Category Archives: Web Article Review

Emergency powers and the fall of Weimar

Because somebody had to compare Trump’s use of emergency powers to Hitler. That somebody is the Washington Post. The main difference as I see it is that Hitler and his enablers manufactured an actual crisis, while Trump simply claims there is a crisis with no evidence or even marginally coherent logic to back up the claim. One interesting thing mentioned in the article is that West Germany at first refused to put emergency powers in their constitution, but the U.S. and NATO allies insisted they do so and eventually prevailed. They have never been invoked.

The Weimar constitution, like ours, had classically liberal aspects that guaranteed freedom of speech, assembly, religion and the right to private property. Yet born in the context of near-civil war conditions between right and left, it also gave the nationally elected president the power to dissolve the parliament and hold a new election within 60 days. Its Article 48 gave the president the power, “if public security and order” were “seriously disturbed or endangered within the German Reich,” to use the armed forces to restore them or suspend “for a while in whole or in part fundamental rights” guaranteed by the Constitution such as freedom of assembly and speech…

Terrorism, racist legislation and the suppression of opposition political parties all found justification in a supposed state of emergency that allowed an end to democratic institutions. Before March 1933, the invocation of emergency clauses of the Weimar constitution had been normalized. The willingness of parliament to cede authority to the executive eased the path for the transition from authoritarian to totalitarian dictatorship and to lawlessness.

Where the comparison holds is previously unacceptable use of emergency powers becoming normalized, which is how Germany took its first steps down the slippery slope.

even more on the Green New Deal

I’ve been thinking more about the Green New Deal, because I just can’t help myself. It mentions water, energy, transportation, housing, food and green infrastructure. As your emperor, I will set up an infrastructure bank to fund projects consistent with approved sustainable infrastructure plans produced by metropolitan planning agencies. I will tell you what the minimum goals of your plan have to be. You can add and sub-divide goals if you want, but you can’t subtract them. I will fund generously fund university planning and economics departments and consultants to help you put your plan together if you want. I will match your investments maybe 50 or even 75 cents on the dollar, but not 100% because you have to have some skin in the game or you won’t make good decisions. I will provide some kind of ongoing support for operation, maintenance, repair and retrofit of existing infrastructure, maybe through a trust fund set up for this purpose. My infrastructure bank will be counter-cyclical, opening up the floodgates when the private sector is struggling to employ everyone able to work, and dialing back when the private sector is robust and there are inflation concerns.

States, you can have a voice as stakeholders in the plans put together by metro areas, but money will not pass through you and you will not decide which projects are funded inside metro areas. You can do the planning for areas outside major metro areas. I might let you be an equal partner with the metro areas when it comes to the food and green infrastructure side of things.

I will turn on the taps for massive funding of basic research, into all aspects of energy, climate change, sustainability and resilience yes, but also for a broader focus on innovation and getting as back to the higher productivity growth trajectory of earlier decades. Tax incentives for private R&D are a pet conservative idea that fits well here too.

Along with capital/infrastructure investment, basic research and R&D, education and training are the other key to boosting long-term growth. I will turn on the taps there too, from pre-school to grade school to college to continuing education. Again, incentives for training on the private side will be part of this. If you lose your job to a robot, going back to school or entering a subsidized training program run by a high-value-added industry will be a viable option at no cost to you.

The “federal jobs guarantee” idea surprises me somewhat. Maybe I don’t understand it that well, but it seems like a fairly conservative idea similar to today’s unemployment benefits, but requiring people to work for the federal government to get benefits. Again, maybe I am misunderstanding. If you lose your job and are able to work but lack the education or skills, I’ll pay you to go back to school or enter a training program. If you truly can’t work, you’ll qualify for disability which will be tied to citizenship rather than past employment. I’m not sure just yet whether a universal basic income is the answer, but I’ll fully explore the idea and institute it if it makes sense. If you just want to sit on your ass and watch TV, I’m not going to make you comfortable, but I’ll make sure you don’t starve or die of exposure or a preventable disease.

As far as health care goes, I’ll just do the single payer thing. Everybody else in the world does it and it works fine. If I have to, I’ll figure out what the premium needs to be for people to buy into Medicare, and then give them that option. Tie it to citizenship, not to working for a large employer. Don’t worry about the insurance companies. They will scream, but they will adapt and make money selling “supplemental” plans like they do to rich retirees now.

There are a couple things missing from the Green New Deal. Childcare is one. There is talk of “family leave”, but really supporting working parents the way other advanced countries do means more than that. A lot of people don’t know that the U.S. came within hours of having a comprehensive government childcare system. It was passed by both houses of Congress and Richard Nixon’s pen was hovering inches above, fully primed with ink, when the lobbyists got to him. (Okay, I’m making up the part about the pen, but the part about Congress passing it and lobbyists convincing Nixon to veto it is all true.) What’s good for children is generally good for women, families, the work force and the nation as a whole, so I will do something to give families flexibility to cover that gap between birth and preschool using whatever combination of home care and high-quality government or licensed private care makes sense to them.

Also missing is any concept of a “peace dividend” or taking on the military industrial complex. I’d like to get our security costs down to 2 or 3% of GDP from the current 5%, which is unprecedented in history and unsustainable. A lot of our allies are richer than us at this point and can pay their fair share. Don’t worry about the arms exporters, they will scream but they are going to be really good at building windmills. If I have to ramp up spending quickly to support allies, Congress will have to declare war and there will be war taxes and war bonds and other sacrifices so the public understands what they are giving up to make that happen. Also, I will just get rid of the goddamn nuclear weapons.

Can we afford it, how will I pay for it? I already mentioned the peace dividend. Beyond that, my friends, my plan will pay for itself through a boost in productivity growth. We’ve heard that before, but I will actually do it. Just to be on the safe side, I’ll phase it in gradually and in a counter-cyclical, thoroughly Keynesian manner, so seriously just trust me you are barely going to notice. Oh, and there’s going to be a VAT like all other advanced countries have, and a carbon tax and other taxes on pollution and waste.

more on the Green New Deal

I’m reading a lot about the Green New Deal today. But after reading about it, I decided to just go and read the actual thing itself. It’s easy to be cynical about something like this by saying it has not been developed into an implementable plan or set of projects yet (even though it mentions “projects”, it doesn’t really contain any), and that would be true. It’s really a vision and goal-setting document. Getting people on board with a vision is the first step in a successful plan. It’s a hard step and it appears to have been done pretty well in a pretty short period of time.

The second step is developing an implementable plan to achieve the vision and goals. This is a harder step. Some people are comparing this to the 2008 stimulus program, but that was not a plan because it had no clearly articulated objectives or goals other than to throw a lot of money at a lot of projects that had already been defined by someone in the past according to whatever their goals were at the time. There was no time to develop a plan in that case – in fact, the projects had to be “shovel ready” meaning taking the time to plan anything was explicitly forbidden. This time, there actually is the possibility of taking the time to develop a plan. Developing a really good plan takes some time though. To do it well, you have to look at an enormous number of projects, policies, and other measures, consider them in various combinations, and pick a set of them that is reasonably technologically and economically efficient at achieving your goals, acceptable to your major stakeholders even if not their first choice, and implementable. I think some of this planning would have to be done at the local and regional level, preferably at the metro-area scale, although the states could maybe be involved in agriculture and inter-city transportation planning.

Finally, there is implementation. This is the hardest step. Complex institutions have to be created or existing ones repurposed; money has to be disbursed; contracts have to be written, awarded, and administered; job descriptions have to be written and people hired and trained and deployed; projects have to be managed; progress has to be tracked and laws have to be enforced. A critical mass of people involved at all levels has to understand and buy into those goals and how their little cog in the massive machine contributes to them. They have to make all kinds of little decisions and course corrections every day that keep the whole massive enterprise aimed at those goals.

So hard, harder, hardest. But like I said, the hard part is already done! In my career, I’ve seen groups of intelligent and well-educated people try to jump into implementing a bunch of projects without defining goals or having a plan for how they are supposed to tie together and meet the goals. I’ve also seen a brilliant vision translated into a reasonably technologically and economically workable, implementable plan, and then fail because key stakeholders were not on board, or because the people responsible for implementing the plan never understood the vision or how their little piece fit into it, so their millions of small daily decisions gradually caused the program to drift away from a path that was aimed at the goals, and there was no mechanism to bring it back to the path. But to end on a brighter note, if you come up with a brilliant vision, a brilliant plan to achieve it, and then you only implement 25% or even 10% of it, you have achieved something that never would have been achieved if you hadn’t come up with the vision and plan. And you show that it can be done and give others a chance to pick up the fight after you have moved on.

If I have time, I’ll try to tease out in another post what I think the vision and goals actually are, and how I think they could be achieved if I were somehow made emperor.

predictive policing

Here’s an interesting article on predictive policing from Motherboard. People are concerned that if a particular area has been overpoliced in the past, that is where the algorithms are going to predict crime in the future and they will continue to be overpoliced. Others just don’t like the idea of proprietary algorithms. I think any of these concerns could be badly depending on how it is implemented, but I don’t see why the tool itself could not be implemented in a fair way. In fact, I don’t see why measures to prevent discrimination couldn’t be built into the algorithms themselves. If the algorithms say people in a particular area or in a particular demographic group are being arrested at higher rates, it could help the search for route causes and preventive measures to help a particular group revert back to the mean. Transparency seems good in principle, maybe publishing some generalized statistics and maps, but of course if it is too predictable exactly where the police are going to be and when, people could take advantage of that. You could try to get around this by balancing random and targeted patterns within the algorithm.

what to eat for your own health and the planet

Walter Willet, Johan Rockstrom, and others have published a long paper on what we should be eating, both for health and sustainability, and how that food ought to be produced.

Scientific targets for a healthy reference diet are based on extensive literature on foods, dietary patterns, and health outcomes. This healthy reference diet largely consists of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and unsaturated oils, includes a low to moderate amount of seafood and poultry, and includes no or a low quantity of red meat, processed meat, added sugar, refined grains, and starchy vegetables.

this year’s doomsday clock

The good news is the clock has not been moved any closer to midnight. The bad news there are only two minutes to go, which is as close as they put it at any point during the cold war. The reasons they give are climate change and, yes, good old nuclear weapons.

In the nuclear realm, the United States abandoned the Iran nuclear deal and announced it would withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), grave steps towards a complete dismantlement of the global arms control process. Although the United States and North Korea moved away from the bellicose rhetoric of 2017, the urgent North Korean nuclear dilemma remains unresolved. Meanwhile, the world’s nuclear nations proceeded with programs of “nuclear modernization” that are all but indistinguishable from a worldwide arms race, and the military doctrines of Russia and the United States have increasingly eroded the long-held taboo against the use of nuclear weapons.

socialism, capitalism, and inequality

This article on History News Network sums it up pretty well. Socialism doesn’t work well when it means an authoritarian government controlling all aspects of the economy in the name of “the people” (e.g., the Soviet Union). Capitalism works well for an elite few but does not work well for the majority when it allows private wealth to hijack the political process (e.g., the United States, especially in recent decades).

There is a formula that works pretty well. It’s almost boringly simple and yet seems depressingly out of reach for the U.S. as long as wealthy individuals and industries are able to buy elections and write the nation’s laws to continue stacking the deck in their favor, while using our free speech protections to wage an effective propaganda war so that the public actually supports this.

It’s a common mistake of both left and right to talk about capitalism and socialism as if there were only two choices. One-party socialist systems in less developed countries have not worked well over the past century. Capitalism as practiced in the United States and many other nations has mainly benefitted those who already are wealthy. The nations in which all citizens gain from economic growth have combined elements of market economies, private ownership, and political policies that mitigate inequality. In western Europe, public health care, nearly free university education, stronger progressive taxation, higher minimum wages, and inclusion of trade unions in corporate decision-making result in much lower inequality and much happier populations.

Oslo has removed onstreet parking

Oslo has apparently removed all or most onstreet parking.


“Cities, like Oslo, have been built for cars for several decades, and it’s about time we change it,” Hanne Marcussen, Oslo’s vice mayor of urban development, said in an email. “I think it is important that we all think about what kind of cities we want to live in. I am certain that when people imagine their ideal city, it would not be a dream of polluted air, cars jammed in endless traffic, or streets filled up with parked cars.”

To help support the shift, the city made “massive improvements in public transport and making cycling safe and comfortable,” says Rune Gjøs, Oslo’s head of cycling. The city is adding new trams and metro lines and more frequent departures, and lowering the cost of tickets. For the last few years, the city has also been quickly building out a better-connected bike network, converting parking to bright-red bike lanes. It handed out grants to help citizens buy electric bikes. The city bike-share system has quickly grown, tripling to nearly 3 million trips a year between 2015 and 2018.

As more people bike, that opens up room on overcrowded public transit. “Usually when you have these discussions you say, ‘Oh, we need bikes to replace cars,’ but there’s a missing link there, and that’s public transit,” says Bentsen. “What we see is that actually we take people out of the bus and onto the bike and walking, which leaves room for people to leave their car and take the bus.”

What, no entitlement to use part of the public realm to store my car for free?