Category Archives: Web Article Review

my proposal to reform the United Nations Security Council

Most of this article in National Interest (which I’m not too familar with) is an opinion piece about Iran sanctions, but a little more than half way it does a good job explaining the rationale behind the UN Security Council.

The UN Security Council is the most important multilateral institution engaged in global governance and cooperative rule-setting. Created in the aftermath of two successive and catastrophic world wars, the council’s legal structure of giving veto power to the major world powers has helped maintain peace between major powers for over seventy-five years. Its decisions mark the highest level of international law.

The raison d’être of the UNSC is to prevent the unilateral use of force by countries. The council relies on consensus decision-making among the five permanent members, ensuring the world’s most powerful countries are constantly in dialogue over pressing security matters. The council’s approval is required to launch wars and the resolutions it passes are binding on all UN members.

Crucially, the veto power the UNSC affords the United States, China, Russia, the UK, and France gives these leading powers a stake in the global order. This helps obstruct zero-sum competition from taking hold among them, which could easily spiral into the kind of worldwide conflicts that reaped immense suffering in the last century.

National Interest

So, one way to state the purpose is to avoid cross-border aggression by major powers against other major powers, because such aggression by any one would automatically be opposed by the other four. No one country is so powerful that the balance of power would be in its favor.

To have a future, the Security Council clearly needs to be expanded to include today’s most powerful countries. It is unlikely it could kick off less powerful countries already there (looking at you, England and France). However, there is some limit to how many parties could be expected to reach consensus. How many? We need more than 5, and more than 10 seems like too many.

How do you define “powerful”? How about a formula? I pulled stats on GDP (at purchasing power parity) from the CIA World Factbook. GDP correlates to economic power, and potential though not necessarily military might. The top 10 look like this:

1China
2United States
3India
4Japan
5Germany
6Russia
7Indonesia
8Brazil
9United Kingdom
10France

That would include all the current members, plus add Japan, Germany (news flash: WWII is over!), India, Brazil, and Indonesia (hands down the world’s most populous and powerful nation that westerners never think about.)

Who barely misses the cut? #11-15 are Mexico, Italy, Turkey, South Korea, and Spain.

What if we decided actual military spending mattered. I pulled those numbers, gave 50% weight each to GDP and military spending, and it looks like this:

United States
China
India
Russia
Japan
Saudi Arabia
Germany
United Kingdom
Brazil
France

So this would trade Indonesia for Saudi Arabia, which seems odd. If you rate GDP 75% and 25%, you keep Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and leave out France. That seems like a non-starter.

Giving 10% weight to military spending doesn’t change the top 10 compared to straight-up GDP.

So I think my proposal is straight-up GDP. To summarize, it wouldn’t cut out any current member, and would add Germany and Japan, major developed countries and economic powers who lost a war 70 years ago, and major developing countries India, Brazil, and Indonesia. It would be harder to reach consensus with 10 than 5, but the effort of adding these important voices to the conversation would be worth it, and any hard-won consensus would have more legitimacy as representing the majority of the world’s power.

the latest on the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox

An updated (and serious) estimate on the Drake equation, which estimates the number of alien civilizations in the Milky Way, says it’s complicated, and uncertain, and highly sensitive to input assumptions…and a possible answer is 36. This kind of sounds like a lot to me, but the article says that given the size of the galaxy, and how far the 36 would be from each other on average, it could explain why we haven’t been able to detect anyone else so far. An important variable in the Drake equation is how long advanced civilizations tend to last. “Advanced” is defined as having invented the radio, because this should make them possible to detect by other civilizations that have also invented the radio. But the theory goes that once the radio is invented, the ball also starts rolling on potentially civilization-ending and ecosystem-killing technologies. There could be many civilizations that come and go, but only a few around at any given time.

India and China

Soldiers from India and China literally fought with sticks and stones – in June 2020 – and reports are that at least 20 were killed. What appears to happen is that both sides undertake construction projects close to the disputed border. Troops occasionally encounter each other – or attack each other on purpose, who knows?

This just seems dangerous when it’s two large, powerful countries with powerful militaries, including nuclear weapons, and nationalist politics. Isn’t the UN Security Council supposed to help mediate in these cases? I haven’t heard a word about that – maybe one more sign the UN has weakened to the point of irrelevance.

IMD World Competitiveness Ranking

The United States fell from 3rd to 10th in the IMD World Competitiveness Ranking this year, after being 1st just a couple years ago. Asian tigers (Singapore, Hong Kong) and Scandinavia/Northern Europe (Denmark, Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway) make up most of the top 10, when Canada and UAE making the cut, and Taiwan just edged out at #11.

For the second year in a row, the USA failed to fight back having been toppled from its number one spot last year by Singapore, and coming in at 10th (3rd in 2019). Trade wars have damaged both China and the USA’s economies, reversing their positive growth trajectories. China this year dropped to 20th position from 14th last year.

IMD

City-states tend to do well, so my quick reaction is that it might make more sense to compare Singapore and Hong Kong to, say, the New York City or Toronto metro areas rather than the U.S. and Canada as a whole.

pandemic reinsurance

You can buy insurance against a pandemic. Well, if you are a giant corporation or a small country. It seems like insurers wouldn’t be able to offer it, but some of the reinsurers, which insure insurance companies against rare catastrophic risks, actually do. They do it by finding parties that can insure them, and the parties that are willing to insure them are pension funds, because when old people start dying in large numbers pension funds actually have a lot of extra cash lying around. The bigger the pandemic and the more people are dropping like flies, the more cash they have to pay off the reinsurance companies. Yes, the insurance business is kind of sinister, so there it is. From Wired.

house of cards

James K. Galbraith has a very pessimistic view of the U.S. economy going forward.

America’s economic plight is structural. It is not simply the consequence of Trump’s incompetence or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s poor political strategy. It reflects systemic changes over 50 years that have created an economy based on global demand for advanced goods, consumer demand for frills, and ever-growing household and business debts. This economy was in many ways prosperous, and it provided jobs and incomes to many millions. Yet it was a house of cards, and COVID-19 has blown it down.

Project Syndicate

Slow, underlying trends can undermine the resilience of a system, without obvious impacts on the surface. Then, when a crisis hits, whether or not that crisis is related to the underlying trend, the system is not able to bounce back the way it would have without the trend. Imagine rising temperatures and invasive species very slowly putting pressure on a healthy forest or water body. The ecosystem can resist these pressures, maybe for a long time. But then one day, a major storm, fire, or drought comes along. Absent the underlying pressure, the the ecosystem could have rebounded to its original state, but with the underlying pressure, it rebounds to something short of its underlying state. Even if the shock is less than catastrophic and the system rebounds to something just a little short of the original state, successive crises over time can lead to a long, slow slide that might only be obvious in retrospective. Or, if the shift is very slow, “shifting baseline syndrome” sets in, where the people involved lose their memory of what the system used to be like, and don’t fully realize what has been lost.

missiles, drones, and mines

I was reading an article recently (which I can’t find at the moment) arguing that the future of warfare is a large number of cheap missiles, drones and mines that make it almost impossible for an adversary to get close enough to attack you. This was put forth as a recommended strategy for the United States – we can give or sell these to our allies, flood the world with these things and make money in the process. It just seems cynical to me because today’s allies are not always tomorrow’s allies. Training Aghan freedom fighters in terrorist tactics seemed like a good idea at one time too.

biodiversity, food and agriculture

Morally, biodiversity should matter to us just because it is. Life on Earth is special, and beautiful, and possibly unique in this universe. But it also matters because losing it could be bad for us humans. The more genetically uniform our sources of food are, the more vulnerable and less resilient they are.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization put a massive report out on this last year. The verdict? Diversity is lower than it should be, it is declining, and some things are being done but not enough things are being done to reverse the decline. Doesn’t that describe most of the thorny problems facing our planet and species at the moment? We better pay attention to food though – cleaning up after storms, fires and floods is one thing; a few million babies and old people out of billions dying prematurely is another thing; but a serious food crisis could be the one that brings our civilization to its knees.

some numbers on police violence

U.S. police violence disproportionately affects black citizens, but U.S. police violence affects the population as a whole at much higher rates than other wealthy industrialized countries. The U.S. has a violence problem, and the police violence problem is one part of that.

American police forces killed three people per day in 2019, for a total of nearly 1,100 killings.

Those numbers are far higher than in other wealthy western countries.

In comparison, The Guardian newspaper reported in 2015 that there was a total of 55 fatal police shootings in England and Wales between 1990 and 2014. Only 15 people were shot fatally by German police in 2010 and 2011 combined, the newspaper reported. The U.S. population is about six times that of England and Wales, and four times that of Germany.

CNBC

It would be nice for the reporter above to do the math for the reader, but here it is. If England and Wales were the size of the United States, they would have around 25 fatal police shootings per year, and if Germany were the size of the United States, they would have around 30 per year. Compare these numbers to 1,000 in the United States!

Look at statistics for other types of violence (which I don’t have handy, but have looked at in the past) like assault, homicides, suicides, traffic/cyclist/pedestrian fatalities, and the picture is similar.

The U.S. has a violence problem. Why? I don’t know – I can list factors that almost certainly contribute to it, but I can’t tell you which ones are the pivotal ones. Racism is certainly one factor, although I would speculate that removing racism alone would not come close to solving the problem. Ubiquity of guns is certainly a factor, because it turns what could be minor altercations and mental health episodes and accidents into fatal ones. Related to the ubiquity of guns is a lot of hidden advertising created by the gun industry and the larger military-industrial complex (free guns, even actors and settings for movie and TV producers, so that stories with guns are cheaper to tell than stories without guns, and sometimes guns are a substitute for bothering to tell stories at all). Economic inequality, and the underlying inequality of opportunity, is almost certainly a root cause. Lack of a functioning mental health care system for most Americans (especially those who lack economic opportunity) is a root cause. Criminalization of some common types of substance use (especially among those who lack economic opportunity) is certainly a root cause.

Solutions: I am probably a broken record, if you have read my other posts. But end the war on drugs now, provide universal health care (including mental health care) now, and continue the long-term project of providing education and job skills to all citizens. Stop tolerating violent death as a result of outdated transportation and urban design choices, when better designs are out there free to copy.

Police reforms are a good idea too – I am just suggesting that police reforms alone are not the leverage point that will bring our violence rates in line with the world’s leading countries. Notice I’m not even saying “other leading countries”. The U.S. is a great and powerful country that has run out of gas and is coasting on its past success. We slipped from a leadership position to the middle of the pack, and now we are slipping behind the middle of the pack. Solutions are out there, if we choose to acknowledge our problems and accept that we might be able to learn from others.