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criscimagnael

Putin's Next Move on Ukraine Is a Mystery. Just the Way He Likes It. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...putin-ukraine-russia.html

shared by criscimagnael on 12 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • What is Russia’s next move? No one knows, except perhaps Mr. Putin. And that is by design.
  • Foreign Minister Sergei A. Ryabkov warned that failure to meet Russia’s demands could put the “security of the whole European continent” at risk.
  • Analysts said that not even members of Mr. Putin’s inner circle — let alone Mr. Ryabkov, who led Russia’s delegation at this week’s Geneva talks — were likely to know how seriously Mr. Putin is contemplating full-scale war with Ukraine. Nor would they know what American concessions he is prepared to accept in order to defuse the crisis.
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  • Instead, Mr. Putin is likely not even to have made a decision,
  • The talks continue on Wednesday, when Russian officials will meet representatives of the United States and its NATO allies in Brussels,
  • After that, Mr. Peskov said, Russia would decide “whether it makes sense” to move forward with diplomacy.
  • For years, Mr. Putin has fumed over NATO’s expansion eastward and American support for pro-Western sentiment in Ukraine; now, by creating a new security crisis that threatens to complicate President Biden’s agenda, he has succeeded in getting the issue to the forefront in Washington.
  • “For the first time in 30 years, the United States has agreed to discuss issues that it was impossible to discuss even a year ago,”
  • Now that the Russian president has Americans at the negotiating table, he is pursuing another classic Putin strategy: putting so many potential moves on the playing field — pointing in so many different directions — that he leaves people guessing, allowing him to choose the tactics that best suit him as events evolve.
  • He said Russia was imposing no specific timeline, but that it needed a “fast response” to its demands. And while he said there was “no reason to fear an escalation scenario” in Ukraine
  • The contradictory messaging continued on Tuesday when the Kremlin’s spokesman, Mr. Peskov, countered any positive assessments Mr. Ryabkov might have offered the day before. “For now, we do not see any substantive reason for optimism,” he said in his daily conference call with reporters.
  • The virus-free cocoon Mr. Putin has tried to establish around himself has meant that even confidants are forced to spend days in quarantine before being allowed into the same room with him, further reducing his connections with the outside world.
  • “No one knows with 100 percent certainty whether Putin is ready for war, or whether this is a bluff or not,” Ms. Stanovaya said.
  • Instead, he has warned of an unspecified “military-technical response” if Russia does not get what it wants.
  • We need long-term, legally binding guarantees
  • we need at least something, at least a legally binding agreement rather than just verbal assurances.”
  • Emboldened, he sees Mr. Biden as a man who may be willing to make a deal — and that Mr. Biden, as a veteran of the Cold War, may possess a respect for power diplomacy with Moscow that younger American politicians do not.
  • “He assumes that the Americans will pay attention only to that which concretely, immediately threatens them,” Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, said of the Russian president. “He uses unpredictability, he uses tension, he uses threats.”
  • it is the demand that NATO offer some kind of formal assurances not to expand eastward and to cease military cooperation with Ukraine that is now most important for Mr. Putin.
  • NATO has repeatedly ruled out the idea that it would allow any other country to veto who can and cannot be in the alliance, creating what appears to be an impasse.
  • As for what Russia does next, Mr. Lukyanov said that this would be solely up to Mr. Putin, who exerts a monopoly on foreign-policy decision-making without recent precedent in Russia.
Javier E

Niall Ferguson: Ukraine Invasion Struggles Could Be the End for Putin - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...les-could-be-the-end-for-putin

ukraine situation crisis analysis consequences strategy russia

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • What makes history so hard to predict — the reason there is no neat “cycle” of history enabling us to prophesy the future — is that most disasters come out of left field.
  • Unlike hurricanes and auto accidents, to which we can at least attach probabilities, the biggest disasters (pandemics and wars) follow power-law or random distributions. They belong in the realm of uncertainty, or what Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book “The Black Swan,” calls  “Extremistan.”
  • What’s more, as I argued in my book “Doom,” disasters don’t come in any predictable sequence.
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  • Ukraine is also receiving vital private-sector assistance, notably the delivery of Starlink internet terminals, which are helping maintain communications
  • All I can do is to apply history, as there is no model from political science or economics that can really help us here.
  • 1. Do the Russians manage to take Kyiv in a matter of two, three, four weeks or never?
  • At least one military analyst I respect said late last week that the Russian invasion force has around two weeks left before serious logistical and supply problems force Putin seriously to the negotiating table.
  • On the other hand, Western media seem over-eager to cover news of Russian reverses, and insufficiently attentive to the harsh fact that the invaders continue to advance on more than one front.
  • A better analogy than the Winter War with Finland may be the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that began in December 1979.
  • Economic warfare between 1914 and 1918 was not a substitute for sending British armies to fight on the European continent, just as it had not been in the Napoleonic Wars against France.
  • What I cannot tell is whether or not these weapons and other equipment will suffice to sustain Ukrainian resistance over the coming weeks.
  • But the Ukrainians have no real answers to higher-altitude bombardment and missile attacks.
  • 2. Do the sanctions precipitate such a severe economic contraction in Russia that Putin cannot achieve victory?
  • I have heard it said that the breadth and depth of the sanctions imposed on Russia make them unprecedented. I disagree
  • recalls but does not quite match the sanctions that Britain and its allies imposed on Germany at the outbreak of World War
  • It seems there are seven distinct historical processes at work and it’s not clear which is going fastest.
  • Then, as now, it was possible for an increasingly authoritarian government to impose economic controls and divert resources away from civilian consumption to the war effort, while blaming the resulting deprivation on the enemy
  • We should remember that those measures did not defeat Germany, however, because — like Russia today — it had the resources to be self-sufficient
  • no one should forget that self-sufficiency is possible for Russia, albeit at the price of severe austerity, whether it is a choice or a consequence of war.
  • China is able to help Russia in ways that could mitigate the economic shock, just as for years it has helped Iran to circumvent U.S. sanctions by buying its oil.
  • Unlike Soviet citizens, who were accustomed to a state monopoly on communications, today’s Russians have come to rely as much as we do on Big Tech. Being cut off from the metaverse may prove a more psychologically painful deprivation than shortages of imported foods.
  • even a 35% quarterly decline in gross domestic product does not condemn a country to military defeat if its planes can still fly and its tanks still fire rounds.
  • 3. Does the combination of military and economic crisis precipitate a palace coup against Putin?
  • 4. Does the risk of downfall lead Putin to desperate measures (carrying out his nuclear threat)? 
  • The people with the power to arrest Putin are the people he counts on to execute his arrest orders: Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council and, like Putin, a long-serving KGB officer; Sergei Naryshkin, the head of foreign intelligence; and Alexander Bortnikov, who heads the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB.
  • 6. Does the West’s attention deficit disorder kick in before any of this?
  • If Putin’s goal was to deter members of NATO from offering direct military assistance to Ukraine, it seemed to have some effect.
  • Russian casualties are being caused by Ukrainians using arms supplied by multiple NATO countries, including the U.S. and Turkey, but they are mostly crossing into Ukraine from Poland. Might Putin therefore strike a target in eastern Poland — Lublin, say, or Przemysl?
  • he is surely more likely to do so if believes the U.S. would not immediately retaliate in kind against a Russian target. A key lesson of this entire crisis has been that indications of weakness on the U.S. side, which I discussed here last week, have emboldened Putin.
  • 5. Do the Chinese keep Putin afloat but on the condition that he agrees to a compromise peace that they offer to broker?
  • My guess is that the Chinese make no serious diplomatic move until they are convinced Putin’s invasion is thoroughly bogged down in Ukraine’s spring mud.
  • I would not bet the fate of Ukraine on Russian internal politics.
  • Remarkably, one U.S. legislator told me last week that he “couldn’t recall an issue more obsessively followed and more unifying among” his constituents.
  • The only real significance of Western public outrage at Putin’s actions is the political pressure it exerts on Biden and other leaders to take a tougher line with Russia.
  • 7. What is the collateral damage?
  • History shows that wars (much more than pandemics) are the most common cause of jumps in inflation.
  • The best-known recent illustration is the way wars in 1973 (Yom Kippur) and 1979 (Iran-Iraq) contributed to the great inflation of the Seventies
  • these price spikes are not confined to oil and gas but involve a host of other commodities. The prospect of this year’s Ukrainian grain harvest being disrupted means a significant surge in food prices, with all kinds of consequences, especially in developing countries.
  • A tsunami of war has struck Ukraine. Whether the Russian tide flows or ebbs in the coming weeks will do much to determine the course of world history for the rest of our lives.
  • Nor can we ignore the risks that may be lurking within the international financial system.
  • This is the first big crisis of Cold War II, which is in many ways like a mirror image of Cold War I, with China the senior partner, Russia the junior, and a hot war in Eastern Europe rather than East Asia (it was Korea’s turn in 1950).
  • I do not know how the crisis will turn out, but I do know it will have profound consequences for the course of the superpower contest.
  • If the invasion of Ukraine ends in disaster for the heroic defenders of Kyiv and their comrades, another disaster may well follow — and it could occur as far away as Taiwan. Conversely, if there is justice in the world and the disaster befalls the architect of this war, that too will give birth to some fresh and unforeseeable event.
  • Add these seven imponderables together and you see how profoundly important the next few weeks will be.
  • The failure of the administration to signal that it would retaliate is of a piece with last year’s reports that Biden’s national security team was considering ruling out first use of nuclear weapons in its new national military strategy. Nuclear missiles cease to be a deterrent if one side is unwilling to use them.
  • Today, however, the boot is on the other foot. Not only is Putin intimidating NATO; he may have achieved something more, namely a tacit admission by the Biden administration that it would not necessarily retaliate with nuclear weapons if Russia used them.
Javier E

War in Ukraine Has Russia's Putin, Xi Jinping Changing the World Order - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ng-capitalism-s-great-illusion

ukraine war russia world order strategy plan crisis globalization history

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • at the beginning of 2022, many of us shared the assumptions of Keynes’s Londoner. We ordered exotic goods in the confident expectation that Amazon would deliver them to our doors the next day. We invested in emerging-market stocks, purchased Bitcoin, and chatted with people on the other side of the world via Zoom. Many of us dismissed Covid-19 as a temporary suspension of our global lifestyle. Vladimir Putin’s “projects and politics of militarism” seemed like diversions in the loonier regions of the Twittersphere. 
  • just as World War I mattered for reasons beyond the slaughter of millions of human beings, this conflict could mark a lasting change in the way the world economy works — and the way we all live our lives, however far we are from the carnage in Eastern Europe.
  • That doesn’t mean that globalization is an unalloyed good. By its nature, economic liberalism exaggerates the downsides of capitalism as well as the upsides: Inequality increases, companies sever their local roots, losers fall further behind, and — without global regulations — environmental problems multiply
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  • Right now, the outcome that we have been sliding toward seems one in which an autocratic East gradually divides from — and then potentially accelerates past — a democratic but divided West. 
  • Seizing that opportunity will require an understanding of both economics and history.
  • By any economic measure the West is significantly more powerful than the East, using the terms “West” and “East” to mean political alliances rather than just geographical regions. The U.S. and its allies account for 60% of global gross domestic product at current exchange rates; China, Russia and the autocracies amount to barely a third of that. And for the first time in years, the West is coming together rather than falling apart.
  • The question for Biden and the European leaders he will meet this week is simple: What sort of world do they want to build in the future? Ukraine could well mark the end of one great episode in human history. It could also be the time that the free world comes together and creates another, more united, more interconnected and more sustainable one than ever before
  • the answer to globalization’s woes isn’t to abandon economic liberalism, but to redesign it. And the coming weeks offer a golden opportunity to redesign the global economic order.
  • Yet once politicians got out of the way, globalization sped up, driven by technology and commerce.
  • Only after the Second World War did economic integration resume its advance — and then only on the Western half of the map
  • What most of us today think of as globalization only began in the 1980s, with the arrival of Thatcherism and Reaganism, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reintegration of China into the world economy, and, in 1992, the creation of the European single market.
  • When the guns finally fell silent in 1918 and peace was forced on Germany at Versailles (in the Carthaginian terms that Keynes decried so eloquently), the Bidens, Johnsons and Macrons of the time tried to restore the old world order of free trade and liberal harmony — and comprehensively failed. 
  • As the new century dawned and an unknown “pro-Western” bureaucrat called Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, the daily volume of foreign-exchange transactions reached $15 trillion. 
  • More recently, as the attacks on globalization have mounted, economic integration has slowed and in some cases gone into reverse.
  • Meanwhile in the West, Ukraine has already prompted a great rethink. As German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has proclaimed, we are at a Zeitenwende — a turning point. Under his leadership, pacifist Germany has already proposed a defense budget that’s larger than Russia’s. Meanwhile, Ukrainian immigrants are being welcomed by nations that only a few months ago were shunning foreigners, and, after a decade of slumber in Brussels, the momentum for integration is increasing.
  • But this turning point can still lead in several directions.
  • the invasion of Ukraine is accelerating changes in both geopolitics and the capitalist mindset that are deeply inimical to globalization.
  • The changes in geopolitics come down to one word: China, whose rapid and seemingly inexorable rise is the central geopolitical fact of our time.  
  • absent any decisive action by the West, geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs: an Asian one with China at its heart and perhaps Russia as its energy supplier; an American-led bloc; and perhaps a third centered on the European Union, with the Europeans broadly sympathetic to the U.S. but nervous about the possible return of an America-First isolationist to the White House and irked by America’s approach to digital and media regulation.
  • World trade in manufactured goods doubled in the 1990s and doubled again in the 2000s. Inflationary pressures have been kept low despite loose monetary policies.
  • From a CEO’s viewpoint, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has done more than unleash Western embargoes and boost inflation. It is burying most of the basic assumptions that have underlain business thinking about the world for the past 40 years. 
  • Commercially speaking, this bet paid off spectacularly. Over the past 50 years multinationals have turned themselves from federations of national companies into truly integrated organizations that could take full advantage of global economies of scale and scope (and, of course, global loopholes in taxes and regulations)
  • Just as important as this geopolitical shift is the change in the capitalist mindset. If the current age of globalization was facilitated by politicians, it has been driven by businesspeople. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher didn’t decide that the components of an iPhone should come from 40 countries. Facebook wasn’t created by senior politicians — not even by Al Gore. Uber wasn’t an arm of the Department of Transportation. 
  • profits have remained high, as the cost of inputs (such as energy and labor) have been kept low.
  • Now what might be called the Capitalist Grand Illusion is under assault in Kyiv — just as Norman Angell’s version was machine-gunned on the Western Front.
  • Militarism and cultural rivalries keep trumping economic logic.
  • The second is Biden’s long experience
  • Every Western company is now wondering how exposed it is to political risk. Capitalists are all Huntingtonians now.
  • Greed is also acquiring an anti-global tint. CEOs are rationally asking how they can profit from what Keynes called “monopolies, restrictions and exclusions.
  • So the second age of globalization is fading fast. Unless something is done quickly and decisively, the world will divide into hostile camps, regardless of what happens in Ukraine.
  • this divided world will not suit the West. Look at the resolution passed by the United Nations General Assembly to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The most trumpeted figure is that only 40 countries did not vote for this (35 abstained, and five voted against it), compared with 141 countries who voted in favor. But those 40 countries, which include India and China, account for the majority of the world’s population.
  • we still have time to shape a very different future: one in which global wealth is increased and the Western alliance bolstered.
  • One of the great problems with modern liberalism for the past few decades has been its lack of a gripping narrative and a compelling cast of heroes and villains
  • Now Putin has inadvertently reversed all that. Freedom is the creed of heroes such as Zelenskiy; anti-liberalism is the creed of monsters who drop bombs on children.
  • Biden can soften that message at home by adding a political dimension to his trade agenda. “Build back better” applies to globalization, too. A global new deal should certainly include a focus on making multinational companies pay their taxes, and the environment should be to the fore. But Biden should also talk about the true cost of protectionism in terms of higher prices, worse products and less innovation.
  • So far, Biden’s handling of the Ukraine invasion has been similarly nuanced. He has drawn a line between supplying the resistance and becoming involved in the war (or giving others an excuse to claim the U.S. is involved). And he has put firm pressure on China to stay out of the conflict.
  • Biden needs to recognize that expanding economic interdependence among his allies is a geostrategic imperative. He should offer Europe a comprehensive free-trade deal to bind the West together
  • It is not difficult to imagine Europe or democratic Asia signing up for these sorts of pacts, given the shock of Putin’s aggression and their fear of China. Biden’s problem is at home. Why should the Democratic left accept this? Because, Biden should say, Ukraine, China and America’s security matter more than union votes.
  • Biden should pursue a two-stage strategy: First, deepen economic integration among like-minded nations; but leave the door open to autocracies if they become more flexible.
  • CEOs who used to build empires based on just-in-time production are now looking at just-in-case: adding inefficient production closer to home in case their foreign plants are cut off.
  • Constructing such a “new world order” will be laborious work. But the alternative is a division of the world into hostile economic and political blocs that comes straight out of the 1930s
  • Biden, Johnson, Scholz and Macron should think hard about how history will judge them. Do they want to be compared to the policymakers in the aftermath of World War I, who stood by impassively as the world fragmented and monsters seized the reins of power? Or would they rather be compared to their peers after World War II, policymakers who built a much more stable and interconnected world?
  • The Western policymakers meeting this week will say they have no intention of closing down the global order. All this economic savagery is to punish Putin’s aggression precisely in order to restore the rules-based system that he is bent on destroying — and with it, the free flow of commerce and finance. In an ideal world, Putin would be toppled — the victim of his own delusions and paranoia — and the Russian people would sweep away the kleptocracy in the Kremlin. 
  • In this optimistic scenario, Putin’s humiliation would do more than bring Russia back to its senses. It would bring the West back as well. The U.S. would abandon its Trumpian isolationism while Europe would start taking its own defense seriously. The culture warriors on both sides of the Atlantic would simmer down, and the woke and unwoke alike would celebrate their collective belief in freedom and democracy.
  • There’s a chance this could happen. Putin wouldn’t be the first czar to fall because of a misjudged and mishandled war.
  • Regardless of whether China’s leader decides to ditch Putin, the invasion has surely sped up Xi’s medium-term imperative of “decoupling” — insulating his country from dependence on the West.
  • For the “wolf pack” of young Chinese nationalists around Xi, the reaction to Ukraine is another powerful argument for self-sufficiency. China’s vast holdings of dollar assets now look like a liability given America’s willingness to confiscate Russia’s assets,
  • Some Americans are equally keen on decoupling, a sentiment that bridged Republicans and Democrats before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
  • In the great intellectual battle of the 1990s between Francis Fukuyama, who wrote “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992), and his Harvard teacher Samuel Huntington, who wrote “The Clash of Civilizations” (1996), CEOs have generally sided with Fukuyama.
  • Biden needs to go further in the coming weeks. He needs to reinforce the Western alliance so that it can withstand the potential storms to come
  • Keynes, no longer a protectionist, played a leading role in designing the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the infrastructure of the postwar Western order of stable exchange rates. He helped persuade the U.S. to lead the world rather than retreating into itself. He helped create the America of the Marshall Plan. This Bretton Woods settlement created the regime that eventually won the Cold War and laid the foundations for the second age of globalization.
  • At the closing banquet on July 22, the great man was greeted with a standing ovation. Within two years he was dead — but the world that he did so much to create lived on. That world does not need to die in the streets of Kyiv. But it is on course to do so, unless the leaders meeting this week seize the moment to create something better. 
  • Javier E on 26 Mar 22
     
     
Javier E

America Fails the Civilization Test - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...673799

civilization test children life expectancy US culture policy history economics

shared by Javier E on 23 Apr 23 - No Cached
  • The true test of a civilization may be the answer to a basic question: Can it keep its children alive?
  • For most of recorded history, the answer everywhere was plainly no. Roughly half of all people—tens of billions of us—died before finishing puberty until about the 1700s, when breakthroughs in medicine and hygiene led to tremendous advances in longevity. In Central Europe, for example, the mortality rate for children fell from roughly 50 percent in 1750 to 0.3 percent in 2020. You will not find more unambiguous evidence of human progress.
  • ow’s the U.S. doing on the civilization test? When graded on a curve against its peer nations, it is failing. The U.S. mortality rate is much higher, at almost every age, than that of most of Europe, Japan, and Australia.
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  • compared with the citizens of these nations, American infants are less likely to turn 5, American teenagers are less likely to turn 30, and American 30-somethings are less likely to survive to retirement.
  • I called the U.S. the rich death trap of the modern world. The “rich” part is important to observe and hard to overstate. The typical American spends almost 50 percent more each year than the typical Brit, and a trucker in Oklahoma earns more than a doctor in Portugal.
  • A series about big problems and big solutions
  • the typical American is 100 percent more likely to die than the typical Western European at almost every age from birth until retirement.
  • magine I offered you a pill and told you that taking this mystery medication would have two effects. First, it would increase your disposable income by almost half. Second, it would double your odds of dying in the next 365 days. To be an average American is to fill a lifetime prescription of that medication and take the pill nightly.
  • A series about big problems and big solutions
  • 1.8 figure as “the U.S. death ratio”—the annual mortality rate in the U.S., as a multiple of similarly rich countries.
  • By the time an American turns 18, the U.S. death ratio surges to 2.8. By 29, the U.S. death ratio rockets to its peak of 4.22, meaning that the typical American is more than four times more likely to die than the average resident in our basket of high-income nations.
  • The average American my age, in his mid-to-late 30s, is roughly six times more likely to die in the next year than his counterpart in Switzerland.
  • The average U.S. death ratio stays higher than three for practically the entire period between ages 30 and 50, meaning that the typical middle-aged American is roughly three times more likely to die within the year than his counterpart in Western Europe or Australia.
  • One could tell a similar story about drug
  • America suffers not from a monopoly on despair and aggression, but from an oversupply of instruments of death. We have more drug-overdose deaths than any other high-income country because we have so much more fentanyl, even per capita
  • Americans drive more than other countries, leading to our higher-than-average death rate from road accidents
  • I expected that these three culprits—guns, drugs, and cars—would explain most of our death ratio
  • he argued that Americans’ health (and access to health care) seems to be the most important factor. America’s prevalence of cardiovascular and metabolic disease is so high that it accounts for more of our early mortality than guns, drugs, and cars combined.
  • Disentangling America’s health issues is complicated, but I can offer three data points
  • First, American obesity is unusually high, which likely leads to a larger number of early and middle-aged death
  • Second, Americans are unusually sedentary. We take at least 30 percent fewer steps a day than people do in Australia, Switzerland, and Japan
  • Finally, U.S. access to care is unusually unequal—and our health-care outcomes are unusually tied to income.
  • voters and politicians in the U.S. care so much about freedom in that old-fashioned ’Merica-lovin’ kind of way that we’re unwilling to promote public safety if those rules constrict individual choice. That’s how you get a country with infamously laissez-faire firearms laws, more guns than people, lax and poorly enforced driving laws, and a conservative movement that has repeatedly tried to block, overturn, or limit the expansion of universal health insurance on the grounds that it impedes consumer choice.
  • Among the rich, this hyper-individualistic mindset can manifest as a smash-and-grab attitude toward life, with surprising consequences for the less fortunate. For example, childhood obesity is on the rise at the same time that youth-sports participation is in decline among low-income kids
  • What seems to be happening at the national level is that rich families, seeking to burnish their child’s résumé for college, are pulling their kids out of local leagues so that they can participate in prestigious pay-to-play travel teams. At scale, these decisions devastate the local youth-sports leagues for the benefit of increasing by half a percentage point the odds of a wealthy kid getting into an Ivy League school.
  • The problem with the Freedom and Individualism Theory of Everything is that, in many cases, America’s problem isn’t freedom-worship, but actually something quite like its opposite: overregulation
  • In medicine, excessive regulation and risk aversion on the part of the FDA and Institutional Review Boards have very likely slowed the development and adoption of new lifesaving treatments.
  • Are Americans unusually sedentary because they love freedom so very much? It’s possible, I guess. But the more likely explanation is that restrictive housing policies have made it too hard for middle- and low-income families to live near downtown business districts, which forces many of them to drive more than they would like, thus reducing everyday walking and exercise.
  • America is caught in a lurch between oversight and overkill, sometimes promoting individual freedom, with luridly fatal consequences, and sometimes blocking policies and products, with subtly fatal consequences.
Javier E

Lina Khan Fires a Crooked CEO - BIG by Matt Stoller - 0 views

www.thebignewsletter.com/...lina-khan-fires-a-crooked-ceo

antitrust monopoly merger economics

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • More than any other possible penalty, the prospect for CEOs that they could lose their job is going to change corporate behavior.
  • again, you may not have heard of Illumina and this board room drama. But I guarantee you that every CEO thinking of taking a risky gamble on an acquisition has. So going forward, when an investment banker pitches a CEO on a potential merger, that executive may no longer see the point. After all, as Upton Sinclar once noted, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Javier E

Tesla May Have Already Won the Electric Vehicle Charging Wars - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...harging-electric-vehicles.html

tesla electric vehicle charging

shared by Javier E on 27 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • G.M., Ford and numerous charging companies and equipment suppliers have agreed to work with Tesla because they desperately need the company’s help. In addition to selling more electric cars in the United States than all other automakers put together, Tesla operates the country’s largest fast-charging network.
  • the decision to work with Tesla comes with big risks for the rest of the auto industry, which will be relying on Mr. Musk, a mercurial leader, for an essential technolog
  • Tesla’s system is known for being easy to use and reliable, while C.C.S. chargers can be finicky. Frustration with the existing charging network is clearly one reason Ford and G.M. decided to throw in their lot with Tesla.
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  • As the Tesla plug becomes dominant, people with cars designed to use the C.C.S. plug will become increasingly dependent on adapters that, for safety, are limited in how much voltage they can handle and will charge more slowly.
  • The decision by other automakers to ally with Tesla, and generate revenue for a competitor, is an acknowledgment that Mr. Musk’s company has the most experience operating a charging network.
  • Tesla’s proprietary charging system, which it recently began calling the North American Charging Standard, is not overseen by an independent organization as other technical standards are. The company has said it intends to hand off control to such a body, though some competitors are skeptical of how much control Tesla will surrender.
  • Tesla has 19,700 charging ports across the United States at about 1,800 stations, according to the Energy Department, while there are 10,500 C.C.S. ports at 5,300 stations. Only 12,000 Tesla chargers will be open to Ford, G.M. and Rivian vehicles.
  • But one reason Tesla’s system performs well is that the company designs and manufactures the whole system — the car, the software and the charging hardware. Tesla will lose absolute control once other automakers join its network.
  • it’s not clear who will ensure that the charging equipment is safe and works as well with Tesla rivals as it does with Tesla itself, and referee any disputes between the company and other automakers.
  • Competitors are betting that government regulators would step in if Tesla tried to create a charging monopoly. Some are glad that someone is taking the lead to remove a major impediment to sales of electric vehicles.
Javier E

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Polymathic Cultural Historian, Dies at 81 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...olfgang-schivelbusch-dead.html

historian Germany culture

shared by Javier E on 06 May 23 - No Cached
  • For four decades, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a polymathic cultural historian, feasted on those and other brainteasers as he explored mass transportation, spices and stimulants, commercial lighting and the legacy of defeat on society in about a dozen groundbreaking books.
  • “He was an extraordinary public intellectual, an independent largely unaffiliated wildly poly-curious and extravagantly gifted seeker after the patterns and idiosyncrasies of history,” the author Lawrence Wechsler wrote after Mr. Schivelbusch’s death
  • Die Zeit, the German national weekly, called Mr. Schivelbusch a “master of cultural-historical research.”
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  • Among his books are “The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century” (1977), “Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants” (1980), “Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century” (1983), “The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery” (2001) and “Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939” (2005).
  • Mr. Schivelbusch operated for most of his career as a private scholar, free from academic constraints but dependent on grants and book advances.
  • In Europe, beer soup (heat eggs, butter and salt, then add them to beer and pour over pieces of a roll or white bread) was the breakfast drink of choice before it was replaced by coffee in the 18th century.
  • Gas mains changed family life because they eliminated the hearth as the focus of family life by giving individuals personal light. They also helped replace private enterprise through the granting of municipal or regional gas monopolies.
Javier E

'Conflict' Review: How Wars Are Fought and Won - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...rs-are-fought-and-won-e52d7a8d

conflict war modern conventional partnership dictatorship big picture history crisis military

shared by Javier E on 17 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • “Conflict” brings together one of America’s top military thinkers and Britain’s pre-eminent military historian to examine the evolution of warfare since 1945. Retired Gen. David Petraeus, who co-authored the U.S. Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency warfare and oversaw the troop surge in Iraq in 2007, brings a professional eye to politico-military strategy. Andrew Roberts, who has been writing on military leadership since the early 1990s, offers an “arc of history” approach to the subject of mass destruction.
  • The pair’s ambitious goals: to provide some context to the tapestry of modern conflict and a glimpse of wars to come.
  • The book begins with the early struggles of the postwar era. China’s brutal civil war, the authors observe, demonstrated “that guerrilla warfare undertaken according to Maoist military principles by smaller forces could ultimately be successful against a Western-backed government.”
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  • the authors argue that the first job of a strategic leader is to get the big ideas right. Those who have succeeded include Gerald Templer, who became Britain’s high commissioner for Malaya in 1952 and whose reference to winning “the hearts and minds of the people,”
  • “remains the most succinct explanation for how to win a counter-insurgency.”
  • By contrast, the nationalist forces in China, the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam got the big ideas wrong and paid a steep price.
  • On the 2021 collapse of Afghanistan’s government troops, who had been so expensively trained and equipped under Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden, Mr. Petraeus remarks that “the troops were brave enough—the 66,000 dead Afghan soldiers killed during the war attest to that. But they fought for an often corrupt and incompetent government that never gained the trust and confidence of local communities, which had historically determined the balance of power within Afghanistan.”
  • Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 serves as the book’s case study on how badly Goliath can stumble against David
  • Elon Musk’s control of the Starlink satellite internet system, they note, gave him a unique veto power over Ukrainian operations in Crimea. “With individual tycoons such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos wielding such extraordinary power,” the authors tell us, “wars of the future will have to take their influence into account.”
  • The final chapter teases out the contours of future conflicts. Artificial intelligence, strategic mineral monopolies and “hybrid wars”—where weapons include deepfake disinformation, political manipulation, proxy forces and cyberattacks—cap an incisive look at the next phase of warfare. “Hybrid warfare particularly appeals to China and Russia, since they are much more able to control the information their populaces receive than are their Western adversaries,”
  • . And with the line between limited and total wars growing fuzzier every year, the combatant of the next war might be a woman sitting at a drone desk, a computer geek hacking into a power grid or a robotics designer refining directed-energy weapons systems.
  • “Conflict” is, in some ways, an extension of Mr. Roberts’s thesis in “The Storm of War” (2009)—that dictatorships tend to crack under the stress of a sustained war against popular democracies. While autocracies enjoy some advantages at war’s outset—they are nimble and can achieve true strategic surprise, for instance—if the sucker punch doesn’t end the fight quickly, democracies, shocked into action, may bring to bear more motivated, more efficient and often larger forces to turn the tide.
  • Both men see modern military history as a succession of partnerships created to counter violent challenges from nationalists, terrorists and dictators.
Javier E

Opinion | Biden Trade Policy Breaks With Tech Giants - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...google-facebook-ai-trade.html

biden trade policy tech oligopoly

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • One reason that the idea of free trade has fallen out of fashion in recent years is the perception that trade agreements reflect the wishes of big American corporations, at everybody else’s expense.
  • U.S. officials fought for trade agreements that protect intellectual property — and drug companies got the chance to extend the life of patents, raising the price of medicine around the world. U.S. officials fought for investor protections — and mining companies got the right to sue for billions in “lost profit” if a country moved to protect its drinking water or the Amazon ecosystem. And for years, U.S. officials have fought for digital trade rules that allow data to move freely across national borders — prompting fears that the world’s most powerful tech companies would use those rules to stay ahead of competitors and shield themselves from regulations aimed at protecting consumers and privacy.
  • That’s why the Biden administration, which came into office promising to fight for trade agreements that better reflect the interests of ordinary people, has dropped its advocacy for tech-friendly digital trade rules that American officials have championed for more than a decade.
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  • Last month, President Biden’s trade representative, Katherine Tai, notified the World Trade Organization that the American government no longer supported a proposal it once spearheaded that would have exported the American laissez-faire approach to tech. Had that proposal been adopted, it would have spared tech companies the headache of having to deal with many different domestic laws about how data must be handled, including rules mandating that it be stored or analyzed locally. It also would have largely shielded tech companies from regulations aimed at protecting citizens’ privacy and curbing monopolistic behavior.
  • The move to drop support for that digital trade agenda has been pilloried as disaster for American companies and a boon to China, which has a host of complicated restrictions on transferring data outside of China. “We have warned for years that either the United States would write the rules for digital trade or China would,” Senator Mike Crapo, a Republican from Idaho, lamented in a press statement. “Now, the Biden administration has decided to give China the pen.”
  • While some of this agenda is reasonable and good for the world — too much regulation stifles innovation — adopting this agenda wholesale would risk cementing the advantages that big American tech companies already enjoy and permanently distorting the market in their favor.
  • who used to answer the phone and interact with lobbyists at the U.S. trade representative’s office. The paper includes redacted emails between Trump-era trade negotiators and lobbyists for Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, exchanging suggestions for the proposed text for the policy on digital trade in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. “While they were previously ‘allergic to Washington,’ as one trade negotiator described, over the course of a decade, technology companies hired lobbyists and joined trade associations with the goal of proactively influencing international trade policy,” Ms. Li wrote in the Socio-Economic Review.
  • That paper explains how U.S. trade officials came to champion a digital trade policy agenda that was nearly identical to what Google, Apple and Meta wanted: No restrictions on the flow of data across borders. No forced disclosure of source codes or algorithms in the normal course of business. No laws that would curb monopolies or encourage more competition — a position that is often cloaked in clauses prohibiting discrimination against American companies. (Since so many of the monopolistic big tech players are American, rules targeting such behavior disproportionately fall on American companies, and can be portrayed as unfair barriers to trade.)
  • This approach essentially takes the power to regulate data out of the hands of governments and gives it to technology companies, according to research by Henry Gao, a Singapore-based expert on international trade.
  • The truth is that Ms. Tai is taking the pen away from Meta, Google and Amazon, which helped shape the previous policy, according to a research paper published this year by Wendy Li,
  • Many smaller tech companies complain that big players engage in monopolistic behavior that should be regulated. For instance, Google has been accused of privileging its own products in search results, while Apple has been accused of charging some developers exorbitant fees to be listed in its App Store. A group of smaller tech companies called the Coalition for App Fairness thanked Ms. Tai for dropping support for the so-called tech-friendly agenda at the World Trade Organization.
  • Still, Ms. Tai’s reversal stunned American allies and foreign business leaders and upended negotiations over digital trade rules in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, one of Mr. Biden’s signature initiatives in Asia.
  • The about-face was certainly abrupt: Japan, Singapore and Australia — which supported the previous U.S. position — were left on their own. It’s unfortunate that U.S. allies and even some American officials were taken by surprise. But changing stances was the right call.
  • The previous American position at the World Trade Organization was a minority position. Only 34 percent of countries in the world have open data transfer policies like the United States, according to a 2021 World Bank working paper, while 57 percent have adopted policies like the European Union’s, which allow data to flow freely but leave room for laws that protect privacy and personal data.
  • Nine percent of countries have restrictive data transfer policies, including Russia and China.
  • The United States now has an opportunity to hammer out a sensible global consensus that gives tech companies what they need — clarity, more universal rules, and relative freedom to move data across borders — without shielding them from the kinds of regulations that might be required to protect society and competition in the future.
  • If the Biden administration can shepherd a digital agreement that strikes the right balance, there’s a chance that it will also restore faith in free trade by showing that trade agreements don’t have to be written by the powerful at the expense of the weak.
Javier E

Chartbook-Unhedged Exchange: China under pressure, a debate - 0 views

adamtooze.substack.com/...rtbook-unhedged-exchange-china

china crisis policy politics economics history analysis options strategy

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • China’s investment-driven, debt-heavy development model needs replacement. Its geopolitical and economic position will become more precarious if the globe’s authoritarian and liberal democratic blocs decouple, a threat made vivid by the war in Ukraine. Its demographics will be a drag on growth
  • Adam sees reasons for hope:
  • Similarly, the Chinese state’s recent intervention in the tech sector, while it has led to market volatility, is aimed at doing exactly what western regulators want to do, but can’t seem to do: stop huge companies from extracting monopoly rents from the economy. 
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  • China’s technocrats have, to date, demonstrated competence in managing the economy’s imbalances.
  • Mainland China has delivered significant extra returns -- 87 basis points a year more than the mighty S&P -- for anyone willing to hack the wild volatility
  • “On balance,” Adam sums up, “If you want to be part of history-making economic transformation, China is still the place to be.”
  • The third point is where we disagree. We just don’t see China as having any good options for maintaining strong growth. 
  • we think China’s underlying growth story is coming to an end as the country’s economic imbalances become unsustainable and global decoupling picks up steam. The volatility and low valuations, on the other hand, are likely here to stay. 
  • Replace bad investment with domestic consumption. 
  • What imbalances are we talking about? In crude summary, China’s growth has been driven by debt-funded investment, especially in property and infrastructure. The problem is that the returns on these investments are in fast decline, even as debt continues to build up.
  • This can’t go on forever. Eventually, you have all the bridges, trains, airports and apartment blocks you need, and the return on new ones falls below zero (How do you know that you have arrived at that point? When you have a financial crisis).
  • The problem is that without a healthy consumer, China’s only real options to create growth are investment and exports -- and at the same time as return on internal investments are declining, the rest of the world, led by the US, are increasingly wary of dependence on Chinese exports. 
  • What are China’s policy options? Broadly, there are five, as Micheal Pettis explained to us:
  • Stay with the current model.
  • Replace bad investment in things like infrastructure and real estate with good investment in things like tech and healthcare.
  • Beijing has policy options.
  • Replace bad investment with (even) move exports and a wider current account surplus.
  • Just quit it with the bad investment. 
  • we think that options 1 and 5 are not really options at all. The current model will lead to a financial crisis as return on investment falls further and further behind the costs of debt. Simply ceasing to overinvest in infrastructure and real estate, without changing anything else, will simply kill growth. 
  • Option 2 might be summed up -- as Jason Hsu of Ralient Global Advisors summed it up to us -- as China becoming more like Germany.
  • The idea is that China would steer more and more money away from real estate and towards high value-add sectors from biotech to chip manufacturing. 
  • The problem with option 2 is that investment is such a huge part of the Chinese economy that it is difficult to see how that the capital could be efficiently allocated to the country's tech-heavy, high value-add sectors, which are comparatively small
  • The most promising Chinese firms are swimming in capital as it is. And developing productive capacity isn't just about capital. It takes things the state can't rapidly deploy, like knowhow and intellectual property.
  • Option 3 is more promising. China could start, as Adam suggests, by building up a proper welfare safety net. But it is reasonable to expect pretty serious social and institutional resistance to this sort of mass redistribution.
  • why hasn’t China increased its welfare state until now? Longtime China watcher and friend of Unhedged George Magnus suggests it is because of a deep bias in the Chinese policy establishment. “It’s how Leninist systems operate: they think production and supply are everything … if you see a demand problem as a supply problem, you get the wrong answers.”
  • Option 4, increasing exports’ share of China’s economy even further, may be in the abstract the most appealing. But it runs directly into the fact that both China and the US and its allies have reasons to reduce mutual dependence on their economies.
  • The emergence of geopolitical divisions between the west, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other, will put globalisation at risk. The autocracies will try to reduce their dependence on western currencies and financial markets. Both they and the west will try to reduce their reliance on trade with adversaries. Supply chains will shorten and regionalise… 
  • Russia must remain a pariah so long as this vile regime survives. But we will also have to devise a new relationship with China. We must still co-operate. Yet we can no longer rely upon this rising giant for essential goods. We are in a new world. Economic decoupling will now surely become deep and irreversible.
  • In all, the most likely scenario is that China’s growth just keeps slowing. That does not mean that investors in China will necessarily lose money. But it does suggest that generic China exposure -- simply owning Chinese equity or credit indices -- is going to be a losing proposition in the long-term
Javier E

Europe's Energy Risks Go Beyond Natural Gas - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eu-energy-crisis-gas.html

shared by Javier E on 17 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • To fill the gap, Europe had to go searching for new sources and found it primarily in liquefied natural gas from the United States, where production is expected to hit a record high this year. LNG is about 600 times more compact than its gaseous form and can be moved anywhere in the world through specialized ships and ports.
  • In 2017, wind surpassed hydroelectricity as the largest renewable source of power for the European Union.
  • A record year for solar and wind power saved the European Union €11 billion in gas costs this year, generating around a quarter of total electricity since the war began
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  • In May, the European Commission put out a plan for achieving energy independence from Russia that leaned further into the renewable energy transition. Known as REPowerEU, it encourages diversifying fossil fuel sources and accelerating the adoption of renewable energy sources like wind and solar, and also pushes for greater energy savings.
  • major challenges remain. Solar power, in particular, has supply chain risks of its own. China has a near-monopoly on the raw materials and technical expertise to produce photovoltaic cells for solar panels. An analysis from Bloomberg BNEF found it would take nearly $150 billion for Europe to build the plants to manufacture enough solar capacity and storage to meet demand by 2030.
  • Achieving energy security and meeting climate goals will take far greater investment and cooperation between European countries than ever before, according to energy experts.
  • “One of Europe’s founding fathers — Jean Monnet — used to say that Europe would be made out of crisis,” said Simone Tagliapietra, a senior fellow at Bruegel, an energy think tank. “Europe will come out of this energy crisis more united when it comes to energy and climate policy.”
Javier E

Sixty years on from the Cuban missile crisis, the US has learned its lessons - but Puti... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...issile-crisis-us-putin-ukraine

missile cuba lessons putin ukraine war history crisis

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • They itched to rectify a military balance that was tipped in favour of the US. The Cuban revolutionaries also approved. Nobody, however, asked Khrushchev what would happen if the Americans discovered the missiles en route to Cuba, before they were ready, or if they reacted violently to them once they were installed. There was no “plan B”.
  • This failure was compounded by sloppy Soviet planning. The head of the Strategic Missile Force, Marshal Sergei Biryuzov, promised Khrushchev that Americans would not discover Soviet missiles because palm trees would cover them. One expert, who knew Cuba’s vegetation better, wanted to object, only to have his superior press on his foot under the table, to make him shut up. The tradition of telling bosses what they wanted to hear while sweeping awkward realities under the rug is not Soviet-Russian monopoly. Yet tradition truly flourished under the Soviets, and warped their decision-making, even in life-and-death situations.
  • There is a whole library of excellent books by US historians on the Cuban missile crisis. Innumerable conferences, seminars and “games” have taken place in an attempt to learn the lessons. No wonder that Biden, his people and the US military no longer share the Kennedy-era “gung-ho” approach to nuclear war. On the contrary, they are extremely careful and attentive to the slightest dangers of escalation in Ukraine. And they are determined that a taboo on the use of nuclear weapons should be maintained.
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  • Ukrainians are aware of their new superiority in conventional arms and want to press their advantage to the maximum.
  • Nuclear escalation seems to be a joker that Putin wants to keep in play. What will he do if more retreat and humiliation come his way? The discussion tends to go in circles, focusing on Putin’s megalomania and his habit of surprising people. All of which leaves a room for a disconcerting level of uncertainty. Clearly, Putin intends to keep it that way. So far, the Russian ruler links the preservation of Russia’s “sovereignty” not to successful diplomacy but to nuclear deterrence and, if need be, brinkmanship.
  • In Moscow, the environment is quite the opposite. Putin, his propagandists and top military no longer say “nuclear war must not be waged”. Instead, they seem to be stoking fears of nuclear conflict. The story of Khrushchev’s gamble and retreat is rarely discussed, and its details have not been digested by the current cohort of decision-makers. Many crucial files still remain secret and forgotten, gathering dust in archives
  • The Ukrainian offensive, backed by US weapons and intelligence, has become part of a precarious web of international security. Will the Ukrainians push to regain all their lost territory or stop at the border of Crimea? Will they start shelling Sevastopol with US-provided missile launchers? If they do, the pressure on Putin to escalate would increase enormously
  • Imagine what Kennedy would have done in October 1962 had the Cubans been given the opportunity to shell cities in Florida. If the Kremlin has no more conventional ways to escalate, the temptation to use a tactical nuclear device will grow.
  • As his delusional gamble in Ukraine produces one military retreat after another, Putin has to find an exit. We simply have no means of knowing what kind of an exit he will choose, and whether it will come with a bang.
Javier E

Elon Musk's Text Messages Explain Everything - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672595

billionaire silicon valley groupthink sycophant twitter musk

shared by Javier E on 29 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • I’ve begun to think of Exhibit H as a skeleton key for the final, halcyon days of the tech boom—unlocking an understanding of the cultural brain worms and low-interest-rate hubris that defined the industry in 2022. What we see in Exhibit H is only a tiny snapshot of a very important inbox, but it’s enough to make this one of the most revealing documents in a year that’s been absolutely overflowing with tech disclosures
  • the Musk texts demonstrate a decadence, an unearned confidence, and a boy’s-club mentality that coincide with the cultural disillusionment regarding the genius-innovator narrative.
  • I snarkily coined the Elon Musk School of Management to describe the petulant way that some tech founders, such as Musk and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, seemed to use confrontational, culture-warring, Twitter-addled thought leadership as a business tactic. The Musk School revolves around two principles: running a company in an authoritarian manner, and ensuring that every management decision is optimized to make news and hijack the attention of those following along on social media
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  • The Musk messages also reveal how some of the richest and most powerful men in the world treat actual billions of dollars with a level of care more appropriate for a 3-year-old tossing around Monopoly cash.
  • Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison, essentially writes Musk a blank check over text, pledging, “A billion … or whatever you recommend.” The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen unsolicitedly offers Musk “$250M with no additional work required.” And Michael Grimes, a top investment banker at Morgan Stanley, proposes a meeting with Bankman-Fried as a way to “get us $5bn equity in an hour.”
  • The blitheness is the point. It is a total power move to talk about getting “$5bn in equity in an hour” the same way we mere mortals talk about Venmo-ing a friend $15 for lunch. The texts make it clear that these men are fundamentally alienated from the rest of the world by their wealth.
  • “These are absolutely not normal people with a normal understanding of the world.”
  • The men in Musk’s phone also appear wildly confident in their own abilities and those of their peers. Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of the media conglomerate Axel Springer, infamously texted Musk his bullet-pointed plan for Twitter, which began with the line item “1.),, Solve Free Speech.”
  • They teach us what happens when a small group of people with too much money come to view that money not just as a reward for success, but as its own form of merit—a specious achievement that totally alienates them from reality.
  • Ultimately, Exhibit H documents the loneliness and isolation of being the world’s richest man. As told via the texts, the seed of Musk’s Twitter purchase was planted by sycophants deferential to the billionaire who will never give him hard, truthful advice, because they wish to stay close to him.
  • the one time he receives actual, honest feedback from Agrawal, Musk behaves aggressively and impulsively, sealing his fate.
Javier E

In defense of science fiction - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion - 0 views

www.noahpinion.blog/...in-defense-of-science-fiction

science fiction dystopia effects billionaire

shared by Javier E on 31 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • I’m a big fan of science fiction (see my list of favorites from last week)! So when people start bashing the genre, I tend to leap to its defense
  • this time, the people doing the bashing are some serious heavyweights themselves — Charles Stross, the celebrated award-winning sci-fi author, and Tyler Austin Harper, a professor who studies science fiction for a living
  • The two critiques center around the same idea — that rich people have misused sci-fi, taking inspiration from dystopian stories and working to make those dystopias a reality.
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  • [Science fiction’s influence]…leaves us facing a future we were all warned about, courtesy of dystopian novels mistaken for instruction manuals…[T]he billionaires behind the steering wheel have mistaken cautionary tales and entertainments for a road map, and we’re trapped in the passenger seat.
  • t even then it would be hard to argue exogeneity, since censorship is a response to society’s values as well as a potential cause of them.
  • Stross is alleging that the billionaires are getting Gernsback and Campbell’s intentions exactly right. His problem is simply that Gernsback and Campbell were kind of right-wing, at least by modern standards, and he’s worried that their sci-fi acted as propaganda for right-wing ideas.
  • The question of whether literature has a political effect is an empirical one — and it’s a very difficult empirical one. It’s extremely hard to test the hypothesis that literature exerts a diffuse influence on the values and preconceptions of the citizenry
  • I think Stross really doesn’t come up with any credible examples of billionaires mistaking cautionary tales for road maps. Instead, most of his article focuses on a very different critique — the idea that sci-fi authors inculcate rich technologists with bad values and bad visions of what the future ought to look like:
  • I agree that the internet and cell phones have had an ambiguous overall impact on human welfare. If modern technology does have a Torment Nexus, it’s the mobile-social nexus that keeps us riveted to highly artificial, attenuated parasocial interactions for every waking hour of our day. But these technologies are still very young, and it remains to be seen whether the ways in which we use them will get better or worse over time.
  • There are very few technologies — if any — whose impact we can project into the far future at the moment of their inception. So unless you think our species should just refuse to create any new technology at all, you have to accept that each one is going to be a bit of a gamble.
  • As for weapons of war, those are clearly bad in terms of their direct effects on the people on the receiving end. But it’s possible that more powerful weapons — such as the atomic bomb — serve to deter more deaths than they cause
  • yes, AI is risky, but the need to manage and limit risk is a far cry from the litany of negative assumptions and extrapolations that often gets flung in the technology’s directio
  • I think the main problem with Harper’s argument is simply techno-pessimism. So far, technology’s effects on humanity have been mostly good, lifting us up from the muck of desperate poverty and enabling the creation of a healthier, more peaceful, more humane world. Any serious discussion of the effects of innovation on society must acknowledge that. We might have hit an inflection point where it all goes downhill from here, and future technologies become the Torment Nexuses that we’ve successfully avoided in the past. But it’s very premature to assume we’ve hit that point.
  • I understand that the 2020s are an exhausted age, in which we’re still reeling from the social ructions of the 2010s. I understand that in such a weary and fearful condition, it’s natural to want to slow the march of technological progress as a proxy for slowing the headlong rush of social progress
  • And I also understand how easy it is to get negatively polarized against billionaires, and any technologies that billionaires invent, and any literature that billionaires like to read.
  • But at a time when we’re creating vaccines against cancer and abundant clean energy and any number of other life-improving and productivity-boosting marvels, it’s a little strange to think that technology is ruining the world
  • The dystopian elements of modern life are mostly just prosaic, old things — political demagogues, sclerotic industries, social divisions, monopoly power, environmental damage, school bullies, crime, opiates, and so on
Javier E

'Social Order Could Collapse' in AI Era, Two Top Japan Companies Say - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...p-japan-companies-say-1a71cc1d

AI Japan risks caution

shared by Javier E on 09 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Japan’s largest telecommunications company and the country’s biggest newspaper called for speedy legislation to restrain generative artificial intelligence, saying democracy and social order could collapse if AI is left unchecked.
  • the manifesto points to rising concern among American allies about the AI programs U.S.-based companies have been at the forefront of developing.
  • The Japanese companies’ manifesto, while pointing to the potential benefits of generative AI in improving productivity, took a generally skeptical view of the technology
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  • Without giving specifics, it said AI tools have already begun to damage human dignity because the tools are sometimes designed to seize users’ attention without regard to morals or accuracy.
  • Unless AI is restrained, “in the worst-case scenario, democracy and social order could collapse, resulting in wars,” the manifesto said.
  • It said Japan should take measures immediately in response, including laws to protect elections and national security from abuse of generative AI.
  • The Biden administration is also stepping up oversight, invoking emergency federal powers last October to compel major AI companies to notify the government when developing systems that pose a serious risk to national security. The U.S., U.K. and Japan have each set up government-led AI safety institutes to help develop AI guidelines.
  • NTT and Yomiuri said their manifesto was motivated by concern over public discourse. The two companies are among Japan’s most influential in policy. The government still owns about one-third of NTT, formerly the state-controlled phone monopoly.
  • Yomiuri Shimbun, which has a morning circulation of about six million copies according to industry figures, is Japan’s most widely-read newspaper. Under the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his successors, the newspaper’s conservative editorial line has been influential in pushing the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to expand military spending and deepen the nation’s alliance with the U.S.
  • The Yomiuri’s news pages and editorials frequently highlight concerns about artificial intelligence. An editorial in December, noting the rush of new AI products coming from U.S. tech companies, said “AI models could teach people how to make weapons or spread discriminatory ideas.” It cited risks from sophisticated fake videos purporting to show politicians speaking.
  • NTT is active in AI research, and its units offer generative AI products to business customers. In March, it started offering these customers a large-language model it calls “tsuzumi” which is akin to OpenAI’s ChatGPT but is designed to use less computing power and work better in Japanese-language contexts.
Javier E

Opinion | Bidenomics: The Queen Bee Is Jennifer Harris - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ennifer-harris-bidenomics.html

history US economics policy economic free trade neoliberalism biden

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • I was thrilled when the Biden administration came in with a plan for big federal investments in the American industrial base, tariffs, support for labor unions and actions against monopolies. No one knew what to call it — Post-neoliberalism? Democratic capitalism? Neopopulism? — but for the first time in generations a U.S. administration was saying that people should control the market, not the other way around.
  • But if it was the right path, why didn’t more voters trust President Biden on the economy?
  • To understand who Ms. Harris is, you have to know who she used to be.
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  • As a young State Department policy planner in the 2000s, she was a lonely voice in Washington raising the alarm about the rise of China. She pushed for tariffs and against trade agreements before it was cool, and was an author of a book called “War by Other Means” about how blind faith in free markets put the United States at a geopolitical disadvantage. For years, she felt like an oddball in Washington, where both parties were still in thrall to neoliberalism.
  • The Hewlett Foundation hired her as the head of an initiative that has given away $140 million so far to people who are devising a new economic philosophy. Then she served a stint in the White House. Today, she’s an intellectual leader of a growing, bipartisan consensus
  • She fell in love with economics and studied it at Wake Forest. After she joined a student delegation to a NATO summit in Prague in 2002, a faculty adviser on that trip offered her a job in Washington working at the National Intelligence Council. In those early years, she believed what everyone else in Washington believed about the economy — that governments ought not meddle with it.
  • if Mr. Trump correctly identified a problem — “China is eating our lunch” — he did not solve it, beyond putting tariffs on Chinese products. His tax cut for the rich hurt rather than helped matters.
  • It’s the Biden administration that came in with a plan to build an economy that was good for workers, not just shareholders, using some strategies Ms. Harris had been talking about for years.
  • The thinking behind it goes like this: Unquestioning belief in the free market created a globalism that funneled money to the 1 percent, which has used its wealth to amass political power at the expense of everyone else. It produced free trade agreements that sent too many U.S. factories to China and rescue plans after the 2008 financial crisis that bailed out Wall Street instead of Main Street.
  • It was her job to track China’s use of subsidies, industrial espionage and currency manipulation to fuel its rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. Ms. Harris argued that tariffs on China were a necessary defense. Nobody agreed. “I was kind of just banging my head against this wall,” she told me. “The wall was a foreign policy establishment that saw markets as sacrosanct.”
  • Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to renegotiate NAFTA, but he struck up a new trade deal instead — the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Ms. Harris argued against it. “We didn’t have the foggiest idea” of what it would do to our economy, she told me. Nobody listened.
  • it sent Democrats back to the intellectual drawing board. Larry Kramer, then the president of the Hewlett Foundation, recruited her in 2018 to promote alternatives to ideas that had guided U.S. policy for decades. He hoped she could do for free-market skepticism what Milton Friedman and his allies had done for free-market fundamentalism, which became policy under the Reagan administration and eventually was embraced by both parties as truth.
  • She has since rejoined the Hewlett Foundation, where she funds people who are proposing new solutions to economic problems. One grantee, the conservative think tank American Compass, promotes the idea of a domestic development bank to fund infrastructure — an idea with bipartisan appeal.
  • But the work that Ms. Harris and others in the Biden administration have done is unfinished, and poorly understood. The terms “Bidenomics” and “Build Back Better” don’t seem to resonate
  • Ms. Harris acknowledges that these ideas haven’t yet taken hold in the broader electorate, and that high interest rates overshadow the progress that’s been made. It’s too early for voters to feel it, she told me: “The investments Biden has pushed through aren’t going to be felt in a month, a year, two years.”
  • she celebrates the fact that leaders across the political spectrum are embracing the idea that Americans need to “get back to building things in this country.” This election has no candidates blindly promoting the free market. The last one didn’t either. In the battle of ideas, she has already won.
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