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.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
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.
Slaughterbots
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.
New Era of Public Safety: A Guide to Fair, Safe, and Effective Community Policing
I think I’m almost done talking about the police and the war on drugs. But this report from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has a compendium of what I understand are considered best practices in modern policing. I don’t see anything about ending the war on drugs, but one thing that did catch my eye is an emphasis on “Responding to Crises”.
By providing adequate prevention, support, and referral services, departments and communities can divert people with mental health and developmental disabilities, physical disabilities, and substance use orders, from the criminal justice system. All departments should develop crisis intervention approaches that connect people in crisis to appropriate health services, and all officers should be trained to identify and handle crises.
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
What if social workers and public health workers got the same pay, benefits, and respect as police officers? Maybe people who would have been trained as police officers would choose those professions instead. Maybe some police officers could be cross-trained as social workers. This could be a way to shift funding and priorities away from use of force without dismantling or defunding police departments.
U.S. Army biological weapons testing
It is documented that the U.S. Army intentionally tested biological weapons on American civilians, mostly in the 50s and 60s. From The New York Times archive in a 1994 article:
The Army released an organism called Aspergillus fumigatus at the Norfolk Naval Supply Center because most workers were black; for some reason, the testers imagined an enemy might target the blacks at military bases. “Since Negroes are more susceptible to coccidioides than are whites,” a report said, “this fungus disease was simulated by using Aspergillus fumigatus.” Aspergillus, further, was known to cause lethal infections.
In 1949, and for 20 years afterward, the Army released bacteria among millions of unsuspecting people. At hearings in 1977, Pentagon witnesses acknowledged that bacteria and chemical particles were sprayed over San Francisco, St. Louis, Minneapolis and 236 other populated locations.
The Army conceded that it had released microorganisms at Washington National Airport in 1965 and into the New York City subway system in 1966 during peak travel hours. The purpose was to see how the bacteria spread and survived as people went about their routine activities.
New York Times
The article goes on to say that the Army still (as of 1994) intentionally tests microorganisms at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Chemical weapons were also once tested in the same area, with devastating results for nearby sheep.
perspectives on police violence
People, from activists to the police themselves, have differing perspectives on police violence. Trying to see things from someone else’s perspective, even someone you strongly disagree with, is the first step toward tolerance, and the first step toward maybe possibly changing someone’s mind.
Barack Obama made this statement on Twitter in response to George Floyd’s death:
…it falls on all of us, regardless of our race or station – including the majority of men and women in law enforcement who take pride in doing their tough job the right way, every day – to work together to create a ‘new normal’ in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts.
Barack Obama
FiveThirtyEight discusses a poll (by the Pew Research Center) of police officers which indicates that most of them do in fact believe that they do their jobs in a fair and unbiased way, and that they are largely misunderstood. Black and female officers are somewhat more likely to dissent from this majority view.
In that survey, 67 percent of officers said they thought the deaths of black people in encounters with the police were isolated incidents, compared with 31 percent who said those deaths were part of a broader pattern. The public,3 by comparison, had almost exactly the opposite reaction — only 39 percent of Americans said the police killings of black Americans were isolated incidents, while 60 percent said they were part of a broader pattern. (More recent surveys of the public also indicate that around 60 percent of Americans think that these incidents are part of a broader pattern.)
FiveThirtyEight
Activists feel differently. Here is an article in the Intercept from Chenjerai Kumanyika, an activist based in my home city of Philadelphia.
A more historically informed and honest engagement with policing will have to confront a painful but urgent reality: The job of the modern police in America has been to reinforce a racist social order since its beginnings in the 19th century. Regardless of the good intentions of any individual police officer, the history, economic incentives, and culture of the police in every era, in every city in the United States, make this clear.
Intercept
These viewpoints are all valid in the sense that they are based on some combination of evidence, personal experience, and sincere belief.
I still think a lot of issues between the police and African-American communities come down to the war on drugs, at least in the modern post-Jim Crow, post-redlining era. Think of Prohibition – outlawing something with an enormous demand raises its price so that the people providing it, newly criminalized, are willing to take up arms and engage in violence to realize the profits involved. In that situation, the government will either be too weak to enforce the law, or it will respond by arming and engaging in overwhelming force itself to stay in control. That is the story of Prohibition, of the drug cartels in Mexico and Central America, and of the War on Drugs. I believe the culture of the organizations charged with enforcing the law evolves to enable and rationalize the actions that are necessary to maintain control by force, and unfortunately bias against the people on the other side becomes part of that.
The way out is to end the War on Drugs once and for all. Then all the funding and weapons and violence will no longer have a purpose. The police-court-prison-industrial complex is a powerful organism and it will fight to preserve itself.
UN reform
This article argues that the failed global response to the coronavirus crisis shows that the UN is in an increasing downward spiral.
More recently, however, the UN’s role has been steadily declining, and its influence on world events and governments has waned. Once the world’s pre-eminent moderator and arbitrator, it has become too constrained by old concepts and doctrines to be the truly effective, collaborative global governing body that its founders envisioned. It can no longer instill respect among governments for international legitimacy, international law, and the maintenance of global peace and security, as it did after both World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example.
Project Syndicate
The answer is “reform”, which seems to focus on some vague proposals to expand the Security Council. That sounds like a good idea, but based on the premise of powerful entities voluntarily giving up some of their power, which is not how the world works. Powerful entities are going to do what they think is in their own interest. I think maybe that means a focus on risk reduction. The IPCC actually is a pretty good example of this – despite some setbacks, it has built consensus around the science, laid out clear objectives and policies that nation-states can choose to adopt or adapt, and reached win-win agreements among a range of pretty powerful parties (with notable exceptions). Public health, food supply, biodiversity, and arms reductions (conventional, nuclear, biological, cyber, space) are other areas where nation-states should be able to come together and forge win-win agreements that reduce collective risk.
Another idea I have is that the UN – perhaps the General Assembly – could focus on writing model legislation on these topics that national legislatures around the world can choose to adopt or adapt to their own situations.
The UN does not seem to be likely to evolve into a world government anytime soon, other than in pretty much all science fiction movies.
Maybe the UN is just too old, bureaucratic and set in its ways, and it is time to create a new body of some sort to replace it and achieve some of its original objectives.