New Review: The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills

New York: Oxford University Press, 1956, pp. 423.

In the course of his classic book, The Power Elite, Charles Wright Mills repeatedly references Thorstein Veblen, which is wholly appropriate. Like that earlier sociologist, Mills is a debunker of American myths, with this book no exception to that pattern. Its principal contention is that, contrary to the classical liberal (e.g. conservative) theory of representative government and free market economics, the ideals of Jeffersonian democracy, and the civics-class pieties that constitute the orthodoxy in American political thought, the idea that no one is in control because everyone is in control, that "we all possess equal powers to make history . . . is sociological nonsense and political irresponsibility" (22).

Rather, American political life is dominated by the concentration of power in massive economic, governmental and military institutions (particularly business corporations of national scale, the expanded executive branch of the Federal government, the large peacetime military establishment that emerged after World War II), and accordingly, by those who hold the commanding positions of these institutions. Together they constitute a (national) "power elite," which is not monolithic, but nonetheless united to a great extent by a significant convergence in perspective, interest and conduct, which is reinforced by the movement of office-holders among these institutions (perhaps exemplified by the revolving door between the Defense Department and industry, or between particular businesses and the regulatory bodies governing those same businesses).

Mills notes, too, that this elite is disproportionately drawn from the upper social classes, which consists not of Horatio Alger-style self-made men or successful inventor-entrepreneurs, let alone immigrants who realized the American Dream by going from rags to riches, but primarily native-born East Coast white Protestants from comfortable backgrounds. Generally the sons of businessmen (or professionals, typically lawyers) they are educated in prep schools and colleges, typically Ivy League colleges, with such education more a mark of their families' privilege than a cause of their later success. Additionally, the proportion of the rich not fitting this profile had as of his time steadily shrunk since the nineteenth century, indicating that self-made men (and upward social mobility of this dramatic type), always a great rarity, were becoming less rather than more common.1 Indeed, he notes, blue-blooded old money did not get shunted aside by the rise of the corporate rich, but fused with it (while the New Deal did not eliminate the upper strata of privilege, which was still doing quite well – with not insignificant help from tax shelters and expense accounts).

Mills also rejects the idea that the ascent to the top of these institutions is meritocratic in some meaningful way. Rather than people "starting at the bottom and working their way to the top" of a bureaucratic ladder, the pattern he finds is instead the progressive accumulation of "corporate advantages" in which inheritance plays a prominent role (e.g. dad's or granddad's positions being stepping stones for their own advancement). Questions of nepotism aside, it is striking that as one moves up the managerial ladder, toward the top executive positions, the measures of performance become ever more intangible, criteria like "managerial ability" perhaps so vague as to be nonexistent.

Rather the "merit" sought by the "top men" selecting their subordinates and successors is not "formal competence" of any kind, but "conformity" to their culture, which is characterized by, of course, loyalty to the interests and prejudices of those top men, and a standard of "leadership" and "soundness" that sets agreeableness above intellect and strength of personality (145). In line with these a propensity to "make the truism seem like the deeply pondered notion," "soften the facts into the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view," and speak "to the well-blunted point" (142), while never, ever personally saying "No" (142) is highly valued, while the prevailing ethics is the "higher immorality" of doing whatever it takes to get oneself ahead.

In short, the makers of the big decisions are selected from a pool largely determined by inherited privilege, with adherence to upper-class norms of outlook and conduct, mealy-mouthed mediocrity (not much different from the "organization man" mentality William Whyte famously described a few years earlier), and a determination to look out for Number One above all else the qualifications that set the winners apart from the losers.

This is obviously not a happy state of affairs (especially given the momentous decisions this elite now makes in an age of Cold War and hydrogen bombs, as Mills points out), and unfortunately those institutions which might check the worst tendencies of such an elite, like a "civil service linked with the world of knowledge and sensibility," "nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues" and "voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision" (361), are absent. As Mills recounts, the United States never had a proper, politically neutral civil service, the spoils system carrying all before it. The professional politician is very much a mid-level player in the hierarchy of power as it exists now. And instead of the public envisaged in classical liberalism, what exists is a mass society, which is essentially passive before a mass media which defines its grasp of reality, and unable to relate its personal experience to national affairs on the levels of thought or action. Far from being middle-class in the sense of being small but independent property owners, the white-collar workers with which the term is typically identified are instead "property-less wage workers" (262), politically distinct from their blue-collar counterparts principally in their being even less organized. Meanwhile, the expansion of public education has failed to compensate for the situation, consisting as it does principally of instruction in "intellectual mediocrity, vocational training, nationalistic loyalties, and little else" (320). The result is a "politically fragmented, and . . . increasingly powerless" (324) populace leading lives of "impersonal drift" (310) – their disorganization a counterpoint to the cohesion of the power elite. And the prevailing "conservatism" (a problematic ideology given American history, as Mills demonstrates in the chapter he devotes to the subject) is a reflection of such drift more than anything else.

Few works confront Mills' subject so directly and comprehensively, and his argument is indeed a formidable one. However, that argument is also fifty years old now, and those years have not been uneventful ones. There have been significant changes in the positions of the relatively junior institutions in the power structure (organized labor being rather weaker today than in the 1950s, for instance), and even the balance among his Big Three. The executive branch, for instance, would seem to have lost power relative to the private sector (certainly to go by analyses like Thomas Frank's in The Wrecking Crew).

Additionally, Mills' discussion of military influence seems open to question. Certainly writers like Charles Dunlap Jr. and Andrew Bacevich have sounded warnings about a militaristic turn in American culture, and a "military-industrial complex" remains. Yet, Mills' assessment still seems more reflective of the prestige of the armed forces in the post-World War II period; of the era of universal conscription, and the devotion of a tenth of the Gross Domestic Product to defense in peacetime; of the Admirals' Revolt, and the Caesarism of Douglas MacArthur, and the election of Dwight Eisenhower President for two terms; of the urgency of the early Cold War, the experience of the Korean War and the enshrinement of "massive retaliation" as military doctrine; and perhaps, of the shock of these developments compared with the state of things in the 1930s; than they do of our own time.

Some might wonder, too, if the passing of the postwar boom that was the backdrop to his critique, and the social changes of the last five decades, have not changed matters in important ways (as discussed by Michael Lind in The Next American Nation); if our "age of networks" has not rendered his critique of mass media obsolete, and given new meaning to the idea of "the public" (as seen among Evgeny Morozov's "cyber-utopians"); and if national elites have not been eclipsed by the global elite represented by the Davos Men (as David Rothkopf argues in Superclass).

Nonetheless, power in modern society remains concentrated in large institutions (national and global) of the types to which he refers, and those who command them. One would certainly be hard-pressed indeed to argue that inherited privilege, mealy-mouthed mediocrity and "the higher immorality" have ceased to be key to getting ahead. (Indeed, the data on social mobility, the epidemic of corporate short-termism and dubious accounting, and the prevailing standard of political rhetoric and debate, suggests matters have got worse rather than better in this area.) One would also be hard-pressed to show that institutions capable of addressing those flaws have actually materialized, that the new technologies which make dissent more widely heard also make it more effective. (Again, one can more easily argue that the opposite is the case for the time being.) So long as these facts remain unchanged, Mills' classic will remain relevant to any understanding of how the modern world really works.

1. Mills notes, however, that this profile is less characteristic of those who rise through the armed forces than their counterparts in government and business.

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New Review: The Next Decade: Where We've Been . . . And Where We're Going, by George Friedman

New York: Doubleday, 2011, pp. 272.

The purpose of George Friedman's new book The Next Decade is to offer a "higher-resolution" image of the first phase of the era he covered in his previous book, The Next 100 Years. Next Decade is much more detailed in its predictions of events, both in discussing what he mentioned in the previous book at greater length, and its discussion of "lesser" factors and actors almost entirely overlooked in that one (like South America, sub-Saharan Africa and India). This book is also much more prescriptive. (Indeed, where Niccolo Machiavelli played the role of a prince's mirror, Friedman plays the part of a "presidential" one, spelling out a grand strategy for the world he predicts.)

Friedman's analysis begins with a consideration of the 2008 financial crisis as a defining event for the period, for two reasons. The first is that it has resulted in a fundamental shift in power from financial elites to state elites, the nation-state accordingly enjoying a resurgence. The second is that it represents the high-water mark for both European integration, and the status of China as an economic juggernaut, both entities to soon appear much less dynamic. As a result the United States (which he believes to have been only lightly damaged by the crisis, or its foreign policy errors in the past decade) remains the world's dominant actor. Indeed, rather than a retreat from empire as the world becomes more polycentric anticipated by so many other observers, Friedman anticipates that the U.S. will "grow" into the imperial role.

In practical terms this means maintaining the country's access to the world economy's resources and markets through a Halford Mackinder-like geopolitical strategy of preventing the emergence of a (Eurasian) contender capable of contesting its dominance of the oceans. As in the Cold War, that strategy means special attention to Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. However, unlike in that earlier period, the United States does not face a meaningful challenge from a single power in all three regions, the three balances largely separate from one another. (Indeed, the balance in the Middle East is itself comprised of three separate balances--the Arab-Israeli balance, the Iran-Iraq balance, and the Indo-Pakistani balance.)

The strategy Friedman recommends has the United States extricating itself from its over-involvement in the Middle East during the last decade (by distancing itself from the Arab-Israeli conflict, reaching an accommodation with Iran, and restabilizing South Asia with a pull-out from Afghanistan and a Pakistani aid package), and limiting its involvement in East Asia (mostly self-balancing for the time being, though attention to a long-range game is called for), to return to its earlier focus on Europe (where the dominant fact is the rise of a Moscow-Berlin-Paris axis, by far the most probable challenge to American hegemony, which the U.S. will counterbalance against through relationships with the surrounding European states, like Britain, Italy, Turkey, and the Scandinavian and "Intermarium" countries).

Latin America and Africa, two regions virtually ignored in the previous book, get somewhat more attention this time. The dominant issues the U.S. faces in Latin America in his reading are the problems of drugs and illegal immigrants, the containment of Chavez's Venezuela (which Friedman regards as only a minor threat), and the prevention of powers from outside the hemisphere from establishing a military presence in it, especially in strategically located Cuba. (The only real surprise readers might find here is a longer-term emphasis on keeping Brazil from emerging as a South Atlantic hegemon.) Sub-Saharan Africa is a mess, but one not likely to matter much in the larger picture, so that it would be an ideal scene for low-cost humanitarian gestures (a luxury the U.S. can afford, and which as anyone who has actually bothered to read The Prince ought to remember, are part of the Machiavellian package).

Friedman also makes some guesses about the "demographic and technological imbalance" he anticipates as leading industrial nations gray while our technological development stagnates (especially in the areas of medicine and automation crucial to coping with an aging population, and our energy base), about climate change, and about the perils the United States will face being both republic and empire. He expects that aging populations will contribute to the investment of labor-scarce Germany and Japan in Russian and Chinese manufacturing, that fossil fuels will have to meet our demand for energy (which our rising use of robotics will expand) until space-based solar power becomes viable, while deferring the significance of climate change to "our children's and grandchildren's time." He is also optimistic about the U.S.'s ability to cope with the contradictions of its position, developing the "culture and institutions needed to manage the republic cast in an imperial role," especially a rationalized foreign policy apparatus and appropriate military investment focused on the maintenance of American command of the seas, with the help of better leadership from the top.

In the course of all this Friedman makes some good points. His critique of the strategic errors of the last decade, and the way in which they dislocated American policy, is on the whole sound. The same goes for his explanation of why terrorism with weapons of mass destruction is far less plausible than it is commonly made out to be. His empirical argument for our period as one of technological stagnation belied by superficial progress in computing and communications is particularly strong.1

Unfortunately, much else in his analysis is underdeveloped at best. In particular, he fails to follow up his sweeping claim about a turn to a more statist economics with any discussion of the practical implications, either for individual states, or for the global economy, crucial as these are.2 (Indeed, his discussion of sub-Saharan Africa, which he consigns to irrelevance partly on the grounds that foreign corporations will not call for much help from their patron states in operating there, runs contrary to this, while flying in the face of recent reality.)

His analysis is also badly flawed by his misreading of the international balance of power as it stands at present, and as it is likely to develop in the coming decade. Friedman is quite right when he notes that even the U.S.'s weaknesses, like its reliance on foreign borrowing, add to its influence in various ways. However, he fails to appreciate how those weaknesses are also undermining that influence, as with that same reliance on debt, as well as many of the problems driving that debt, like deindustrialization and chronic trade deficits. These are serious, long-term threats to its economic standing, and in turn, the "deep" power it possesses, which he does not acknowledge, let alone answer. (It might be said, too, that he is overly dismissive of the costs of the errors he does recognize, as with U.S. actions in the Middle East in the past decade, even as he recognizes that these contributed to the 2008 financial shock, and gave Russia its window of opportunity.)

Just as Friedman may be overoptimistic about the U.S.'s position, he may be overly pessimistic about the prospects of the EU and China. For all its problems, it may be that Friedman overestimates the significance of the popular enmity toward the EU (a project which has always been more popular with elites), while underestimating the potential significance of several other factors, like the developing economic interconnections between Europe and North Africa (extending the influence of the entente through the Mediterranean); the plausibility of a broader European accommodation with Russia, either through the EU or bilateral ties (such as Russia enjoys with Silvio Berlusconi's Italy); and the continued attraction Europe has for Turkey over the United States (which trades much more with Russia, Germany and France than with the U.S.).3 Any combination of these factors easily translates to a much stronger European entity than Friedman anticipates, and the unworkability of his strategy for checking the entente that concerns him (especially if the U.S. proves weaker than he predicts, as implied above), should it actually arise.

At the same time, while Friedman is correct to recognize the obstacles to China's growth (indeed, in overlooking ecology, and the unbalanced trade and financial relationships it has with the U.S., he understates the range of them), and to recognize that internal concerns will absorb much of the country's energy and resources, the claim that China has already peaked is a very big one--and not made more persuasive by his underestimation of the country's economic weight. China may be a distant second to the U.S. in total income (and rather farther behind than that in per capita income), but it is already the world's largest manufacturer, and a financial heavyweight financing American borrowing, so that it enjoys leverage out of proportion to its GDP (just as the opposite may increasingly be the case with the United States). Friedman also overestimates the extent to which geography constrains China's economic expansion, or the expansion of other instruments of Chinese power. (As the situation already stands, China is thoroughly integrated with Southeast Asia and Central Asia, and making major inroads into Siberia.) Finally, he overlooks the extent to which a more consumption-oriented strategy would continue to strengthen China's already formidable position (albeit at a less staggering rate), while ameliorating its problems. Even with the U.S. weaker than he expects, this would not mean China's overwhelming the regional balance between now and 2020, but that is due at least partially to the factors he neglects in his analysis of the East Asian situation, like the weight of Russia (which he all but excludes from the East Asian discussion) and India (ditto, just as he curiously excluded China from the discussion of the South Asian balance).

Additionally, while it may be that climate change and energy scarcity will not significantly alter the international balance of power between now and the start of the century's third decade, more frequent and severe bouts of bad weather (such as has affected harvests this past year), along with rising energy prices, are likely to further dampen economic growth in the years to come. Those impacts are also likely to be unevenly distributed, given the differing geographies and energy portfolios of various powers--perhaps not enough to significantly shift the balance of power between now and 2021, but all too plausibly working against the U.S. and China (perhaps to the relative advantage of the EU), all the more so as Friedman downplays the extent to which energy conservation and renewable energy technology can establish a cushion against those developments.4

Granted, both the EU and China are not likely to be militarily competitive with the U.S. in the next decade, or even for much longer than that. Yet, it should be remembered that military force is just one area of international competition, one that Friedman perhaps overstresses in this analysis (especially given that anything like an actual U.S. war with a Russo-German alliance, China or any other comparable power in this time frame is remote). At the same time, it should not be thought they are totally without options in this area, like supplies of arms, technology and expertise to client states (as in China's relationship with Sudan), and the establishment of overseas bases, if only token ones, in strategic locations (like France's new facility in the Persian Gulf). Additionally, it is worth noting that peacekeeping is a recognized strength of the EU, and that the presence of European peacekeepers in the Balkans has furthered the Union's interests there.

In short, my guess is that the U.S.'s preponderance of power is rather less dramatic than he makes it out to be because of both the U.S.'s weaknesses in key areas, and his failure to appreciate in full the strengths of Europe and China. For the next decade this may narrow the gap among the three actors rather than widen it. At the same time, all three actors will be operating in an essentially stagnant world economy, dampened further still by increasing environmental and resource shocks, leaving them all with fewer resources (and opportunities) with which to pursue their ambitions.

NOTES
1. As Friedman notes "We are now at an extrapolative and incremental state in which the primary focus is on expanding capacity and finding new applications for technology developed years ago . . . it is very difficult to think of a truly transformative technological breakthrough that occurred in the past ten years" (p. 229).
2. As a reader I was left wondering whether this meant states would have more scope for the heterodox strategies essential to industrial development (as thinkers from Alexander Hamilton to Ha-Joon Chang have demonstrated), reining in the unproductive and destabilizing forms of global finance that produce crisis after crisis, or strengthening the demand essential to fueling substantive, long-term growth, either in the U.S., or globally. Given recent experience, the failure to address these problems (as indeed they have not been addressed) suggests the crisis of 2008 will be followed not only by the continued deepening of the stagnation characterizing the post-1973 period (American growth in the first decade of the twenty-first century was in fact weaker than at any time since the Depression), but by deeper and more damaging crises with still new disruptive effects, which might again work to the particular disadvantage of the United States.
3. One might also note the vulnerabilities of one of the key actors in the U.S.'s balancing strategy, Britain. The country shares many of the U.S.'s economic weaknesses with respect to deindustrialization, debt and balance of payments issues, with falling British oil and gas output (and increasing imports) worsening the picture. Elsewhere, his analysis assumes the rapid economic growth of American regional partners (like Turkey), which in turn rely on the active promotion of that strength by the U.S.--something he simplistically discusses as if it could be done by flipping a switch.
4. My guess is that, contrary to the portrait Friedman offers, renewable energy production is a more promising area for R & D dollars than either medicine (likely to continue to disappoint) or robotics (where autonomous, versatile machines remain a long way off). The problem is that the political support for renewables remains too weak to realize the potential of even present technology, let alone push the envelope.

Review: The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, by Parag Khanna

New York: Random House, 2008, pp. 440.

Recent years have seen a slew of books swapping talk of a "unipolar moment" and visions of global American imperium for a portrait of a polycentric, globalized order, like Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World (2008), or Thomas Barnett's Great Powers: America and the World After Bush (2009). The New America Foundation's Parag Khanna's The Second World is one of them, and in its particular analysis, the world is already dominated not by one empire, but by three--the United States, the European Union, and China. (Khanna consigns other large states, like Russia, India and Japan, to the second tier, not on a par with the "Big Three," but playing the role of balancers.) All three empires are expanding (the EU moving east and south, China becoming the hub of its region, etc.), in the process forwarding the process of globalization, even as they pursue their geopolitical interests, the two forces continually interacting with one another. One result is that the relationship among these three actors is both competitive and cooperative, each seeking to maximize its advantages even as they become increasingly reliant on the prosperity of the other empires to preserve and extend their own prosperity.1

Crucial to the development of the relations among the three empires, and the international system as a whole (and not least, the question of whether globalization will triumph in a world of great power peace, or geopolitics will get the upper hand, perhaps even culminating in a new world war), Khanna argues, will be the development of "the Second World." The term, formerly used to denote the Soviet bloc, refers to states which are neither "First World," nor LDCs (Least Developed Countries), epitomized by the nations typically labeled "emerging markets." It is the aim of Khanna's book to explore these regions, in particular Eastern Europe, North Africa, Southwest Asia, Mexico, South America, Central Asia and Southeast Asia, with Russia and "Greater China" each getting a measure of attention. (By contrast, India is treated only briefly, and sub-Saharan Africa is almost wholly left out, with even South Africa not getting a mention.)

Khanna's approach, which the author parallels with Arnold Toynbee's world tour following his completion of A Study of History, is comprised largely of brief, impressionistic, journalistic descriptions of particular countries, most running for less than ten pages. Depth is unavoidably sacrificed to breadth, the strokes he paints with are broad, and a good many factual errors do turn up in his pages. (The Turkish siege of Vienna was in 1683, not 1687, to name but one.) Nonetheless, it is broadly informative, and while anyone acquainted with the regions and countries he visits will find few surprises, or run across the striking detail that will change the way that they look at these countries, collectively the pieces convey a strong sense of the Second World's "middleness." As he noted, "Second-world countries are frequently both first- and third-world at the same time" in differing respects, with a narrow strata, having the standard of living of the former, "the mass of the poor" the latter, and mixing "growing public economies and inward investment" with "vast black markets and Potemkin villages," with the First World elements most conspicuous in disproportionately productive and affluent capitals and vice-versa so that these nations "grow poorer in concentric circles" (p. xxv)--and sometimes, distinct features of their own. (As he remarks, the First World recycles its garbage and the Third World burns it, but in the Second "it is occasionally collected but . . . dumped off hillsides.")

Additionally, Khanna is not without insight into the larger picture. By and large Khanna hews to economic orthodoxy, seeing globalization as a positive force and being bullish on the development prospects of much of the "Second World." I'd say he's overoptimistic, especially about the prospects of energy exporters escaping the resource course (Nigeria's lot is unfortunately much more common than Norway's), while paying insufficient attention to the indispensability of a solid manufacturing base to balanced development. Still, his take is more nuanced than the unqualified gushing about Golden Straitjackets of Thomas Friedman and others of his ilk, more conscious of the existence of a world outside the offices and hotels of national elites, and more alert to the failings of neoliberalism and the successes reaped by walking a different path—as in his assessment of the performance of countries from Chile to China. (He even criticizes the Washington Consensus in so many words.)

Khanna's grasp of geopolitics is also reasonably solid, especially in the more analytical chapters, and he does on many occasions break with conventional opinions. Khanna takes a rather more favorable view of the EU than is fashionable among American commentators, the European Union appearing in his portrait an attractive and dynamic social model, one that is actually far more energetic and effective at fostering democratization and development than the U.S. through its strength in building the institutions required for democratic governance and economic development.2 (Indeed, Khanna favorably compares the EU's performance in Eastern Europe and Turkey with the U.S.-Mexico relationship under the North American Free Trade Agreement.) He is also quite bullish on China, and sees both these actors expanding at the expense of Russia, with a Turkey that has become the commercial hub of its region "from Budapest to Baku" (p. 37) merging with Europe, and China on track to emerge on top in Central Asia, Mongolia and Siberia due to the depth, intricacy and continuing dynamism of its economic (and demographic) penetration of those regions.3 (In particular, he is impressed by its dynamism in laying down economic infrastructure in developing nations where Western aid accomplished little.)

Unsurprisingly he is sharply critical of the course the U.S. has followed. Just as was common in the '80s, Khanna points to the U.S.'s deindustrialization and balance of payments problems; its deteriorating public services (education, health, transport, even disaster relief) and infrastructure; its energy profligacy and consumption beyond its means; its widening inequality and declining living standards; and all the associated social ills (like increased crime, and the primarily punitive response to it), weakening the material bases of its strength, while political cleavages (from the weight of corporate special interests to the prospect of cultural Balkanization) threaten paralysis and worse. The difference is that these problems are all rather more advanced than when the declinists of the '80s pointed them out, and that the international balance of power is all the less propitious to U.S. influence, which has further been damaged by the alienating course the U.S. followed in the War on Terror (from visa rules that send international conference planners elsewhere, to the spurning of the United Nations in favor of "coalitions of the willing").4 As a result, "in every Second World region," America's false assumptions of dominance are laid bare, for "South America can reject the United States, Arab states can refuse American hegemony, and China cannot be contained in East Asia by military means alone," all as Europe can "stabilize its East" and China do the same in Central Asia (pp. 322-323).

Of course, the U.S. is not the only actor facing obstacles: Khanna recognizes the cost of expansion to the EU, and the massive social and environmental costs of China's rapid rise. Nonetheless, despite their limitations to date (in military capability, for instance, a point to which Khanna devotes little attention), and the vulnerabilities that are both particular to them and shared by all (not least, common association inside the global economy with all its troubles), they are still enlarging their resources and influence. By contrast, the fact that they can be regarded as competing empires is inseparable from the U.S.'s diminished relative position, while the country "needs a Marshall Plan to stay where it is" (p. 333). Indeed, Khanna goes so far as to characterize the U.S. as a First World country that may be bound for Second World status.

At the time of this writing it has been nearly four years since Khanna finished his book. The price of oil hit $150 a barrel the summer of 2008, a reminder of the tightness of energy supplies, and the vulnerability of first, second and third world countries to supply shocks. Later that year the developing financial crisis shook the global system, revealing the frailties not just of the "nervous" Second World, but of all three of the empires he wrote about. Europe's fiscal crises (which made states like Greece look less first world and more second), and the austerity measures with which the region's conservative governments chose to meet the situation (despite widespread popular opposition) are making the common European house look more ragged than rugged, and their economies and social models likely to look more like the U.S.'s in the most problematic ways.5 Meanwhile the U.S. has come to resemble Europe in the high structural unemployment that American conservatives once regarded as "Eurosclerosis" of the kind that "couldn't happen here," while the Federal budget deficit hit $1.5 trillion this year--all while the U.S. seems further away than ever from the kind of action needed to rectify its problems. (Indeed, the libertarian right most averse to such reforms has become more influential.) China fared better, but the falloff in purchases of its exports revealed the limits of its growth strategy. Chinese authorities responded with a stimulus package that was relatively larger than anything attempted anywhere else, and spoke of shifting to a more consumption-oriented economy, but whether this will actually be forthcoming (and whether it will be able to sustain the growth rates seen these last three decades) remains an open question.

All three empires, in short, may be emphasizing the protection of their positions rather than extension for some time to come, and the chances of success are anything but certain. This is not only because of what has happened to date, but because of the resource, climatic and other challenges further limiting their scope for maneuver, and all too likely to make them run harder to stay in place.

NOTES
1. The U.S. consumes a fifth of China's exports--some $300 billion of them annually--making it the largest single importer of Chinese goods, while Chinese purchases of American Treasury bills finance American debt.
2. While some American commentators have taken a favorable view of European domestic policy (as with Jeremy Rifkin's writing about the "European dream"), perhaps the only other one I can think of to take Europe seriously as a geopolitical actor in this way has been Charles Kupchan in The End of the American Era.
3. For all its petrodollars, Russia is "the state whose map is most likely to change unfavorably in the coming century," Khanna observes. Khanna, pp. 74-75.
4. French demographer Emmanuel Todd made a similar (though more harshly phrased) argument in 2003's After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order. Todd, however, scarcely mentions China, and seemed rather more sanguine about a reconciliation between a reformed Russia and Europe.
5. One might add to this the point that Britain, one of Europe's "Big Four," is in much the same boat as the United States with respect to the problems threatening to turn it from First World to Second (like deindustrialization, balance of payments problems and inequality).

Review: In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, is the Key to Future Prosperity, by Eamonn Fingleton

Boston: Houghton & Mifflin, 1999, pp. 273.

In 1999, at the height of the "New Economy" hype, business journalist Eamonn Fingleton published In Praise of Hard Industries, a challenge to the conventional wisdom in the United States and Britain, where the tendency has been to view manufacturing as yesteryear's business, safely left to developing nations while the more advanced countries focus on services--and especially "information." This, Fingleton posits, is because the value of a strong manufacturing sector is underappreciated.

In particular, Fingleton points to manufactring's superiority to services in generating high-wage employment at all educational levels (in contrast with the "two-tiered" postindustrial economy of credentialed, specialized professionals and disposable wage-earners), sustaining rapid income growth (services perform less well in this area), and developing exports (a great many services, like legal services, not being easily exportable). Fingleton, notes, too, that capital and knowledge-intensive industries dependent on proprietary know-how "acquired only by dint of many years of learning by doing" (p. 19) are not quite so footloose as one might imagine in the age of globalization--the reason why the production of such high-tech items as semiconductor-grade silicon or steppers remain the business of established, affluent industrial powers. This makes the efficient production of high-end goods in even "declining" lines like ships, textiles and steel likewise remains an area of strength for established industrial powers. And of course, the fact remains that any attempt to raise global living standards to Western levels, let alone do so on an environmentally tolerable basis, will mean that far from stagnating, manufacturing will see revolutionary changes--and massive expansion, in advanced countries as well as developing ones.

Fingleton makes the point all the clearer in his discussion of the vulnerabilities that go along with an overreliance on the activities on which promoters of post-industrialism pin their hopes, like finance, media and software--so often thought of as the glory of the American economy. The personal computer has made software writing a labor-intensive business rather than a capital-intensive one, easily and profitably relocated to low-wage countries (as the tales of offshoring make all too clear). At the same time, linguistic and cultural barriers mean that any one product must be heavily adapted for use elsewhere, while its great susceptibility to piracy eats into sales, as a result of which it is not a great earner of foreign currency. (Indeed, Fingleton notes that popular discussion gave an exaggerated sense of the sales, employment and export profile of Microsoft.)

Fingleton's analysis is a persuasive one, comprehensively reasoned and well-supported by an abundance of concrete examples. Of course, that leaves the question of why, despite the excellence that Germany and Japan demonstrate in the area of manufacturing, they have not been more prosperous (even with the burdens they have borne in the form of German reunification and Japan's banking crisis). Fingleton argues that these countries have in fact done better than advertised, in particular offering an alternative view of Japan's "lost decade" (and of American growth) that may not convince the reader that Japan is poised to overtake the U.S., but which certainly makes enough worthwhile points to show up the simplistic view of the matter that is the norm.

The years since this book's first appearance have offered some substantiation of his outlook. The U.S. has seen its balance-of-payments deficits balloon to 5 percent of its Gross Domestic Product in the past decade (demonstrating the inability of the service sector to make up for rising imports of manufactures), while Germany and Japan, which continue to derive much more of their GDP from manufacturing than the U.S. and Britain, boast impressive trade surpluses.1

Moreover, these same years have brought a renewed willingness to consider such facts. In the wake of oil price shocks and the global financial crisis (strongly connected with American monetary policies that encouraged real estate speculation and the unsustainable consumption that helped widen those same trade deficits)--which incidentally raised American unemployment to European levels--there has been more questioning of the U.S.'s approach (and more bullishness about Germany's position) than at any other time since the early 1990s. Indeed, the last State of the Union address saw the President speak of the U.S. needing to "outinnovate, outeducate and outbuild the rest of the world." Alas, the commitment to such a drive seems likely to prove more rhetorical than real.

NOTES
1. According to United Nations data, Germany and Japan both get a little over 21 percent of their GDP from manufacturing, compared to a bit under 13 percent in the case of the U.S., and 12 percent in Britain's.

Keeping the Hype in Check (Collected)

A decade ago I produced a number of posts about much talked about "highlights" of the modernization of the Chinese armed forces, the principal theme of which was putting the hype about them in perspective. They seem to me to still have sufficient relevance that I have collected them together here in this one post.

The Chengdu J-20
The unveiling of the Chengdu J-20 has certainly provoked alarmist rhetoric is all the expected quarters. Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney, for instance, writes of "shades of 1939" (predictably, in a piece for FOX News).

For the moment, though, set aside the dubiousness of Tom Clancy fantasies about high-tech, big power war (which I must admit I regard as extremely unlikely for now), without which the plane would not get so much attention. Set aside the questions about the J-20's real purpose, whether the rather large plane (the design of which appears to emphasize fuel capacity and payload) is not intended as a strike aircraft instead of a fighter--a replacement for the JH-7, for instance, rather than a match for the latest American fighters--or even, as, Lewis Page suggests in what is by far the most well-grounded assessment I have seen so far, a "demonstration/propaganda/industrial-subsidy project."1 Set aside also the fact that the plane's first test flight simply puts it where the U.S. was in 1990 with the F-22 program (twenty years ago), the unavoidable uncertainty about if and when the aircraft will actually go into production, and in what quantity (defense hawks being all too quick to forget that it's not just the Pentagon which has to cope with delays, cost overruns and underperforming, buggy hardware in its procurement programs).2

Instead consider the realities involved in building and operating a functioning air force, which involve much more than producing a prototype of a fighter aircraft, or even a couple of hundred of them. The makeup of China's overall air force is at issue, and the gap in capability between the U.S. and China remains wide today. The U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marines collectively possess some 3,000 fighter planes today, compared with roughly 1,800 for the China's People's Liberation Army Air Force and Navy Air Force. Additionally, the U.S. fighter inventory consists entirely of fourth-generation or later aircraft (principally late-model F-15s, F-16s and F-18s, plus nearly 200 F-22s), whereas only 500 or so of China's inventory (very late-model J-8s, J-10s and J-11s) are comparable in capability, so that a 1.6-to-1 advantage in overall numbers becomes a 6-to-1 advantage in this key area. The U.S. armed forces also have a massive advantage in support assets, from tankers to command and control aircraft, greatly enhancing their other numerical and qualitative advantages.

It will be a long time before China can close that broader gap, with or without the J-20, especially as the U.S.'s fighter forces are themselves being modernized, with Super Hornets and F-35s replacing the earlier F-16s, F-18s and AV-8 Harriers.3 Indeed, it may be that the gap in numbers will increase in the U.S.'s favor as China continues to slough off vast quantities of older aircraft in favor of a smaller number of up-to-date models.

It is also simplistic to imagine such a war as a series of fighter duels. As David Axe notes in the Wired Danger Room,

in a major shooting war, the Navy and Air Force wouldn’t wait for J-20s or other Chinese fighters to even take off. Cruise-missile-armed submarines and bombers would pound Chinese airfields; the Air Forces would take down Chinese satellites and thus blind PLAAF planners; American cyberattackers could disable Beijing’s command networks.

In the air, the planes would also be vulnerable to surface-to-air defenses on land, or aboard U.S. warships.

Finally, Chinese capabilities of all kinds are that much less overwhelming when the regional distribution of power is considered. Russia and India (with their own fifth-generation aircraft undergoing flight testing), as well as South Korea, and Taiwan and Japan offshore, all have their own, quite substantial air forces (and armies and navies as well). No matter how aggressive one is in their projections, no serious conflict scenario can overlook this fact, and taken with the others it is a reminder that while China is modernizing its armed forces, and developing new capabilities commensurate with its greater wealth, and its perceived requirements, a revolution in the military balance of power in the region is not at hand today, or even likely to be in the next decade--even if one takes the most alarmist claims made for the J-20 at face value.

NOTES
1. Making the opposite argument, Dr. Carlo Koop and Peter Goon of the Air Power Australia think tank, in acknowledging the plane's size and configuration, suggest in their analysis that it is a

a long range interceptor for anti-access operations in the Second Island Chain geography . . . with the capability to penetrate an opposing IADS to destroy assets like E-3 AWACS, RC-135V/W Rivet Joint, other ISR systems, and importantly, Air Force and Navy tankers,

crippling U.S. Air Force or Navy operations within this area, and insist that the idea

that an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter or F/A-18E/F Super Hornet will be capable of competing against this Chengdu design in air combat, let alone penetrate airspace defended by this fighter . . . [is] simply absurd.

It might be noted, however, that the two functions are not mutually exclusive. The F-111 program was originally intended to produce both the well-known strike aircraft for the U.S. Air Force, the F-111A, and a long-range carrier-based interceptor, the F-111B, for the U.S. Navy (which is comparable in its weight and its internal storage of weapons to the J-20). Of course, the F-111B eventually proved unsatisfactory and its niche was filled by the lighter F-14 Tomcat, a reminder of the difficulties involved in reconciling such missions in a single airframe. (More success has been attained by building an effective air-superiority fighter, which is then used as the base for a strike fighter, as with the F-15E Strike Eagle.)
2. It is worth noting, among other points, that China appears dependent on imported Russian engines to power the large, high-performance aircraft. Lewis Page has also raised questions (quite well-grounded in the available evidence) about the plane's stealthiness, maneuverability (due to its size, probable weight and lack of thrust-vectoring nozzles) and avionics (specifically the chances of the plane getting a Low Probability of Intercept radar) in comparison with the fifth-generation F-22.
3. The F-35 program is troubled, suffering from cost overruns and delays, but not dead. Additionally, while it is plausible that the U.S.'s economic woes and budgetary difficulties will undermine the acquisitions process such as to diminish its lead, it is far from clear that this would go far enough to make a fundamental difference in the picture described above (especially given the relationship between American consumption, investment and solvency, and Chinese prosperity).

The ASBM
Besides the J-20, the story which has attracted the most attention in the last couple of years has been the country's program to develop Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles, which have reportedly attained operational status.

As Andrew S. Erickson and David D. Yang note in their excellent article in the Naval War College Review, the paucity of actual detail about the system, and the vagueness of the literature, have resulted in an avalanche of conflicting speculations, but little real clarity. Still, there are grounds for reasonable guesses about some things. First and foremost, China's ASBM would appear to be a relatively cheap way of achieving sea denial, compared with the country's building the kind of navy it (and just about everyone else excepting the United States) cannot and will not build any time soon. This would be consistent with China's apparent focus on the acquisition of systems for neutralizing capabilities the country may deem threatening rather than on the acquisition of the muscle for long-range actions of its own (a capability China is clearly developing at a much more careful rate).

As might be guessed, technical feasibility's a much grayer area. Still, it's clear that building a working system of the kind described is a tall order. Implicit in such claims is China's possession of surveillance and communications capabilities advanced and robust enough to, under combat conditions, reliably locate a warship and call in timely, accurate fire on it. (This kind of thing goes off without a hitch in Tom Clancy novels, but the reality is much different, though China has reportedly made great strides in this area during the last decade.) That, in turn, would be meaningless without Chinese industry's resolving the problems in making the missile capable of tracking and maneuvering in response to a moving target in the course of its flight--the larger challenge, as it would involve a new technology nothing short of revolutionary. Ballistic missiles historically have been used to hit stationary targets, not moving ones, and an aircraft carrier can move a distance measurable in miles inside the missile's likely flight time. The intrinsic difficulty of developing an effective system of this kind aside, the fact remains that new weapons systems tend to have long teething processes, as the history of combat aircraft makes clear, and it is worth noting that the system has yet to actually be "test-fired over water at maneuvering targets."

Assuming China has succeeded in overcoming all this, actual use of the ASBM entails an additional, political problem, the same one facing American plans to use conventionally-armed ballistic missiles for quick strikes--the launches may be susceptible to misinterpretation as a different kind of strike, with potentially strategic consequences. (It is worth remembering that the 1995 Black Brant scare was started by the launch of a comparatively innocent weather rocket.) That by itself may inhibit their use in a crisis situation, as might the fact that the use of ballistic missiles by one great power against another (something that has not happened since Germany's V-2 attacks against Britain in World War II, a situation not at all comparable) would be worrisomely unprecedented. At the very least, the threat to use such missiles would increase the possibility of strikes against launch sites inside the Chinese mainland, escalating any crisis situation.

These technical and political complications do not make the existence of such a system impossible, and it should be conceded that even a system that's only partly functional would be a factor in any U.S. calculations (for instance, regarding the placement of its carrier groups in a repeat of the 1996 crisis over Taiwan). Still, they also suggest a strong likelihood the weapon is too problematic for China to get much use out of it, and perhaps simply a stopgap solution to the acquisition of a more robust conventional capability. Despite the highly publicized appearance of the J-20 fighter this month, and new talk about a carrier program, it remains to be seen that this will materialize anytime soon.

China as Global Military Power
Alongside its economic profile, China's military profile has also risen in recent years. Besides the modernization of the country's large armed forces (highlighted by the ASBM and J-20 programs, and renewed talk about a Chinese carrier), the country has engaged in strategic sales of arms (for instance, to Iran and Sudan), and even sent troops abroad on unprecedented missions, as in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization's Peace Mission 2007 exercise (which saw Chinese troops training in the Urals in 2007), and more recently, the dispatch of warships to East Africa to fight pirates.

Some may take this as indicating China will be a global military power before long. Yet, it is not enough to have a large, modern army, navy and air force, or even to be capable of supplying arms and expertise to distant friends and send small forces briefly abroad on occasion. Rather a portfolio of very diverse, specific assets is required, namely:

* A blue-water navy (including sufficient auxiliary ships to sustain long-range operations, and aircraft carriers and amphibious assault vessels capable of projecting force landward from the sea).
* A long-range air force (including long-range bombers, and aerial refueling tankers, in quantities adequate to support major operations).
* Access to bases around the world capable of accommodating substantial air, land and sea forces engaged in actual combat operations for extended periods of time. Ideally some of these would host "forward-deployed" combat and support forces capable of not just providing a presence, but enabling a rapid response to crises.
* Sealift and airlift assets capable of swiftly moving large ground and air forces (think divisions rather than brigades, wings rather than squadrons) outside its region, and sustaining them in place for an extended period (years rather than months).
* The command, control, communications and intelligence infrastructure to manage large ground, air and sea forces engaged in operations anywhere in the world.

China is today in only the earliest phases of developing such assets. The Chinese navy's first carrier is still years away, and as the situation stands, the auxiliary ships simply aren't there. Its air force has only a small fleet of strategic airlifters--its planned fleet of fifty or so Ilyushin-76 transports perhaps half complete now--and its bomber and tanker fleets (the latter quite small, a mere ten aircraft) consist solely of H-6s--China's version of the '50s-era Tupolev-16.1 Despite much speculation about China's presence in Myanmar from the 1990s on, and more recently mention of a possible Chinese base in the Gulf of Aden, the country lacks even a single overseas base. And so on and so forth.

Relatively little attention is paid to most of these items, which tend to be dull and unglamorous and of little interest to superficial observers. (Lumbering transport planes are less exciting than sleek new fighters, auxilliary ships not as cool as destroyers bristling with weaponry.) Nonetheless, acquiring them will not be cheap or quick, the same reason that the European Union (which collectively possesses far vaster resources and more modern and diverse capabilities, by any measure) remains a long way from being in such a position.2

There is the fact of China's geopolitical position to think of as well. While the U.S. is in a relatively secure position in its hemisphere, with virtually no direct threat to its territory from neighboring conventional forces, China is a large power surrounded by many other large powers (e.g. Russia, India, Japan). Along with the issue of Taiwan (so long as relations between the two governments entail military confrontation), this is unavoidably a factor in its military posture, and its freedom to both invest in long-range capabilities, and send large forces far from home. Combined with its economic position (large in the aggregate, but far less impressive when considered in per-capita terms), the likelihood of a shift in its economic strategy bound to have some impact on its expansion, and the prioritization of growth over military acquisition, serious observers are far more likely to think 2050 than 2015 when thinking of a date at which China might be a world-class power in these key respects.

NOTES
1. The U.S. Air Force, by contrast, has nearly three hundred C-5s and C-17s for long-range transport, over 200 B-1s, B-2s and B-52 serving in the long-range bomber role, and over 500 KC-10s and KC-135s in its tanker fleet--a significant difference in not only the quantity of the aircraft assigned to each mission, but the quality of the aircraft as well.
2. It is noteworthy, for instance, that EU members Britain and France both possess numerous bases around the world capable of facilitating global operations, while Britain, France, Italy and Spain all operate aircraft carriers.

China's Sub Fleet
Five years ago, one forecast had China amassing a submarine force of as many as 180 boats by the mid-2020s – enabling it to outnumber the U.S. Pacific Fleet's submarine force by five to one according to a widely cited estimate published by John Tkacik. Developing such a force in this time frame required China to add six subs a year to their fleet, above replacement level – and virtually the whole current fleet would have to be replaced, given that the bulk of it is comprised by obsolete, aged Romeo, Ming and Han-class boats sure to be past their useful life by then.

In short, China would have had to launch eight boats every year for almost two decades to reach a force size of 180 subs. Such a rate of peacetime production seemed very unlikely to me. On the contrary, China's modernization of its modern forces has tended to produce smaller (though more up-to-date) forces.

A new analysis by David Axe in The Diplomat indicates that this is exactly what has happened. In the 2007-2010 period, China added a mere six subs to its fleet, a small fraction of the frantic rate of production needed to realize the higher estimates. As a result, China has some sixty submarines in 2011, its size remaining well below the aggressive estimates offered by analysts hyping the "China" threat (though modern Song and Kilo-class boats have replaced many of the older vessels in that time). It also seems likely that this force will shrink in the coming years, with Russia less willing to sell additional submarines (projections based on the Chinese Kilo purchase, in fact, seems to have contributed significantly to the overestimates of China's sub force increases).

Moreover, it is worth noting that boat-counting has its limits. There are significant differences between the relative handful of nuclear boats China seems likely to possess, and the diesel boats that seem likely to continue to comprise much of the country's fleet. The most important are submerged range and speed. The Kilo-class sub can sail six thousand miles while snorkeling at a speed of seven knots, while fully submerged, it can only do four hundred miles while crawling along at three knots (in comparison with a nuclear-powered Los Angeles-class submarine, which can sustain twenty knots while submerged, over a range limited only by the endurance of the crew).The upshot is that in today's threat environment, conventional submarines can be very effective in a coastal defense role, but are rather less suited to the kind of long-range operations undertaken by "blue-water" naval powers than the nuclear-powered vessels that make up the whole of the U.S. Navy's force. Additionally, as Axe notes, a straight comparison between the U.S. and China is simplistic given – as so many continually forget – China is itself surrounded by other countries with considerable naval establishments, and submarine forces, of their own, including Russia, Japan, India and South Korea.

The result, as Axe notes, is that "China isn’t building a world-class, globally-deploying submarine force. It’s building a mostly defensive, regional undersea force – and a smaller one than once predicted."

New and Noteworthy (Collected)

Back in the '00s, with social media rather less developed and utilized, it was not uncommon for bloggers to post little announcements or referrals to other material such as we would now convey to the world through a service like Twitter instead. I certainly did this with various items that caught my eye under the headings "New and Noteworthy," "In the News," "Items of Interest" and other such headings.

Many of these items have since lost their interest simply because they became dated, while in cases th items in question have disappeared altogether, such that it makes little sense to keep them here. Still, it seemed to me that a few were worth preserving and this post fulfills that purpose, providing a round-up of the lot in one place for anyone who might be interested in them, organized in chronological order, and under the dates of their publication.

December 10, 2008
* A new report about the risk of a WMD attack has cropped up in the headlines, The World At Risk: The Report of the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism the actual text of which you can find here.

The aspect of the report that has attracted the most attention is, predictably, the estimate in the Executive Summary that

The Commission believes that unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013 (xv).

There is no explanation in the report as to why 2013 should be thought of as some significant benchmark, and while most of the press seems to have uncritically swallowed the claim, experts Donald Henderson and Michael Krepon have appropriately criticized the report for what looks like an attempt to hype up its findings.

It is also noteworthy that the report seems to totally ignore chemical weapons, the authors saying in the preface that they focused on nuclear and biological weapons because "they pose the greatest peril" (x), and leaving it at that. There is no mention of the sarin gas attacks by the Aum Shinrkyo cult in Matsumoto in 1994, which killed seven and sickened six hundred, and in Tokyo in 1995, which resulted in over six thousand casualties. (Instead the only mentions of Aum's activity, despite its lengthy record of activity in this area are in relation to a single botched anthrax attack on Tokyo (on pages 10 and 11).) Partly because of this, the report tends to give the impression that WMD use by terrorists, certainly in a mass-casualty attack, is unprecedented, though clearly it is not (this report itself citing the Rajneeshee cult's 1984 bioterror attack, which sickened over 700 people, with the anthrax attacks of 2001, and the full range of Aum's bioweapon activities, worthy of mention).

These are serious deficiencies which have attracted too little attention in the press, too accustomed to simply reporting what the People In Suits Say, instead of scrutinizing it.

* Speaking of lousy journalistic coverage, consider the treatment of the crisis in Greece, into which a general strike has just factored. The spark for this was the shooting of a youth by police, but the larger background to the situation seems to be long-running clashes between police and "anarchists" (I never know exactly what to make of that label here, given its vulnerability to abuse), and wide discontent with the corruption, incompetence (the mishandling of the wild fires of 2007, the fiscal mismanagement), and economic reforms (read: IMF-recommended neo-liberal measures, like privatizing the state telecommunications company and taking a hard line with labor), of the unpopular conservative government of Kostas Karmanlis.

One should note that Greece is not a Third World country. It is a member of the euro zone, with a $30,000 per capita GDP, putting it right between Taiwan and Italy for 2007. Its Gini score is 33, and its ranking in the Human Development Index is 24th in the world. It has problems with unemployment, debt, inflation, somewhat worse than Western Europe as a whole, but on the whole they do not seem to be very much so (the sizable current account deficit aside, partly due to the high energy prices now on the wane), and the country's growth has actually been comparatively robust (frequently clocking 4 percent a year these last several years, despite worries about slipping competitiveness).

In short, it is not the sort of place where things like this are "expected" to happen (like Latin America, for instance). Nonetheless, the numbers discussed above seem to miss some of the facts on the ground. These include youth unemployment, generally higher and in this case over 26 percent in 2006 according to Eurostat. Nor do they seem to reflect the actual poverty level, a recent study putting one in five households below that line (when the line is drawn at 470 euros a month, or about $7,300 a year), and attributing it to a relatively well-funded but exceptionally ineffective (mismanaged?) welfare system. Official inflation figures tend to understate the actual hardship for consumers of price shocks everywhere, but this is perhaps especially the case in countries which made the transition to the euro, with Greece in particular known to have "faked reported values of inflation in the run-up to accession of the monetary union in order to meet Maastricht criteria" according to this study by Milan Vyskrabka.

Simply put, this means things are worse than they look, and in some critical ways. The slowdown of growth, the promises of still more neoliberalism (keep in mind the country has a large public sector, so that the proportion of the citizenry directly affected will be comparatively large), and skimpy poor relief-justified on the grounds of a lack of money right after the Greek government provided the banking system with a generous and highly controversial financial bail-out (relative to the size of the Greek economy, equivalent to a $1.5 trillion package from the U.S.)-could not possibly be helping the political situation.

Looking at all this data, rarely touched on in the coverage of the riots, my guess would be that the causes of the current crisis are in large part economic, with the anomalousness of Greek politics perhaps playing a role as well. Following World War II the country went through a civil war, and in 1967-74, the country was ruled by a military dictatorship. The radicalization that resulted from it does not seem to have fully disappeared today-one expression of which is the size of the Communist Party (number three in parliament, with an eight percent share), and an opposition to U.S. foreign policy strong even by European standards (though those who see the world through Sam Huntington's "clash of civilizations" lens may also point to the country's Greek Orthodox religious identity). Immigration does not seem to be the "wedge" issue it has been in West European countries, helping to bouy conservative policies in spite of their rarely popular economic components. And the centrality of Athens as a center of Greek life (literally half the country's population lives there) adds to the government's vulnerability.

Nonetheless, with the world struggling through a financial crisis and economic slowdown so sharp as to evoke the "D" word from commentators who would ordinarily never dare let it slip past their lips, and energy prices on the wane now but perhaps poised to rebound even higher (Kevin Phillips speculating on C-SPAN2 yesterday about their going back to over $200 in just a few quarters), and the daily news offering one blast from the pre-neoliberal past after another, the way things are playing out in Greece may hint at the dangers to security and stability that other nations could face in the coming years. When even a eurozone member has this kind of trouble, other, poorer countries are unquestionably vulnerable, and it stands to reason that other affluent countries, many of which are in the same boat with regard to the problems discussed above, may not be totally exempt.

January 19, 2009
* The protests continue in Greece--as have other incidents, including domestic terror attacks staged against the police. (Those only newly following the issue can check out my earlier coverage of the matter, in this blog post, and my subsequent follow-up to it.)

Readers should note that Greece is far from being alone in facing such discontent, Bulgaria and the three post-Soviet Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) all having unrest of their own related to government corruption, economic contraction and yet another round of painful reforms imposed on them by international financial institutions, which you can read about in this Guardian article here.

May 17, 2009
* Accelerando author Charles Stross's extrapolation of the future of computer technology (with a focus on gaming) from what he terms a "laughable conservative" set of assumptions in a keynote address at the 2009 LOGIN conference in Seattle (the text of which is available on his site).

* A recent piece in The Economist on the state of ocean mining, another of those ideas that seemed likely to go much further back in the 1970s (indeed, such expectations played a role in the development of international maritime law in that period).

* The latest Reading Radar Weekly Round-Up from the folks over at The New Security Beat.

May 21, 2009
* Gyre.org has identified plenty of interest in recent days, including a piece from Scientific American on the rush on the world's seabed (recently highlighted by Russia's claiming of the North Pole, though this is far from the only instance); work on instilling "ethics" in robots; the ecological impact of space debris (extending to ozone depletion); an article discussing a recent GAO report on the prospect-and implications-of GPS service deterioration; and the capabilities of next-gen telescopes with regard to the spotting of "biosignatures" (like atmospheric water vapor) on exoplanets.

* Dwayne Day has produced another excellent article on the space colony concept as it was once presented, and their fading from the popular consciousness, in "The God That Failed" (a topic I've touched on in pieces like "Revisiting Island One", where I considered the finances and logistics of trying to realize Gerard K. O'Neill's plans with the space shuttle as we know it).

* Science fiction writer Charles Stross recently weighed in on his own blog on the subject of his own recent experience riding American rail, and how it stacks up against service in Europe and Japan (a topic timely again with new attention being drawn to American infrastructural deficiencies, and Keynesian policies which may help to correct them).

* In part due to the concern over swine flu (and in the U.S., optimism about the housing sector which strikes me as rather exaggerated), the global economic outlook remains pretty lousy, most of the major players logging scary drops in GDP during the first quarter of the year. Forbes recently presented us with a round-up of developments worldwide, but here's the Washington Post on Japan, where the 14.4 percent "annualized" decline in GDP over October to December was followed by a 15.2 percent drop in the first three months of this year, though the observers quoted believe the situation is bottoming out.

* RTTNews and Xinhuanet on trouble in the Eurozone, where all the major economies are still contracting, not as badly as is the case in export-driven Japan, but apparently harder hit than the U.S., their GDPs ending up about 4.6 percent smaller in the first quarter of 2009 than they were in the same quarter in 2008. And there is also some prognostication about the prospects for Europe as a whole from the New Europe newsweekly, positing more shrinkage this year and contraction all the way through 2010 before recovery begins, and also

* Fistful of Euros' briefing on Russia, where the first quarter had the country's GDP 23 percent smaller than a year before, not only because of fallen oil prices, but a very sharp drop in industrial output, and while some are claiming mixed signals, the Russian government is speculating about the possibility of an 8 percent contraction over the year as a whole.

Are we through the worst, with things likely to go back on track (such as it was) later this year, or the next, or at worst the year after that? Perhaps, but then again perhaps not, and this piece from FinFacts on the state of the Irish economy (booming, and until recently, widely held up as a model for others) caught my eye. According to the accounting firm of Ernst & Young, Ireland is looking at a full-blown depression (by virtue of a shrinkage of its GDP by 10 percent), with an employment picture that may not quite return to pre-crisis levels until 2021. (Read the Executive Summary of the report here.)

Interestingly, much of what Ireland supposedly did right (here termed "the one-dimensional economy") seems to be part of what is going so wrong (a point the report's summary notes on page 22), and it is worth noting that a few years ago Finfacts reported on a a study by the International Integration Institute at Dublin's Trinity College in 2006 which discussed the country's vulnerability in the event of a downturn in the high-tech or financial services sectors.

These disproportionate impacts, the questions they raise, and the bleaker possibilities they point to ought not to be overlooked.

June 22, 2009
* Economic historians' Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O'Rourke update of their April 6 column regarding the present economic situation (apparently part of their work toward a full paper to run in Economic Policy). What they conclude is that "world industrial production continues to track closely the 1930s fall," with German, Britain and the U.S. and Canada tracking the fall of the '30s closely, and France, Italy and Japan actually doing worse. Additionally, despite the rebound of world stock market since March and the stabilization of world trade these were "still following paths far below the ones they followed in the Great Depression."

In short, the situation is not just as bad as it was in 1929-1930, but in some important ways worse. However, they are hopeful the worst can be averted, in part because of the more aggressive response in the form of monetary growth and stimulus.

Martin Wolf, commenting on their column in the Financial Times notes that "the combination of strong monetary growth with deep recession raises doubts about the monetarist explanation for the Great Depression," and accordingly he focuses on stimulus. He raises the concern, however, that governments might not be able to sustain the necessary levels of stimulus.

I think Wolf is right on both counts, and find myself turning to the U.S. economy's performance during the years of the New Deal. Following the sharp contraction of 1929-1932, the massive expansion of U.S. government spending restored the 1929 level of America's GDP by 1936, and by 1940 produced a figure 20 percent higher than that. The price, however, was the quadrupling of the once small federal debt in the space of those years. (Those curious about the numbers can check out my stats and calculations here.) And they still did not effect a long-term revival, however, the rapid global growth of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s being driven by much more than that (World War II and the rebuilding that followed, the Cold War, "the welfare state"-things that might be said to have built stimulus into the system on a routinized, sustainable basis) in a situation that may not repeatable.

Indeed, we seem set to go in the opposite direction, given the talk of austerity in Europe and elsewhere, likely only to deepen the hole-as Nicolas Sarkozy himself has said, pointing out that "an austerity policy . . . has always failed in the past" in one of his rare moments of lucidity. (Whether the actions of the man who has so often struck onlookers as a "French Thatcher" will reflect this rather sound thinking remains to be seen.)

And we can expect the resulting troubles to extend far beyond the merely economic. As Greece demonstrated (those who don't remember the troubles there can refresh their memory here), even Western Europe is not immune to the kind of unrest we tend to associate with Latin America, and as this round-up from Reuters shows, the talk already has people in the streets. As the results of the EU elections earlier this month show, a radicalization of public opinion (so far, trending far-right) may already be underway.

June 24, 2009
* On the heels of Monday's sourer-than-expected news from the World Bank (in the Global Finance Development 2009 report) came a slightly better-than-expected prediction from the OECD.

As the opening of the preliminary edition of the latest Economic Outlook says, "For the first time since June 2007, the projections in this Economic Outlook have been revised up for the OECD area as a whole compared with the previous issue." The authors give the credit for this to "massive policy stimulus and progress in stabilising financial institutions and markets."

Still, one should not make too much of the difference between this piece of news and what we got on Monday, the Paris-based organization simply forecasting a milder contraction this year (a 2.2 percent rather 2.9 percent reduction in GWP), with a return to growth next year (somewhat more robust than in the WB's guess), and virtually every page of the document reiterates the point that even if 2009Q2 may see the end to the sharp (Depression-level, as Eichengreen and O'Rourke point out) contraction of the preceding six months, we are not out of the figurative woods.

And strings are attached to such optimism as they can offer, particularly at the policy level continued loose monetary policy and supportive financial policy-read government propping up of the banks-are necessary, while governments should not be too hasty about tightening their belts, and "reemployment measures" need to be strengthened to prevent cyclical unemployment from turning structural. (The last two are not a trivial conditionalities, given the talk of austerity that already has some economists very worried.)

On top of this the authors of the Outlook warn that

the financial system may be more vulnerable to weaknesses in the real economy than assumed in the projection which in turn would have negative repercussions on growth. This risk of a negative spiral would be amplified if households and businesses were to expect that a sustained period of deflation was imminent, in contrast with assumptions behind the Secretariat‟s medium-term reference scenario . . . Other downside risks include a faster increase in bond yields due to sharply deteriorating public finances and a stronger response of household spending to higher unemployment.

Additionally, unemployment levels will remain high-10 percent in the U.S. (official number; the real one's bigger, as those who've been following this blog well know) for some time to come, those hoping to find it not getting the reassurance that the U.S. is not, after all, the "new" France.

* Those at least willing to consider the possibility that officialdom may be a little too quick to say the fall's bottomed out should check out this article by Joshua Holland over at Media Channel which, unlike far too much of the coverage, is attentive to the structural, long-term weaknesses of the U.S. economy, and the toll it is taking on American householders, as well as the hard facts regarding real estate, energy and other elements of the situation which might not necessarily cooperate in the promised recovery.

* Over at MSNBC.com, Tim Hanson also considers another underappreciated aspect of the situation: what the crisis may mean for the unbalanced economic relationship between the U.S. and China.

October 8, 2010
* By way of Gyre.org, a piece in New Scientist discussing the prospect of harnessing the solar wind to meet the Earth's energy needs.

* An article in LiveScience discussing China's blocking a shipment of rare-earth minerals to Japan, which the author links to the dispute over Japan's arrest of a Chinese fishing crew. (Indeed, Leonard David at Space.com references the possibility in his discussion of the question of whether resource politics on Earth make moon mining a national security imperative for the U.S..)

* A report from National Public Radio on popular reaction to the country's economic troubles. Ireland's case is all the more noteworthy given that the "Celtic tiger" had not only appeared to perform so well in the years prior to the 2008 crisis, but had been widely held up as a success story of neoliberal globalization; and afterward, suffered particularly deeply (as noted in the report firm Ernst & May, the GDP decline rated the D-word--"depression")--arguably, because of how closely it hewed to the same fashionable prescriptions for which it was so highly praised.

* By way of Futurismic, a piece by "Lay Scientist" Martin Robbins in the Guardian satirizing bad science journalism, which is, of course, far and away the predominant kind. (Case in point: Time magazine's annual list of "50 Best Inventions," which I discussed on this blog a couple of years ago.) Since then, Robbins has offered a follow-up in which he offers his more straightforward critique of the field.

December 22, 2010
* As a practical matter the transition to a post-fossil fuel economy is for the time being far more likely to entail a shift to a reliance on other kinds of resources rather than freedom from the limitations of the planet's resource base all but promised by those Thomas Homer-Dixon refers to as "economic optimists." This has raised questions about "post-fossil fuel energy security," reflected in discussions in recent months about rare earth metals. This month the U.S. Department of Energy released the Critical Materials Strategy report examining the role of rare earth metals (getting much more attention in recent months) and other materials (lithium, cobalt, indium, tellurium, gallium, etc.) in the "clean energy" economy.

The report (which is comprehensive, even if the vast area it covers means a great deal can only be touched on briefly) examines the use of particular materials in particular products (like batteries for electric vehicles, wind turbines, photovoltaic solar cells with thin-film conductors and fluorescent lighting systems) (chapter 2), historical supply and demand for the materials in question (chapter 3), current programs relating to those materials in the U.S. (chapters 4 and 5) and abroad (chapter 6), and projections about supply and demand (chapter 7). These are followed by an assessment of the criticality of supply in the short- and medium-term for each type of material (chapter 8). In its final chapter (chapter 9) the report outlines a strategy for securing supplies by diversifying the list of suppliers; identifying appropriate substitutes; and more efficient use, recycling and reuse of the necessary materials; with R & D, the encouragement of domestic production, and stockpiling and diplomacy all playing roles in the plan.

* A story in The New Scientist discussing yet another dark side to the "emissions trading" component of the Kyoto Treaty (on top of the way in which it encourages a redistribution of emissions allowances rather than emissions reduction)-specifically the incentivizing of enlarged production of a certain type of greenhouse gas, HFC-23. This is a useless but extremely climate-unfriendly byproduct of HFC-22), a refrigerant used in developing nations. The concern follows a demand by Chinese chemical companies that they receive a subsidy for destroying their HFC-23 stocks rather than releasing them into the air (vastly disproportionate to the cost of safe disposal, perhaps by a factor of 100), raising the specter of an overproduction of HFC-22 (and its byproduct HFC-23) to milk the system.

* By way of The New Security Beat, the Stimson Center article "Wither the Demographic Arc of Instability?" which offers a global overview of projected changes in the age structure of the world's countries (with a focus on the date at which the median age moves past 25)-significant because the zone of "youth bulge" countries largely overlaps with what has been variously termed the "Global Balkans," the "Non-Integrating Gap," or "The Arc of Instability" (from which the article's title is derived), encompassing those areas where armed conflict has been most frequent and bloody in recent decades. While Mexico, Central America, the Andean countries, much of the Caribbean, the whole African continent, southwestern, southern and southeastern Asia are presently inside this category (with Brazil only recently leaving it), the projection has the situation largely confined to sub-Saharan Africa by 2030 (with only a handful of exceptions, like Yemen, Afghanistan, the West Bank and Gaza). The item also offers a brief but useful history of the development of "political demography" as a field. Also at the Beat: a video featuring Joel E. Cohen (the author of 1995's classic How Many People Can the Earth Support?), and a repost of Robert Engelman's analysis of the role of demographics on climate change at the Worldwatch Institute's Transforming Cultures blog.

February 4, 2011
* An in-depth analysis by Daniel Indiviglio of The Atlantic parsing the BLS's unemployment data for January--and showing that the improvement in the numbers (particularly a drop in the U-3 rate from 9.4 to 9 percent, in the U-6 from 16.7 to 16.1 percent during that month) is not due to job creation, which remains paltry. (The month saw a net gain of a mere 36,000 jobs, accounting for less than a tenth of the change.) There is of course disagreement about where the rest of the change comes from, with some observers (Indiviglio included) suggesting it is mainly a matter of discouraged workers finally giving up, though Emily Kaiser at Reuters offers a somewhat more optimistic view. One possible bright spot is that, where in previous months most of the gains have tended to be in services, manufacturing has led the way this time, though Jeff Harding at Seeking Alpha offers a reminder as to why a sustained recovery is unlikely--the softness of demand, which seems unlikely to change anytime soon. In short, it's still a long way back to where the U.S. economy was in 2007--which really wasn't all that great to begin with.

* Two articles in The New Scientist, discussing a pair of reports released this week about how the nine billion people likely to inhabit the world by 2050 might plausibly be housed and fed. The reports are, respectively, One Planet, Too Many People? (which actually considers food, water and energy alongside urban shelter), published by the British Institution of Mechanical Engineers' and freely available online; and Agrimonde: Scenarios and Challenges for Feeding the World, published jointly by France's National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), and the Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development (CIRAD).

Both argue for the manageability of the problem, the One Planet report noting in the overview of its recommendations in the executive summary that "there are likely to be no insurmountable technical issues in meeting the basic needs of nine billion people and improving their world through engineering" (p. 9). They have been received as good news because of this, but the optimism is not unconditional: as the same report goes on to say,

there is much urgent work to be done in preparing to meet this mid-century peak in a sustainable way. It is evident that many of the potential barriers to developing these solutions and ensuring a successful outcome are not technological, but lie in the areas of politics, social ethics, funding mechanisms, regulation and international relations (p. 9).

Of course, these barriers are far from trivial (indeed, the "social ingenuity" needed to tackle a problem is often tougher to come by than the technical kind), but the fact of feasibility is meaningful in itself.

April 19, 2011
* Oliver Wyman's scenario for the next financial crisis. (The Atlantic offers a summary here.)

* The Washington Post on the spark that started the wave of revolutions across the Middle East--fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi's protest against Tunis's corrupt and abusive cops.

* A story in the Daily Mail on an improved version of the "artificial leaf" that may make a contribution to the expansion of renewable electricity production.

May 1, 2011
* In Slate, Nouriel Roubini asks whether China's infrastructure-heavy macroeconomic policy, which helped it to blunt the effect of the global economic crisis, is not running out of steam. The article has its share of conventionalities, but the question is a valid one, and Roubini raises some very good points. (It is also a reminder that the reality of China's policies--far more reliant on government stimulus than the U.S.'s--makes the ridiculous, xenophobic commercial from "Citizens Against Government Waste" all the more ironic.)

* New York Federal Reserve Bank President William Dudley was recently booed when he told an audience in Queens that there was no inflation. Economists have long been whining about deflation when it's been the "I" word (and plenty of it) that ordinary people have confronted on a daily basis (not least at the grocery store, as the New York Times noted in a recent article on the concealment of rising food prices in shrinking package sizes), this happening, incidentally, as paychecks trend in the opposite direction, a connection too few seem to be making. Of course, rising prices for energy and food--already a source of crisis in significant parts of the world--as well as a weaker U.S. dollar--especially given the inflationary monetarism that has been the Fed's standard operating procedure and the persistent U.S. trade deficit--are trends that can only be expected to sharpen for the foreseeable future.

May 12, 2011
* After six and a half years Jason Sigger has written the last post for his blog, The Armchair Generalist due to a job change. By offering a blog devoted to a progressive view of military affairs, Sigger's blog filled an important niche, and I am sorry to see it go. However, it seems his earlier posts will remain available online, so those unfamiliar with his site can still check out his previous commentary.

* At the Washington Post, Ezra Klein recently assessed President Obama's policies--and found that, far from being the "socialist" he has so often been accused of being, his policies are those of an early '90s moderate Republican. At the New York Times' blog Five Thirty-Eight, Nate Silver offers a rebuttal to this analysis, but doesn't--indeed, can't--dispute the significant rightward shift of American politics overall since the '90s, by no means the start point of the trend.

On a related note, two pieces from the Huffington Post. In the first, Dan Froomkin at reports on a study by public watchdog group Public Citizen of Democrats' increasing fear of the power of moneyed interests to mount attack campaigns in the wake of the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission. In the second, British columnist Johann Hari considers what Donald Trump's apparent bid to become America's answer to Italy's Silvio Berlusconi says about the Republican Party.

* Two new studies regarding energy consumption. The first (discussed in an article by Jeff Tollefson in Nature) is Energy Emergence: Rebound & Backfire as Emergent Phenomena, a review of the academic literature on the "rebound effect" in energy use by researchers at the Breakthrough Institute. To quote the summary's findings,

Rebound effects are real and significant, and combine to drive a total, economy-wide rebound in energy demand with the potential to erode much (and in some cases all) of the reductions in energy consumption expected to arise from below-cost efficiency improvements . . . [and] render the relationship between efficiency improvements and energy consumption interrelated and non-linear, challenging the assumptions of commonly utilized energy and emissions forecasting studies.

Nonetheless, the study does not dismiss energy conservation, rather offering a "new framework for envisioning the role of below-cost efficiency improvements in driving energy modernization and decarbonization efforts." (Summed up briefly, the authors suggest the benefits of "below-cost energy-efficiency improvements" are worthwhile, mainly because of their contribution to economic growth, which will better enable a more plausible source of decarbonization--a shift to "decarbonized" energy production that will be easier for a more affluent society.)

The second (which Christina Larson reports on for Scientific American), is an assessment by the China Energy Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, China's Energy and Carbon Emissions Outlook to 2050. China's Energy suggests that China can meet its government-set goals in the area of energy efficiency and carbon intensity, and anticipates a

saturation in ownership of appliances, construction of residential and commercial floor area, roadways, railways, fertilizer use, and urbanization . . . [and] slowing population growth

by 2030. The result is still a massive increase in energy consumption and carbon emissions, but perhaps a more useful (and hopeful) basis for action than other scenarios of more explosive growth (this study including an "alternative" as well as a "baseline" scenario).

May 25, 2012
* Author Chris Hedges on what he calls "The Globalization of Hollow Politics." Reporting from France prior to the recent presidential election in that country, he offers a reminder that the phenomenon he described in his book Death of the Liberal Class (recently reviewed here) is not at all a uniquely American phenomenon.

* Over at Alternet, an interview with Morris Berman, author of the recent Why America Failed (the concluding book in his "trilogy" about American decline, The Twilight of American Culture, and Dark Ages America). Among other things, the interview provides a good overview of the case he makes in his latest book. Rather idiosyncratic in some respects (Berman's argument draws on, among other things, an unconventional take on the antebellum South), it is certainly thought-provoking.

* From The Diplomat, a report on a recent poll carried out jointly by the Center for Public Integrity, the Program for Public Consultation and the Stimson Center regarding defense spending – which found broad support, in virtually every demographic, for significant cuts in a host of areas (including withdrawal from the Afghan War), and "modest majorities" favoring "dumping some major individual weapons programs, including the costly F-35 jet fighter, a new long-range strategic bomber, and construction of a new aircraft carrier."

* An opinion piece from Walt Gardner (of Education Week's "Reality Check" blog) on the fate of public schoolteachers in the face of two trends: teaching scripts and the proliferation of computers with educational software. It's an old question all the more pressing with budget troubles at all levels of government and public-sector unions an increasingly easy target as American politics continues its rightward shift.

July 26, 2011
* Glenn Greenwald in Salon on the New York Times' shabby and shameful coverage of the neo-Nazi terrorist attacks in Norway, and the (frankly, bigoted) misuse and abuse of the word terrorism that has become standard in the mass media.

For a bit of additional perspective, check out Dan Gardner's analysis of the European Union's Terrorism Situation and Trends Report 2010 (which incidentally makes clear that perhaps 80 percent of the terrorist attacks attempted in 2009 in the EU are the work of separatists, operating mostly in France, Spain and Ireland).

* Reported by way of Energy Bulletin, here's Kris De Decker's excellent article for Low Tech Magazine on an aspect of the solar energy issue that gets little consideration - the use of solar thermal power for industrial production. Decker argues that this is a practical and useful supplement to electricity generated by photovoltaics, which has the potential to get us that much closer to a renewable energy base.

* And finally, from the Huffington Post, a report on the discovery of a rich deposit of rare earth minerals off Japan - only part of the possibly 100 billion tons of them that may lie below the world's oceans (some 1,000 times the size of the deposits found on land to date). Given the important role of such elements in renewable energy technologies (and worries about China's present near-monopoly on the production of these minerals), there is cause for optimism here - though it is also worth remembering that ocean mining has frequently been overhyped in the past.