Month: May 2020 Page 2 of 7

I’ve been thinking hard about why I write. It started as an attempt to fix the big things, by explaining what was wrong and how to fix them.

That didn’t work.

Really didn’t work. Almost 100 percent failure.

Unfortunately, much of my writing has continued in this mode: Explain the big wrong things. Didn’t work in the 00’s. Didn’t work in the 10’s. Unlikely to work in the 20s.

I’ve lost a lot of my heart for it. Explaining the world to people makes very little difference to the world, at least when I do it. Predicting trends and events years in advance, same.

So I’m going to change the emphasis of my writing. Oh, there’ll still be grand explainers, but I’m going to write them less with the hope that they’ll change the world, and more so that they help individuals and small groups navigate the world better. That way at least I’m more likely to help people

The big stuff is pretty much locked in now: We’ll see really bad climate change, we’re moving to a two-polar or multi-polar world, surveillance societies will be the norm until collapse, inequality will keep increasing in most countries, etc. Some is more locked in than other stuff; we could, in theory, reverse inequality (and we will, the question is when), but climate change is here to stay, and the international trade order is falling apart.

Back in 2000, when Bush v. Gore happened, my friend Stirling Newberry said, “We’re going to ride this bucket all the way down to hell.”

He was right.

But, as I emphasized yesterday, even in very bad times, some people are doing well, and others are doing better than they might have. Perhaps we’re unlikely to change the big picture, but more of us can change our picture and those of smaller groups.

Knowing how the world works, how governments, large corporations, and billionaires work, and knowing how non-human systems like the environment work, will be useful to those people. You may not be able to change the world (though keep trying if you want, someone will), but you can adapt better or worse to it.

This doesn’t mean I won’t keep writing the bigger pieces. I’ve spent most of my adult life building a world model of which I’m proud. It’s different in some ways from anyone else’s (this doesn’t mean better, though I hope it is better than most), and I want to get it out into the wild. My book “The Construction of Reality” is part of that (and stuck at the editor who is overwhelmed thanks to Covid-19), and there will be other books, long essays, and so on.

Maybe that world view will find an audience in the future or be useful to the future, maybe it won’t, but I want to give it a try.

But on the blog, I’m going to shift the emphasis in articles to not just what’s going to happen but why and try and pull out more of the reasoning so that readers can learn to do the analysis themselves, and can use it plan for and react to the world’s changes over the next few decades.

Things are going to be bad–really bad–for a lot of people. The time is past where most of that can be stopped, and the odds of stopping that which can still be stopped are, in most cases, small, and beyond the reach of individuals.

What is not beyond our reach is helping ourselves, those we care about, and–hopefully–some people beyond that circle.

And it’s in hope of that, and of a future where people and their leaders are willing to do the right things, the good things, that I am going to reorient my writing.

Be well.

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May 26th US Covid Stats

By Ian Welsh

On May 26, 2020

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Our benefactor notes that the US should hit 100K deaths on Thursday or Friday.

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.

Telling an Adventure Story with Your Life

By Ian Welsh

On May 25, 2020

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One of the most popular articles on my site is The Philosophy of Collapse and Decline, whhich about how to live in a civilization where you know bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them.

This is a topic I keep thinking about. At one point, I threw myself into the fight to stop evils like climate change, massive increases in inequality, a surveillance society, war, and increasing authoritarianism.

Lost those fights. Pretty much all of them. Not just me, us.

While some things will get better, there’s a lot of bad shit coming down the line. Most of is either unstoppable, or stoppable by having worse things happen. For example, facial recognition may be stopped or very delayed if no Covid-19 vaccine can be created, since people may be wearing masks in public most of the time.

Yeah, didn’t see that coming.

Totalitarian states, likewise, may be stopped by economic collapse caused by bad-case climate change.

Mmmmmm, fun stuff.

I don’t want to tell people not to fight the big fights. The best way to lose big fights is to not fight.

But the fact is, we’ve already lost some of the most important ones, for example, climate change. We ain’t stopping that, it’s happening–anyone who says otherwise is expecting a miracle. Now, I’m willing to give Fate, God, or the Wyrd a chance, but I’m not big on counting on any of them, so yeah, happening.

When people look hard at the crap rolling down civilization’s hill, when they do the work, and have their “Oh SHIT!” moment, they tend to lose said shit. Depression ensues, or all the stages of grief.

Go ahead and do that, because generally you have to go through it.

But what’s at the other end? There’s all of the, “Well, love and sex and cookies still rock,” (Hey, try all three at the same time!), and if that’s your path, go chill in the Philosophy of Collapse and Decline with the Chinese gentlemen (and, today, women) getting drunk on fine wine, composing poems, and admiring beautiful men, women, and mountains (sometimes, yes, all at the same time.)

Another model is the adventure hero(ine) model.

I read a lot of fiction as a kid, heck, I still read a lot of fiction (gestures expansively at the many thousands of books I’ve had to abandon over my life). Now, there are angsty protagonists, having a shit time as they labor through their lives, yes. There are the hopeless schmucks of literary fiction, endlessly examining their navels.

But there are also protags who look at bad shit and think (and feel, more importantly), “This is an interesting challenge! How can I manage this?”

Then they manage it and often have fun doing so.

The world is always going to hell, yup. Just depends where you are, when. Roman empire is collapsing, other places doing great. America is booming in the 50s, Chinese are starving. It’s the 60s, there’s a Rock and Roll invasion, dope, LSD, lots of sex, and, hey, the Vietnam war and lots of Vietnamese dying, some being burned alive.

Someone’s always having a shit life. Someone else is always having a good life.

Now, I’m not suggesting you become an asshole: You don’t have to make someone else’s life miserable for yours to be good. You don’t have become the sort of prick who doesn’t understand that other people are suffering.

But perhaps, just perhaps, because the world is going to hell, it doesn’t mean you have to go to hell. Perhaps you can say, “Well, people lived through World War II and some of them even had a good time, and goddamn, I’m going to be one of those.” Perhaps you can look at the challenges and think, “How do I get around this? Is there a good life for me and mine to be had anyway?”

The first art of winning your fights it to choose your fights, “Jet Li or Woody Allen, hrrrrm?”

You’re one person, there are over seven billion people in the world, and a lot of them are a lot more powerful than you. Events like climate change have momentum that an individual can’t stop (you can still contribute), but there are fights you can win, and there are good lives that will be possible even as the world goes to shit.

This is how adventure heroes act, think, and feel. “Well, that’s terrible, but hey, I have a plan.”

And I’d like to encourage some of you reading this to do that. You can’t save everyone, but you may be able to save yourself and some others, and have fun doing it. Heck, maybe you can even look stylish doing it.

And the mountain, wine, and beautiful men or women will all still exist. (So will the cookies, unless we go full Mad Max, in which case, well, remember, apocalypse in style!)

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.

May 25th US Covid Cases

By Ian Welsh

On May 25, 2020

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Our benefactor writes:

There’s been quite a drop in the number of deaths, likely due to the holiday weekend. Lots of big states (e.g. TX, KS, NE, KY) not reporting any deaths. They give health officials time off, too.

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.

May 24th US Covid Cases

By Ian Welsh

On May 24, 2020

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Our benefactor notes that the seven day average is still going up. We’ll see if it continues. Remember that many states are essentially allowing uncontrolled spread. States that are serious about controlling this are going to have to put in border controls.

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.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 24, 2020

By Tony Wikrent

On May 24, 2020

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

The Big Failure of Small Government
Maria Mazzucato [Project Syndicate, via Naked Capitalism 5-22-20]

Effective governance, it turns out, cannot be conjured up at will, because it requires investment in state capacity….

Decades of privatization, outsourcing, and budget cuts in the name of “efficiency” have significantly hampered many governments’ responses to the COVID-19 crisis. At the same time, successful responses by other governments have shown that investments in core public-sector capabilities make all the difference in times of emergency. The countries that have handled the crisis well are those where the state maintains a productive relationship with value creators in society, by investing in critical capacities and designing private-sector contracts to serve the public interest….

Unfortunately, for the last half-century, the prevailing political message in many countries has been that governments cannot – and therefore should not – actually govern. Politicians, business leaders, and pundits have long relied on a management creed that focuses obsessively on static measures of efficiency to justify spending cuts, privatization, and outsourcing….

Vietnam’s successful approach to COVID-19 has emerged as a striking contrast to the US and UK responses. Among other things, the Vietnamese government was able to amass low-cost testing kits very quickly, because it already had the capacity to mobilize academia, the army, the private sector, and civil society around a common mission. Rather than simply outsourcing with few questions asked, it used public research and development funding and procurement to drive innovation. The resulting public-private collaboration enabled rapid commercialization of kits, which are now being exported to Europe and beyond.

New Zealand is another success story, and not by coincidence. After initially adopting the outsourcing mantra in the 1980s, the New Zealand government changed course, embracing a “spirit of service” and an “ethic of care” across its public services, and becoming the first country in the world to adopt a wellbeing budget. Owing to this vision of public management, the government adopted a “health first, economy second” approach to the current crisis.

The Golden Age of White Collar Crime

[Huffington Post, via Naked Capitalism 5-21

Tax evasion, to pick just one crime concentrated among the wealthy, already siphons up to 10,000 times more money out of the U.S. economy every year than bank robberies. In 2017, researchers estimated that fraud by America’s largest corporations cost Americans up to $360 billion annually between 1996 and 2004. That’s roughly two decades’ worth of street crime every single year. As the links between corporations and regulators become increasingly incestuous, the future will bring more crude-soaked coastlines, price-gouging corporate behemoths and Madoff-style Ponzi schemes. More hurdles to suing companies for poisoning their customers or letting bosses harass their employees. And more uniquely American catastrophes like the opioid crisis and the price of insulin.

Why the Neoliberals Won’t Let This Crisis Go to Waste

An interview with Philip Mirowski [Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 5-17-20]

Neoliberals really believe that people are inherently bad cognizers — they can’t work their way out of their problems just by thinking. Of course, that sounds like a very negative doctrine: i.e., telling us that people are incapable of understanding the nature of their problems and pursuing their own democratic ends.

But for the neoliberals, there’s an upbeat answer: the market. And they have changed the meaning of what a market is from earlier economic thought which tended to treat it as an allocation of scarce resources…. This is important, because it means that people have to be brought to understand politically that they have to, in a sense, concede that the market knows more than they do. So, they have to adjust their hopes, their fears, to what the market tells them is necessary. This point binds together a lot of sub-schools of neoliberalism….

There’s an assumption that neoliberalism arose to oppose authoritarianism — and I’m sure that’s how figures like Hayek thought about it. But as Thomas Biebricher points out, the real problem is that their theory has no imagination of how they’re going to get people in general to accept their “reforms” when, of course, they’re not going to like any of them, because they won’t understand how the market knows more than they do. This puts the neoliberals in a bind: How are they going to achieve their political objectives? So, they’re driven, essentially, to concede that authoritarianism is the only practical way they are going to triumph….

The neoliberals talk among themselves, too, and already at this stage of the crisis there are discussions of what they see as current political successes…. They see the gutting of FDA controls over drugs, the boosting of privatized telemedicine, which is something that they’ve proposed for a long time — seeking to get rid of the idea that a poor person ought to be able to see a doctor face-to-face. They also see these developments as blocking a state-run, single-payer system in the United States — they believe the crisis made it less likely than before.

They also like the idea that this is turning pharma into a “heroic” sector, after there had been a lot of political pushback against pharma and it was getting a bad rap. That’s all being undone now. They love the idea that this crisis is inadvertently causing a reengineering of higher education. They have long argued that higher education is just something that most people can’t afford to have. Now, what’s going to happen is widespread distance education, even at elementary levels. It’s promoting homeschooling, something they’ve always been in favor of. It’s boosting the privatization of elementary education, so that’s great . . . They like the idea that an inadvertent effect of the crisis is to kill the US Postal Service. These are the sorts of projects they’ve long had on the back burner. And now they see, “this is our chance.”

“Dominant religions in the U.S., county by county”
[The Big Think, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 5-19-20]