I accidentally published this post yesterday with no content. Just a blank post. Sorry about that. Below is the real thing.
1. US-China, begun the cold war has. The Cold War between the US and Soviet Union ran from 1945-1990. With the arrest of the chief financial officer of Huawei (maker of networking and mobile equipment), exports of the opioid fentanyl, and longstanding accusations of theft of tech IP, it seems like the US is headed toward a cold war with China.
Donald Trump instigated the anti-China shift. But both for better and for worse, I suspect it was inevitable. Which means the US-China cold war will outlast Trump. Here’s Ivan Krastev:
In most European capitals, policymakers and the chattering classes want to believe that before too long, Mr. Trump will be gone and the world order — including the close alliances between Europe and the United States — will return. But here’s the dirty secret that I learned in my three months in Washington: That’s not true.
The Trump moment in the end may resemble the Truman moment, when over a short period America dramatically changed its views of the world. This may be hard for Europeans to swallow, but it’s the message I am bringing back with me from Washington. The post-Trump world will not be the pre-Trump world.
Mr. Trump’s presidency has ushered in two significant changes that are likely to have staying power. First, with his administration, Americans have lost confidence in their exceptionalism.
Second, under the Trump presidency, rivalry with China has become the organizing principle of American foreign policy. Republicans and Democrats disagree on almost everything today, but one area where there seems to be effective bipartisanship is that America must change its policy toward China.
Here’s Tyler Cowen, on similar lines:
Like it or not, the United States is the global hegemon. In my view this is an overall positive, but for our purposes today let’s just take it as given.
If you are the global hegemon, and another country, largely hostile to your political values and geopolitical desires, engages in widespread subversion of your power and influence, you must in some way hit back. Otherwise you will not be global hegemon for much longer. And unlike India or the EU, China desires to build an international political and economic order which would destroy liberalism as we know it. Imagine a world where autocracy is a much more widespread norm, the Xinjiang detentions and North Korean nuclear weapons are considered entirely appropriate behavior, Taiwan is a vassal state, and few Asian countries could allow their media to print criticism of the Chinese government, for fear of retaliation. Institutions such as the WTO would persist only insofar as they created loopholes which gave China the benefits of membership without most of the obligations.
What really solidified my views is Peter Turchin’s books, such as Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Turchin argues human society at mass scale came about through the crucible of war. War forged cooperation within large polities, as do or die against foreign threat. External enemies and internal cohesion are two sides of the same coin.
Viewed in this light, the second world war and the subsequent cold war were secret drivers of US cohesion during the latter half of the twentieth century. Which means it’s not social media, Facebook, Trump, the internet, or Russia that’s to blame for our recent outburst of tribal conflict. It’s merely a return to normalcy, after the collapse of our previous enemy the Soviet Union.
Perhaps the lesson here is not to pretend we can achieve a world with no external enemies. Else things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Human cooperation within requires an external enemy without. If so, the goal should be to keep those inevitable rivalries in check. Avoid hot war. Avoid brinkmanship like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Instead, the best we can hope for is to be like rival sports teams who (mostly) play by the rules. After each round we shake hands and say “good game my friend, good game”.
2. Moving to superstar cities. Below is a chart of the number of people moving per year (blue bars), and the mover rate (black line). Notice the downward trend of the black line. The mover rate was 20% in 1948, declining to 10% in 2018.
Christopher Mims argues that “Technology is creating an economy in which superstar employees work for superstar firms that gather them into superstar cities, leading to a stark geographic concentration of wealth unlike any seen in the past century.” The solution is to have people move to these superstar cities. The problem is housing costs have skyrocketed in these same cities, which means only superstar employees can move there. So we should do more of what Minneapolis just did, remove zoning barriers to cheaper housing in superstar cities. This idea of housing restriction as bad and divisive policy seems to be slowly gaining ground over the past few years.
Along these lines, also see these two recent articles: 1) How rising rents contribute to homelessness, 2) Benefits of upzoning near transit and jobs.
3. Internet shaming. Helen Andrews had an early (2010) experience with internet shaming when her former fiance ranted about her failings as a human being, which went viral on YouTube. She recently wrote about internet shaming more generally. It’s a rather long post, but I thought it very good. Here’s one bit:
The more online shame cycles you observe, the more obvious the pattern becomes: Everyone comes up with a principled-sounding pretext that serves as a barrier against admitting to themselves that, in fact, all they have really done is joined a mob. Once that barrier is erected, all rules of decency go out the window, but the pretext is almost always a lie. Matthew Yglesias once claimed that the reason he mocked David Brooks for his divorce was because Brooks had written columns about the social value of marriage, but I do not believe him. He did it because it’s fun to humiliate your political opponents. Moira Donegan claims that she created the Shitty Media Men List—a clearinghouse of anonymous accusations optimally parked for maximum dissemination in the Google Spreadsheet cloud—for altruistic reasons and with no thought of its being used to hurt anyone, but I do not believe her. If it was about protecting women in media from harassment, then why no attempt to sort the true accusations from the false? Why the coy protestations that “I thought that the document would not be made public,” when of course she knew that it would be spread far and wide, or she wouldn’t have bothered creating it?
Read the entire piece here.
4. Track by track breakdown of Fleetwod Mac’s song Go Your Own Way. If you are interested in how pop songwriters put together songs, Song Exploder is the podcast for you. How much I like it depends on the song and artist. But in this recent episode they picked an all time classic pop song. Lindsey Buckingham does the track by track (drum part, acoustic guitar, vocals, base, etc) walk through of how the song was put together. I thought it was excellent. link
And that’s all for today. Thank you for your time!
Praxtime by Nathan Taylor 