Ian Welsh

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

Month: December 2020 Page 3 of 4

You Can’t Buy Anything That Matters When It Matters (Covid Vaccine Edition)

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On December 12, 2020

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… unless you have control over the production facilities.


I think this map is a little inaccurate, but it makes the point. Money matters, yes, but having control over vaccine manufacturers and R&D matters more.

This is true of everything. Oil is not a global market if there are ever shortages decision makers care about. FOOD is not a global market if there’s ever a worldwide shortage, and countries which net import will find that out. (The Irish famine, where Ireland, then an imperial colony, continued to export food even as its people starved, underlines the word control.)

Global markets are OK for things that don’t matter. For anything that does matter you want manufacture, R&D and supply lines concentrated in your own country or that of true close allies. In those cases, you want mutual vulnerability. If country A has it all and is a close ally, that won’t work when they’re desperate, you have to have part of the dependencies.

Even this doesn’t work completely. It was very popular before WWI to state that a big European war couldn’t happen because of how interdependent the economies were.

Yeah.

 

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It does help.

 

Industrial policy means that if you can, you make it at home, and if it costs a little extra, too bad, slap on a tariff. If you control natural resources, you NEVER sell them raw if you have any choice. The history of England’s economic development leading to the Industrial revolution starts with a ban on selling English wool to mainland Europe, allowing them to build their own textiles industry. Of course, those textiles were worse than what Flemish weavers would have made, and less efficient to start, with higher prices. The English, correctly, did not care. They had the wool, and there wasn’t a huge surplus of wool. Buy the clothes from us or no one.

Food, water and essential goods: if it is at all possible you want to be self sufficient in all three. In sensible countries a great deal of geopolitics is driven by this when a country can’t do it all internally. China knows, for example, that the US can shut down the Strait of Malacca any time it wants, crushing their oil supply and that is a major reason why they are creating a huge land route all the way across the Asian continent, and getting snuggly with the Russians (who can supply oil by land.)

Chinese economic policy, letting Westerners get super rich by producing goods in China, was also driven by this. The Americans aren’t wrong, the Chinese were super-aggressive about technology transfer. The deal was often that in order to get access, you had to give them the tech. If you wouldn’t, they would try and steal it (Americans stole a ton of British IP back in the day, don’t get all pious, everyone does it.) There was also technology-arm breaking creep. Sure, you gave us a tech a few years ago, but what have you given us recently, and why should we allow you to stay in our market today?

Foolish nations, like Canada and the US, let key industries go overseas, or sell raw materials without processing. Wise countries don’t, unless they’re getting something very worth it in return. Getting a bunch of new rich people who made their money by selling your country out isn’t “worth it” to anyone but the rich people and the politicians they bribed.

Money doesn’t cut it. Per capita Canada bought more Covid vaccines than anyone else, but notice that Canadians won’t be in the first wave to get mass vaccination. This is a “white, 1st world” country, and it can’t buy its way in. (The case is a bit more complicated than that, because the government are incompetent, but we’ll leave it there for now.)

If it isn’t on your territory, where your people with guns and your bureaucrats have power, you don’t control it and when it matters, you can’t buy it.

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Disney Setting A Precedent For Not Paying Writers

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On December 11, 2020

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Back when the original Star Wars came out, an author named Alan Dean Foster wrote the novelization as a ghost-writer, and wrote the first other Star Wars novel, “A Splinter In The Minds Eye.”

Disney isn’t paying him for those novelizations any more (authors of books which do well get payments long after the initial sale, it’s how they stay afloat.) They assert that when they bought the books they gained the privilege of paying him but not the requirement.

Obviously the amount of money involved is trivial to Disney, if not to Foster, so they aren’t doing it to save that amount of money. They’re doing it to set a precedent that whenever a piece of IP is sold, they aren’t bound by the original contract.

Since any company could set up another company and then sell their IP to it, this threatens all authors and very quickly all artists and so on.

 

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It does help.

 

Disney is engaged in outright theft, and an attempt to set a precedent that theft is legal. They’re betting Foster can’t fight this in court: that he can’t afford it. As authors go, he’s relatively well off but compared to Disney he’s a pauper.

Writers are one of the few sets of workers left who retain any right to profit from their work after they’ve done it. This right should be extended to more workers: profit sharing of some variety should be the norm, not a rarity.

At any rate what Disney is doing is deeply wrong and unethical. I like a lot of Disney media, but I won’t be spending a cent on anything Disney till this is resolved for Foster and if it isn’t, Disney stays on my permanent shit list (and I’ll be doing more than boycotting.) I don’t expect anyone else to do anything, this is where my bread is buttered after all, and there are more outrages than anyone can keep up with, and more companies worth boycotting than anyone can boycott. But I won’t cooperate, at least, in cutting my own throat (since I’m a writer.)

Not the worst thing in the world, but bad. If you’re not a writer or other creative who gets to keep some ownership rights and share in profits, remember the key point for you is that more workers; the people who actually produce things, should share in profits and ownership.

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Open Thread

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On December 10, 2020

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Had some computer issues today, so no post. 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.

Twelve Million Renters To Be Homeless Soon Because It Benefits the Rich

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On December 9, 2020

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And so we are where knew we would be:

Nearly 12 million renters will owe ~$5,800 in back rent and utilities by early January.

This was predicted regularly: people lost their jobs, they got one $1,200 and improved EI benefits for a while, and that’s pretty much it. Eviction protection is nice, but it doesn’t pay the rent and ends. This was 100% predicted and predictable, your lords and masters knew it was happening and would happen.

Oakland Homeless Encampment

They could easily have stopped it, and chose not to. The Fed and Treasury and Congress bailed out rich people, and their wealth has skyrocketed. Meanwhile New York wants to put a tax of $3 on deliveries of anything but food and medicine to bail out the subway system; taxing the poor and middle class rather than the rich who made out like bandits.

The money to fix this is fairly trivial. 69,600.000,000 – about sixty-seven billion dollars. In context, the TARP bailout for rich people was 700 billion back in 2008. The Federal reserve, by some calculations, floated about 20 trillion dollars. Seventy billion isn’t even real money in the modern world.

 

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It does help.

 

But when renters can’t pay rent, the landlords will go bankrupt, and the actual rich will buy up the properties. Meanwhile desperate unemployed people keep wages down and ensure that current workers will do anything they are told with no back talk, because they know there are way fewer jobs than workers. Win/win/WIN.

If you’re rich.

So, if you’re going to be homeless, or lose the property you rent, rest assured it’s in the cause of allowing the rich to control even more of the economy, gutting small and medium landlords and small and medium businesses (who have had to shut down, while companies like Amazon and large retailers make mint.)

Your leaders impoverish and kill you for money. That is all. Wouldn’t want you to think this is for no reason at all or because of incompetence. Your poverty and desperation does help somebody, and that’s why it is happening.

 

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Why People Bully & A Better Way

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On December 8, 2020

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Fundraising note: we’ve hit about $7,500 and are getting close to the end of the 2020 fundraiser. This puts a little over $500 short of tier 2 in the concepts series:

Three more articles, this set most likely on the conditions that create golden Ages, including one on how to create an ecological Golden Age (what we need next.)

We’re $3,500 from tier 3. It’s an amount we’ve raised in the past, but I know that this year has been very tough for people. If you value my writing and can afford to subscribe or donate, please do, if not, no worries. Take care of yourself and be well.

The Piece Proper:

As a child, when I first went to school and thus first encountered bullying and deliberate meanness, I remember feeling a sort of pure bewilderment, why would anyone hurt others?

I’ve been working thru this problem for most of the rest of the my life. Last year I read a book by the late David Graeber, “Bullshit Jobs.” Graeber was concerned with why people hate meaningless jobs and his theory was based on the human need to affect the world.

Babies, when they realize they can affect the world, even by something as simple pushing something are delighted. They get pure joy from the feeling of efficacy, or, if you wish, power.

Knowing we can change things, that we can affect the world, makes us happy. It makes us feel safe. It is pure, primal pleasure.

Humans are the most important thing to be able to affect. Humans have almost everything we want, especially in a society like ours, where most of us are very removed from nature and primal activities like hunting, gathering, farming and building things.

The easiest way to affect someone is to upset them. Make them angry, or sad, or hurt them. They react, the person doing it feels powerful, and feeling powerful feels good. No matter how shit your life is, if you can make someone else react to you, you don’t feel helpless and you get that little rush of primal pleasure.

(When I’ve pointed out similar things in the past, there’s always someone who writes a comment about how this makes me evil and a bad person and they, of course, never feel such emotions.)

Being mean is a way of proving you still have the ability affect the world and people in it. Bullying them, forcing them to do what you want though they wouldn’t without your threat or violence, is an even purer form of this. Imposing long term fear, so they do it even when you’re around feels even better. (Bullies in the mil-ind-police complex call this “tuning people up.”)

Being mean or a bully has a payoff. You just need to be careful not to try and bully the wrong person.

The problem with bullying is the same as most bad behaviour (long term readers know where I am going and can groan now.) You create bad feelings, and you have to live with unhappy people. Maintaining dominance is stressful, because one of your victims may strike back and you may mistake how powerful or vengeful someone is.

So you become a lord of Hell. You’re able to impose your will, but you make the world you live in hellzone.

There is another route to getting what you want. You can make people feel good and happy, or get them to like you. You can create positive emotions. You can be charming and kind. (I am aware that I don’t always do this, I’m not holding myself up as a paragon of good behaviour, would that it were so. I’m learning and sharing what I learn with my readers.)

If you predominantly act this way and keep would-be hell lords out, you will create a heaven around you: an oasis of positive emotions and happy people. You’ll get most of what you want, without most of the risk.

None of this means that even a heavenly person many never have to use threats or even violence. But that isn’t their go-to: it isn’t their default strategy.

When dealing with a would be hell-lord the strategy is to disarm them; to stop their strategy from getting what they want, and then only rewarding them for using heaven strategies. Like all such re-conditioning it takes time. First you remove their power to do harm; the rewards from being scum. Then you set it up so they can only win by being charming and kind.

This isn’t always possible, we’ve all been in settings where the leadership was so ensconced in their hellish ways that the only way to end hell was to leave. In some other places (one corp I worked for comes to mind) it is possible to create an island of heaven inside hell, carefully choosing who one lets on the island.

All of this scales. The mean we use daily to get what we want create the feeling of the world around us; the means are the end. Heaven is a place where people are kind and good, and hell is a place where people are mean and bullying  and don’t care what happens to other people.

Being selfish and mean is a strategy that works only if not too many people are doing it. If too many people do it, you hit a tipping point where the group or society as a whole turns toxic, and everyone loses. We can see this at the world level today in climate change and ecosphere collapse. When I worked in the US for a month, I saw it in the way people treated each other: scared and defensive and unwilling to trust, because they knew any trust would be abused.

Heaven and Hell are created by nothing more or less than how we treat each other, and how we treat the world around us.

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The Fortune of the Commons

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On December 7, 2020

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There is a theory, called, “the tragedy of the commons” that if no one owns something, it will be overused.

You can see this in pollution. No one owns the air, so assholes over-pollute it because they get the profits and bear only a tiny part of the costs. When I was young the BC coasts had tons of clam and oyster beds. In the 90s people with no connection to local communities (Vietnamese) came along and stripped them clean. Made a lot of money, but destroyed most of the beds.

The problem is that these aren’t “commons”.

Commons are resources a community or group in the community manages together. The air and oyster beds weren’t managed.

The commons, in England and elsewhere, lasted for well over a 1,000 years. They were managed well, were over 90% as productive as enclosed fields and produced a far better standard of living for more people than enclosed fields, which were associated with throwing people off the land they had lived on for over a thousand years, so they could work over 80 hours a week in factories with horrific rates of dismemberment, in cities rife with disease where people died far younger and were ill far more often.

There is no tragedy of the commons.


What we call commons, aren’t. To be a commons, a group of people which benefit more from the continued existence of something than its destruction or degradation have to be charge in it. No short-termers or outsiders (people who don’t need it to continue in their lifetime and beyond) need apply. In the terms of Carse’s “Finite and Infinite Games” no one playing a finite game can ever be allowed close to a commons.

 

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It does make a difference.

 

The tragedy of the commons is that people who didn’t benefit from them continuing used the power of the state to break them up (enclose) them for their private profit, thus improverishing millions of people.

The modern tragedy of shared resources (which are NOT commons) is that the people in charge of them are playing finite games. My friend Stirling Newberry called this the death-bet. Simply put, the people fucking the world up with massive pollution and over-using resources, will be dead when the bet comes due. Nancy Pelosi, clinging grimly to power, is 80 years old.

The people you want in charge are people who are young and people who care about their great-grandchildren. Or, in the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) phrase, for the next seven generations.

As for old people, the problem is twofold: first they think their money will help their kids, second they don’t /really/ care about their children or grandchildren. (Based on the behaviour I see, I assume most Americans don’t actually care much about their kids, especially once they’re adults. They scream that they do, but their actions show otherwise.)

They also have to be, for types of commons which are not global, locals, so that they can’t leave when things go bad. People who aren’t committed to the local area can’t be in charge of the long-term sustainability of a local area.

Put crudely, people who don’t have to eat where they shit can’t be in charge of anything.

Because this isn’t always possible, with global resources, you need to put people in artificial boxes. They need to experience the consequences of their failures. If they have both authority and power to act, after a certain time in office (and when out of office for a certain amount of time, so they don’t dodge their failures) they need to eat their own dogfood, to use the business expression. Make them live in the place with the worst pollution. If there are people there without a mask, then they don’t get to have one either. Make them drink the water. Make them eat the fish from the river.

This sort of personal responsibility, if combined with actual power, will clear problems up fast. If you want to make it really potent, give them a bit of time then make their non-adult children do the same.

In India there is a longstanding problem, not primarily environmental, but similiar, called manual scavenging. Simply put, untouchable (Dalit) caste members clean sewers and so on manually. No other jobs are available to them.

If you simply made it so that the governor and police chief and Prime Minister all had to do a day of manual scavenging every week till there was no manual scavenging (or so close to none as to unmeasurable) I guarantee this problem would be solved so fast your head would spin.

As for heads of industry, making the Shell CEO and every executive and all major shareholders eat fish from the Gulf oil spill for a year would be laudatory.

No wealth or power without responsibility for results. None. No scapegoats. If you have power, you’re in charge, no saying someone is responsible without giving them necessary authority.

The Ganges, in India, is horribly polluted and Indian politicians constantly wail, promise to do something and do nothing. Make them drink it every day, in front of witnesses, and the problem will resolve itself. (Sure, there can be some time lag. But perhaps make them drink one glass at the start of their term of office. Concentrate the mind a bit.)

No one gets to be in charge of anything unless they are affected by the results of their actions. Nothing.

This may seem similar to “Skin in the Game” by Taleb, but it is an ancient idea. Even in modern thinking, before Taleb, Jared Diamond made the same point in his book Collapse. But the idea is as old as civilization, and I am quite sure older.

As for the generational altruism idea, the ancient Greek saying was “a society is great when old men plant trees in whose shades they will never sit.”

We know all this, but in the modern era bunch of people who were either fools or evil or both, starting with Adam Smith (who was, admittedly, not quite as bad as his idea’s misuse would lead one to believe), created the idea that governing the world based on short term greed would lead to good results.

It did, for some people, and for a larger group for a while (that while is coming to an end.) It was based on genocide, enclosure (aka the violent removal of property rights from peasants) and the conquest of 70%+ of the world.

Or, if  you want another authority, Keynes,

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.

Put that way, it’s pretty obviously nonsense.

The Tragedy of the Commons is that we don’t have properly constituted Commons, that is all.

 

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The Beauty of the Future

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On December 6, 2020

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These pictures are of the Bosco Verticale, or Veritical Forest, located in Milan.

This is a beautiful building, and even with embedded carbon (the carbon of its materials) it’s better for the environment than normal buildings. The two towers have

“a total of 800 trees (480 first and second stage trees, 300 smaller ones, 15,000 perennials and/or ground covering plants and 5,000 shrubs, providing an amount of vegetation equivalent to 30,000 square metres of woodland and undergrowth, concentrated on 3,000 square metres of urban surface.”

It’s cooler in the summer, warmer in the winter, has better humidity. The water pumps run off solar power and use ground water.

(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.)

It also appears to be a lovely place to live.

Creating any future includes making it something people want. People wanted the suburban house with picket fences, a castle of their own. If they are to embrace a green future, that future has to attractive to them.

There’s no reason that shouldn’t be so. People love trees, plants, waterfalls, mist, ponds and even marshes (so long as they don’t have to slog thru them.) Natural light is healthier and buildings like these need less air conditioning and heating and thus feel better to live in. Air conditioning is better than the alternative, but being cool without it or with less is more comfortable.

An era is as much about aesthetics as about anything else. It is about a look and a feel and a way of doing things. This sort of building, while only a start, shows the way towards a green aesthetic. There’s no need for a green world to feel worse for people, it should feel better.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 6, 2020

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On December 6, 2020

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by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

“This Is a Revolution, Sir”

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 12-2-20]

Workers in India last week launched a general strike that brought out an estimated 250 million people, arguably the largest in human history. Now, they’re joining hands with farmers to protest Narendra Modi’s pro-corporate, far-right agenda.

Anti-Populism with Thomas Frank (podcast)

[The Dig, via Naked Capitalism 11-30-20]

Lambert Strether: “…if you want to understand why Frank has been blackballed by liberal Democrats and won’t (at least as I heard him say on Useful Idiots) be writing on politics any more, this is the podcast episode for you.”

Transcript is at: Thomas Frank: How the Democratic Party Became a Vehicle of Aristocracy​​​​​​​

[ScheerPost, 12-4-2020]

And Martin Luther King actually knew this history. The reason he knew it–it’s not, you know, hard to figure out–there was a famous historian of the South back in those days, his name was C. Vann Woodward, who wrote about this. You know, he wrote book after book after book about this story. C. Vann Woodward was a classic Southern liberal, and for him populism was the only bright spot in Southern history between the end of the Civil War–or I should say the end of Reconstruction, and then the present day in the 1960s, when he was writing populism. Was the only moment when there was even a glimmer of hope that Blacks and whites could get together in some kind of common action.

And Martin Luther King knew this history pretty well. And so he’s at this triumphant moment in Montgomery, Alabama, and he’s giving this speech. And he does this amazing shoutout to the populist movement of the 1890s. And he talks about how it threatened the Bourbon Democrats of the South, and how they instituted Jim Crow as a response to populism. So, to reinforce this idea of white solidarity, so that they could go to the, you know, to the poor white farmer who had nothing–you know, who was basically starving, almost–and say to this guy, well, you know, at least you’re a white person. So you’re better than these other people. And it’s one of King’s great moments. You can watch the speech on YouTube. But he says–I don’t want to spoil it, but you should go and watch the speech, because it’s absolutely fantastic. And he says, you know, the poor white farmer, when his stomach growled and his family called out for food, “he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was,” he was still better than these other people. It’s one of his beautiful moments….

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