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.

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.

teeth: miracle or weakness of evolution?

I’ve always thought that teeth might be the weakest point of the human body. Why did our teeth evolve to be made of calcium, which dissolves in acid, when pretty much all our food is acidic? Why do we have to strap metal torture devices to children’s teeth for years just for them to be reasonably straight? Why don’t animals seem to have these problems?

This article in Scientific American sings the praises of teeth. It argues that, like many of our other organs and systems, our modern lives just aren’t what they evolved to deal with. It basically comes down to the idea that our food is too sweet and too soft.

The evolutionary history of our teeth explains not only why they are so strong but also why they fall short today. The basic idea is that structures evolve to operate within a specific range of environmental conditions, which in the case of our teeth include the chemicals and bacteria in the mouth, as well as strain and abrasion. It follows that changes to the oral environment can catch our teeth off guard. Such is the case with our modern diets, which are unlike any in the history of life on our planet. The resulting mismatch between our biology and our behavior explains the dental caries (cavities), impacted wisdom teeth and other orthodontic problems that afflict us.

Scientific American

I admit, I don’t like working for my food – I like boneless, seedless, shell-less everything. My teeth may have paid the price.

integrating movement ecology and biodiversity research

This article talks about two sub-disciplines of ecology that have developed independently and would benefit from more integration. One is about the movement of individual animals, whether natural or fragmented/impacted by humans. The other is about the variety of organisms and how they interact with each other in habitats.

Editorial: thematic series “Integrating movement ecology with biodiversity research”

Bridging the gap between biodiversity research and movement ecology is possible. First integrations demonstrated that individual movement capacities and strategies are critical in determining the persistence of species and communities in fragmented landscapes, with changing climatic conditions, or in the presence of invasive species. At the same time, the ever-increasing human impact on nature puts long-established movement patterns in jeopardy, and organismal movement is changing perceivably across scales. Yet, a full-fledged integration of movement ecology and biodiversity research is still in its infancy. Empirically, we need more studies that not only focus on the movement of individuals, but also how they interact, while moving, with their environment and with other individuals, including their own and other species. From a theoretical viewpoint, there is a lack of modelling approaches that integrate individual movement and its consequences with population and community dynamics.

Movement Ecology

This could potentially be helpful at a time when remaining natural habitats are becoming increasingly fragmented, and are interspersed with agricultural, urban and suburban environments. All this could be optimized, given the right theory. Professional and political understanding and willingness to act would have to follow, of course, but doing the science would be a necessary first step.

Technosols

A technosol is an artificially created planting/structural medium from manmade materials, such as construction debris and compost. This article from Ecological Engineering journal says a mix of 20% “excavated deep horizons” (in layman’s terms, I think this is just dirt from construction sites), 70% crushed concrete, and 10% compost might work. If we truly want green cities, and we don’t want to reduce natural habitats to wastelands by harvesting materials from them to green our cities, this could be a good approach.

May 2020 in Review

You can’t say that 2020 has not been interesting so far. The Covid-19 saga continued throughout May. I certainly continued to think about it, including a fun quote from The Stand, but my mind began turning to other topics.

 

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • Potential for long-term drought in some important food-producing regions around the globe should be ringing alarm bells. It’s a good thing that our political leaders’ crisis management skills have been tested by shorter-term, more obvious crises and they have passed with flying colors…doh!

Most hopeful story:

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • There are unidentified flying objects out there. They may or may not be aliens, that has not been identified. But they are objects, they are flying, and they are unidentified.

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.