The Bilderberger Meeting Begins

The 67^th Bilderberg Meeting is beginning today, 30 May, in Montreux, Switzerland, and is scheduled to run to June 2nd.  There are reported to be about 130 invitees confirmed from 23 countries.

Needless to say, the conspiracy theorists are besides themselves. They see secret planning events leading to One World Government and a New World Order (damn, these guys like capital letters!) and a general depopulation of the planet. Billions dying! Mind control! Apparent rivals working behind the scenes to attack the common man! Dogs and cats, sleeping together!

Mass hysteria!

Sorry. But it was fun to get that out of my system. And there are conspiracies, always have been. Most of them have failed. The ones that haven't were often working at cross purposes. Seeing a monolith when it isn't there grants the perception of power to people whose greatest power resides in people's perceptions of them. It builds what it claims to be fighting.

If I was inclined to think conspiratorially, I might think the opposition was part of the conspiracy.

And that's why it makes more sense to limit yourself to things that can be seen, and confirmed, and measured. Just because something scares you is no reason to assume it's real. I'd love to see what, if anything, leaks out of this meeting. The fact that these people are selecting themselves as "the elite" (one of them, anyway) is an interesting fact, in and of itself. We can compare what slips out of this meeting with the things that have slipped out over the past sixty-six meetings: white papers, guest lists, agenda items, and so forth. See what's changed, and what hasn't. Make predictions (did ANYONE predict Trump after the prior Bilderberg meeting?) and test them against observations. It's hard to do good work to understand people who don't want to cooperate. Hard, but not impossible.

Then again, Bilderberg meetings may all be Red Herrings. It's not like these people need to get together in a hotel for face-to-face discussions one week a year. I suspect it's more like a professional conference: a place to get away from the office, gossip, and have a few drinks with friends. Maybe even get a little work done, but that's secondary.

It could be an interesting place for some bugs. I imagine the NSA has some there already. The Swiss, too. But I hope there are some from Anonymous. A conspiracy spying on a conspiracy is a good metaphor for our times.

The Bilderbergers in Switzerland

Retirement

The president's State of the Union speech is tonight. I have low expectations. Very low expectations. But it's as good a moment as any to report on myself, and where I expect to go next.

So--I've retired. I haven't officially checked yet, but from what I heard last semester I suppose I'm a "professor emeritus" now.

Actually, it wasn't my first choice. Although I feel fine, my Parkinson's Disease had progressed to the point that I couldn't handle the full load of teaching and advising, etc., that goes with the job. An hour of commuting (each way) didn't help. So long as I take my pills and get enough sleep, it's something I barely notice--but when was the last time someone in our business kept to a strict schedule and got nine hours of sleep a night? The good news is I can think, and occasionally write, and I see more of the IR-related stuff in Pittsburgh than I ever could when I was putting in my hours at Slippery Rock. It's a little bit like grad school, but without the pressure.

I was afraid I would just waste the time, while the time wasted me. For a few months, as the inevitable grew closer, I couldn't imagine life without the daily "professor" role.  But four classes a semester, plus advising, plus all the other service to the department and the university that goes with that role, was too much. Parkinson's emerges slowly--at least seven years ago, I suspect, in my case--but it's cumulative. I started taking short naps between classes and appointments (neglecting my research, writing, and other service). Then the naps grew longer. I was hard to stand in front of a class for an hour. I'm sure I wasn't doing my best work. Not by a long shot.

The point where I should have called it off and applied for disability was probably December of 2017. During finals week, there's no chance to take a nap. I made it until my last final exam (the third of the day, in the evening), but when the time came I had dropped to the floor of my office, unable to get up. There's only so much you can ask of your body before it shuts down. I was awake, I was thinking, but my muscles wouldn't work. Fortunately it was one of my advanced classes, and the students had the good sense to come up to my office to remind me where I was supposed to be. I suppose seeing me on the floor shocked everyone. I still couldn't sit up. Of course, they wanted to help. But there really wasn't anything anyone could do. I explained what had been going on, assured everyone that I would work around the problem so nobody's final grade would be affected, and asked them to leave me to get a few hours sleep. After that, I would be ready to pick myself and drive home. They were concerned, of course, and I was embarrassed, but I couldn't see any better options. So they got to finish early, and I slept for slept for three or four hours, and after that my body was ready to get up, walk to the car, and drive to Pittsburgh.

I should have thrown in the towel then, I suppose. But I'm stubborn. I don't like to think I can give my body a reasonable order and it will refuse to obey. And as I regained my strength over the winter break I told myself I could organize things to make everything work. But I couldn't. I made it to May (barely), but I really wasn't doing my job. The Dean (and Human Resources) were kind enough to allow me sick/disability leave, but that was to get me past my 60th birthday, so I could collect on my pension without penalty. My last official day of employment was January 4th of this year. 

Since then, I've been making adjustments. Finances, insurance, all the usual stuff. But the biggest adjustment had to be mental. I don't have to take this as an end to my life's work. If anything, it removes some of the distractions. I can still think, and read, and write. So long as I stick to schedule, take my pills four times a day, and allow myself nine hours of sleep, I actually feel pretty good. I even have the first draft ready of a paper I'll deliver at a conference in March (and I must arrange my sleeping arrangements in Toronto!). My greatest enemy is me: trying to ignore my limitations, or giving in to a temptation to watch a movie when I have better things than TV. Losing myself in the news would be an easy way to remain occupied but unproductive, So I'm not doing that, and I won't do that. (Usually. There's always the temptation to piece together the pieces of the Trump scandals.)

So that's the State of My Union. I'll probably be checking in more here, from time to time, and connecting some of the interesting stuff to Facebook. Social media can easily be another time sink. But it's also allowing me, through "professional" social media, to keep in touch with current and prospective colleagues. I can read more of their work now. I can, and do, contribute. I still have things to say, and I will say them. 

The world by income (2017)

 
I like it when a map helps me to see connections I'd otherwise overlook.  I know North Korea is poor, but putting it in the same box with South Sudan and Afghanistan is something I hadn't thought of.  Likewise, Singapore and Seychelles.  It also raises some obvious questions:  why is French Polynesia so much better off than American Samoa?  Better administration?

The world by income (2017)

North Korea: Risking the Nation to Preserve the Regime

Satellite picture displaying the Korean peninsula at night. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It seems our friends from North Korea are at it again.  Only this time the threats are noticeably more shrill, the propaganda noticeably more clumsy, the moves noticeably more blatant, the insanity - if such a thing is possible - more insane.  What's going on here?

Let's start with McIntosh's three rules for understanding foreign policy.  They don't cover everything.  They are too vague, in and of themselves, to make strong predictions.  They are probabilistic.  Yet I'd argue that all of those "bugs" are in fact "features": they provide a structure for analysis without creating a false sense of certainty.  What are they, and how do they apply?

RULE ONE: WHAT PEOPLE DO IS DETERMINIMED BY WHAT THEY PERCEIVE TO BE REAL.

This includes not only perceptions of the physical conditions, but perceptions of how others see themselves and how they see the world and how will react, and even perceptions of one's own identity and reactions to hypothetical circumstances.  Is nuclear deterrence a bluff?  I don't know, and neither do you, and we won't know if it's a failure until it fails.

How does this apply here?  North Korea, under the new kid, is trying to create a perception of itself as more powerful and less frightened than most people (myself included) beleive it to be.  At the same time, there are indications that the regime of Kim Jong Un is not firmly entrenched in power.  There are rumors of attempted coups.  There are mobilizations of not only the military, but the people, that go beyond the norm for this time of year.  The regime is locking down the people, even more than usual, and locking the military to their posts, and justifying it by ratcheting up the Fear.  Many of the threats to the West and South sound like little more than propaganda in praise of the Great Leader, the Military Genius, the Only Man Who Can Bring Us Out of the Hell, that he, himself, has done so much to promote.

RULE TWO: WHAT IS REAL DETERMINES WHAT WORKS.

Unfortunately, we only approach reality by testing it.  As a first approximation, we coud say Reality is what surprises us - for good or for ill.  Kim Jong Un is testing the reality of the tense standoff on the Korean peninsula.  There's some indication that what he wants (beyond the usual foreign aid) is recognition and the long-postponed peace treaty that ends the War, preferably on terms favorable to the North.  I doubt he thinks the South will surrender (my perception, remember), but he might think that a formal recognition of the border and the end to the war will serve to consolidate his hold on power.  He would have taken a risky move that would have delivered what his father and grandfather were never able to achieve.  But the only way to know if he can get it is to push.  And now, having pushed, he has no clear way to draw back.

If his position is as precarious as some observers believe, pulling back now could, unless it was was coupled with concessions to military and political elites that he can't afford to make, bring about his fall, and the fall of his family.  Gods aren't allowed to fail - at least not in ways that can't be spun into "victory" by the propagandists.

Meanwhile, the threats - not just the public statements but the doctored photos and the blackboards with strike plans hitting Texas - clearly don't match the technical capabilities.  North Korea can, and may, launch a skirmishing strike to establish its resolve, but it just doesn't have what it takes to fight a war with the US, or a South Korea with US backing.  The people at the top know this.  Either they've convinced themselves the US wouldn't support the South, or it's about the domestic agenda.

RULE THREE: LEADERS ACT TO KEEP AND EXPAND POWER.

Again, there are some exceptions, on some dimensions.  But they are damn few.  And when leaders do seem to be leaving their formal position, they do everything they can to maintain their policies, put their hand-picked successors in the job, and maintain a secure "retirement."  One the great things about a republic is it formalizes the transition, regularizes it, and allows departing leaders the confidence they won't be prosecuted for their crimes.  (And yes, this includes the US, and it factors into how Obama refused to prosecute Bush officials and assumes he can get away with his own policies.  Obama is to Bush as Ford is to Nixon.)  North Korea has nothing like that.  Kim Jong Un can lose everything, and he knows it.  Thus the gamble, and thus the trap.  His weakness makes him belligerent.  His failure makes it worse.

And what if he does fail?  Best case, in the short run, might be a palace coup.  The Great Leader dies is a tragic accident, and another member of the family fills in as figurehead while the elites bargain over the spoils.  A middle case could be civil war, and a failed state.  A failed nuclear North Korea is something mobody wants to think about, and everyone has to.  A worst case could be war, triggered bu accident, or miscalulation, or madness.  Or maybe he'll find a way to back down without looking like he's backing down.  The the US and South Korea are scheduled to end their exercises soon.  A big party is scheduled for the departed Kim Il Sung in the middle next month. The Great Leader of today declares victory, telling everyone how he drove away the Americans.  Most don't know any better, and those who do get enough of a payoff from the status quo to be happy to return to it.  It looks like Kim Jong Un is risking his nation in order to consolidate his personal power.  The interests of the State are not the same as the interests of the people, and the interests of the Leader are not necessarily the interests of the State. As a result, the uncertainties are real, and dangerous.

Probabilities, anyone?

Other options?

North Korea: timeline of escalating threats - Telegraph

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Criminal or incompetent?

Cover of George W. Bush

Eleven years after 9/11, it seems the real core of the argument about the truth of 9/11, one that all so often descends into technical minutia and mutual name-calling, really boils down to competing images of the roles and capabilities of government.  Paul Craig Roberts, an intelligent critic of the conventional 9/11 story, does a good job of highlighting the differences.  As he describes it the options are that elements of the government, or elements of several governments, are either VERY competent at managing and hiding a false-flag operation, or those elements are VERY incompetent to the point of multiple simultaneous failures.

In order to understand the improbability of the government’s explanation of 9/11, it is not necessary to know anything about what force or forces brought down the three World Trade Center buildings, what hit the Pentagon or caused the explosion, the flying skills or lack thereof of the alleged hijackers, whether the airliner crashed in Pennsylvania or was shot down, whether cell phone calls made at the altitudes could be received, or any other debated aspect of the controversy. 

You only have to know two things. 

One is that according to the official story, a handful of Arabs, mainly Saudi Arabians, operating independently of any government and competent intelligence service, men without James Bond and V for Vendetta capabilities, outwitted not only the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency, but all 16 US intelligence agencies, along with all security agencies of America’s NATO allies and Israel’s Mossad. Not only did the entire intelligence forces of the Western world fail, but on the morning of the attack the entire apparatus of the National Security State simultaneously failed. Airport security failed four times in one hour. NORAD failed. Air Traffic Control failed. The US Air Force failed. The National Security Council failed. Dick Cheney failed. Absolutely nothing worked. The world’s only superpower was helpless at the humiliating mercy of a few undistinguished Arabs.

I'll ignore the implicit racism in describing the hijackers as "a few undistinguished Arabs."  His main point is he finds it easier to believe in superior villains than in spectacular fools.  I disagree.  This is not to say that I disagree with the idea that conspiracies operate in the world.  Of course they do.  What I find hard to accept is they are that good at it.  My personal experience with government at all levels is that, along with other organizations, it often magnifies the failures of the people in it.  People in power don't believe what they don't want to believe.  Bureaucracies fail to perceive things that fall outside of their areas of expertise.  Those who do put the clues together will find themselves marginalized and ignored, or even punished.  And what happens next?

It is hard to imagine a more far-fetched story–except for the second thing you need to know: The humiliating failure of US National Security did not result in immediate demands from the President of the United States, from Congress, from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and from the media for an investigation of how such improbable total failure could have occurred. No one was held accountable for the greatest failure of national security in world history. Instead, the White House dragged its feet for a year resisting any investigation until the persistent demands from 9/11 families for accountability forced President George W. Bush to appoint a political commission, devoid of any experts, to hold a pretend investigation.

This is supposed to be a surprise?  When organization and governments screw up--totally, completely, and from the top down--they circle the wagons, look for excuses, punish scapegoats, derail investigations, do whatever they can to cover the asses of those most responsible for the failure.  This is not a surprise.  An exception to this pattern would be a surprise.

What shocks me about so much of the "9/11 truth" critique is not the idea that there could be duplicity in government, or among other elites.  What amazes me is they have so much faith that so many, so powerful, could be so good at it, and so consistently.  They believe in the state, even as they criticize particular people in it.  They believe that if the state fails, there must be a sinister agenda, because at heart the state is too good and too competent to stumble as it did.  Personally, I don't buy it.  I don't buy the official story--there's no reason to assume that any official story is the truth--but if the only choice is between human fools and perfect villains, I find it easier to believe in fools.

The 11th Anniversary of 9/11 ~ Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org

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I love the Swiss...

Boeing F/A-18 Hornet of the Swiss Air Force Axalp Shooting Demo 2006, Axalp-Ebenfluh Bombing and Gunnery Range, Switzerland (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

...in part, because of their tradition of armed neutrality.  Neutrality isn't something you just "declare" (sorry, Berkeley and Boulder), it's something you have to be able to defend.  So how do you do that without becoming a threat to others?  Without, to use the expression from political science, triggering a "security dilemma"?

One way is to make it damn expensive for anyone who might want invade, protecting the civil population even as it joins in the job of defending the country, and blocking entry points to the extent that the country can "button up" and remove itself from the outside world.

And this is what the Swiss did--and still do.  Those beautiful mountains?  Honeycombed with military installations.  The scenic bridges?  The tunnels?  Mined and ready to collapse.  The pretty little houses overlooking the roads?  False fronts for artillery.  The rifle hanging over the fireplace?  That's not for show--everyone has military training.

The Swiss have natural advantages.  But that is not enough.  They also have the will and the tradition of making the most of what they have.

There's a story--perhaps apocriphal--that a Nazi official threatened a Swiss diplomat with invasion.  "We outnumber you," he said.  "Even after your defenses, if we invade we'll outnumber you two to one."

The diplomat replied, "In that case, each of us will shoot twice."

And that is how you maintain your neutrality.

BLDGBLOG: Various forms of lithic disguise

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Dumb and dumber

In case you missed it, Congress has been growing more stupid over the years, if we are to go by the quality of their speeches.  Here's a graph of the grade level of Congressional utterances, plotted by time and Party:

For particular Congresspersons, your mileage may vary.  And while there seems to be a precipitous drop for the Republicans, nobody comes out looking very good.

Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a Republican from South Carolina, speaks at the lowest grade level, registering just less than an eighth-grade level. Rep. Dan Lungren, a Republican from California, speaks at the highest level — about a 16th-grade level.  

Here are some notables: Rand Paul is among the lowest 20 members of Congress, at just above an eighth-grade level. Nancy Pelosi speaks around the average of an 11.5 level. House Speaker John Boehner is 12.6, Marco Rubio is a 9.4, and Rob Portman is at an 11th-grade level. Finally, Harry Reid is at about a 9.75 grade level. 

In the good news, maybe the rise from 2011 to 2012 is the beginning of a trend.  I wouldn't bet on it, though.

So what's going on?  Are politicians reaching out to an increasingly ill-prepared electorate?  Is it the influx of new members?  It looks like 2006 was a critical year.

Congress Is Getting Dumber And Dumber - Business Insider

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Where's my jet pack?

English: David Graeber on a boat at Fire Island. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Take a look at David Graeber's thought-provoking essay on why the future is so damn disappointing.  On one level, it's a critique of the neoliberal project as a means of prioritizing social control and profit stability over innovation and (potentially disruptive) progress:

what will the epitaph for neoliberalism look like? I think historians will conclude it was a form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time. There is every reason to believe that destroying job security while increasing working hours does not create a more productive (let alone more innovative or loyal) workforce. Probably, in economic terms, the result is negative—an impression confirmed by lower growth rates in just about all parts of the world in the eighties and nineties.

Britain - spy nation (Photo credit: Clive Power)

But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and overdetermining the future. Economically, the growth of armies, police, and private security services amounts to dead weight. It’s possible, in fact, that the very dead weight of the apparatus created to ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will sink it. But it’s also easy to see how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be different from our world is a crucial part of the neoliberal project.

On another, it's an inditment of the corporate bureaucratization of the culture.  I've certainly seen much of what he describes in the university, where ideas are marketed, students are customers, and administration seems to take priority over teaching or research:

The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped in creating marketable products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do, in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic. 

My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.

The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on. 

As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure. 

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.

If all this is true in the social sciences, where research is still carried out with minimal overhead largely by individuals, one can imagine how much worse it is for astrophysicists. And, indeed, one astrophysicist, Jonathan Katz, has recently warned students pondering a career in the sciences. Even if you do emerge from the usual decade-long period languishing as someone else’s flunky, he says, you can expect your best ideas to be stymied at every point: 

You will spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors, you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. . . . It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal, because they have not yet been proved to work. 

That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.

You don't have to agree with his estimate of causation.  Bureaucratization, I suspect, is more basic than  capitalism, and crony capitalism is not the only way capitalism can go.  Nevertheless, he's pointing to something very real.

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit | David Graeber | The Baffler:

'via Blog this'

One empire down, one to go?

Here's an interesting perspective on where we've been and where we're going, as articulated by Monika Halan:

The fracturing post-World War II equations showed through the plaster in 2011. The 63-year period from 1945 to 2008 will be remembered as the time when two dominant ideas about people and money, and how we choose to organize ourselves around these ideologies, died. One version delinked people from money; the other put money before people. The first collapse was in 1991 when the dominant interpretation of collectivism shattered the Soviet Union into 15 shards. The classless, moneyless, stateless, egalitarian society, which took from each according to his ability and gave to each according to his need, crumbled under the weight of authority and effort that was needed to impose something so state-centric and unnatural in place. Progress does get measured by money, and the severe scarcities and the dysfunctional economies of the Soviet bloc hastened the collapse—the delinking of people and money did not hold true. 

But handing over the keys to the market caused another collapse, and 2008 was when the interpretation of individualism in the form of predatory capitalism began its death dirge when the US’ financial sector demonstrated what unregulated greed can do. This version of capitalism (which was not what Adam Smith envisaged) delinked risk from reward, made a section of labour behave like capital, and made governments subordinate to the transnational corporation. That version of capitalism, emboldened by the breakdown of communism, pushed for and got what were called “free” markets and “less” government. But markets, as was later found out, were not really free—but compromised by the 1% who held the levers of control to move the system. And move it they did, towards appropriating more and more for themselves.

But there's more to it than that: both post-war empires overextended themselves. The Soviets couldn't pull back and manage a real "restructuring" (perestroika) and failed to keep "openness" (glasnost') under sufficient control to keep the empire intact. Today, with greater technologies for information transparency--and heavy-handed attempts to restrict it--the parallels for the US are too close for comfort. Do we really think the TSA is just for the external threat?

And then there's the Chinese. The Chinese government is watching the various "Springs" of recent history and finding it's too vulnerable for comfort. Little noticed in the growth of Chinese military power is the fact that the internal security forces now have a budget that rivals that of the PLA.

Old patterns of social organization and control are breaking down, but there's no consensus on what will replace them. Probably the best we can do is encourage experimentation, and see what works (and for whom) in various circumstances. But that's precisely what those in power are most opposed to trying. This could get interesting.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - Home - livemint.com

Leaders and the "common good"

On day one I give my foreign policy class three "laws" that explain ninety percent of what states do:

1. What people *believe* is real determines what they will attempt.
2. What *is* real determines what will work.
3. Leaders will do whatever is in their power to stay in power.

There are other factors, but these are the big ones.  It's odd how the hardest one to get people to believe is rule #3.  Now the Economist publishes an interview with Alastair Smith (New York University) in which he gives some great examples of what I've been talking about all these years.  For example,

It is virtually impossible to find any example where leaders are not acting in their own self interest. If you are a democrat you want to gerrymander districts and have an electoral college. This vastly reduces the number of votes a president needs to win an election.  Then tax very highly. It’s much better to decide who gets to eat than to let the people feed themselves. If you lower taxes people will do more work, but then people will get rewards that aren’t coming through you. Everything good must come through you. Look at African farm subsidies. The government buys crops at below market price by force. This is a tax on farmers who then can’t make a profit. So, how do you reward people? The government subsidises fertilisers and hands it back that way. In Tanzania vouchers for fertilisers are handed out not to the most productive areas but to the party loyalist areas. This is always subject to the constraint that if you tax too highly people won’t work. This is the big debate in the US. The Republicans are saying that the Democrats have too many taxes and want to suppress workers. But when they were in power five years ago they had no problem with taxing and spending policies, but now it’s taxing their supporters to reward Democrats. 

Or, as Harry Browne is supposed to have observed, the state breaks your legs, gives you crutches, and claims credit for the fact you can still get around.


And what about the common good?  I don't deny there might be one, but I'd never count on it being the basis of policy.  As Smith observes, "If you’re working for the common good you didn’t come to power in the first place. If you’re not willing to cheat, steal, murder and bribe then you don’t come to power. "

How bad is it?

Porter Stansbury, already noted for his gloomy predictions about the American economy, finds "the numbers tell us America is in decline... if not outright collapse."  His analysis starts with an estimate of real per capita GDP/time, based on a market-basket of currencies and/or gold.  Even this has pitfalls.  But, anyway, he uses a commodity index (the CRB) until 1975, and after the US is off the gold standard he switches to gold, and the chart looks like this:

I don't know that this is the best way to estimate what is going on, but clearly something is.  And this misses what may be the greatest problem of all: that per capita GDP tells us nothing about the distribution of wealth.  Things got better, it seems, in the years from Reagan to George W. Bush--but how much of that was consolidated in the hands of a few?  Even ignoring that, however, after 2001 things look bad for almost everyone.

Why bring this up here?  Because economic failure promotes desperation, and crime, and a police state mentality.

Stansbury connects the decline to an ethic of entitlement, coupled with vast (and unpunished) corruption at the top.  Henry Paulson and Tim Geitner should be behind bars for lying to Congress and providing more accurate insider information to old associates.  Congress doesn't do anything about it (perhaps because the Congress as a whole has an ever-widening gap with their consitutents, based in part on their exemption from insider-trading laws).

He also wants to claim that there's a direct correspondence to the Great Society programs, either by design (to buy off troublesome groups) or error (the basic errors of large-scale government planning systems).  That's debateable, but what isn't in doubt are the numbers--and the spiral of poverty and crime and incarceration they represent.  Some data points, again from Stansbury:

According to the NAACP, Texas taxpayers spent $175 million in 2009 to imprison residents from a small part of Houston – only 10 zip codes out of 75. Thus, people from neighborhoods that are home to only about 10% of the city's population account for more than 33% of the state's entire $500 million annual prison spending. These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly poor and African American. 

In Pennsylvania, taxpayers will spend $290 million in 2009 to imprison residents from just 11 of Philadelphia's neighborhoods, representing about 25% of the city population. On this relatively small urban area, the state will spend roughly half its $500 million prison budget. These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly poor and African American. 

In New York, taxpayers will spend $539 million to imprison residents from only 24 of New York City's 200 different neighborhoods. Only 16% of the city's population lives in these areas, but they will account for nearly half of the state's $1.1 billion prison budget. These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly poor and African American.

This is not about race, or at least not only about race.  In Detroit, where twenty-seven percent of African-American males graduate from high school, only nineteen percent of white males do so.  In practical terms, in an economy that's increasingly technical and global, these people have little or no chance.

My dad used to be a principal in the schools of St. Louis.  Eventually, he ended up in charge of the school for incarcerated minors.  I'm not sure what's worse: that he found that to be one of his safer assignments, or the fact that some of his students would commit crimes to get off the streets and return to the relative safely of his school.

Today, this country has more than seven million people in prison or on parole, more that any other industrialized state.  The prison population has grown from less than half a million people to more than 2.5 million today--and the building and running of prisons has become a profitable growth industry.  What does that say about us?

Stansbury identifies villians: democrats, republicans, government employee unions, big business.  I don't agree with all of his analysis.  But it's worth a look at the start of what is likely to be a very, very difficult year.

A lesson for analysts

From the December 15th edition of Nightwatch, one of the best sources on current events:

NightWatchFor the night of 15 December 2011 

Administrative note: NightWatch will not be published this night in honor of the official end of the US intervention in Iraq. Now Iraq can rediscover a new Arab normality and identity. 

Lesson for new analysts: Whenever a senior official of any government feels the need to assert in public that a nine-year military commitment was worth it, that assessment obviously is not self-evident.

I have nothing to add.

Boldly going where we've never been before

From the Institute for the Future, a visualization of trends and where they may be leading us

A look at 'the future of science: 2021, from CNN.com

Would anyone care to speculate on what some of these imply for politics and economics?  It sometimes seems like most political discussion is analogous to medieval debates over angels, pins, and biblical interpretation.  I suppose it seems important in its own context, but the world is passing it by.

An important lesson for researchers

Perception management? In *America*?

For the undergraduate IR student

Freshmen with an interest in international relations ask me where they should start. What should they read? Fortunately, Steven Walt has put together a very good list.

My "top ten" books every student of International Relations should read | Stephen M. Walt:

They're not necessarily "the best," nor are they a complete list, but they are classics, relatively easy to read, and give you a feed for how people who analyze this stuff for a living think.