Slouching towards Utopia
The war in Ukraine is pushing Central Asia away from Russia
Russia’s loss has been China’s gain
As the Russian army pulled back the troops after a series of humiliating defeats in north-east Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin flew to Uzbekistan to attend a gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation on 15-16 September.
The group comprises states from across the Eurasian continent, including China, Russia, four former Soviet Central Asian nations, India, Pakistan and Iran. Belarus, Mongolia and Afghanistan have observer status. And more than a dozen countries in the Caucasus, Southeast Asia and the Middle East are dialogue partners.
But if Putin was hoping the forum would be a welcome respite from his increasing isolation from the West, he would have been disappointed.
Most international news headlines focused on the fact that Putin had to publicly acknowledge “concerns” over his invasion of Ukraine from China and India, who had previously avoided any criticism of the war. But no less important was the fact that the summit also exposed Russia’s dwindling clout in Central Asia — a region historically in its sphere of influence.
Russia’s loss has been China’s gain.
Brad Delong’s Slouching towards Utopia
Here’s Brad’s summary of the argument:
Since 1870, we humans have done amazingly astonishingly uniquely and unprecedentedly well at baking a sufficiently large economic pie.
But the problems of slicing and tasting the pie—of equitably distributing it, and then using our technological powers to live lives wisely and well—continue to flummox us.
The big reason we have been unable to build social institutions for equitably slicing and then properly tasting our now more-than-sufficiently-large economic pie is the sheer pace of economic transformation.
Since 1870 humanity's technological competence has doubled every generation
Hence Schumpeterian creative destruction has taken hold.
Our immensely increasing wealth has come at the price of the repeated destruction of industries, occupations, livelihoods, and communities.
And we have been frantically trying to rewrite the sociological code running on top of our rapidly changing forces-of-production hardware
The attempts to cobble together a sorta-running sociological software code have been a scorched-earth war between two factions.
Faction 1: followers of Friedrich von Hayek, who say: "the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market"
Faction 2: followers of Karl Polanyi, who say: "the market was made for man; not man for the market"
Let the market start destroying "society", and society will react by trying to destroy the market order
Thus the task of governance and politics is to try to manage and perhaps one day supersede this dilemma.
The Long March of the YIMBYs
Slowly, the tide is starting to turn.
Another excellent and informative piece by Noah Smith on what could be the most important economic issue of our times. Housing the population as if we were rich — you know like we were a generation ago?
Seven years ago when I first encountered it, the YIMBY (Yes In My Back Yard) movement was almost a joke — a handful of transplants living in San Francisco who wished the city were more like New York. The idea that such a small band of squawking misfits might one day mushroom into a nationwide movement for housing abundance would have sounded either sarcastic or insane. And yet here we are.
YIMBY organizations have sprouted up all over the country, and are even appearing in other countries like Brazil, Canada, Italy, Peru, Sweden, and the UK who suffer similar housing shortages.
Vaccine mandates: Maybe not such a good idea
Peter Godfrey-Smith, he of the book octopus minds, was my philosophy lecturer aeons ago at ANU. He’s as far as I know a thoughtful guy.
What to Know About Tucker Carlson’s Rise
I wonder when he’ll run for president?
Good old Lachlan backed Tucker.
While Mr. Murdoch and Fox executives have often couched their defense of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” as a protection of free inquiry and controversial opinions, Mr. Carlson’s on-air provocations have long been something else: part of a painstaking, data-driven experiment that has succeeded wildly in bolstering Fox’s profit machine against the long-term decline in cable news subscriptions.
According to three former Fox employees, Mr. Carlson was among the network’s most avid consumers of what are known as minute-by-minutes — ratings data on an audience’s real-time ebb and flow. “He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up,” said a former employee who worked frequently with Mr. Carlson.
Network executives soon began applying the approach to the daytime news shows. They pitched it as “Moneyball” for television: an audience-first approach to deciding what to cover and how to cover it.
Journalists on Fox’s daytime shows discerned a pattern to what the audience didn’t like: segments featuring Fox’s own reporters, stories deemed unfavorable to Mr. Trump, left-leaning or independent guests. Immigration, on the other hand, was a hit.
Network executives ordered up so much coverage of illegal immigrants or nonwhite Americans caught in acts of crime or violence that some employees referred to it by a grim nickname: “brown menace.”
Meanwhile at fruitcake watch
#MAGACommunism. Count me sceptical.
It’s safe to say the prospect of socialist ideas spreading among American workers is not one the country’s ruling classes look upon favorably. But the advocates of #MAGACommunism hope to make communism appealing to ordinary working-class people by decoupling it from the toxic ideology of leftism. Whereas the latter has turned into a fanatical and anti-popular ideology that looks down upon the masses, and despises everything most people hold dear—nation, family, tradition—#MAGACommunists claim to be reclaiming a revolutionary legacy rooted in a deep patriotic respect for the national, familial, and cultural premises that define a people.
“Socialism with American characteristics,” as they call it, does not aim to change all private-property relations, let alone abolish all private property. On the contrary, it is one that aims to overthrow the monopolists, the bankers, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, Big Tech and others, in order to allow people have more things, not less.
Adele Waldman on Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone
I read Adele Waldman’s excellent The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. when it came out about eight years ago and ended up on her website when she liked a tweet of mine. And an essay on it is this one from 2011 on Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone. Here are the first and last paragraphs of the essay:
FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1965, Margaret Drabble’s slim third novel tells the story of a single woman who gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby and raise it on her own. But to see this book as primarily about the sexual revolution, illegitimacy, and the swinging London of the 1960s, is to miss its point. The Millstone is about liberal guilt. It is perhaps one of the most philosophical books written on the subject, full of the sly profundity that is sometimes the special strength of spare, comic novels. …
Yet Drabble’s novel is hardly a salvo against liberalism, compassion, or social conscience. It is something deeper, a wry and witty testament not only to the difficulties but, more damningly, to the absurdities of living according to principle, no matter how worthwhile the principle. To behave, as Kant would have us do, as if our every move were in accordance with a universal maxim, is in a certain light admirable, but it also requires a cast of mind that is not inherently likable, lacking as it does in spontaneity and warmth. For all her winning dryness, Rosamund’s excessive concern with justice is more often than not indistinguishable from self-consciousness and neurosis. There is in it, too, an unattractive whiff of grandiosity, as if her every action was imbued with world-historical significance. Drabble’s unrelenting focus on Rosamund’s moral life causes us to feel, for page after page, just how fine is the line between the good and the ridiculous.
From the LOLBerger department
HT: The Australian Statistician
What Math Can Tell Us About the Universe
A fun extract from a popular book on mathematics.
Over the weekend, I watched [my previous book] obsessively as it crept into the top three, then nudged its way into second place. What I barely noticed was that the pope had chosen that very week to make some startlingly progressive statements about gays, abortion, and birth control. Just as I was about to claim my rightful pinnacle of victory, he appeared behind me from nowhere, bounding up the list in twos and threes. Quads flexing, cassock billowing, he made one final spectacular jump, to leapfrog clear over me and land in my number one spot.
Now, you may wonder if I developed a lingering grudge against the pope, if I’ve written my new book, The Big Bang of Numbers, to vindicate myself in an imagined mano a mano with him. Let me assure you that’s not the case. I’ve completely forgiven him and will even be mailing him an autographed copy of the finished book at the Vatican to show no hard feelings remain.
Sam Roggeveen proposing an ‘echidna’ defence posture for Australia
Makes sense to my (inexpert) thinking.
Our defence strategy and force structure should signal benign intent towards Indonesia. But that’s the bare minimum. At best, we should try to achieve a relationship based on a shared strategic objective of ensuring that China never becomes the dominant maritime power in Southeast Asia. A long-range strike capability might be useful for such a shared objective, but we should only acquire it with Indonesia’s implicit consent, and preferably its cooperation. We’re nowhere near that point yet, and developing such capabilities before the diplomatic groundwork is laid could make things worse for Australia. …
In defence terms, geography still favours Australia, but geoeconomics does not. The rise of China and Indonesia compels us toward a defensive approach, an ‘echidna strategy’, if you will, which is unthreatening to others but which can hurt them if they get too close. Our defence strategy should signal benign strength, an ability to hold off an adversary but otherwise with no ambitions—and no means—to use military power for coercion. If there is a compelling reason to do more than that, it should only be done with Jakarta’s consent, and preferably with its help.