Ian Welsh

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

Author: Ian Welsh Page 99 of 437

Britain’s Bare Produce Shelves

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On March 9, 2023

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The Daily Mail had an article on this, and it’s worth reading.

A dig down in this reveals two main factors (the Daily Mail was pro-Brexit and discounts that factor).

First, increases in energy prices.

Tony Montalbano, a director of Green Acre Salads in Roydon, Essex, typically produces a million kilograms of baby cucumbers a year, but his glasshouses were empty last month.

He delayed growing his crops to avoid rocketing winter fuel bills of up to ÂŁ500,000 a month. He expects his production to be cut by up to half this year.

‘It’s sad and frustrating but I can’t afford to grow,’ he said. ‘I must make a profit. If I don’t, there’s no point in me going on. Lots of growers are closing their doors and selling up.’

Jack Ward, chief executive of the British Growers Association, added: ‘Up and down the country, we’ve got empty glasshouses. People who would grow two or three crops of cucumbers a year may cut that to just one, because they want to avoid using more expensive energy.’

Eggs are also being rationed as farmers cannot afford the costs of keeping laying hens warm in energy-guzzling sheds.

Second, crop failures due to poor weather (aka. climate change) in Spain and Morocco have had a big effect, as Britain imports a lot from them.

Now, the thing about energy prices is that they have been raised far more than fuel prices have. The UK system has producers of energy, suppliers (the people who run electricity lines and ship fuel to retail customers) and the retail customers of energy.

Let’s take oil:

Unveiling its latest results, Shell said the price of the barrels of oil it sells rose from $62.53 a year ago to $101.42. Gas prices rose from $4.31 to $13.85 per thousand standard cubic feet over the same period.

So, their costs increased about 62%, and they about tripled the prices they charge.

In electricity, there is a price cap. The companies are not allowed to earn more than thirty-five pounds more than they sell the electricity to households. That cap, however, only applies to households, it doesn’t apply to business. So on the business side, they’ve been massively raising prices.

Thus the empty green (glass) houses, which grow far more than just cucumbers. Likewise vertical farms have been hit hard. If you want produce during the non-harvest season you have to buy from other countries or you have to grow in controlled environments. Add in climate fluctuations from climate change and high energy prices making it impossible to make a profit growing produce and you have shortages.

Price increases from Russia, in other words, are only an excuse to raise prices, not the reason for most of the price increase.

The solutions have been discussed even by the mainstream press: either re-nationalize the energy sector or put in a windfall profit tax so they don’t get to keep excess profits. And it’s worth noting that many energy companies did go under due to increased costs when they were regulated to be unable to pass them on. Some companies made way more than their increased costs, while others went under.

In the post-war liberal era private utilities were highly regulated, but a cornerstone of proper regulation was that they would always make a decent profit: enough for proper maintenance, which had to be done (remember all the fires in California because the privately owned utility won’t maintain power lines and poles), and to expand capacity as necessary. Utility stocks were “widow and orphan stocks” because they would make the same every year. Genuine price increases were passed on, but profits could not either rise or fall.

So, if you want to keep them private the best way isn’t so much a windfall tax, which is a response to a crisis, but proper regulation. Or you can just make them public again.

Energy prices in France have risen far less than in Britain for the simple reason that France owns its own generators and grid.

The other obvious factor is that if you have a cap on households for political reasons (they vote) you need a cap on the costs to farmers and to industry. But if you’re going to put all these caps in place, it’s better to just move to proper regulation, and a flat cap makes little sense, it should always be in percentage terms. When prices went up 60%, someone has to pay that. That either means end-users, or it means the government subsidizes. Those subsidies could be broad, if the increase is expected to not last long, or they could be targeted at specific industries and people with low income.

While generally means targeted subsidies are a bad idea, there are specific cases where they make sense, and this is one of them.

Anyway, Britain doesn’t have bare produce shelves “because of Russia” it has bare produce shelves because energy companies gouged the customers they could gouge using Russia as an excuse and because the government refused to step in and ensure prices which allow the “free” market to work properly, because there is no free market and never has been, and it always requires intervention to keep it working.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Basis Of All Law

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On March 7, 2023

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All laws are ultimately backed up by “if you don’t we will send violent men after you” and we should never, ever, pretend otherwise.

Mao’s “all power comes from the barrel of a gun”, or pre-gunpowder, guys with swords or clubs, is, however, only one-third true.

What matters isn’t the violent men, it is controlling the violent men. If all power came from violence, then it would be guilds of violent men who run society directly, but as powerful as police and armies are, in most places it isn’t military men or cops who who make the laws and are in the executive positions and when they are it is usually in a second or third tier country.

Ideology, whether religious or secular, is used to control violent men. It’s about legitimacy: about who has the right to give orders and what violence is legitimate. All power comes from controlling violent men, but that doesn’t mean that the violent men are necessarily in charge, especially after the first generation. Mao was a military guy: his successors after the Long March generation aged out of power were not.

George Washington was a general, most of his successors were not and when they were, as with Grant and Eisenhower, it was generally right after an important war.

Of course there are periods of history where almost every ruler was a military man, but even in such cases, control over the violent men was what mattered. The Roman Praetorian Guard choosing emperors makes this clear.

But moving back to the first sentence: law is enforced by violent men. The idea that there is some “social contract” is nonsense. You do what you’re told because their are consequences if you don’t. Those sanctions may start with fines or losing your job, but if you decide to do things the law says you can’t, well, the violent men show up. The whole history of cops going into homeless encampments, taking all the homeless people’s possessions and destroying them makes this rather clear.

At its heart law is violent. That’s why when you make a law, you should always be thinking “is this important enough that someone should be beaten up, killed or imprisoned for it? Is it important enough to use violence to enforce?”

There is a trade-off here. There’s a fair bit of evidence that many (not all) pre-historical societies were very violent. The early kings reduce internal violence by centralizing violence. “Everyone and everything belongs to me and only I and people I give permission to get to be violent.”

Whether it reduced violence overall, however, is less clear, because societies on the edge of these “civilized” states suffered a lot of violence from the civilized folk. There’s a perception that barbarians were the violent ones, threatening civilization, but when you look into the behavior of Rome or China towards the tribes on their borders, it’s abominable. As with many such things the question of “who started it” is impossible to answer, but that “civilized” nations were very often hyper-violent to their neighbours isn’t in doubt, and when they weren’t, they were constantly meddling.

The Mongols, when they invaded China, had a lot of reasons to hate the Chinese based on how China had constantly meddled in their affairs, including militarily. The Romans slaughtered “barbarians” in vast numbers. And so on.

Violence is, sadly, part of the human condition, and so far our solution sets for managing it at scale have been bad: either externalizing it, effectively enslaving most of the population as a byproduct, or both.

Finding a better way: a way that doesn’t produce war or tyranny, is one of our tasks.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Open Thread

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On March 4, 2023

18 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

The UK Continues Its Decline

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On March 3, 2023

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From the Guardian:

The number of UK children in food poverty has nearly doubled in the last year to almost 4 million, new data shows, ramping up pressure on ministers to expand the provision of free school meals to struggling families.

According to the Food Foundation thinktank, one in five (22%) of households reported skipping meals, going hungry or not eating for a whole day in January, up from 12% at the equivalent point in 2022.

Regular readers will know I’ve written about this often. The UK appears to be in decline to third world status. While the EU is neoliberal, it was better than what UK neoliberals wanted to do by leaving it. The UK has spent the time since Thatcher deliberately de-industrializing, leaving it with little more than the financial industry and a few hi-tech spars remaining. Leaving the EU makes the “City” less valuable: being inside the EU was useful, and now it’s outside.

On top of this, financialization cannibalizes real industry, since financial profits are higher and the highest profits come from taking public goods and privatizing them. This has been done to everything substantial owned by the UK government in 79, when Thatcher took power, from railroads to water and electricity, leaving on the National Health Service. That’s the last big chunk of profits, and then they’re done.

At that point, what does Britain have to offer to the rest of the world other than a corrupt financial center? Little, and that financial center can’t, won’t and doesn’t want to support most of the population, since even if they could, that would defeat the point: the people who run it don’t want to share, they want to be rich.

The Russia mess has also made this worse. There was a lot of Russian money in the UK, and freezing or taking it means no more will come in and it also makes everyone who’s in a non US ally country wary of using London to store money, whether in banks, securities or properties. After all, they could be next.

Brexit done right could have been the start of rebuilding the UK, but that would have required reigning in the City and engaging in industrial policy to provide industries capable of employing Britons, supply domestic British needs rather than importing, and also able to export.

As it is, Britain is done. The political fallout will probably include, within a decade or so, the loss of Northern Ireland and Scotland. At which point the United Kingdom (Scotland and England unified) will be no more, and England will stand alone again.

The Sun does set, it seems.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The US Endgame In The Ukraine

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On March 1, 2023

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Seems to be what most of us thought it was before the war ever started: try to replicate Afghanistan in the 80s. Keep Russia tied down till Russia collapses, supplying weapons and letting masses of Ukrainians die, avoiding US casualties. The country will be in ruins and not recover for decades if ever.

There are a few problems with this.

Russia is not the USSR. In many ways the USSR was stronger, but Russia is far more resilient. The USSR had a food deficit, while Russia is a net food exporter: one of the world’s largest. They still have a vast market for hydrocarbons and for their weapons. There is nothing the West can sanction that they must have. This is especially the case because while China and India have pretended to go along with the sanctions, both countries are moving into Russia in a big way to replace the Western businesses which left.

In the 80s China was not a Russian ally, and even if it had been it was not the greatest manufacturing power and world’s largest exporter. The Chinese make noises about peace, and they don’t supply weapons, but they are happy to buy Russian oil and gas and to sell Russia whatever else it needs.

Russia has a population problem, but it still has a far larger population than Ukraine. It can feed men into the grinder far longer than Ukraine will. Weapons are great, but they must be used by soldiers.

Further, Russia is not trying to occupy the entire country, but only the parts which are Russian majority or close to it. These places are not anti-Russian. They are not ideal for guerilla operations, both because of the lack of support for them and because Ukraine is basically a large open plain, not mountain or jungle.

Internally, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, the Russian leadership cannot afford to lose. If Putin is seen by Russians to have lost the war, he will lose power and he may not survive that, nor may his family.

Further, people who think Putin losing power would be good for Ukraine or the West are deranged. The people who will replace him are to his right, and they will want another go. Their primary complaint is that Putin hasn’t gone all in: hasn’t full mobilized, hasn’t used all the weapons available (Russia has been far more restrained than the US was in Iraq), and hasn’t moved to a war economy.

Meanwhile, the West is becoming more unified, but not stronger. China continues its rise, and US reshoring efforts seem to involve taking industry from Europe and some week efforts at moving semiconductor production to the US. China produced more semiconductor patents last year than the rest of the world combined, the idea that the Western tech lead is durable is a joke.

Western power and leadership is a wasting asset. Russia is now firmly a Chinese satrapy, China and Russia and India are moving to their own payment system and OPEC is moving to sell oil in non-dollar denominations. Meanwhile climate change advances and it increases Russia’s advantage in agriculture: it improves their yields.

This is a fantastically stupid war, with no good end and it’s not going to replicate Afghanistan and the USSR because Russia is not the USSR, Ukraine is not Afghanistan and America is not the America of the 80s, still vastly dominant economically.

Negotiation should be the way out, but we are stuck in a maximal position: Russia must get nothing.

And that is not going to happen any more than Russian collapse.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

“Fuck Suffering”, The Buddhist Solution (Part One)

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On February 27, 2023

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In “Fire From The Gods” I argued that humanity has proven consistently unable to handle new technologies: that we have usually wound up making them do more harm than good. This is a first in a series on looks at past attempted solutions.

Now the people who made these solutions usually didn’t say that they were trying to solve the problems of technology, though it’s implicit in some myths, like that of the eating from the tree of knowledge and being kicked out of paradise. But there is a wave of major solution sets being proposed all at about the same time. This is known as the Axial revolution, and includes Socrates/Plato, Confucius and Buddha. Zoraoaster comes in a bit earlier, Jesus rather later and the Jewish prophets (who spend a lot of time on social issues) scattered around thru the period.

The Buddha was born a nobleman, and during his life his father was conquered. While called a “king”, his father really lead a coalition of nobles and warriors: clans. He wasn’t a powerful king in the sense of having the ability to enforce his will. The Kings who were rising during this period in India were, and it was one of them who conquered his father. Indeed the Buddha’s time was one of huge prosperity in the part of India he lived in: probably this was the most prosperous area in in the world. They were urbanizing and for those who got in on the prosperity, standard advice was to keep one-third of one’s profits for oneself, give one-third to one’s friends and give the final third away.

They were filthy rich.

At the same time they were deeply dissatisfied and a large group of people renounced and tried to find a better way of living. These people were admired: they weren’t considered to be bums, but because they lived with few possessions and were trying to find a way out for everyone, were generally looked up to. It is that group Siddhartha joined.

Now the story of Siddhartha is that he was brought up by his father with all suffering concealed from him: aging, death and disease in particular, because a prophecy said that if he saw such, he would leave. Eventually he did and he left.

But, and this is important, the essence of the Buddha’s question is heroic to the point of being quixotic. Siddhartha saw suffering and instead of saying “well, it’s inevitable, I just have to accept it” instead determined:

Fuck suffering. I refuse to accept it is inevitable and I will dedicate my life to finding a way to end suffering.

Now that’s heroic to the extent of imbecility, except that he seems to have succeeded.

This is the core of all great ideologies, of which religion’s are a subset. The are based on a heroic ideal: a heroic conception of what it is possible for humans to achieve. Something extremely idealistic, often to the point of near insanity.

Buddhism is a heroic ideology, just like Christianity and Marxism and the Declaration of Independence and Confucianism and even Capitalism (to name only a few, but a few we will be covering.)

On a personal note, having done a lot of work and meditation and met a fair number of masters who seem to “have it” I’d say the Buddha succeeded: his way works. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t work for everyone, at least not in one life. (If reincarnation is a thing.)

Buddhist societies have sometimes extended the mandate. Asoka, the first Buddhist King of India had, so far as I know, the world’s first animal welfare laws. Construction in Buddhist Tibet was slow and difficult, because they would dig out the foundations very carefully, sift thru the dirt and remove the insects and worms and so on so they didn’t kill them.

Even when suffering cannot be ended, we can reduce it. The reduction of suffering and, when possible, its end, is the goal of Buddhism.

Mahayana Buddhism, with its Boddhisattva ideal, is an extension of this. Final enlightenment is said to remove one from the cycle of reincarnation (this doesn’t necessarily mean the individual stops existing, but they stop coming back here.) So a Boddhisattva swears to not accept final enlightenment until all sentient beings are enlightened. They’re going to stick around and keep helping, thru multiple lives if necessary.

We’re all ending suffering together

That’s the Mahayana extension.

Now of the great solutions, Buddhism is in the group I consider to have done less harm than good, but it’s definitely been perverted at various times. Like all ideologies, like all great ideals, there are ways it goes wrong. We’ll deal with that in the next article, but I wanted the articles separated, and this will be a pattern, because I want people to focus on the dream, on the ideal, on the greatness of the initial conception and its beauty. That beauty is there in all great ideologies; all of them, or they would not have succeeded.

Sometimes you have to dig a bit to find it, though not in Buddhism, but it’s always there. Just as in dealing with enemies, even when it’s an ideology you have (or perhaps you hate all ideologies) acknowledging whatever virtues there are is important. Great ideologies succeed, in part, because of some seed of great beauty: something wonderful.

If you want to understand the ideology, you cannot just look at all the evil it has done, or what you hate about it. You must find the beauty. If you haven’t, you aren’t close to the truth. If I skip some ideologies, it will be because I can’t see the core beauty that obvious exists in them. (Islam perhaps, if I can’t figure it out while I’m doing this series.

We’ll continue with the failures of Buddhism: the ways it either went wrong, or failed to achieve its dream. But understand that failing to go all the way doesn’t mean good wasn’t done, for any ideology, or even that more good wasn’t done than ill, especially for a period of time.

See you soon.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Open Thread

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On February 25, 2023

21 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Fire From The Gods: the Original Sins of Agriculture and Industrialism And Hope For The Future

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On February 23, 2023

35 Comments

We’re all familiar with the myth: Prometheus steals fire from the Gods and gives it to man and is cruelly punished for it.

I’ve considered writing a story in which Prometheus is freed by Zeus and returned to Earth to judge the results of his action.

We’ve gone over the problems of industrialization and agriculture many times and that isn’t what this post is about, but as a brief summary: most people’s lives got worse about two thousand years after agriculture, and in some ways immediately after. Rotten teeth, more disease, reduced lifespan and narrow hips in women leading to more deaths in childbirth and harder live childbirths, then the rise of the kings and all the evil that came with them. As for industrialization, it came with capitalism and required stealing people’s property rights and forcing them to take wage jobs that up until the middle of the 20th century were worse than staying on the land. Then climate  change and ecological collapse, without which technological triumphalism might have something of a point

But the bitterness of the fruit (and the fall from Eden is a related myth) is the bitterness that knowledge has turned in our hands and struck us. We learned to do amazing things: to grow our own plants; to domesticate animals; to make a vast variety of items; to use river and wind and coil and oil and the sun itself for power; to look at our own DNA and change it and so on and so forth.

The triumphalism in some circles: the joy at human ingenuity, is largely justified. What we have learned and invented as a species is amazing and we should, collectively, be proud.

The issue isn’t human ingenuity, it’s demonstrated instead that every time something new is discovered or invented, instead of thinking “what great things will we do with this”, many of us think “oh fuck, how is this going to be misused?” The recent AI crap is instructive, but I’m old enough and was online enough in the 90s to remember the initial predictions from futurists about how the internet itself was going to change the world. A lot of it was right, but way too much of it was wrong: far too optimistic.

My favorite example is that every study I know of (there may be a few exceptions) find that the more you engage with social media the more unhappy you are. There are countless other examples, insert your own.

So the pattern, and this is a pattern that has gone on for somewhere between eight to ten thousand years, depending on whether you look at agriculture or the rise of kings as the watershed, is that we figure out something amazing and then, more often than not the balance between how much it makes life worse and how much it makes life better is in favor of “oh crap.”

Debates about capitalism, communism, anarchism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and so on are debates about a way out of this trap, these original sins—these stories of taking fire or knowledge from the Gods and then burning ourselves more than helping ourselves. They are attempts to find a way to get more of the good and less of the bad, to tilt the field solidly towards the good.

Most major attempts have been sincere in their inception, much like the glee of of most discoverers of new knowledge. Then they have gone wrong, some more than others.

Some solutions have done significant good, especially at first. Others have had the opposite pattern. The same is true of specific inventions. The printing press in Europe (not China) probably did far more evil than good for about 200 years (say hello, wars of religion.)

We’re going to spend  time teasing this apart over the next few months or maybe year or two because this is important. If there is a way out of this trap, it lies partially in understanding what we’ve tried in the past, and how it both worked and failed.

In the meantime, the simplest understanding is this: we are in a trap. As a species we created this trap ourselves. We forged our own chains and our own torture instruments, then used them on ourselves and keep doing so, in large part because we imagine them to be ourselves.

There is blame here, sort of, but really the blame/responsibility distinction is more important. We were born into societies that were already fucked up and that are immensely powerful, far more powerful than we are. Our collective might and the weight of the chains we have forged for ourselves over millennia is like Sisyphus’s boulder. It’s too much and every attempt to push it to the top of the hill has failed.

But the Gods haven’t said we must suffer forever from our own discoveries and inventions: only that we must learn to use these inventions with consistent kindness and wisdom.

Our task, then, is to figure out how to use knowledge and power with wisdom and kindness, in a sustained way, over not just a few decades or a century or two, which seems to be our best record so far, but over millennia, in a stable solution set.

Let’s get to it.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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