping and aviation….
Since it inaugurated the first line in 2007, China has built the world’s largest high-speed rail network, totalling 40,000km at the end of 2021. It provides fast, punctual train transport nationwide, and China plans to expand the network to 75,000km by 2035.
Now, with China and South East Asia seeking new growth drivers after the economic dislocations of the pandemic, China wants to accelerate the connection of its high-speed rail system with a series of railways that will open trade routes through South East Asia.
In contrast: After a decade of hype, Dallas-Houston bullet train developer faces a leadership exodus as land acquisition slows.
[Texas Tribune, via Naked Capitalism 9-2-2022]
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
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.