As some are suggesting about Trump now, in 1922 the New York Times said maybe Hitler was just saying those awful things to get attention. Ted Cruz, on the other hand, almost certainly means to do awful things if elected, like torture and kill civilians in foreign countries. Even The Economist doesn’t like Trump. None of the Republicans (or at least half the Democrats running for President) are likely to do anything about corporate dominance of the U.S. political system.
An IMF official uttered the words “economic derailment“. That sounds like it could be a real train wreck. Meanwhile Robert Gordon has expanded his pessimistic article on future growth into a book.
This is a new book about the potential for space colonization.
Its concluding section presents a scattered but sweeping vision for our future in space, and offers more plausible ideas than can be found in whole shelves of futuristic science fiction. Want to construct a lunar base, or mine asteroids for precious resources? Are you looking for alien life in our solar system, or habitable planets around other stars? Impey covers all this and much, much more in a brilliantly brisk series of chapters intended to show how we might someday become not only an interplanetary species but also an interstellar one.
Such a leap would be far more epochal than that of the Apollo moon landings, Impey notes. If Earth were the size of a Ping-Pong ball, the marble-size moon would be only a yard away — and the nearest neighboring star system would be 30,000 miles distant. Though that distance may now seem insurmountable, Impey implores us to consider the possibility of crossing it, even if only to grasp how far we have come since our ancestors spread out of Africa, and how far we still must go in securing a legacy for our distant descendants.
Someday, the sun and Earth will perish, but humanity may have the choice to be “more than a footnote in the history of the Milky Way.” Contemplating this future “and the possibility that we might not exist at all, is as haunting as deep space,” Impey writes.
The book review makes some references to H.G. Wells’ 1902 essay series Anticipations, which I might get around to reading some day.
The IAD Framework offers researchers a way to understand the policy process by outlining a systematic approach for analyzing institutions that govern action and outcomes within collective action arrangements (Ostrom, 2007, 44). Institutions are defined within the IAD Framework as a set of prescriptions and constraints that humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions (Ostrom, 2005, 3). These prescriptions can include rules, norms, and shared strategies (Crawford and Ostrom 1995; Ostrom 1997). Institutions are further delineated as being formal or informal; the former characterized as rules-in-form and the latter as rules-in-use.
The IAD framework identifies key variables that researchers should use in evaluating the role of institutions in shaping social interactions and decision-making processes. The analytical focus of the IAD is on an “action arena”, where social choices and decisions take place. Three broad categories of variables are identified as influencing the action arena: institutions or rules that govern the action arena, the characteristics of the community or collective unit of interest, and the attributes of the physical environment within which the community acts (Ostrom 1999; Ostrom 2005). Each of these three categories has been further delineated by IAD scholars into relevant variables and conditions that can influence choices in the action arena. For instance, the types of rules that are important in the IAD include entry and exit rules, position rules, scope rules, payoff rules, aggregation rules, authority rules, and information rules. Key characteristics of the community can include factors such as the homogeneity of its members or shared values. Biophysical variables might include factors such as the mobility and flow of resources within an action arena.
The IAD further defines the key features of “action situations” and “actors” that make up the action arena. The action situation has seven key components: 1) the participants in the situation, 2) the participants’ positions, 3) the outcomes of participants’ decisions, 4) the payoffs or costs and benefits associated with outcomes, 5) the linkages between actions and outcomes, 6) the participants’ control in the situation, and 7) information. The variables that are essential to evaluating actors in the action arena are 1) their information processing capabilities, 2) their preferences or values for different actions, 3) their resources, and 4) the processes they use for choosing actions.
Here are a couple papers that describe attempts to operationalize this framework:
If self-driving cars come into their own, will they reduce the total amount of vehicles on the road, or will everybody who owns a car now just buy a self-driving one? This study set in Austin says that each self-driving car will displace 9 normal cars. So even if the same or more cars are in motion at any given time, there will be a lot less land required for parking. That land can be used for something else – housing, commerce, habitat, recreation, gardening/farming, or some combination. Bring it on!
Following the shocking events in Belgium, maybe people here in the U.S. should reflect on inequality and violence closer to home. Here is a Slate article called Why Belgium Is Such a Hotbed for Islamic Terrorism:
As my Slate colleague Josh Keating wrote last November, the apparent concentration of Islamic extremism in Belgium is largely the result of a group called Sharia4Belgium and its charismatic leader Fouad Belkacem. The group, which was founded in Antwerp and first gained attention by staging public commemorations of the 9/11 attacks, has capitalized on the high rates of poverty among Muslims in Belgium, as well as anger over widespread discrimination against Muslims and bans on Islamic veils that were passed in Antwerp in 2009 and at the national level in 2011.
Speaking to CNN for a recent article, the brother of two young men who left Belgium for Syria cited a sense of marginalization and a lack of opportunity as the main drivers of radicalization. “The Belgian state rejects children and young people,” he was quoted as saying. “They say, ‘They are all foreigners, why should we give them a job?’ They fill us with hate, and they say we aren’t of any use, so when young people see what’s going on over there [in Syria], they think ‘Well OK, let’s go there and be useful.’ ”
Which makes me wonder, if poverty and inequality are really the issues, can we see that in the statistics compared to a random country like…oh, I don’t know…the United States of America? For a ready source of statistics, it’s fun to go to the CIA World Factbook. Here are the poverty rates and Gini Index for the two countries. The Gini Index is a measure of how wealth is spread across households, ranging from 0 (a hypothetical perfectly equal distribution) to 100 (a hypothetical case where one household has all the wealth and all the others have nothing). We can also look at GDP per capita at purchasing power parity and unemployment just to round it out.
GDP Per Capita
Belgium: $44,100 (34th highest in the world)
USA: $56,300 (19th highest in the world)
Unemployment Rate
Belgium: 8.6%
USA: 5.2%
Poverty Rate
Belgium: 15.1%
USA: 15.1%
Gini Index
Belgium: 25.9 (8th most equal out of 144 countries tracked)
USA: 45 (43rd most unequal out of 144 countries tracked)
So average income is a bit higher in the U.S. Unemployment is fairly high in Belgium, but the poverty rate happens to be identical for the most recent statistics. The U.S. is much more unequal (Belgium is right up there with the most equal countries in the world, including the Scandinavian countries.) So it is a little hard to see the U.S. having the moral high ground when it comes to poverty or inequality. And yet our media is pointing to poverty and inequality as the reasons for the violence in Belgium. I suppose it is possible that the poverty and violence that does exist disproportionately involves one ethnic group. But that too is true of the United States.
Let’s look at one more set of statistics which I pointed out recently – deaths from violent assault happen at more than double the rate in the U.S. than they do in Belgium. So the body count is actually much higher here. It is just less shocking because we have come to take the daily violence on our streets as normal, which is sad.
In Nation on the Take, Wendell Potter and Nick Peniman talk about the extent to which the U.S. political system has been hijacked to serve the interests of big business.
On campaign finance:
It is the knowledge that an elected official has of who is writing the check, who’s going to be there if and when this person decides to run for reelection, that they can expect another campaign check if they have demonstrated that they are voting the way the donor wants…One of the things I used to do in my job in the insurance industry was administer the political action committee and there’s a lot of thought that goes into who you write checks to, and you want to make sure that you’re writing checks to people who can be persuaded to see things from your perspective and vote for the things that you want them to or vote against things you are not supporting when the time comes.
On the finance industry:
Their contributions have been extensive and continue to be so and certainly the legislation that was finally approved by Congress, the Dodd-Frank Act, and other pieces of legislation that have been proposed to regulate the financial industry were written to a large extent by the lobbyists for financial institutions. And we point out in the book how the interest of the banks and mortgage companies were served first, and the challenges and the difficulties that a lot of average homeowners are having even yet today to keep their homes out of foreclosure… I remember watching Bill Moyers’ show a number of years ago when he had Gretchen Morgenson on, the chief financial reporter for The New York Times, and when she was asked whether or not Dodd-Frank had tackled the big stuff, she said, “No, absolutely not. It hasn’t and we could likely have another financial crisis as a result.” And when asked why, she said, “Because the banks have hundreds of lobbyists in Washington and the American people have none.”
On the pharmaceutical industry:
Despite the promises that Barack Obama had made when he was running for president that at the very least Medicare should have the ability to negotiate with drug companies to lower prices for Medicare beneficiaries — and he also campaigned on making it lawful for Americans to reimport medications from Canada where drugs are a lot cheaper — despite those campaign promises, President Obama gave both of those up under intense pressure from the pharmaceutical industry to be able to get something passed…Yes, few people realize that even though the pharmaceutical industry talks a great deal about how much they spend on research and development, the companies spend far more on sales and marketing than research. In fact, most of the research is done at taxpayers’ expense by governmental or quasigovernmental entities like the National Institutes of Health and universities that get funding from the government. So much of the research is done at the taxpayers’ expense, and rightfully so. But the companies themselves spend relatively little on research. They take the research typically and invest in the development of medications but most of the prescription medications are developed at publicly funded institutions. And in a sense we pay twice as a consequence. We pay for the research as taxpayers and of course we pay dearly whenever we need the medication.
On the food industry:
We want our kids to eat healthy, period. That should just be a no-brainer, a fait accompli in a good society. But instead, because of the power of money in politics, it becomes hyperpoliticized, a massive battle with all kinds of very powerful people who make a lot of money trying to manipulate the food items that show up on our kids’ plates at their school cafeteria.
We use numerical climate simulations, paleoclimate data, and modern observations to study the effect of growing ice melt from Antarctica and Greenland. Meltwater tends to stabilize the ocean column, inducing amplifying feedbacks that increase subsurface ocean warming and ice shelf melting. Cold meltwater and induced dynamical effects cause ocean surface cooling in the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic, thus increasing Earth’s energy imbalance and heat flux into most of the global ocean’s surface. Southern Ocean surface cooling, while lower latitudes are warming, increases precipitation on the Southern Ocean, increasing ocean stratification, slowing deepwater formation, and increasing ice sheet mass loss. These feedbacks make ice sheets in contact with the ocean vulnerable to accelerating disintegration. We hypothesize that ice mass loss from the most vulnerable ice, sufficient to raise sea level several meters, is better approximated as exponential than by a more linear response. Doubling times of 10, 20 or 40 years yield multi-meter sea level rise in about 50, 100 or 200 years. Recent ice melt doubling times are near the lower end of the 10–40-year range, but the record is too short to confirm the nature of the response. The feedbacks, including subsurface ocean warming, help explain paleoclimate data and point to a dominant Southern Ocean role in controlling atmospheric CO2, which in turn exercised tight control on global temperature and sea level. The millennial (500–2000-year) timescale of deep-ocean ventilation affects the timescale for natural CO2 change and thus the timescale for paleo-global climate, ice sheet, and sea level changes, but this paleo-millennial timescale should not be misinterpreted as the timescale for ice sheet response to a rapid, large, human-made climate forcing. These climate feedbacks aid interpretation of events late in the prior interglacial, when sea level rose to +6–9 m with evidence of extreme storms while Earth was less than 1 °C warmer than today. Ice melt cooling of the North Atlantic and Southern oceans increases atmospheric temperature gradients, eddy kinetic energy and baroclinicity, thus driving more powerful storms. The modeling, paleoclimate evidence, and ongoing observations together imply that 2 °C global warming above the preindustrial level could be dangerous. Continued high fossil fuel emissions this century are predicted to yield (1) cooling of the Southern Ocean, especially in the Western Hemisphere; (2) slowing of the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, warming of the ice shelves, and growing ice sheet mass loss; (3) slowdown and eventual shutdown of the Atlantic overturning circulation with cooling of the North Atlantic region; (4) increasingly powerful storms; and (5) nonlinearly growing sea level rise, reaching several meters over a timescale of 50–150 years. These predictions, especially the cooling in the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic with markedly reduced warming or even cooling in Europe, differ fundamentally from existing climate change assessments. We discuss observations and modeling studies needed to refute or clarify these assertions.
Citation: Hansen, J., Sato, M., Hearty, P., Ruedy, R., Kelley, M., Masson-Delmotte, V., Russell, G., Tselioudis, G., Cao, J., Rignot, E., Velicogna, I., Tormey, B., Donovan, B., Kandiano, E., von Schuckmann, K., Kharecha, P., Legrande, A. N., Bauer, M., and Lo, K.-W.: Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming could be dangerous, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 16, 3761-3812, doi:10.5194/acp-16-3761-2016, 2016.
Some people are raising questions about pedestrians. Well clearly, you can’t do this around pedestrians. It has to be elevated, underground, or on the edge of town. Notice I am not suggesting we send people through underground tunnels or over bridges. It is time for we flesh and blood humans to reclaim the surface of our cities!
Michael Pollan has written an enormous article in the New Yorker on medical research into psychedelics. They were banned in the U.S. in 1970 as having no legitimate medical uses, but that is changing now with some researchers are using them to treat depression, post-traumatic stress, and to ease suffering near the end of life. It’s so long I don’t know what part of it to quote.
I had a relatively common, relatively easily curable form of cancer when I was a kid. And with apologies to people out there who have far more horrible, deadly forms of cancer, it was hell. Beyond all the physical pain and psychological stress involved for me and my parents, the worst parts were sheer boredom (hours of waiting, followed by hours of hydration, followed by hours of intravenous drip for a routine out-patient chemotherapy session every other week), and extreme nausea that lasted for days which they had absolutely no effective drugs for (this was 1987, and I think the situation has improved today.) But the idea that there might be effective and low-risk ways to reduce that suffering, like controlled doses of marijuana or LSD under a doctor’s supervision for example, and that these treatments have been denied suffering people for decades, is shameful.
The Economist “Intelligence Unit” issues a top ten list of global risks each month. The high probability and high impact ones include severe recession and debt crises in Asia, military tension between the U.S. and Russia, and a breakup of the E.U. Donald Trump makes the list as high impact but only moderate probability:
In the event of a Trump victory, his hostile attitude to free trade, and alienation of Mexico and China in particular, could escalate rapidly into a trade war – and at the least scupper the Trans-Pacific Partnership between the US and 11 other American and Asian states signed in February 2016. His militaristic tendencies towards the Middle East (and ban on all Muslim travel to the US) would be a potent recruitment tool for jihadi groups, increasing their threat both within the region and beyond.
Terrorism, U.S.-China confrontation, and a sudden oil price shock make the list lower down as potentially severe but less likely.