Category Archives: Web Article Review

is the U.S. becoming a developing country?

This Bloomberg article has a list of areas where the U.S. is following behind its peer group of developing nations.

  • roads, highways, bridges
  • high construction costs for all types of infrastructure, particularly high speed rail causing planned projects to be canceled
  • health care costs and outcomes
  • life expectancy
  • maternal mortality
  • rents rising faster than inflation
  • opioid addiction
  • suicide
  • lead in drinking water
  • poverty and hunger

The article offers the cautionary tale of Italy, which has been sliding backward over a decade or so following many years of similarly flashing warning lights before that.

“competing” with China

This article in Defense One says the U.S. Department of Defense has been ordered to “compete” with China, but they don’t know what that means. One interpretation seems to be that it means a good old-fashioned advising, training, and arms sales. But another interpretation seems to be alliance forming and economic competition. Neither one of these is the military’s job, and they know they don’t have the expertise to perform these functions.

The article does offer some clues as to why some in the military feel threatened by the Belt and Road Initiative.

In Greenland, for example, Beijing sought to finance and build three airports that the DOD feared it could seize for military purposes if Nuuk fell behind on its payments. In Africa, Pentagon leaders are watching to see whether Beijing will invest in a West African port that could harbor its warships at need. “We need to understand it so that we know how to respond to it,” said the Army official.

Belt and Road

The Council on Foreign Relations has a primer on China’s Belt and Road initiative here.

Xi’s vision included creating a vast network of railways, energy pipelines, highways, and streamlined border crossings, both westward—through the mountainous former Soviet republics—and southward, to Pakistan, India, and the rest of Southeast Asia. Such a network would expand the international use of Chinese currency, the renminbi, while new infrastructure could “break the bottleneck in Asian connectivity,” according to Xi. (The Asian Development Bank estimates that the region faces a yearly infrastructure financing shortfall of nearly $800 billion.) In addition to physical infrastructure, China plans to build fifty special economic zones, modeled after the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, which China launched in 1980 during its economic reforms under leader Deng Xiaoping.

Xi subsequently announced plans for the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road at the 2013 summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Indonesia. To accommodate expanding maritime trade traffic, China would invest in port development along the Indian Ocean, from Southeast Asia all the way to East Africa.

a peace race?

This article in History News Network talks about proposals since World War II for general and complete disarmament. We tend to scoff at ideas like that, assuming that they are impractical and have always been considered so. But actually, it is a case of shifting baseline syndrome where ideas we take for granted to today would have been considered fairly radical in the past, and we don’t realize that because we have lost our memory of the past.

leisure-enhancing technologies and productivity

This article claims that the rise of the entertainment industry explains slowing productivity growth, because not only does entertainment distract us from creative and productive pursuits, but our creative and productive people are pouring their energies into this sector because it is where the profits are. I don’t necessarily buy the former, because it is possible that we could be deciding as a society that we are productive enough and choosing to spend more time on pursuits that do not put ever more monetary wealth in our pockets. I think some people are doing that, perhaps not most. Perhaps in Scandinavia. But the second part does make sense to me, that the smartest and most creative people are not being drawn to the sectors where they could do the most good for society.

data-driven economics 101

This article in Vox is about an entirely data-driven approach to introductory economics. The idea of asking students to discover their own theories is an interesting one, but in most fields I do think there is an established body of theory and standard practice that students should learn before they are qualified to go off reinventing their own wheels. If a new generation doesn’t know what they don’t know, they have to reinvent everything and society doesn’t make progress.

renewable energy, batteries, and demand for metals

This report from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney talks about the increasing demand for metals driven by renewable energy and battery technology. Basically, recycling has to be improved a lot if current technologies are going to scale up without damaging the environment as much as they help.

I got to work with the Institute for Sustainable Futures once, which was fun. They had a worm compost bin in their office. They were also one inspiration for the title of this blog. I don’t know any of the authors of this report.

treehouses

There’s a treehouse hotel you can stay at in Ohio. It’s a pretty cool idea. You could pretend to be an Ewok. I wonder what the maximum density would be for a sustainable treehouse-based civilization. You could use gondolas to get around, minimizing the transportation footprint. You would still need electricity and water infrastructure, hospitals, etc. You would need food, but maybe you could rely heavily on tree nuts and fruit to provide a lot of it. And obviously, you couldn’t cut down too many trees to build the treehouses or you wouldn’t have enough trees left to build them in.

NACTO intersection design guide

The National Association of City Transportation Officials has a new guide for safe intersection design. I’m thinking about buying a few hundred printed copies and sending them to the local engineers, planners and politicians who have caused Philadelphia to fall well behind peer cities (and many cities that should not even be peer cities) in safe street infrastructure.