August 2023 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Immigration pressure and anti-immigration politics are already a problem in the U.S. and Europe, and climate change is going to make it worse. The 2023 WEF Global Risks Report agrees that “large scale involuntary migration” is going to be up there as an issue. We should not be angry at immigrants, we should be angry at Exxon and the rest of the energy industry, which made an intentional choice not only to directly cause all this but to prevent governments from even understanding the problem let alone doing anything to solve it. We should be very, very angry! Are there any talented politicians out there who know how to stoke anger and channel it for positive change, or is it just the evil genocidal impulses you know how to stoke?

Most hopeful story: Peak natural gas demand could happen by 2030, with the shift being to nuclear and renewables.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: There are a number of theories on why “western elites” have not been (perceived to be) effective in responding to crises in recent years and decades. Many have to do with institutional power dynamics, where the incentives of the individual to gain power within the institution do not align with the stated goals of the institution. Like for example, not killing everyone. The possible silver lining would be that better institutions could be designed where incentives aligned. I have an alternate, or possibly complementary, theory that there has been a decline in system thinking and moral thinking. Our leaders aren’t educated to see the systems and or think enough about whether their decisions are on the side of right or wrong.

RFK Jr.? Michelle Obama?

There’s talk of a viable RFK Jr. candidacy and even a Trump-RFK Jr. ticket. I first became aware of him many years ago when he was talking about mercury poisoning in Rolling Stone. I am concerned about mercury, and lead, and possibly even floride, but his grasp of science turned out to be bogus. Unless you believe there is a vast conspiracy to cover up the fact that we are all being poisoned. I don’t think so. We are being exposed to a vast variety of chemicals in modern industrialized countries and we should do more to understand and control their effects.

I haven’t looked into his Covid vaccine denialism much. If the point is that no vaccine is risk-free, sure, but this vaccine clearly saved tens of millions of lives worldwide. And the technology holds great promise to cure a wide range of diseases including many types of cancer. It also holds perils from (more?) lab leaks to bioterrorism to biological warfare.

Happy topics. The problem with RFK Jr. even if you read things he has written or things written about him and are tempted to nod your head, is…it is impossible to listen to him talk. Seriously – give it a try. It’s just too awkward to even contemplate. He makes W. Bush or even Trump look like a slick public speaker.

Michelle Obama? I don’t know. People might vote for her but (1) she is not a professional politician and (2) she has said a million times she is not interested. She is basically a celebrity with some name recognition.

In a country of 332 million, there have to be some people with (1) charisma, (2) leadership and public speaking ability, and (3) ideas. These three things do not preclude corruption and evil of course, but they are a starting point. Will the real potential leaders please stand up?

propaganda and the media’s Israel-Palestine coverage

This FAIR article lists some propaganda techniques it says the media uses to bias Israel-Palestine coverage. I am not taking a political stand here on the basis of my limited knowledge of these issues, but rather taking note of the propaganda techniques themselves. It is a useful skill in today’s world to be able to spot propaganda. The bold-faced headers are my paraphrasing of what the article presents, while the remaining text is my own analysis.

  1. Disproportionately presenting position statements made by one side or the other, or interviewing individuals representing one side or the other. Corporations and governments are well aware that “press releases” become pre-packaged news for the cash strapped and possibly lazy media to use with minimal effort. So the better organized side with deeper pockets is going to get more coverage. Sure there are journalistic ethics, but economics is the stronger force, so it becomes an arms race where everybody hires “communications” specialists and competes to get their version of a story out. The news coverage then goes to the highest bidder.
  2. Using words that do not assign blame for violence, such as “clash” rather than “assault”. We see examples in the local U.S. media too, where street violence is caused by “criminals” or “gangs” but vehicular homicide, negligent road design, and non-enforcement of traffic safety laws are portrayed as “accidents”.
  3. Excessive use of the passive voice. “People were killed” used more often when talking about violence affecting one side or the other.
  4. Covering deaths on one side much more than the other, or not covering deaths on one side at all. We certainly see this with U.S. coverage of our foreign wars and local violence. I think there is also just a sensationalist aspect to this where unfamiliar acts of violence (a horrific suburban school shooting) are covered disproportionately to all the other acts of violence around us (again, deaths in and around motor vehicles possibly being the most glaring.) I think the media could combat this somewhat by giving more facts and figures on death and violence to give context to the more sensational, anecdotal stories. And a lot of this could be automated pretty easily. For example, if the media is covering the latest incident involving an autonomous vehicle, AI could very easily put national crime, violence, and transportation safety data stats at their fingertips. This is routinely done in the sports world (this is the 18th time such and such a combination of random events has happened on a Thursday in June is 1976…).
  5. “Sidelining international law”. In the case of Israel, there is somewhat of an international consensus that some of the government’s actions are illegal. Palestine is also recognized as a state by quite a few UN member states. We don’t hear much about this in the U.S. media. Again, it is not hard to have facts and figures provided by international non-governmental agencies handy. Although, in the U.S. we have propaganda causing us to discount information coming from the UN.
  6. “Reversing victim and victimizer”. This has to do at least partially with how “protests”, “demonstrations”, “looting”, and “riots” are covered. In the U.S., one example of this was the Hurricane Katrina coverage, although I think the media coverage of the 2020 George Floyd protests was a bit more even-handed. There is a certain element of media and corporate self-licking ice cream cone on this though, where they all stand around in a circle patting each other’s backs while continuing to rig elections for the rich and powerful and not deliver concrete benefits and services to the working people of this country.

human population

This video shows the growth in human population throughout history, complete with maps of where the major cities and empires were.

American Museum of Natural History

I think this would be an interesting way to teach a world history class, with both some multicultural street cred (Romans, Chinese, Indians, Mayans) and some practical geography and quantitative critical thinking skills.

The idea that population is going to shrink is interesting. It just doesn’t make sense that this has to represent doomsday. Just by focusing on per-capital wealth and income as a metric, rather than total national wealth and income, we can try to come up with ways to improve the quality of human lives rather than just increasing total money spent, activity, and environmental impact ceaselessly. What would this mean for “markets”? I’m not sure, but if we can accelerate productivity growth, and spread the gains fairly among the shrinking pool of humans, I don’t see why it has to be so bad.

autonomous vehicle brakes and gently bumps fire truck going through a red light on the wrong side of the street

Every minor autonomous vehicle incident is headline news, while meanwhile we just accept 40,000 Americans (and something like a million human beings worldwide) per year dying in and around cars operated by human drivers. It’s not that we should accept the risk posed by autonomous vehicles, it’s that we should recognize that it something like an order of magnitude lower than the risk of human-operated vehicles, which is huge. Every time the news reports one of these incidents, they should tell us how many people, including children, were killed and gruesomely injured since the last time they reported such an incident. We also need safe street designs and we need to stop pretending vehicles designed to be safer in highway collisions are also safe in urban environments with pedestrians and bicyclists. Something like golf carts traveling 15-20 mph would be a much safer, cheaper, convenient, and less polluting way to get around in the city.

There Be Dragons: my 2022-2023 fantasy journey

Stop reading here if you don’t care about my fantasy (novel reading) journey. I read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings probably as a pre-teen in the late 1980s or so, and loved every minute of them. I was talking to a young person recently who has not read them and does not have any interest in them, and it kind of made me sad. I would not be the same person if I had not read them. Sadly, I don’t think anyone else can ever live up to Tolkien’s legacy, not even authors who put “R.R.” in their names and then don’t finish their books (I liked Ice and Fire as far as it went and I hope it eventually concludes). But anyway, here’s what I’ve read over the past year or so.

The Silmarillion: I finally went back and read this. I supposed it was in the back of my mind from the recent Amazon series (which I thought was decent and hope will continue) and from the mention of it in Ready Player Two. The Silmarillion is long and somewhat hard to read, but it really helped me appreciate the incredible depth of the fantasy world that Tolkien created. Long as it is, I did not appreciate before that the Silmarillion is only a summary of the incredibly deep alternate universe Tolkien created. He must have spent more time in that alternate universe than in this one. An interesting thing about the Silmarillion is the idea of a mischievous creator god who created evil on purpose. Was this for his amusement. He also created humans and elves, and we eventually learn that humans return to be with him after death. Elves do not die from old age or disease, but they die in battle, but they go somewhere but they don’t get to be with the creator god. Dwarves were created by a lower level of gods akin to angels, without the creator god’s permission. Orcs were created by the evil demon-like god in “mockery” of the elves.

Earthsea: I read the five-part Earthsea series by Ursula K. LeGuin. I’ve heard this described as “the other” great fantasy series of the 20th century. Maybe, but not on a par with Tolkien. I liked it.

Land Fit for Heroes: Since I love Altered Carbon, I will read anything by Richard K. Morgan. I enjoyed this, although I found the ending leaving me to piece some things together on my own, in a classic William Gibson move. Well, Morgan is clearly Gibson-inspired.

What to Middle Earth, Ice and Fire, Earthsea, and Land Fit for Heroes all have in common? DRAGONS!!! So I learned that Rule #1 of fantasy writing, should I ever choose to undertake it, is there have to be dragons.

Is “green growth” possible?

Green growth is the holy grail where human wellbeing is able to grow exponentially over the long term without depleting natural resources including the natural environment’s ability to assimilate our wastes. I won’t claim to understand all the words in this abstract, but the author is basically coming up with a big fat NO.

Is green growth possible and even desirable in a spaceship economy?

There seems to be a consensus among many growth and resource economists that perpetual growth can be ensured if it gets increasingly resource-efficient and if growth focuses on creating values, a result derived by models using production functions that allow asymptotically complete decoupling of the economy from its resource base by substituting natural resources through physical and knowledge capital. This growth process can be called green growth. The following paper attempts to show, within the framework of an semi-endogenous growth model using a linear-exponential production function (Linex function) with bounded resource efficiency, that the accumulation of physical and knowledge capital to substitute natural resources cannot guarantee green growth. As the population grows, per capita income decreases, and the economy’s capital base decays. In addition, an ecological displacement effect resulting from the biophysical embeddedness of the economy further exacerbates the result. Physical capital pushes back the natural spaces necessary to regenerate natural services and resources and can, therefore, not be accumulated endlessly. A comparison with standard resource models shows that this displacement effect also limits growth for models with production functions with low elasticities of substitution. Finally, the analysis of transitory dynamics addresses aspects of intergenerational equality in a limited biosphere.

I’ll take a crack at interpreting this. The human economy cannot be fully separate from the natural environment because it will always result in some physical displacement, even if pollution could be eliminated. Well, what if all human enterprise were built on stilts well above the earth? All food would also be grown on these stilts, all materials recovered and cycled endlessly. This would shade out natural ecosystems, but you could use giant space mirrors to beam in sunlight that would otherwise have uselessly bypassed the earth (which is all but a vanishingly tiny fraction of sunlight). Now, you might say why not just go live in orbit? But the advantage of my scheme is that you can just take an elevator down to the earth, and the entire earth is a park for your enjoyment. What about tigers, you say? Well, we will just invite those rolling bubble things from Jurassic Park.

Are markets underestimating climate risk?

This sprawling Naked Capitalism article says yes, basically because investors don’t consider the long term. But if it were really true that most investors are not aware or not correctly valuing the risk, a small minority of investors should in theory be able to make money on that and bring markets back into equilibrium. Maybe the “long term” is just too long for mortal human investors to consider? But corporations and other institutions like pension funds are not mortal humans. Fossil fuel companies could try to exploit these opportunities to hedge their bets while they continue to cast doubt on the science and technology needed to get out of the mess.

How would an investor exploit other investors’ underestimation of climate risk, if this actually exists? Short-sell companies insuring homes, businesses, and lives in coastal and fire-prone areas? Buy construction and engineering companies that will get our tax money to clean up after disasters? Military and security contractors who build walls and detention camps (a morbid thought, but mass migration driven by climate panic seems likely to hit us at some point). Clean energy? Nuclear energy? It’s hard to guess and time these things – basically comes down to luck, and there are always going to be people with deeper pockets and political influence to keep us small-time investors from getting ahead. Diversifying across asset classes and internationally, and not having all our savings tied up in our houses, still seem like the best options for us little people.

Venice flood protection

The Italian government has completed an $8 billion coastal flood protection system. It is interesting because it is submerged under normal sea conditions and can be raised when a storm is coming in.

Youtube

$8 billion sounds like a lot of money, but perhaps it is not to protect a major coastal city and international cultural treasure. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has spent $14 billion to protect New Orleans and is undertaking a projected $31 billion project to protect Houston (and projections have a way of running over). These are guaranteed to be far uglier projects than the Venice one. These U.S. cities may have “benefitted” from being the first to be devastated by coastal storms in the climate collapse era. Do we really think the U.S. Congress will not pony up even more enormous sums to protect New York, Washington D.C., and San Francisco when the time comes? They will. Cities with major military bases like Norfolk, Virginia and San Diego might make the cut. Smaller but still major cities with less political clout may have more trouble getting their fair share. Boston and Miami might make the cut. Major cities with less political clout, like Philadelphia and Baltimore, might not make the cut. And all this money Congress will find to protect major urban areas, while it will have some economic multiplier effect, will be money not spent on other priorities.

Whoever is Responsible for The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, LOCK THEM UP!

This thing is a major serial killer of around 40,000 Americans every year, including children, and gets away with it! Essentially, it sets the design standards that determine what road and street designs can get federal funding, and it ends up flowing down to a lot of state and local design standards. Making the relative modest changes recommended here by the National Association of City Transportation Officials would help, but really I feel like this is thinking pretty small. Maybe if we held the known serial killer, the Federal Highway Administration, to account it might deter the many copycat killers known as state and local transportation agencies.

NACTO

This also reminded me of this Freakonomics podcast: The Perfect Crime. If you want to kill somebody and get away with it, just run over a pedestrian with your car.