Category Archives: Web Article Review

how chili peppers got to Asia

There were no chili peppers in China or Southeast Asia until at least the 1500s according to this article. Chilis are native to South America.

The first mention of the chili pepper in the Chinese historical record appears in 1591, although historians have yet to arrive at a consensus as to exactly how it arrived in the Middle Kingdom. One school of thought believes the pepper came overland from India into western China via a northern route through Tibet or a southern route across Burma. But the first consistent references to chili peppers in local Chinese gazettes start in China’s eastern coastal regions and move gradually inland toward the West—reaching Hunan in 1684 and Sichuan in 1749—data points that support the argument that the chili pepper arrived by sea, possibly via Portuguese traders who had founded a colony near the southern Chinese coast on the island of Macao…

The article also suggests that it might have been Columbus himself who was responsible for calling this plant “pepper”. Because he thought he was in India, and had a habit of naming people and things using words already assigned to other people and things.

Camp David

This post from 38 North compares the North Korean (possible, budding?) peace process to the Camp David accords of 1978-79.

The Camp David agreements were also implemented in phases over time. Moreover, US troops were stationed in the Sinai as part of the UN’s Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) to ensure an effective transition from Israeli occupation to Egyptian rule there and keep the peace. In effect, this was a peace enforcement mechanism; and if the Korean War is to be brought formally to a close, then some kind of analogous mechanism may well be needed that can prevent violations of the accords involved. It might be necessary and beneficial for all the parties to the Korean conflict to have some impartial outside party, trusted by all sides—such as Sweden or India—to monitor moves toward peace. In the nuclear sphere, that could likely be the IAEA because it alone has the depth of technical capability and international standing to report credibly on steps towards complete denuclearization and verify its occurrence. But along the 38th parallel, it might be desirable for someone agreeable to both sides to perform functions analogous to those carried out by US forces in the Sinai. As noted above, we have cited the UN MFO in the Sinai or we could look to alternatives like the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Other alternatives may, of course, be possible. But presumably some such mechanism will be needed to distance the now hostile armed forces from each other and the truce lines at the 38th parallel.

Saudi AramCo IPO may not happen

Saudi Aramco was planning a $2 TRILLION initial public offering which would have been unique, but now it sounds like that may not happen. Aramco is interesting:

Aramco is a company like no other. Its profits easily outstrip those of every other company on Earth, from Apple to Exxon Mobil Corp. The billions of petro dollars it pumps out every month underpin the kingdom’s decades-old social contract: generous state handouts in return for the political loyalty that maintains stability in the birthplace of Islam. Those dollars also finance the lavish lifestyles of hundreds of princes. For decades, diplomats have joked that Saudi Arabia is the only family business with a seat at the United Nations. As the world’s largest petroleum producer, Aramco is key for global economic growth and international security. At one point during the Arab oil embargo in the 1970s, the U.S. even considered the possibility of seizing the company’s oil fields by force, according to declassified British intelligence papers.

Apparently, the U.S., China and India are all pressuring Saudi Arabia to pump more and lower the price of oil, while it needs to prop up the price of oil to support this IPO.

The main problem is valuation. There’s a wide gulf between MBS’s ambitious $2 trillion target—which the prince says is nonnegotiable—and the $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion that most analysts and investors see as more realistic, according to two persons directly involved in the internal discussions. The gap between what the market thinks Aramco is worth and what the Saudi royals want is so wide that, even at the narrowest end it would overshadow the combined value of America’s two largest oil companies—Exxon Mobil and Chevron Corp...

Fund managers also worry that the value of oil fields could dwindle as governments ramp up their efforts to reduce fossil-fuel consumption to fight climate change. The spread of electric vehicles, for example, will reduce demand growth over the next two decades. In May a group of investors including Standard Life Aberdeen, Fidelity Investments, and Legal & General Group warned oil companies about the risk of global warming. “As long-term investors, representing more than $10.4 trillion in assets,” they said in an open letter, they believed “the case for action on climate change is clear.”

Maybe that last paragraph is wishful thinking, I don’t know. Personally I want to believe it. Maybe the market is starting to reduce how much it thinks oil is worth in the long term if viable alternatives emerge.

Trump wants to invade Venezuela

According to the AP, Trump has repeatedly pressed his aides to consider invading Venezuela. Any claim that this could be about democracy or human rights simply is not credible. Regional stability? Venezuela’s neighbors seemed aghast at the suggestion. Oil? That must be it, although the former CEO of Exxon was Secretary of State at the time and was also aghast. We’re in year 2 and counting of the Trump presidency with no war – can we make it to the end?

WTO withdrawal could spark recession…or not

Axios quotes economists who think a U.S. withdrawal from the World Trade Organization could spark a recession…and economists who do not.

Thus far, Trump has mostly damaged U.S. prestige with his anti-globalization actions, including withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris climate agreement, as well as threatening to pull out of NAFTA. He’s also caused global stock markets to gyrate by imposing tariffs on Canada, Europe, and China; and oil prices to rise by pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. But “the financial shock would be very, very large” should he withdraw from the WTO, said Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute for International Economics…

“Business confidence in the system would be severely shaken,” Hufbauer told Axios, and there would be “quite a hit” to long-term investment in plants and equipment. “You don’t need much of a slowdown in these areas, and you have recession…”

The White House seems to be showing little understanding of the WTO’s history, originating in 1947 along with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as vehicles to prevent any future global war by buoying the economies of the world.

Not everybody likes the WTO, but it seems to be the best of many imperfect options for resolving trade disputes, and for not letting trade disputes escalate to be about more than trade.

Trumponomics – just plain made up

Trump claims recent economic growth is unprecedented. The claim is demonstrably false and just plain made up. According to Politifact:

Trump said, “Watch those GDP numbers. We started off at a very low number, and right now we hit a 3.2 (percent). Nobody thought that was possible.”

This is inaccurate two ways. First, the most recent saw GDP growth of 2.0 percent, not 3.2 percent. And second, exceeding 3 percent GDP growth in a quarter is not an unusual achievement — Obama accomplished it eight times. The real achievement would be a full year at 3 percent, which hasn’t happened under Trump yet.

We rate the statement False.

Much more interesting is that the U.S. has not managed a full year of 3% growth since 2005. Politifact has a much more interesting article here that explains why most economists think a sustained 3% will not be achievable in the foreseeable future.  In summary:

  • Growth in the working-age population is much lower than it was (political response: prevent willing workers from entering the country, oppose measures to provide childcare to working age adults…)
  • Productivity growth has also slowed significantly (political solution: underfund infrastructure, education, research and development; although to be fair, some of the recent changes to corporate tax policy might help if companies choose to invest the savings in plants, equipment, research and development rather than just letting executives pocket them)

 

Red Queens and Black Queens

It sounds like a fantasy novel, but the Red Queen hypothesis is about species competing and co-evolving with one another over long periods of time. It is named after the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, who said “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” In other words, species have to constantly evolve and adapt, or they go extinct. 

The Black Queen hypothesis is hard for me to understand, but it refers to

the queen of spades in the game Hearts, where the usual strategy is to avoid taking this card. Gene loss can provide a selective advantage by conserving an organism’s limiting resources, provided the gene’s function is dispensable. Many vital genetic functions are leaky, thereby unavoidably producing public goods that are available to the entire community. Such leaky functions are thus dispensable for individuals, provided they are not lost entirely from the community. The BQH predicts that the loss of a costly, leaky function is selectively favored at the individual level and will proceed until the production of public goods is just sufficient to support the equilibrium community; at that point, the benefit of any further loss would be offset by the cost. Evolution in accordance with the BQH thus generates “beneficiaries” of reduced genomic content that are dependent on leaky “helpers,” and it may explain the observed nonuniversality of prototrophy, stress resistance, and other cellular functions in the microbial world.

In other words, organisms can sort of help their rivals, and there can be some survival advantage to this over long periods of evolutionary time. I’m not sure I quite get it, but there it is.

Is the U.S. at war in Africa?

According to Politico, U.S. Special Forces are choosing, planning, directing and occasionally participating in missions in at least eight African countries.

A spokesman for Africa Command declined to say which African states host teams under the authority, but former special operations officers have identified eight countries as current or recent sites of the surrogate programs. They include well-known combat zones like Somalia and Libya as well as more surprising sites for American-directed commando raids like Kenya, Tunisia, Cameroon, Mali and Mauritania — and Niger, where the October mission that ended in tragedy involved one of two units that Green Berets run in the country under the authority…

After planning the mission based on U.S. intelligence and getting approval from higher headquarters, the Americans drive or fly with their local partners to the vicinity of the target, where they are required to hang back at “the last position of cover and concealment.” That is the military term for the last place where they can stay out of sight and are protected from gunfire by some sort of natural obstacle. But the former special operations officer pointed out that in the deserts and scrubland of northwestern Africa, “a lot of the time there really isn’t any cover or concealment to be had.”

There, the team “remotely commands and controls” the raid while monitoring feeds from drones and aircraft that eavesdrop on enemy phone calls. Afterward, the Americans move forward to check the raid site for intelligence — or, if something goes wrong during the raid and the African troops need help, they might move forward and join the shooting.

This is done with the full knowledge and participation of the host countries, apparently. Still, it raises questions. To what extent have the keys to U.S. foreign policy been turned over to the military, with little or no civilian involvement? What exactly is the return on the American blood spilled and taxes spent on this? To what extent are some of these people fighting simply because the U.S. is there in the first place?

our world in data

This video from OurWorldinData.org is a reminder of how much things have improved for human beings over the past couple centuries or even the past 50 years. It’s a reminder that the disspiriting reversals we are feeling over the past decade or two could be just a bump in the road when you take a longer-term perspective.

However, we shouldn’t just assume that doing more of what we have done in the past 50-200 years is the way to keep the trend going for another 50-200 years, because it may not be. Part of the trend is about a few key technological breakthroughs, such as vaccines, electricity and water disinfection. If we want more of those, we have to invest in R&D, infrastructure and human capital, and we are underinvesting in all of those. Part of the trend was due to mining of natural capital, and fossil fuels in particular. We know that we can’t just keep mining more and dumping more forever without eventually hitting a plateau or worse, triggering a major reversal in our fortunes.

Nonetheless, we should take a moment to celebrate this progress.