Long Game

Unless domestic consumption expands dramatically, China can continue growing rapidly only by increasing investment well beyond what is economically useful or by forcing larger trade surpluses onto a reluctant world.

Many reasons have been given for low Chinese consumption -- demographics, Confucian culture, skewed tax incentives, amateurish marketing, the sex imbalance, the tattered social safety net, etc. If Beijing takes administrative steps to address the correct cause of low consumption, so goes the theory, it will automatically rise.

The other, smaller (but rapidly growing) school of thought argues the model itself prohibits high consumption: growth is high because consumption is low.

Contrary to conventional thinking, the Chinese have no aversion to consuming. They are eager shoppers, as even the most cursory visit to a Chinese mall will indicate. The problem is that Chinese households own such a small share of total national income that their consumption is necessarily also a small share.

One option might be for Beijing to engineer a huge shift of state wealth to the household sector through, say, a massive privatization program.

Another option, and ultimately the only sustainable path forward, would involve reversing the subsidies that generated such furious growth.

Unfortunately, the longer China waits to make the transition from this model of growth, the more difficult the transition will be.

The sooner China begins the difficult transition, the less costly it will be, but in no circumstance is it likely to be easy. They key will be to get consumption to grow quickly relative to GDP, and China might simply not have the time to do it by reversing the wage, currency, and interest-rate subsidies paid by the household sector.

We've already said why we favor allowing the mosque to be built. We support the developer's right to build on private property as law permits. Local officials green-lighted the project by a 29-1 vote. That should be that.

Regardless, it is unlikely that ketamine, psilocybin or any of these psychedelics would be used directly, because of their hallucinogenic and other side effects. According to Duman, several pharmaceutical companies have already begun the search for alternative compounds that target the same biochemistry or brain function, including some that his lab is testing.

Without the support of the Chechen commander of the CE (Khusein Gakayev, who withdrew his support for Umarov in the Aug. 12 video), Umarov has a serious deficit of support in controlling the Caucasus Emirate.

Umarov announced the formation of the CE only in 2007, which means the group was just three years old when the leadership turmoil broke out Aug. 1. This is precious little time to consolidate militant groups across a region with sharp geographic fragmentation that traditionally has caused groups to be isolated and independent.

Indeed, even though the Caucasus Emirate may be seriously disrupted by recent turmoil in its leadership structure, the regional militant groups that made up the CE will certainly continue to conduct attacks against security forces and even civilians as they try to loosen Moscow’s control over the region. But the turmoil will reduce the strategic threat the combined efforts of these disparate groups had posed to Moscow for the foreseeable future.

North Korea, though far from a robust nuclear power, was not stopped from crossing the nuclear red line.

it would require an extensive air campaign to even attempt to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, and there is considerable uncertainty about whether such a campaign would even be successful in that regard, rather than simply setting the program back a few years.

If Bushehr was Osirak in Iraq in 1981 or a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007, Israel would have destroyed it long ago. But Bushehr is not in Iraq or Syria, and it is not the heart of Iran’s nuclear efforts.

Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’

In ‘The Language Instinct’, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference between pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when you put together a bunch of people – typically slaves – who have already grown up with their own language but don’t know each others’. They manage to cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all. However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.

4. It has delivered a powerful message about its willingness to use force to settle political disputes, arguably strengthening its hand in foreign relations

5. By extension, it has reestablished a degree of control over its near abroad, where Moscow has long worried that the US -- and increasingly China -- have been steadily gaining a foothold

The results – both from individual states and when compared across states – were definitive. For instance, in Michigan – where the kindergarten cutoff date is Dec. 1 – students born Dec. 1 had much higher rates of ADHD than children born Dec. 2. (The students born Dec. 1 were the youngest in their grade; the students born Dec. 2 enrolled a year later and were the oldest in their grade.) Thus, even though the students were a single day apart in age, they were assessed differently simply because they were compared against classmates of a different age set, Elder said.

What The Spirit Level shows is that more equal societies enjoy better physical and mental health, lower homicide rates, fewer drug problems, fewer teenage births, higher maths and literacy scores, higher standards of child wellbeing, less bullying in schools, lower obesity rates, and fewer people in prison.

This left us with 23 rich market societies. We took our data from the best sources, such as the World Health Organisation, the United Nations and the World Bank. To double-check our findings, we then repeated our analyses for the 50 US states, to see if more unequal states showed the same consistent tendency to have more of these health and social problems. In almost 30 different cross-national analyses, we show the same tendency for one problem after another to be significantly worse in societies with bigger income differences.

Our critics also ignore the fact that these relationships have been widely demonstrated by other researchers. For example, as early as 1993 in the Criminal Justice Review, Hsieh and Pugh reviewed 34 studies of income inequality and violent crime and found a consistent correlation between the two—the authors estimated that it would need 58 new studies which found no effect in order to overturn this result. But studies since then have continued to confirm the link.

The contrast with China is stark. China’s rapid ascent was made possible through massive annual production that makes up a much greater proportion of its overall worth than it does for other major economies.

Government spending will have to make up for both lost foreign demand and weak domestic demand. And, unlike Japan, China will face greater social fragmentation and unrest.

And from the American perspective, this government did not have to be pro-American (that had long ago disappeared as a viable goal), but it could not be dominated by Iran.

For Iran, a strong Iraq is the geopolitical nightmare.

At this point, the Iranians do not have the ability to impose a government on Iraq. However, they do have the ability to prevent the formation of a government or to destabilize one that is formed.

The Iranians understand the weakness of America’s position in Iraq, and they are confident that they can use that to influence American policy elsewhere.

Given all that has been said about the success of the Petraeus strategy, it must be observed that while it broke the cycle of violence and carved out a fragile stability in Iraq, it has not achieved, nor can it alone achieve, the political solution that would end the war. Nor has it precluded a return of violence at some point. The Petraeus strategy has not solved the fundamental reality that has always been the shadow over Iraq: Iran. But that was beyond Petraeus’ task and, for now, beyond American capabilities. That is why the Iranians can afford to be so confident.