Waves vs deep currents

The surface of the ocean is covered with waves, sometimes in storms even spectacular waves. It is the waves that draw and hold our attention when by the ocean. Yet in fact waves are nothing more than water molecules moving up and down, and hardly going anywhere. Mostly nothing really significant is happening. Deep within the ocean, on the other hand, are massive currents that transfer heat from one part of the planet to another and make a very significant difference, keeping England warm for example.

This is a good metaphor for the political world. On the surface are endless fads, crises, and one-day emotional issues. People get outraged about this or that, the media goes wild over it, and a month or two later it is forgotten in the rush to be outraged over some new issue. Like the waves, this is essentially meaningless, even if it captures our attention and emotions for the moment. But underneath this there are deep and powerful currents that will shape the world of the future.  The trick is to try to ignore the waves and focus on trying to discern the deep currents.

The partisan battles over Trump’s policies and behavior, and now over Biden’s policies and behavior, are in the long run just waves, even if some media pundits try hard to convince us that there are existential issues at stake. The daily press attacks on one side or the other, and the endless largely childish attempts to spin the political narrative toward one side or the other, are equally insignificant in the long run, as are the inevitable scandals. It is easy to get emotionally drawn into these battles and issues and scandals and movements, but mostly it is a waste of time and energy. Who even remembers most of the issues that so outraged and exercised us a year ago, let alone ten years ago?

And for all the vitriol between the US political parties these days, in truth both are fundamentally almost the same, equally right or wrong on (or, perhaps more likely, oblivious of) most of the truly consequential issues, equally beholden to wealthy individual and corporate patrons. And both are largely staffed and funded by the wealthy elites, and therefore remarkably disconnected from the lives and issues of the majority of the voters they claim to represent, so although watching the Washington political street fights may be entertaining and emotionally engrossing, I would argue it too is largely a waste of our time and energy.

The deep political, cultural, and social currents are what ought to really warrant our attention. It is of course much harder to see the deep currents than the surface waves, and some of them won’t be obvious until years after the fact, if then. But it is worth trying to discern them.

So what deep currents might one identify at the moment, currents that are worth paying attention to? Let me suggest some possibilities that I see:

Among the first tier, those likely to have the most profound effects worldwide, two stand out:

1)      The precipitous drop in the birthrate worldwide. As the UN’s demographic charts demonstrate, many nations, including major states like China, Russia, Japan, Germany, and France, are in the process of rapidly depopulating themselves, almost or already past the point where their birthrate can recover because too large a proportion of their population is past the childbearing age. This will have major effects over the coming decades in all sorts of places, including at least trade patterns, international balances of power, and the internal political and economic stability of many nations.

2)      The ongoing climate change. Change is occurring, and for a number of reasons it seems to me highly unlikely that governments and populations worldwide will be able to make the very expensive, painful, and culturally difficult changes in time to actually halt this process, let alone reverse it. The eventual climate changes may in fact turn out not be as profound as some alarmists claim, but they are already enough to begin to shift weather and rainfall patterns, and hence to disrupt agriculture around the world. Since much of the world has a precarious food supply anyway, this will have a large effect, potentially producing widespread famines and massive migrations.

Among the second tier, perhaps somewhat less profound and/or more localized than those in the first tier, but nevertheless highly significant, two more stand out:

1)      Universal connectivity. Although the roots of this go back at least to the invention of radio, and perhaps even to the invention of the telegraph, it has accelerated greatly with the invention of the internet and the widespread availability of cell phones. The fact that humans everywhere on the planet can now be connected almost instantaneously with each other and with vast quantities of information and misinformation has produced a mass of new uses and abuses. This is in the process of substantially changing the nature of commerce, warfare, education, crime, government and politics, among other things, and it is still really in its infancy. In the long run this will probably be seen as a step function in civilization as significant as the invention of the printing press in 1450.

2)      The biotech revolution. The “green revolution” of the 1960s which so vastly increased the world’s food supply, especially in third-world nations, is perhaps the leading edge of this current. But recent advances in manipulating the chemistry of the basic life processes opens up an immense potential for new uses and abuses. Not only may it eventually produce substantial changes in the world’s food and energy supply, it may also eventually extend the productive life of humans, which would have profound demographic effects, and perhaps produce profound new ethical dilemmas.

One might identify a third tier, of even more local currents that might perhaps have a significant shorter-term effect over, say, the next few decades or the next century. In that tier I would suggest:

1)      The withdrawal of the Pax Americana.  In process since at least the Clinton administration, and driven by the demise of the unifying Soviet threat and the turning inward of the American voter, the slow withdrawal of America from the role of the world’s policeman (despite political rhetoric to the contrary) has the potential to revert the world to its much more normal state of endless local conflicts, and bring to an end the (relatively) peaceful world in place since the end of World War II.

2)      The dissolution of the Russian and/or Chinese empires. One or both of these nations may not in the end dissolve, but demographics alone suggest it is highly probably they will over the next decade or so, and both face other existential threats as well. The disappearance of either or both as potential rivals to US dominance would change not only the US political calculus, but the attitudes and alliances and trade patterns of many other nations as well.    

Three more possibilities, which in time may or may not turn out to be significant in the long run are:

1)      The move to space.  The burgeoning business of using earth orbiting satellites is really just an extension of existing technology, though certainly a useful one. But the move to extend the human species to other planets would be another substantial step function in human civilization, much more significant even than the expansion of European civilization into the new world in 1492. But this is an extremely difficult step involving among other things mind-bending distances, and while we have landed humans on the moon and we may eventually be able to put a token human presence on other nearby planets for a few weeks, it is not yet clear we can really plant a self-sustaining colony on other worlds or in deep-space habitats. But if we can, this would certainly be a very significant deep current.  

2)      Artificial intelligence. This too is a field still in its infancy, so it is still far too soon to tell how significant it will be in the long run. But it has the potential to produce something like intelligence – at least in limited domains – that far exceed that of humans. If this proves to be so, it could have profound effects on civilization.

3)      Fusion energy. Commercially viable fusion energy is said by some to be at least 40 years away, and has been 40 years away for the last 50 years. But there are promising advances, and if in the end it proves commercially feasible to produce energy by fusion, that would make a profound difference in a number of areas, not least in perhaps slowing the rate of climate change.

I would argue that it is a far better use of our time, attention and energy to focus on areas such as these, the “deep currents” of civilization, than to waste those resources on the “waves”, the daily noise spewed every day by the media, emotionally engrossing as that noise may be.

On "being stupid"

The geopolitical strategist George Friedman (author, most recently, of The Storm Before the Calm) has a short (14 minute) piece on YouTube here, part of a panel in December 2020 in Korea. It is well worth listening to. He is discussing China, and the popular media perception that China is a growing power and will eventually displace the U.S.  In that context he talks about teaching his research staff to “be stupid”. In other words, not to get all wound up in sophisticated analysis, but just look at the implications of the plain facts before them.

That certainly applies to China. The media and the professional talking heads love to wave the China bogyman around, and many are apparently gullible enough to buy Chinese propaganda about its growing might. Yet in fact, as Peter Zeihan, Stephen Kotkin, Ian Brenner and other geopolitical experts keep reminding us, China is where it is today only because of the US, because we provide a vast export market to feed their economy and worldwide security to ship their products anywhere. If the US walks away from that, China is in deep trouble. And as far as a military threat, China depends heavily on oil shipped thousands of miles by the ocean from the Middle East, in waters dominated by India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia (all U.S. allies) and the U.S. Start a war and we cut that on day one and by day 10 China can’t fuel their ships and planes, let alone keep the lights on at home.*  And of course the US export market which undergirds their entire economy would disappear.

But it seems to me this idea of “being stupid” – not getting lost in elegant analysis or listening to media “experts”, but just looking at the plain facts in front of us – applies in many other fields as well. The excellent 2015 movie The Big Short, based on a real-life story, which I discussed in several posts back in October of last year, is another example. Anyone who was ”stupid” enough to just look at the craziness in the housing market could have seen the danger that eventually brought on the 2008 market crash.

And so I wonder what “being stupid” right now might suggest.

Bitcoin, a virtual currency with absolutely nothing backing up its value, has risen from less than $1000 to $60,000 per coin recently. Median home prices in San Francisco are about $1.6 million, and a 500 square foot studio condo rents for about $4000 a month. Amateur day traders are taking out loans on their houses to play the market and try to outsmart the professional hedge funds. The stock market has risen to astronomical heights, with a price-to-earnings ratio (~40) more than double the historical average (~15). There are companies floating IPOs that make them worth (on paper) more than General Motors, yet have never yet produced a product.

And in the midst of this the federal government is falling all over itself (for the best of reasons, to be sure) to pass one multi-trillion dollar “stimulus package” after another, all with borrowed money, while the national debt as a percent of GDP is now higher than as it was during World War II. The fed is pumping new money into the system at a great rate (35% of the money in circulation has been “created” in the last 12 months), which ought to bring on inflation, yet inflation (thus far) remains low and the economic experts freely admit that they have no idea why it isn’t behaving as they think it should.

If I were sufficiently “stupid” I would think that this can’t last, that this is all a series of bubbles waiting to pop, and someday, probably soon, there is going to be a very painful “readjustment”. I keep remembering the story that Joe Kennedy in 1929 decided to sell off his holdings in the market when a shoeshine boy started giving him market tips. I wonder if we haven’t reached that stage today.        

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* China currently consumes about 14 million barrels of oil a day in peacetime. In wartime that would vastly increase. China’s domestic production is about 4 million barrels a day, so even in peacetime it has to import about 10 million barrels a day (about 5 supertankers per day), almost all by sea from the Middle East. There is an overland oil pipeline from Kazakhstan, but at maximum flow it supplies only a relatively small amount, about 120,000 barrels a day.

Bill Gates and Climate Change

Bill Gates has just published his first book, How To Avoid A Climate Disaster. It’s a good book.  The beginning of the book explains the basis of the climate problem, and probably won’t provide much new information to anyone who has been attending even peripherally to this debate. But the remainder of the book makes three good points that seem to be missed by many activists:

1.      Useful as they are, currently fashionable “green” technologies – primarily solar and wind, and electric cars – are not enough to make a significant difference, nor (as the Mark Mill’s paper we all studied a while ago made clear) is there any chance that they will follow some sort of “Moores Law” like microchips have, and evolve the 10-fold or 100-fold improvements that some activists are counting on.  

2.      To make the changes that would be required to make a significant difference will be far, far more difficult and painful than most people realize. Climate activist for the most part are pretty naïve about what would be required to really make a difference. In a world where we have trouble getting adults to wear simple masks in a pandemic, imagine how much harder it will be to get people to change their diets, curtail their traveling, downsize their houses, and give up most of their consumer goods. Or to get China or India to forgo further development.

3.    The solution, Gates argues, is to invest far, far more into research into new technologies for how we use electricity, how we make things, how we grow things, how we get around, and how we stay cool and keep warm. The remainder of the book talks about possible developments in these five categories

Gates’ pragmatic approach is certainly refreshing, devoid as it is of ideological mythology. He is, however, a technologist, and sees the problem primarily as a technological problem. I am not nearly as optimistic as he is that governments can move quickly enough, that politicians and industry can be persuaded to do the difficult, unpopular and expensive things needed, or that the public can be persuaded to change their habits enough to make a difference in time.   

Still, it is a good book, worth reading.

Recommended: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

George Friedman argues in his latest book that one of the forces underlying the nation’s current unsettled political situation is the growing disenchantment with experts. And indeed one can see that playing out in the tensions created by the COVID pandemic. The medical “experts” are advising us to close down schools and businesses – no doubt the correct strategy from a narrow medical point of view – but seem not to have thought much about the equally serious economic or educational consequences of their advice. So of course it is producing increasingly strong pushback from those put out of work, and from parents who are increasingly worried about the educational progress of their children.

In that context, David Epsteins’s 2019 book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, is particularly relevant. Very readable, with some fascinating stories and history (who knew that Vivaldi’s music was so influenced by the orphan girls of Venice, for example?), it makes a well-documented case for encouraging a true generalist education rather than the sort of specialization that is now so embedded in our culture. I highly recommend this book, and find it interesting that Amazon has paired it in their recommendations with Bill Gates’ new book on climate change – a good book from another generalist.

I suppose I resonate with this book because a deliberate generalist is in essence what a system engineer is. I happened to work in the aerospace field (rockets and satellites particularly). These devices are made of hundreds or thousands of subsystems, each developed by experts who are brilliant at optimizing their own particular piece of the system. But these devices as a whole live within a mass of constraints – power, weight, reliability, error budgets, thermal limits, thrust requirements, etc, etc. What we learned (at great expense) in the 1960’s was that left to their own devices, all these narrow experts optimizing their own subsystems in isolation produced products that failed disastrously if they worked at all. Successful development required that someone have an overall picture, and the authority to optimize across subsystems, not just within subsystems, and to negotiate necessary tradeoffs between subsystems, and hence the field of system engineering was born.

I can’t help but think that what was needed in this pandemic was some generalist thought across all the relevant fields – medical, economic, educational, political – to find a national COVID strategy that was optimal across all these domains, not just the medical domain. Of course the issue has gotten politicized, which hasn’t helped.

In any case, I highly recommend this book.

 

The immigration issue

For context let me offer the opinion that one of America’s core problems these days is that on most important issues we have no rational, widely-debated, thought-out national policy; we are just reacting day-by-day, usually on the basis of mindless partisan ideology, media-driven focus, or momentary emotion. We are not alone in this – most nations seem to operate this way – but it is one of the things that is impeding our ability as a nation and a culture to adapt to the rapidly changing world.

I would argue that this applies to our immigration policy. We have never had a rational national debate about just whom we ought to allow to emigrate to the United States, and whom we ought to exclude. Well, we had better have that debate, because bad as the problem is right now, it is about to get much, much worse over the coming decades.

Why? For at least two reasons:

First, because of global warming. Global warming is almost certainly going to happen, despite all the empty promises made by nations in the Paris agreement (see, for example the 2019 Forbes article here) Our current worldwide civilization is built on the profligate use of energy, and it is exceedingly unlikely that we can change human behavior enough and in time to halt climate change. Most climate activists are fairly naïve about just how drastic the worldwide lifestyle changes would have to be to make a significant difference, and about how difficult it would be politically to impose those lifestyle changes on populations. We have trouble even getting people to wear masks in a pandemic. Think about what it would take to get Americans to give up, among other things, travel, meat, air conditioning, social media including their phones, and most consumer goods, or for India or China to abandon their drive to modernize - yet that is the level of change that would be required.

And in fact many climate researchers think we have already passed the point where we can make much difference. No one is quite sure how bad the global warming will be, and exactly what effects it will have, but it is already clear it will disrupt crops and hence the economies of many countries, and rising sea levels may displace millions of people who live in low-lying areas, and these effects will inevitably create serious social and political unrest, and perhaps even local wars, which will drive millions to seek to migrate to more favorable lands.

Second, because of the collapse of the global order that has prevailed since the end of World War II. Peter Zeihan’s books and lectures explain this fairly clearly (watch his YouTube lectures here, or here, for example, if you are not acquainted with his works), and most other geopolitical experts pretty much agree with his overall view, though of course they differ on details. The consequences of the impending breakdown in global trade will leave many nations short of energy and food, providing yet another impetus for mass migrations to better lands. (It will also drive many back to using coal as their only available domestic energy source, exacerbating the climate change problem.)

The upshot is that the pressure on our borders, for both legal and illegal immigration, will become more intense in coming decades. Clearly we cannot accept hundreds of millions of immigrants. It would disrupt our economy, our culture, and probably lead to political unrest even worse than we have today. So there are hard choices to be made about just whom we will admit, under what circumstances, and with what sort of social support to help them assimilate and find work. On what basis should we make those choices? That is what needs a national debate, as free as possible from mindless ideology or partisan political point-scoring and virtue-signaling.

And it needs to be made by those with real skin in the game, who will suffer the effects of whatever policy is adopted along with everyone else.  Thus far immigration policy for the most part has been set by politicians and bureaucrats who are relatively insulated from the consequences of their decisions. It’s not their jobs that would be threatened, their cultures that would be disrupted, nor their neighborhoods that would be invaded. That’s why there is so much political unrest around the immigration issue.   

Will we ever get such a debate? It seems unlikely in the current highly-polarized political atmosphere. But we had better find a way to have this discussion, because the problem is about to get a lot worse!

 

The other side of the argument

Yes, yes. I know I am apparently almost the last of a dying breed, a fiscal conservative who actually believes that someday the government ought to, indeed is morally obligated to, pay back the enormous debt it has accumulated. But I do understand that the world I grew up in, in which people and governments were expected to live within their means, is passé, and that we now live in a never-never land in which politicians in both parties compete to offer us voters ever more debt-financed goodies from the government and it is gauche to worry about the debt.

Still, despite the press drumbeat for a crisis to justify yet another massive $1.9 trillion stimulus package (with borrowed money), on top of the $3.1 trillion the government borrowed in 2020, there is another side to the argument that ought to be heard.  

I suggest reading an article in Issues & Insights today which can be seen online here. Yes, it is a bit right-wing in tone, as you can see from the title, but they make a reasonable case, worth considering, that $1.9 trillion is too much, and although some help is certainly needed, it ought to be more targeted toward the places that really need it.

The official federal debt currently stands at about $20.5 trillion, which is about the size of the entire U.S. GDP for 2020 (about $20.8 trillion), and that doesn’t even count the truly massive ($100-175 trillion) unfunded promises in things like Medicare and Social Security.

In 2020 the average interest on the federal debt was very low, about 2%, and the government paid $376 billion in interest payments. To put that in perspective, that $376 billion is more than  half of what we spend on the military ($636.4 billion in 2020), or about three quarters of what we spend on the rest of  the government agencies, not counting the military ($470.3 billion).

If inflation returns just to its historic level of about 4%, then interest alone on the federal debt will increase to about $760 billion, or more than 70% of what it costs to run the whole government. And that is just returning to the historical average. If we actually got real inflation of 5-6% or more, interest payment on the debt would absolutely swamp the federal budget. And remember, during the Carter administration in the 1980s fed rates reached 20%, so even higher rates are not unprecedented.

All of which is to say it is not unreasonable to be uncomfortable with the size of these big debt-financed stimulus packages, especially since no one in either party has proposed any way of ever paying back the debt.

Bad precedents

It seems to me we are on the verge of creating some bad precedents that will haunt us in the future.

Take the case of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. The House is about to vote on stripping her of her committee assignments because of comments she has made in the past, before she was elected. Now it is true she has said some pretty off-the-wall things, since she apparently believes a lot of the crazy QAnon conspiracy stuff. But I worry about the precedent of the majority stripping an elected representative of legislative power just because we don’t agree with them. That precedent opens up a lot of potential for abuse in the future.

Then there is the idea being floated of voting to deny Trump the ability to run for president again. Now I personally don’t want to see Trump in the presidency again, but this move sounds to me a lot like the candidate “vetting” that Russia and Iran do before their elections – ruling out certain candidates simply because they don’t fit the party line. The proper way, in my opinion, to deny Trump another term is to offer candidates that can beat him in an open and free election, not to deny the American voter the chance to re-elect him if enough of them feel so inclined. The argument that we need to deny Trump the ability to run again because a large number of the American voters are likely to make the “mistake“ of re-electing him is unbelievably condescending and self-serving, and certainly doesn’t fit the premise of our form of government.

I have argued in a previous post that the current fad for using impeachment as a political weapon, first with Clinton and now twice with Trump, is a bad precedent.  And certainly, it is now clear that Harry Reid’s move to eliminate the 60-vote rule in the Senate for confirming judicial appointment backfired on the Democrats once they were out of power under Trump.

We have already made the serious mistake of letting our rage and fear from the 9/11 attacks justify massive intrusions into our privacy and civil rights, and that is a very bad precedent.

There is that old saying that the “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. No doubt all these moves and proposals are made with the best of intentions, but it seems to me they all set bad precedents that may come back bite us in the future.