Ian Welsh

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

Author: Ian Welsh Page 1 of 424

The Four Steps Guide To Learning

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On December 4, 2025

In How to think

Sometimes it seems like half my life was spent learning something new. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve thought about how to learn, and I’m going to distill part of the process down for you. These methods are primarily about intellectual matters: mastering a subject, but are easily adapted to practical and creative skills.

The four steps are:

1) Study/Read.

2) Think about.

3) Discuss (something is to be learned from your superiors/equals and inferiors.) 4

4) Do (write in intellectual disciplines). You must try out what you learn to own it.

The first step is reading or going to lectures or watching someone else do the task you want to learn. In intellectual matters I suggest finding the shortest book on the subject to start. If it’s well written it will give you a map of the subject. That map may be wrong or oversimplified, but it is a start.

Once you’ve got that map, spend some time thinking about it. This means two things: get it to the point where you can run thru the entire map or model in your head, or speaking out loud. Then spend time examining the map: are there places where it seems incomplete or potentially wrong?

In the discussion stage find someone to discuss what you’ve learned with. They need to be interested and engaged, but the level of knowledge is less important. If they’re ignorant, you wind up teaching them, and that shows what you don’t know. If they know about as much as you, you can easily bounce off each other. And if they know much more than you, they can point out issues and suggest further reading and interesting questions you should ask.

If you have no one available to talk to, have an imaginary conversation. Daydream it. You can use someone you know (I often imagine past teachers) or you can imagine someone well known you’ve never met. What would Socrates or Plato or Kant say about this philosophical issue? What would Napoleon or Sun Tzu say about these military issues? What would the Buddha or Jesus say about this religious issue? What would Adam Smith, Marx or Keynes say about an economic issue? What would FDR, Thatcher, Stalin, Pericles or Deng do about this political/economic issue?

The discussion stage can be viewed as an extension of the thinking stage, except you’re getting someone else’s thinking: a different viewpoint than your own. You can talk to multiple people, or seek multiple imaginary perspectives from historical figures whose thinking you understand well. “What would X say about this?”

In the doing stage either teach what you’ve learned, or write something about it. Explainers are fine, so are argumentative pieces. Once you’ve finished, get feedback from your student and think about what you had trouble teaching or put what you wrote aside, then read it a couple days later, ideally out loud. Ask yourself what you don’t understand yet, what doesn’t make sense, or what seems wrong.

Then read the next book or attend the next lecture or watch a practitioner performing. This recursion should be based on what you didn’t understand or problems you found or just what you’re curious to learn more about.

And then… think, and discuss, and do.

All thru this remember, you will only truly master what you love. This should be an enjoyable loop, even the frustration should encourage you as long as it comes with “I don’t get it, and I want to  and I look forward to figuring it out.”

If you want to do particularly well, learn to express what you’ve learned fairly and strongly, BUT look for where it doesn’t work. Is there a place where the logic doesn’t flow, where it’s not coherent. Are there real world cases it would not predict or predict incorrectly? These anomalies tell you where to go next.

Don’t just look for where it doesn’t work, though, look for where it does. Few intellectual tools work in all circumstances. What’s it good for?

And as you learn, stack up models. “Neo-classical economics works for this, Marxism works for that. Keynesianism explains this well. Austrian economics….”

Then you wind up with a multi-faceted understanding and an intellectual took you know when and where to use, and understand where they are inapplicable. And that is very close to mastery.

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Possible Site Down Time

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On December 3, 2025

In Administrative

One of the things I did with the money from last years fundraising drive is hire a Dev to fix the issues with the site, like it often being down and slow loading, and with the mailing list.

This may mean the site has some down time over the next week. It should be more than worth it to get the site operating reliably.

And my thanks to all donors and subscribers for making it possible to get this fixed. I’m OK at simple website tasks, but 16 years of uptime and a server move have left the site’s back-end in a snarl which needs a professional.

Britain To Restrict Jury Trials, Ending Jury Nullification For Political Crimes

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On December 2, 2025

In Britain

Without jury trials, there is no justice:

David Lammy, the justice secretary, told The Times that the scale of the backlog – which has reached nearly 80,000 cases – is failing victims as he warned that “justice delayed is justice denied”

Lammy is expected to announce that he will scrap the right to trial by jury in “either way” cases, where defendants have the choice to have their cases heard in the magistrates’ or crown court.

Last year there were an estimated 13,000 either way cases – including theft and handling stolen goods, burglary, assault causing actual bodily harm, fraud, dangerous driving and possession of drugs with intent to supply – went before juries. 

Or you could spend more money and hire more judges and judicial staff? As usual, the real reason for the backlog is that governments after government have made cuts to the justice system.

But I suggest connecting the dots. All those people being arrested for protesting Palestine, they won’t have the right to a jury trial either. Which means that juries can’t nullify the law by refusing to convict.


Oh yes, she’s a terrorist.

The war on terror, as an aside, has reached the point many of us predicted at its start: anything the government wants to say is terrorism, is terrorism. As a rule I oppose most strengtheners. A crime is not more of a crime if it is motivated by hate. We already have motivation based modifiers in law (the difference between manslaughter and murder is intent) and those are enough.

But terrorism is particularly egregious because the way we define it is completely arbitrary at this point: it’s just “whatever a government says is terrorism, is terrorism.” Even in the past it was bullshit, because “killing civilians to effect political change” is something governments do all the time, but don’t call terrorism. The biggest terrorist organization in the world right now isn’t Palestinian Action, it’s Israel. At least by any sane definition. But even there, who cares? The actual crime isn’t “terrorism”, it’s genocide and the penalty for that is either execution or life imprisonment.

The UK government is becoming one of the most authoritarian and repressive in the world. To end jury trials for a huge class of people because they can’t be bothered to tax rich people like themselves is the very definition of tyranny, especially in Britain, the very mother of the right to be tried by ones peers, not some appointed judge who will often rule exactly as those who appointed them want.

Pathetic.

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The Financialization Hoover Effect & The End Of The American Dream

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On December 1, 2025

In End of American Empire, The Twilight of Neoliberalism

The great problem with financialization is that produces higher returns than productive investments do. If you want to industrialize or stay industrialized, you will have lower profits than a financialized economy does. This leads to situations like the below:

Generally US assets are highly valued and money tends to flow into the US over other countries. This is because US assets out-perform. The Chinese stock market, like the US market of the 50s and 60s, trades sideways. The US stock market since Greenspan never stops going up: crashes are just speed bumps. Likewise, US housing prices just keep going up, and so on.

On its face, money flooding into the US seems odd. After all, it’s not even close to the world’s most dynamic economy. China is ahead in 80% of technologies, the world’s largest manufacturer, and increasing its lead. In the last 3 years it has increased the numbers of cars it produces by five times, surpassing the US, Japan, South Korea and Germany, all of whom it was behind. It has the largest drone market, the most robots, etc, etc… It is the world’s strongest economy.

But China is a competitive market, and in competitive markets, profits are low, because the second they start to rise, someone new jumps in. That’s how capitalism, in theory, is supposed to work. The problem is that it only works that way with aggressive government regulation and enforcement. The CPC, being Socialist, doesn’t “believe” in markets. It uses them as a tool, without an ideological commitment. There’s no nonsense about markets being self-correcting, about rich people being good, about trickle down, etc, etc… If a market isn’t working to improve mass welfare, the state intervenes, and it will let, and sometimes force, “too big to fail” companies die.

This is, ironically, “real” capitalism, something the West no longer practices.

So America in specific, and the West in general has spent about 45 years now hollowing out its real economy. In exchange a great deal of money has been created, and if you as an investor want money, then you invested in the West.

This is coming to an end. It is in its last five or so years. It relies in the destruction of the real economy by jacking up prices, loading up debt and liquidating industries, often, ironically, to send to China. Once the real economy is gone, there will not be enough financialization opportunities to allow vast inflows of foreign money. This is especially true because, increasingly, US consumers are tapped out. The decision to end large classes of Obamacare subsidies is just a nail in this coffin.

Right now the US economy is bifurcated. Most people are under huge financial stress, but about 20% of the population is doing well and spending more. They are attached to a financialization spigot of some sort. This will end, or rather contract to about 5% of the population over the next decade. As financialization opportunities go away, the number of people benefiting from remaining financialization will of necessity contract. This contraction has been going on for decades. At one point a majority of people benefited, but as time went by more and more had to be sacrificed and the losers soon outnumbered the winners. The 2008 crash was when this became impossible to deny without straight up lying.

What will be left is a sclerotic economy, with a lot of rich people (relatively, in absolute numbers, not so many), a lot of poor people and a small real middle class. (And to be in that middle class you will need to earn low six figures minimum, because financialization makes everything expensive. You’re better off living in China with half the salary of an America. Maybe a third.)

It’s weird being, well, me. Because this is the endgame. I’ve been writing about this for decades, and now I’m seeing my Cassandric prophecies all coming true. None of this was, in one sense, necessary: up till about 2010, it could have been reversed, in theory, by correct policy. In another sense it was inevitable, because the people who make all the decisions were all in, and benefiting immensely, and were unable or unwilling to understand or care about long term consequences. For many of them that made cold hard sense. They were engaged in a “death bet”, they bet they’d be dead before the game ended. Others are just fine being the richest or most powerful people in a shitty country. They don’t, yet, understand what they’ll lose when China is recognized by everyone as the most important and powerful country in the world, or what the decay of American military ability (entirely a product of a now lost industrial and tech lead) will mean to them.

This the middle of the end. The beginning of the end was when Obama and Bernanke decided to bail everyone rich out during the financial crisis, and pass the cost to ordinary people, including by stealing their houses.

This is also epochal. For the first time in centuries, the West will no longer be the most powerful or the most technologically advanced region.

The consequences, for everyone in the world, will be vast.

 

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Open Thread

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On November 29, 2025

In Uncategorized

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

The Killing Of Two National Guardsmen In DC

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On November 28, 2025

In Afghanistan

is ironic in a number of ways.

As Sun Tzu pointed out about two and a half millenia ago, you should always treat traitors well. Never really trust them, but treat them well, because if people know you don’t, they won’t betray. (And be clear, this man was a traitor to his own country.)

To cap it off it turns out that he was a highly trained murderer. Highly trained murderers with shitty morals (most of them) need to be treated very carefully. Either take care of them well or kill them. At the very least, don’t bring them into your country and then abandon them to a shitty racist society without any support. (Aka. give them a job. There are tons of meaningless well paid government jobs. Give people like this one, plus a nice health care plan.)

Fortunately (or is that unfortunately?) he was in a rage and killed two national guardsmen, who while obviously willing to kill for Empire (like him, but probably less so) had no real power or responsibility for what happened to him. If he’d been thinking straight he would have gone after a politician or admin official. Even easier, a lot of the people responsible for how he was mishandled are no longer elected officials or high admin officers and thus have no real protection.

Seems a bit silly to kill a couple of peons. The people responsible won’t give a damn, they’re just talking points. But if it was one of them?

Not, of course, that I would ever condone extra-judicial murder of people who are responsible for a stupid, hopeless war and thus all the deaths, murders, rapes, torture, starvation and homelessness a stupid, hopeless war entails.

Anyway, treat traitors well, but never trust them. Sun Tzu knew. If I were a member of the elite, I’d be wondering if the next pissed off veteran, foreign born or not, will connect the dots and decide to go after actual responsible parties. Perhaps jobs should be found for them, and health care, just out of self-interest?

Oh, and do note that he did not kill civilians. That makes this act, in at least one way, morally superior to 95% of the decisions made to use violence by elected members of Congress and every administration official of my lifetime.

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Trade Is Not The Primary Driver of Currency Rates

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On November 27, 2025

In China, Class Warfare, Development Economics, Trade

The misunderstandings packed into this little bit of writing are stupendous:

Over the past few years, China has been in deflation, while the US has been in inflation. Yet despite this stark divergence, the CNH has still depreciated more than 10% against the US dollar. This combination — falling relative prices in China and a weaker currency — has made Chinese goods and services extraordinarily cheap in global terms. A vivid example: a night at the Four Seasons Beijing costs roughly $250, compared with more than $1,160 in New York

First, a 10% drop does not make a hotel room cost one quarter as much in Beijing as in New York. That’s ridiculous on the face. Almost everything costs less in China than in America. America has an economy optimized to drive prices high to extract maximum profit. China has economy with actual competitive markets: if you raise prices someone else will come in underneath you. Almost all of America is operating in or as if it is in an oligopoly. There is little actual price competition because even when there are competitors they figure that competing on price is stupid: it hurts both of them. Why not both raise prices to usurious heights? Win/Win.

This doesn’t happen in China because it has competitive markets and it has competitive markets in large part because China will throw executives in prison or execute them if they engage in this sort of price collusion, whereas in the US, though ostensibly illegal based on the laws on the book, such collusion has been made legal by decades of court decisions and prosecutorial decisions. (Prosecutors mostly don’t, and when they do courts almost always refuse to convict.)

China also has lots and lots of firms and genuine low barriers to entry. If you try to collude, someone from outside your industry will enter and undercut you, and often this will be someone with deep enough pockets that you can’t win a price war with them.

Second, currency values outside of hyperinflation are driven primarily by demand for currency. That isn’t primarily about trade, it’s about investors and financial carry trade. China unquestionably has a more dynamic and larger economy than any Western nation, but it isn’t financialized: Chinese companies don’t produce the sort of returns that American companies have over the last 50 years. This is deliberate policy: if they did, then China’s economy would suck for ordinary people, like Western economies suck for ordinary people because prices would be much higher. (See that Hilton room, though it cascades thru the entire economy, with rent and food at the low end much cheaper in China too.)

It is also pretty hard to invest in China as a foreigner, while the US is set up for foreign investors. Even if you want “China exposure” it’s hard to get.

So the Yuan isn’t in massive demand, because there aren’t bullshit over-sized returns like the AI bubble. The central bank doesn’t run its policies based on “the stock market must always go up.” America has spent 50 years burning down its real economy to produce outsize “profits” due to asset pumping. China keeps asset prices under control, and when a bubble does occur, as it did in real-estate, they deliberately deflate it, bearing the cost.

None of this is particularly unique, by the way. It’s basically the way the US economy was mostly run from the 30s thru the mid 70s or so. The policy details, the ways things are done are different, but American policies were meant to encourage real economic growth and if you look at a stock market graph you’ll see it traded sideways. No 50 year bull market. Asset bubbles were discouraged. You can’t have a good economy with high real-estate prices, just can’t be done and the stock market is a secondary market, not a primary one. Emphasizing it is sheerest insanity.

There is very little that China has done which is genuinely unique, despite jingoistic assertions otherwise. The playbook they have run is the same one almost every successful industrializing nation after Britain used, and very similar to the Japanese model. What is different are two things. First, the scale, when 1.4 billion people industrialize and modernize, it shakes the world. Second, a genuine desire to help the poor, which is extremely rare during industrialization, though not unheard of. (The Gilded Age did not care about the poor. Britain’s industrialization period was driven by hurting the poor as much, or more, than they could bear. They were far better off as peasants than in factories.)

Anyway, countries can be real rich (lots of genuine productive capacity with low prices and dynamic markets) or they can be fake-rich, with financialized markets that squeeze the last penny out of consumers and immiserate workers, leading to non-competitive markets and oligarchy. China is rich. America is fake-rich.

 

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By The People? For the People?

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On November 25, 2025

In Chinese Communist Party, Our Government vs the Government, The Twilight of Neoliberalism

The simplest measure of a government’s legitimacy is whether or not it works for the benefit of the people. Democrats also believe the government should be selected by the people.

America does not meet either criterion at this time. Yes, there are elections, but the duopoly means that voters tend to choose from a small slate, pre-selected by others. The most visible occasion of this was when Obama had every Democratic presidential nominee candidate drop out so that Biden could defeat Bernie Sanders. Year in, year out, most of the candidates put up for election are those chosen by party insiders.

This is not always true, of course. It is less true on the Republican side, where primarying incumbents often works and where a vocal but grassroots minority does have significant power in choosing candidates. On the Democratic side it’s mostly true, but some candidates do slip thru: Mamdani for New York City mayor being the most recent example.

Still, overall, it’s questionable that Americans really choose their own government, and that’s true in most Western countries. In Romania, for example, the unacceptable candidate who was going to win was simply arrested and banned from running and there is a movement to make Germany’s AfD illegal. In Canada the party leaders simply refuse to allow pro-Palestine candidates, even those who are selected as candidate by their riding, to run.

The more accurate view is that political parties in most ostensibly democratic countries are political oligarchies. How much this is true varies. First past the post system tend to have very strong oligopolies, while proportional representation countries allow more flexibility.

Perhaps worse when outsider candidates do break thru and win they usually don’t wind up voting for and doing what they ran on. You can see this (though it’s a bit of a stretch to call him an outsider) with Trump. It’s visible with AOC, the darling of the left who has voted for almost all Israeli aid packages and who has clearly decided to become an insider.

So first there’s a huge barrier to electing people who support outsider views, then most of them are co-opted. If there’s a real threat of an outsider taking the top seat, the establishment works hard against them. We saw that with Corbyn, where one academic study found that about 80% of all news stories lied about his policies.

It’s fair to say that most Western countries don’t really have “government by the people.” The mechanisms still, partially, exist. The form is there, but the reality isn’t. They’re political oligarchies. (The EU is worse than the US.)

And we all know that most Western governments aren’t “for the people.” For fifty years they’ve been immiserating their own people, becoming rich themselves and forcing money upwards, creating a financial oligopoly on top of the political oligopoly. I often say that for most Westerners their most dangerous enemies are their own politicians. Putin isn’t a danger to you as a EU member or America. But Macron or Von Der Leyen are. They’re the ones destroying your standard of living and piecemeal destroying social supports. This is even more the case in Britain, where there hasn’t been a Prime Minister whose primary legacy wasn’t hurting most Britons since the 70s. (Well, maybe Tony Blair had that as his secondary goal, his primary goal being hurting Iraqis to toady to America.)

Great systems are judged by their great opponents. For much of the 20th century that was the USSR and it is not entirely a coincidence that when the USSR was strong, Western governments treated their people well. Of course that isn’t all there is to it, there were the oil shocks, Vietnam, etc… But the West was ideologically scared of communism and when it seemed to work, they felt they had to make capitalism work.

These days the great opponent is China, and the one party communist state running a hybrid capitalist/socialist economy. And the problem for the West is that China’s government, while not “by the people” is definitely “for the people”. They’ve brought more people out of poverty than anyone else ever has. They keep rent and housing and health care prices low, as deliberate policy. Incomes are lower than in the West, but costs are much lower. You can buy enough food to feed someone for a week for $50 in most of China, with ease.

They also create the future: high speed trains, for example. They build real public infrastructure. I was very impressed when they built rest and relaxation places for delivery workers: they cared that such workers were miserable and exploited. And they build things like this:

Now it’s fair to say that this isn’t precisely “socialism” vs. “capitalism”. There was a time when the West built lots of public parks and so on. It’s the difference between a real rich society and a financialized society. One has plenty of excess capacity, the other has plenty of money but very little actual ability to build and create and no desire to do so if someone can’t make an unfair profit from it.

The problem for the West is simple: China is better governed than almost any (perhaps actually any) Western country. And that governance shows plenty of signs of being in the interests of the vast majority of Chinese, whose lives it has vastly improved. Democracy itself is in danger. If it doesn’t produce better results for ordinary people, and if it’s basically fake anyway, why keep it?

The risk here is that the anti-democratic forces in the West aren’t the CPC, they’re billionaires who think the problem with the current government is that it still does some things for ordinary people which aren’t primarily about benefiting billionaires. They’re fascists, at best.

Democracy, if it wants to survive as a major force in the world, needs real reform (all so-called reforms in the West over the past 50 years have been about hurting ordinary people to benefit rich people). If it isn’t re-aligned to work for the majority, its day as a major force in the world faces a bloody sunset.

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