Fireside this week! My hope in terms of the upcoming schedule is to have my usual July 4th post next week (we’re discussing political philosophy in an election year, so I am sure everyone will be very chill; regardless let me repeat you will be civil) and then after that to dive into the Teaching Paradox series on Imperator (for which I’ve been doing a Carthage and a Seleucid run). I think then there’s a good chance I’ll stick a one-month hiatus after that, either in August or perhaps September, to help me finish up the book while also dealing with start of the 2024-5 academic job season.
For this week’s musing, I actually wanted to reflect on something a bit more contemporary. One of the oddities of the way we (and the broader media) talk about society is that we, understandably, focus on problems that need to be fixed. But the result is that when things are fixed, they simply stop being discussed and I find that a lot of folks thus assume that – as they had on last report – these things have stayed broken, rather than being fixed. So this week, I want to list out a series of relatively major concerns and crises from my lifetime (with a bit of a US-slant, unavoidably) that I can remember, checking back in to see how they’re doing. Because it turns out that things have, in fact, gotten better and a lot of these problems have been either resolved or at least greatly improved. This is hardly intended to be a comprehensive list, of course.
Let’s start with something that I recall a lot of focus on when I was young: ozone depletion or as I always heard it discussed, “the hole in the ozone layer,” which was going to result in rising cancer rates. It turns out this has been largely fixed: we banned certain ozone-depleting substances (I remember a real focus on chloroflorocarbons) and beginning in the 90s, ozone levels stabilized and then began to recover. The ozone hole is now smaller than it was when it was first observed in 1982. Fixed!
The second thing I recall being a big focus when I was young (so, early 90s) was the AIDS epidemic. And the news here is, of course, mixed: we haven’t cured HIV/AIDS yet. However, thanks to better education, in the United States, the number of new infections of HIV has declined, albeit modestly. The total number of people living with HIV has increased, but this is actually the dark lining of a silver cloud: this is the result of massively improved treatment for HIV that results in far better outcomes, in which the progression from HIV infection to full-blown AIDS is rare. New treatments can also suppress the virus effectively enough to prevent transmission and straight up cures may soon be in reach. Meanwhile internationally, PEPFAR, an AIDS relief program started by the (W) Bush Administration in 2003 has been tremendously successful, saving more than 25 million lives globally. So this problem certainly isn’t fixed, but we’ve made tremendous progress; in 2012 Anthony Fauci and Gregory Folkers in a paper went so far as to say, “an AIDS-free generation is indeed within reach,” which is an incredible improvement from the gloomy outlook I remember in the early 1990s.
The other big concern in the early 90s when I was young in the United States was extremely high crime rates. Violent crime rates in the United States peaked in 1992 and have been falling basically ever since; while there was a brief upward surge in 2020, the falling trend has reasserted itself and crime rates in the United States are now at 50-year lows. That said, crime rates in the United States remain elevated compared to similarly rich countries and still have quite a ways to fall to reach international norms. Nevertheless, crime in the United States has never been lower in my lifetime and continues to fall. That seems like good news!
Then there were the major foreign policy issues of the 1990s. Here the record is certainly mixed, but actually mixed, rather than uniformly negative. Two conflicts that were never far from the headlines in the 1990s were The Troubles in Ireland and the spate of conflicts that resulted from the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Both, I recall, were talked about the same way people often talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict today: as some ancient conflict that had been going on ‘forever’ and as a result would never be solved (this is nonsense, by the by, the Israel-Palestine conflict isn’t ancient, it’s 76 years old). But both conflicts have been resolved! The Troubles largely ended with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Meanwhile the last of the “Yugoslav Wars” ended in 2001 and some of the participants are now even happily ensconced in the EU (Slovenia and Croatia) and others are on the way to joining though you can still see lingering effects in the ‘hole’ in the EU and NATO in the region.
Of course the other dominating foreign policy news story of the 1990s was Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. This isn’t the place to re-litigate the decisions there given their complexity,1 but I’m not going to put this into the ‘fixed’ category: while the Hussein regime is gone and the Iraqi government that replaced it certainly poses far fewer problems in the region (for folks that were not paying attention in the 90s, you may not realize what a continuous political problem Hussein’s Iraq was, never long out of headlines), regional instabilities – some of them caused by the regime change operation – remain.
We can also look at some major issues from the aughts and 2010s as well.
One also sees fairly frequently on social media the insistence that technology and related quality-of-living questions have been stagnant for decades, which is simply not true. A lot of this is based on people gauging their notion of the median 90s family on the Simpsons or the median 70s family on the Brady Bunch and so forth, when those were not households with anything like median consumption. But more broadly the stuff in our lives is better now. Now if you point to the really obvious improvements (electronics, broadly), folks will cry foul, so let’s take a very basic, every day example – the one that occasioned this topic.
Light bulbs. Beginning in 2007, the U.S. Federal government enacted regulations which would start phasing out incandescent light bulbs beginning in 2012. People freaked out, they stockpiled old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs (do not tell me this didn’t happen, I personally knew people who stocked up). But 12 years on from the regulations taking effect light bulbs are way better now. Now on the one hand, the unit-cost per bulb went up significantly (about 5-6 times over incandescent, by my basic math) but the resulting bulbs last about twenty times longer and use something like 15% of the power. Since the cost of lighting your house is more electricity than it is the physical light bulbs, the result is a bulb that uses less energy (good for the environment) and is much cheaper (around six times cheaper). Best of all, you don’t need to replace the damn things two or three times a year. The great 2011 lightbulb freak out? Fixed.
And just more broadly, stuff now is way better. Cars are much safer now and – Cybertrucks not withstanding – getting progressively safer over time. TVs are now slim, high definition things which are somehow cheaper than the low-definition monsters we used to buy. I am raising a little one right now and the improved quality of basically everything baby-related in the USA is shocking, from the safer car seats to the better-and-safer toys to the more rigorous and research-based advice parents get. And before someone asks, “what about the maternal mortality crisis in the United States?” – maternal mortality is very bad, but it hasn’t been rising, we’ve been getting more rigorous in measuring it, which is also good.
One perennial complaint I see is that they “never fixed the water in Flint Michigan,” often in the form of quips that the United States can afford this or that thing, but “they still can’t drink the water in Flint.” This is, simply put, untrue. It is a lie. Flint made the switch to water from the Flint River in 2014 and the contamination was recognized in 2015 (albeit more slowly than it should have been). In January of 2016, a state of emergency was declared to enable federal aid to Flint and the city switched back to Detroit water and began a long process of pipe replacement. In 2017, the water tested safe to drink (below the federal limits), although concerns remained. By 2021, pipe replacement was complete, replacing the old lead pipes (whose linings had been removed by the Flint River water) with safe copper pipes. Flint now has water as good as any city in the United States; the lingering problem is instead (understandably) mistrust. However, the water in Flint is fixed and has been for years now.
Of course many issues remain unresolved. The most obvious is climate change, where the good news is that the worst-case scenarios are now largely off the table and the bad news is that so are the best-case scenarios. But progress – albeit perhaps too slow – is being made: U.S. carbon emissions are falling fairly sharply. This certainly isn’t in the ‘fixed’ category (global emissions growth is slowing, but not yet reversing), but it also isn’t the no-progress-at-all situation it is often presented as being.
But I think the constant bias towards doom, where problems make the headlines but solutions do not, is a real problem because it leads to the assumption that things are not getting better and indeed that they cannot get better, which in turn fuels more extreme political solutions – the assumption that the only way to ‘better’ is to burn everything down. It does not help that humans are primed for nostalgia: everything was the best when we were young, ignorant of the world’s problems and with fewer cares. But things are getting better, remarkably so. I hope that one effect of discussing so much pre-modern economies here – on farming, iron production, textile manufacture, military foraging and so on – is to hammer home that incremental improvements do add up and that the pace of this change is accelerating and mostly positive and also that ‘burning it all down’ means burning down a lot of those careful, incremental changes. The base-state of humanity is not abundance, but poverty – it is the things we have built that lift us above that state.
At the same time, positive change doesn’t happen automatically for no reason: it happens because we make careful, incremental, deliberate improvements.
On to recommendations!
First off, medieval historian and prodigious film-watcher (and grad school colleague) Peter Raleigh has started up a substack, The Long Library, where he plans to discuss films and other things. His first offering, “The Tell of Us All” is a look at the universe of the Mad Max films and the way they understand history, memory and progress. It’s a fascinating look at the themes as they cut across all five films, including the recent Furiosa (which I saw, at Peter’s recommendation, in theaters and heartily recommend – catch it if you can before they pull it out of the last theaters, it is great).
Meanwhile, if you want to read more from me, I wrote a piece for The Dispatch, a critique of the Heritage Foundation’s annual assessment of U.S. military strength, a 600-page document designed to justify a handful of media-friendly charts which functionally no one in the nat-sec or military studies community takes very seriously. As has always been the case for these reports, the 2024 report’s analysis is contorted to provide Heritage’s perennial recommendation (more military spending on everything), while at the same time provide Heritage a cudgel in the culture war to claim that ‘wokeness’ or some such is ruining the U.S. military. Of particular note, these are reports which, since 2018 (the oldest report I could get) have never rated threats to the United States as anything but ‘high’ or ‘elevated’ (elevated above what?) and American military strength never higher than marginal; it is the word-table equivalent of deceptively manipulating the Y-axis on a chart, creating tables whose vast, empty right space exists only to scare Fox News views (which is how it is used).
Then we have a few fun history YouTube videos. Insider brought in friend-of-the-blog Michael Taylor to review the depiction of Roman infantry tactics in film and TV and there are a lot of good infantry tactics tidbits here from the fellow who is at this point probably the leading authority on Roman infantry tactics during the Republic. Meanwhile, HistoryHit brought on Roel Konijnendijk to answer google questions about Sparta. Most of what he says isn’t going to be a huge shock to folks who have read the Sparta series, but there’s a lot of detail here all the same and some really good nods to the general weakness of the sources. I actually think the contrast between Roel and I on Sparta is really handy because we come, I think, from different ‘camps’ of scholarship on Sparta and yet end up agreeing on 95%+ of questions, which gives a good sense both of where the scholarly debate really is these days and what sort of arguments the evidence does and doesn’t permit. And of course, Roel is well worth listening to on any topic relating to ancient Greece.
And in a bit of “ancient military history is a tiny field and we all know each other” Michael’s video occasioned this tweet by Roel noting someone in the comments wondering why I didn’t do Michael’s video:
For what it is worth, I suspect the answer to the question is “Insider has a studio in New York, which is not far from where Michael Taylor teaches” but it could equally be “Insider was interested in tactics, a topic on which Michael Taylor has more expertise than I.”
Also, Liv Yarrow’s blog is always excellent, but I was particularly struck by this entry mulling over historical memory among the Romans in the context of Cicero trying to track down a historical fact: the name of the ten commissioners who settled affairs for Rome in Greece after 146.
Finally, a ‘head’s up’ so to speak, but we’ve got a new edition and translation of the Babylonian creation epic the Enuma Elish coming later this year and not only are physical copies actually kind of affordable, the book will be open access online!
And of course a book recommendation. This week, now that I’ve finally finished it, I want to recommend Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006). As the title suggests, this is a history of the economy of Nazi Germany from 1933 to its destruction in 1945, though I think the title might perhaps have been a bit clearer as the ‘making and breaking of the Nazi war economy’ but we’ll come to that. Naturally, this involves discussing some of the most horrific Nazi policies – the intentional starvation of Eastern Europe, the use of slave labor, the Holocaust and so on – though Tooze does so in a largely clinical, economic way (with the occasional digression to make clear he does, in fact, think these things are horrible).
Tooze’s approach is chronological, walking the reader through the development of the Nazi economy in a set of distinct stages: an initial period of recovery that gives way to the armaments drive beginning in 1936, then the initial phase of the war to 1941 and finally the frantic effort to mobilize to match Soviet and American economic power following 1942. The collapse of that system in 1944-5 is also covered, but more as a coda, as Tooze already concludes that the economic war for Germany was effectively lost in 1942, even if the full effects wouldn’t be felt until 1943. That said, the focus on the Nazi economy is pointed: the is a history of key economic decision-makers in government and the impact of their decisions. That has the odd effect that Tooze’s attention shifts as theirs do: as the Nazis become singularly focused on armaments production at the expense of civilian production, so to does Tooze. Nazi atrocities are noted (and suitably condemned) but in so much as they interact with economic policy, which by the 1940s means armament policy. It is striking that the economic impact of all of this on the people in the interior of Hitler’s genocidal empire largely vanishes from the book after 1936.
As you might expect for a book of this scale (the core text runs 676 pages) Tooze has a bunch of different interventions (that is, points where he wants to revise the consensus) he wants to make, both large and small. On the larger side, Tooze wants to make a point of how economic considerations shaped Nazi strategy. The first third or so of the book is dedicated to making the case that effectively the Nazis began with a domestic economic vision and an armaments vision both deeply rooted in ideology, but that when they had the resources for only one, armaments won out – nearly all of the civilian economy recovery ends up as smoke. That armaments drive, in turn both succeeds and fails: on the one hand, as Tooze notes, Nazi Germany was more mobilized than any other capitalist peacetime state, possibly ever. On the other hand, by 1938, it was clear that the Nazi economy was ‘maxed out’ in raw materials and ability to import more while the re-armament programs of the other major powers – motivated by German re-armament and aggression – would soon eclipse what the German economy could accomplish, thus motivating Hitler’s decision to have the war in 1939 in a relatively narrow window of opportunity. The next part of the book then covers the distance to Barbarossa, which Tooze argues was motivated by similar concerns: the Nazis believed that the resources of Russia were the only way to develop an economy that could resist Britain and the United States in the long term. Finally, Tooze wants to take Speer’s armaments ‘miracle’ – mostly a product of focusing even more raw material on preferred categories – down a peg and does so, while at the same time noting that Speer was not – as he portrayed himself – a non-ideological technocrat, but was, like basically all senior Nazi leaders, especially post-1942, a deeply ideological Hitler-acolyte who stayed with the failing Nazi cause because he was a true believer.
Perhaps most of all, Tooze wants to push back against the picture, which had been dominant in the scholarship, that Nazi incompetence and under-mobilization had led to an inefficiently economically organized war effort, only rationalized later by Speer, too late to make a difference. Instead, Tooze argues that the Nazis mobilized to a high degree relatively early, but simply had no real hope of competing with the combined economies of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. The one thing that is understandably missing, of course, is the counter-factual only briefly alluded to in Tooze’s conclusion. The Nazis went to war in order to obtain vast territories in Europe which they believed held the resources necessary to enable an autarchic (self-sufficient) economy which would enable German prosperity and security. The irony (shared by Japan) is, of course, that Germany has achieved security and prosperity within its borders, post-1990, with the world’s third largest economy. Hitler chose war instead of trade for ideological reasons, but the degree to which trade has outperformed war for Germany is staggering.
Regardless, I think Tooze’s book is a useful read to get an insight into the economic dimensions of modern war, in which steel often matters as much as manpower.
- Instead, read J. Stieb’s book on it, recommended here.
I bought Wages a while back for Kindle, and I’m now looking forward to reading it as soon as I finish The Wrong Stuff (a fun history about the Soviet space program).
Even managed to become the dominant economy and country-in-terms-of-pan-European-policymaking in Europe from it! Granted, they did have to lose a big chunk of territory when Stalin decided to shift the borders of Poland to the west to get it, but it really is remarkable how the 1950s-1960s West German economic boom smoothed things over – they had to absorb a huge number of Germans expelled from other countries in Europe in the aftermath of the war.
Consider, as a counterfactual, Germany in its 1935 borders embracing the policies of the 1950s.
Depending on where you went to high-school, even the basic “the Third Reich’s economic plans were built entirely around stealing resources, slaves and food from Eastern Europe and the USSR, and practically nothing about the way things worked was actually efficient” may be news to you.
Tooze’s narrative is much more nuanced than “nothing was efficient”: if anything, he is pushing back against the idea that Nazi economic and industrial was inefficient until Speer came along, which is a popular narrative.
*Shrug*
That was my impression back when I read the book.
If you like Adam Tooze, I’d strongly recommend his weekly podcast, Ones and Tooze. He has some great episodes about all sorts of historical & economic topics, including a recent ep about the history of the Tour de France (including its original link to far-right/anti-Dreyfus politics) & an episode last November about the transformational impact of Napoleon Bonaparte (& how the Ridley Scott movie utterly fails to do justice to it). Links to these two:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ones-and-tooze/id1584397047?i=1000659742453
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ones-and-tooze/id1584397047?i=1000637167729
My youngest is ten and his sister is 25, and just in that ten-year gap I saw how much baby- and child-rearing technology had improved. It turned out the crib we kept our oldest in was no longer available because the type with the side you could lower is now considered unsafe!
That doesn’t prove improvement. It could as easily prove that bureaucrats are making life more expensive for parents by generating new regulations to justify their paychecks. What would be needed is evidence that fewer children die as a consequence of their cribs being the way they are.
This is a constant problem and can even be counterproductive. Playgrounds have had a big push toward safety. As a consequence, children do not find them a challenge and a place to develop their physical ability and courage. So they go off to find other places where they are challenged, which were not intended for play in the first place.
Let it be noted, a good part of the counterproductive emphasis on safety comes from trial lawyers and our judicial system, not bureaucrats. There is a lot of money to be made suing manufacturers of playground equipment; if a child falls out of a tree, the manufacturer is less vulnerable.
> As a consequence, children do not find them a challenge
Well, not when they’re being used for their intended use. When children are chasing each other (or willing adults like myself) around like maniacs, throwing balls and frisbees at each other in some sort of Calvinball-esque game, modern playgrounds can still be a lot of fun. 😉 And the over-engineering means that I, an adult, can grab pretty much anything and use it to suddenly redirect my entire body’s motion, and it still holds up!
Playgrounds have had a big push toward safety. As a consequence, children do not find them a challenge and a place to develop their physical ability and courage. So they go off to find other places where they are challenged, which were not intended for play in the first place.
This is the hysteresis model, right? Cars get safer so people drive more dangerously, and there’s no actual improvement in terms of how many people get killed. But has that actually happened with regard to child safety?
As far as I can tell, no – the CDC says that child death due to accidental injury in the US has dropped 30% in the last ten years. Now, most of that is children dying in car accidents (down 41%, incidentally; safer cars, better car seats).
But even excluding that, deaths due to falls are down 19%, which is going to be most playground deaths, I should think.
Deaths due to suffocation – and the CDC seems to think this is mostly happening in cribs – are up, 30%. So while I can’t find evidence that you’re right about playgrounds, it does seem likely that you’re right about cribs!
https://archive.cdc.gov/#/details?url=https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/childinjury/index.html
That can easily be improving medical techniques (we have more attempted murders and fewer murders because more gunshot victims are saved) and decrease in accidental deaths away from the playgrounds.
Sure, it *could* be. But is there any actual reason to suppose that there’s been a rise in child deaths and injuries due to play happening in non-playground areas, and that’s outweighing the decrease happening because playgrounds are safer, because fewer children are using playgrounds because they’re boring?
I’m not even sure where I’d look for that sort of information. Frankly I doubt it exists. You’d need really granular time use studies for children age 6-12 that break down “active play in designated playground” vs “active play elsewhere”. You’d need them to go back a few years, to show that kids were using playgrounds less.
And then you’d need really granular information from CDC showing the exact locations and circumstances of injuries and deaths – not just “in Riverside Park” but “in the playground in Riverside Park” vs “falling out of a tree in Riverside Park”.
The only information I’ve got is “kids are dying in falls less often than they used to”.
The empty playgrounds are, at the very least, a waste of resources that could be directed elsewhere.
Not seeing any empty playgrounds, to be honest. They’re all busy.
For child car accidents it may be back-up cameras also, as backing over kids is something that happens too often.
Come visit the playgrounds in Canberra – that city run by bureaucrats. Great, challenging, safe and swarming with kids (and often adults) any time the weather allows. Safety does not preclude fun or challenge.
The most mobilized capitalist economy ever is probably Paraguay from 1864-1870. Who had effectively mobilized every single piece fo land and human being towards the war effort, it was also facing consideravbly worse odds than even Nazi Germany and ended up about as well as it did.
> Meanwhile the last of the “Yugoslav Wars” ended in 2001
…with Boznia-Herzegovina becoming an independent state. But B-H has never controlled all its own territory, and the Serb-majority region known as Republika Serpska is allied to Serbia; that doesn’t look like a war that has ended, it looks like a war that is frozen. I can’t say whether the breakup of Czeckoslovakia was linked to the Yogoslav wars, but it sure looks like it to me. Several of the Yugoslav and Czeck remnants appear to be essentially fascist.
As a European, it seems to me to be rather polyannaish to claim that those wars are over.
A frozen conflict with no active military operations going on and no mass murdering of civilian population is definitely an improvement compared to the war that was.
And it seems to me that the situation in former Yugoslavia is not as bad as in other frozen conflicts like the one between North and South Korea.
So, the war is over … for now. Maybe Russia is trying to fan the flames of conflict again, we will see how successful they will be.
Eh, it depends on how you see “bad”. Sure, the conflict was ended in the sense that there are no active military operations going on, ie the killing has stopped, which is a massive improvement from before. But otherwise, the whole region is a pretty big mess. Not just Bosnia (although it’s the worst there): Croatian internal politics are dominated by the hostility against Serbs and unresolved border disputes, war cold cases, and semi-resolved restitution; similar in Serbia, with the addition of that other huge elephant in the room (Kosovo); in Montenegro, the society is becoming more and more split between the pro-Serbian and pro-European side…
And then there is of course Bosnia, which is a dysfunctional international protectorate that is barely independent.
“Frozen conflict” might not be the correct term, but the entire region (except Slovenia) is a huge tangle of semi-failed states that would collapse at the moment the big international players would look the other way (and have, in fact, been collapsing slowly ever since the wars ended).
Your problem is that you are an optimist and think the glass is half-empty because you think it should be full.
Pessimism is wiser. Once you learn that the natural state of the glass is empty, you can appreciate half-full, and better yet, realize it is not natural or spontaneous and so work to keep it half-full.
“I can’t say whether the breakup of Czeckoslovakia was linked to the Yogoslav wars, but it sure looks like it to me.”
No, I’m not aware of any connection at all between them. They happened around the same time; that’s it.
I think 2001 was Montenegro? Bosnia was independent from 1992 and the war there finished in 1996.
2001 was the ethnic Albanian insurgency in (North) Macedonia and is the last armed conflict in the region. Montenegro declared independence in 2006, but since there was never any armed conflict between Serbia and Montenegro, it makes sense to consider this not a part of the Yugoslav wars.
And no, there is no link whatsoever between the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Well, except that both were a part of the international “reshuffling” after the fall of communism in Europe, of course.
Ah yes, of course. Thanks.
The breakup of Czechoslovakia happened at the start of 1993, by splitting the Federative Republic (that was created following the 1989 revolutions and unwillingness of soon-to-be-former Warsaw Pact countries to militarily interfere with each other) resulted in exactly 2 remnants: Czech Republic and Slovakia. The transfer of power from Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was also peaceful (remarkably so considering e.g. Hungary) and wasn’t a breakup of any kind anyway.
This wasn’t linked to Yugoslav wars at all, since Yugoslavia was a significant outlier for a communist country in never joining the Warsaw Pact. Both had a common cause in the fall of USSR and transformation in power dynamics of the world towards USA as (temporarily) a sole world power, but no causal relationship directly between them.
The internal politics have been turbulent especially here in Slovakia, but there have been no military conflicts with our neighbours since (and same for Czechs). Neither state can be called “essentially fascist” unless you define fascism as “anyone I don’t like”. Mafia state would be a reasonable description, but that’s extremely far from fascism.
I’m not as familiar with the history of Yugoslavia’s breakup, but I don’t think any of its remnants could’ve been called fascist either, again unless you go for the same definition.
Car safety is really out of place on this list. It’s not in the category of something we stopped discussing because it hasn’t been fixed, it’s a problem the public at large hasn’t even started to understand.
Yes an individual passenger is more likely to survive a collision at a given speed, which is what the DOT wanted but using that metric is the exact problem, responsible for Americans dying at twice the rates of other countries. The way to win by this metric is to make cars bigger which makes them more dangerous to others while simultaneously making drivers less cautious. Then because the cars have gotten so big, more and more restrictions are placed on the movement of other modes of travel. This in turn creates more driving and results in the American roads killing people at 3rd world country rates.
The talk about car safety reminds me of the “controversy” about global warming a couple decades back. We know changes are needed but those changes piss some people off so instead we tinker with inoffensive details and wish for technology to magic away our problems. Problems we don’t discuss are still problems. Global warming wont destroy human civilization but people will die from heatwaves and droughts and more of them will die because we dragged our feet on fixing the problem. The US wont be destroyed by our broken definition of highway safety but it does mean tens of thousands of preventable deaths every year.
While I agree with most of the second paragraph in general, it does seem to ignore the possibility of safety improvements not directly resulting from ‘bigger cars’, which in turn seems like somewhere between ‘a stretch’ and outright ludicrous. Airbags, crumple zones, automatic braking, and the like have to be doing *something*, even if it’s counterbalanced to an indeterminate extent by the simultaneous trend toward bigger and heavier vehicles.
Generally, car safety improvements can do two things. If the driver can see them, what they do is cause people to drive more recklessly, because they figure it’s safer. If the driver can’t see them, they can actually improve safety.
(Why Things Bite Back by Edward Tenner. Good book.)
“Airbags, crumple zones, automatic braking, and the like have to be doing *something*”
Probably they do, and at least they don’t intrinsically make the car more dangerous for others the way that simply having a larger and heaver car do. But as Mary says, there’s a risk compensation effect, where people drive more recklessly because they feel more protected. (Hypothetical counterexample: driver has no seatbelt and there’s a sharp metal spike sticking out from the steering wheel; in what manner will they drive?)
At any rate US cars _are_ getting bigger, and airbags and such don’t help pedestrians who get hit; automatic braking might, I dunno, but at any rate _more_ pedestrians have been getting killed on US streets. “Cell phone distraction” isn’t a good explanation because the rest of the world has cell phones too. It’s debated whether “big vehicles” are that good an explanation either, given trends in Canada. Possibly the big problem is rising urban housing prices forcing more poor people (less likely to have a car) into run-down suburbs and exposing them to suburban arterials, which are the real death streets.
Yes, all of this is a much better way to talk about it. The productive trends and the counterproductive trends are both significant and they interact in nontrivial ways. It’s only when we consider all of these that we can begin to comprehend the system.
Of course real technological developments happen, but this doesn’t actually change the argument. As a matter of public policy decisions were still made which favored bigger, heavier vehicles, partially because of how safety tests and standards work, which operates somewhat independently from technological developments. If regulations create an economic incentive to produce better tech or bigger cars, then in practice companies will tend towards bigger cars because tech is expensive. This isn’t an economic truism and incentives could and do swing the other way, but it’s a truth of the American car economy.
The bigger point is that the road not traveled is to implement mass transit, which may be less safe in that if the transportation system catastrophically fails it’s more likely to kill *someone*, but is more safe because it both fails less often and transports more people.
For an example of this in action, by letting car manufacturers advertise the safety of their vehicles in a crash we’re effectively flipping the safety standards we use for aircraft. Large aircraft have some inherent safety risks compared to smaller ones, on a crash by crash basis. More fuel, momentum, runway space needed, etc. However small plane travel is among the most dangerous ways of traveling per mile in existence, while jets are incredibly safe per mile traveled.
If we let companies advertise planes to the public like cars(1), we’d see claims that 95% of travelers survived a particular small airplane crash type juxtaposed with examples of jumbo jets hitting the ground and bursting into flames or the Hindenburg burning up. Lost in that is the incidence rate and how many people are on board each craft; if small airplane crashes are 100000 times more likely per mile and fatal large airplane crashes often only kill a handful of people out of the total passenger count then small airplanes can still be more dangerous overall.
And, as it turns out, that’s not an exaggeration of the magnitudes involved. Private planes are 1000-10000 times more dangerous per mile per passenger than commercial jets.
For cars and trucks versus trains and buses, trains and buses are merely 10-60 times safer per passenger mile. Ignoring non-passenger fatalities, which severely hurt cars and trucks on net in most places.
1 actually, more like if we trusted the advertisements uncritically. You’ll find those statistics in shareholder meetings and trade shows, but any basic flight school will disabuse you of the notion flying a private airplane is safe.
“The bigger point is that the road not traveled is to implement mass transit”
Without trying to sound unduly nostalgic, the United States of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the world leaders in mass transit. Much as peer countries elsewhere did at the same time, the US built most of the currently extant parts of the NY, Boston, Chicago, etc. heavy rail systems, as well as streetcar networks in most cities.
And yes, most peer countries did later make some degree of a turn toward cars (and within transit, from trams to buses). In the US, this turn was “merely” much more total.
Which is a reflection of certain public policies favoring cars, both explicitly and implicitly. I can’t really speak to the specifics of the explicit part, it’s been too long, besides to parrot the conclusion that certain aspects of 20-50’s highway construction, tax codes, and labor laws were written to favor the politically valuable car industry.
Implicitly one of the biggest factors in the ubiquity of cars in the united states is urban flight, which was based on the joint desires of racist urbanites to get away from black people and racist political agents to starve black facing public services of funding. The combination of these factors was that white only suburbs were built which required transit to reach productive city centers, and this transit was either segregated or individualistic.
How this jives with a global movement towards cars is less clear, but I suspect it’s the same story-the upper class wanted to get away from the lower class, and either intentionally or incidentally starved lower class transit of funding. It’s just that their classes may or may not have been race segregated.
I think the global movement toward cars (and incidentally air travel) has some economic-fundamentals component to it. In the very early 20th c. transit and bicycles are king, because they require the least machinery per passenger. Then as productivity/industrial growth happens and makes capital cheaper, cars become a viable proposition. (Note that the famous model T is basically a golf cart. Somehow the first world jumped over mopeds and was too organized for private van-bus-taxis, but these two are ubiquituous in the third world today.)
In parallel, transit in particular has problems with lagging labor productivity. If you last reinvented how to lay and maintain track in 1910, but it’s now 1950, that hurts. There’s a “fair” component to cars winning more in the contest for streetspace. (There are also “unfair” components. Obviously headbutting vs. bikes/mopeds. Less well known is the one vs. transit: cars actively make transit slower, less frequent and less predictable. If you have a fixed cost, i.e. a fixed number of vehicles circulating on a route, then cars getting in the way and particularly forming traffic jams causes service to degrade.)
And so yes, outside cities where transit was sufficiently established that it would have broken the city to remove it, upper(-middle) class “windshield perspective” — I can easily afford a car, surely everyone can — overcorrects toward automobilizing cities. (There’s a hilarious tangent here, namely that to basically make the population more survivable against nuclear attack of a fixed size, governments supposedly intentionally encouraged suburbanization. If they stab a motorway into the heart of the city, it will bleed suburbs. Though when they do this with rapid transit or commuter railways, I consider that good — bringing down land costs is good for people who want rents and home prices to be lower.)
My confusion is that all of these factors were shared between the US and other first-world countries. All had influential auto industries, etc. And I was hoping for a more palatable difference than “people were trying to escape that ’60s-’90s crime wave which didn’t exist elsewhere to any similar degree”.
“the global movement toward cars (and incidentally air travel) has some economic-fundamentals component to it”
_some_, yes. Cars provide neat new capability, and it seems to make sense to accommodate for that, especially if you don’t account for all the negative externalities (pollution, noise, deaths) which no one did.
OTOH, it’s also odd. I’d think that economic-fundamentals would lead to more investment by poor places in not just transit but bikes, as much cheaper, yet the only place where I know that was explicitly the case was Copenhagen, where some past leaders say “we built for bikes after WWII because we couldn’t afford cars”. Even poorer places like Mexico City are choked with cars and not friendly to bikes. So I suspect there are other ‘fundamentals’ at play, like what elites wanted (cars) and valued (not the lives of people on bikes.)
(This might be a place where someone can say “countries that can make rational economic investments don’t stay poor.”)
There’s also the Dutch, who _were_ going all-in on cars, until they reversed course in the 1970s due to all the children being killed, and a collective decision that maybe they should try to make safer streets rather than keeping kids at home. So yeah, economic-fundamentals or something added cars to their society (where they still are; hardly a car-free society), but fundamentals of valuing lives and equity amended _how_ cars were being added. Probably with some help, but not determinism, from geography. (Japan is also a fairly high-bike society, with much more mountains and nastier weather; one could fairly compare Tokyo and Atlanta in climate.)
US leadership in mass transit before the automobile is essentially tied to US leadership in automobiles.
They are aspects of the same underlying phenomenon
“Private planes are 1000-10000 times more dangerous per mile per passenger than commercial jets.”
I’m shocked that the difference is that large. What makes private planes so dangerous?
I don’t know if that factor is accurate, and wikipedia contradicts it, but I can make a few guesses in general:
Less experienced pilots, often basically hobbyists. Relatedly, maybe less maintenance/inspection of the planes, and less redundancy/safety equipment in plane design. Perhaps more reckless flying.
Shorter trips: most of the danger of plane flight is in take off and landing, so making 6 1-hour flights is a lot more dangerous than 1 6-hour flight.
As for numbers, wiki says
> According to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, general aviation in the United States (excluding charter) suffered 1.31 fatal accidents for every 100,000 hours of flying in 2005, compared to 0.016 for scheduled airline flights.[9] In Canada, recreational flying accounted for 0.7 fatal accidents for every 1000 aircraft, while air taxi accounted for 1.1 fatal accidents for every 100,000 hours.
Those US numbers make general aviation 81x more dangerous, not 1000x.
Well, oops, my quote is per hour, while the original claim was per mile. General aviation is also slower than jetliners, so will spend more time traversing a set number of miles, which will boost the risk factor per mile even more, though I doubt by 10x. All that said, I question whether “per mile” is the most relevant safety metric.
AOPA says ‘Some 75 percent of GA accidents still involve some type of pilot mistake.’
Thank you! Also the drivers of these bemouth vehicles can’t even see smaller vehicles, and certainly not human beings. Their lights are also now in high position and blind people driving smaller vehicles and pedestrians. Pedestrian deaths are increasing — not only from being hit, by by being hit by much heavier, and less responsive vehicles, making their injuries more severe, and the likelihood of the injury being fatal far higher than it was previously.
They’re not just heavier, they do more blunt force trauma in more sensitive areas.
A sedan hits you around your hips. That’s easier to survive than an SUV hitting you in the chest.
Oh, the lights! The lights on SUV’s perfectly encapsulate the insanity with our cars. Many decades ago lawmakers regulated them on the input electricity instead of the output light because that was easier to measure. Lights became more efficient which could have been an unmitigated good but instead men insecure about their virilitas to legally make their lights blindingly light and at an offensive height in order to legally harass complete strangers.
The way to win by this metric is to make cars bigger which makes them more dangerous to others while simultaneously making drivers less cautious. Then because the cars have gotten so big, more and more restrictions are placed on the movement of other modes of travel. This in turn creates more driving and results in the American roads killing people at 3rd world country rates.
I love to cite this to people because I think it’s a great example of how choices that are rational (or ‘rational’) at an individual level can end up with everyone worse off. The way out, of course, is for the state to restrict or regulate how big the cars can get.
I don’t particularly cite this situation to prove points about other things, but regulations are a major cause of this mess.
– Minimum parking requirements. You must pay for the cost of several parking spots (at home and at various office/shopping/etc. destinations) even if you never end up using them.
– Zoning, both in strictly separating uses and in putting low limits on maximum usage intensity. The increased distances make alternatives to the car unattractive to use.
– US standards for lane width are excessive.
– SUVs are largely a result of regulation (the CAFE standards).
Yeah, well, I’ve heard from people living near places without minimum parking requirements. They complain of people living there literally parking in front of other people’s driveways.
Telling people they can’t park here is not going to prevent their having cars.
Sounds like a law enforcement problem.
And aren’t you usually skeptical of government intervention and planning?
Japan has a nice policy combination. No curbside parking, minimal parking mandates in terms of what buildings have to provide, but to _buy_ a car you have to prove that you have a place to park it, whether a place at home or a leased garage space.
Try arguing my point and not with the views you impute to me.
No. Have consistent beliefs. Or we’re just going to assume your real faith is in hypocrisy.
Your inability to find consistency in my beliefs is a you problem.
Especially since when the “mandatory parking” is held out as something that *causes* car ownership, pointing out that eliminating it demonstrates it’s not so is not even a belief.
There’s certainly a lot of room for improvement but it seems pretty objectively true that traffic deaths per capita have gone down substantially.
It’s not objectively true, they are on the way up again. And they **should** be going down because the rates have gone way down in other countries.
“Yes an individual passenger is more likely to survive a collision at a given speed, which is what the DOT wanted but using that metric is the exact problem, responsible for Americans dying at twice the rates of other countries. The way to win by this metric is to make cars bigger which makes them more dangerous to others while simultaneously making drivers less cautious. Then because the cars have gotten so big, more and more restrictions are placed on the movement of other modes of travel. This in turn creates more driving and results in the American roads killing people at 3rd world country rates.”
Serious question: has someone looked into this rigorously? Are Americans killed in road accidents more often than Europeans because the vehicles are bigger, or could there be another reason? Anecdotally, drunk driving seems to be much more accepted in the US, and driving tests are much easier – those might have something to do with it?
It doesn’t seem to be the case that more Americans die on the roads simply because Americans drive more. The US is also near the top of the list of deaths per billion passenger-km https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
“has someone looked into this rigorously”
Lots of people have looked into it, but I’m not sure it coalesces to “we definitely know why”. Also, the basic facts have changed over time: a few decades ago, the US was middle of the pack in road safety. But western Europe and Canada improved safety faster than the US did and now we’re back of the pack, even before we started becoming more dangerous (rather than “safer but not as quickly”.)
Also, it can vary a lot within the US; Massachusetts has 1/3 the death-per-vehicle-mile rate of South Carolina. (And if you look at per capita or even per driver, the worst/best ratio is 4.6)
A big difference is speed. US will have higher speed limits within developed areas and lower use of speed cameras (which seem popular in Canada but anathema in the US). Faster cars = deadlier cars. Much of the world has been working at lowering speeds, not just posted speed limits but the actual design of streets.
Another one is modern roundabouts. Increasingly, many places use intersection design that naturally slows traffic while preventing the kind of left turn or U-turn that often leads to deadly T-bone crashes, and _also_ often making traffic move more smoothly. But roundabouts are still strange and exotic in the US, regarded with fear and doubt.
Related is pedestrian-friendly design. Are there even sidewalks? In the US, often “no”. Are crosswalks frequent enough to avoid people being tempted to jaywalk across a busy stroad? Again, “no”. Do intersections protect pedestrians or endanger them by optimizing for fast cars? Rounded corners for fast turns, and no pedestrian refuge on a 6 lane stroad, are a lot different than square corners or bulb-outs to slow turning cars, and median refuges. And as I may have already mentioned, housing prices are pushing carless poor people from safe cities into dangerous suburbs, so more people are trying to walk along or cross deadly arterial stroads.
And also, how good are the drivers? Very relatedly: do bad drivers have a realistic option to not drive? Many other countries are more stringent in their driving exams, which they can afford to be because it’s not a social and economic death sentence to not have your license. And people who technically can drive but don’t feel good at it can choose not to. Americans who attack alternatives to driving don’t seem to realize they’re condemning themselves to sharing the road with bad drivers.
Thank you for that exhaustive reply – lots of really interesting points!
And you start off by making the useful observation that we should not be asking “why are US roads more dangerous than roads elsewhere” but two other questions instead: “why didn’t US roads get safer over the last 30 (say) years as fast as roads elsewhere got safer” and “why have US roads actually got more dangerous again”.
Speeding might be part of it – US roads seem generally to be designed so that it’s practical to drive at least at the speed limit all the way along them. Which obviously means that you can speed on them. Roads in the UK aren’t. A two-lane road in the countryside will have a limit, by law, of 60mph, but it will very often be either obviously unsafe or impossible to drive along it at that speed unless you’re Kimi Raikonnen. So it’s not just that our new roads are designed to be slow, our old roads are, willy nilly, slow as well.
One quibble, though:
“Very relatedly: do bad drivers have a realistic option to not drive? Many other countries are more stringent in their driving exams, which they can afford to be because it’s not a social and economic death sentence to not have your license.”
But being a bad driver isn’t an inherent condition like being red-haired or being six feet tall.
And in a lot of parts of Europe and even of the UK it is also essentially impossible to live independently if you can’t drive. There are towns near me that have no railway station and two buses a day *to anywhere*. You drive, or you have someone to drive you: that’s it. As a result, the disparity between Europe and the US isn’t that great in terms of learning to drive. Most European countries have around 80% of eligible adults with driving licences – in the US it’s 91%.
I’d conclude from that that having stricter driving tests doesn’t mean you have fewer drivers on the road because none of the bad drivers pass. It means you have fewer bad drivers on the road because they practice until they stop being bad. Having better public transport may mean that some people don’t bother learning to drive at all – certainly we, especially Londoners, tend to learn *later* than Americans do – but it also, much more commonly, means that people who can drive, drive less.
“being a bad driver isn’t an inherent condition”
Depends. Some of it is easily teachable skill, but some people get stress and anxiety about driving that isn’t so easily countered. And some people do have inherent handicaps, for medical reasons or simple age. There’s also being temporarily a bad driver, due to being drunk or sleep deprived or sick.
So there’s an effect from having the option to live without a car at all, or having the option to skip driving _today_.
Also, I’ve seen it said that having to e.g. make a left turn across multiple-lanes of high speed traffic is very cognitively demanding compared to using a 1-lane roundabout. In which case, the US not only requires driving more, it’s requiring more _challenging_ driving out of potentially elderly or sleep-deprived drivers.
“in a lot of parts of Europe and even of the UK it is also”
True… but to my limited ability to tell, the proportions are different. I once did a poll on a forum, about having a car and feeling a need for a car. 83% of the Americans said they needed a car; 38% of the non-Americans (mostly a mix of Canadians and western Europeans) said they did. 82% of the Americans said they had a car, 45% of the non-Americans said they did.
Yeah, lots of people have licenses, or even own cars, to have the option of driving, but that’s different from needing to. Plus the difference in how _much_ one needs to drive, as you allude to.
One time I very crudely added up the populations of major cities that I knew have decent degrees of walkability and transit. I got 14% of Canada’s population, but 5% of US’s population. I wouldn’t put any trust in the exact numbers but I think the ratio is indicative. However many car-free places there might be, there are proportionally more people living in them outside the US.
There’s also a degree of ‘need’. In some cities, a car may actually be a worse way of getting around, at least inside the city, and adds little to your life other than cost. In a western suburb of Sydney I stayed in, a car would definitely add to your mobility options, but living car-free was _possible_: there was frequent (10-15 minute) train service downtown, there were supermarkets near the train station. You might have fewer jobs and social options than a driver, but you still had some.
While in a similarly far out US suburb, you’d likely be entirely trapped without a car. No food, no job. Or else dependent on some bus that might come by once an hour.
“It means you have fewer bad drivers on the road because they practice until they stop being bad”
That too. And I don’t want to insist on the “eliminate bad drivers” point. OTOH, letting the worst 10% of potential drivers not drive does seem like it could be a big deal — they’d be expected to be the ones most likely to get into crashes, after all.
Made up example:
If 20% of Americans can live driving, and 50% of British can, then that’s still a lot of Brits where bad drivers have the option of doing something else, even if the _other_ 50% are still forced behind the wheel. Which should mean lower death rates, in addition to the effects of slower speeds, narrower streets[1], better intersections, etc.
[1] Oh yeah, that’s another difference. The US seems to have liked wider streets even before cars came along, and designing newer streets to have curbside parking made them even wider. More lanes and wider lanes, meaning higher speeds, more passing (thus risk), and more time (thus risk) crossing a street.
“One time I very crudely added up the populations of major cities that I knew have decent degrees of walkability and transit. I got 14% of Canada’s population, but 5% of US’s population.”
That’s a terribly noisy judgement because mobility varies enormously within cities. Canada has extremely similar problems to the US so a good metric would probably show them to be very similar.
“a terribly noisy judgement because mobility varies enormously within cities”
It is very noisy! But I assumed that variation would be similar between US and Canadian cities. Again, the idea wasn’t so much to actually define how many people live in “walkable” areas but to gauge the proportions. And there would be better approaches, but that one suited how much effort I was willing to put in (and how much GIS I know: none.)
“Canada has extremely similar problems to the US”
No it doesn’t, since we were talking about traffic deaths. Checking wikipedia’s lists, the US has 12.9 deaths per 100,000 people and 8.3 per billion vehicle-km. Canada is 5.3 and 5.1 60% of the deaths per vehicle-km and 40% of the deaths per capita. France is 5.0 and 5.8; Netherlands 3.8 and 4.7; Australia 4.5 and 4.9; Germany 3.7 and 4.2.
So in this, Canada is much closer to many other countries than it is to the US, which stands out, tied with Mexico in deaths per capita. The next rich countries are a surprising Taiwan (12.1, though footnoted with “non-harmonized figure”, also Taiwan uses motorbikes a lot, which are dangerous), then New Zealand and 7.8; all of Europe is 7.4. So Canada and the US are on opposite sides of “Europe”.
In deaths per distance the US is less extreme (out of a very limited data set), but still definitely high for a rich country, while Canada’s 5.1 is closer to the best entry (Norway at 3.0)
So Canadian driving is notably safer than the US, _and_ there seems to be a lot less driving, period.
It’d be nice to directly look up distance driven, but that’s surprisingly hard. OTOH OurWorldInData says, for “Share of the urban population who can access a public transport stop within a walking distance of 500 meters (for low-capacity public transport systems) or 1000 meters (for high-capacity public transport systems).”, 58.9% US and 72.9% Canada. (One then wonders how many people were considered “urban” in each country.) Also, 867 vehicles per 1000 people US, 670 Canada — or to reverse the numbers, Canada has 2.48x as many people for whom there isn’t a vehicle (330 vs. 133).
And various urbanists have said that Canadian cities have much higher transit ridership than similar US cities, helped by much better off-peak frequencies. The four busiest metro systems in US+Canada are NYC, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, ahead of DC, Chicago, and Boston. With stark differences: “Montreal saw an average weekday ridership of just over 900,000, while Toronto saw over 850,000. Vancouver averaged at 400,000, Washington, DC saw over 350,000”
The way to win by this metric is to make cars bigger
This is just not correct. I suspect you’re conflating two different things, the fact that safety regulations in the US do not take into consideration, safety for people outside the car (mostly pedestrians and bicyclists, but also people in other cars), with the tendency for automobile manufacturers to prefer to market large vehicles, mostly for profit margin reasons.
The number one injury causing accident is a single car colliding with an immobile object (usually a tree or telephone pole). Physics being what it is, and all other things being equal (that is, all other safety features being equal), you are less likely to have single car collisions in a smaller car (because less weight means smaller cars are easier to stop), and resulting injuries from such accidents are less harmful in smaller cars (for the same reason — it’s easier to slow down lighter cars). Crumple zone technologies, air bags, and automatic breaking don’t care if your car is big or small; indeed, the largest SUVs are actually too large to effectively implement crumple zone technology and are therefore more dangerous to occupants than smaller cars.
Manufacturers like to market larger cars because it’s easier to present them as “premium” vehicles, aimed at the higher end of the market where people are willing to pay more (even eager to pay more, since they are more likely to view their car as a status symbol). This means that you’re more likely to find advanced safety features in larger vehicles than in small sedans, which are usually marketed to the lower end of the automobile market. This fact impacts safety statistics, but small cars with the full suite of safety features are as safe or safer than large cars.
I’m curious whether you think the question of “what percent of GDP should the US spend on defense for the foreseeable future” is a good question to debate. That is, is that the right framing?
I can’t say what our illustrious blog host thinks. However, I think this that framing gets it backwards. You need to decided on the capabilities you need from the threats faced, and then build to meet that challenge. Although, there are about a million twists on that question, including that it’s often easier to keep momentum than build it, but also that you don’t want to devote resources to military spending if they eat away at your economic base, and the impact of alliances, etc.
Also, you can basically *never* have enough resources to feel totally secure. There will be threats you have to manage with diplomacy, or a mix of military and diplomacy. You may need to do that with all the threats you face to some degree.
personally i think that before we in the US decide on any sort of guidelines to the money numbers for defense, we need to do an audit of what we’re currently actually spending, what we’re spending it on, and where it is actually going. because *we’ve never done one* the military has spent basically 200 some years being a black box where money goes in one side and a military comes out the other side, with minimal external oversight. yes the military has its own internal affairs for such things but they tend to be “little picture” affairs focused on specific programs and incidents, and they’re not really concerned with big picture issues like how much money is being wasted on management empire building or layers of internal bureaucracy.
We ought to audit the entire government and start firing civil servants when they can’t account for money.
The failure to account for the money is by design.
Roughly 100 years ago, people decided that the government needed to root out corruption by introducing all kinds of objective metrics. The problem is that so many things in life aren’t objective and organizations can’t create a variance for every one of them. They should have loosened up the objectivity but voters like that in principle. So instead they gradually accumulated the regulatory loopholes where things weren’t accountable so that they could be subjective again. As information technology has improved the ability to be objective in counterproductive ways, the need to evade accountability to get anything done intensified. And so here we are.
You can see a similar process in big companies. A glaring example is the way that job listings often are for jobs that dont exist or aren’t actually publicly hiring and when they are they bear no resemblance to the actual position. If you actually want to vet potential knowledge workers effectively the only thing to do is let other knowledge workers make the judgement however they please. But that process is rife with favoritism (as shown by what happens in academia where things are more like that) which companies dont want. So instead we get a system where a bunch of people are all doing their jobs but the process is completely broken. The only difference in my experience is that with companies the rules are still loose enough that you only need to break the spirit of the regulations to get things done while in the government you need to technically break the letter of the regulation.
At some point or another there is no substitute for human judgement, a fact we ignore at our peril.
No. There is no excuse for not being able to explain why you were given a large sum of money that is now gone and being utterly unable to explain where it’s gone.
“No. There is no excuse for not being able to explain why you were given a large sum of money that is now gone and being utterly unable to explain where it’s gone.”
Okay, so in your view there is no excuse for every single government, corporation, university and small business in America.
Nice brazen lie there.
And there you go again, lashing out when proven to be a hypocrite. Happen to you a lot, Mary?
You should lie down until you are feeling better.
I suspect the military is *much* better audited than the rest of the government.
Among other things, at some point that equipment and those soldiers actually go up against an opposing force. Forces that don’t for a long time tend not to perform so well, so there is a decay effect.
Pretty much everything else in government spending has *no* competitors against which it’s measured. If there’s a decay effect for the military (which occasionally gets competition), how much worse must it be for those parts where there is no measuring stick?
There’s some pretty well known “issues” with auditing the military. Partially in that auditing some of the more sensitive projects is a non-trivial thing wrt security, partially just that military procurement is a massive mess, where “the military actually needs more precise standards for everyday goods” and “it’s just a way to essentially funnel money to certain providers” intersects in complicated ways.
the defense budget is, without a doubt, the most scrutinized aspect of US federal government spending. this does not mean that it’s well scrutinized, US government accounting standards are universally atrocious and would frequently be illegal for any non-government entity, but the DOD is the best of a bad bunch.
Post gold-standard, pegging government expenditures to government income or a proxy of it is always wrong. It may be possible to determine an optimal share of total government expenditures for a given task, but even that is probably just busywork.
The way to find the technocratically correct amount of spending is to have a dynamic system that tracks outcomes-per-unit of expenditure and slows spending increases at points of significant diminishing returns. Budget solvency can be maintained by minting new currency, and inflation from minting new currency can be controlled by taxation, but both can also be managed by a dynamic system once the currency supply is not tied to hard metal.
It sounds like you’ve been listening to MMTers, with all that talk about printing money and controlling inflation through taxation.
For the record, when governments spend money what they are doing is transferring real resources like oil, steel and labor from private purposes to government purposes. Taxation is one way of doing that, inflation another and direct requisition a third. Taxation can be in kind or in money, taxing in money is often convenient as it has low transport costs. But the objective is the transfer of real resources, not the money itself.
That’s actually not a given. Sure, at some point taxation and spending interact with the economy of labor and materials, but a lot of the economy is just based on keeping money flowing. In a very real sense transferring money so that people will spend it is the goal, because the actual goal is to incite economic activity. Monetary policy is designed to manipulate people (in a value neutral sense, mostly) to do things for each other. It does this via currency, which is a tender that can be used to basically justify your place in society and right to goods. But if there’s already enough stuff in the economy then the concern of government isn’t to encourage production, but circulation. To keep enough money moving that everyone can justify their existence to each other, and get a portion of goods in exchange for services.
It’s not like the USA economy has been resource locked since arguably the oil crisis. Even COVID just slowed circulation, goods still existed in sufficient amounts.
My point is that even if the government needed nothing there’d still be a point in taxing income and paying people to do things, just because that’s one of the ways money is given value as currency and a way to ensure it’s kept circulating smoothly.
The question isn’t if this is a real effect and policy goal, but rather if it’s a significant driver of economic forces compared to supply limitations and price forcing. That depends a lot on what the economy is doing, but I’ve seen a lot to suggest that our economy is massively underutilized, in direct contrast to the oil crisis, where there wasn’t much industrial slack in the economy and hence “mainstream” economic theories dominated.
GDP, the most widely available measure of macroeconomic activity, is literally a measure of goods and services (that’s the “product” part of the name). We only measure it in $ (or £ or drachma or whatever) because that’s the only way we have of aggregating all the different goods and services.
It would be nice to believe that we lived in an economy where we had all the products we want, but that doesn’t make it true.
You’re engaging with economic analysis on a shallow level, not to be accusatory. This is ultimately an expression of the value paradox, but let’s slow build. To attempt to construct an argument based on shared facts, let’s look at war.
Historically it was relatively easy for countries like the US to increase military production by orders of magnitude if the government simply ordered it, without completely crashing civilian production, leading to massive GDP jumps during wartime. But peoples lives, the number of civilian goods and overall economic production in the economy, doesn’t just magically increase. What’s actually happening is that a lot of easily consumable goods are being produced, whose nominal value might be relatively high. A lot of stuff get’s churned out, but the need it’s satisfying isn’t for actual human development.
In other words; Broken windows fallacy. Breaking windows can increase GDP, but decreases real development and wealth.
As a more mundane example, producing 100 plastic straws per person a year would almost certainly show up as a higher GDP than producing 1 metal one a decade. Yet a society where everyone carried a metal straw would be superior in all sorts of metrics over one where we produced a thousand disposable plastic straws, and the need of people to drink through straws is still sastified.
Because GDP measures production and consumption of goods and services, not the real value generated by consuming or producing them, it’s an imperfect tool of economic analysis. Hence why simplifying the economy to “line go up” is shallow; who is benefiting, where that production is going, is more important because that’s what we, as citizens, care about.
Besides…By that logic, the government can absolutely pay people to do random shit. That increases GDP. Digging holes is a service, as is another person filling them. Nothing *happens*, nothing of value is produced, but services were provided. For another historical example, Mao ordered the production of a shit ton of steel by peasants who couldn’t actually make steel (not just ignorance, tools and resources mattered too). Strictly speaking a lot of metal was produced, but most was worthless. Is that product for GDP? How do you measure it? Economic activity happened, but did it have value?
@dcmorinmorinmorin, on both occasions here that I’ve criticised your claims, you’ve responded not by defending your earlier claim nor by asking questions but by making a new set of claims, of no better quality than your first set.
Re read usernames on this thread and try again? You’ve responded once with a spurious argument. I explained why it’s incorrect. My point isn’t the original guys point, but subtly different and builds on it, because I believe different things. Not that this actually matters, if I was the same person you’d still be off base.
I’m also not trying to debate you. If my argument changes, you might have changed my mind.
To writ: you’ve identified MMT, said that government spending is constrained by the real economy, and responded to the criticism that the economy isn’t resource or production constrained by pointing out that GDP measures total production and asserting that this proves it is.
The first is an applicable framework but not new information, the second is a good comment that’s been addressed, and the third is spurious because, as stated, GDP is an imperfect measurement in precisely the ways were actively discussing. If you don’t have something else to say then we’re back at “the influence of monetary policy can be decoupled from the real economy”, which supports not treating government spending as a simple allocation of resources.
Apologies for misremembering the user name.
Okay earlier you said “but Apologies for misremembering the user name.
Okay earlier you said “but a lot of the economy is just based on keeping money flowing”. You offered no evidence nor argument for this assertion. The most common measure of “the economy” is GDP which measures not money but the production of goods and services such as barrels of oil, military defence, video games, healthcare and books about Roman military history. Another, slightly less common, measure of the economy is national income, which for nearly all large economies is very similar to GDP, the exception is Ireland.”. You offered no evidence nor argument for this assertion. The most common measure of “the economy” is GDP which measures not money but the production of goods and services such as barrels of oil, military defence, video games, healthcare and books about Roman military history. Another, slightly less common, measure of the economy is national income, which for nearly all large economies is very similar to GDP, the exception is Ireland, where GDP is substantially higher than national income due to multinationals locating there.
You may of course have some personal definition of economic activity which includes a lot of activity just based on keeping the money flowing, but if that’s so important to policymakers, why aren’t they funding statistics measuring *that* instead of GDP or national income?
And then you go on to repeat the broken window criticism of GDP, and digging holes to refill them in again. This misses that in reality, if my window is unbroken I get to do something else with the money I would have spent on repairs, which likely would have contributed to GDP. And it also misses that in a market economy people seldom pay people to dig holes only to fill them in again.
Yes, broken windows is a fallacy, it doesn’t make value, but the money spent on broken windows is counted in GDP. And while it’s not good for you to break your windows, it’s good for a window repair company.
And yes, let’s acknowledge that companies which go around literally breaking windows so you can pay them to fix them aren’t common, outside of the Mafia. But this type of activity, including socially draining work which accumulates wealth for certain people at the expense of society, isn’t uncommon. See Health Insurance. Or tax consultants. Or people literally being paid to tell prisoners to dig holes so the next shift can fill them. And people being paid to imprison people on false charges. Etc.
Those industries should not exist and merely extract money from the population, but represent a bloating of GDP because they provide a service. That service doesn’t need to exist, but it counts.
Point being, GDP is a weak measurement in a way that matters here. It fails to account for how needs match production, which can make increased consumption look like a higher GDP when it’s not making anything better.
As for why it’s the only one still used, it’s because its simple, its got impetus behind it, and most importantly, its not. Human Development Indexes, Gross Progress Indicator, Gross National Happiness, Social Progress Index, etc. all exist. Some are more controversial than others but the general theme is to try to constrain externalities like spurious consumption or environmental degradation by measuring how happiness, satisfaction, infrastructure, health, etc. are changing as well.
And these tools are used in policy decisions by governments, local to federal. GDP is just a first pass. It’s hardly worthless, but it’s known that it’s not the full story among responsible decision makers.
@dcmorinmorinmorin – your earlier claim was that “a lot of the economy is just based on keeping money flowing” and “the concern of government isn’t to encourage production, but circulation”.
Again, if this is the concern of the government, why isn’t it collecting statistics on that basis, instead of GDP, which is a measure of goods and services?
None of those other indicators you mention are measures of “keeping money flowing” or the circulation of money either.
I reckon the answer is simple – the reason governments and international organisations like the World Bank are producing measures like GDP, the HDI, happiness indicators etc, is because those measures are what they are interested in, and you are wrong in your assertion about government interests.
“It’s not like the USA economy has been resource locked since arguably the oil crisis. Even COVID just slowed circulation, goods still existed in sufficient amounts.”
You never heard of supply chain issues? There were definitely resource constraints during COVID. At my work facility we had doors and elevators that weren’t fixed for over 6 months because the facilities claimed they couldn’t get parts. And also, basic research supplies like pipette tips were in short supply.
A shortage of tiny pipette tips is creating huge problems for science (statnews.com)
“My point is that even if the government needed nothing there’d still be a point in taxing income and paying people to do things, just because that’s one of the ways money is given value as currency and a way to ensure it’s kept circulating smoothly.”
Taxing income to just to pay people so that money circulates is the broken window fallacy which you condemned another reader for using. Income means money is already circulating and taxing it so that people get less income for the amount of work they are performing reduces economic activity unless the taxed money is producing offsetting benefits. You listed tax consultants as something that shouldn’t exist, but that is indirectly government taxing income and paying the tax consultant because the government needed nothing.
Ah, but that isn’t necessary for my point Tracey. It’s hard to measure how money is flowing in a macroeconomics sense, but it’s the tool the government pushes on, not the end goal. The actual end goal are the measures, like development, GDP, poverty, happiness, etc., but the existence of multiple ones validates that an overly simplistic view of government spending as just resource allocation is fully incorrect; GDP estimates that and it’s not the only measure governments track to determine monetary policy. Just the most mainstream.
Abystander: supply chain shortages are logistics and timing based in most fields. Your right that certain goods remain limited, but that’s because they are specifically difficult to make. Rockets capable of going to Mars are supply limited, but that doesn’t mean the economy is.
The fact that even with a massive lockdown supplies were largely available actually proves my point. A lot of production stopped or changed, and people just had issues getting toilet paper, not sustenance. In America, mind you, not everywhere.
That’s about as hard a check on how much give is in the economy as is possible without mobilization for war or a complete economic collapse.
And the problem with the broken windows fallacy is that the money is being spent on a satisfied need. The key to this view of economic policy is that you’re right…if we’re talking about a flat tax. But add inequality and progressive taxation into the mix, and moving money around helps some people satisfy needs more efficiently without hurting others, leading to less conspicuous consumption and more rational spending.
In essence, spending on the poor becomes an investment. Among many mechanisms they get more time to make long term self investments, but it also just keeps people from starving to death or turning to economically destructive ends instead. This isn’t resource production, it’s giving people money to spend on goods that already existed but which they were being denied access. It’s resource circulation.
The other key is that the reason tax consultants are a scam is because the government does their job, then pays them to do it. If the government just paid them for nothing it’d be more rational; they’d be able to spend time producing something that isn’t redundant. I’m not advocating that because they’ve effectively robbed the public for generations, fuck them in particular, but it’s purely redundant.
@dcmorinmorinmorin, can I take it from this that you now disagree with your earlier assertions that “a lot of the economy is just based on keeping money flowing” and “the concern of government isn’t to encourage production, but circulation”?
No, my statements don’t contradict that.
@dcmorinmorinmorin, your statements have never supported your earlier claims either. You’ve made no argument, nor supplied no evidence. Instead you’ve kept trying to change the topic.
Yes they do. Perhaps you can summarize my points and that will help you find what you’re missing?
“Historically it was relatively easy for countries like the US to increase military production by orders of magnitude if the government simply ordered it, without completely crashing civilian production, leading to massive GDP jumps during wartime.”
I don’t think this is generally true at all. It was true for the US before and during WW2 because the US was coming out of a Great Depression and had a lot of idle capacity. But it wasn’t true for Britain in either World War, it wasn’t true for France in WW1, it wasn’t true for Germany…
Germany didn’t really experience significant domestic hardship until 1942-1945, despite going from single to double digits in military spending per GDP. Given that Britain did experience issues at lower rates, it seems clear that military spending isn’t actually responsible for the civilian impacts, trade disruption is. It’s just that actually being at war correlates both.
I mean, within reasonable limits. Russia was at over 100% gdp spending on military during the civil war, if I remember right, which led to massive wealth consumption by the military, starvation, and sky high debts.
More generally it’s widely known in economic circles that war production is a spoiler in GDP. Making bombs is counted as a positive growth, but blowing up buildings doesn’t decrease GDP. Hence, in part, why measures like the HDI exist.
@ajay, GDP is a measure of domestic production, not of national income. In the early part of WWII, the Germans were stealing resources from the countries they had conquered.
“Germany didn’t really experience significant domestic hardship until 1942-1945, despite going from single to double digits in military spending per GDP. Given that Britain did experience issues at lower rates, it seems clear that military spending isn’t actually responsible for the civilian impacts, trade disruption is. ”
No, you’re wrong on both these counts. You’re also wrong to claim that Germany saw a massive jump in GDP during this period.
“No, you’re wrong on both these counts. You’re also wrong to claim that Germany saw a massive jump in GDP during this period.”
I mean…No I’m just factually not. Do you want to elaborate on that, or is being boldly wrong your mission?
I can’t say, as Tracy W thinks, whether you are a MMT-er or not. I would say I politely disagree with the conclusions reached by MMT-adherents regardless.
However, your proposals sound rational but they’re just impossible, for very simple reasons. First, government programs are frequently unaccountable in the literal sense: you literally *cannot* get an efficiency value out of them. Consider the topic of military spending as above: you can never know in advance, for certain, whether the next marginal jet fighter is economically worthwhile. You have to gauge it against it military alternatives, non-military alternatives, and the inability to know for certain whether it would be used.
That jet fighter might never fire a single missile, and strictly speaking the money would be wasted… unless it acted as a deterrent against attack. But of course, you don’t know whether it will deter an opponent, or if you might need a hundred more to deter them. It’s a cloud of unknown variables which defies attempts at rationalization. You can simply do the best job practical under the circumstances, applying rules of thumb, best practices, common sense and retrospective analyses.
This drives me nuts at work all the time. Whenever a problem gets solved its always instantly on to the next problem, with never a moment to pause and give kudos about the solution. Besides morale issues, this means that it always feels like everything is going wrong all the time–especially for somewhat more senior people, who only get involved once something has gone wrong and so have a wildly inaccurate view of how wrong most things are going.
‘Every time I see you, something has gone wrong’ can simultaneously be a true statement and not really mean much, because I only bring you the 1% of things that have gone wrong to the level that I can’t just fix ’em myself.
You can blame the plumber for being near the leak, but odds are good he didn’t break the pipe.
> ‘You are held wise, my friend Wormtongue, and are doubtless a great support to your master,’ answered Gandalf in a soft voice. ‘Yet in two ways may a man come with evil tidings. He may be a worker of evil; or he may be such as leaves well alone, and comes only to bring aid in time of need.’
It also means that people will quickly do good enough work in tasks they are most productive and move on to the low productivity tasks even if there is low hanging fruit in the high productivity areas.
I’d like to recommend the thesis “Oil and Grant Strategy” by Anand Toprani, a work that explicitly builds on Tooze’s “Wages of Destruction” and other historical works like Martin van Creveld’s “Supplying War.” Toprani makes the case that Nazy Germany effectively lost the economic war in July 1940, because by that point they occupied a broad swath of territory that consumed far more oil than it could produce. As long as war continued with the British Empire, Germany would inexorably draw down its fuel reserves; synthetic fuel production & imports from Romania & USSR could postpone the fuel crisis but not prevent it.
In the list of things that were talked about a lot back in time was the Y2K problem.
There were some doom predictions about how everything that depended on computers would break down, the civilization will be back to the Middle Ages, and some people were stocking up on consumables and so on.
But there was also a concerted effort to try to identify and resolve the potential problems, and when the dreaded date came, nothing major happened and people stopped talking about it.
There was a huge international effort for over a year, as well. Massive scramble.
And then nothing happened in 2000, and far from forgetting it, people mocked the doomsayers for years! I still occasionally hear jokes about it in 2024!
Quite a number of things happen, mostly trivial
Looking forward to the Imperator series! The game having been shelved so long ago I figured you’d never get to it. I assume you’re playing vanilla and not Invictus?
Yeah a comprehensive article about the rise and fall of this game will be very wonderful, especially coming from a Roman expert. I expect at least five article from this, please.
I appreciate the many uncritically neoliberal posts on this blog; they remind me not to take everything posted here as fact.
Is that neoliberal from a direction of “things are actually terrible and it will take massive structural reform to actually fix them” or “things weren’t actually so bad in the first place, it’s all a bunch of hand-wringing”?
I think it was “I didn’t like the message of the blog post so I’ll call it neoliberal and stop thinking”.
Causality’s t’other way: “stop thinking” precedes the fatuous use of “neoliberal”.
I always assume that use of “neoliberalism” is an act of neocolonialism.
to be fair, the traditional definition of neoliberal is “someone to my right that I don’t like but whom I can’t get away with calling a fascist right now”, so this seems par for the course.
To attempt to translate, the talk of safety standards improving over time in cars via technology is consistent with actual neoliberal philosophy, but that’s literally met with a paragraph above it talking about how the government said “Use better bulbs jackasses” and people did, which isn’t. Actual neoliberalism would say that this would be a overly onerous regulation that forced economic activity and that this should be left up to the lightbulb manufactures and blah blah blah.
Point is that Brett might have a bias towards car safety (threads above discuss this), but it’s not a neoliberal bias.
The only other thing I think someone might say is neoliberal in socialist circles is the Iraq war, and that’s always been a stupid thing to say. It’s not that it was neoliberal, it’s that it was nationalistic; the net positive and negatives of hindsight aside, we went to war under a nationalistic war fever. You can say it’s generically right wing, depending on context, but that’s not because of economic policy.
When ‘neoliberal’ was first borrowed into colloquial American English in the naughts it was misapplied. In an effort to invent ideological coherence for members of ostensibly-left-of-center governments of US allies who supported the warmongering of American neoconservatives, non-scholars began using ‘neoliberal’ as if it were a portmanteau of ‘liberal’ and ‘neocon’. Aftereffects of this mean that it has been very hard for a very long time to know what people on the Internet think the word means, to the point that many now using it don’t really expect people to respond intelligently.
It is from a direction of “It would take massive structural reform to fix things.” Of course, in this case, neoliberal is used as shorthand to criticize someone who supports the current capitalist status quo and has seemingly never bothered to think about any criticisms of it. To say that any attempts at structural reform would actually result in a return to humanity’s so-called natural state of poverty is a wildly thoughtless statement for someone who is usually so measured in his value judgements. This is evident in many other posts on this blog, particularly the yearly 4th of july ones. The general message of the first segment of this blog was that the material conditions of humanity are actually better because we have better opportunities to engage in rampant consumerism. This ignores many of the very real struggles that people have now as compared to a few decades ago. Also, the part about the worst case scenarios of climate change being impossible is completely false.
So, this makes one wonder if Brett is this wrong about everything he writes about, or is he an otherwise intelligent person who refuses to question things that are dear to him. As a relatively well-off older American, it would certainly benefit him to not have anybody question the current status quo, and he would have little cause to question it himself since it must work so well for him. This means that the latter is probably true, but I do not know enough about ancient Mediterranean military history to know if the former is true.
You know, I think there are reasonable arguments and critiques to make against these things that you find odious, but when you just express it as a drive-by bit of passive aggressive condescension (with a touch of performative cruelty), it does not lend much credibility or sense of good faith. I think a more critical outlook in somebody who lays out information with an argument than in the one who just reduces everything down to making “neoliberal” a dirty word and rolls their eyes at everybody who doesn’t share their ideology.
Except that’s not neoliberal philosophy, that’s just conservatism. Neoliberalism would involve the assertion that things are going to improve *without government action or collective organization*, so government action and collective organization are bad. Bret isn’t arguing that here, he’s just saying that things improve, don’t despair.
Point being that this is the wrong label for criticism. A more philosophically coherent critique would be that he’s engaging in a form of the just world fallacy, or is parroting gradualist centrist talking points. But not all of those points are wrong here, even.
Also, he knows what he’s talking about in general, the sphere of his biases isn’t subtle. Don’t look for reasons to dismiss smart people, you can always find them and the ones you find generally speak more to yourself than them.
I think among detractors and supporters alike, neoliberalism can be effectively defined as a belief that a combination of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy can be used to achieve progressive ends and generally improve the well-being and prosperity of individuals and society as a whole.
There just happen to be people with left-wing politics who view this as investing people in a system that is markedly limited in how much real and necessary change can actually be achieved, because on any occasion where the interests of progressivism and capitalism diverge, capitalism will choose itself and have the resources to win out.
As I said, I think there are valid points to make there. But it often gets stripped of a lot of nuance to just be a buzzword to dismiss a lot of people as sheep and sneer at them, as lacking the enlightenment to embrace the only system that can offer true change and prioritizing creature comforts over idealism (with at least an underlying hint of accelerationism).
I agree with the sentiment and movements you’re describing precisely, in that everything you are saying right…Except that also isn’t neoliberalism, that’s gradualism. Conservatives are also neoliberal, but don’t believe or care about any of that.
Everything you’re saying is true, but the term is *still* wrong. Which speaks to the validity of rejecting the buzzword, because basically no one is using it right.
Do you have any criticisms of anything Bret actually said?
“As a relatively well-off older American, it would certainly benefit him”
This makes one wonder if you are this wrong about everything you write about.
Bret (you can’t even spell his _name_ correctly) is relatively young in his few photos, has written extensively about the difficulties of finding a good (let alone tenured) job in history, and I think had his first kid recently. So neither older nor well-off (except in the sense of being American and able to find _any_ job that lets him work as a historian.)
If you’re 15 years old, you probably do think of Bret as an older American.
“uncritically neoliberal”
Everything Bret listed here as an improvement is factually true.
Bet you can’t explain what was “neoliberal” about the post.
That’s easy, in practice “neoliberal” is a term that means “a thing I don’t like” for a certain part of the left, the same way socialist and marxist do for a part of the right. The poster didn’t like the post, therefore it is neoliberal.
When the main point of many of somebody’s writings is that everything is fine and that there is no need for systemic change, it is pretty safe to assume that that person is an ardent supporter of the political and economic systems under which they live.
If the system is producing steadily better results, the case for systemic change requires strong evidence that the change will be for the better and not at a steeper cost than the steady.
Except burning fossil fuels is steadily improving in a technical sense (efficiency and extraction technique), but both isn’t sustainable and has delayed damages that completely invalidate the assertion.
Without getting into the larger philosophies involved or if the central assumptions here are *true*, there’s ample reason to *not* accept the steady state just because you can define a metric by which it’s acceptable.
Plus most of the changes here were A. Forced, society wasn’t making them without impetus, and B. Argued against *as too radical* by people who were in favor of the system.
In other words, the system doesn’t get credit for improving global warming or car safety or lightbulbs when the system has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into every single step of change.
So you are proposing a system in which people can not oppose change? That is going to make resistance to these proposals look like damp squibs.
One also notes that everything you say about these changes was also true about eugenics. If it weren’t for Hitler, the involuntary eugenic sterilizations would still be going on en mass. Despite the kicking and screaming from people being dragged every single step of change.
I find that Bret doesn’t necessarily advocate for the system so much as point out that the results indicate that there are at least dedicated people working to the ends, with or without friction.
“So you are proposing a system in which people can not oppose change? That is going to make resistance to these proposals look like damp squibs.”
No.
“One also notes that everything you say about these changes was also true about eugenics. If it weren’t for Hitler, the involuntary eugenic sterilizations would still be going on en mass. Despite the kicking and screaming from people being dragged every single step of change.”
Completely incoherent. I’m not even sure what your point is, what do you even think I’m saying that you’re arguing against, and what is your arguement?
“No.”
So what are you proposing? Especially since you can not recognize a counter-example to your exultation of people’s objections being trampled underfoot as if such trampling were an unmitigated good, thus decreasing confidence in your judgment.
Then you should phrase your statement more clearly
“most of the changes here were A. Forced, society wasn’t making them without impetus,”
Forced by whom? If the impetus came from within the society/system, that seems an argument _for_ liberal democracy: it was able to identify and solve problems. Yes, some people’s self-interest and/or delusions lead them to oppose changes. That is going to be true in _any_ society made of humans, or of agents who are capable of disagreement.
A “workers’ democracy”, even if genuine, is not going to be some utopia where everyone agrees on things. There will be self-interests and conservatisms, if different ones than today.
“The American Soviet has proposed building more housing in California.”
“The California Soviet objects that there are too many people in California and housing should be built in Montana.”
“The World Soviet has proposed moving away from fossil fuels.”
“The Venezuelan Soviet objects that fossil fuels are an essential cornerstone of civilization, not to mention their jobs…”
Not a system where changes can’t be objected too, as evidenced by what I said above? You’re bringing that here via your biases, it’s not textual.
And okay, here’s my paraphrase of your point: because some people had force applied to them by Nazis systemic change is bad.
My counterpoint is, again, what the fuck? Is there a connection there? Eugenics and Nazism are part of the system and reactions against change respectively, which were stopped with force, that is the only valid connection I can think of and it leads to precisely the opposite conclusion.
I could fill in the association’s I think you’re making, but that speaks to my assumptions, not your beliefs.
Your historical ignorance is noted. It was the United States that was the original innovator in eugenics, and Buck vs. Bell was decided before the Nazis were in power, and it was the Progressive, not the conservatives, who said “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Indeed, it was a great Progressive thing to jeer at the antiquated conservatives who still clung to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and held to the equality of man, and how they would dragged, kicking and screaming, to the bright future of involuntary eugenic sterilization.
If you want to persuade anyone to believe that you know how government should go, you will have learn enough history to show that you know how human beings actually act.
“Forced by whom?”
In the context of this thread, government action via law as opposed to the natural functioning of uncoordinated activity.
This is in direct opposition to neoliberalism, which thinks that government action by laws is generally bad and that uncoordinated activity will naturally lead to outcomes favorable to either themselves or society.
Yes, democracy has the capacity to enact those changes, but the current neoliberal systems are extremely resistant to change. Hence reformers generally don’t want to get rid of the democracy part, but rather how campaign funding, corporations, our specific legal system, and the way we run elections influence that democracy. Which is plenty big to be called a systemic change.
In the context of your mention of Soviets, this is true, but not terribly relevant to this discussion and I don’t feel like engaging. To put it simply, that influences how people want to reform the system but not that reform is necessary. Mostly via not being stupid enough to make any reformed regional government follow the contours of states/provinces/nations.
“In the context of this thread, government action via law as opposed to the natural functioning of uncoordinated activity.”
Except that any serious view of history shows that the vast majority of improvements do spring from uncoordinated activity. Even when the government does things with intent, the greatest benefit may be unintended. The Interstates were created in order to ease moving the military about the country, for defense; they have yet to be used for that, but they did stop the tendency of prices to be “slightly higher west of the Rockies.”
For a more useful invention, consider that the inventor of the first aesthesia used it for entertainment. Only when a spectator noticed that the people under “laughing gas” did not only engage in humorous activity but felt no pain from injuries was it possible to use it as aesthesia — and make surgery really feasible.
Mary, the modern progressive movement has basically zero links to that movement. And the Eugenics movement was ended by mandate, and wasn’t begun by one. It was a broad social trend.
It is also, to be abundantly clear, *still not related to our discussion*. The movement to sterilize people was implemented broadly by government *and* private citizens, and had to be opposed by collective action and legal mandate. Without reform it would have continued. It’s actually a great example of the systems of power in a capitalistic state leading to government oppression. It’s hardly like turn of the century America was socialist; it was among the least socialist countries in existence.
What you call the people who did that is irrelevant to the actual discussion, as modern progressives have thoroughly divorced themselves from that movement. Modern reactionaries embody it.
I do appreciate that it’s possible to construct your argument now, but it’s spurious.
It is irrelevant that you claim no links to the movement (even though you claim their name).
What is relevant is that their actions are exactly what you praised. You embody the same principles, and have not divorced yourself from them.
One also notes that the euthanasia of the disabled is a progressive cause at this time. Witness that Canada has progressed so far as to offer death as a treatment to a woman seeking treatment for suicidal thoughts.
“Except that any serious view of history shows that the vast majority of improvements do spring from uncoordinated activity.”
Like space exploration, the highway project, the construction of major dams and bridges, the funding of railroads and land clearage, desegregation and the ending of slavery, the right of women to vote and protection from domestic violence, the protection of minorities from lynch mobs and terrorism, the…
I actually agree with you that good things are done by non-government organizations and peoples all the time, but we need to acknowledge that government action or progressive reform has accomplished major reforms and enacted common projects in the past and will continue to do so, and that uncontrolled systems have created horrific systems of oppression or stalled economic development in the past and will continue to do so.
“Even when the government does things with intent, the greatest benefit may be unintended. The Interstates were created in order to ease moving the military about the country, for defense; they have yet to be used for that, but they did stop the tendency of prices to be ‘slightly higher west of the Rockies.'”
The interstate system was created for multiple reasons, but its improvement of military connectivity has actually been used multiple times. Not in a land war, but as part of the military industrial complex, certainly. The early proponents were military men, but they weren’t limited in scope to military matters. To quote-
“It was evident we needed better highways. We needed them for safety, to accommodate more automobiles. We needed them for defense purposes, if that should ever be necessary. And we needed them for the economy. Not just as a public works measure, but for future growth.”
-Lucius D. Clay, speaking on the motivations for the system.
The government intentionally set out to do something and did it. You *can* find examples that support your thesis, but this ain’t one. I mean, go look at the space program, the policy intention was (probably/mostly) to develop rocket technologies to cheapen and develop ICBM’s in a way the public would embrace, but we got a bunch of useful technologies out of it by pure accident.
At that, we need to acknowledge that uncontrolled systems have accomplished major reforms and enacted common projects in the past and will continue to do so, and that government action or progressive reform has created horrific systems of oppression or stalled economic development in the past and will continue to do so.
“It is irrelevant that you claim no links to the movement (even though you claim their name).”
It’s more that similar labels are applied to broad swaths of people. Modern reactionaries would be called progressives in 1920 speak because they approved any form of collective action at all, but we can distinguish between those who want to use the government to kill immigrants and those who want to use it to feed them today.
“What is relevant is that their actions are exactly what you praised. You embody the same principles, and have not divorced yourself from them.”
No. Just…Fucking no. I’ve never praised them, my positions don’t embody the same principles, and the movements have been unrelated and *diametrically opposed* for the majority of a century now.
I could go on the offensive here, like by pointing out that people that represent your beliefs were caught on recording a couple weeks ago praising the concept of making policy decisions because black people have larger genitalia and lower IQs, so perhaps we should stick to what *we* believe?
“One also notes that the euthanasia of the disabled is a progressive cause at this time. Witness that Canada has progressed so far as to offer death as a treatment to a woman seeking treatment for suicidal thoughts.”
I could say a lot on this topic, but how about you listen to the people you’re speaking for? It’s outrageous to presume you can both A. Levy every single thing you disagree with about leftism at my door as though it’s relevant to this discussion and B. Speak tritely for a woman who *has their own voice*.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2024-03-05/canada-backtracks-on-euthanasia-for-the-mentally-ill
One notes, to use your own tactics, that *slaves* weren’t allowed to kill themselves. Maybe chew on those parallels?
You literally and overtly praised trampling people’s objections just as they did, and on the same principles they did, and for both of you they are central to your plans.
One notes that your defense of Canada is that the progressive state DID NOT succeed in forcing people to be “dragged, kicking and screaming, into every single step of change.” Indeed, the people who objected to them won.
And resorting to offensive, obscene, extremely vague, and frankly ludicrous comments and calling going on the offensive is an argument against you.
Forcing a company to do something has no relationship at all to forcing a person to be sterilized. We’ve been over this. Companies aren’t people and regulations aren’t sterilization. The scales of coercion are hundreds of orders of magnitude against equivalencies here.
If your point is that those are equivalent go touch grass, you need some interaction with reality.
No, my defense of progressives is that they were never forcing anyone to do anything. They allowed people to make choices. You disagree with them, but they were still choices. That ability was, in fact, taken away by your side.
Mary, libertarian national convention speakers are on video saying that black people have big dicks and small IQs while Asians have small dicks and big IQs, directly in the context of “this justifies public policy including race”. This has absolutely nothing to do with me, this happened a couple weeks ago. I cannot be blamed for it being offensive when im using what they said and meant.
This is your team. They agree with you on basically everything you’ve said and embody your philosophy in modern politics.
And they’re a bunch of horribly racist assholes who need to justify their atrocious policies by saying that black people are inferior.
If you’re offended because that actually bothers you, *stop being on their side*. Get away from their positions.
If it’s offensive because it’s damning to your case, stop being disingenuous. You’re wrong. That’s all there is to it. Move on and grow.
No, we haven’t been over this. And no, once there is the power to force things, nothing on earth prevents that power from being used to force things that YOU object to.
The idea that progressives only give choices is — well, go read some history.
Also, since I am not and have never been a libertarian, I am not on their team. You do not get to claim I am so that you can run on with obscenities rather than argue.
Incidentally, if your only argument for government programs is to erect a strawman of minuscule government and feign it’s the only alternative, perhaps government should not, in fact, implement those programs
“At that, we need to acknowledge that uncontrolled systems have accomplished major reforms and enacted common projects in the past and will continue to do so, and that government action or progressive reform has created horrific systems of oppression or stalled economic development in the past and will continue to do so.”
Ignoring that I think we may have different definitions of progressive reform there, yes, people trying to enact such reforms can do the wrong thing and yes, reforms that look progressive can be wrong in context.
There’s been a lot of people trying to do what they can earnestly say were needed reforms, like land ownership reform or collectivization of agriculture, that just ended up killing people.
There’s a lesson there.
The lesson *isn’t* that progressivism is always or even often wrong. Just as progressivism has resulted in bad things,
No, the lesson that is that “progressivism” does not get the benefit of the doubt.
Is there a post hotkey or what? Anyway, just as progressivism has done bad things, the rational interests of mass action has too. The ideal is to peacefully fix structural issues as they occur and move towards a better society, but to do that you have to be open to structural reform and acknowledge that coercive laws to enact it can be valid as well, you can’t put on idealogical blinders.
You do realize that this comment here is, for all practical purpose, void of content? The people implementing involuntary eugenic sterilizations were all for peacefully fixing structural issues as they occur and moving towards a better society. They were quite proud of the suffering they were preventing .
“No, we haven’t been over this. And no, once there is the power to force things, nothing on earth prevents that power from being used to force things that YOU object to.
The idea that progressives only give choices is — well, go read some history.
Also, since I am not and have never been a libertarian, I am not on their team. You do not get to claim I am so that you can run on with obscenities rather than argue.”
Yes we have, yes there is, and it’s self evident. Among many, many other reasons, *we can vote*. The government is accountable to *us*, because this was solved a century ago when everyone was given the vote.
Massive projection Jesus Christ. History is not kind to your position.
So you’re not a libertarian, you identify as a liar instead?
Either you’re ignorant, a liar, or merely incidentally hold every opinion they do except the racist parts. Of course I didn’t want to bring it here, but you **continue** to resort to ad hominem attacks on your perceived opposition. So let’s do this.
So, speedrun, justify *everything ever said by anyone opposing change in the history of the world*. And it’s anyone I define as opposing change, so I can freely move the goalposts if you disown someone.
That’s the standard you hold progressives to. Go. You fail to account for one flaw, one historical sin, I can ignore you. Oh, once you get to WW2 it’ll be *funny*, the Nazis *hated* progressives, and looooved this reasoning-it was easy to get people to kill for it.
And continuing to pretend you’re being coy with your beliefs is pathetic. We know who you affiliate with, what you have to defend in this idiotic game.
Needless to say your entire intellectual process is fucked. It’s anti thought. But if applied to you, it’s a completely valid reason to ignore *you*, in your own framework.
Or we can engage in some honest intellectual engagement and you can open your goddamned mind to the possibility progressives are *right*.
Your choice.
YOU claimed I was a libertarian because you wanted to lie about me. That makes YOU the liar.
Then we didn’t need to know that. For instance, right here you state
“That’s the standard you hold progressives to.”
That’s a flat-out lie. The standard I hold progressives to is that there shall be a single standard. You exulted over trampling on people to get what you wanted. So did the eugenist Progressives. You have not even tried to come up with a principle by which it is right for you and wrong for them, in all your rather lengthy comments.
This is why civility is dead. You’re so incredibly defensive and delusional that you can’t even coherently identify your own positions. Let alone mine. I’ve repeatedly given you every opportunity to state a standard of belief, judgement, fuck *anything*, but you’re so uninterested in growing that you refuse to define your own beliefs because then they can be disputed.
I’m done with you, I don’t know what can possibly convince you to ever grow as a human being but it’s probable the answer is nothing. You’re going to spiral until you die, possibly taking someone else out with you. I hope you find a way out of whatever madness inducing cult has hold of you. I truly pity you.
I will believe it when I see it.
You’re naive. You think we will accept your definition of “Nazi” as anyone you want to murder while you, at the same time, use the actual Nazis as a defense for your murders.
Also you are a liar when you claimed you were “done” with me.
I am done with you. This is me talking to other people through your puppet.
This is the sort of transparent lying that shows up that you are not engaged in serious discussion.
“Except burning fossil fuels is steadily improving in a technical sense (efficiency and extraction technique)”
This is really not true (and a geologist should know it isn’t true) because you first extract the deposits that are easier to reach, so efficiency in EROI and EROEI terms is steadily declining over time for a given fossil fuel type.
“This is the sort of transparent lying that shows up that you are not engaged in serious discussion.”
I’d given you every opportunity Mary. And I have never lied to you. I’m just not engaging in discussion with you because you’re irrational.
And this is the sort of vacuous babble that fails to cover up that you are not engaging in serious discussion. You obviously have lied by anyone’s standards because you flatly contradict yourself.
“This is really not true (and a geologist should know it isn’t true) because you first extract the deposits that are easier to reach, so efficiency in EROI and EROEI terms is steadily declining over time for a given fossil fuel type.”
This does not in any way invalidate my point? If you’re just building on it, then EROI is going down because there’s less easily accessible oil but going up because the techniques have increases in efficiency massively, leading to several conflicting trends. The net has been relative stability for a while now, after we removed the fuels that literally just bubble out of the ground.
Actual burning of fossil fuels has increased in efficiency greatly, burning cleaner and producing more power per fuel-it’s just that producing this fuel is harder because the easily accessible deposits are, as you said, depleted.
It’s not like this changes that the steady state is insufficient for this situation. If we wait for oil and gas to become truly unprofitable A. The economy will collapse, and B. The environment will collapse. Millions will die and thousands already are dying, although those deaths have been offloaded to the global south so Americans are still safely insulated from the effects. It clearly isn’t sustainable.
Systematic changes do have a long history of resulting in much worse outcomes than incremental changes. One has to be extremely naive or extremely risk loving to favour systematic change.
As someone who has observed a couple of revolutions at close range, definitely agree. Yet systems have a certain self-reinforcing internal structure which can become so rigid and confining and the only possible way out is to break it. The inertia of the french ancien regime (800 years of tradition embedded in courts and legal processes and manners and social relations and status and wealth and religious belief) defied easy modification even when obviously unfit for purpose – remedies were proposed tried, opposed, abandoned multiple times in the decades prior to the revolution.
The US Civil War was another such moment – most of the country could see that slavery was incompatible with its current institutions and underlying ethos yet all gradual remedies were rejected by parties powerful enough to stop change.
Systemic change doesn’t mean revolution, it means changing the system of power. It’s not a dichotomy with incremental changes, and neither is synonymous with violence or peace; the transition of Spain out of fascism was peaceful, systemic, and abrupt, as an example.
This matters, because people actually do use systemic to when arguing for progressive reform and opposing it because you imagine violence is simply incorrect.
For an example, in the wake of the most recent American railway strike some progressives argued for a systemic reform via nationalizing the railways that were acting unsafely. The change is peaceful, it would actually help prevent deaths long term, and it’s systemic because a system of power has changed. It’s a minor systemic change in the grand scheme of society, not a radical one, but it is one
“Systemic change doesn’t mean revolution, it means changing the system of power. It’s not a dichotomy with incremental changes, and neither is synonymous with violence or peace”
Too late. It means those things as used in English today.
It means those things as used by reactionaries, Mary, trying to get you to kill the people arguing for systemic change. They’re not speaking English, they’re speaking emotions, and the emotion is hate.
You can dispute this, but actual engagement with people who use the term themselves will disprove that. On both sides. The people saying that it means violence are horrible and the people using it to argue for reform are using it to refer to peaceful change.
“the people using it to argue for reform are using it to refer to peaceful change.”
They would be wiser to use another term, then. If you really want the change, you would do anything necessary to avoid confusion.
They would be even wiser to change their rhetoric and their actions, both of which point to violence, and consequently would taint any term.
No. You’d be wiser to listen to us instead of pretending you know everything because some jackass told you what we think. You’re the one falling for violent rhetoric here, and you need to acknowledge that. The people against progressivism want a bunch of people dead and don’t mind if you join them.
@dcmorinmorinmorin
The transition of Spain out of General Franco’s rule was a transition back to an existing system of government – the new king, Juan Carlos I, was the grandson of the previous king. The transition of Spain into Franco’s rule was brutal – the Spanish civil war is estimated to have killed 500 thousand people and it was followed by tens of thousands more deaths under General Franco’s rule.
If you think I’m “incorrect” to oppose systematic change because of all the thousands to millions of people it has killed, well, we have a very different opinion about the value of human life.
…and done by reactionaries who were against systemic reform.
No, fascism isn’t a systemic change, its murders have universally been targeted by conservatives at progressives. The entire philosophy is based on return to the system that existed in some imaginary pure past.
And socially, it’s what happens when you take this anti intellectual desire to ignore progressives and reformers advocating for systemic change to it’s natural conclusion.
If your underline is that systemic change is bad then, as the flaws of the system develop, you’ll inevitably decide to ignore empirical reality. Hence why conservatives universally suffer from just world fallacy. It’s impossible to justify resistance to change if things are bad, so things must not be bad.
If things become bad enough they can’t ignore it, bad enough they are affected, two things happen.
First, the systemic change movement gains enough power to do something, typically.
Two, conservatives move from ignoring them to doing the one and only thing that can resolve debates if you’ve rejected being convinced of anything.
They kill them.
Boom, fascism. Anti empiricism as a natural consequence of conservatism leads to violence.
@dcmorinmorinmorin, you are the one who brought up the topic of Francoist Spain.
I also think the Great Terror in Revolutionary France, and the Russian Civil War and the Holomadar and the Chinese Civil War and the Great Famine and Tanzanian villagisation and Ethiopian Civil War and the Khmer Rouge are other examples of the dangers of systematic change. Progressives killing other progressives aren’t any better than conservatives killing progressives.
…? Spain proves my point. I brought it up because it proves my point. It still proves my point, as I explained.
Your basic point is that progressives, and progressive reforms, can kill people, right? Granted, but insufficient.
This broad category of progressives isn’t valid. The libertarian socialists who believe what I actually believe are responsible for precisely none of that, fought all of it, and lost. Although I’m not familiar with Tanzanian villagization, so perhaps I’ll learn something.
My point is that you’re putting the movement arguing for systemic reform in a modern context alongside a historical movement that is comprised of different ideologies united only by the deserve for reform broadly. You can convince yourself not to listen to anything that way. Flip that on conservatism and the tally of dead is both longer, much more reprehensible, and ongoing.
No idealogy is safe from that standard.
Hence if you want to actually criticize progressive ideology you should find a specific idealogy and say its reforms are bad. Given that Marxist-leninism did almost all of the things you listed, that’s an easy pick. It just doesn’t invalidate modern progressives, who largely aren’t vanguardists at all let alone Marxist-leninists. They’re broadly socialists, most often libertarian or anarcho socialists, and specifically social Democrats. Those ideologies differ from the ones responsible for what you’re talking about in pretty much every way you’re saying progressivism is dangerous.
The bigger reason why this is such a swing and a miss is that progressives are well aware that systemic change can be abused and hence are among the strongest advocates for ways to prevent this abuse, like restricting the use of violence by the state, ensuring rights and protections are written into law, removing special interests from power that can manipulate democratic processes, encouraging transparency, etc.
Change can be abused, but resistance to change is no better.
I think the whole problem is with going for systematic changes, instead of incremental changes.
You are talking about specific ideologies, and yet what I see across history is the same pattern playing out regardless of ideology. There’s the Spanish Civil War (and there, not only the fascists and monarchists committed atrocities but also anarchists and other leftist groups committed their own atrocities, look up “Red Terror” in the Spanish civil war). There’s the Great Terror following the French Revolution, which was done under a liberal ideology. There was the Tanzanian government, which wasn’t Marxist-Leninst but instead was African socialist (and Julius Nyere seems to have been a genuinely ethical leader). There was the religiously-motivated reformation in Europe over the 16th-17th centuries, leading to numerous bloodbaths. The constancy I see here isn’t the ideology, it’s the determination to overthrow everything.
You say that “the libertarian socialists who believe what I actually believe are responsible for precisely none of that, fought all of it, and lost”. Sounds to me like said libertarian socialists aren’t very good at politics. Meanwhile, William Wilberforce fought for the abolition of slavery, and won. The Duke of Wellington fought for Catholic emancipation, and won. Emmeline Pankhurst fought for women’s suffrage, and won. Not that these processes were bloodless, but I prefer an ideological approach that has succeeded at least in some changes that made people’s lives better, and has on some occasions even managed to do those changes without associated mass murder and other such atrocities.
“I think the whole problem is with going for systematic changes, instead of incremental changes.”
As I said, systemic changes can be incremental.
“You are talking about specific ideologies, and yet what I see across history is the same pattern playing out regardless of ideology. There’s the Spanish Civil War (and there, not only the fascists and monarchists committed atrocities but also anarchists and other leftist groups committed their own atrocities, look up “Red Terror” in the Spanish civil war). There’s the Great Terror following the French Revolution, which was done under a liberal ideology. There was the Tanzanian government, which wasn’t Marxist-Leninst but instead was African socialist (and Julius Nyere seems to have been a genuinely ethical leader). There was the religiously-motivated reformation in Europe over the 16th-17th centuries, leading to numerous bloodbaths. The constancy I see here isn’t the ideology, it’s the determination to overthrow everything.”
Then you’re wrong? The Marxist-Leninists were almost solely responsible for the violence of the red terror in Spain. I mean there were NKVD agents running the death squads, they weren’t anarchists.
I’m not saying there weren’t anarchist atrocities entirely, but I honestly know of only a few and they were universally outpouring of local outrage. This was because, in part, a lot of the factions in the civil war *needed to be killed*. It’s not murder to hold trial and kill fascists, and if you believe the entire legal fabric of society has been corrupted by them-correctly-then it becomes real hard to construct a moral or legal framework that precludes all forms of *extra*judicial violence. I mean, unless you’re completely opposed to the death penalty, but that just wasn’t part of the zeitgeist there.
Which is why letting it get to that point was such a disaster. There should have been systemic change through incremental means long before it became a power keg.
The other examples, ignoring the Tanzanian one I just don’t know enough about, are either completely unrelated to progressivism or *extremely* not that simple. The great terror, for instance, had several sequences, some involving legal judgements, some involving rabid hate filled rampages, and some involving self cannibalistic purges. But, and this is important, liberals were not the only ones represented. There were many, many parties in the revolutionary government, in fact we have our modern “left” *and* “right” wing terms from them, and the purges were performed along messy ideological lines *within* those parties.
The real lesson is that revolution is very, very dangerous. Of course, not revolting in 1789 was also dangerous. The French Revolution was, on net, necessary. That’s just deeply unfortunate.
“You say that “the libertarian socialists who believe what I actually believe are responsible for precisely none of that, fought all of it, and lost”. Sounds to me like said libertarian socialists aren’t very good at politics. Meanwhile, William Wilberforce fought for the abolition of slavery, and won. The Duke of Wellington fought for Catholic emancipation, and won. Emmeline Pankhurst fought for women’s suffrage, and won. Not that these processes were bloodless, but I prefer an ideological approach that has succeeded at least in some changes that made people’s lives better, and has on some occasions even managed to do those changes without associated mass murder and other such atrocities.”
…Emmeline Pankhurst was a socialist during the suffragette years and campaigned alongside anarchists and other libertarian leftists. Basically all major political movements between ~1850-1970 were heavily socialist influenced; they’re responsible for union protections, pensions, various forms of social security, labor reform laws including workers compensation and OSHA…
Society stopped listening to them in the later 70’s, at least in America, and everything went to shit. I’m pretty sure the experience was even more stark in Britain, didn’t austerity politics literally shrink their kids via cuts to the NHS?
The problem libertarian socialists have in conflict is that their goals might actually challenge the domain of the powerful. In the context of the peaceful, incremental sequence of changes that you’re advocating for, they are basically *the* drivers and source of reform.
And yes, *this is systemic reform*. Giving women the vote is a great example-it changed the system of political power drastically. This realignment had all sorts of positive knock on effects, and eventually led to large scale movements against spousal violence, a movement that was effectively completely stalled until women gained political power. That’s precisely what progressives mean by systemic reform-a change to the systems of economic and political power.
If you’re against systemic reform now then you would have been against suffrage then. Or, say, the civil rights movement. Both were decried as extreme, even violent expressions of reform that were too fast, too state mandated, too drastic. But the key insight is that *there’s no pace conservatives find acceptable*. Reform will always be uncomfortable and appear too fast to them, literally going back to the earliest histories. This strongly suggests that all these concerns are just goalpost moving.
To quote you:
“a lot of the factions in the civil war *needed to be killed*.”
As I said earlier, you and I have very different opinions about the value of human life.
Of course you can find stupid reasons to ignore me, but I am talking of literal fucking Nazis. If your thesis is that I should be ignored because I don’t particularly care that Nazis died, guess what, literally everyone on the planet disagrees and thus to you every society and system on this earth is damned, better no participate in anything ever.
Or you’re a hypocrite. Likely that.
@dcmorinmorinmorin, this is why you come across as naive.
“You’d be wiser to listen to us instead of pretending you know everything because some jackass told you what we think.”
Leaving aside your delusions about why I think what I do — you do realize that you contradict yourself so frequently that the only thing I could learn from listening to you is that it’s unwise to listen to you?
I come across as naive for saying that every society in the last century has felt the need to kill Nazis, including the Nazis? That’s many things, but it’s not what I’d call naive.
And adults are talking Mary, go back to waiting for societies problems to magic themselves away, now that we’re talking about naivete.
“If you think I’m “incorrect” to oppose systematic change because of all the thousands to millions of people it has killed, well, we have a very different opinion about the value of human life.”
@TracyW,
I’m sure I do have a lower value of human life than you do, but I think the bigger difference is where your preferred endpoint is. Incremental, peaceful change is fine at achieving small improvements (e.g. women’s suffrage), but not so effective at achieving fundamental changes, e.g. in overturning private ownership of the means of production.
Since you bring up Spain here, the same goes for that side: if you really do think establishing a Catholic confessional state is really, really important, then maybe you believe that was worth 300k executions plus 500k war deaths. I don’t share that value judgment, mostly because I’m not Catholic or Christian, but there’s no way I can state it’s ‘incorrect’, it’s a normative value judgment.
If you don’t aim for systemic change, whatever the cost, then you’re never really going to achieve systemic change.
@dcmorinmorinmorin “but not so effective at achieving fundamental changes, e.g. in overturning private ownership of the means of production.”
Which, given the historical track record of attempts at that causing mass famines, and huge environmental damage, is another argument against systematic change.
Private ownership of the means of production is essential to any large economy because of monitoring costs. Even the Soviet Union brought back in de facto private ownership – the managers of state owned factories could and did do things like trade with other factories to get supplies (though sometimes that was punished for political reasons).
As I said, you come across as naive.
Holy fucking turn batman.
If you want to argue economics I’ll go ahead, but we’re firmly in the “Now explain all socialism and how it’s perfect” phrase of the debate. That’s also dishonest, it’s not actually relevant to what we were talking about, but I can certainly try. I do want to establish you no longer care that Anarchists killed Nazis, it’s a fairly important point to get across.
And you keep using the word naive like it implies you understand my position better than I do, which is hilarious when I’m not holding up the soviets as a standard.
I *never* argued for a command economy-that’s stupid for the reasons you argued, it simply doesn’t work to meet variable demand with imperfect knowledge-but that’s not what progressives are trying to implement.
Which, given the historical track record of attempts at that causing mass famines, and huge environmental damage, is another argument against systematic change.
Private ownership of the means of production is essential to any large economy because of monitoring costs. Even the Soviet Union brought back in de facto private ownership – the managers of state owned factories could and did do things like trade with other factories to get supplies (though sometimes that was punished for political reasons).
As I said, you come across as naive.
TracyW,
You’re responding to me, not to dcmorinmorin. I don’t know what his political views are, but they seem vaguely anarchist (and I despise anarchism about as much as I despise capitalism), he’s not a believer in state owned factories.
I’d also disagree quite strongly with your argument here on several grounds.
1) I’m sympathetic to centrally planned economies both in theory and practice, but I would not say that I ideally *support* a planned economy, in the last analysis. I think centrally planned economies can work much better than you suggest (and *have* worked much better than you suggest), but I think for the foreseeable future (probably not forever, but for now) markets serve an important purpose too, and my ideal economy would feature a mix of planning and markets, *without* ownership by a private capitalist class.
2) You’re conflating capitalism with markets: markets have been a feature of lots of precapitalist economies as well as some postcapitalist economies. Market socialism, for example, was a feature of the aforementioned communist Yugoslavia, and to a lesser extent Hungary, and maybe some of the postcommunist states depending on whether you consider them socialist or capitalist. Markets serve an important informational and cost-accounting role (for now), but they’re compatible with many different kinds of ownership- state firms, capitalist firms, worker owned firms, probably other models too.
3) I assume you’re aware, since you’re commenting on a history blog, that *most* centrally planned economies didn’t have any famines? There were no famines in any of the Warsaw Pact states, whatever their other problems. There weren’t any in Vietnam or Laos, or in Cuba, or in Nicaragua, or in the African communist states *except for* Ethiopia. There weren’t even any in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death. You can argue that four countries experiencing famine is bad enough, and you’d be right, but I’d also say that I think the record demonstrates that famine is not a typical or even especially common experience of planned economies. I’d also say that it demonstrates that communist states, just like other types of regime, were able to learn from their own mistakes and from the mistakes of others (specifically, other communist countries learned from the mistakes of the pre-1956 Soviet Union). And also, though this is more controversial, I’d say it suggests there are some underlying issues with Russian culture (regardless of the economic system, and going back for centuries) that you don’t get in, say, Czechoslovakia or East Germany or Hungary, or even Yugoslavia.
To take some specific examples, Hungary was considered to have a highly productive agricultural sector during the communist era: they did have a mixture of state, cooperative, and small scale private agricultural enterprises, but the state and socialized enterprises were about similar in efficiency to the private ones, if I remember right. Same in East Germany, and in Czechoslovakia (at least if you trust contemporary estimates done by the CIA).
4) Environmental damage is a distinct issue of its own, but I’d say again that while some socialist states incurred a lot of environmental damage, others didn’t; that while some measure of planning is a *necessary* component for environmental protection, it isn’t a sufficient one; and that it’s hard to pin stuff like the disappearance of the Aral Sea purely on communism, since the postcommunist states also continued to tap the Syr Darya and Amu Darya for cotton irrigation and since the Soviets were even considering plans (never implemented, partly because of domestic controversy) to repair the damage by building a canal from the Ob River.
Environmental protection is something societies do as much of as they can afford: it shouldn’t surprise anyone that middle income countries devote more resources to environmentalism than poor countries do, and rich countiries spend more on it than middle income countries do. This is sort of independent of the specific economic model.
“(and I despise anarchism about as much as I despise capitalism),”
I am curious about this Hector, simply because my impression from you was that you think it doesn’t/won’t work because of failures to account for internal and external social divisions that persist past the context of capital, not that it was actively malicious like the partnership between capital owners and governments that underlies capitalist economies. I’m curious about what you actively hate about anarchism.
Pertinent to your points, the problems with Russian culture in the early soviets era was basically that there wasn’t a clear line of communication between the peasantry and the cities; the rural/urban divide was extreme and pervasive, which was partially the result of centuries of power consolidation by the Tzar around the few cities which conveyed useful military and economic power as opposed to the countryside which was best politically suppressed and used to extract untrained manpower and resources. The representative factions that inherited this system could have tried to fix it imperfectly, or at least worked together, but they stopped talking stopped talking. There wasn’t enough actual horizontal social integration to makeup for the failure of leadership so it devolved into violence, implicit and explicit.
This isn’t a unique problem to Russia, but was notably exaggerated and all checks on it broke down under Lenin and Stalin, who pretty clearly had an urbanist view of their new social order and were completely willing to let troublesome populations die. It’s also a problem that existed in the Khmer Rouge, except Pol Pot was completely pathologically insane on top of it and had a ruralism vision of his nation, which just made it all worse per capita.
The current social problems with Russia are likely related to this, but are distinct-one of the big ones is that socialism has been defined by the legacy of the soviet union, meaning that it’s inherently imperialistic, brutalist, and totalitarian, which has effectively made the debate between people who want to use the state to invade their neighbors and establish a ring of extractive puppets for Russia, and people who want to use the state to enrich their friends, both positions of which are harmful to the overall nation and interact to create a horrific synergism of private corruption and public belligerence. There’s no effective third side anymore.
@Hector, an important reason the Soviets stopped having famines is that they stopped trying to force the abolition of private property, in practice. (Something can be illegal but widely tolerated, e.g. I know heaps of people who smoke weed and it just has occurred to me that I’ve never thought of reporting any of them to the police, nor do I know of anyone else who has, and if I heard of someone reporting someone else I’d assume they had a separate beef and this was just a way to get revenge. Property rights can be like that).
There’s also a factor of better systems for distributing aide to provide food to stop famines – both things like better transport technologies but also I presume the UN had some learning-by-doing over the decades at famine prevention.
As for the things you imagine I believe about “capitalism”, well if you want to believe that I’m that ignorant I’m confident I won’t be able to change your mind.
Hector, an important reason the Soviets stopped having famines is that they stopped trying to force the abolition of private property, in practice. (Something can be illegal but widely tolerated, e.g. I know heaps of people who smoke weed and it just has occurred to me that I’ve never thought of reporting any of them to the police, nor do I know of anyone else who has, and if I heard of someone reporting someone else I’d assume they had a separate beef and this was just a way to get revenge. Property rights can be like that).
TracyW,
I don’t think I’d really agree with that, at least in part because as I said in my comment, I’m not just talking about the Soviet Union but also about the Warsaw Pact states. Not only did the Warsaw Pact states not have famines, but their *state farms* were generally of comparable productivity to the private farms as well. Which is why I think that while, yes, there are/were some intrinsic disadvantages to central planning, it’s also the case that Germans, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and Hungarians did central planning *way* better than the Russians did, and without either the catastrophic famines or the ultraviolence.
It’s true that in the Soviet Union itself, agriculture and food production was a perennial problem (even though they avoided famines after 1948): I would just say that it’s likely that these issues had more to do with Russian culture and less to do with central planning (since, as noted, the Warsaw Pact states didn’t experience them to nearly the same degree).
@Hector – in your previous reply you imagined I was totally ignorant of all the problems with the term “capitalism” and now you’re imagining totally I’m ignorant of all the complexities in the word “productivity”.
Darling, I don’t know why you’ve decided I’m a sweet summer child but if you want to have a shot at convincing me, I recommend a bit more modesty in your telepathic abilities. You could even try asking me some questions about why I think what I think. Wild idea I know.
I am curious about this Hector, simply because my impression from you was that you think it doesn’t/won’t work because of failures to account for internal and external social divisions that persist past the context of capital, not that it was actively malicious like the partnership between capital owners and governments that underlies capitalist economies. I’m curious about what you actively hate about anarchism.
I may be unfair to anarchists here, but I tend to think of them as people who really dislike authority structures, who want to be in complete control of their own lives, and who dislike the idea of being constrained by authority, by circumstances, by other people or by institutions. That’s what I actively dislike. Authority and submission are part of the human condition and are what we’re built for: I want the best possible people running the authority structures, not to do away with authority itself. (And no, I don’t think the best possible people are “the ones who control the most capital assets”, which is one reason I’m opposed to capitalism).
“Authority and submission are part of the human condition and are what we’re built for: I want the best possible people running the authority structures, not to do away with authority itself. ”
How probable do you think it that you will be one of the people submitting? Rather than authorizing?
@dcmorinmorinmorin, you wrote
“This was because, in part, a lot of the factions in the civil war *needed to be killed*. It’s not murder to hold trial and kill fascists,…”
So no you are not talking of literal Nazis. In the first sentence you don’t specify whether you are referring to fascists, republicans, or communists. And given the way you’ve thrown around “fascist” to describe just about anyone who disagrees with you in other contexts, why shouldn’t I believe that you’re in favour of killing such people?
Which is why there’s a second sentence?
And if I misidentify people as a fascist then please, show me the error of my ways. I am fully confident I’m not, and every single interaction I’ve had has here massively strengthens that belief. No matter how patient I am there’s a conservative audience that is so devoutly incapable of meaningful engagement that it’s astounding, and this isn’t a random selection. We’re on a relatively obscure history blog. If relatively educated conservatives are like this, so utterly incapable of defending or extolling their own intellectual positions and so unaware of basic logical fallacies, the majority are just walking piles of bigotry. A core of fascists rising from that isn’t a surprise.
Of course you can also just see them talking. Their on camera leading Nazi chants, arguing for explicitly fascist policies, using direct translations of their rhetoric.
No shit I think violence is justified if the shooting starts. They’re threatening me personally with death for the stupidest reasons possible, the violence of the state is necessary. I don’t like that, but it’s true. If there truly is no other redress of grievances that’s it, that’s what there is.
It might be a surprise to you, but that’s not a controversial sentiment. Basically everyone wants force to be used against certain political movements, at least if they’re poised to take real power, because they’re that dangerous to society. Ethnonationalists, religious fundamentalists, and yes, generic fascists. If they gain power millions die. Actually we’re a nuclear nation, the number might be billions.
If accepting that the same standard of violence that made WW2 just and necessary applies today is too much for you, you’re either a hypocrite or such an extreme pacifist that you’re frankly naive.
And to be honest, no one is that much of a pacifist.
“And if I misidentify people as a fascist then please, show me the error of my ways. I am fully confident I’m not, and every single interaction I’ve had has here massively strengthens that belief.”
And that is why your path is unwise. Massive certainty that you are right is the straight route to massacre, disaster, famine, and appalling poverty. Every time someone demanding systemic change gets into power, they always makes things worse.
” No matter how patient I am there’s a conservative audience that is so devoutly incapable of meaningful engagement that it’s astounding,”
This is the one of the major things leading to the massacre. You, like so many people demanding systemic change, simply can not believe that their people who disagree with you and will not change their minds when you tell them to, or when you use harsh language about them.
Your evidence that I’m wrong to argue that violence is the final recourse when conservative obstinacy becomes fascist violence is…that I don’t realize you won’t change your opinion no matter what is said?
Mary, that’s precisely the problem. You’re hostile to me and pathologically incapable of changing your position. This makes violence inevitable not as some theoretical, but as simple logical inevitability. Either the violence of time, politics, or action will have to render you impotent. You’re either going to die of age, be overruled by political action and implicitly threatened into silence, or fought. If persuasion is impossible that’s what you’ve forced on everyone else.
Almost every single conservative I’ve ever engaged with is like this. The ones who aren’t have already walked away from conservatism by now.
I completely understand you. And you’re a tragedy. All of you are.
“You’re hostile to me and pathologically incapable of changing your position. ”
Prove it. Thus far all evidence is that YOU are hostile to ME and pathologically incapable of changing your position.
Also, having vapors about violence when all I’ve done is post comments is, indeed, one common Leftist tactic to commit atrocities.
” This makes violence inevitable not as some theoretical, but as simple logical inevitability. Either the violence of time, politics, or action will have to render you impotent. You’re either going to die of age, be overruled by political action and implicitly threatened into silence, or fought. If persuasion is impossible that’s what you’ve forced on everyone else.”
That was the Left’s side on the 1920s. Either we jumped on the bandwagon of the great Leninist/Fascist experiment or we would be trampled by History!
One notes that experiment is long gone, having killed a lot of people and rendered the places where it was more miserable than those where it was excluded. And we are still here.
Furthermore your problem is quite clear when you say that you have to use violence against me because I won’t change my mind. Alternatively, you could learn that other people are allowed to have their own opinions.
We’re talking in the context of a shooting war mary. And while you’re allowed to, for instance, have your own completely insane opinion that fascism is leftist, you’re not allowed to impose that position on us through force and it only proves you’re insane when you say it.
Literally every interaction has been that way; favorably to you you’re just fucking with me, unfortunately it’s very likely you just don’t have any functional civic knowledge. There’s no way to prove anything to you when you’re this incoherent and your opinions not only this hard to discover, but this divorced from reality.
If your best defense is that I can’t stop you from being crazy then…sure. I have no reason to listen, and if you hurt people in real life expect zero mercy, but you can be wrong. Wrong and ignored, hopefully your opinion given no political weight, but sure. It’s not like there’s any other way for me to persuade you. I just wish there was a way to help you.
As for proving hostility; literally every reply in this thread accuses me of being itching to murder people on the basis of a pure fantasy about what I believe, until I was sadly forced to conclude you’d never change and will likely end up dying in violence you started. I’ve literally never seen you interact with anyone in this community in a way that indicated any give, any growth, any education.
It’s not like we were destined not to find some synthesis we agreed on, I even thought we might get close, but you are steadfastly determined not to even try to change. I’ll find something we can agree on, try to get a consensus, then watch you wildly pivot to another attack.
It’s hopeless. You’re lost.
“you’re not allowed to impose that position on us through force and it only proves you’re insane when you say it.”
There’s only one person here talking about killing people in order to impose positions, and that’s YOU.
“literally every reply in this thread accuses me of being itching to murder people on the basis of a pure fantasy about what I believe,”
So when you stated
“This was because, in part, a lot of the factions in the civil war *needed to be killed*.”
you were lying? And everyone should have known it?
Why then should we believe anything you say?
” It’s not like there’s any other way for me to persuade you.”
Try telling the truth. I was right to say that I would believe you had dropped me when you did it.
“So when you stated
“This was because, in part, a lot of the factions in the civil war *needed to be killed*.”
you were lying? And everyone should have known it?
Why then should we believe anything you say?”
Oh no, I absolutely believe people need to die, but they’re *Fucking Nazis*, you know, the side the anarchists were fighting in the Spanish civil war. You keep accusing me of believing a bunch of other people need to die.
And I’ve been honest, nothing can persuade you, you’ve provided no evidence otherwise. And I am done with you, this is just good clarification for others.
“Oh no, I absolutely believe people need to die, but they’re *Fucking Nazis*, you know, the side the anarchists were fighting in the Spanish civil war. You keep accusing me of believing a bunch of other people need to die.”
Oh, that’s a good one. Contradicting yourself in the space of ONE sentence. And then again.
You state that people NEED to die. Present tense.
Then you say they are the people the anarchists were fighting in the Spanish civil war — and even if the fighters were in the last year of the war, and were, oh, fourteen at the time, the youngest such fighters are a hundred years old.
No, you are simply demonstrating that you use the mote and bailey fallacy. You want to kill people. You call them Nazis. You insist that because you have called them Nazis, they fought the anarchist side in the Spanish civil war, and therefore it is right to kill them — in fine, you PROVE that you believe a bunch of other people need to die.
Both “Nazi” and “done with you” are words with meanings. Your attempts to change them back and forth midargument for your convenience only make your bad faith clear.
You do realize that there are literally still Nazis, right? They dress like Nazis, look like Nazis, say they’re Nazis, and vote Republican. Along with the other fascists, racists, homophobes, bigots, and reactionaries.
It’s only a Motte and Bailey if there [i]isn’t[/i] an equivalency. There is.
I am therefore [i]proudly[/i] asserting that, in the tradition of my forefathers, that Nazis are bad and killing them is necessary.
If that’s unacceptable to you, go deface the freedom wall or something, you have bigger problems and it’d be useful for the country to see raving lunatics disgracing the memory of WW2 vets because they killed fascists.
Done with you means *I’ve given up on you*. It doesn’t mean I won’t reply, at least not while I can continue to make you look really stupid when you put out a reply predicated on the belief that the people goosestepping through main street chanting blood and soil aren’t Nazis.
“You do realize that there are literally still Nazis, right? They dress like Nazis, look like Nazis, say they’re Nazis, and vote Republican.”
See everyone? The guy who claimed to be talking about “shooting war” is now claiming that voting Republican is grounds for his committing murder. The rest of it being all obvious lies.
“Done with you means *I’ve given up on you*.”
No, it means you are DONE. Engaging with me at all shows you are a liar.
Just as when you claim you are only for killing in a context of a shooting war, you are simply lying. You overtly lump people who vote against you into people who fought in the Spanish Civil War or WWII to claim that killing the former is justified by the later, because you want to kill
“If that’s unacceptable to you, go deface the freedom wall or something,”
That’s a Leftist thing. Once more you project
So you admit Republicans are Nazis implicitly? Because I said Nazis vote Republican; if I’m saying shoot all of them, does that mean you believe all Republicans are Nazis?
I don’t even believe that one Mary. You must really hate Republicans, or really love Nazis.
And I get to decide what my words mean. This insistence you get to speak for others makes you no friends.
“So you admit Republicans are Nazis implicitly?
Because I said Nazis vote Republican; ”
And then you said that, therefore, you get to kill them.
Which makes you a shameless liar. You do not get to kill people for how they vote, even if you call them Nazis, and you do not get to deny that you pretended you would kill them only in a “shooting war” and then asserted you were entitled to shoot them for how they voted.
All the more in that history clearly shows that your side continually expands any excuse to shoot people.
“And I get to decide what my words mean.”
No, you don’t. Your words mean what they mean. You want a different meaning, you need to choose different words.
@dcmorinmorinmorin, you wrote:
“I get to decide what my words mean”
Humpty-Dumpty from Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There wasn’t supposed to be a figure to be emulated.
I’m having a bit of trouble articulating how stupid it is to insist that an attack on Nazis in your party is an attack on the party, unless you’re one of them. Note that Mary hasn’t denied they’re in there, and has insisted they’re leftists before, so her internal beliefs here are scrambled; Nazis simultaneously don’t exist, are leftists, it’s inarguable they’re Republicans, and it’s vital to defend them being Republicans, but leftism is bad.
And guilders, as a matter of basic epistemology no they don’t. People’s inner worlds have meaning, words convey it. Insisting you understand someone’s inner world better than they are conveying is possible, but the actual chain of accusations here is nonsensical. I’m also fairly certain humpty Dumpty provided valuable exposition to Alice and was perfectly legible, although it’s been long enough I may be wrong; I suspect you’re misinterpreting the actual reference.
“I’m having a bit of trouble articulating how stupid it is to insist that an attack on Nazis in your party is an attack on the party,”
Why? Because it makes your motte-and-bailey fallacy too brazen?
Because it makes you look like you’re outright a Nazi.
“Because it makes you look like you’re outright a Nazi.”
Yes, I can see how that makes it difficulty for you, since it is seeping into your awareness that you are talking nonsense when you say that.
With some amusement, I’ve noted in recent years a curious reversal of the situation way back when in the late George W. Bush era. The Iraq War was decidedly not nearly so popular after several years as the Afghan War, for obvious and mundane reasons. Although, in both cases the “War War” part was over relatively quickly, but the “Jaw Jaw” part didn’t go as well and the United States wound up in a lengthy quasi-occupation. (Quasi, in the sense that we intended to create a democratic government with more legitimacy than either a fascist dictator or theocratic oligarchy).
There were some massive protests over Iraq. For most opponents (and even some supporters) the assumption was that the effort could not succeed. And it was frequently contrasting against the “good” Afghan War. However, at the present time it appears that, right or wrong on the merits of the wars, Iraq is now a functional and reasonably-stable government. Afghanistan, on the other hand, eventually went back to the Taliban.
There is no broader message here and no political intent. It’s just a case of history not working out in the way we humans might think “sensible”. In another ten years maybe we’ll all wonder how in the world Iraq created a Buddhist Vegan Divine Monarchy or some other unforeseeable chaotic event will occur.
I’ve often wondered if it wouldn’t have been better for the world if the US had simply carved up Afghanistan along ethnic lines and handed the pieces to its neighbors of those ethnicities. My recollection is that would have left out one major ethnicity, but that they were sufficiently related to another that perhaps something like a protectorate could have been worked out. We’ll never know whether that would have been better, of course.
I’ve often wondered if it wouldn’t have been better for the world if the US had simply carved up Afghanistan along ethnic lines and handed the pieces to its neighbors of those ethnicitie
I think one concern there was the biggest ethnicity (and titular nationality) of Afghanistan is also the second biggest ethnicity in Pakistan, and giving them their own state might further destabilizie Pakistan. (There are actually more Pashtuns in Pakistan than in Afghanistan, just like there are more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan).
Which is not to say that it wouldn’t be a good idea (on general principle I’m all in favor of ethnically cohesive, relatively homogeneous nation-states), but it would have required some intense negotiations with Pakistan.
Simply ending the Durand Line–just giving all of Afghanistan to Pakistan–was probably the only thing that would have actually worked. Just like carving off Kurdistan in Iraq seemed like an obvious move for some people too. In both cases, the decision to go to war in the first place was made by people who knew they would never do those things. To American neocons, the US’s single most important treaty obligation, the only international pact you can rely on them not to break for a ham sandwich, is the Helsinki Protocol’s rule that international borders cannot be changed. All of the blisteringly stupid colonial and post-colonial borders aren’t held in place by inertia or lack of imagination, but by American faith in the domino theory and American nuclear weapons.
I am not in a position to say you are *wrong*, but I do find myself questioning your certainty there. First, I would question whether Pakistan even wanted to control Afghanistan as well as whether or not it actually could. Second, and independent Kurdistan would be an immensely risky step that could cause knock-on problems throughout the entire region. It’s not all clear that the United States even could credibly force those changes on its own hook.
Oh, everything you say is *also* true. But it’s not the case that those resolutions were taken off the table because they were impractical or because diplomacy was insufficient or because local people did not want them. Partitions etc were not discarded as options after the dream of being greeted as liberators was dashed, they were never ever ever options to the architects of the war at all. To me that’s a very important point.
I may be wrong about what’s important in general.
I would be very cautious about assuming that giving one country to another is necessarily going to end well.
Life being what it is, it is rash to assume that anything, including doing nothing, is necessarily going to end well.
it wouldn’t have involved Afghanistan in general, just the majority Pashtun areas. (Kabul would have been a sticking point, just like Vilnius was after WWI, but I’m sure it would have gotten sorted out eventually).
All of the blisteringly stupid colonial and post-colonial borders aren’t held in place by inertia or lack of imagination
There are absolutely a ton of postcolonial borders (and for that matter postcolonial countries) that shouldn’t exist in any rational world, no arguing with you there.
I
The question of minority protection is one with a long history of failures. At the end of WWI, about every newly independent European country instituted pretty strong legal protections for linguistic minorities (which passed for ethnicity at the time). These were strongly promoted by the Entente powers.
By 1930, almost all of those protections were gone. About the only countries that actually respected the cultural autonomy it had granted were Finland, for Swedish-speaking Finns. This was a result of two reasons: the relatively wealthy Swedish-speaking minority could, more or less, finance its own institutions on their own, and maintaining good relations with Sweden was a vital interest for Finland. For Everywhere else, it was usually a question of some backward yokels near some border, and those would have little support in the capital when their cultural rights were eliminated.
And the overt reason for Hitler to demand territory and start WWII was to protect German-speaking minorities.
This goes back further. Britain (as the most tightly-governed state in Europe) was pretty harsh on ‘minority’ cultures from the 16th century – and increasingly so up to the late 19th. France started this in the early 19th. The general shift from ‘government over a people’ to ‘government for a people’ obviously needed a definition of who were the people – and the answer was ‘those who spoke English (or French/German/Castillano/Russian etc).
Would’ve just led to Turkey -Greece style cleansings. You’d end up with every major ethnicity in it’s borders, every minor ethnicity waging an insurgency/guerilla war, and the resulting nations staring at each other through artillery scopes.
If that’s meaningfully different from today is another question, but there’s something to be said if not *intentionally* engineering a genocide.
I’d say that the Greco-Turkish population transfers (and similar things, like the removal of Germans from Eastern Europe after WWII, etc.) are a big part of why Europe is peaceful today, actually. Greeks and Turks may not like each other much, and maybe they never will, but the fact that there aren’t large Greek minorities in Turkey and Turkish minorities in Greece has removed what would otherwise be an obvious cause for war.
The ideal way to deal with ethnic conflict (and ethnic tensions more generally), in my opinion, is to separate the groups. To the extent possible.
Then you’d be wrong. I don’t mean to be blithe, but anyone looking at the entire region can quickly tell it’s still a powder keg. The reason the area’s peaceful is a combination of: NATO of which both are members, the UN which actively peacekeeps the entire region, and the legacy of the cold war freezing regional conflicts because their international benefactors wanted to choose when the shooting war started instead of being dragged in.
It’s internationalism that is keeping people from killing each other; the natural state of affairs would have been a war. This isn’t a utopian view of politics or anything, a lot of the organizations involved are/were somewhere between imperious, malicious, and patronizing towards the individuals and peoples involved, but they’re historically the reason several million aren’t dead.
This can be evidenced by a half dozen incidents from 1945 to today that all form casus belli that weren’t acted on specifically because of international pressure. Segregating the populations solved nothing, it just ensured that the peoples *hated* each other for what feels like cause.
More broadly ethnonationalism has not, historically, been a tool of regional stability and peace. The same song and dance always occurs where someone does something horrific, the government realizes it can use this to justify it’s own suppression of rights, and suddenly ethnic tensions flare. If you just try to become more of an ethnostate there’s always some minority that still exists, and if a country falls into the spiral of “purity” it never ends and your final resting state is an eternal war on your own population, then everyone else.
This spiral can most clearly be shown in Nazi Germany and the Khmer Rouge. While theoretically on opposite ends of the political spectrum, both nations faced a similar death spiral because they were built around an ethnic identity. First they had to purge their internal minorities to justify the states power, but there were still minorities that existed across messy borders. Thus they had to do the same to external ones. The main difference is that Nazi Germany was capable of violence and its suicidal death cult killed millions before the weaknesses of their society showed, while the Khmer Rouge invaded Vietnam and got instantly obliterated.
“The ideal way to deal with ethnic conflict (and ethnic tensions more generally), in my opinion, is to separate the groups.”
But that’s not how the history points at all.
In the US the armed conflicts between ethnic groups are with exactly the ones who weren’t allowed to mingle freely. We forced natives to move away and got centuries of low level insurgency. We let white people mingle freely and there has never been ethnic warfare between Irish and British or French and Germans or Germans or Poles or Germans and Danes or Germans and Russians or Germans and British.
Europe had lots of ethnic cleansing and there is a major sectarian war going on in Europe right now. Northern Ireland stopped having the Troubles when they gave up on creating racial boundaries. Western Europe is free of sectarian conflict because it’s leadership spent decades breaking down international boundaries.
“Northern Ireland stopped having the Troubles when they gave up on creating racial boundaries.”
I’ve read one or two books about the Troubles, and literally none of them have said that, even in passing.
ad9: There’s a reason Brexit was the one thing that was threatening to reignite things. Allowing (essentially) free access within the EU framework was a major part of the Northern Irish settlement.
That’s not really a racial boundary, although I suppose that’s an acceptable way to categorize the inane obsession with which particular 5-5 plot someone’s ancestors came from. I’d call it ethnic, but the concern wasn’t really about that either.
It’s more to do with people feeling that a militarized border between their ancestral lands maintained by what they viewed was a hostile imperialist power was, to put it mildly, completely unacceptable. They protested this, were attacked by establishment goons, and when the UK responded to the tensions by basically sending an occupying army to the region it just ensured that violence was inevitable.
The ethnic elements were secondary at best compared to the natural and inevitable result of suppressing political speech with violence and segregating populations with force.
But that’s not how the history points at all.
With all due respect, I think the history (of Europe in particular) supports my position much better than yours here.
Europe has certainly had conflicts since 1945, but much fewer than before that, and I think that at least part of that is because of the long process (culminating after the end of the Cold War) of sorting the continent into relatively ethnically homogeneous nation states. I’m going to leave Ukraine aside for a moment since that’s more complicated, but the other places where (civil) conflict has happened, in Europe, since 1945, are precisely the places where the national question *was not* resolved and where you still had ethnically heterogeneous populations. That’s to say, in the Abkhaz areas of Georgia, in the minority areas of Moldova, in Cyprus and various areas of Yugoslavia. (Whether I would consider Serbs, Croats and Bosnians to be one ethnic group or several isn’t really the point here- they thought of themselves as distinct, or at least many of them did).
In places where fairly ethnically homogeneous societies were achieved (the Czech and Slovak lands, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, etc.) there wasn’t civil conflict at least in part because you didn’t have ethnic differences to fight over.
I don’t really think looking at America is very useful here- it’s such a weird country that I don’t really think American history has all that many useful lessons for the rest of the world- but the way that Native Americans were treated is absolutely *not* what I’m talking about when I argue for a principled form of “separate states for separate ethno-national groups”. They absolutely *were not* given sovereign, separate, economically viable units of land on which to maintain distinct societies: on the contrary, every piece of land they were given, even Oklahoma, was gradually encroached on and taken away and all the promises made to them were revoked.
“and literally none of them have said that, even in passing.”
Oh they absolutely did say that for the entire duration of the book, they just didn’t use the same terminology. The Troubles were created by trying to create boundaries between the “British” and “Celtic” “races” in the 19th century terms. This was just a continuation of a “racial” division that they’d been creating for the better part of 1000 years. But race is an absurd contrivance so now that the island of Ireland is in a post-racial utopia of all these people being white nobody describes them as races any more.
God willing the crick dont rise, in a couple hundred years people wont have the slightest understanding what “racism” would have the slightest thing to do with the 1960s civil rights movement because to their eyes all the major groups were members of the same American race just like to our eyes, both sides of the Troubles were the same race.
“They absolutely *were not* given sovereign, separate, economically viable units of land on which to maintain distinct societies: on the contrary, every piece of land they were given, even Oklahoma, was gradually encroached on and taken away and all the promises made to them were revoked.”
So in other words it was a completely typical racial division that played out exactly the same way that such things always does.
Go around to the locations of the European Shtels from 200 years ago and see how many of them are left. Or look at Palestine here the lines were very formally drawn and in 80 years they’ve lost half their land by both population location and land area. Go around what used to be Ainu country a few hundred years back and you’ll find Japanese cities, not Ainu ones. Look at the way that ethnic “Han” Chinese are deliberately eroding the supposedly protected territory of minority groups.
Draw a clear racial boundary line today and somebody will try to move it tomorrow. In places where the divisions are stark one side tends to be strong enough to succeed. Where they tend to fail is the places where the divisions get eroded and the borders become porous. The way to protect the Indian reservations isn’t to keep the white people out of the reservations, it’s to stop keeping the Indians out of the cities and towns where everybody else lives.
“With all due respect, I think the history (of Europe in particular) supports my position much better than yours here.”
Not to be trite, but absolutely not. Most European states are multicultural unions that might maintain a fiction of a unifying ethnic identity, but this was largely imposed by centuries of not caring and legal equality. France isn’t a monolithic culture, there were dozens of regional ethnicities explicitly united both by forced interaction (mandatory public schooling) and being citizens of the same political entity. Spain has a half dozen completely unrelated ethnic groups that all more of less get along; the Catalan are the vocal ones, but there are many others. Britain is a hodgepodge, Germany a kleidoscope, Italy is at least split down the heel of the boot, etc.
The differences people are killing each other over in Asia Minor, Greece, the Balkans, Cyprus, etc. are just as trivial as these distinctions. Linguistic, genetic, and religious differences can be found in every single large European state, particularly before the 1800’s and public education.
Separating them just validates the us versus them mentality and is directly the wrong thing to do; we have clear sociological studies on this, separate people with a common language and culture into groups and they will fully fabricate differences to fight over.
Oh, I already said ‘not to be trite’, now I just look like an ass. Er… Insert “respectfully, then” instead?
I recognize I’m dismissing a clearly held belief outright but that’s because it’s just explicitly wrong. There’s no way to say that without appearing dismissive, because it is dismissive, no matter how I explain why it’s wrong. But I still respect your opinions.
Then you’d be wrong. I don’t mean to be blithe, but anyone looking at the entire region can quickly tell it’s still a powder keg.
Um, no. I’m pretty confident i know more about Eastern Europe than most Americans (I don’t know about you, in particular), and I would absolutely not describe the region as a “powder keg”. Do you seriously believe what you’re saying here? Do you actually think that, say, Poland or Slovakia is more likely to experience a civil war or for that matter an international war within the next 50 years than a cosmopolitan western country like, say, France or England? I can very easily see France or England collapsing into civil war over the ethnic and political divisions resulting from mass migration. I can’t even conceive of a civil war in Poland or Slovakia- who would be fighting whom? They’ve *achieved* their national ideal of “as many people of X nation as possible within the state boundaries, as few people of not-X nation as possible within the state boundaries”.
Multiethnic societies can exist, certainly (lots of them do) but in my opinion they come at a serious cost and I’m in general going to prefer the (relatively) ethnically homogeneous model of the nation state.
More broadly ethnonationalism has not, historically, been a tool of regional stability and peace. The same song and dance always occurs where someone does something horrific, the government realizes it can use this to justify it’s own suppression of rights, and suddenly ethnic tensions flare. If you just try to become more of an ethnostate there’s always some minority that still exists, and if a country falls into the spiral of “purity” it never ends and your final resting state is an eternal war on your own population, then everyone else.
You’re spinning a lot of theories here, but when I look at history or anthropology I see no evidence for it at all. The world is full of ethnically defined and ethnically homogeneous nation-states today, and the world has had plenty of ethnically homogeneous territorial communities throughout history (I’m not going to get into whether these were ‘states’ or not). Most of them today aren’t getting into any wars, most of them historically don’t seem to have been more warlike than the cosmopolitan empires, and while they’re usually tough on minorities (by liberal “western” standards) many of them seem like quite thriving and well functioning societies. I would point to ethnic conflict as something that’s more characteristic of *diverse* societies: when you reorganize states on ethnic lines (or even, when you reorganize internal borders within a country along ethnic lines), while there may be conflict in the process of getting these, I do absolutely think that you tend to wind up with less conflict in the end once the new boundries are established.
We were talking below about Malaysia, and I think they’re actually a good example here: Malaysia has gotten less diverse since independence, partly because they expelled Singapore and partly because of differential fertility, and I’d say that as Malays become a demographic supermajority, the salience of race has decreased. The ethnic-minority party actually won an election in 2018, for the first time in history. I would say that’s largely because as natives have gone from 45% of the population to 70%, they’ve become less concerned about specifically ethnic interests and can afford to vote based on other factors. When you’re 70% of the population you are unlikely to feel like the survival and thriving of your group is at stake.
Finally, your bringing up Nazi Germany and Cambodia here is just….strange. You are aware, right, that there are plenty of ethnically defined and relatively homogeneous nation states in the world (including, say, the Czech Republic one of whose first acts following the *liberation* from Nazi rule was to ensure homogeneity by *expelling the Germans*), right? And that most of them don’t particularly represent Nazi Germany or Cambodia in any meaningful sense? Both of these states were so weird and unusual that I don’t think they have much in the way of lessons for the rest of the world (unless you’re someone who actually believes, like the Nazis did, in the virtue of war and aggression for its own sake, so I think maybe Putin and his regime may qualify). Slovaks are not invading any countries today, nor are the peoples of Japan or Botswana or Bhutan.
“most of them historically don’t seem to have been more warlike than the cosmopolitan empires”
The cosmopolitan empire of the Pax Romana in its heyday seems to have been more peaceful than the endemic low-level warfare of small ethnic kingdoms. Especially from the point of view of a small farmer getting ‘foraged’ or not.
the neighbors likely would have refused to take them. For much the same reasons none of the states bordering the west bank/gaza will take them even if offered.
I mean, the Iraqi government still isn’t great and very nearly fell to an Islamist extremist organization. The larger opposition wasn’t that the war goals couldn’t succeed, it’s that they didn’t *exist* until the occupation had already begun-WMD’s were a lie and the way it was sold in public parlance was as a war on terror, when in fact there was a tenuous connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda at best.
More pertinently, if the US was really in the ideological business of overthrowing totalitarian fascist regimes and theocratic oligarchies, we’d start by pressuring our half-dozen allies which are conservatively worse. It’s clear that the project had nothing to do with that.
IIRC, Tooze estimated Germany, Russia and the UK each having ~33% US GDP, with France being a little smaller. So if the UK had been occupied after France, the odds against Germany would suddenly have started to look a lot more reasonable, given the difficulty of a bombing offensive or blockade in those circumstances. (Assuming the conquered territories could be effectively exploited.)
OTOH, it is not easy to invade an island in the face of a superior navy.
Yeah my understanding is that a German invasion of Britain was never really in the cards, given that they would’ve needed both air & naval superiority to do it & never came close to achieving either (with naval superiority, they never even tried).
Of course, there’s still the question of what would’ve happened if the British had sued for peace, as Halifax proposed. But even that possibility was a lot more remote than Hollywood likes to pretend; Alan Levine documents strong political will in Britain to keep fighting even when (for example) Parliament didn’t expect the Dunkirk evacuations to succeed.
There was a strong belief in all of the combatant leadership that popular interest in surrender and civilian deaths from explosions were tied measures which would necessarily increase (or decrease) together. Almost all of the real-world testing of this assumption that humanity has undertaken since the 1930s has shown it to be false.
But it was so strongly held in WWII that it remains one of the main drivers of strategic planning globally today, almost a century later.
TBH, if the Chain Home early warning radar stations had started construction a year later, or if the Ground Control Intercept system had been less effective, the Battle of Britain might have had a very different ending.
Note that the Germans did not know much about this system during the battle, and no one could have known how effective it would be in advance. It is not as if anyone had fought such a campaign before.
Look what happened to Pearl Harbour, radar-equipped though they were.
It’s possible, although note that chain home was just one element of British success in the Battle of Britain; the Observer Corps & Ultra were also important, as were various technical, training, & organizational advantages. The Battle of Britain was not a close-run thing, so removing one British advantage wouldn’t automatically change the outcome.
Note also that even if the Germans had won the BoB, that only gives them air superiority. They would also have needed naval superiority for a successful invasion, & that was much farther out of reach.
Very much so. Aircraft at the time (apart from British naval aviation) could not operate effectively at night – anf any invasion would have to undertake a considerable part of the journey at night. The RN had 200+ craft active in the Channel at night – often only just outside the invasion harbours. Forming up barge strings while under fire and then trying to tow them across tidal wreck-strewn waters while under fire was essentially mass suicide. As the German High Command knew. The threat was a bluff, intended to bounce Britain from the war politically.
“although note that chain home was just one element of British success in the Battle of Britain”
The Luftwaffe’s targets were not more than a few minutes flying time inland. The major Supermarine Spitfire factory was in Southampton – a port city on the south coast directly opposite occupied France.
No radar would mean no early warning, would mean no chance of the defending aircraft reaching the attackers altitude in time. Air defence would be impossible.
(Germany, the US and the UK all developed radar immediately before the war – but none of them knew the others had.)
“No radar would mean no early warning, would mean no chance of the defending aircraft reaching the attackers altitude in time. Air defence would be impossible”
Again, you’re discounting the Observer Corps & Ultra, both of which could & did frequently detect Luftwaffe forces in time to organize interception. I have no doubt that defense would be *less effective* if radar weren’t part of that mix; but to say it would be impossible is at best speculative if not dubious
Aircraft warming up could be detected by radio finders, and the distribution gave some idea of the targets. Germany used this as advance warning of raids from mid-war.
AJS, the battle was fought at a height of 15000-25000 feet. It took around 5 minutes to scramble a squadron (if it was at the highest state of readiness), and they climbed at 2000-2500 feet per minute.
So it would take around 15 minutes from the order to scramble before they reached operational altitude over their own airfield. During that time a raid moving at 200mph would move 50 miles. The centre of London is 50 miles from the South coast.
So if the only warning came from the Observer Corps when they saw an aircraft fly over the coast, an 11 Group squadron at the highest alert status might be able to defend its own airfield. Or perhaps not.
Coastal radar with a range of 50-100 miles gives you another 15-30 minutes warning, doubling or tripling the time you have. That is why it was essential.
Codebreaking takes time, so it might advise you on when to release squadrons for maintenance, of which they need many hours for every hour in the air, but it doesn’t tell you when to launch the fighters. If it did, you would not need to keep them on five minutes notice.
(Note, by the way, that later in the war 8th Air Force would probably spend an hour over German territory before they reached the Rhur, let alone Berlin. So the Luftwaffe could have gotten away with just an observer corps in that campaign. OTOH, German radar could have had a big impact on their ability to fight a battle over the Channel. Especially if they had had a better command and control system.)
@ad9 On the contrary, codebreaking of low-grade cipher traffic gave the British advanced warning of the altitude and location of incoming German aircraft, sometimes doing so even before those aircraft came into radar range (see https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/how-codebreakers-helped-fight-battle-britain%20https://raf.mod.uk/what-we-do/centre-for-air-and-space-power-studies/aspr/apr-vol3-iss3-3-pdf/ ).
It’s important to avoid the trap of assuming that without radar data, the RAF would have fought the same way but worse; RAF doctrine and organization would almost certainly have developed differently. This may have involved basing more fighters in Midlands and other interior airfields (for which Observer Corps data would provide sufficient advance warning); dispersing production facilities and other essential infrastructure in the south (as happened to that Southampton Spitfire production facility, by the by, after a bombing raid destroyed the original factory in September 1940); and operating more combat air patrols in sensitive southern areas. All of these measures had significant tradeoffs, and being forced to adopt them would certainly have weakened the RAF and increased the odds of a German air victory. But the RAF would still have had a fighting chance, and one could hardly say that air defense would have been “impossible.”
Also, Halifax is protrayed as a cheese eating surrender monkey, but he was more picturing a Peace of Amiens scenario. He would have been pushing rearmament. Obviously isn’t going to be letting be looted for German war machine. And will want to reenter no later that when Operation Barbarossa looks to be bogging…
You’re overlooking the fact that the economies of everywhere the Germans occupied crashed, burned, and never really recovered. The assumption that the conquered territories could be effectively exploited is a very bad one; especially since those conquered western major powers are sitting on extensive trade/colonial networks that rely on a sea control the Germans don’t have and can’t acquire in anything less than a decade or so.
So instead, everything to operate factories and the like in places like France, the Low Countries, Denmark, etc, had to come from Germany. And Tooze goes into how by early 1942, Germany was facing a severe shortage of coal, despite being one of the biggest coal producers in the world at the time, because they suddenly needed to feed furnaces in half of Europe but coal production hadn’t kept pace.
Yeah, even in a Nazi win scenario based on the depopulation trends in the East and economic decline in occupied Western Europe (which continued pretty reliably throughout the war) their economic model is going to be falling apart before 1960s.
One of the interesting features of Wages of Destruction is the way Tooze clearly illustrates the logic of the Nazi slave labour campaigns for Eastern Europe, and the related “guest-worker” programs for Western Europe.
Ultimately importing skilled and unskilled labour made more sense than exporting tasks to the industrial zones of the rest of Europe, which were of course unreliable and very unmotivated. Not to mention it allowed even more German men to be fed into the military furnace to be burnt up.
The German economy was larger than the UK’s (351 to 284, but the UK more fully industrial), but the British Empire and the Dominions added considerably – to total 684: nearly double Germany. Half the divisions at Alamein were from the Dominions or Empire.
Germany being able to effectively make use of french or british GDP is another thing entirely, while looting occupied countries certainly had *some* effect it’s far from just taking one country’s GDP and adding it to anothers’.
There’s a reddit called r/optimists. I recommend that you read that *too*.
I still wonder why American crime rate is sky high at 90s. People have offered “lead” and “abortion” as main cause but both doesn’t seem likely as THE cause to me. Is it a coincidence that the decline starts at the end of Soviet Union? Still, I don’t see this decline as anyone’s accomplishment unless someone can give convincing answer why it’s so high in the first place. Also it actually prove that there was “good old days” in 50s where crime is very low per capita.
my guess is “culture” and the legacy of being a frontier society. (Russia was a frontier society too, expanding east instead of west, and they also have unusually high murder rate by European standards).
Canada/ Australia/ New Zealand have similar homicide rates to Europe, but were presumably just as much frontier societies. OTOH Mexico, Brazil and Jamaica have much higher homicide rates than the US, but were not obviously more frontier-like.
I wonder if it might be a consequence of slavery/ serfdom/ peonage. It is easy to imagine that a long period of such things might not do much for your confidence in your fellow man, your countrymen, or the authorities.
I wonder if it might be a consequence of slavery/ serfdom/ peonage.
Probably? ALthough there are some societies that used to have slavery or peonage that have fairly low homicide rates today. I’m sure it’s a confluence of factors in America, and the legacy of slavery is probably one of them.
EVERY society used to have slavery.
“EVERY society used to have slavery.”
“every” is probably an exaggeration, but sure, slavery of some kind has been a widespread institution in the past. I meant to point out that some of the societies which had slavery until *very late*, in the early 20th c (e.g. places like Niger, Nepal, Turkey etc.) have quite low homicide levels today.
The US had a much lower homicide rate in the first half of the 20th century, when the legacy of slavery was much closer in time (and racial discrimination was legally mandated in half the country), which suggests that this isn’t the cause.
1930s America had a lower homicide rate than 1970s America, but it had a higher rate than 1930s Britain. The homicide rates have more or less gone up and down in parallel, but the American rate has always been much higher.
And it has always been higher in the South than the North. (You could find areas in the North where it was higher than the average in the South, but in general the average northern state was less murderous than the average southern one.)
So what is peculiar to the South (and the former British Caribbean colonies), that distinguishes them from the North, Britain and the rest of the British settlement colonies? And that appears to distinguish Russia and the tropical Americas from the rest of the Western world?
Whatever it is, it has to effect the way that people think about justice and acts of violence.
The legacy of slavery might (or might not; there are many other differences between the southern USA and the northern USA, or between the USA and UK) be the reason why the US has a higher crime rate than the UK, but it’s unlikely to be the reason why the US crime rate was so high in the 1990s, since the crime rate was much lower in earlier decades when the legacy of slavery was more salient.
(Also, nitpick/pet peeve: I think you meant “it has to *affect* the way people think about justice” (ad-ficio = do something to), rather than “effect the way” (ex-ficio = bring about, cause, produce).)
While homocide rates are more “sticky” than other crimes (in that they are harder to conceal) they’re still reliant on eg. the data being collected. Classic caution “Are the numbers changing because of underlying changes or because something changes about how the numbers are collected?”
Also economic inequality is much higher in the US (and in post-communist Russia) than anywhere in Europe, as far as I know. Although i think culture is also equally important.
“someone can give convincing answer why it’s so high in the first place”
That is in fact one of the strengths of the lead theory. We poisoned a couple of generations with a known neurotoxin, and behavior got worse; we stopped, and behavior got better. Supposedly (I’m trusting Kevin Drum and others) the timing works out pretty well between US states and between countries.
It does. Although, full disclosure, there’s a confounding variable of cellphone access. The issue there is that cellphones both have a mechanism to reduce crime and access became mainstream almost exactly as our crime rate (and delayed lead effect) started to plummet, although lead is probably still the primary factor.
Anecdotally, rates of violent crime in America track almost perfectly to levels of student access to Doom and it’s successor games on computers/devices inside public school facilities.
How broadly are we defining “its successor games” for this purpose? Because the existence of the 2005 turn-based mobile spinoff “Doom RPG” may befoul any attempt at observing statistical trends here. Although it is also quite funny.
Have you heard the term “spurious regression”?
Or “completely uncorrelated”.
Look, violent crime in the US didn’t begin it’s steady fall the year Doom was released, it began the next year when broad access to free pirate copies happened and students could afford to widely install it in school computer labs. The decline continued steadily to today with one major exception, the pandemic. And what was the largest feature of the pandemic disruption in America? Public school closures! Students lost the ability to misuse public school facilities as a ‘third space’ to play violent videogames and violent crime went up. When they regained that ability the decline in crime also resumed.
In American popular culture, the only explanation for declining crime that *doesn’t* start outside of popular common sense is, ‘we continued the beatings until things improved.’ Every other explanation is *equally* a wild hypothesis that needs to be studied before anyone will treat it seriously.
It may be the case that what I wrote is of no value except as an unserious joke by an unserious person, but we do not know that; it hasn’t been studied, and also it won’t be because it will be dismissed out of hand by people who ‘know better’ every time someone suggests studying it.
Yes it has been studied, it’s a spurious connection that isn’t casual. We’ve looked at crazier things. There’s a persistent hypothesis that insulating pants heating up male genetilia is responsible for declining testosterone and fertility rates, and it’s treated seriously and studied.
We’re literally studying the effects of sweaty jock straps on sperm count.
Scientists are *lunatics*.
I don’t think there was one specific cause, but rather a combination of factors, many of which had started decades before. A lot of violent crime is driven by those in the young hot-headed teen demographics so things early in their childhood effecting their development have can an outsized influence.
So, while things like leaded gas have an effect, I think the two biggest factors where white flight and the war on drugs. In the former, the loss of tax revenue as middle class white families move to the suburbs cause the urban areas to face massive revenue shortfalls, leading to cities getting a lot worse in the 60’s and 70’s, so lots of rundown, overcrowded schools, less money for the sorts of after school programs that might help wayward youths. Add to that the effects on the War on Drugs: gang violence in the streets, families broken up because a parent got a tough jail sentence, etc. So, by the time you reach the late 70s and 80s, you’ve got a new generation entering their teens and 20s having grown up in that environment.
Then, things start of turn around. Gentrification, for better or for worse, brings money back into the urban centers, a lot of cities (especially New York) get cleaned up, and a decade or so later, we see the crime rate peak and then start to go back down.
Anti-urbanist policies also contributed in the same way as white flight. If you read Jane Jacob’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” she devotes considerable time to explaining how anti-urbanism would create crime. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can say it’s even worse then she was saying.
White flight is/was an American problem, and yet crime rates in the rest of the first world increased (and later fell) at the same time. Similar considerations apply to the war on drugs — other first-world countries have anti-drug laws, obviously, but I don’t think any of them went after drug use as hard.
There is no single answer, and anyone who confidently states that it’s a single thing is wrong. Especially if that single thing is US-centric, because the crime drop of the 90’s was global. Academics have looked at it ever since, and come up with dozens of little things that all could explain part of the crime drop, but which also aren’t all compatible with each other.
It was a macroeconomic trend that did not come from a single policy, and was not fixed with a single policy.
This is true of a lot of complex problems, searching for single causes is often folly.
Abortion? Oh well, then the crime rate should be very low now, seeing as women’s rights were pretty much abolished in the US.
(Of course, the opposite is true: With forced birthing, crime rates increase, because there’s more young people who don’t have a perspective because their mothers were forced to give birth to them before being able to get established in their jobs.)
I agree that the “crime rate” doesn’t really prove anything much. One thing, you can reduce the crime rate massively by just making crimes legal. Thus, a massively violent, horrible dystopic hellhole society can have a very low crime rate. (I imagine Sparta had a very low crime rate. Or would have had, if anyone had bothered to record it. )
Second, if you discourage people from reporting crimes, the official rate goes down, but things get worse, not better. (Some countries saw their rate of rape increase massively after improving women’s rights, because, lo and behold, with less risk of being victim-blamed, women actually went and reported it. Dubai likely has an official crime rate of zero where rape is concerned, because no woman except for the occasional tourist is stupid enough to report it, because the natives all know THEY would be the ones punished if they reported it.)
Third, which crimes went up and which went down?
The prohibition is generally regarded as a failure with regard to crime rates, but I have read it did actually massively reduce the rate of domestic violence – just like the women who had fought for it predicted it would.
There are a lot of additional facts needed to know whether a lower crime rate is actually an indication of a better society, and thus, whether anyone is to be praised for accomplishing it.
(I don’t know any perfect indicator for a good quality of life, but I think a low maternal mortality is one of the best indicators of improvement. Good, affordable healthcare for everyone is something countries generally only get around to once they have solved other problems reasonably well, plus, one of the main causes of maternal mortality is homicide. I don’t know whether this is counted towards the official maternal mortality rate, but if one did count it, then maternal mortality rate would also tell you what the crime rate for the most serious crime is. Two in one!)
The abortion argument (made, if I recall correctly, in “Freakonomics”) is that legal abortion, by reducing unwanted children, produces less crime in about twenty years, when the unwanted children get big enough to be dangerous. So abortion was generally illegal in the fifties, and there was lots of crime in the 70s, and then Roe v. Wade came along, and crime decreased 20 years later, in the 90s. If the argument is true, we should see a rise in crime levels starting in the 2040s, especially in more conservative states.
I personally don’t think this argument is very persuasive, but time will tell.
The abortion argument (made, if I recall correctly, in “Freakonomics”) is that legal abortion, by reducing unwanted children, produces less crime in about twenty years, when the unwanted children get big enough to be dangerous. So abortion was generally illegal in the fifties, and there was lots of crime in the 70s, and then Roe v. Wade came along, and crime decreased 20 years later, in the 90s.
How do they explain the fact that the ’50s had a low crime rate, and abortion was illegal in the ’30s? Or do they just gloss over that?
It’s not addressed in the book, but my guess would be that any surplus of 1950s angry young men which would have otherwise been caused by restrictions on 1930s abortion was more than canceled out by deaths in WWII.
It’s not addressed in the book, but my guess would be that any surplus of 1950s angry young men which would have otherwise been caused by restrictions on 1930s abortion was more than canceled out by deaths in WWII.
And the low crime rates in the ’40s, ’30s, ’20s, ’10s, and ’00s?
The violent crime rate was at near 1970 levels from 1900-1930, and projections further back show it even higher. You have to account for lack of state crime reporting, which was voluntary until the 1930’s, and crappy data.
The actual trend has been a high rate in 1900-1930, a low at 1930-1960, a rise until 1990, then a steady decline.
The best explanations are A. WW2 and the new deal acting as social engineering, B. A general downward trend from a high C. More accurate violent crime reports post 1960, D. Leaded Gasoline, and E. Cellphones post 1990, coincident with lead outlawed.
All have relatively good cases, so all are likely true.
Practical abortion access in the US in the 1930s was probably much higher than in the 1950s. Regulatory infrastructure to actually investigate and punish doctors and nurses moonlighting in women’s health or other unlicensed capacities was much weaker before the war; the cultural pressure to undo the gains in women’s independence caused by the war did lead medical professionals to reevaluate their moral perspectives on women after the war.
You are correct. How you can tell that Freakonomics was lying with statistics is that if you look at their argument, they never look at the age cohort. If their argument was correct, first juvenile crime would decline, then by 18 year olds, then 19 year olds. . . .
The opposite was true. The massive crime rate drop was chiefly driven by older criminals dropping crimes at massively high rates. IIRC, juvenile crime went up.
In addition to the other responses, remember that crime rates depend on definition. There’s no polite way to say this, so…It was legal for men to rape and beat their wives prior to the 70’s. Defining that as illegal created new category of crimes, that we recognize as crimes both morally and legally, which didn’t exist then and which still exist now. And which show up on both violent and sexual crime rates, so it’s not like drugs which can be tracked separately.
Point being that the 50’s crime rate statistics are, to be blunt, utter bullshit too.
It was legal for men to rape and beat their wives prior to the 70’s.
Only half right. Marital rape wasn’t a recognised crime, but battery was.
Defining that as illegal created new category of crimes, that we recognize as crimes both morally and legally, which didn’t exist then and which still exist now.
Do you have any actual evidence that this was behind the rise in crime, or is this merely a just-so story?
Incorrect.
Yes.
The UK and US both outlawed wife-beating in the later 19th century, well before the 20th-century rise in crime.
Incorrect. It was part of the civil rights movement. There were local exceptions, but they weren’t enforced or national until the 1940’s, state laws making domestic violence criminally prosecutable started in earnest in the 1960’s, and weren’t ubiquitous until after 1990.
Prior to that domestic violence was either only a crime if someone died, the beating was excessive, or was a civil matter. This meant it didn’t show up in crime rates, despite being illegal in a technical sense.
Does that timeline look familiar?
It was a crime, but often not a recorded one – or seen as one by the participants (so not recorded in Victims of Crime surveys). Just as, for instance, what might be assault in an upper-class mileu was just a bit of a push in a lower class one, or what was an unrecorded caution for a white person was an offence for a black one. Crime is tricky.
Sure, crime is tricky, which is why social scientists often use homicide rates as a proxy for (violent) crime in general, since it’s generally one of the hardest crimes to hide. Given that the homicide rate is higher than it was in, say, 1950, it’s probably safe to assume that the increase in reported crimes is reflecting an increase in actual crimes, rather than just an increase in the percentage of crimes being reported.
None of these legal changes would effect the homicide rate, because that is just a matter of counting the bodies of people who have been violently killed by someone. And that rate clearly went up in the postwar era and has subsequently gone down again. And not just in America.
Conversely, I believe there are homicide statistics for England going back to the Black Death, and they show an almost continuous decrease, with the late 20th century as a brief uptick near the end. I find it hard to believe that is because they were so much better at counting the bodies in the fourteenth century.
Those statistics are imperfect…but they are valid. We have better data for the past century though, so I’ll use that.
If we look at violent crime by crime we see something interesting.
The murder rate doubles, from 5 to 10, peaking in 1980.
The rate of rape *quadruples*, from 10 to 40, peaking in 1993. Aggravated assault was similar and burglary was in between.
What we’re seeing is two signals overlapped; one real signal depicting a doubling of violent crime, and one categorical signal doubling *that*.
As pertains to this discussion, this suggests, combined with corrections for imperfect data pre 1930, that violent crime was lower from 1930-1960, but not *as low as we think*. Likewise, violent crime post 1990 is better than we think, and the 70’s crime effect wasn’t as big as we thought.
It doesn’t invalidate the hypothesis, mind you, lead still doubled crime and the post war era was pretty good, but it helps dispel some nostalgia.
Do note I’m assuming a proportional prior between murder rate and other violent crime rates, but don’t see any good reason not to.
There’s a natural confounder with homicide rates: as medical care improves over time, people survive attacks that would have previously been recorded as homicides. This probably accounts for a lot of the decrease in homicide in Britain since the Black Death.
On the other hand, it makes increases in the homicide rate more impressive (though they are more local in time scope)
“But the result is that when things are fixed, they simply stop being discussed and I find that a lot of folks thus assume that – as they had on last report – these things have stayed broken, rather than being fixed.”
Hank Green talked about a similar problem to this, calling it the “Sad Gap:” you know a problem exists, but you don’t know about efforts to fix the problem, so you are stuck in outrage and hopelessness, until you learn that there are people working on the problem, and that allows you to be usefully engaged https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbPY2hyU3zk
I appreciate it’s not zero work, unlike just not posting, but it might be a thought to get some guest posters for the hiatus when you’re working on the book?
Even if not this year, perhaps worth considering for the future.
Replying before reading comments:
Local air quality has seen improvements, though been a mixed bag. I went to Caltech in the 1990s, and we commonly couldn’t see the San Gabriel mountains, mile-high hills 6 miles to our north; instead it would just be a wall of gray, except in the winter. On bad summer days I could detect light diffusing between me and the nearest daylight. I was told it had been even worse in the 1970s; it’s better now. (Obligatory caveat: except when wildfire smoke picks up…)
The long decline of violent crime from the 1990s peak (perhaps caused by lead from gasoline, another improvement) was interrupted by the pandemic, but has resumed going down in the past year: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-fbi-stats-show-historic-declines-violent-crime-rate-murder-showing-rcna156573
Progress in making city streets safe from cars, and in loosening the US’s determination to ban affordable housing, is far less than I would like, but there is progress in some places bulb-outs, protected intersections, bike paths and other improvements get made, speed limits get lowered, the iron grips of single family housing and government parking mandates are loosening, with modest results in lower rents.
Houston improved its transit ridership with little additional resources simply by deploying its buses in a smarter way: from a radial system of many low-frequency bus lines to a grid of fewer high-frequency lines.
I discovered recently that you can get a good folding bike for a few hundred dollars (Zizzo brand), rather than the $1200 minimum price for a Brompton (the only folding bike I’d heard of before). Being able to easily fold your bike helps with a lot of “bike theft” and “bike on transit” problems.
Digital storage makes a nomadic lifestyle a lot more pleasant now; I can carry a whole library in my pocket, never mind on my laptop. And while some disagree, I’ve found Airbnb a huge boon in finding reliable and affordable medium-term housing on short notice; I can live like some rich person flitting from hotel to hotel, without rich person’s income.
There’s of course a lot about the world that alarms me greatly too, but this isn’t the place for that…
Is that a whole library in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
Also, regarding another disease: how quickly we got vaccines against Covid-19 is _amazing_. Old tech like Coronavac, newer tech like vector vaccines and mRNA. IIRC, the first mRNA candidates were produced in January or February 2020, shortly after the viral sequence was published, because RNA can be _that fast_.
(Yeah, the long term results were disappointing, but that seems more the nature of the virus than a weakness of the vaccines; “natural immunity” is disappointing too. It’s hard to stop a virus that infects faster than memory B cell response time (3 days vs. 5 days) and that keeps changing its coat every few months.)
People who only wore cloth masks don’t know what they were missing out on in high tech masks; N95s and relatives are both far more protective and more breathable, thanks to technologies like melt-blown fibers (1970s) and electret layers (1990s). New designs like Auras or duckbills are more comfortable and more likely to fit than the old “bra cup on your face”.
Wildfire smoke is getting worse, but being able to get a monitor and a room air purifier, both for under $150, is pretty neat, plus those same masks for going outside.
Heat pump technology has advanced, with even air-source heat pumps now working well at fairly cold outside temperatures, based on advancements in just the past decade I believe.
In Japan I discovered the magic of mini-split air conditioners and heat pumps: the per-room temperature control of window A/C units and the quiet of HVAC.
Absolutely the speed of Covid vaccines is massive. I remember it being news in 1999 that the HIV genome had been _sequenced_ – for Covid we were doing that something like monthly or weekly.
And then there’s the knock-on effects of that vaccine push, like (I suspect) malaria vaccines going into trials just in the last few years. Effectiveness is low (for now), but any progress against malaria is a win in my book.
Another covid one: for a while we had Evusheld, a monoclonal antibodies (mab) product that could be given preventively to people with defective immune systems, making them basically immune to covid-19 infection for 6 months. It was scarce and expensive (I think mabs are genuinely difficult to manufacture, not just marked up like insulin) and needed to be given intravenously (not just a jab like flu shots), and viral evolution eventually made it not work (now replaced by Pemgarda, which probably isn’t as effective because the viral diversity is much greater than in 2021 so it’s harder to find antibodies that will block everything), but the fact that it was even an option was pretty neat.
I stumbled across this today which is both amusing and should effectively waste everyone’s time.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Blog/ACollectionOfUnmitigatedPedantry
A TV Tropes time sink joke? Good God, my time machine works!
I’ll make a Flash animation about it later on Newgrounds with some “borrowed” sprites from GaiaOnline.
Need to save this for when the blog takes a hiatus.
If you’ve read Bret’s Dispatch post and wonder why The Heritage Foundation is goosing its Index to make the Marines look good and the Air Force look bad, playing with the demographics dashboard to the DoD profile explains why. The Air Force has the highest percentage of women of all the services, while the percentage in the Marines is *much* lower than any of the others. The Marines are also *much* whiter than the other services, to my surprise — in my youth (Vietnam era & just after) the Navy was the notoriously white service.
That is pretty interesting! I’ve read somewhere that the Navy is also the most liberal service (in terms of the politics of its members I assume) of the US military, does that fit with your experience?
It certainly fits with historical stereotypes about navies.
I realize this is more controversial, but in my opinion, overpopulation is the most striking problem that we’ve mostly “solved” (and the one that I take most consolation in).
The global population is still growing of course but in more than half of countries it’s at or below replacement: it’s only in Sub Saharan Africa and a few Muslim countries that fertility rates are still high, and even there, they’re making (slow) progress.
Ozone is another big one though.
Truth be told, overpopulation was never a problem in the way that people like Paul Ehrlich (who by the way is a lepidopterist, which means his expertise is butterflies, not population trends) made it out to be. For the most part, the problem is poverty and political corruption preventing the creation of the necessary infrastructure to handle high population densities.
My impression is that a big part of it was the assumption that the demographic transition would take 5-6 generations to kick in, because that was how long it took in Europe and the US, limited by technological development. But it turns out that it only takes 2-3 generations.
The biggest part of it was the assumption that, while *some* parts of the world’s population were genetically/culturally capable of making that transition in x generations, and no part of the world’s population could be expected to make that transition in less than x generations, *other* parts of the world’s population was genetically/culturally incapable of ever making the transition.
It’s an idea that was born in 19th-century ‘race science’ and raised as an argument to convince otherwise open-minded people to agree with eugenics, and its ghost still haunts or entertainment and policy sectors in equal measure.
I agree that that assumption turned out to be wrong (and many people, including me, were surprised/stunned by the result), but note that it’s a separate and different claim from the one I’m responding to above, which is that the planet can/should support a much larger human population than it has today, or that it will have in 2050.
The collapse in fertility in Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, and Latin America (and the projected collapse in fertility rates in Africa and the Muslim world in future) are reasons to be happy and comforted, they’re not reasons to think “oh population growth was never a problem in the first place”.
No, you’re still wrong. Necessity is the mother of invention; more humans means more solutions, always. Maximizing the population would be a brutal goal for many reasons, bur ZPG belongs in the same bin as Ancient Aliens and the Vril.
So there’s three things that need to be said.
First, there’s a hard limit on population, corresponding to how much food and power can be generated by the sun in our orbit. We are nowhere near close to that; only completely unrestrained global growth could hope to hit that level in a century from now, and we had enough data in 1950 to say that wasn’t happening.
(Even this isn’t absolute)
Second, there’s a soft limit, which is the limit of what is possible given current technologies or reasonably predictable growth of technology. By that standard in 1950 we still are nowhere near that limit, but some effort needed to be done to reach it.
Well, some very clever, altruistic, and determined scientists sat down, researched the problem, and developed high yield easily harvested crops that feed several billion people today using genetics. They put in the effort.
Without them some billion would have died or never been born, particularly in Southeast Asia and Africa. India would likely be a burning crater, in particular, once the mass famines hit.
But the technology existed. There were no hard limits. And once implemented we could support billions more; there’s no real danger until we’re pushing 20 billion or so with our current crops.
Three there’s the illusionary limit where billions due if nothing happened. That’s never a real limit, but is always looming and a good indicator of the virtue of progress.
Endy, there are some limits on that; growth can outpace progress because struggling people don’t have the free time to develop technology. And without purely sustainable fusion, basically deuterium-deuterium or proton-boron, we’re limited by nuclear fuel and solar input, which probably limits the population to 100 billion to 1 trillion or so, but life would be pretty miserable and the world economy would have to be optimized for food, water, fertilizer, power, and recycling. We’d also likely have to be replicating natural cycles with either manmade ones or extraction of minerals from the ocean or crust. It’d be miserable.
If d-d fusion or p-b fusion works then we’re officially beyond all limits. The universe is a vast array of power, effectively infinite and ripe for exploitation. The theoretical limit on population would be limited by our ability to honeycomb the planets crust into living space, and we’d have no reason to stick to just one planetary body. Any restraining resource can be harvested with the raw power of nuclear fire, blasted from the rock under our feet and molded by electrochemistry to our needs.
But that assumes we can figure it out. It might not be possible with our laws of physics, although that’s vanishingly unlikely given post 1950’s research.
So there’s three things that need to be said.
There’s a fourth thing that needs to be said, which is that human population growth (and yes, I compared it to cancer cells before, and I’ll do so again, because I believe that) has come at the expense of nature and many other species that we share the planet with. Maybe some of you are fine with that, but I’m not, and even if it were technically possible to support 20 billion people on this planet by converting it all to intensive agriculture and cities, that would be a dystopian and horrific world, from my point of view. For that matter, I think the world we live in right now- see the citation I linked below on how human-dominated the earth already is- is bad enough, and I would much prefer a world with, say, 1 or 2 billion people on it than with 8 billion.
That’s a normative question of values of course, but since none of us here seem too shy of sharing our personal values and preferences, those are (some of) mine.
Converting the earth into high intensity farmland isn’t necessary until we’re pushing past 20 billion. Until then things can be kept basically stable without natural encroachment just with currently allotted farmland and resources. Hell, the US alone can conservatively double yield just by not producing as much meat, and that’s a very generous underestimate.
You don’t need to reduce the population four fold to preserve the environment. You just need to stop burning so much goddamn oil and letting capitalists remediate their mines, among other items of madness. It’s fully possible to construct a sustainable resource economy that doesn’t use fossil fuels and which has sustainable mining, as evidenced by the few mines in New Zealand that have done so as propaganda projects, but capital will never set out with that end goal.
This has nothing to do with the total population, just how we structure ownership. I absolutely agree that a century of growth at the current paradigm will likely produce a hell, but that’s not actually because of the extra ten billion people, and certainly not because of the eight already here. It’s because of the decisions of a few million elites that we keep paying for.
All that said, I absolutely agree that destroying the planet is very bad. If we idiotically decide to reach multiple tens of billions as a species we should go ruin some dead ice balls in the belt instead, they’re boring and have no intrinsic value. Earth is special.
I’d strongly disagree with that (if I understand your point of view correctly, i.e. if you’re holding to the “cornucopian” view that, to reduce it to slogans, “human numbers are a resource, not a liability” and that “every new baby born is a pair of hands to work, not a mouth to feed”.). For several reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopianism
1) At the most basic theoretical level, we live in a world of finite resources, and no species, certainly not including humans, can grow indefinitely without exceeding the carrying capcity of their environment. Whenever I hear someone spout cornucopian rhetoric, my response is always, “so, exactly how many people do you think the earth *can* or *should* support- what’s your ideal population size?”
2) Cornucopians typically point to the Green Revolution as the innovation that allowed the world to escape from the Malthusian trap. The implication here is that similar Green Revolutions can be repeated indefinitely into the far future, and this isn’t true: the Green Revolution relied on a very specific strategy, in theory and practice, which for the crops in which effort was focused (wheat and rice most importantly) has now reached its limit, and yield increases in our major crops are *falling behind* the rate of projected increase in demand by 2050. There isn’t going to be more progress achieved by breeding wheat to be shorter: it’s as short now as it will ever be. There are efforts now to target the *other* strategy for improving productivity- increasing photosynthetic efficiency- but I can say as someone who has worked in this area, this is proving to be a harder nut to crack than initially envisioned 15 years ago, and even if this were achieved, the theoretical maximum photosynthetic efficiency could still only support a 3x increase in demand, or so (which means that we would still have a hard carrying capacity, albeit one higher than today).
here is the classic paper on the topic, i think:
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-arplant-042809-112206
3) Even if it were possible to support a much larger human population than the planet has today, why would you ever *want* that? From my perspective, there are already *way* too many people in the world: humans have spread like a cancer over the planet at the expense of many other species and at the expense of the world’s natural ecosystems. To give you a sense of how sick the world we live in today is, humans and human-raised mammals currently account for 67% of mammalian biomass, and human-raised domestic birds account for 70% of avian biomass. How is this in any way healthy or desirable???
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349004735_Food_system_impacts_on_biodiversity_loss_Three_levers_for_food_system_transformation_in_support_of_nature/figures?lo=1
I’m not a Cornucopian, I’m an anti-Malthusian. Both views dehumanize humanity into a manageable resources, one that can either be maximized or controlled by direct interventions. I oppose those direct interventions, because each individual human is a person with autonomy, but also because the population size debate was always a disingenuous exercise in taking a proposed solution (which is monstrous, because that ‘solution’ was and is eugenics) and then searching for a problem.
How is your position here different from the cornucopian one, since you suggest above the same slogan about “humans are the ultimate resource” that the cornucopians quote?
“Eugenics” and “population control” can mean a lot of things, but the one thing I do find “monstrous” is the idea that people consider themselves entitled to spread like a cancer all over the planet, at the expense of natural ecosystems. I’m also skeptical of any argument that starts right off the bat by talking up individual autonomy: of course that’s true to an extent, but the purpose of society is to figure out how to balance individual autonomy against the common good, and very often that’s going to mean coming down on the side *against* individual freedom.
“At the same time, positive change doesn’t happen automatically for no reason: it happens because we make careful, incremental, deliberate improvements.”
Nope.
It does not, indeed, happen automatically or for no reason. But it often happens because we do things carelessly, without the slightest intention of improving anything, or with the intention of improving something else entirely, and accidents happen.
Thomas Newcomen just wanted to pump water out of coal mines.
John Wilkinson just wanted to sell cannons to the Navy.
James Watt just wanted to make a better steam engine.
None of them wanted to prevent the spread of diseases by making cloth so cheap that people were willing to throw out otherwise usable clothes from people with contagious diseases. Yet they were integral steps in the process that led to the plenty of this day.
Are you sure about the car thing? Because while traditional passenger sedans and sports cars are much safer (and more fuel efficient), an increasingly larger proportion of passenger vehicles are SUVs and Light trucks instead of more traditional minivans, station wagons, and sedans, And these bigger vehicles are more loosely regulated and are much less safe for everyone outside of them – pedestrians and people driving small cars.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popularity-federal-policy-pollution
This isn’t the best article on the subject but it’s the one I could quickly google up.
Reintroduction of formerly endangered or locally extinct species, in a bunch of developed countries, is also a success story- the European bison (which came near to extinction in the mid-20th century, surviving only in one location on the Poland-Belarus border) is a striking example here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_bison
Very true! And you don’t have to go that far to see that kind of success.
I moved to NJ in 1974. At that time–and through the early 80s–there was 1 (one) pair of Bald Eagles nesting in the state, and they kept failing to produce chicks due to DDT. DDT was banned in 1972, but I really thought it was too late for Bald Eagles in the eastern US, I didn’t think I’d *ever* see a nesting pair out here in my lifetime.
There are now about *250* active nests in NJ–and one is a few miles from my house.
When I moved back to my home state after 40 years away, I was surprised to see soaring hawks or other birds of prey in the sky. I never recalled seeing them as a child. My brother claimed this was because we were children in the age of DDT.
The trade in endangered animals’ parts took a big hit because of a pharmaceutical company attempted to make a drug to treat high blood pressure. We know it as Viagra. Hence, folk impotence cures took a big hit, and so did their ingredients.
I think decline in hunting is definitely part of it, but I’d say the biggest issues are 1) the fact that human populations have stabilized in many / most countries and in some areas like Japan, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (and in rural regions of many other countries) are actually declining, and 2) modern agriculture has allowed us to get the same yield from a much smaller land area. Both of which tend to free up land for conservation that could otherwise be used for agriculture.
plus more generally, as societies industrialize and become more prosperous they can “afford” to prioritize things like wildlife conservation to a degree they couldn’t before. (Lots of societies, rich and poor, *value* having wild lands and charismatic megafauna around, but the poorer they are the less they can afford to act upon it).
Absolutely with you on the development of initiatives to restore some of our damaged wild spaces. I live about 5 minutes from where a population of European Bison have been brought to the UK for initial rewilding trials and it’s fantastic (they were brought here a week or two after we got back from Poland on a trip to try and see them there!). I can travel half an hour and see red kites flying over my head. There’s now beavers, and natterjack toads, and bitterns.
On the ozone hole topic, this is anecdotal, but in 2017 I moved from Hawaii to Victoria, Australia for four years. Being fair-skinned and mostly an indoors person I don’t have a huge resistance to sunburn in the first place, but after moving I kept feeling like I was burning noticeably (and surprisingly) faster, until I realized, oh yeah, the ozone levels (though recovering!) are still lower further south than they are in the northern hemisphere, to the point where I could actually detect a difference in my mean-time-to-sunburn. It was an interesting, and very personal, taste of how things could’ve turned out if the ozone layer kept being depleted.
I’m a New Zealander and I can confirm the ozone hold is an extant problem down here. We still have high rates of melanoma death, and people who visit from up North inevitably get badly burned the first summer they’re down here because they don’t use the aggressive sun protocols we have drilled into us from childhood.
That is people from high latitudes moving to low latitudes. No ozone hole is needed, since it obviously was an effect from long enough ago to produce microevolution.
mmmmmmmm.
The sun at Auckland NZ latitude sears the skin brutally in a way the sun at the equivalent Northern latitude simply doesn’t. So its definitely not a simple Norwegians moving South to the sun lands issue.
In my experience the NZ summer sun produces an almost immediate prickling effect, like hundreds of little needles, that I’ve never felt anywhere in the US, or closer to the equator. Pasty people burn in no time flat.
I’m going to presume burn times have improved since the 90s, but having minimum burn times be part of weather forecasts should tell a bit of a story.
That and the hideous rates of melanoma.
Is this supposed to agree or disagree with me?
“having minimum burn times be part of weather forecasts should tell a bit of a story.”
Is that the story of improving things? Because, here, when I was a girl, you had to sit by the radio in the morning to hear if school was canceled (or sometimes go wait for the bus into your mother called for you to come in), but now it’s generally called on the night before and you can look it up on the web. That’s not a reflection of a change to weather but to forecasting and communication.
“Minimum burn times” was something they had to develop.
The idea that invasion of Iraq was somehow a “careful, incremental, deliberate improvement” would be laughable if it wasn’t for all the human suffering and strategic problems resulting from it.
Iraq war would no doubt be its own sub argument, but if I were interpreting things, I’d put changes down to what happened after the invasion (over the 2010’s), rather then the invasion itself. Lots of bad decision making at first, but in the 2010’s various diplomacy, organization, dealing with ISIS, etc. seems to have ended up with a sort of stable looking country. At least to someone who is vaguely paying attention, there might be under the surface issues I don’t know about.
Nobody said that the Iraq War was any of those things, as far as I can see.
I mean, “the Ozone layer is no longer a problem, so the whole thing was a hoax” is an article of faith in US right-wing circles (I no longer even have to specify “radical” or “conspiracy minded”). I imagine the same is true about the HIV epidemic.
On a different note, skipping from lightbulbs to cars without really getting into planned obsolescence is… odd.
“Cars are much safer now“, with citation to NHTSA.
Given that you do not take Bertran de Born at face value when he says “war is fun”, be similarly watchful of the assumptions/blinders this source has. The linked page itself reveals: “The average vehicle on the road in 2012 would have an estimated 56% lower fatality risk for its occupants than the average vehicle on the road in the late 1950s.” What happens to people who are not
military aristocratscar occupants? Maybe the increasing prevalence of e.g. vehicles with high hoods (which impact a larger fraction of the population (especially those who aren’t adult men) at abdomen or chest height, causing much more severe injuries given identical speeds than the “extended impact” unfolding from a lower-hooded car hitting at thigh level) is a worsening rather than improving situation.I just wanted to quickly point out that the Maternal Mortality rise has actually been entirely due to a counting change and a truly shameful display of using misinformation to promote one’s own cause.
The argument about trade outperforming war for Germany since 1946 misses one of Tooze’s major points, made to some extent in The Wages of Destruction but also in his previous book The Deluge and in his course which I took last semester at Columbia. Yes, Germany today is a wealthy country, but it is clearly subordinate to the United States. Hitler envisioned a German Reich which could rival the United States. The only way to achieve that was to establish a continental state, stretching at least from the Rhine to the Volga or thereabouts, populated by German farmers and workers. This goal required not just conquering, but also depopulating, a vast stretch of eastern territory. One of Tooze’s points is that to understand Hitler, we should not write him off as a madman or a fool, but read his writings carefully and analyze his conduct in light of his declared goals.
“Hitler envisioned a German Reich which could rival the United States.”
This is a case of madness and folly. I think psychiatry even has a term for this kind of symptom, namely delusion of grandeur. Strategic planning should be able to say “bzzt, that goal is unachievable”.
On the other hand, I do want to mention that — particularly in light of the WW1 blockade experience — putting agricultural self-sufficiency on the list of strategic desires was reasonable. However, this doesn’t imply conquest! In fact, some states of the post-Habsburg chaos ended up as semi-sovereign allies of and breadbaskets to Germany. Extending such offers to other areas, even if not successful, would not have created enmity, whereas “you are about to be conquered and depopulated” very obviously did. This case of strategic tunnel vision should have been completely avoidable. (Likewise, “I shall wave an administrative wand and henceforth consider all of you Germans” is a much more welcoming way to implement the goal of “populated by Germans”. Obviously the vast majority of people ever, with the exception of an extremely liberal minority, would immediately point out that this “proposal” grotesquely misinterprets what the requirement means. Even liberal statesmen as they existed at the time would simply drop the goal as unconscionable rather than do this.)
On the other hand, I do want to mention that — particularly in light of the WW1 blockade experience — putting agricultural self-sufficiency on the list of strategic desires was reasonable. However, this doesn’t imply conquest! In fact, some states of the post-Habsburg chaos ended up as semi-sovereign allies of and breadbaskets to Germany. Extending such offers to other areas, even if not successful, would not have created enmity, whereas “you are about to be conquered and depopulated” very obviously did. This case of strategic tunnel vision should have been completely avoidable.
If you rely on allies for your food, you’re not really *self*-sufficient, and there’s a chance that a rival might induce them to defect, leading to a WW1-style food shortage scenario.
And if you rely on your fellow citizens for your food, there’s a chance that a rival might induce them to secede.
But if you rely only on yourself for your food, you’re basically condemning yourself to starve to death when you have a bad year.
Inducing people to rebel against their government is generally harder than inducing independent states to change allies.
The problem (for Hitler) is that this is just not possible. He can’t magic a hundred million german citizens even if he has the land, and he can’t turn a hundred million eastern europeans into productive german citizens either (even should he want to)
Even should he have suceeded he would have created a wasteland filled with corpses.
That misstates the vision though. There had been a documented and steady German diaspora for hundreds or years (and in Nazi mythology since the invasions of the Roman Empire) and there were German-identifying families throughout Eastern Europe and the Americas; there were also ethnic groups in all of the neighboring countries that could (and which Nazis did) identify as Germans potentially. There was a huge pool of possible Germans outside of Germany that Nazi fantasists could imagine populating a massive Germany.
You can’t say a depopulated country can’t be re-filled by giving away the land to immigrants who just pass a phenotype test and agree in principle to send their children to a monolingual school where they pledge to honor the Fatherland every morning. You especially can’t say it’s impossible if the plan is to have the expense of the repopulation softened by a massive pool of slave-labor.
The internal system of oppression in nazi Germany was already devolving into increasingly spurious purity tests that were 90% political theatre, and that was a decade after taking power. The idealogy is a suicide cult, and while it’s possible to construct an actual ethnonationalist idealogy that is merely evil and not self cannibalizing, but there’s no way to get people to choose it. The motives that lead people to believe racial rhetoric aren’t based on empirical reality or rational analysis, and ethnonationalism requires building those reasons into your population and nations core identity.
You need the irrationalism of fascist idealogy to convince people to follow something this irrational, and integrating that irrationalism makes the entire idealogy subject to endless recursion and arbitrary internal division; there’s nothing real restricting its excesses.
So no, Nazis Germany was never building its Reich to rival the usa. The project was doomed the second they choose fascism as an idealogy. It’s just a matter of how long until it’s economy collapsed under the internal security obligations, even if it magically won.
Googling ozone issue, resulted in NASA’s own data https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/statistics/annual_data.html.
The problem is not solved at all.
I am not sure what “worse options are off the table” means for Climate Change but there is absolutely no reason for anything approaching optimism with regards to climate change. There is pretty strong reason to think it is developing worse and faster then expected.
The LED light bulbs don’t last as long claimed. I’ve had so many break within just a few years that I’ve started meticulously tracking which ones I use where to be able to claim warranty replacements. Very disappointing. Also, many LED strips have awful colours.
Like any overarching product category, there’s a lot of variability both between manufacturers, product lines, and even specific examples in a product line. I’ve switched over to LED lighting (away from CFLs) as they have required replacement. While I’ve had to replace some LED lights, I also have a trio of Phillips LEDs (with this stylishly ugly yellow trefoil housing) that were some of the first I’ve bought. Two of those bulbs are now 12 years old, and they see almost daily use (for 5-6 hours a day on average). So for my anecdotal experience, yes some of them happily do.
Is the issue the bulbs, or the wiring? I’ve had LED bulbs go bad fast, but the issue was with the wiring getting to the bulb. Incandescent bulbs are less sensitive to that issue (they use electrical resistance to generate light, so they’re fairly robust as long as it’s not a physical shock), so they lasted longer in those fixtures. Repairing the faulty wiring fixed the issue. And to be clear, the definition of “faulty” is changing here; what was perfectly fine for one system may be faulty for another.
From what I can tell, the problem with LED bulbs is generally the wiring and other electronics, not the LED itself, and as Dinwar says, if you know enough to repair the wiring, you can often fix bulbs or mix-and-match parts. And last I checked, this was mostly an issue with newer manufacturers who don’t have a lot of experience creating bulbs or electronics, or getting things to work in a high-heat environment. I’ve had especially bad luck when trying to get the “very best” LEDs from companies with a lot of experience in LED manufacturing but very little experience in building reliable end-user electronics, or when getting super-cheap LEDs from no-name manufacturers that probably use the lowest bidder to assemble the product.
So my rule of thumb tends to be: Stick with companies that have experience with electronics and bulbs (Philips, GE, etc.) and avoid new companies that come into the market by developing special types of LEDs. Avoid cool funky shapes and bases and stick with the most common form factors, where it’s easy to drop them into existing fixtures, so if something goes wrong it’s cheap to replace. Avoid extra electronics in the bulb, like anything “smart”, or almost anything adjustable, because that’s just something else that can fail, and probably it’ll fail faster than the LED. Personally I’ve had good experiences with Philips – their “warm dim” bulbs are great at night, their “ultra definition” line has about ~95 CRI which is good enough for me, and if they have flicker, it’s below my ability to detect.
For a moment I thought you were going to do a 4th of July post on the British general election.
I feel that saying that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is 76 years old ignores the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. While the State of Israel didn’t exist yet, the Jewish Agency as a predecessor of the future Israeli government already did and there is clear continuity of both the conflicts and the players.
Okay, so then it’s 88 years old. Compared to the assertion that it’s a timeless and innate conflict that cannot be resolved between fundamentally incompatible neighbours, a difference of twelve years is kind of nit-picking,
The first attacks on Jewish settlements (Gaza etc) are in 1920. And that’s not counting previous pogroms.
I would say that the issue dates back at least as far as the Balfour Declaration in 1917. If a “Jewish State” means anything at all, it must mean a state politically and demographically dominated by Jews. If you wish to quickly create an area demographically dominated by group X where there was not one before, you are almost certainly going to have to get rid of a lot of the non-X inhabitants. I am not aware of any case of someone quickly and consciously creating or expanding such an area without a spot of ethnic cleansing.
However convincing and persuasive the justifications for such an act, it is not to be expected that they will convince and persuade the people who need to be ethnically cleansed. So you should expect resistance and counterattacks where possible, if not pre-emptive strikes. Which is more or less what happened.
For the conflict to end permanently, probably Israelis and Palestinians would have to cease to exist as distinct groups. Given the tendency for co-religionists elsewhere in the world to sympathise with them, perhaps it would be necessary for Jews and Muslims to cease to exist as distinct groups.
That’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
That’s overly skeptical in regards to peace. Secular liberalism can and has united people from different backgrounds and religions. There are, in fact, humanist organizations whose idealogical backings can absolutely survive multiculturalism in the region.
They just aren’t in power or are more broadly irrelevant. By design. Everything about the conflict and western involvement in it is designed to produce that outcome, and it has. It’s not an eternal conflict because no one wants peace-its an eternal conflict because the bad guys won.
Oh, and every once in a while you see peaceful land cessions, even accounting for people ignored by history. Some of the cessions in the dying days of the western Roman empire were legitimate peaceful cessions of territory and movements of people without ethnic cleansing, like in France.
There are also several examples of cities being ceded and developing into a regional colonial city state. Arguably Singapore and Hong Kong count today, Carthage had a just so story to that effect in the past.
However these events weren’t motivated by a desire to occupy a new land in a homesteading sense; the Franks were looking for a land grant , military alliance, and or social standing in the empire, but they didn’t imagine replacing the Romans and genetics supports the conclusion that they didn’t. Likewise Mediterranean colonies were trading hubs that sometimes grew into urban centers, but didn’t replace the locals. Ditto with modern trade cities.
“There are also several examples of cities being ceded and developing into a regional colonial city state. Arguably Singapore and Hong Kong count toda”
can you explain exactly what you’re alluding to w/r/t Singapore? Are you talking about its development under the British, or about its separation from Malaysia in the 1960s?
Eh. Both, the end result has been a political entity which has at least some tenuous claim to being legally formed without violence and which hasn’t engaged in ethnographic replacement.
Hong Kong was inarguably violent in it’s seizure, and we can safety discard the pretense that the Chinese were voluntarily signing treaties post-opium war. But it still wasn’t an ethnographic replacement, for all that a lot of British moved there.
I did say arguably, though. I think the common theme is that when the interest is trade, rather than what we’d term homesteading, you don’t end up with ethnic replacement, but an mixture.
I’m still not quite clear what your claim about Singapore is? But if your claim is that its existence is a testament to the wonders of cosmopolitan values, I don’t think that’s correct.
Singapore is a distinct state today at least partly (in the negative sense) because of ethno-national reasons: they were expelled from Malaysia because, as a cosmopolitan city-state dominated by ethnic Chinese, they didn’t fit well into the Malay nationalist project. (for one big example, they were resistant to affirmative-action programs that favored Malays and other subgroups of the indigenous majority).
I think the peaceful separation of the two countries was a good thing for both sides in the long run, but it isn’t a testament to the idea that ethnoracial differences don’t matter, quite the contrary.
I’m not saying it’s good, just that not every land acquisition is necessarily going to end in demographic replacement. The natives still exist, there’s no larger settler project, and the boundaries of the city state are largely stable. Assuming I’m not missing something.
In terms of ethnonational differences, a better evidence for that is that separating ethnic groups simply isn’t a contributor to peace. Singapore isn’t an example either way, as it’s also multicultural.
A better example of how not separating people leads to peace is the white melting pot in America, where all white people were accepted into the legal and cultural union and now the ethnic differences aren’t a source of tension, not really. Of course America explicitly denied this shared identity to anyone not white enough, and has spent the last century paying for that sin. Neatly providing evidence of both how arbitrary ethnic divisions lead to violence and how dissolution of those boundaries to peace.
I have others examples about how division of all types is disastrous, including sociological experiments that show that if you divide people arbitrarily they will fight, but it’s a pretty evident conclusion.
“The natives still exist, there’s no larger settler project, and the boundaries of the city state are largely stable. Assuming I’m not missing something”
The natives *exist*, in Singapore, but they’ve been comprehensively replaced, they are only 15% of the population. They’re probably not that irritated by that fact though, because they know that right over the border is an ethnically based nation state where their group is constitutionally defined as the titular nationality. (Malaysia is actually more diverse than Singapore in raw numbers, but it’s still an ethnically based nation state while Singapore is a cosmopolitan multiethnic one). Which underscores my argument: the separation of Singapore and Malaysia makes both societies better off, because people who really want a Malay nation-state have one, and people who want a cosmopolitan city state have that too.
I have others examples about how division of all types is disastrous, including sociological experiments that show that if you divide people arbitrarily they will fight, but it’s a pretty evident conclusion.
It’s not evident to me, on the contrary it seems like self evident nonsense. Normal people like to associate with people *like them*, who they perceive as their kin, who share ancestry and language with them. The city where my parents grew up is a good example here: they are, today, substantially less linguistically diverse, and more homogeneous, than they were in the late 19th century, because as soon as the heavy hand of the British Empire was removed and people were able to reorganize their own affairs, the local people prioritized their own language and the largest ethnic minority mostly left. You seem to think of people as naturally cosmopolitan, and that ethnocentrism is something that has to be imposed on them: on the contrary, I’d say that while every society has a minority of cosmopolitans, especially among elites, that *most* people are naturally insular and ethnocentric, and if you set them free to follow their revealed preferences, they’re going to group together with people like them. And that eventually, if allowed, they’re going to form ethnically homogeneous polities (the modern incarnation of which is the nation-state). As people like Yaneer Bar-Yam have argued eloquently (although not that it really needed argument, it’s clear to anyone without a cosmopolitan ideological agenda, from simply looking at history and anthropology).
I’m an ethnic nationalist for several reasons, the most importance of which is that I think the existence of distinct ethnoracial and ethnolinguistic groups is something valuable, and that we should actively resist any efforts to blend us all into some formless, cosmopolitan tapioca pudding. It’s really interesting to me that you portray America as a model: I would see it much more as a negative warning, something to be avoided. In the comment thread a couple weeks ago I said something like “if Austria was the prison house of nations, America is their graveyard”, and in case I wasn’t clear, I didn’t mean that in praise of America. Quite the contrary. I think it’s terrible how the American melting pot has served as such an effective solvent of ethnonational identies (and it’s one of the many reasons I have an extremely dim view of America). I don’t want my ethnic group to disappear, and I doubt you do either. (I’m less concerned about this than some people might be, since at least in the old country, we are one of the most endogamous groups on the planet and have a fierce pride in our language).
Though a *secondary* but still important reason is that, yes, I do absolutely think the ethnic nation state is a better pathway towards peace and minimizing the risk of civil war, than the kind of society you hope for. Ethnic division is one of the primary causes of conflict, and the best way to avoid such conflicts is to, you know, give each conflicting ethnic group *their own state* where they can be a majority. My suspicion is that in the medium term future you’re going to see the “Singapore vs. Malaysia” separation model happen in other parts of the world as well, as a cosmopolitan major city ends up detaching itself from the nationalist hinterland. I wouldn’t be surprised if, say, London and Vienna end up following a similar path.
“They’re probably not that irritated by that fact though, because they know that right over the border is an ethnically based nation state where their group is constitutionally defined as the titular nationality.”
I am baffled by the idea that Malays in Singapore wouldn’t mind being a minority there because Malaysia exists.
Is your idea that if they cared they would just move to Malaysia? If so, is that actually true? Does Malaysia promptly accept any Malaysian Singaporean who wants to move?
I mean, i think the conflict could end tomorrow if some third party, more militarily powerful than either Israelis or Palestinians, separated the two sides, imposed a hard border and used force to prevent incursions and expansionism by either side.
I don’t see that happening anytime in the foreseeable future, but it looks to me like the only plausible resolution.
Hmm, Bernard Lewis told of some Arab friends who said, “We will defeat the Israelis in the end. We defeated the Crusaders, we defeated the Ottomans, we defeated the British, and we will defeat the Israelis.” Lewis responded, “Stop living in a fantasy world. The Turks defeated the Crusaders. The British defeated the Turks. The Jews defeated the British. Who do you think is coming next?”
We had an interesting parallel to the raising HIV rates where I live in Kent in the UK, but with strokes. We went through a fairly painful process of rationalising our stroke provision across the county (closing some stroke units to concentrate delivery in a smaller number of better provisioned ‘hyper-acute’ stroke units, in line with clinical best practice).
Since doing this we’ve actually seen more strokes happening. This is because as a result of the more effective care, more people are living through strokes that previously would have killed them (as the peak of the general trend of people having less severe ongoing symptoms). However, them still being at high risk of having a stroke, often they go on to have another stroke later in their lives.
You see this quite often with advances in healthcare provision. On first glance at the headline data it looks like the problem has got worse, but only if you don’t consider that a lot of these people would be dead otherwise.
“Lower mortality usually means higher morbidity”.
People are now living with a life-long need for care for their diabetes — because a century ago, they were just dumped in the diabetes ward after they went into a coma, and kept there until they died. Without insulin the coma was irreversible.
Ah, yes, I have also encountered such claims, but only on the internet as I do not live in the USA and doomerism/pessimism/negativism takes on other forms in my country, that the median household in the USA had it better in the 1970’s or even the 1950’s.
However, once you start looking at objective indicators of standards of living it quickly becomes clear that such claims are nonsense. For example, in half a century the Living Space per Person Has Doubled, the average size of homes has greatly increased whilst the average amount of people in a household declined*, the share of houses equipped with amenities like air-conditioning also increased; likewise the sizes of automobiles, television screens, and so on have also greatly increased; lastly, the sizes of food portions have also greatly increased whit the result that the sizes of the Yankees themselves also greatly increased.
* The numbers are from below article, which I had encountered multiple times on r/BadEconomics:
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/todays-new-homes-are-1000-square-feet-larger-than-in-1973-and-the-living-space-per-person-has-doubled-over-last-40-years/
Not that I am saying that everything is fine. Income inequality in the USA has greatly increased over the last few decades*, with the result that despite economic growth the compensation of lowest income deciles and least educated groups have stagnated.
One could even make the argument that in some aspects they even have it worse. For example, crazy zoning laws, like single family zones with absurd minimum plot sizes, makes it impossible to find small and affordable houses in large parts of the country.
However, that is still something very different from the false claim that things had not greatly improved for the median person.
* This for a variety of reasons, from skill-biased technological change, through de-unionization, to the ‘China shock’.
Except median incomes, political representation, rent prices, health care costs, and other required payments have increased. You, and Bret, are glossing over how massive those increases are and how devastating they are to social mobility and standard of living of anyone not effectively grandfathered into homeownership; things are objectively worse than they were in the 70-90’s for anyone who has to rent or who has health conditions as a result.
And it’s not just zoning laws; there are incredibly sociopathic laws regarding home speculation, welfare benefits, and rent as well. The inequality of society is also creating the conditions that produce these home prices, and disenfranchise and deempower voters.
You need a healthy dose of pessimism. Things haven’t improved, they’re worse.
Also literally three seconds of browsing AEI has convinced me they cannot be trusted to not simply lie. The topics for discussion are communists having nefarious plans, Trump not being so bad, and deregulation. This, to put it lightly, isn’t evidence they’re intellectually honest.
“You, and Bret, are glossing over…”
That seems a strange criticism, particularly of Bret, given that the premise of this article was “We read enough about how bad everything is, how about some good news for a change?” Since the things you mention don’t fall under that heading they should properly be set aside for this essay, and (possibly) addressed in a separate one.
The logic of your argument appears to be that since they don’t mention something you consider important–again, in an article that is intentionally built to show something else entirely–they therefore are not adequately considering it. That doesn’t follow, however. Bret has given his views on how essays are written, and “Tell someone everything I’ve thought about the topic” simply isn’t part of how he approaches essay writing (great gods below, imagine how long these things would be if he did!).
I have no great dislike of Brets post fir the reasons you’re ascribing, but the poster here is using a line from it which is overly rosey and further interpreting it.
Which has already been included in the inflation adjustments used to calculate median real wages.
Maybe, if you do not bother to adjust for changes in housing quality since the 1970’s and only look at how rent increased as share of income.
I admit that there are plenty of people who had fallen out of the boat because their incomes have stagnated and for which one could claim that their situation is worse when it comes to housing. I had even read that since since 2000, median rent growth has outpaced median renter incomes, as median renters had below average income growth.
However, to claim that renters in the middle or higher end of the income distribution, which exist even if it is less common than people in lower end of the income distribution renting, have it ‘objectively worse’ is ridiculous.
Unless they had health conditions which could not yet have been treated in the 70-90’s…
Which is why I had said that those were just an example.
I already encounter much more pessimism than I need on the internet. And cynicism and doomerism I also encounter more than enough of.
Come on there are clearly many things which are bad in the USA, like its dysfunctional health care system; but claiming that the median person in the 1970’s USA had it better than now is ridiculous.
I had also noticed that they seemed to be ideological crazies.
However, I had originally found the link on r/badeconomics where people even attack their own previous posts if they found they made an error and they used government data so.
Well, that housing sizes greatly increased since the 1970’s is a fact at least.
The problem with US housing isn’t where we are relative to 1970, it’s where we are relative to 2000. My $1000 San Francisco apartment in 2002 is probably $3500 now. I had friends driven out of Davis Square (Somerville MA) because of multiple consecutive years of rent going up 20+%. New condos are sold for (probably) far beyond their construction cost, because of high land costs that they’re not allowed to build tall enough to amortize.
The housing hasn’t gotten better; in such tight housing markets, it’s often century-old housing that’s going for high prices. Drafty, no HVAC, insufficient wiring, uneven floors. But the _location_ has become in demand, the supply is nearly fixed, so prices soar.
(And heck, even the locations haven’t gotten that much better, objectively speaking. A bit of falling crime rates and gentrification here, but public transit falling apart over there. But a hot job market, plus rising taste for scarce walkable neighborhoods.)
_New_ housing has gotten better in some ways, but not enough to justify an $800,000 condo that’s under 2000 sqft. As for new housing being bigger… that’s great for those who want it, but I don’t _want_ a 2400 sqft house. I grew up just fine in under 1200 sqft. Living by myself, with all my books being digital now, I can be pretty comfy in 400 sqft. But between minimum lot sizes and parking mandates, it doesn’t make sense to provide small units of housing in the US.
Whereas in Tokyo… trusting Craigslist, you can get an apartment for around US$500 in PPP (even less by exchange rate), or less. It’ll be small, but it’ll be a home, and in a place with good walk/bike ability and public transit. Expensive city, but you have the option of buying a small amount of housing, plus construction is ample.
The median American is increasingly rare. There’s an elite that’s great, and a majority that are objectively worse. Hell, many people whose diseases are treatable now can’t afford treatment. Is that actually an improvement?
And while I appreciate you might not want to think about how bad things are, letting yourself fall into fallacies about the economy that ignore peoples suffering is bad. Many things have improved; the economy, and housing in particular, aren’t one. Pessimism is warranted and a hard and necessary defense.
I am not ignoring peoples’ suffering. I have admitted that the low income deciles and low educated people in the USA have it, in some aspects, worse now than in 2000.
And maybe things have declined in even more aspects for them than I had initially assumed. For example, I had read this week that even inflation had benefited the upper-class at the cost of the lower-class; the prices of the goods bought by the lowest income quintile tended to rise about 1% more per year than for the top income quintile during the period 2004-2015, indicating that purchasing power inequality grew even faster than nominal income inequality. Though, as the scanner data used in that research accounted for only about 10 percent of the household consumption basket, it might not have been representative*.
It was just that I did not believe that those in the middle-class had it ‘objectively worse’.
However, I suppose you are not interested in further arguing about that point.
* I had encountered that claim on this page here:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/differences-in-rent-growth-by-income-1985-2019-and-implications-for-real-income-inequality-20211105.html
when I had been looking for other articles about how house prices adjusted for size grew compared with inflation after you had complained about the previous article.
This subject slightly reminds me of this essay/ fable: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/
The point as I take it is that if cooperation really does leave cooperators better off than non-cooperators, you should expect entities to tend towards finding ways to do so, and to disincentivize non-cooperation.
Over the long term, you should expect to see more cooperation in the world, and it become a better place.
The thing is, the best state for YOU is when everyone else cooperates, and you don’t. You reap all the benefit and suffer none of the costs.
Indeed. But you are not likely to live in an area in which everyone else cooperates unless they have some mechanism to punish the cheaters. In which case, it is probably best to cooperate and praise yourself for your virtue in doing so.
The problem is that they also know that. So everyone will try to chisel if they get away with it. — at least with some people. Consequently, human society, where people are always trying to get away with chiseling, enough to cause serious problems.
Sometimes more, sometimes less.
And yet here we are, a eusocial mammalian species, whose brains rely for development on communal input.
Go look at Haiti sometime.
And yet here we are, a eusocial mammalian species, whose brains rely for development on communal input.
I wouldn’t really say humans are eusocial in the same sense that, say, bees and molerats are, although we certainly have tendencies and capacities to act that way, and at our best we can approximate it. We have tendencies the other way too, which one emerges on top at any moment depends on which ones we, and society, choose to cultivate.
@May Catelli, you keep complaining that in these future anarcho-socialist societies where no-one is forced to work, you will somehow … be forced to work?
On behalf of solarpunks everywhere, I can assure you that if this future comes to pass and you want your own self-sufficient life in a mountain cabin somewhere, you can. Your neighbours will help you move. Heck, they’ll probably erase the trails leading to your refuge so no-one else can find you and take advantage.
And if you’re part of a larger group who want to form a hardworking commune where everyone is rewarded only for effort, again, sure, go for it. We’ll even help build a nice high wall around your Galt’s Gulch so the freeloaders and parasites can’t get in. And while you’re waiting for civilisation outside to collapse, feel free to expel any slackers or philosophical doubters.
No, thanks, I don’t want any bridges today.
One notes, incidentally, that you propose exile as punishment for not working, which shows up your entire claim.
Oh, you are free to stay in the community and quote “The Road to Serfdom” at everyone instead if that’s what you prefer. It’s an anarchist/minarchist society, you can grumble about it. (Everyone else will too, human nature being what it is.)
Do you actually prefer a continent-wide giant faceless national bureaucracy telling you what to do rather than the local community? The only freedom you’re giving up in this anarcho-socialist society is the freedom to become a millionaire and watch others suffer from poverty. You’ll just have to console yourself by living a life that, in your own words, would be considered godlike by any ancient emperor.
As to punishment for not working, an anarcho-socialist society relies primarily on intrinsic motivation, that people genuinely like to work to support themselves and others, rather than profit. (You were listing off scientific discoveries made by serendipity rather than directed research earlier: scientists still do science even when they’re not being paid.) And for the dull and dirty but necessary jobs, everyone takes turns.
So if someone won’t work, they won’t starve or freeze or die of pneumonia. They will get lectured endlessly about community responsibility, and most people won’t be very nice to them.
I suggested exile as your preferred punishment, not mine, because you have never said AFAIK how you’d motivate such people. I assume enslavement is not an option. So what’s left other than avoidance by exile? If you’re going to just give motivational speeches, what’s the difference to the anarcho-socialist way?
And the ancient Romans said that slaves obviously deserved to be slaves because otherwise they would have committed suicide to escape it. No, the exile is YOUR preferred punishment.
Also, false dilemma. Your vicious and heartless bullying is merely the faceless bureaucracy in a new mask — since the bureaucrats will take new “jobs” as the most vicious of bullies — and not freedom.
” The only freedom you’re giving up in this anarcho-socialist society is the freedom to become a millionaire and watch others suffer from poverty. ”
An obvious lie. Your plan is for there to be no freedom at all except for the bullies who get all the freedom in the world to bully and call it their job.
Go read up on the Sixties sometimes. Leftists who tried that kind of thing were continually infested by narcissists who found your proposal to be Happy Hunting Grounds.
“You’ll just have to console yourself by living a life that, in your own words, would be considered godlike by any ancient emperor.”
Except that you have openly bragged that you will enforce a bare subsistence that will fall below the standard of average Roman. You bragged that no one will do plumbing for people who don’t work as you demand.
(And then the narcissists will lie and say you didn’t do the work after you did it. You do realize I have met some human beings, do you?)
Your proposed Utopia would be hell on disabled people, at that. Anyone who tried to make provision for their disabled children would fall afoul of your dictates to prevent millionaires.
I particularly pity autistics for whom the bullying would be a particular hardship. But then, you will dismiss it as merely people not being very nice to them when they are driven to suicide.
“As to punishment for not working, an anarcho-socialist society relies primarily on intrinsic motivation, that people genuinely like to work to support themselves and others, rather than profit.”
Incidentally, if this is so wonderful, perhaps you should go off and found this wonderful society so that you can show it us in action. Then you could allure everyone into it. Anyone who would try to shut you down you could stop by lecturing endlessly, or not being very nice to them.
“(You were listing off scientific discoveries made by serendipity rather than directed research earlier: scientists still do science even when they’re not being paid.) ”
Serendipity does not equal not being paid. Rare indeed is the advance made by the pure hobbyist.
“As to punishment for not working, an anarcho-socialist society relies primarily on intrinsic motivation, that people genuinely like to work to support themselves and others, rather than profit.”
Scifihugh, have you ever heard the slogan: “From each according to his laziness, to each according to his greed”?
That is the system you are proposing, after all.
The whole point of cooperation is that you have to do something for the other co-operators yourself in order to receive a net benefit. A paradise for parasites is not a paradise for co-operators.
A co-operative transaction is one in which both parties benefit, not one in which both end up equally well off. You may if you wish claim that Robin Hood was virtuous in stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but he certainly was not cooperating with them.
Victorian Britain was a more cooperative society than ours precisely because it took less from the rich to give to the poor.
Victorian Britain was more cooperative than ours? What the…? Did you not read Oliver twist when you were a kid? The entire novel was about how Victorian society completely failed its children. That’s basically mark zero of being a cooperative society. They were incredibly uncooperative, massively exploitative, their social fabric was only sustainable by a steady mulching if the poor into the industrial machine and was so onerous that people revolted, regularly, until welfare was instituted.
We have ample, incredibly rigorous evidence that class segregation and inequality decrease charity, kindness, empathy, and cooperation. There’s literally no interpretation of reality not filtered through the eyes of a pervasive madness that supports the idea that the rich being untaxed is the means of increasing cooperation.
This is pervasively delusional.
@ad9, thanks, I was wondering if anyone else reads what I write.
This is the comment section of a blog, so please don’t expect me to go into massive detail about anarcho-socialist societies. And I’m by no means an expert anyway. My suggestion is to read Ursula le Guin’s “The Dispossessed” or Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Red/Green/Blue Mars” trilogy. Yes fiction, but the authors do solid world building and don’t shy away from the downsides.
Start with socialism. Intrinsic motivation means the assumption that people will naturally cooperate for a net benefit, as opposed to external motivation, ie profit. For tens of thousands of years human beings lived in small hunter-gatherer bands and they didn’t need a cash economy to work together. Bret has discussed horizontal bonds in farming societies in previous posts, which also aren’t capitalist. So yes there are lazy people who try to avoid work, but if our stone age hunter-gatherer ancestors could survive them, I think we can.
A huge chunk of the industrial society surrounding me in Canberra, Australia is not capitalist. We have a sewer system because that’s cooperating for mutual benefit, and no-one gets charged per flush. We have a public education system where children are taught for free (reminder: 96% of the people in the world don’t live in the USA) and teachers (mostly) aren’t teaching because they make more money. We have medical care. Science in particular has brought huge benefits to all societies in the past couple of centuries, and most/nearly all scientists are not motivated by profit.
Socialism asks “Since sewage, education, health care, science, … work so well without capitalism, why don’t we run everything like this?”
The anarchist side comes from recognising that yes centrally planned socialism was a disaster. Money is a great way to account for time/energy/resource usage, and markets are a great way to let individuals decide what they’d like to do beyond the basic necessities. Anarchy, or minarchy, tries to minimise the amount of central planning and large scale government, devolving as many solutions as possible to local communities. Which includes how to deal with parasites.
So no I don’t think it would be a paradise for cheaters. Humans have been coping with those who don’t want to pull their weight for tens of thousands of years, so I’m confident that it won’t be a serious problem.
*The Dispossessed* on the contrary, does a great deal to paper over the problems. For instance, slackers are dealt with by isolation. All they have to do is form gangs, and they can go on freely with plenty of company.
Sewage systems might not be profit driven, but they definitely require a lot of centralised organisation.
You can’t form the supply chains that sustain the manufacture of life saving medicines at the local level either.
One notes that a proposed punishment — refusing to repair the plumbing for anyone deemed obstinate — could have ripple effects on the sewage system.
“Victorian Britain was more cooperative than ours?”
Yes.
“What the…? Did you not read Oliver twist when you were a kid? The entire novel was about how Victorian society completely failed its children.”
Dcmorinmorinmorin, “cooperative” does not mean “generous to children”. It is a cluster concept, which clusters around the concept of entities voluntarily acting together for some mutual benefit. For example, if you have seen a nature documentary about prides of lions, you may recall seeing a number of male lions (usually brothers) cooperating to drive the previous male lions away from a pride of lionesses, then kill their cubs to bring the lionesses into heat, and also eliminate the completion for the cubs they are about to sire. The attacking lions are cooperating for mutual benefit.
Likewise, if you have seen the HBO film Conspiracy, you may recall that it is about leading Nazis cooperating to plan the murder of around twelve million people.
Cooperation is about benefitting the cooperators, not altruism to people other than the cooperators. Trade is about mutual benefit, so trade is form of cooperation. And economic activity in Victorian Britain was all about trade and mutual benefit.
Today we have taxes for purposes of income redistribution that take from the rich in exchange for nothing, and give to the poor, also in exchange for nothing. That is not mutually beneficial, because it doesn’t benefit the people doing the giving, and it is not voluntary, because the people doing the giving are forced to do so.
Consequently, quite a large part of our economy is about something that is not cooperative. A much larger part than in Victorian times.
Redistribution may be virtuous, and it is almost certainly utilitarian, but it is not cooperative.
Cooperation does most to help those who help others. Well, the rich are in the best position to do that. So they get most of the help.
AD9, okay. Let me break this down.
First, cooperative, as you’ve defined it, is not a priori something we want to encourage or should care about. The assertion that it’s linked to mutual benefit and other nonsense aside, if the end result is a society that starves children *I don’t care*. Nor does anyone with children. Who will, quite simply, murder anyone in their way to feed them.
You can construct a Utopia, but if it doesn’t include the poor it’s built on billions of dead who will strenuously object.
Thus it is neither good or practical to extol “cooperation” as you’ve defined it.
Second, cooperation as defined this way compromises the majority of people cooperating to threaten the rich for 99% of their income via taxation, given that it benefits them.
Given that in this vision of the world the majority are voting to cooperate to seize money from a minority, the majority are sure as hell doing a lot of cooperation. And if Nazi’s murdering jews is “cooperating”, then so is this; the fact we can define a minority that suffers is clearly immaterial to your definition.
Your definition is thus nonsense. When applied correctly all joint human activity is cooperation, in which case Victorian society is less cooperative by any measurable metric, from megaproject construction, net economic activity, social networking, what have you.
Third, if redistribution is virtuous and utilitarian then your thesis in the first point is completely contradicted and it’s basically purely a good thing, negating the entire point of the reply. What you mean to say is that it’s virtuous but not utilitarian, or virtuous but not practical, at which point you’re defending that Victorian society was better than ours and we’re back at children dying in the streets.
In totality you cannot defend your thesis as applies to Victorian society, which is a huge problem because the society that most evidences your thesis should be Victorian society-pre socialism and pre state welfare.
Hence…Your thesis is simply wrong, even beyond the issues with cooperation, because if it were correct reality would be different. We’d see some utopian past where absent the state, absent unions, absent taxation, and absent socialism the world was better under a society where you were compelled to produce to survive, where everything was a commodity including the necessities of life and freedom.
But we don’t see that, we see a dystopian hell that no one in their right mind would want to return too. Absent restrictions on exploitation the free market economy simply grinds people into meat, the population kept stable solely through a lack of contraception, the domesticated slavery of women, and the wonders of science.
We both are doing better and can continue doing better, but only by rejecting this dystopian past.
“Your thesis is simply wrong, even beyond the issues with cooperation, because if it were correct reality would be different. We’d see some utopian past where absent the state, absent unions, absent taxation, and absent socialism the world was better under a society where you were compelled to produce to survive, where everything was a commodity including the necessities of life and freedom.”
dcmorinmorinmorin, I didn’t say Victorian Britain was utopian. I didn’t say it was better than present day Britain. I said only that it was more dominated by voluntary cooperation than the present day.
It was you who leapt to the conclusion that must mean I was saying it was paradisiacal. I said no such thing.
As I have already explicitly said, taking from the rich and giving to the poor can indeed make the average person better off: You are just not cooperating with the rich when you are doing it.
But it’s absurd to call one society more cooperative than another because it has more compulsion. Even if it is a nicer society to be in.
“Scifihugh, have you ever heard the slogan: “From each according to his laziness, to each according to his greed”?
That is the system you are proposing, after all.
The whole point of cooperation is that you have to do something for the other co-operators yourself in order to receive a net benefit. A paradise for parasites is not a paradise for co-operators.”
Certainly seems like you were, actually. So…I convinced you that everything in this post was wrong? Or did you never believe it to begin with?
“As I have already explicitly said, taking from the rich and giving to the poor can indeed make the average person better off: You are just not cooperating with the rich when you are doing it.
But it’s absurd to call one society more cooperative than another because it has more compulsion. Even if it is a nicer society to be in.”
Taking from the poor and giving to the rich can be done through the tools of enterprise, that doesn’t make it cooperative. Your definition is still nonsense, designed specifically to make capitalist societies seem better than they are by ignoring the coercive aspects of them and calling them by a different, positive sounding, name. It’s useless and conveys zero information.
Besides, you said the Nazi’s were cooperating, so I’m not sure you understand absurdities.
Victorian Britain was a more cooperative society than ours precisely because it took less from the rich to give to the poor.
this seems like a very…..nonstandard definition of cooperation. The people I’ve heard or read discussing the evolution of cooperation generally treat it as semi-synonymous with altruism. Cooperation can be mediated by the state just like it can be mediated by markets, we can speak about cooperation happening between classes or other social groups just as it can happen between individuals, and you’re exaggerating the distinction between voluntary and coerced cooperation (as far back as Augustine, and probably before, people in the “western” tradition have been pointing out that the distinction between freedom and coercion isn’t really that hard or distinct). All of which pose a problem for you claim here.
Cooperation merely means cooperation. People can cooperate for any reason and purpose whatsoever.
Money is a great way to account for time/energy/resource usage, and markets are a great way to let individuals decide what they’d like to do beyond the basic necessities.
I mostly agree with this, although I’m less wholesale in my critical of central planning than you are (I’d say that central planning, to the degree that the Warsaw Pact states used it, was sub-optimal, but that doesn’t mean that a healthy society would have *zero* central planning, or that the optimal balance between planning and markets is the same everywhere and always: it’s quite possible that the optimal balance varies between historical eras and societies).
That said, your argument here is an argument for market socialism, not for anarcho-socialism. Market socialism is compatible with the existence of the state, even a fairly authoritarian state (e.g. Yugoslavia).
Thanks for the correction. Will do some reading (when I have some time) on market socialism.
Market socialism is also compatible with Anarcho-socialism. It all depends on how you define the means of production versus market products. Basically, anarcho-socialists generally want completely joint ownership of the means of production, but after that you can still trade *things*, particularly luxuries, which is a market economy.
From an economics perspective there will always be a luxury goods trade because human interactions are economic even if there’s no tokens exchanged-social currency exists even in Star Trek-but it’s not really economically threatening to have some form of rich people own such things in abundance.
Likewise you can have an economy with market socialism and a state, it just depends on if the means of production are owned by the people through a state which represents them or through cooperatives they are members of.
I think we had a fantastic discussion about how anarchist cooperatives can become effectively fiefs, exploiting each other based on relative profit, so my personal beliefs are that a basically cooperative organization with some state oversight with limited remits and sharply limited individual terms/powers would probably be best for actually instituting this.
As an aside I think most socialists are market socialists, as even the Soviet premiers looked at supermarkets and *salivated* at that abundance. You don’t need pure capitalism for supermarkets but you do need a market economy, central planning just isn’t responsive enough. Outside of some technocratic nonsense involving AI, but I’m not one to believe in God Machines.
market socialism is a nonsense term. If people are free to buy and sell, you will end up with something that looks like liberal capitalism, if they aren’t, you don’t have markets. There’s no alternative that magically gives you meaningfully different patterns of ownership, just wishful thinking.
No, it’s not, you can own the factories jointly but the products of labour individually, meaning that everyone is entitled to a share of the profits but that these profits can be spent on individual property. This creates a market economy underpinned by worker cooperatives owning key businesses.
Or the state can own the railroads and the freight cars, but not what’s in them. That’s the thread of our discussions. I don’t trust the state, Hector doesn’t trust the cooperatives. Neither is capitalism.
That’s the meaningful distinction, it’s real, can be done, and isn’t wishful thinking. The assertion otherwise is ahistorical and irrational. You can assert it shouldn’t be done or isn’t effective, but that requires some more leg work and can be disputed.
>No, it’s not, you can own the factories jointly but the products of labour individually, meaning that everyone is entitled to a share of the profits but that these profits can be spent on individual property.
this is called a joint stock company, and there are quite a few of them in liberal capitalism, and 2/3s of americans own some of them. The ones that don’t are overwhelmingly young and will own them in the future.
> This creates a market economy underpinned by worker cooperatives owning key businesses.
Again, we have this already. You just don’t like it.
> it’s real, can be done, and isn’t wishful thinking.
The wishful thinking part is thinking that changing around who owns companies will make them function differently. it won’t. if you re-distributed the S&P evenly, each american would get 150 grand in stocks. Lets just ignore for a minute that if you do that, you would ruin tens of millions of pensioners, retirees, and soon to be retirees. the average person would get 150 grand or so in wealth. Not enough to live on, and much of it would be immediately sold off. In a decade, we’d have exactly what we have now and nothing would change. Your model for how the world works is based on fundamental misunderstandings of economics and human behavior.
“And economic activity in Victorian Britain was all about trade and mutual benefit.”
That’s a strange reading of the period. No colonisation or imperialism and the consequent benefits to the upper and middle classes? No economic coercion (look up tied cottages). No clearances? No Opium Wars? No workhouses? No back-to-backs?
Around 10% of the British population was too malnourished to – in the words of one study ‘be capable of more than a little light begging’. A third of volunteers in 1900 were unfit for military service.
“If people are free to buy and sell, you will end up with something that looks like liberal capitalism, if they aren’t, you don’t have markets”
Nah, that’s a false binary. You can have limits on what is bought and sold, or on how property is used, without immediately transitioning to “don’t have markets”. The US has land markets despite zoning laws banning most of the interesting uses of most land.
‘Socialism’ and ‘market socialism’ both have multiple definitions, but let’s start with the “worker control of the means of production” definition of socialism, and imagine a society where all business are owned and operated by their workers, whether self-employment, small partnerships like law firms, or big co-operatives like Mondragon. Wage labor, working for a private employer, is at most a small fraction of the economy (whether by custom, tax incentives, or outright prohibition.) The legal structures that allow a public corporation like Microsoft to exist, don’t exist.
Let’s further imagine that there is a cap on the amount (or perhaps value) that one person can own. You can buy and sell land, but if you own too much, the state will tell you to sell some or else it’ll be simply taken away. Co-ops can own more land, proportional to their number of equal voting members.
Is this a market society? Definitely: there’s private property and competitive firms.
Is it a _capitalist_ society? Not by definitions that focus on the dominance of big capitalists and firms, and the predominance of employer-employee relations. It’s a society that deliberately caps the concentration of at least one kind of capital (land), prohibits others (stocks, maybe bonds) and encourages if not requires worker control and “economic democracy” (within a co-op, though not between them.) Whether you end up labeling it ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘other’, it would be very different from modern capitalist societies, while still having vigorous markets (possibly more vigorous than we do, with less big-firm presence.) But one could justifiably call it a form of market socialism.
Especially if, say, when one comes of age, the state grants you some large sum of money (equivalent of $50,000-200,000), and/or some amount of land, or perhaps a housing unit. A market society with private property, but also a socialist society (by some definitions) that ensures everyone starts live with a sizable chunk of their own property.
We could also twiddle a dial on whether you are allowed to sell your granted land/housing, or perhaps only swap it with another one, so that no one can end up landless/homeless. There might be _other_ land/housing that was more conventionally traded, but also inalienable allotments. Somewhat market, somewhat socialist.
“market socialism is a nonsense term. If people are free to buy and sell, you will end up with something that looks like liberal capitalism, if they aren’t, you don’t have markets”
No, this isn’t correct. Markets and capitalism are two completely separate concepts. A market economy deals with how wages, prices, allocation, etc., are decided (through market exchange, supply and demand, etc.): capitalism means, specifically, that there’s a distinct class (separate from workers, peasants, state bureaucrats, clergy, etc.) that privately owns the means of production.
Market socialism is compatible either with an economy based around worker’s cooperatives, with an economy based around centralized state ownership, with an economy based around decentralized public-sector ownership (e.g. “township and village enterprises”, etc.). What it rules out is capitalist ownership (i.e. ownership of enterprises by a distinct class that’s separate from the workers and that derives their primary income from ownership of capital).
I don’t know what dcmorinmorin or anyone else on this thread is envisioning, when they talk about market socialism, but I’m envisioning something like the Yugoslavian model. (Yugoslavia had its problems, most notably foreign debt, and I’m happy to interact with you about those if you want: I would just point out that while they’re derided for getting into debt, their debt to GDP ratio in 1989 was *much* lower than the debt to GDP for the US today, so if their problems count against market socialism, then America’s national debt should discredit capitalism too).
It’s certainly possible for a market socialist economy to *devolve into* capitalism- if a worker-owned enterprise or a state-owned enterprise starts to converge on a capitalist enterprise, in the way it operates- and that’s exactly why I would say heavy state regulation is needed, to *prevent* this kind of thing from happening.
formerlycassander
Joint stock companies differ in three key ways.
They aren’t equal shares. Most have a share structure that prevents the public shares from overpowering the original ones, or which makes this harder. This is directly hierarchical in a way that’s just not good for poor people.
You can buy shares you don’t participate in. This also screws poor people because their income can then be controlled by a nonparticipant.
They’re a scam. No matter what nonsense you theoretically ascribe to joint stock companies, every time public participation has increased inequality has gotten worse. If they were a tool of economic equality then this wouldn’t have happened.
Also your statistic is bullshit. 2/3 own stocks but only 20% do so directly. For the rest it’s through a retirement account or other mechanism that is not framed as a choice; not contributing is effectively taking less paycheck.
The end result is that between small accounts and the rigged nature of the markets 93% of stocks are owned by the 10% and the top 1% own a strict majority. That’s a horrifying curve of inequality.
Even then 1/3 of Americans don’t own anything through any mechanism, which isn’t evenly racially divided or age divided; 2/3 of black Americans don’t participate for instance.
And young people will never own stock at this rate, many have zero or near zero retirement and no savings nor any way to accumulate savings. The gig and service economies are designed to prevent paying out such benefits at anything like the rate older Americans had them.
End result, no, the stock market has almost no relationship to what I’m talking about and participation is demonstrably just a way to rip more wealth from the middle class and poor. It’s cooperatives as structured by a manipulative authoritarian sadist.
> They aren’t equal shares. Most have a share structure that prevents the public shares from overpowering the original ones, or which makes this harder. This is directly hierarchical in a way that’s just not good for poor people.
this is straight up wrong. there are some companies like this but they’re the exception not the rule.
> You can buy shares you don’t participate in. This also screws poor people because their income can then be controlled by a nonparticipant.
And we immediately jump to “no. you’re not free to buy and sell”, which is my point. you don’t actually believe in markets, you’re just using market socialism as a fig leaf.
>No matter what nonsense you theoretically ascribe to joint stock companies, every time public participation has increased inequality has gotten worse. If they were a tool of economic equality then this wouldn’t have happened.
Yes, people have gotten rich, that’s a good thing!
> Also your statistic is bullshit. 2/3 own stocks but only 20% do so directly. For the rest it’s through a retirement account or other mechanism that is not framed as a choice; not contributing is effectively taking less paycheck.
No, it isn’t. You own the stock in your 401k. You can sell it, borrow against it, spend it, etc. It is genuine ownership. And it is most definitely a choice
> The end result is that between small accounts and the rigged nature of the markets 93% of stocks are owned by the 10% and the top 1% own a strict majority. That’s a horrifying curve of inequality.
No, it isn’t. if you had a perfectly equal society where everyone got paid the same, made the same investments, and got the same return/raise every year from 18 to 68 you’d get the 60 year olds owning 2/3s of everything. wealth is largely a product of age.
> And young people will never own stock at this rate, many have zero or near zero retirement and no savings nor any way to accumulate savings.
the way you accumulate saving is to make more than you spend. the idea that people have no way to do this is laughable in a world that is more materially abundant than ever.
In sum, you’ve demonstrated my point rather well. you don’t actually believe in markets, and are using market socialism as a fig leaf. You don’t know how the world actually works, and have an emotional abhorrence of inequality. You use it as an excuse to ignore actual progress in favor of your vision of utopia, an ideology that results in nothing but death and dark humor. it’s disgusting, and disgusting common.
As an aside I think most socialists are market socialists, as even the Soviet premiers looked at supermarkets and *salivated* at that abundance. You don’t need pure capitalism for supermarkets but you do need a market economy, central planning just isn’t responsive enough.
I wouldn’t go that far- I’d say that I believe (and I would expect most critics of capitalism believe) in some combination of planning and the market. There are some areas of life where I don’t think markets produce socially optimal outcomes, either in terms of producing too much of some goods and not enough of others, or in terms of setting wages and prices.
I’m mostly opposed to *capitalist ownership* though, not to markets, and I’d be quite happy with an economy that had a very large scope for markets while also maintaining state planning in some spheres and at some levels. There is a vast spectrum between complete state planning on one extreme and market capitalism on the other.
It’s also worth pointing out that even if you have a largely planned economy internally, you can still get information about supply, demand, and pricing through international trade. Alec Nove recounts an exchange he once had with a Czechoslovak economist who said, at least half seriously, “when the world revolution happens we’ll leave one capitalist economy around so that we can still have price signals”.
>this is straight up wrong. there are some companies like this but they’re the exception not the rule.
Not a rebuttal, thanks for agreeing. I am also curious if you know *how many*, as a percentage.
> And we immediately jump to “no. you’re not free to buy and sell”, which is my point. you don’t actually believe in markets, you’re just using market socialism as a fig leaf.
The stock market isn’t the only market. The idea that everything needs to be a Market is exactly what is wrong. The synthesis of market socialism is that some things can be a market, not all need to be. We can decommodify workspace ownership and still have a trade in commodities.
> Yes, people have gotten rich, that’s a good thing!
I’m more concerned with the vast majority that haven’t. This is also a pathetic recontextualization of wealth inequality-it doesn’t answer the question.
> No, it isn’t. You own the stock in your 401k. You can sell it, borrow against it, spend it, etc. It is genuine ownership. And it is most definitely a choice
For the vast majority of people they don’t interact with it, and if you do take it out then you lose money. Perhaps this isn’t actually true if you merely borrow against it, but the information as presented by the system makes it seem like it is. Most people can’t afford financial advisors.
> No, it isn’t. if you had a perfectly equal society where everyone got paid the same, made the same investments, and got the same return/raise every year from 18 to 68 you’d get the 60 year olds owning 2/3s of everything. wealth is largely a product of age.
This is antifactual. We can fix the income inequality to age and it’s massively increased in the past decades beyond any and all natural functioning of the economy.
This has been in pew research polls for decades, for fucks sake. How you can possibly chart through an analysis of the economy and not see that is astounding-are you offloading *all* your thinking to conservative pundits?
> In sum, you’ve demonstrated my point rather well. you don’t actually believe in markets, and are using market socialism as a fig leaf. You don’t know how the world actually works, and have an emotional abhorrence of inequality. You use it as an excuse to ignore actual progress in favor of your vision of utopia, an ideology that results in nothing but death and dark humor. it’s disgusting, and disgusting common.
Oh jesus fucking christ. The sheer projection of ignorance is absolutely astounding. Almost everything you’ve said that could be factual is simply wrong, and you have the audacity to sit here and tell me I’m ignorant? Am I supposed to believe that you know more than me when you’re in denial of factual trends?
You need to do better. There aren’t any excuses anymore.
> The synthesis of market socialism is that some things can be a market, not all need to be. We can decommodify workspace ownership and still have a trade in commodities.
That’s called badly performing capitalism, and it performs badly.
> I’m more concerned with the vast majority that haven’t.
poor people today live better than kings did a century ago. By every objective standard, people are vastly richer than they were even a few decades ago. everyone has gotten rich
> For the vast majority of people they don’t interact with it
no, the vast majority do, 2/3s own stock, a higher percentage if you look at lifecycles.
> and if you do take it out then you lose money.
only if yu take it out before a certain age.
> Perhaps this isn’t actually true if you merely borrow against it,
“i don’t know how the system works but I’m sure you’re wrong” is not as good an argument as you seem to think
> This is antifactual.
it’s the basic math of compound interest.
> We can fix the income inequality to age and it’s massively increased in the past decades beyond any and all natural functioning of the economy.
I was talking about wealth, not income. that you don’t seem to understand the difference makes me doubt your ability to accurately assess what is “economically natural”
> The sheer projection of ignorance is absolutely astounding. Almost everything you’ve said that could be factual is simply wrong, and you have the audacity to sit here and tell me I’m ignorant?
It could be wrong, yes. but it isn’t. what you’ve said, however, is.
>That’s called badly performing capitalism, and it performs badly.
“It’s called badly performing socialism, and it performs badly”.
I can do logical fallacies too, da!
Performance over.
>poor people today live better than kings did a century ago. By every objective standard, people are vastly richer than they were even a few decades ago. everyone has gotten rich
Why is it that every time I talk to conservatives they are under the impression they can *lie to my fucking face* about how poor people are suffering and expect me to believe them? Are you just so completely insulated from any of the economic suffering in America, let alone the world, that you *honestly believe this complete bullshit*?
Homeless exist. Starving people exist. People in crushing debt exist. If your philosophy can’t accept that your philosophy is antifactual, antiempirical, and wrong.
And most of the kings were gone a century ago.
>no, the vast majority do, 2/3s own stock, a higher percentage if you look at lifecycles.
We went over this.
> only if yu take it out before a certain age.
Irrelevant.
> “i don’t know how the system works but I’m sure you’re wrong” is not as good an argument as you seem to think
I know how the system works. You don’t.
> it’s the basic math of compound interest.
Thank you for explaining how capitalism leads to inequality? Also, no. No it isn’t.
If you were right I could be arguing about how capitalism, in it’s working form, places undue burden on minorities and the young, but the fact is that young people aren’t keeping up with where their parents or grandparents were, let alone with where they are.
It’s not age related, it’s an accelerating runaway inequality that is class based, where it solely serves people with money at the expense of people who don’t have it. This is age correlated but not casual.
If your system is doomed to fail the younger generations with each generation being poorer than their parents it’s a failed system and your kids will destroy it.
> I was talking about wealth, not income. that you don’t seem to understand the difference makes me doubt your ability to accurately assess what is “economically natural”
Wealth is related to income genius, and wealth inequality is even worse. It’s just that income is more relevant to your point. If you want to be stupid I’m not waiting for you.
> It could be wrong, yes. but it isn’t. what you’ve said, however, is.
lol.
Whether you end up labeling it ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘other’, it would be very different from modern capitalist societies, while still having vigorous markets (possibly more vigorous than we do, with less big-firm presence.) But one could justifiably call it a form of market socialism.
@mindstalko,
I’d have some criticisms of your preferred model, but I’d definitely prefer it to any capitalist economy that exists today.
>That’s called badly performing capitalism, and it performs badly.
Yugoslavia, which was not a capitalist country (and was the closest to market socialism we ever saw during the Cold War era) had the highest GDP/capita growth rate in the world, among high or middle income countries, for a 15 year period. (I think Botswana was higher, which is why I said “high or middle”).
There are other indices of how an economy performs, but that’s one.
” People in crushing debt exist.”
And they always will. If you abolish lending, they will be in crushing debt to loan sharks. We can tell this because many people with very high income are in crushing debt.
Indeed, winning the lottery does not decrease your chances of going bankrupt, and most indications are that it increases it.
that people genuinely like to work to support themselves and others, rather than profit. (You were listing off scientific discoveries made by serendipity rather than directed research earlier: scientists still do science even when they’re not being paid.)
It’s certainly true that people like to work for its own sake: at best, work is a creative endeavor, the products of work are things we take pride in, work is part of what makes us human and part of what makes us feel fulfilled (this is part of why unemployment is so bad for people). This goes not just for scientists, but for people in lots of other jobs as well. It’s *also* true, though, that people want to be fairly rewarded for their work, and in particular don’t want to see their work go unrewarded while *other people* get by without doing their fair share. A healthy society- and a healthy state- is going to have to figure out how to balance those two aspects of human nature, and ensure that they’re both fulfilled to some degree. I spend most of my “free time” working on a work project that isn’t formally part of my job and that I don’t get paid for, for example: on the other hand, if I didn’t get my name on a paper, at the end of it, I wouldn’t be doing it: that’s the “reward”, in this case.
I think a society that relies wholly on self-interest and private profit is a hideous deformation of human nature- which is one of the reasons I’m strongly opposed to capitalism- but a society that relies purely on moral incentives and doesn’t make any distinction in *material* reward between someone who works 60 hours a week and someone who works 30, is an unhealthy and undesirable society too (which is why I’m not a Maoist or a Guevarist).
All real-world economies are mixed economies, with the arguable exception of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, which collapsed in short order along multiple dimensions.
Even in the USA, that bogeyman of a certain type of leftist, there’s love, there’s family, there’s Medicare, there’s charity, in fact the USA rates third on the World Giving Index, https://good2give.ngo/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/2022-CAF-World-Giving-Index.pdf
I happened to look at my WordPress subscriptions, at https://wordpress.com/read/subscriptions
and it has “Paused” for Email Frequency for acoup. That doesn’t seem to be something I can toggle, so I assume the blog did it, deliberately or accidentally.
It seems that we’ve proven Mary Catelli is an evil person in this comment thread, then?
Dcmorinmorin is factually right (except when she argues against Bret’s own defenses of regular liberalism) and the failure of conservatives to be convinced by her is proof of their boundless evil, malice, and selfishness.
‘except if’, I meant.
Just saw what she has to say. I’m so angry that she is still here.
She shouldn’t be here. She is a monster who is morally equivalent to someone who slits poor people’s throats in the night.
‘She’, being Mary Catelli, btw.
In fact, I’ll go right out and say it. It is The State, which she abhors as an institution and a concept, that keeps her from being dead just because *I want her to be such.*
Mary Catelli is the worst person on this comment section, when you don’t include the Pro-Russian trolls who seem to have gone away after some point.
Dcmorinmorin and I don’t deserve to be attacked by conservatives when *she gets away with everything*.
She is a monster in human form who wants *poor people to starve*, Muslims to convert to her specific brand of Christianity or *die*, and has never been convinced by any argument made at her.
It is The State that keeps her from being *dead*, not her gun (as I assume she is a gun owner).
There can be no civility with a beast who can only be called Anti-Altruism, Anti-Humanity, and thus Anti-*Human*.
“She is a monster in human form who wants *poor people to starve*”
And there you go.
People in this thread see poor people starving, and say, “How can I use this as an excuse to remake society to be more to *my* taste?”
And you slander a person who objects to this power grab as wanting the poor to starve.
Here’s a hint, Highestsun: go feed poor people. That’s what I do.
I disagree with Mary Catelli on most things (and with dcmorinmorin on a lot of things as well), but unlike you, she hasn’t spun wildly delusional fantasies about other people here or, you know, issued death threats against other commenters (and she seems to, you know, be able to disagree civilly with me and others).
I don’t mean this to be critical, but I’ve been commenting on political blogs for since about 2007, and I’ve taken plenty of abuse from people all over the political spectrum, but you really do seem to be psychologically unstable in a way that I very rarely see. After you get banned from here, I would really recommend you get some help.
Pro-Malay Apartheid is still apartheid, Hector. You don’t deserve to be listened to or heeded.
And while we’re at it, we’re better off with ey81 and Mr. X. being *dead* too. Nonwhites are better off without them.
And yes, Mr. X *is* scum. He is a threat to life, liberty, and happiness.
I am not Muslim, but that guy hates Muslims to the point he’d gladly endorse drone attacks on weddings.
Also, as Bret might ban me from commenting on this blog anymore, let me just say this: I do not, for a second, believe that Mary Catelli, ey81, and Mr. X do not have plans to *murder Bret*, because all conservatives are good for when their arguments are deleted is trying to *kill their opponents*.
They secretly fantasize about murdering Bret Deveraux, our host. They need to be stopped.
> when their arguments are deleted
I mean defeated, because their arguments here have been defeated completely by what Liberals and Leftists here have said to disprove their assertions.
And yes, I am writing from the assumption that I do not need hard evidence – Them being conservatives who won’t change their mind is enough to paint them as people planning to murder their host, aka Bret Devereaux.
You do realize that this is hard evidence?
“all conservatives are good for when their arguments are deleted is trying to *kill their opponents*.”
*Looks at the mass murderers of the 20th century.*
Aha, you are just repeating their claims!
Well, you’ve just proven you are.
Can you offer any kind of support for any of your claims whatsoever, as in providing actual quotes with links?
Because if not, I think the only reason you couldn’t be sued for slander or libel is because it would be very difficult to prove any kind of harm from some rando on the internet making wild and easily refuted accusations.
So I had some spare time and decided to write a Python web scraper to do some ACOUP stats.
Here are the people with over a thousand words on the page, as of Mon 08 Jul 2024 10:50:00 UTC.
Main post words: 3400
Number comments: 433 people: 81
Total words 50091
Rank Words
1 13613 dcmorinmorinmorin
2 3908 mindstalk0
3 3820 Mary Catelli
4 3400 Bret Devereaux
5 3271 Hector
6 1886 ad9
7 1399 Tracy W
8 1396 AiryW
9 1279 aj
10 1169 Endymionologist
11 1105 formerlycassander
…
(If anyone is wondering I’m down at #14.)
Yes, I double checked. Bret Devereaux, despite being the author of the original article, is only the fourth largest contributor. And number one has a massive, massive, lead.
Well that’s a bit embarrassing.
Can you count number of comments, too?
I just skimmed your comments here, and I personally don’t think you have anything to be embarrassed about. I’d guess that you simply have a higher tolerance than some of us who are posting less than we used to, in the last month or two.
it’s embarrassing in the sense that those of us in the top 5 probably feel like we’re wasting too much time here….
Yeah, some on-topic replies, then in depth discussion of traffic safety, housing policy, or lead/crime, and little political sniping, isn’t too bad. Still have a “maybe talking too much” reaction, even if most of my word count is defensible on its own merits.
@mindstalko, yes I have comment counts and also the number of bytes.
For comment counts (using the same downloaded page so not reflecting more recent activity), the top ten does not change much. Prof Devereaux vanishes, since his original post only counts as 1 “comment”. The gap between number one and the rest narrows considerably. The top ten are re-arranged slightly, with The Original Mr. X pushing out formerlycassander.
79 dcmorinmorinmorin, 72 Mary Catelli, 21 Hector, 19 mindstalk0, 18 Tracy W, 15 ad9, 14 Endymionologist, 12 AiryW, 11 aj, 11 The original Mr. X
That’s nice to know, thank you for doing it!
Since the traditional reward for writing software is a bunch of suggestions for new features, I’ll not only echo mindstalk0’s suggestion for comment counts, but also add a suggestion for stats going back to, oh, March 15th? I don’t actually expect you to do so, but, well, I thought I’d ask. 🙂 It might shine a bit of light on an ongoing trend.
No problem on the comment counts since I’d already written that code.
Hmm, why not do some historical analysis on a history blog? Maybe next weekend.
And I should improve the output format by creating some kind of HTML table, since WordPress massacres my neatly monospaced terminal output…
Nothing to see here, just me seeing if I can put a table into a comment
1 2000 Muad’dib
10 20 Alia
100 20000 Bene Gesserit
Three rows, each 2 numbers right aligned and a name?
Regarding AIDS, are there any sources on how many tests per capita (per unit of time, in USA at least) were done historically? This affects perception of improvement a lot, as reducing testing intensity across the board can mask problems, not to mention changing testing intensity for different social groups, which I’m sure there won’t be reliable historical records for. Current numbers per capita per country are easily available but also drown out anything from the 80s or 90s.
A correction regarding the I/P conflict: It’s older than 76 years, it’s at least 107 years old, and in my eyes 142 years old. It’s the Palestinian narrative that it’s 76 years old. Secondly, I find it odd that Western scholars believe that by signing a treaty the conflict will end. Indeed, the conflict will most likely improve by a treaty (which might happen in the next few years because Israel is in a corner), but the conflict itself won’t end within our lifetime. Not because I don’t think the occupation wouldn’t end or that there won’t be treaties, but because while Westerners think of the conflict mostly in terms of the occupation (in the past since the 6 Days Way and nowadays since the multilateral civil war in 1947-9), it is simply not how we, who live this conflict, think about it. It most likely will end the interest of the world in the conflict, but not end it. For that, we’d need at least a few generations after us. Plus, what I assume will happen is that since Israel has an ultra conservative growing religious population that doesn’t get provided adequate education, Israel’s economy will collapse, and in that moment, Palestinians will be able to take control over Israel without even using violence. That doesn’t sound like ending the conflict, the world will simply care less.