The Nudgelords

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

Comments at Andrew Gelman:

* At this point I’m pretty familiar with Cass Sunstein. I’ve participated in a multi-day workshop with him, read some of his books and many of his articles, and have used his writings frequently in my teaching. I don’t plan on reading his new book since I think I already know what he will say about almost any topic.

There are two central legs (stool minus one) to his thinking. The first is that he fully embraces a conception in which the ideal rational actor is counterposed to the empirical actor burdened by nonrational heuristics. His understanding of rationality is not simply abstract in the sense of consequentialist decision theory but operationalized via orthodox welfare economics. All choices are understood as consumption decisions over which each individual has or should have a consistent preference map. Our truest guide to well-being are the consumption choices people make when not under the influence of heuristics, which is most of them. Thus monetization as a framework for cost-benefit analysis of the remaining choices is theoretically grounded. There is also a libertarian bias to welfare economics insofar as it uses individual utility-maximizing as its benchmark, understanding individuality as possession of one’s own preference map. The honoring of individuals as a moral and political value—liberalism—is therefore no more or less than respecting their preferences. I will admit that Sunstein has helped me understand the limitations of welfare economics to the point where I would now do without it altogether.

The other leg, which has made him a frequent subject of this blog, is that he shares the delight that Andrew has recognized in many economists (and economist followers) in showing that people are less rational than they think they are. Sunstein and those of a similar bent regard themselves as experts in rationality, equipped to detect lapses among the less knowledgeable. Identifying such lapses and coming up with policy tweaks to remedy them is how they see their job. (Designing nudges is one strategy but hardly the only one, and Sunstein’s advocacy of cost-benefit analysis goes far beyond nudging.) As Andrew has pointed out, identifying the foibles of others gives people like Sunstein enormous pleasure, so much that they seize on every research paper that claims to have found a new irrationality, whether or not the evidence stands up to scrutiny. I won’t stoop to pointing out the irony here….

* Basically – famous/influential people have an impact because they have optimized, at least in part, for becoming and staying famous and influential. This might necessarily (though I don’t actually know that it must) make them worse at getting things right. There was a recent Scott Alexander post on this that I thought was pretty good:

* WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless. Its most famous problem is that whatever your symptoms, it’ll tell you that you have cancer. But the closer you look, the more problems you notice.

* Dr. Anthony Fauci is the WebMD of people.

At least this is the impression I get from this rather hostile biography. He’s a very smart and competent doctor, who wanted to make a positive difference in the US medical establishment, and who quickly learned how to play the game of flattering and placating the right people in order to keep power. In the end, he got power, sometimes he used it well, and other times he struck compromises between using it well and doing dumb things that he needed to do to keep his position.

* I can’t tell you how many times over the past year all the experts, the CDC, the WHO, the New York Times, et cetera, have said something (or been silent about something in a suggestive way), and then some blogger I trusted said the opposite, and the blogger turned out to be right. I realize this kind of thing is vulnerable to selection bias, but it’s been the same couple of bloggers throughout, people who I already trusted and already suspected might be better than the experts in a lot of ways. Zvi Mowshowitz is the first name to come to mind, though there are many others…

When Zvi asserts an opinion, he has only one thing he’s optimizing for – being right – and he does it well.

When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things – being right, and keeping power. If she doesn’t optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she’s trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.

The way I imagine this is that Zvi reads some papers on whether the coronavirus has airborne transmission, sees the direction they’re leaning, and announces on his blog that it probably has airborne transmission.

The Director of the CDC reads those same papers. But some important Senator says that if airborne transmission is announced, important industries in his state will go bankrupt. Citizens Against Lockdowns argues that the CDC already screwed up by stressing the later-proven-not-to-exist fomite-based transmission, ignoring the needs of ordinary people in favor of a bias towards imagining hypothetical transmission mechanisms that never materialize; some sympathetic Congressman tells the director that if she makes that same mistake a second time, she’s out. One of the papers saying that airborne transmission is impossible comes from Stanford, and the Director owes the dean of Stanford’s epidemiology department a favor for helping gather support for one of her policies once. So the Director puts out a press release saying the evidence is not quite strong enough to say airborne transmission definitely happens, and they’ll review it further.

* Dr. Fauci is able to make decisions that will affect billions of dollars in wealth, Senate seats, Twitter likes, and other extremely valuable resources. Thousands of people who would prefer that they get the dollars and seats and likes will be gunning for him. In order to stay on that throne, Dr. Fauci will need to get and keep lots of powerful allies (plus be the sort of person who thinks in terms of how to get allies rather than being minimaxed for COVID-prediction).

This interferes with his COVID predicting ability, but in the current system there’s no alternative.

* Think of centers of expertise like the CDC or the IGM Economists Panel as giant systems for disentangling corruption and power. Their job is to produce one or two people who can get in front of the population and say something which has some resemblance to reality, even though the entire rest of the economy and body politic is trying to corrupt them. They…actually do sort of okay. Anthony Fauci is neither Attila the Hun nor Trofim Lysenko. He’s a kind of bumbling careerist with a decent understanding of epidemiology and a heart that’s more or less in the right place. The whole scientific-technocratic complex is a machine which takes Moloch as input and manages – after spending billions of dollars and the careers of thousands of hard-working public servants – to produce Anthony Fauci as output. This should be astonishing, and we are insufficiently grateful.

Posted in Andrew Gelman | Comments Off on The Nudgelords

Figureheads, ghost-writers and pseudonymous quant bloggers: The recent evolution of authorship in science publishing

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

According to Wikipedia: “Bruce Graham Charlton is a retired British medical doctor and was Visiting Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham.[1] Until April 2019, he was Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at Newcastle University.[2] Charlton was editor of the controversial and non-peer reviewed journal Medical Hypotheses from 2003 to 2010.”

Charlton co-authored a 2016 book with Edward Dutton — The Genius Famine: why we need geniuses, why they’re dying out, and why we must rescue them.

In 2008, Dr. Charlton published:

* Traditionally, science has been published only under the proper names and postal addresses of the scientists who did the work. This is no longer the case, and over recent decades science authorship has fundamentally changed its character. At one extreme, prestigious scientists writing from high status institutions are used as mere figureheads to publish research that has been performed, analyzed and ‘ghost-written’ by commercial organizations. At the other extreme ‘quant bloggers’ are publishing real science with their personal identity shielded by pseudonyms and writing from internet addresses that give no indication of their location or professional affiliation. Yet the paradox is that while named high status scientists from famous institutions are operating with suspect integrity (e.g. covertly acting as figureheads) and minimal accountability (i.e. failing to respond to substantive criticism); pseudonymous bloggers – of mostly unknown identity, unknown education or training, and unknown address – are publishing interesting work and interacting with their critics on the internet. And at the same time as ‘official’ and professional science is increasingly timid careerist and dull; the self-organized, amateur realm of science blogs displays curiosity, scientific motivation, accountability, responsibility – and often considerable flair and skill. Quant bloggers and other internet scientists are, however, usually dependent on professional scientists to generate databases. But professional science has become highly constrained by non-scientific influences: increasingly sluggish, rigid, bureaucratic, managerial, and enmeshed with issues of pseudo-ethics, political correctness, public relations, politics and marketing. So it seems that professional science needs the quant bloggers. One possible scenario is that professional scientists may in future continue to be paid to do the plodding business of generating raw data (dull work that no one would do unless they were paid); but these same professional scientists (functioning essentially as either project managers or technicians) may be found to lack the boldness, flair, sheer ‘smarts’ or genuine interest in the subject to make sense of what they have discovered. Some branches of future science may then come to depend on a swarm of gifted ‘amateurs’ somewhat like the current quant bloggers; for analysis and integration of their data, for understanding its implications, and for speculating freely about the potential applications.

* Over the past few decades, these ideas of personal responsibility and accountability seem to have broken down – at least in medical science. Scientists’ names no longer guarantee the provenance of the work published under that name, and a specific
name and address no longer implies accountability. Especially has accountability broken down in relation to the highest status scientists.

From numerous informal observations over the past two decades, it seems clear that high status scientists are no longer required to respond to requests for clarification or to published criticism, but can ignore it with impunity. The traditional default that criticism was regarded as correct unless it was refuted, no longer seems to apply to high status scientists when a criticism comes from a lower-status scientist. This applies even when clarification is clearly necessary, when the criticism is potentially devastating, and even when critical communications are published as articles or correspondence in high impact journals. The fact is that, nowadays, high status scientists are seldom sanctioned in any way for ignoring criticism by the scientific community.

The current default assumption seems to be along the lines that high status scientists are always right unless and until conclusively demonstrated otherwise – in other words, high status scientists are now regarded as innocent until proved guilty. So that science published under the name of high status scientists from prestigious institutions is apparently regarded as intrinsically correct until such time as it is proven false. And high status scientists are now placed under no obligation to co-operate with their critics in discovering the truth – in the first place high status scientists usually do not need to acknowledge or respond at all to criticism; if they respond they are not compelled to provide relevant refutation but are allowed to bluster, change the subject, and make ad hominem attacks on their critics; requests for extra methodological detail or raw data can be ignored. Sometimes, criticism is met with legal threats – for example accusations of libel.

* The deep, underlying cause of the immunity to criticism of high status scientists is probably the greater role of peer review in science, and the domination of peer review by a minority (‘cartel’) of high status scientists. Peer review mechanisms are now used not only to evaluate completed science, but pre-emptively in allocating resources. Modern science uses peer review mechanisms at many levels: defining overall research strategies, awarding research grants, granting ethical permission to do research, journal refereeing processes prior to publication, organizing conferences. . . indeed it is hard to find an area of science which is not dominated by peer review. This means that a low status scientist can have their career damaged (perhaps without knowing it) if s/he makes a powerful enemy of a high status scientist who is influential within the all-important peer review system. The problem is that peer review processes are systematically biased to give more weight to negative than positive evaluations (ie. a bad report has a greater impact on the review process than a good report [2]) – so having a high status enemy involved in the peer review system is likely to have a significantly damaging impact on a scientist’s career.

The result is that high status scientists are feared to the extent that the mass of lower-ranked scientists will not call them to account for their errors and misdemeanours in case they provoke reprisals via the peer review systems. Another very important result of the centrality of peer review is that while traditional science was mostly a marketplace of ideas, modern science is dominated by a ‘cartel’ of scientists who are powerful within peer review and have quasimonopolistic power. (In economics a cartel usually refers to a group of persons or organizations who cooperate to act as if a monopoly; to control production
and prices and to protect themselves against competition, for example by lobbying government to introduce favourable regulations.)

* It is a bizarre paradox of modern science that while named high status scientists with postal addresses at prestigious institutions are operating with suspect integrity and minimal accountability; by contrast, science bloggers – of (mostly) pseudonymous and unknown identity, unknown education or training, and writing from unknown addresses – are nonetheless publishing interesting work and having exciting interactions, on the internet. The recent emergence of (frequently pseudonymous) ‘quant bloggers’ and other internet scientists is a phenomenon at the opposite extreme from the high status scientists who seem to be operating as individuals but in fact function as ‘front-men’ (or women) for anonymous teams with inscrutable agendas.

In what follows I provide only a very selective picture of blog science, based on my personal interests and tastes, and noting only the blogs that I have been reading for months or years. Clearly there are many, many other examples – but the blogosphere is now so vast that no individual can experience and evaluate more than a tiny fraction of the output.

The term ‘quant blogger’ (i.e. quantitative analysis blogger) was invented by Steve Sailer [8] who is the practicing ‘blogfather’ of an interconnected group of mostly pseudonymous bloggers that have been in some way inspired by Sailer’s example and his (often distinctly ‘non-PC’) interests in issues such as IQ; immigration; evolution; education; politics and sports – often analyzed by sex, class and race. Sailer has blogged many interesting quantitative analyses, including an influential hypothesis of the relationship between ‘affordable family formation’ and politics in the USA.

The Sailer-influenced quant bloggers include the pseudonymous Razib who hosts GNXP (Gene Expression) which includes several other quant bloggers such as the pseudonymous Agnostic and (his real name) Jason Malloy [9]. Other pseudonymous quant bloggers in this Sailer-descended group include Inductivist [10], Half-Sigma [11] and the Audacious Epigone [12]. Unrelated, not-Sailer-connected, quant bloggers include Engram who posts almost daily quantitative analyses on mainly socio-political or policy topics [13]; and who discovered an inverse relationship between capital punishment and murder rates in four developed nations. La Griffe du Lion has focused on IQ [14] and developed many hypotheses including the ‘smart fraction’ theory of economic development. The Climate Audit blog has been influential in its field, and is associated with discrediting the ‘hockey stick’ graph that was supposed to illustrate climate change over the past millenium [15].

In most of the above examples, typically the blogger presents analysis, tabulations or graphs of already-published data sets – such as population surveys or questionnaires; or does a re-analysis of a published scientific paper; or synthesizes several
studies; or draws out applied implications of published science which are neglected (or obfuscated) by the primary authors. (Of course, quant bloggers usually also post chatty ‘opinion’ pieces and responses to current news.)

Although often the blogger’s true identify and location may be unknown, there is an accountability mechanism via the comments section of the blog which follows the primary blog posting, and potentially also by other blogs linking and critiquing the original blog. Most of the above named bloggers form a broadly-sympathetic network who comment-on and critique each others work. But the crucial point is that a quant blogger must behave such as to earn the trust of their readers – and this typically involves engaging with their critics critics, and refuting relevant criticisms to the satisfaction of their readership.

Presumably, the reason why most of these bloggers are pseudonymous is their subject matter: they are often dealing with population differences in relation to sex, class and race; focusing on controversial matters such as IQ, personality, educational achievement or crime. At present, in USA and Western Europe – and especially in universities – such issues are virtually taboo except when treated using elaborately euphemistic language and reaching politically correct conclusions [16]. This means that mainstream human sciences may err in ignoring robust, but politically-incorrect, interpretations for their data [e.g. 17].

Pseudonyms are used because scientists (and other media commentators) who work in these non-PC ‘taboo’ fields may be subject to the risk of denunciation by the media and to professional or institutional arbiters of coercive political correctness. The sanctions have ranged from the moderate unpleasantness of unpopularity among professional colleagues, up to deliberate misrepresentation and false ascription of opinions or motivations, mob-vilification, hate campaigns, persecution by employers (failure to get academic jobs, failure to get promotion or tenure, sacking etc.), legal sanctions, aggression and personal violence. Even the most distinguished scientists are vulnerable to onslaught: the hugely-influential psychologist Hans Eysenck was one of the earliest victims from the mid 1960s, the sociobiologist E.O Wilson was similarly attacked in the late 1970s, and more recently Harvard President Larry Summers and the great James D. Watson both lost their jobs after transgressing the bound of political correctness. In such a context of endemic intimidation, a scientist’s natural wish to get maximum personal credit
for their research by using their real name and address is often overwhelmed by sheer survival instinct – and pseudonyms and web addresses are regarded as safer. For such reasons, some of the most exciting and potentially important current scientific discourse is forced to be pseudonymous; even though – in a more honest, tolerant and rational world – it would surely be better to have scientific discussion between people using their real identities.

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I Love The New York Times! (6-1-21)

Posted on June 1, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 What does it mean when you don’t like the New York Times?
07:00 How Do Animals Safely Cross a Highway? Take a Look., https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/31/climate/wildlife-crossings-animals.html
10:00 Ethan Ralph vs Anthony Fauci
17:00 Lionel Nation makes fun of e-streams
25:00 How the World Ran Out of Everything, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/business/coronavirus-global-shortages.html
27:00 Disputing Racism’s Reach, Republicans Rattle American Schools, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/us/politics/critical-race-theory.html
30:00 Biden’s China Policy | John Lee, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCwG5wW-OqQ
33:30 Something Bothering You? Tell It to Woebot. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/health/artificial-intelligence-therapy-woebot.html
36:00 Editor of JAMA to Step Down Following Racist Incident, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/health/jama-bauchner-racism.html
38:00 Four Lessons From Your Anxious Brain, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/well/mind/anxiety-brain.html
41:00 The 36 Questions That Lead to Love, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/style/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.html
42:00 To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/style/modern-love-to-fall-in-love-with-anyone-do-this.html
45:00 New opportunities for the USA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nGDDIrjSxk
53:00 7 Podcasts to Soothe Your Back-to-Normal Anxiety, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/arts/podcasts-anxiety-covid.html
56:00 Peter Zeihan on Silicon Valley woes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nGDDIrjSxk
1:00:30 Paying More for Uber and Lyft Rides, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/30/technology/uber-lyft-surge.html
1:02:45 Jordan Peterson drops the Red Pill on woman that has hit the wall, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTtAyfJ1CiI
1:04:00 MAGA (Make America Goalless Again), https://www.takimag.com/article/maga-make-america-goalless-again/
1:12:40 Life at the Bottom | Theodore Dalrymple – Jordan B Peterson Podcast, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ET7banSeN0
1:15:00 France and Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139858
1:21:00 ‘Man who told police he fatally shot ex-Hardeeville fire chief in 2017 found not guilty’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139834
1:25:20 John Ziegler Explains Why He Believes Jerry Sandusky Is Innocent, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24rwXoJfvNM
1:28:00 Sandusky: ‘I’m attracted to young people’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF5SkaUbXuY
1:32:00 Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/04/host/303812/
2:08:00 Confrontation Talk: Arguments, Asymmetries, and Power on Talk Radio, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139829
2:10:00 Call-In Talk Radio: Compensation or Enrichment?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139785
2:19:10 Extemporaneous Blending: Conceptual Integration in Humorous Discourse from Talk Radio, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139777
2:20:00 UCSD Cognitive Science – Seana Coulson, Ph.D
2:26:40 World’s best radio host is Australian Kyle Sandilands
2:28:00 Australian Talk Radio, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139732
2:48:00 JUST BE YOURSELF? TALK RADIO PERFORMANCE AND AUTHENTIC ON-AIR SELVES, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139758
3:11:00 Eric Kaufman, author of White Shift, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/23/both-left-and-right-pratise-cancel-culture-both-should-stop

Posted in New York Times | Comments Off on I Love The New York Times! (6-1-21)

Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

Posted on June 1, 2021 by Luke Ford

Peter Zeihan writes in this 2020 book:

* The United States’ Report Card
BORDERS: Lakes, mountains, forests, deserts, and vast ocean moats surrounding the best agricultural lands and largest waterway network on the planet. Nowhere else on Earth does a territory have such a beneficial balance of good lands with great standoff distance. Americans spend little on territorial defense, freeing their military to project out .
RESOURCES: Nearly two centuries of industrialization have heavily tapped out a continent of bounty, but new technological breakthroughs continue to surprise. The most recent surprise—the shale revolution—has made the country a net oil and natural gas exporter.
DEMOGRAPHY: The American Baby Boomers—the country’s largest generation ever—are nearing mass retirement, generating a painful financial crunch. But American Boomers had kids. Lots of them. America’s Millennials may be a pain, but their numbers may just save us all. *gulp*
MILITARY MIGHT: The most powerful projection-based military in world history. With the Order ending, it has . . . nothing to do.
ECONOMY: The American economy isn’t simply the world’s largest and most diversified economic system; it is the least dependent upon the outside world for its health. The world needs the American economy to survive, not vice versa.
OUTLOOK: The Americans excel at missing opportunities due to domestic squabbling, but there is nothing in what’s left of the international system that will threaten the American heartland either militarily or economically before 2050.
IN A WORD: Detached.

* China’s Report Card
BORDERS: Vast emptiness to the west, jungles to the south, nuclear powers to the north and southwest, and superior maritime powers to the east. China doesn’t so much secure its borders as manage them the best it can.
RESOURCES: China didn’t get really serious about industrializing until the 1970s, so its local resources were all tapped more or less at once. That served China well . . . until now. China is on the verge of running out—of everything.
DEMOGRAPHY: Oy! Breakneck urbanization combined with Maoist population controls gutted the Chinese birthrate for decades. The one bright spot is that China’s demographics are not the worst in the world. Yet.
MILITARY MIGHT: China is BIG and its military is modernizing quickly, but that doesn’t mean its military is well suited to the challenges of today. Or tomorrow.
ECONOMY: The Chinese system is both highly leveraged and highly dependent upon international trends it cannot shape or preserve. Every system that has followed China’s path has crashed. So too will China.
OUTLOOK: Only Russia has worse relations with its neighbors. When the Order ends, everything that has made China successful will end with it and no one will reach out with a helping hand.
IN A WORD: Overhyped.

* Japan’s Report Card
BORDERS: Japan’s island geography provides covetable standoff distance from the region’s major land power, China. But the archipelagic nature of Japan has made intraregional connectivity costly and difficult.
RESOURCES: The most resource-poor of the world’s major powers, Japan is also located at the very end of several major supply lines. The Japanese import nearly all their energy. No potent navy, no modernized Japan.
DEMOGRAPHY: It’s not just the monarchy of Japan that’s the world’s oldest. Japan’s population is also aging, with 28 percent over age sixty-five.
MILITARY MIGHT: On paper, Japan doesn’t have a military. In reality, they are close training partners with the United States military and possess the most capable indigenous navy in Asia, arguably the second best in the world.
ECONOMY: Japan was once one of the most globally exposed industrial economies, but Japan has been in the rare position of having the capital to face its challenges head-on. The Japanese have invested heavily in automation to offset a shrinking labor pool, and have moved much of their supply chains offshore.
OUTLOOK: The Japanese have the capital, navy, technological know-how, and geographic insulation to step into the space left by a retreating United States better than any other regional power. They also don’t have a choice.
IN A WORD: Jefe.

* Russia’s Report Card
BORDERS: Russia’s borders are long and impossible to defend, prompting the Russians to endlessly expand outward until they hit significant geographic or military resistance.
RESOURCES: Russia is a huge producer of oil and natural gas, and its vast geographies sustain massive mining and even more massive grain production. Much of this activity is seasonal; most Russian territory vacillates between frozen and swampy.
DEMOGRAPHY: The horrific Soviet legacy and the post-Soviet birthrate collapse have fused with skyrocketing mortality fueled by alcoholism, heart disease, violence, tuberculosis, and HIV. Russia is suffering through a complete, multivector, unstoppable demographic collapse.
MILITARY MIGHT: Russia still invests heavily in defense, though much of the hardware is showing its age. Thirty-plus-year-old submarines and an aircraft carrier that habitually catches fire, but impressive tanks and aircraft and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal—Russia’s kit may be old, but it still packs a punch.
ECONOMY: Sanctions and an overreliance on commodity exports have made Russia struggle since the Soviet fall, but Russian geography never supported a successful, industrialized economy.
OUTLOOK: Russia is an aging, insecure, former power determined to make a last stand before it is incapable of doing so. American disengagement from the global scene couldn’t have come at a better time, but the reactivation of Russia’s traditional local foes couldn’t have come at a worse one.
IN A WORD: Panicked.

* Germany’s Report Card
BORDERS: There are few significant buffers between Germany and its western, eastern, and northern neighbors.
RESOURCES: The greatest concentration of wealth-generating navigable internal waterways in the world, the most efficient manufacturing and production systems in the world, and the best trained labor force in the world. But jack for actual physical resources.
DEMOGRAPHY: Old! So very ooooold! One of the grayest and fastest-graying populations in the world, Germany’s population is too old to consume the goods its industrial sector produces, creating a dependency on exports.
MILITARY MIGHT: Germany makes excellent tanks, diesel submarines, and electronic surveillance equipment. Unfortunately for Germany (but not Poland or Belgium or anyone else), decades of reliance on NATO and being hamstrung by the Second World War and the Cold War have left it a paper panzer.
ECONOMY: The entire German economy is predicated on leveraging its manufacturing sector to push high-quality exported goods to a globalized consumer base. In a post-Order world this will not work. At all.
OUTLOOK: Few countries are more dependent on the American-led global Order. Germany’s best backup plan—the European Union—is already falling apart. Germany needs a new way of doing things. Or an old one.
IN A WORD: Outdated.

* From a geopolitical point of view, nationalism’s defining characteristic is its capacity to better harness national power. Medieval feudalism splits capacity among the royals, the nobles, and the peasantry, with loyalty within and among the three largely determined by a system of bribes and threats. It works, but is wildly inefficient. In contrast, nationalism fuses ethnic identity directly to a centralized governing system, both eliminating the middleman and making loyalty part of the governing rationale. Such organizational slimming funnels more resources—financial and labor, in particular—to the one government that rules it all.
Nationalism took root quickly, in no small part because France’s rivers enabled the quick transmission of ideas. A single horrific bloodbath to annihilate the economic and political classes of the medieval order and France was off to the races.
The question quickly became what to do with all those newly concentrated resources. Nationalism suggests the answer. Because the nation-state is rooted in ethnicity, not everyone qualifies as “people.” Sitting not-so-comfortably on the other side of the twentieth century, you probably see where this is going. Nationalism might make for a much more powerful, capable, inclusive, and accountable state than feudalism, but it also makes it excruciatingly easy to march to war.
Empowered by the social technology of nationalism, France was the most consolidated, stable, mobilized, and potent country of the early 1800s. In contrast, the rest of Europe was politically shattered, emotionally demoralized, and in many cases militarily incompetent. Napoléon Bonaparte wielded the merger of ethnic and government interests against his unsuspecting foes like a flamethrower against soccer hooligans. In a few short years, France’s citizen armies had either conquered or forced alliance upon every country on the North European Plain, as well as Italy and Iberia, and stood at the gates of Moscow itself.
Yet the French bid didn’t simply fail, it failed catastrophically . Which brings us to the first lesson of French power: even when France has its ducks rowed up and everyone else has gone fishing, the geography of Europe—the endless Northern European Plain, the variety of highlands and peninsulas and islands—means France can never win.

* While only about 13 percent of the US economy is dependent upon imports and 8 percent on exports, the total trade flow in and out of the United States still amounts to about $4.3 trillion in commercial involvement. Total Latin American non -commodity trade is another $2.3 trillion.

* In a world of Disorder, the power balance in the Canadians’ disfavor is extreme. Working purely on population and economic strength and completely leaving aside issues of military capacity and reach, the United States outweighs Canada by a ratio of roughly ten to one. Other similarly lopsided power balances around the world include India v. Bangladesh, Japan v. Taiwan, China v. Vietnam, Brazil v. Bolivia, and Germany v. Denmark.

* Brazil’s choice is a direct, brutal one. Encourage those American business interests—the sole source of the capital that Brazil so desperately needs—and risk the country spinning apart as local oligarchs seize operational control. Or bar the Americans, and descend into such poverty that the country becomes a riotous mass. Such options feel almost . . . Chinese.

* straightforward. The nature of the Israeli state will determine future American-Israeli relations. Ever since occupying the Palestinian territories after wars in 1967 and 1973, the Israelis have wrestled with an internal, existential debate: Is Israel a democracy, a Jewish state, or should it directly control all occupied lands? So far, Israel has mostly managed all three, but demographics are swinging the argument. Higher birthrates among both the occupied Palestinians and deeply conservative Orthodox Jews means that by 2030 an enlarged Israel will be a Jewish-minority state that will not even want to converse with the Palestinians, much less grant political or territorial concessions.
The only possible outcome is a social and security management system that makes Apartheid look progressive. Apartheid South Africa enabled the country’s black population to hold jobs in white-run zones but refused integration or political rights. In contrast, in Israel the Palestinians are kept permanently in what have become massive open-air prisons.
For Americans with a sense of history or ethics or national security, this is, at best, problematic for bilateral relations. Add that Americans under age fifty have no memory of Israel battling for its life in the wars of the 1950s to 1970s, and it’s easy for the American polity to view Israel as aggressor and occupier rather than plucky upstart.
Even before economics, distance, and time suck some of the venom out of American-Iranian relations, Israel’s coming evolution means there is no way forward for Israel in which US-Israeli relations strengthen. The increasingly racial and religious diversification of the American political scene will only hasten this evolution in perceptions. The rise of American populism, particularly on the political left, has brought the questioning of the ethics of Israeli security policy into the American political mainstream, and there it will stay.
Such shifts in American perceptions do not present Israel with an imminent threat. The Israeli military is among the world’s most competent, and the threats to Israel are manageable. Jordan already is a satellite state. Egypt and Saudi Arabia already are de facto allies. Lebanon and Syria already are teetering on the edge of failed-state status. The Palestinians are already boxed up. Post-Order Turkey already has a cool, businesslike partnership with Israel that soon will likely include joint management of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The only country with the capacity to take military action against a worse-than-Apartheid Israel for moral reasons would be the United States, and the Americans need to work from their current attachment to Israel to neutrality before they might even theoretically flip to hostility. That mental evolution would take at least a decade or two. Israel may become defined by attributes that are normally associated with pariah states, but without American leadership, international institutions like the United Nations are not likely to continue anyway. Being a pariah doesn’t mean what it used to.
For the duration of the Disorder, Israel will be left alone—even if supporters of liberal democracy don’t necessarily like what they see.

* The “America First” of the hard right is reflexively hostile to the world. The “America First” of the hard left is reflexively hostile to American involvement in the world. The “America First” of the middle just finds the world exhausting.
In all three versions, however, Americans believe that the world is not their problem and that America’s military strength will keep the world from hurting them.

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Dominic Cummings

Posted on June 1, 2021 by Luke Ford

From the New York Review of Books: “Cummings, while individually odd, is in many ways a familiar political archetype. The annals of politics are replete with advisers who seemed to be impregnable and uniquely insightful until, just like that, they fell out of favor—often pushed by their own hubris. In that sense, if not ideologically, the Bannon comparison is perhaps apt. In TV drama terms, Cummings came to resemble less Sherlock Holmes than Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor from the British political satire The Thick of It whose Machiavellian reign of terror eventually petered out into impotence. As Darren Lilleker, a professor of political communication, wrote last year, the depiction of Cummings as a Svengali is part of a discourse that pervades British politics, one that “allows the political leader to be portrayed as the innocent at the mercy of their gurus.” But this itself, Lilleker noted, “is essentially a piece of spin.””

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