Ian Welsh – Page 242 – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Schools and Covid

On December 2, 2020

Back in August, when it became clear that schools were going to reopen in countries like the US and Britain that did not have Covid under control, and which never would control Covid until there is a vaccine, I wrote an article warning against going back to school while Covid was out of control.

I’d think twice before sending my kids back to school under these circumstances.

I was told this was wrong, that it’d be OK. So let’s revisit that (specific examples courtesy of the Republican Dalek):

Here’s a nice little pie-graph from Toronto, Ontario:

Children get Covid. Most don’t have symptoms, but they can pass it on. Some, even though they don’t have symptoms, will have long term damage. Because they don’t have symptoms, most children won’t be tested, so the numbers above are surely significantly lower than the actual count.

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and going slower than normal this year.) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider subscribing or donating.)

Once they get it, children, showing no symptoms, can pass it on to their parents, grandparents and any one else who comes into contact with them. They may be somewhat less infectious than adults, but that isn’t the same as not being infectious. The older the kid, the worse (high schools absolutely should be closed.)

Re-opening schools was moronic. But if you want the hoi polloi to go back to work, well the schools have to be open, because schools are primarily childcare. Note that high end workers are still isolating at home: the City of London is still effectively shuttered. Our lords and masters sure aren’t putting themselves at risk if they don’t need to.

Sending your kid back to school may be something you had to do, legally, or because you have to work, since if you don’t, you and the kid wind up homeless. So you play Covid-roulette. But as a public health measure it was stupid at best, criminally malign at worst and people who didn’t need to send their kids back shouldn’t have and often didn’t. Many schools don’t even make children wear masks, and schools, with kids locked into rooms for hours on end in close proximity, are near ideal for Covid spreading.

Our elites do the wrong thing, repeatedly, knowing it will kill or impoverish a bunch of us, and they don’t care. It’s that simple.

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

2020 Fundraiser Update

By Ian Welsh

On December 1, 2020

1 Comment

We’ve raised just under $6,000 so far, which means we’ve reached the first goal at $5,000 – five linked articles in a series about political concepts and how to actually use them. Most people learn political and economic concepts, but the knowledge really does them no good, since no on explains when they work and how, or when they don’t work.

Fundraising has been slower this year than normal. Readership is up, so it’s probably what you’d expect: the pandemic has been bad for a lot of people.

That said, donating or subscribing does make a big difference to me. If you find my writing valuable AND you can afford to donate or subscribe (please don’t if it will cause you hardship), I’d greatly appreciate it.

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

The Path Of The Great Prophets

By Ian Welsh

On November 30, 2020

41 Comments

A religion is an ideology with supernatural elements.

We consider it OK to criticize Marxists or capitalists or libertarians or monarchists, but we tend to shy away from saying that a religion has bad elements.

The Hindu caste system is evil. It needs to end, and it needs to end today. If The Laws of Manu sanctify it, they need to go or be reinterpreted, whether they are a holy document or not.

All religions which claim that non-believers automatically are damned need to change that because it leads to things like crusades and jihads and burning people at the stake to save their souls.

God also does not have a chosen people, and claiming it does leads to obvious problems.

Male “leadership” needs to go away as well.

Prophets are great men (there don’t seem to be many women prophets) and most of them did more good than evil. Codified religion, however, generally winds up missing the point. Muhammad, for example, made the lot of women far better than it was before. He improved it. His followers took the better status he gave them (still less than men’s) and said “OK, this is it” or they backslid, rather than noting the direction of movement: forward.

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and going slower than normal this year.) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider donating.)

Confucius put human relationships at the center of his teachings, but denigrated women and put only one relationship involving women as important: the husband wife bond. His teachings, resting in the family, also had a tendency to lead to nepotism.

Jesus, poor bastard, had his teachings bastardized more than almost any great prophet I can think of: a Christianity which includes the book of Revelations has lost the plot, and I suspect the Old Testament should be ditched as well, because the God of the Old Testament acts in ways opposite to what Jesus teaches.

Great prophets are not perfect, they don’t get everything right. Their successors are usually their lessers, and get even more wrong.

Senator Carl Schurz once said, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” This is the correct attitude in religion, as well.

Religion is often wrong, and the great prophets were not always right. You take the good and jettison the evil. If a great prophet tells you to do evil: to enslave people, or to murder, or to oppress, it is still evil. To abnegate to them your moral responsibility is not the road to God or good, it is the road to Hell.

Religious followers who fall back on authoritarianism “my prophet/god said so, that’s why” are not due a pass because they have a religion. If what they’re doing is wrong, it’s wrong no matter what authority they claim. A God who is not good and does not want its followers to do good is no God anyone should follow.

What is especially ridiculous is that almost everyone who has a religion was born into it. Converts are actually quite rare. So people follow a set of beliefs they didn’t choose just because of where and who they were born to. (Not that this is unique to religion.)

The person of reason; the moral person, takes these beliefs as arbitrary and inquires as to what parts are good and bad, rather than bowing down before tradition and authority.

This is the path of respect for the great prophets, each of whom came into an imperfect world, was unwilling to accept it, and tried to make it better. Buddha saw suffering and sought a way to end it. Confucius saw rulers savagely mistreating their subjects and sought to bring better rule. Jesus saw people following “the law” and missing the spirit of love and care for fellow humans that was the essence of the love of God. Muhammad’s first followers were mostly women and slaves (as was true of early Christianity) because he offered them a better life than the one they had.

It is that spirit: the spirit of improvement, of movement towards the good, that is the legacy of the great prophets. If you are not doing that, no matter how pious, you are not following their example. By not striving to improve on what they got wrong, left undone, or their successors messed up, you disrespect them more profoundly than anyone who takes their name in vain but tries to do good.

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

Abundance Mindset, Scarcity Economies and the Great Game Of Musical Chairs

By Ian Welsh

On November 29, 2020

31 Comments

Like a lot of older Gen-X I remember the good times without having every participated in them. By the time I was an adult stagflation, the Federal Reserve, Reagan and Thatcher had done their work and the decline had begun. Everything kept getting shittier for most people in the western world and it has kept doing so for about 40 years now. Depending on what group you’re in, it might be fifty.

This has given rise to a whole body of how to get rich works. They rival those of the gilded age: Napoleon Hill’s “How To Think and Get Rich” is a good example. (The best of them is still “How To Make Friends and Influence People,” its advice will work as long as humans are human.)

The catchphrase these days is “abundance thinking”. There’s a ton of good stuff in the world, and you just have to figure out how to get some. The world isn’t full of scarcity, it’s full of too much.

This is, of course, true. There are money spigots, like various central banks, early entry to crypto, being attached to important resource economies like oil (though that’s ending) and so on. There are people who have way more money than they need, for whom money is a trivial concern, a way of keeping score, and those who just have too little.

You want to move to a position of abundance. You want to find a spigot. On the right this selling is courses on how to get fit or slim or rich or whatever. Sometimes the courses are bogus, sometimes they’re pretty good stuff, but they price them high and find desperate people to buy them.

So it is, so it always has been. Sell the dream to desperate people and you’ll get rich. Attach to a money spigot and you’ll be fine. It’s why the fights are so savage these days. Corbyn in Britain threatened the money-spigot attachment of Labour elites and they hate him for it and will do anything they can to destroy him. Nothing was too low to do to stop Sanders, because he would have brought in his own administrative class into the Democratic party. Democrats used many of the same vote suppression tactics against Greens and Sanders as they squealed about Republicans using against them.

It’s all about position. This is why the standard advice in prosperity circles is to ditch your loser friends and hang out with successful people. They’re attached to some spigot, or have found some vein of insecurity to mine and they can cut you in or show you how to get in.

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and going slower than normal this year.) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider donating.)

But this is the larger issue: it’s all about position.

It’s a giant game of musical chairs. Some people are in abundance economies, other people are in scarcity economies (these have little to do with national economies, though it’s easier to get into an abundance economy in some places, obviously.)

But there are only so many money spigots and only so many people who can mine veins of insecurity. There aren’t enough good seats.

So the abundance stuff focuses on how you can become one of the winners, one of the people in an abundance economy. If you do it ethically, you help others get inside. If you do it unethically, you’re just a parasite and you reduce the number of prosperity chairs. (Jamie Dimon, for example.)

The issue with all this, even when done ethically, is that even the “good” guys are rarely increasing the number of seats in the abundance economy. They’re just redistributing who gets them.

In econo or math-speak that’s a zero sum game. But because most of the people attached to money spigots like the Federal Reserve are actually reducing the number of good seats, it’s actually a negative sum game. Every dollar someone like Dimon earns hurts other people.

Abundance thinking could be a good thing: there’s no reason the world can’t be abundant. I am perfectly aware of limits to growth, but every human could have a good life if we wanted them to. But right now it’s all about winners and losers. It’s about each of us, perhaps on team with the other “winners.”

You can win such games, of course, but they produce a world that is hell, and worse a world that keeps heading towards worse hells. This is how downward spirals happen: when we’re concerned only with a few people’s well-being, rather than the well-being of all.

Eventually the hell becomes so bad that practically everyone is in hell, with perhaps a few lords of hell still enjoying life (almost every post-apocalyptic story still has some people doing fine.)

This is the treadmill we’re on, as we seek to save ourselves from the horrible fates we see around us.

So we resort to “I see what it takes to be successful and I’m going to do it and I have those characteristics or can get them. I’m not a loser. I’m a winner!”

The worse things get, the more we focus on what it takes for individuals to grab onto a money spigot.

We grab a prosperity chair (or we don’t, I haven’t!) And that’s great, but the number of chairs relative to the number of people keeps going down, the carbon goes up, and every day more species go extinct.

And hell looms.

A solution that just works for a few is a solution: but it’s only a partial solution unless you don’t care about others, about the future, or about non-human life.

Not everyone, as we’ve designed the modern world, can live in an abundance economy.

Perhaps we should try for a world where people don’t have to do everything just right, or be born to wealth, to live well?

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 29, 2020

By Tony Wikrent

On November 29, 2020

1 Comment

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 29, 2020

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

For What Are America’s Wealthy Thankful? A Worsening Culture War

Matt Taibbi, TK News, via Naked Capitalism 11-26-20]

….From the “vast right-wing conspiracy” through the “basket of deplorables” to now, the Democratic message increasingly focuses on the illegitimacy of the ordinary conservative voter’s opinion: ignorant, conspiratorial, and racist, so terrible that the only hope is mass-reprogramming by educated betters.

On the other hand, Republicans from Goldwater to Trump have warned that coalitions of “marauders” from the inner cities and “bad hombres” from across the border are plotting to use socialist politics to seize the hard-earned treasure of the small-town voter, with the aid of elitist traitors in the Democratic Party.

Spool these ideas endlessly and you get culture war. Any thought that it might abate once Trump left the scene looks naive now….

This is what happens when the very wealthy stop having a stake in the outcome of a country’s future. Having long ago stopped investing in ameliorative programs to keep cities and small towns alive, they stop bothering with unifying national legends, too, letting long-simmering divisions rise….

…we’re now back to corporate-sponsored tales of half against half. What’s always forgotten is who’s paying for these messages. We have two donor-fattened parties that across decades of incompetence have each run out of convincing pitches for how to improve the lives of ordinary people. So they’ve settled into a new propaganda line that blames voters for their problems, with each party directing its base to demonize the other’s followers. Essentially, in the wake of Trump, the political class is accepting the inevitability of culture war, and urging it on, as something preferable to populist revolt.

Divided Societies In Decline Use Scapegoats To Re-Unify

Ian Welsh, November 24, 2020

America is moving towards a cold, and perhaps hot war with the rising superpower and the last superpower (China and Russia). At home, passions are hot and at some point some groups are going to be chosen as the “bad Americans. The traitors.” Some part of the elite (a small part) will be thrown to the dogs, and so will many of the powerless.

This doesn’t happen in all great powers in decline, to be sure. But it’s common play and it has powerful people other than Thiel pushing it. They see America’s decline and its disunity and they are looking for a way to turn the decline around or at least distract Americans from the actual authors of the decline (that would be people like Thiel) towards scapegoats.

Know Your Enemies

Ian Welsh, November 23, 2020

An enemy is someone who means you harm and has the means to inflict it…. You must know who wants to harm you and has the means. Let’s start here:

“If America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the 3 decades following the second world war… A low-income American earning $35K this year would be earning $61K. A college-educated worker now earning $72K would be earning $120K.”

Everyone responsible for this is your enemy, unless you’re in somewhere between the top 4% to top 10%….

So the people who are responsible have robbed you of a million or more dollars, and a good, prosperous life. These people had names. It started with with intellectuals like Milton Friedman and the oligarchs who funded economics departments to overturn the economic orthodoxy the old order ran on. It moved onto politicians, executive and CEOs. Margaret Thatcher, and Reagan; then Blair and Clinton, who made their victory complete. Thatcher understood that it was Blair who made her victorious, until Labour accepted “There Is No Alternative” they could have simply undone almost everything she did. Clinton, cutting welfare and smashing blacks and poor people in the face with punitive jail sentences, was Reagan’s heir more than George Bush Sr. ever was.(Biden, of course, was there for all of it and supported almost every shitty piece of it. Enemy. If you can’t manage “enemy, but perhaps not as bad an enemy as Trump, you can’t think.”)

Now, here’s another fact: wage theft is almost equal to ALL other theft combined, except (get this) it isn’t considered a crime. That’s right, when your boss steals from you, it’s a civil/regulatory matter! Who’s the enemy?

The Epidemic

Over 900 Mayo staff have gotten COVID-19 in past two weeks

[Post-Bulletin, via Naked Capitalism 11-23-20]

Does contact tracing work? Quasi-experimental evidence from an Excel error in England (PDF)

[CAGE Research Centre, via Naked Capitalism 11-25-20]

A natural experiment. From the Abstract: “Between September 25 and October 2, 2020, a total of 15,841 COVID-19 cases in England (around 15 to 20% of all cases) were not immediately referred to the contact tracing system due to a data processing error. Case information was truncated from an Excel spreadsheet after the row limit had been reached, which was discovered on October 3. There is substantial variation in the degree to which different parts of England areas were exposed – by chance – to delayed referrals of COVID-19 cases to to the contact tracing system. We show that more affected areas subsequently experienced a drastic rise in new COVID-19 infections and deaths alongside an increase in the positivity rate and the number of test performed, as well as a decline in the performance of the contact tracing system. Conservative estimates suggest that the failure of timely contact tracing due to the data glitch is associated with more than 125,000 additional infections and over 1,500 additional COVID-19- related deaths. Our findings provide strong quasi-experimental evidence for the effectiveness of contact tracing.”

Swedish Life Expectancy to Drop for First Time in Century Due to Covid-19

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 11-26-20]

Happy Thanksgiving

By Ian Welsh

On November 26, 2020

47 Comments

Be happy and be well. Please be careful about Covid. Viral load matters for infection, spending hours in a house with people is a great way to get infected.

Feel free to use comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

I’m doing my annual fundraiser. If you like my writing and can afford to, please consider giving.

The Flynn Pardon Is The Right Thing To Do + Mishandling Russia

By Ian Welsh

On November 25, 2020

57 Comments

So, Michael Flynn has been pardoned by Trump. His crime was lying to the FBI about talking to the Russians before Trump was inaugurated.

Even a man like Trump can do the right thing occasionally, usually for the wrong reasons. It is entirely reasonable and routine for a President-elect’s advisors to talk to foreign governments. Flynn asked the Russians to not retaliate against the US, because Trump did not intend to let the sanctions for Russian election interference stand, once he was President.

This is not a crime. It was prosecuted as one under the Logan act, which has never been used for this purpose. Plenty of other politicians have done this, indeed, as Greenwald points out, Biden is doing so right now.

Next, lying to the FBI about something which is not a crime, should not be a crime. (Honestly, just never talk to the FBI or cops if you aren’t forced to. Ever. For any reason. Remember, they can lie to you.)

You really don’t want it to be the case that you have to tell the truth to any group of police, just because they ask.

There are a great number of tragedies in US foreign affairs under Trump, though less tragic than under Obama or Bush Jr (no Libya, no Iraq). One of the greatest is that, contrary to what you constantly hear, he in fact made US/Russia relations even worse, slamming the Russians with more and more sanctions and withdrawing from nuclear weapon treaties. This is the actual fact, for someone supposedly a Russian “asset” Trump sure acts awfully strange.

“He’s their asset,” I yell, as he kicks them repeatedly in the ribs.

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and going slower than normal this year.) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider donating.)

The Russians likely had an influence project in the 2016 election, it was minor, and only “cost” Clinton the election in the sense that everything did. They have a smaller economy than California and one-third the population of the EU. Yes, they punch above their weight militarily, but the real threat is just that they still have a lot of nukes. The Russians are only a threat to the West if they are pushed into a corner.

Further, in raw geopolitical terms, what has happened over the past 30 years is that they went from wanting to be Westerners to being China’s key strategic partner. They will be at the core of China’s new alliance, providing muscle and resources.

Acting as if Russia is the USSR is deranged. They aren’t nearly that powerful. Acting as if they are some third world country one can push around is also deranged: they aren’t that weak, they’re still a continental power with high tech and nukes, and they have options like allying with China.

Imagine the geopolitical situation if Russia was a firm western ally. Rather different, isn’t it?

It is probably as well they aren’t, simply because there needs to be a counterbalance to the West. Since the fall of the USSR America and its allies have proved that absolute power in the hands of a sole-superpower will be abused, over and over again. The cold war sucked, but when the USSR was around, it put some limits on Western bullying, only because there were other options.

The China/Russia axis (which will wind up including much of Africa) will provide that alternative again.

In the broader sense, this is a pity, but when Americans “won” the Cold War they decided it meant they were victorious for all time, it was, in Francis Fukuyama’s utterly foolish phrase “The End of History”.

History never ends, imperial arrogance always leads to horrible behavior and stupid mistakes, and here we are, staring down a new cold war.

One of the only smart things Trump appeared serious about at the start was having good relations with Russia. That it didn’t happen is one the bad things about the Trump administration, not one of the good things.

As for Flynn, he had every right to do what he did, and, again, a free standing lie to cops should not be a crime. Hatred of Trump or Russia is not a good reason to normalize anti-civil liberties behaviour or apply a double standard to something like a President-elect’s people talking to foreign countries.

If it is, I look forward to Biden apparatchniks being charged with the same crime.

No?

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

Divided Societies in Decline Use Scapegoats to Re-Unify

By Ian Welsh

On November 24, 2020

76 Comments

Chinese and American flags flying together.

A while back, Haydar Khan wrote an excellent article on American economic and technological decline, focusing on the diagnosis and differing solutions offered by economist James Galbraith and by Peter Thiel (the founder of Palantir, who made his initial fortune with PayPal and who is famous for his libertarianism, despite running a surveillance company).

The US is riven by divisions, split into two factions, who mutually hate, fear, and distrust each other. It has been in relative economic decline since the 70s, and this decline shows up in productivity statistics and in other ways like corruption and inequality. China is now, by some measures, the larger economy, and still growing faster than the US. While still somewhat behind technologically, in some areas, like 5G wireless, China is ahead.

So how does one fix this decline? We’ll skip Galbraith’s plan and move to Thiel’s.

Khan thinks that Thiel’s solution is more likely to work, because unlike Galbraith, Thiel has found scapegoats: The PC Left, parts of Silicon Valley (Google in particular), and China.

This is a standard policy. When a country is cracking up with internal divisions, it is common to find enemies to focus on. The German Nazis found socialists, Jews, and other “mongrel” races like Gypsies (whom everyone seems to forget), and the nations who had taken what they saw as German land, in particular France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.

Obviously, any country that is “great” can’t “fail” and if it does, it must be because of “traitors and enemies.”

(It’s my annual fundraiser, which is going slower than normal this year.) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider donating.)

The pivot against China began with Obama, ramped up with Trump, and despite some fears among China hawks, seems likely to continue under Biden. The PC left includes all the usual scapegoats, people who violate “purity” ethics: transsexuals, gays, blacks, and so on. The people the US and, indeed, many nations, love to beat down. Its core includes a LOT of Jews. These are groups many people live to hate and hurt.

As for Silicon Valley, it’s a neat trick for Thiel to pretend he doesn’t belong, but also it’s smart: He’s picking a part of Silicon Valley (his enemies) to be taken out, hoping to avoid the backlash himself. Silicon Valley isn’t loved, everyone believes that tech companies took and take away the good jobs, leaving people driving cars for Uber and doing odd jobs for Task Rabbit, and so on. There’s no dignity to these jobs, and definitely no money to speak of.

The political classes have bought in, big time, to the China part of this pivot, and there is a lot of hatred among both Democrats and Republicans of big tech, though more Facebook than Google. The PC left is a harder question; the liberal core of the Democratic party loves PC politics because they treat it as weaponized tokenism. It doesn’t matter how blacks are doing, what matters is that a black man was President. It doesn’t matter how women are doing, what matters is that a woman is going to be vice-President. Liberals want the glass ceiling shattered for minorities and women, not for the majority of minorities to have a good income and good health care, say. Plus, PC politics is easy weaponized against the Left: claim someone is racist, sexist, or anti-semitic (or is 30-years old and dares to date a 20-year old) and by the time it’s shown they aren’t, they’ve already lost.

Still, there’s a deep contempt in the liberal class whenever identity politics are taken truly seriously. Joe Biden may make noises about Black Lives Matter, but his plan is to give the police more money, after all. He doesn’t actually believe in it.

Thiel’s trying to package up all his personal hatreds and enemies into one bundle and get them chosen as the scapegoats. This may or may not work, but that’s what he’s doing. The problem is that, even if he doesn’t get everyone he wants in, the basic strategy is working. The US is moving towards a cold, and perhaps hot war with the rising superpower and the last superpower (China and Russia, respectively). At home, passions are hot and, at some point, some groups are going to be chosen as the “bad Americans.” The traitors. Some part of the elite (a small part) will be thrown to the dogs and so will many of the powerless.

This doesn’t happen in all great powers in decline, to be sure. But it’s a common play, and it has powerful people other than Thiel pushing it. They see US decline and its disunity, and they are looking for a way to turn the decline around or at least distract Americans from the actual authors of the decline (that would be people like Thiel) towards scapegoats.

Given how angry the American people are, this seems like a good odds bet. It’s not a sure thing, but it’s one of the high probability outcomes, especially with regards to China.

If you’re in one of these groups, or if you have ties to China or Russia or countries which will fall into the Chinese bloc, you should be keeping a very careful eye on how this develops. These are people who don’t blink at mass casualties to keep their power and wealth, and they won’t blink if you become a statistic.

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE