Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged plague

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
lilyrashkind

How The Pyramids Were Built: An Ancient Puzzle Close To Completion - 0 views

allthatsinteresting.com/how-the-pyramids-were-built

pyramids ancient

shared by lilyrashkind on 25 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • uilt 4,500 years ago during Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the pyramids of Giza are more than elaborate tombs — they’re also one of historians’ best sources of insight into how the ancient Egyptians lived, since their walls are covered with illustrations of agricultural practices, city life, and religious ceremonies. But on one subject, they remain curiously silent. They offer no insight into how the pyramids were built.
  • It’s a mystery that has plagued historians for thousands of years, leading the wildest speculators into the murky territory of alien intervention and perplexing the rest. But the work of several archaeologists in the last few years has dramatically changed the landscape of Egyptian studies. After millennia of debate, the mystery might finally be over.
  • For example, the Egyptians hadn’t yet discovered the wheel, so it would have been difficult to transport massive stones — some weighing as much as 90 tons — from place to place. They hadn’t invented the pulley, a device that would have made it much easier to lift large stones into place. They didn’t have iron tools to chisel and shape their stonework.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The Heated Debate Over How The Pyramids Were Built
  • Though they didn’t have the wheel as we think of it today, they might have made use of cylindrical tree trunks laid side to side along the ground. If they lifted their blocks onto those tree trunks, they could effectively roll them across the desert. This theory goes a long way toward explaining how the pyramids’ smaller limestone blocks might have made their way to Giza — but it’s hard to believe it would work for some of the truly massive stones featured in the tombs
  • Proponents of this theory also have to contend with the fact that there isn’t any evidence that the Egyptians actually did this, clever though it would have been: there are no depictions of stones — or anything else — being rolled this way in Egyptian art or writings. Then there’s the challenge of how to lift the stones into position on an increasingly tall pyramid.
  • No conclusive evidence has been found in favor of either of these ideas, but both remain intriguing possibilities.
  • Amid such mystery, two startling new revelations about how the pyramids were built have recently come to light. The first was the work of a Dutch team who took a second look at Egyptian art depicting laborers hauling massive stones on sledges through the desert.
  • Though today the pyramids sit in the middle of miles of dusty desert, they were once surrounded by the floodplains of the Nile River. Lehner hypothesizes that if you could look far beneath the city of Cairo, you would find ancient Egyptian waterways that channeled the Nile’s water to the site of the pyramids’ construction.
  • The icing on the cake is the work of Pierre Tallet, an archaeologist who in 2013 unearthed the papyrus journal of a man named Merer who appears to have been a low-level bureaucrat charged with transporting some of the materials to Giza.
  • He recorded his journey with several gigantic limestone blocks from Tura to Giza — and with his writings offered the most direct insight there’s ever been into how the pyramids were built, putting a piece of one of the world’s oldest puzzles into place.
  • Though the work was dangerous, it’s now thought that the men who built the tombs were most likely skilled laborers who volunteered their time in exchange for excellent rations. The 1999 excavation of what researchers sometimes call the “pyramid city” shed light on the lives of the builders who made their homes in nearby compounds.
criscimagnael

Methane Leaks Plague New Mexico Oil and Gas Wells - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...methane-leaks-new-mexico.html

shared by criscimagnael on 25 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Startlingly large amounts of methane are leaking from wells and pipelines in New Mexico, according to a new analysis of aerial data, suggesting that the oil and gas industry may be contributing more to climate change than was previously known.
  • The study, by researchers at Stanford University, estimates that oil and gas operations in New Mexico’s Permian Basin are releasing 194 metric tons per hour of methane, a planet-warming gas many times more potent than carbon dioxide. That is more than six times as much as the latest estimate from the Environmental Protection Agency.
  • He and Ms. Chen, a Ph.D. student in energy resources engineering, said they believed their results showed the necessity of surveying a large number of sites in order to accurately measure the environmental impact of oil and gas production.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The largest previous assessment of methane emissions from oil and gas in the United States, published in 2018, reviewed studies covering about 1,000 well sites, a tiny fraction of the more than one million active wells in the country. The new study, by contrast, used aerial data to examine nearly 27,000 sites from above: more than 90 percent of all wells in the New Mexico portion of the Permian Basin, which also extends into Texas.
  • estimated about a decade ago that the break-even point — the point above which natural gas would actually hurt the climate more than coal — was a 3.1 percent methane leakage rate. Based on more recent data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Howarth estimates that the threshold is closer to 2.8 or 2.9 percent.That makes the 9.4 percent leakage rate in the new study highly alarming,
  • Methane can be released by wells both on purpose, in a process known as venting, and through unintentional leaks from aging or faulty equipment.
  • Natural gas accounts for about a third of American energy consumption, and because it is less costly than coal in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, many policymakers have promoted it as a “bridge” that could do less damage to the climate while society works on a longer-term transition to renewable energy. But compared to coal, natural gas results in much higher emissions of methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere.
  • They found that a small number of wells and pipelines accounted for “the vast majority” of methane leaks, Ms. Chen said, adding, “Comprehensive point source surveys find more high-consequence emission events, which drive total emissions.”
  • If there was good news in the study, it was that a small number of oil and gas sites contributed disproportionately to emissions — suggesting that, if the worst offenders change their practices, it is possible for the industry to operate more cleanly.
  • The Stanford researchers emphasized that the same methodology they used to quantify methane emissions could be used to identify problem sites and target regulations accordingly.“Aerial technology found high methane emissions,” Ms. Chen said, “but can also help fix them cost effectively.”
Javier E

Opinion | There's a Reason There Aren't Enough Teachers in America. Many Reasons, Actua... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eacher-shortage-education.html

teaching teachers trends history school analysis shortage

shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Here are just a few of the longstanding problems plaguing American education: a generalized decline in literacy; the faltering international performance of American students; an inability to recruit enough qualified college graduates into the teaching profession; a lack of trained and able substitutes to fill teacher shortages; unequal access to educational resources; inadequate funding for schools; stagnant compensation for teachers; heavier workloads; declining prestige; and deteriorating faculty morale.
  • Nine-year-old students earlier this year revealed “the largest average score decline in reading since 1990, and the first ever score decline in mathematics,”
  • In the latest comparison of fourth grade reading ability, the United States ranked below 15 countries, including Russia, Ireland, Poland and Bulgaria.
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession. What made this work good for them is no longer accessible. That is why we are hearing so many refrains of “I’m not leaving the profession, my profession left me.”
  • We find there are at least 36,000 vacant positions along with at least 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.
  • “The current problem of teacher shortages (I would further break this down into vacancy and under-qualification) is higher than normal.” The data, Nguyen continued, “indicate that shortages are worsening over time, particularly over the last few years
  • a growing gap between the pay of all college graduates and teacher salaries from 1979 to 2021, with a sharp increase in the differential since 2010
  • The number of qualified teachers is declining for the whole country and the vast majority of states.
  • Wages are essentially unchanged from 2000 to 2020 after adjusting for inflation. Teachers have about the same number of students. But, teacher accountability reforms have increased the demands on their positions.
  • The pandemic was very difficult for teachers. Their self-reported level of stress was about as twice as high during the pandemic compared to other working adults. Teachers had to worry both about their personal safety and deal with teaching/caring for students who are grieving lost family members.
  • the number of students graduating from college with bachelor’s degrees in education fell from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11 to 85,058 in 2019-20.
  • We do see that southern states (e.g., Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida) have very high vacancies and high vacancy rates.”
  • By 2021, teachers made $1,348, 32.9 percent less than what other graduates made, at $2,009.
  • These gaps play a significant role in determining the quality of teachers,
  • Sixty percent of teachers and 65 percent of principals reported believing that systemic racism exists. Only about 20 percent of teachers and principals reported that they believe systemic racism does not exist, and the remainder were not sure
  • “We find,” they write, “that teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely among nations — and that these differences matter greatly for students’ success in school. An increase of one standard deviation in teacher cognitive skills is associated with an increase of 10 to 15 percent of a standard deviation in student performance.”
  • teachers have lower cognitive skills, on average, in countries with greater nonteaching job opportunities for women in high-skill occupations and where teaching pays relatively less than other professions.
  • the scholars found that the cognitive skills of teachers in the United States fell in the middle ranks:Teachers in the United States perform worse than the average teacher sample-wide in numeracy, with a median score of 284 points out of a possible 500, compared to the sample-wide average of 292 points. In literacy, they perform slightly better than average, with a median score of 301 points compared to the sample-wide average of 295 points.
  • Increasing teacher numeracy skills by one standard deviation increases student performance by nearly 15 percent of a standard deviation on the PISA math test. Our estimate of the effect of increasing teacher literacy skills on students’ reading performance is slightly smaller, at 10 percent of a standard deviation.
  • How, then, to raise teacher skill level in the United States? Hanushek and his two colleagues have a simple answer: raise teacher pay to make it as attractive to college graduates as high-skill jobs in other fields.
  • policymakers will need to do more than raise teacher pay across the board to ensure positive results. They must ensure that higher salaries go to more effective teachers.
  • The teaching of disputed subjects in schools has compounded many of the difficulties in American education.
  • The researchers found that controversies over critical race theory, sex education and transgender issues — aggravated by divisive debates over responses to Covid and its aftermath — are inflicting a heavy toll on teachers and principals.
  • “On top of the herculean task of carrying out the essential functions of their jobs,” they write, “educators increasingly find themselves in the position of addressing contentious, politicized issues in their schools as the United States has experienced increasing political polarization.”
  • Teachers and principals, they add, “have been pulled in multiple directions as they try to balance and reconcile not only their own beliefs on such matters but also the beliefs of others around them, including their leaders, fellow staff, students, and students’ family members.”
  • These conflicting pressures take place in a climate where “emotions in response to these issues have run high within communities, resulting in the harassment of educators, bans against literature depicting diverse characters, and calls for increased parental involvement in deciding academic content.”
  • Forty-eight percent of principals and 40 percent of teachers reported that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in school leadership or teaching, respectively, was a job-related stressor. By comparison, only 16 percent of working adults indicated that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in their jobs was a source of job-related stress
  • In 1979, the average teacher weekly salary (in 2021 dollars) was $1,052, 22.9 percent less than other college graduates’, at $1,364
  • Nearly all Black or African American principals (92 percent) and teachers (87 percent) reported believing that systemic racism exists.
  • White educators working in predominantly white school systems reported substantially more pressure to deal with politically divisive issues than educators of color and those working in mostly minority schools: “Forty-one percent of white teachers and 52 percent of white teachers and principals selected the intrusion of political issues and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compared with 36 percent of teachers of color and principals of color.
  • and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compar
  • A 54 percent majority of teachers and principals said there “should not be legal limits on classroom conversations about racism, sexism, and other topics,” while 20 percent said there should be legislated constraint
  • Voters, in turn, are highly polarized on the teaching of issues impinging on race or ethnicity in public schools. The Education Next 2022 Survey asked, for example:Some people think their local public schools place too little emphasis on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. Other people think their local public schools place too much emphasis on these topics. What is your view about your local public schools?
  • Among Democrats, 55 percent said too little emphasis was placed on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people, and 8 percent said too much.
  • Among Republicans, 51 said too much and 10 percent said too little.
  • Because of the lack of reliable national data, there is widespread disagreement among scholars of education over the scope and severity of the shortage of credentialed teachers, although there is more agreement that these problems are worse in low-income, high majority-minority school systems and in STEM and special education faculties.
  • Public schools increasingly are targets of conservative political groups focusing on what they term “Critical Race Theory,” as well as issues of sexuality and gender identity. These political conflicts have created a broad chilling effect that has limited opportunities for students to practice respectful dialogue on controversial topics and made it harder to address rampant misinformation.
  • The chilling effect also has led to marked declines in general support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity.
  • These political conflicts, the authors wrote,have made the already hard work of public education more difficult, undermining school management, negatively impacting staff, and heightening student stress and anxiety. Several principals shared that they were reconsidering their own roles in public education in light of the rage at teachers and rage at administrators’ playing out in their communities.
  • State University of New York tracked trends on “four interrelated constructs: professional prestige, interest among students, preparation for entry, and job satisfaction” for 50 years, from the 1970s to the present and founda consistent and dynamic pattern across every measure: a rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift rise in the 1980s, relative stability for two decades, and a sustained drop beginning around 2010. The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.
  • Who among the next generation of college graduates will choose to teach?
  • Perceptions of teacher prestige have fallen between 20 percent and 47 percent in the last decade to be at or near the lowest levels recorded over the last half century
  • Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 50 percent since the 1990s, and 38 percent since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years
  • the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50-year low
  • Teachers’ job satisfaction is also at the lowest level in five decades, with the percent of teachers who feel the stress of their job is worth it dropping from 81 percent to 42 percent in the last 15 years
  • The combination of these factors — declining prestige, lower pay than other professions that require a college education, increased workloads, and political and ideological pressures — is creating both intended and unintended consequences for teacher accountability reforms mandating tougher licensing rules, evaluations and skill testing.
  • Education policy over the past decade has focused considerable effort on improving human capital in schools through teacher accountability. These reforms, and the research upon which they drew, were based on strong assumptions about how accountability would affect who decided to become a teacher. Counter to most assumptions, our findings document how teacher accountability reduced the supply of new teacher candidates by, in part, decreasing perceived job security, satisfaction and autonomy.
  • The reforms, Kraft and colleagues continued, increasedthe likelihood that schools could not fill vacant teaching positions. Even more concerning, effects on unfilled vacancies were concentrated in hard-to-staff schools that often serve larger populations of low-income students and students of color
  • We find that evaluation reforms increased the quality of newly hired novice teachers by reducing the number of teachers that graduated from the least selective institutions
  • We find no evidence that evaluation reforms served to attract teachers who attended the most selective undergraduate institutions.
  • In other words, the economic incentives, salary structure and work-life pressures characteristic of public education employment have created a climate in which contemporary education reforms have perverse and unintended consequences that can worsen rather than alleviate the problems facing school systems.
  • If so, to improve the overall quality of the nation’s more than three million public schoolteachers, reformers may want to give priority to paychecks, working conditions, teacher autonomy and punishing workloads before attempting to impose higher standards, tougher evaluations and less job security.
Javier E

Why the World Still Needs Immanuel Kant - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nuel-kant-300-anniversary.html

kant reason enlightenment morality justice

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • “Immanuel Kant: A European Thinker” was a good title for that conference report in 2019, when Brexit seemed to threaten the ideal of European unification Germans supported. Just a few years later, “European” has become a slur. At a time when the Enlightenment is regularly derided as a Eurocentric movement designed to support colonialism, who feels comfortable throwing a yearlong birthday party for its greatest thinker?
  • Before Kant, it’s said, philosophers were divided between Rationalists and Empiricists, who were concerned about the sources of knowledge. Does it come from our senses, or our reason? Can we ever know if anything is real? By showing that knowledge requires sensory experience as well as reason, we’re told, Kant refuted the skeptics’ worry that we never know if anything exists at all.
  • All this is true, but it hardly explains why the poet Heinrich Heine found Kant more ruthlessly revolutionary than Robespierre.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Ordinary people do not fret over the reality of tables or chairs or billiard balls. They do, however, wonder if ideas like freedom and justice are merely fantasies. Kant’s main goal was to show they are not.
  • In fact Kant was driven by a question that still plagues us: Are ideas like freedom and justice utopian daydreams, or are they more substantial? Their reality can’t be proven like that of material objects, for those ideas make entirely different claims on us — and some people are completely impervious to their claims.
  • Could philosophy show that acting morally, if not particularly common, is at least possible?
  • Kant always emphasized the limits of our knowledge, and none of us know if we would crumble when faced with death or torture. Most of us probably would. But all of us know what we should do in such a case, and we know that we could.
  • This experiment shows we are radically free. Not pleasure but justice can move human beings to deeds that overcome the deepest of animal desires, the love of life.
  • We want to determine the world, not only to be determined by it. We are born and we die as part of nature, but we feel most alive when we go beyond it: To be human is to refuse to accept the world we are given.
  • At the heart of Kant’s metaphysics stands the difference between the way the world is and the way the world ought to be.
  • But if we long, in our best moments, for the dignity of freedom and justice, Kant’s example has political consequences. It’s no surprise he thought the French Revolution confirmed our hopes for moral progress — unlike the followers of his predecessor David Hum
  • who thought it was dangerous to stray from tradition and habit.
  • This provides an answer to contemporary critics whose reading of Kant’s work focuses on the ways in which it violates our understanding of racism and sexism. Some of his remarks are undeniably offensive to 21st-century ears. But it’s fatal to forget that his work gave us the tools to fight racism and sexism, by providing the metaphysical basis of every claim to human rights.
  • Kant argued that each human being must be treated as an end and not as a means — which is why he called colonialism “evil” and congratulated the Chinese and Japanese for denying entry to European invaders. Contemporary dismissals of Enlightenment thinkers forget that those thinkers invented the concept of Eurocentrism, and urged their readers to consider the world from non-European perspectives
  • At a time when the advice to “be realistic” is best translated as the advice to decrease your expectations, Kant’s work asks deep questions about what reality is
  • He insisted that when we think morally, we should abstract from the cultural differences that divide us and recognize the potential human dignity in every human being.
  • This requires the use of our reason. Contrary to trendy views that see reason as an instrument of domination, Kant saw reason’s potential as a tool for liberation.
  • Should we discard Kant’s commitment to universalism because he did not fully realize it himself — or rather celebrate the fact that we can make moral progress, an idea which Kant would wholeheartedly applaud?
  • In Germany, it’s now common to hear that the Enlightenment was at very best ambivalent: While it may have been an age of reason, it was also an age of slavery and colonialism.
  • many contemporary intellectuals from formerly colonized countries reject those arguments. Thinkers like the Ghanaian Ato Sekyi-Otu, the Nigerian Olufemi Taiwo, the Chilean Carlos Peña, the Brazilian Francisco Bosco or the Indian Benjamin Zachariah are hardly inclined to renounce Enlightenment ideas as Eurocentric.
  • The problem with ideas like universal human rights is not that they come from Europe, but that they were not realized outside of it. Perhaps we should take a lesson from the Enlightenment and listen to non-Western standpoints?
Javier E

(2) The Problems of Plenty - by Lawrence Freedman - 0 views

samf.substack.com/...the-problems-of-plenty

plenty scarcity IR climate change history culture politics international global commons

shared by Javier E on 31 Jul 24 - No Cached
  • with all these diverse issues, whether it's International monetary relations, alliance relations, concerns about the German question, nuclear strategy, and troop withdrawals, you'll have an expert in charge of each. But it's only at the top that these issues are all tied together.
  • President Kennedy, day after day after day, in 61 and 62 through 63, might have eight meetings. One might involve tax cuts, another the crisis with US steel, and the Test Ban Treaty, Berlin, and the balance of payments. Then different people would be in different meetings. So Carl Kaysen would deal with his portfolio and he would come in for one or maybe two of those meetings. Only at the top was some consideration given to all these issues. So in a president or prime minister's mind, the German question would be related to the balance of payments, which would be related to tax cuts, which would be related to Berlin, in a way that a mid-level person might not see.
  • It's sort of the reverse of the bureaucratic politics model. I started seeing that these issues got tied together in a way that many mid-level people would not see, but was understood at the top where grand strategy was made.  
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • LF: You made an interesting point about political scientists. They do have a problem in that once you start expanding from your narrow area to take in other areas there are just too many variables. There are too many things to track
  • Do you think this gives historians an advantage over political scientists because while they may not be scientifically robust they can explain things better?
  • And, to my mind, doing great violence both to this history, which is far more complex, and to the current set of circumstances which may or may not be relevant to whatever that past tells us
  • But. and I'm being just a tiny bit flip here, 90 percent of IR theory comes down to three historical questions: What caused the First World War? Was Hitler unique? And how did nuclear weapons affect international politics? Those are all historical questions.
  • I had the great fortune of being trained by Mark Trachtenberg. You can use some of the advantages that IR theory and political science provide, which is a certain level of precision.
  • But, taking a historical perspective, you see not just these horizontal connections but also complexity, contingency, chance, circumstances. You become very suspicious of importing historical lessons from the past in total to the present, which you see these days with what people believe to be lessons from the Cold War, the 1930s or Wilhelmine Germany.
  • I kind of grew up with IR theory. It's an enormously powerful lens to help make sense of the world. It exposes underlying assumptions about research, design, causality and agency.
  • That problem looked similar to others that we will see coming down the road, be it new emerging technology, the climate crisis, anything involving the ‘Global Commons.’ I was struck that this was a wake-up call
  • Yet global public health was the low hanging fruit of international political cooperation. We knew this was coming. We knew what to do and we failed miserably.
  • Russia's behaviour demonstrates that there are other factors involved that drive states to conflict that have not gone away. It's just that a very particular form of war, of unlimited imperial expansion, makes no sense now for states to pursue
  • Yet, once it eased, our governments and our friends who study these questions went back to normal.
  • I was disturbed by the fact that the ease with which people began to look at the world through an old lens. With Russia's horrendous invasion of Ukraine there was almost a sense of, well, we know what this is. It looks like World War Two. We have the models to deal with this. This gives us a focus because we have no idea how to deal with these other sets of global problems. The return of great power politics seemed to excuse serious study of these other challenges, which to me were sort of catastrophic.
  • as a historian I was struck that we use established models to understand international politics without accounting for the profound changes we've gone through, including the doubling of life expectancy. 
  • That got me into studying and thinking about these issues and inspired me to dive into looking into how a world of scarcity had changed to one of plenty, and how that might change perspectives on how international relations works.
  • The difference between the world we live in today and the past is that scarcity was an actual physical limit. In the 19th century there was nothing you could do necessarily to produce more food, more fuel, more clean water, more housing. Whereas today we have it completely within our means to solve these scarcity issues.
  • When those scarcity issues exist it's often the consequence either of some political issue or of us not doing more to alleviate these issues of scarcity. So scarcity today is the result of political circumstances, not a hard physical limit as it was in the past.
  • In the past, human beings could not get access to the basic resources they need in a consistent way that was predictable. That problem theoretically is now gone. It is not applied universally
  • If you look at life expectancy curves, the increases pretty much everywhere are extraordinary. In China, which was unimaginably poor, life expectancy has actually surpassed the United States.
  • The COVID-19 global crisis killed upwards of 20 million people, which is the equivalent of a World War, and was a failure of international cooperation and national domestic responses. Liberal democratic states did poorly; authoritarian states did poorly.
  • These circumstances were changing underneath in ways that were not recognised. Taming scarcity involved unbelievable increases in agricultural and economic productivity. At the same time there was an unexpected demographic compression where people just stopped having as many kids as expected. This was combined with a variety of other forces including improved governance and massive increases in information about the world. This meant that the historical forces that drove imperial plunder make literally no sense today
  • European and global politics from the late 19th century to, say, the middle of the 20th century reflected very particular historical circumstances. These drove Imperial conquest. During that period, there was a need for territory to feed populations that were seen as growing geometrically. Those wars of imperial conquest generated many of the disasters both on the European continent and globally
  • Its hard to imagine now that a geopolitical empire could pull that off. China is actually facing a declining population. People live in cities. They don't need more land.
  • FG: Even though the problems of plenty were created by developed Western states they hit hard most on states trying to make the transition. So climate change, public health, and inequality affects these states more
  • The states that have this wealth need people who are drawn in through migration or the efforts to migrate. This is the most divisive political issue globally right now in developed states. The rise of populism in the US and Europe is bound up with the politics of migration, which is a problem of plenty because that generates the magnet that attracts people
  • In the end, are individual states going to have to work out how to handle these issues in their own ways, or do we need new forms of multilateralism?
  • FG: I would say it's both. It's a manifesto and I’ve tried to think of some specific policy consequences.
  • I did a piece for Foreign Policy in which the model I used was of an alien who comes down to Earth every 50 years to assess the situation
  • Secondly, the problems of plenty, the climate and pandemics, represent the only truly existential threat
  • The alien would say, why is everyone so sad? I don't have a full explanation but we have deeply bitter, angry politics and some of this has been caused by plenty.
  • what I say in the essay is that China does terrible things - repression, the Uyghurs, the crackdown on Hong Kong, coercive threats in the South China Sea and Taiwan, its economic policies. It is not a good actor. But what I say is:
  • in 2024 I'm looking at the numbers, and you live longer. You have this great technology. All the information in the world can be accessed by anyone in this tiny little device for free. On the one hand, under the lingering shadow of our Marxist training, we've done really well. We have great wealth, but we could distribute it better. We've got great technology, but people are miserable. People feel this deep sense of enmity and of anger. That needs to be studied and understood.
  • if Taiwan were suddenly to be taken over by China, it would not be an existential threat to the United States. It's a very challenging problem, but they need to ask, is this an irredentist problem, that is similar to what happens whenever you have divided two states, whether its the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East, or Kashmi
  • First, there's one specific threat that can cause World War Three, which is this very difficult challenge of Taiwan. This leads to the question whether China wants Taiwan as an irredentist objective, or is it the beginning of some 1930s like bid for geopolitical hegemony?
  • We know another pandemic will come and imagine one with more lethality. And don't we have an obligation - both China and the United States - to find some way to work together on these issues even while the other competition persists.
  • During the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a far deeper, more bitter ideological and geopolitical political battle that almost ended with a thermonuclear exchange. Yet they worked together to solve two of the greatest problems that plagued humanity. First, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, where they came together in 1968 with the UK to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, as a shared responsibility.
  • At the same time, they worked together at lower levels to eliminate smallpox, a disease that had killed twice as many people as all the wars combined in the 20s century
  • if these two powers, whose geopolitical and ideological competition was an order of magnitude worse than anything that exists between the United States and China today, could figure out a way to work together why not these two powers now?
  • If somehow the United States figures out a cure for cancer and at the same time China figures out a cure to the climate crisis would we really not want them to share this with each other and Europe and everyone else?
  • There's only one existential crisis, which is the climate crisis
  • And as terrible and tragic as the war in Ukraine is and as threatening and terrifying as Cross Strait relations are between the United States and China, so that they demand attention, neither is existential unless we let them become so.
« First ‹ Previous 181 - 185 of 185
Showing 20▼ items per page