Ian Welsh

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

Tag: 1 Page 1 of 2

The UR Rule Of Civilizations Worth Living In

By

On December 16, 2024

Comments

I saw this rather revealing tweet recently:

Andreessen, if you don’t know, made his money during the dot-com boom, at Mozilla. He then formed a venture capital firm, Andreessen-Horowitz.

Now what’s interesting about this tweet is the word “guilt.”

Andreessen doesn’t want to feel guilt. He doesn’t like the idea that one should run society to try and do the most good for the most people.

Understandable, venture capital in the 21st century has mostly created firms which profit from using as few workers as possible and San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley, has gone to Hell. Andreessen’s filthy rich, and he has to see homeless people every day. If he felt guilt about being having way more money than he’ll ever need while other people go hungry and live without heat, cooling and a dry place to sleep, he’d feel guilty pretty damn often or would have to spend a lot of his two billion to feel good.

But that’s not the point I want to make.

It is fashionable to go on and on about taking care of family and friends, and that’s a good thing up to a point.

But only up to a point. Societies work best when members care about people they’ll never meet. If we all look out only for those close to us, the actions we take to do so often hurt those who aren’t near us. Private equity buys firms, loads them down with debts and they go bankrupt, destroying the lives of workers. Bankers create asset bubbles which burst. They get bailed out and if they don’t are still worth millions from bonuses based on fraud, but ordinary people lose jobs, homes and healthcare. Insurance companies and pharma overprice their services, deny care and get rich. Ordinary people aren’t blameless either, we NIMBY and care about schools in our neighbourhoods but not in slums, and complain about the homeless and tell the cops to move them out but don’t want to pay for their housing. We look after and we vote for truly evil people and a majority, it seems, would never vote for someone actually good. We want low taxes and cheap goods and segregated housing prices that never go down.

This is… stupid. Society is other people. If other people are sick, we’re more likely to get sick. If other people are poor, they can’t pay for whatever products or services we produce. If people are homeless we find that distasteful and unpleasant to be around. Unhappy people, of course, are not as fun to be around as happy people.

And so on.

The better off everyone is in society, the better it is for you and me, unless we’re rich enough to live in a bubble, rarely seeing anyone but servants and our fellow rich. But even a billionaire will sometimes see a poor person, if only from their limo or looking down from a chopter, and they might feel some guilt. (If Andreessen does feel guilt, well, that’s mildly impressive in a pathetic sort of way. I doubt most billionaires do. But he’s repressing hard.)

And then one day someone flips out and kills a CEO, and others start talking about how wonderful CEO killing is. Perhaps making other people poor and miserable and killing their relatives might be a bad idea even for the masters of the universe. Might just be a good idea to care about people Andreessen doesn’t know, because one of them might get past his security one day.

Or, I guess, we could have assassinations, bombings, riots and civilization collapse.

It really is one or the other. If oil company execs had cared about people they don’t know they wouldn’t have buried climate change and financed denialism. If insurance and pharma and hospital execs cared about people they don’t know, there’d have been no assassination because they’d be trying to make sure as many people as possible got the care they need instead of optimizing to make more money.

It might just be that only looking out after people you know and care about and not giving a damn about anyone else is not just morally right, but pragmatically right.

Or you can bet on your bodyguards and the security of your gated communities, I guess. That’s a good bet, till it isn’t.

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

 

 

Did Mangione Break The Law of Nature When He Killed the Health Insurance CEO?

By

On December 10, 2024

Comments

So, Mangione assassinated Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, the US health insurance company with the highest denial rate in the industry.

It’s pretty clear he did it, he was found with a manifesto which amounts to a confession.

“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

The problem for the prosecution is simple: most people think the assassination was justified. All it takes is one juror to hang on and refuse to convict.

Jury nullification is legal, but it’s not legal to tell jurors they have the right.

But jury nullification is part of the “deal”, the social contract. It’s one reason why people accused of a crime have the right to a jury trial. We all know that the law and justice aren’t the same thing. We gave up the right for private vengeance because it lead to feuds and violence, but in exchange for giving it up we expect the “justice” system to operate in a way which leads to a better society, not a worse one. We expect the law to protect us.

Mangione killed one person. Thompson is a mass murderer. Mangione is a criminal because it’s against the law to kill people who kill by spreadsheet, but it’s legal to kill by spreadsheet.

When the law doesn’t work; when it allows mass murder, there will be some people who take the law into their own hands. As nasty as it is, this is one the real “checks and balances”. If elites won’t work for the common good, if they loot and impoverish and kill too much the masses always have the ability, if not the legal right to fight back. America’s founders were pretty clear about this.

Hamilton:

“when the first principles of civil society are violated, and the rights of the whole people are invaded, the common forms of municipal law are not to be regarded. Men may betake themselves to the law of nature.”

Elites are supposed to work for the benefit of all. There must be a case that what they do benefits the majority in society. When it doesn’t there must be some force of recourse.

Mangione broke the law. He almost certainly killed Thompson.

But did he break the law of nature?

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE\

 

Syrian Allies Try To Hold At Homs

By

On December 6, 2024

Comments

So, according to Magnier, who usually knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the Middle East:

Syrian government forces are expected to: 1. Leave Al Bu Kamal, Deir-ezzour, Palmira and stop at al-Qaryateyn to protect Homs. 2. Leave Daraa and retract to the limits of Damascus rural area. That will limit the defence of a larger area to a smaller area, secure Latakia, Tartous, Damascus and Homs.

Meanwhile Israel is considering annexing southern Syria.

Apparently some Iraqi militias Hezbollah forces are at Homs to fight, but HTS is still strong and is very well equipped, including with plenty of drones.

Edrogan has announced that HTS forces intend to occupy Damascus and Homs, which is a clear statement that they are his proxy forces.

Most of the Syrian army has proven unwilling to fight. The troops are ill paid, the winning army was mostly disbanded, and the army troops subsisted by setting up checkpoints and extorting people who had to pass through them. The critical oil fields are under US control, so Syria’s government is poor. Hezbollah can’t send the amount of troops they sent in the past, for obvious reasons, and Russia is occupied in Ukraine and doesn’t have nearly as many “mercenary” troops to send as it used to.

(This map makes things look better than they are. The majority of the population is no longer under Syrian government control, nor is the oil.)

If Syria falls, Hezbollah is cut off from its Iranian supply chain, and Russia wants to keep its naval and air bases. As for Iraq, they have to figure that they’re next: once HTS has secured a bigger base in Syria, or taken most of it, they will turn on Iraq, as similar forces did in the past.

The situation is developing quickly, and a lot will depend on whether and/or where Syria and its allies can halt the HTS advance.

Assad has proved himself unable to do what needs to be done. His need was to have a functional Syrian army and he failed at that. There may be good reasons for that, like lack of money and sectarian and tribal issues, but the bottom line is that the Syrian army’s willingness and ability to fight has so far been terrible.

If his allies do manage to save him, they should turn him into a figurehead and just the run the place themselves, it’s clear that he isn’t up to the job.

At the current time it seems the most likely outcome is Syria being partitioned between Israel and Turkey, perhaps with a rump Syrian state. But until we see if and where Syria and its allies manage to hold the line, it’s hard to say. All that being true, it’s also true that Syria in 2015 had been reduced far further than it is so far, so the situation is not, at least in principle, beyond rescue yet.

But Syria’s allies need to face the fact that the Syrian army is garbage and take over the war. If they don’t, the odds of success seem… bad.

SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE TO OUR 2024 FUNDRAISER

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 01, 2024

By

On December 1, 2024

Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 01, 2024

By Tony Wikrent

Jonathan Larson: A Life of Learning, Service, and Curiosity (July 17, 1949 – November 2024)

It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Jonathan Larson, the founder of the Real Economics blog. Jonathan’s insatiable curiosity, dedication to public service, determination to improve the human condition, and deep intellect left an indelible mark on all who knew him….

He authored Elegant Technology: Economic Prosperity from an Environmental Blueprint, a book that showcased his commitment to sustainable development and his vision for a greener future. Published in Scandinavia, the book demonstrated his global perspective and ability to inspire change across borders.

He also authored a paper on heterodox economist and scholar Thorstein Veblen, and supported and closely followed the restoration of the Veblen homestead.  Jonathan began this blog, Real Economics, to do as Veblen had — challenge and seek to supplant the failing orthodoxy of mainstream neoliberal and conservative economics….

Jonathan’s passing leaves behind a legacy of intellectual brilliance, moral courage, and unyielding dedication to the betterment of society. His life serves as a reminder that curiosity, compassion, and hard work can create a better world. Those who knew him who will forever cherish his memory.

 

Strategic Political Economy

Trump tariffs a “10 year project” to make China consume more and manufacture less.

[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 11-27-2024]

[TW: The Trump regime’s goal of forcing China to “manufacture less” should be understood in the context of Thorstein Veblen’s explanation of the conflict between business and industry. Business managers and financiers dislike the uncertainty and unpredictability created by technological innovation. Rather than creating wealth through increased and less imperfect production (here, think of the Japanese concept of kaizen), business managers and financiers instead seek to acquire wealth “by a shrewd restriction of output,” causing privation and unemployment. This actually establishes and perpetuates a process of financial sabotage of industry, as Veblen explained in the first chapter of his 1921 book, The Engineers and the Price System.

[By contrast, a foreign policy based on principles of civic republicanism would seek to collaboration and cooperation with other nations to solve the most pressing problems facing humanity, such as transitioning off of fossil fuels, and ensuring universal supplies of clean water, medical care, transportation, and so on.]

Read More

How Much Does Having More Babies Matter For Domestic Politics?

By

On November 18, 2024

Comments

The right is strongly pro-natal. Some of it is for religious reasons, some of it is because they want to control (no, don’t even, the constant talk of male leadership leaves this unquestionable), but a lot of it is that they figure if they out-breed their opponents they’ll win.

Now if you’re talking ethnicity or “race” this is indisputable. Want more whites, or latinos, or whatever, if you breed less than others, that’s going to tell.

But when you’re talking ideology and culture, it isn’t.

The anti-abortion right thinks that out-breeding will work for them, but out-breeding only works if the kids you’re popping up keep your beliefs.

Now this all very nice, and the numbers don’t look too bad, but there’s more to it than nominal membership. If you call yourself Christian but believe in abortion rights and contraception and women’s equality, you aren’t what the Christian “right” is looking for, are you?

So here’s over time:

Basically flat. What about by age?

Huh. Doesn’t look so good, does it? If you raise ’em and they don’t stay with you and you can’t convert non-members very well…

Whatever the deeper causes, religious disaffiliation in the U.S. is being fueled by switching patterns that started “snowballing” from generation to generation in the 1990s. The core population of “nones” has an increasingly “sticky” identity as it rolls forward, and it is gaining a lot more people than it is shedding, in a dynamic that has a kind of demographic momentum.

Christians have experienced the opposite pattern. With each generation, progressively fewer adults retain the Christian identity they were raised with, which in turn means fewer parents are raising their children in Christian households.

Now America’s still a very religious society. Far more so than Europe or most of the rest of the developed world.

***

(If you like the writing here, well, support it if you can. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. Please Subscribe or Donate.)

***

But replacement rates aren’t just about popping up babies and raising them with your beliefs. You have to be able to keep them once they’re adults. And seculars have been very, very good at converstion. Even back when everyone still said they were Christian, notice that abortion became legal, women got legal rights, contraception spread and so on. People said they were Christian, but if the Pope or their pastor said “no condoms, no pill” they ignored them.

Most people enjoy having sex. Most people, at least at some points in their lives, want to have a lot of sex, and want to do it without worrying about suddenly having to raise kids or having to go thru pregnancy.

(I often suspect that the most vehement anti-contraception and anti-abortion activists are people who are closet or in denial gays, or essentially asexual. “Sex is a duty, if we only have to have it to make babies, I won’t have to have it so often.”)

But the larger point here is that replacement rate for anything but biology is determined by ideological reproduction rates. If you can’t keep the people you raise in your ideology, then popping out more kids isn’t the solution.

Early Christians out-produced pagans, but if they hadn’t been able to keep their kids Christian: if pagans had been good at converting them, well, they would never have won.

What Christianity offers, in the US, is the church community. Church groups are one of the few social support groups left. If you need help, the church will often step up. And that makes it odd that the stickiness rate started declining in the 90s, just as government support also started a serious decline and as good jobs became harder and harder to get.

But there are other factors. One is that seculars, starting in the 70s, offered a better deal to women: a lot better deal. You could have your own bank account when married, you had no fault divorce, you could get that abortion and you didn’t have to always do what your husband said, nor did you have to marry just to get support.

Part of the secular offer became a lot better for half the population.

At the same time Christian ideology became less and less appealing. It was around the late 80s and early 90s that the hard-core Christians really began to win internal battles and made being anti-abortion the litmus test, moved towards hardcore natalism and heavy parental authoritarianism with plenty of beating of children. Oh, and when all the “male leadership” stuff cropped up.

This is a better deal for some men (the one’s who like keeping their kids and wife under their thumbs with force) but it isn’t a better deal for a lot of women and kids. And when the kids grow up, well, all that heavy handed authoritarianism, justified by religion doesn’t make them think fondly of religion.

The community support deal within Christianity is a good one, but if the price is domestic violence, corporal punishment, an inferior position for women and less sex, plus more pregnancies whether you want them or not, plus more dangerous pregancies, well maybe the cost of that social support is too high?

Reproduction of groups and ideologies over time isn’t just about who bears more kids, it’s about who keeps them. If “give me the child and I’ll give you the adult works” you’re golden, but if it’s breaking down, well, you may just be producing the next generation of your ideological enemies.

Breeding isn’t enough. The life you offer has to seem better than what your opponents offer.

Churches should be cleaning up. As the last solid community support structure the offer something that almost no one else does. But at the same time as this became true they decided to be anti-sex, pro-hitting children, and for women to be subordinate to men.

Weird that more and more people don’t want that life.

It’s The Economy, Stupid (AKA Economists)

By

On November 6, 2024

Comments

Over ninety-nine percent of economists did not predict the 2008 financial crisis.

The vast majority of economists were pro-globalization, by which I mean pro offshoring and outsourcing. They said it would be good for America, they were wrong.

China is predicted to wind up with over 50% of the world’s industry by 2030. Forget all the bullshit about great power competition. It’s over. There may be a war, but if there is one the West will either lose or the world will be destroyed in a nuclear exchange.

Back in the 90s an economist called Brockway liked to say “Economists are bad for your health.”

(If you like the writing here, well, support it if you can. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. Please Subscribe or Donate.)

Let’s bring this back to the election. I thought that abortion would be the election defining issue. Stupid of me, though abortion was and only four percent behind inflation. It was inflation, which given how much I write about it, I should have expected. Two tables from the CNN exit polls:

Abortion was the second most important issue. Inflation was , and people who voted for pro-abortion measures voted about 9% less for Harris.

Economists meanwhile keep talking about the : the idea that there is no recession, people just think there is.

Economists, as usual, are full of shit. They have a professional dependence on official statistics and refuse to realize that many of them don’t reflect reality. As I have written in the past, according to official inflation statistics the price of cards did not rise between 2000 and 2020. In another case, you will be happy to know that medical service costs are going down. Hedonic adjustments are completely out of control: prices are dropping, you see, because products are so much better now. (There are other finangles, this is the main one.)

Growth numbers are based entirely on nominal growth minus the inflation rate, as are real wage numbers.

I would bet that the US economy has been contracting since 2008, but since inflation is understated, it isn’t visible.

I would also bet that median welfare for Americans has been declining since somewhere between 1968 and 1979, though average might have been increasing till 2008 because of how much money was being shoveled to the rich and wealthy.

We live in a pretend world, and economists are the chief pretenders, the sycophants telling the Emperor how wonderful his new clothes are.

To riff on Galbraith, economists exist to make astrologers look good.

Economics, as a discipline, should be wiped from the face of the Earth. The less than 1% of economists who aren’t charlatans or fools are not enough to justify the harm economists do, which exceeds even that of MBAs.

Harris lost because of the insistence of Democrats that the economy was good, inflation was fine, and that voters were too stupid to read their own grocery bills. Because of this belief Harris said she wouldn’t have done anything different than Biden did. What she needed to do was get out there and say she was going to drive down prices, especially rent and groceries.

As for Trump, we’ll talk more about the effects of his economic plans, if instituted, later.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 11, 2024

By

On February 11, 2024

Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – February 11, 2024

by Tony Wikrent

 

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Israel’s Relentless Bombing Erases Gaza’s Heritage Sites 

[Wide Walls, via Naked Capitalism 02-09-2024]

The war in Gaza is wiping out Palestine’s education and knowledge systems 

[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 02-09-2024]

In the past four months, all or parts of Gaza’s 12 universities have been bombed and mostly destroyed.

Approximately 378 schools have been destroyed or damaged. The Palestinian Ministry of Education has reported the deaths of over 4,327 students, 231 teachers and 94 professors.

Numerous cultural heritage sites, including libraries, archives and museums, have also been destroyed, damaged and plundered.

 

Oligarchs’ war on the experiment of republican self-government

The Republican Party and Their Billionaire Backers’ Plot Against America

Thom Hartmann, February 8, 2024 [Common Dreams]

…The most appealing thing about a dictator is that he can “get things done.”

Dictators don’t have to worry about bureaucracies hindering them, or pesky laws and regulations. They don’t care about local opposition to their projects, or their impact on the environment.

From making the trains run on time to building an autobahn and a car company to go with it, dictators famously “get things done.”

The corollary to that old nostrum is that when things are going well, when things are working smoothly, when the people are getting what they want from their government, there is little interest in putting a dictator into office.

You have to break government pretty badly before people are willing to trade in a normal democracy for a dictatorship, but it’s sure happened before.

Germany wouldn’t have embraced Hitler if it weren’t for the depression the country had slid into because they lost World War I and were hit with fierce sanctions in the Treaty of Versailles.…

One of the most successful ways the forces of autocracy and authoritarianism have risen to power throughout history is by creating or stepping into a crisis and promising to be the “strongman” who will fix things and fix them now.

Which, of course, is why right-wing billionaires and the Republicans they own have been working so hard in the decades since the Reagan Revolution to break our government.

They want a series of terrible crises. And if they don’t happen organically, right wingers are more than happy to create them, as we saw this week when Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to do anything about our southern border or to fund aid to Ukraine and the Palestinians….

Warn Voters About the Radicalism Beyond Trump 

Nancy MacLean, February 8, 2024 [The New Republic]

…Promoters have been methodically lining up authorizations from the states since the 2012 election showed them that most Americans reject the kind of society they seek, even Mitt Romney’s mild version. So strategists concluded that the only way to permanently entrench minority rule by plutocrats and theocrats is to encase it in a dramatically altered Constitution….

Read More

The Competition Between West And The Rest Is Already Over

By

On February 10, 2024

Comments

This is what people refuse to get: the West has already lost. It’s over. It’s done. There’ll be some shooting, but it doesn’t matter.

China has the world’s largest economy by all statistics that matter. It has by far and away the most manufacturing. It has way more shipbuilding capacity than the entire West.

China is the premier trade power. Most of the global “South” would rather trade with it: it gives better deals and it interferes less with internal politics. This will continue. Western analysts are already talking about the coming semiconductor flood, as China catches up there. In ten years or so they’ll have more reliable planes at better prices than Boeing. They lead in about two-thirds of all major tech areas and surging in the rest. They are crushing it in the auto-industry and soon will produce better cars for cheaper, if they don’t already.

They have a real economy: “China speed” is a phrase. They get things done, and fast.

Russia is now the world’s fifth largest economy and over-took Germany, which is crashing out due to high energy prices with the cut-off from Russia oil and gas. Europe barely registers on new patents. They have advanced weaponry, their economy is booming thanks to sanctions forcing them to invest in their own country, they have plenty of food, resources and water and they’re on of the few countries who will benefit for the early to mid parts of climate change and global warming.

Changes in weapon systems have made cheap weapons much more effective, especially drones and missiles. The tech has spread widely, to the point where a backwards country like Yemen has enough to shut down a key trade route. The US military can’t meet its enlistment goals, and US weapons are much more expensive and far slower to produce than their enemies. The West can’t even supply Ukraine with enough artillery shells, drones and ammunition: but China, North Korea, Iran and Russia together have been able to keep Russia armed to the teet.

The US navy still has the largest tonnage, but can’t fully man all its ships, and as noted early, China has far more shipbuilding capacity, and it now has as many ships as the US. They are pushing in on technology which will allow them to detect submarines at great distances.

The US no longer has bigfoot capacity: it can’t easily occupy foreign countries any more and it can’t hit them while not being hit in return, as the multiple strikes on US bases and the closing of the Red Sea show.

It’s over. The world economy is re-orienting to China. They will have first dibs on resources because they offer a better deal on almost everything. Soon there will be nothing important one can’t buy from China or Russia, and for less than the West can sell it for.

The US and Europe need the global south—they need those resources, but the South will have little reason to sell to us, and will prefer China and Russia and so on. (France is being kicked out Africa, right now, in exchange for Russia and China.)

Military might will continue to tend to China and Russia, it is a lagging indicator on industrial power and technological lead, and we have already lost both of those.

It’s over. We lost without most of us even realizing we’d lost. When we decided to send our industry to China in exchange for some of our elites getting richer faster for three decades, we decided to give up our centuries old hegemony.

This isn’t to say all is woe, or that Western countries who are smart can’t maintain good standards of living. But we can only do so if we stop pretending we’re , the hegemonic civilization and everyone else has to kiss our asses or else.

The Euro-American centuries are OVER. We had a good run, but all runs end. We could have eked it out for a few more generations, but decay always begins at home. We gave our lead away, deliberately and as policy.

And a lot of countries, with good reason, hate our guts. They will get their kicks in as we go down.

We’d better learn humbleness, contrition and cooperation, we’re going to need them. And our elites need to be defenestrated as a class if the rest of us are to have any chance at decent lives.

 

You get what you support. If you like my writing, please SUBSCRIBE OR DONATE

Page 1 of 2

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén