The Real Unemployment Rate (Collected)

Back in 2009-2010 I published a number of posts about the monthly unemployment report, rounding up what seemed to me the relevant commentary and getting in my own two cents (not least, in looking beyond the usually cited U-3 figure to the other, more expansive measures of unemployment). For whatever interest they may still have (if only as a time capsule) I have decided to gather the more substantive of them together below.

June 5, 2009
Regular readers of this blog know the drill. Another month, another unemployment stat when the BEA puts out its report for May 2009, which it usually does the first Friday of the month.

According to the release, May saw the official ("U-3") unemployment rate rise from 8.9 to 9.4 percent-a full half percent increase, for the second month in a row.

The "U-6 measure," the fullest calculation of "labor underutilization" regularly reported in the BEA stats (counting not just "total unemployed" but also marginally attached workers, discouraged workers and involuntary part-timers) went up from 15.8 percent of the work force in April to 16.4 percent in May.

Once again, this bad news is being packaged as a "good news, bad news" deal.

The good news is that the job loss rate is slowing. What this means when you look at the actual numbers is that 345,000 jobs were lost in May-a lousy number, but still less than the half million-plus seen in recent months.

Yet, the overall 9.4 percent number that resulted from this slower pace of loss is worse than what was expected (apparently, a 9.2 percent unemployment rate).

This implies a contradiction which has not been commented on (how can fewer job losses than expected track with more unemployment than expected?), and so one has to look below the surface of that number.

As it happens, the category that saw the main increase is people coping with long-term (15 weeks+) unemployment, which went up from 4 to 4.5 percent of the work force, this happening without depleting the other categories covered, there being "more where they came from."

One explanation for this is that more people are participating in the labor force. There is a tendency to think of this as an unusual, temporary aberration, but it may plausibly be taken to mean that the hard times have driven a certain percentage of people who earlier didn't feel that they had to work to look for employment (retirees who have watched their investments vanish; members of households coping with the loss of income, etc.)-skewing the figures perhaps, but in a way that reflects the current difficulties.

Additionally, it is worth noting that the "official" (9.4 percent) figure does not include those working on an involuntary part-time basis, a category which did see a slight increase during May, and may also be reflected in the cutbacks in hours worked. The work week is down to 33.1 hours, the shortest it's been "since recordkeeping began in 1964." As Liz Wolgemuth of U.S. News & World Report notes,

cost-cutting employers may have slowed their job shedding but continued to slash their employees' hours. Indeed, more than half of employers surveyed last month by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported using cost-containment strategies such as cutting salaries and wages, while a smaller percentage were cutting staff.

This must be recognized as a different strategy, distributing the economic pain differently, rather than clear-cut proof things are getting better.

While not related to the problem at hand, it is also worth noting that the steepest losses were in the sectors concerned with actually making things (particularly manufacturing, where 156,000 places were lost), whereas the sectors adding jobs were in services (health and government, particularly-with in the latter cases, federal employment seeing job losses, while education systems have done some hiring). Of course, this would seem to be a commonplace, manufacturing being more susceptible to such shocks, and quicker to let workers go, but given the long-term trend of U.S. deindustrialization this would seem to support Richard Moody's claim that the recession is creating a great deal of structural, rather than cyclical, unemployment.

Not inconsistent with such an outlook, James Galbraith recently predicted that not only will the official figure hit 10 percent, but that it will stay there for "a long time"-perhaps years (an assessment that brings to my mind the bleak picture projected for Ireland in the report by Ernst & Young I discussed last month).

Even the comparative optimists banking on a recovery in the third quarter of the year (July-September) expect the employment picture not to recover this year, improvements in the employment generally lagging recoveries (perhaps by up to a year in this case, according to one prediction).

My guess-looking at the collapse of business investment reported in last month's GDP data, and the data from earlier this week testifying to the weakness of consumption, is that while we may see some ups as well as downs in the months to come, the foundations of a really solid recovery have yet to be laid-and things could yet get worse than even Galbraith has speculated.

July 5, 2009
The BLS reported on Thursday, July 2, that the official (U-3) rate's 9.5 percent, while the more inclusive U-6 rate hit 16.5 percent. (In each case, the figure is up 0.1 percent from what it was in May.)

This report is apparently "not as bad" as what was expected (a 9.6 percent U-3 rate), even though the number of job losses was higher than forecast: 467,000 workers got pink slips, many more than the figure predicted (over 100,000 more actually, and close to 50 percent more than in May).

This lower-than-expected unemployment rate, despite higher-than-expected job losses, is all the more surprising given that the percentage of the labor force which is suffering long-term (15 weeks+) unemployment (the U-1 category) saw a big jump-from 4.5 percent in May to 5.1 percent in June (a full 0.6 percent).

At least part of the explanation would seem to lie in the shrinkage of the work force. While some economists last month were quick to point to the labor force's expansion as a factor in the high unemployment rate (it rose by over a million between January and May, which as I noted last month could be read as a sign of distress) the number dipped by over 150,000 from May to June (about 0.1 percent of the work force) as people drop out of the game, an issue rarely acknowledged in the press (Liz Wolgemuth of U.S. News & World Report, whom I also cited in my discussion of this issue last month, being the one exception I've come across).

In any case, simply counting up the number of unemployed understates the problem, because those who do have jobs are still seeing their hours drop. The average work week is now down to "33 hours . . . the lowest level on record," which combined with weak earnings growth (hourly earnings were flat), means falling income (even prior to adjustment for inflation).

As to the longer term picture: this recession has effectively erased the growth in employment of the last business cycle in its entirety, so that as far as the number of jobs available countrywide goes, we're back where we were in 2000, when the country's population was about 10 percent smaller. (And it is well worth noting that manufacturing has been especially hard hit, again accounting disproportionately for the lost jobs-136,000 of them, or almost 30 percent-speeding us further and faster along the road to deindustrialization.)

Of course, there is still plenty of optimism among the talking heads, still promising a turnaround in the "second half of the year" (which we have just entered). One reason is that announcements of layoffs to come seem to have fallen to their lowest levels in 15 months.

Still, the general expectation is that unemployment will hit 10 percent later this year, and just as the talk of "growth" has meant increasingly less to those who actually have to work for money, so will "recovery" (likely to take years where job creation is concerned, in even the optimitsic forecasts-even some mainstream ones being much worse) mean little as this "indicator" (if you actually need a job to live, it's far more than that to you) continues to lag.

November 16, 2009
As was widely reported in the press, we hit (and passed) the much talked-about milestone: 10 percent of the American work force "officially" unemployed.

The actual number is, of course, 10.2 percent.

The figure denoting long-term job losers (15+ weeks out of work) is likewise up, to 5.7 percent (compared with 2.7 percent of the work force exactly one year ago, when the panic was at its height).

And of course, the broader, U-6 category, now stands at 17.5 percent-more than one in six members of the work force presently lacking the full-time work they wish they had.

For a better than average assessment of the news, check out this post from Seeking Alpha.

Also worthwhile from the standpoint of perspective, this article from Tom Raum of the Associated Press confirms the increasingly mainstream character of the view that this unemployment is structural than cyclical. (Remember Richard Moody's comment from a few months back, or the story from the Christian Science Monitor asking if the U.S. is "the New France"?)

Raum specifically points to, among other things, the vicious cycle at the root of the situation, the weakness of the job market (along with the credit crunch) suppressing the consumption that would be key to the new investments that would drive job growth (in fact, it may be that Americans are already "settling into spending less"). The situation is all the worse for "the carnage among Detroit's automakers and the surplus of new and foreclosed homes and empty commercial properties," the auto- and construction industries, two keys to the renewal of employment expansion in the past, having been left in an especially poor position to play the role of economic locomotive anytime soon. (Indeed, both manufacturing and construction suffered 60,000+ net job losses each last month, a particularly dark spot in this 22nd straight month of job losses.)

So much for the ebullient talk of green shoots; the hope of anything more than a shallow, short-term fix leading to still more long term mess from the methods tried; and in the sweeping of harsher economic realities under the rug as the Dow Jones average rebounds, the hope that governments would move beyond "business as usual" after the cold shock of reality afforded by the Great Recession of 2007-2009 (as noted by Mike Whitney of the Centre for Research on Globalization in his sweeping overview of the economic policy of the Obama administration, one year in).

December 4, 2009
The official, U-3, unemployment rate has edged down from 10.2 percent in October, to 10 percent in November, according to today's report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Additionally, the U-6 rate went down by an even larger margin, from 17.5 percent in the last report, to 17.2 percent in this one.

However, a quick check shows that the number of long-term unemployed actually climbed, from 5.7 percent in October to 5.9 percent in November. The improvement, as Kurt Brouwers of Marketwatch suggests, may simply be "a statistical change rather than a real improvement" due to a number of frustrated job-seekers giving up the hunt.

In other words, the fact that people give up looking for work because the situation is so awful ends up, perversely, looking like a sign of improvement.

It also seems that, as Briefing.com suggests, the "drop in payrolls was entirely driven by goods-producing firms shedding jobs. Goods-producing companies lost 69,000 jobs in November." Read: manufacturing and construction. This is also bad news rarely commented upon, fashionable as it may be to slight actual goods production as trivial.

As always, the details count.

The U-3 unemployment rate held steady until last month, remaining officially at 9.7 percent-a point which is of course being spun in the usual ways-like "Wasn't that a close one? We thought it'd be worse!" or "We've stabilized, which means we can only go up from here!"

Less noted was the fact that the broader U-6 rate, after seasonal adjustment, actually saw a slight uptick-from 16.5 to 16.8 percent.

It may be that the Census (which will see the hiring of a half million workers) will trim the numbers slightly in the next few months, but this is a short-lived blip, while observers continue to wait for signs of real strength in critical sectors. Construction suffered last month, still shedding plenty of jobs-64,000 is the figure I'm seeing-but economists chalk that up to the unusually rough winter weather. (Given the trend over the last year, however, I'm not sure how much difference it made.) Manufacturing has seen some hiring, but the car industry clearly saw job losses-10,000 in February after the uptick of the previous month, and John Schmid of the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel is right to refer to the sector's "erratic fluctuations," of which this may simply be one.

Even the relatively upbeat report from Business Week does not question the widespread expectation of a slow labor market recovery-a pessimism that affects not only the officially unemployed, but the underemployed as well, according to Gallup tracking polls from January. Notably, the pessimism is far stronger among those with postgraduate degrees than those who just have "some college or vocational school," with sixty-five percent in the former category giving the "not optimistic" answer, compared to forty-two percent in the latter. (Those looking for broader coverage of those confronting such downward mobility can check out Peter S. Goodman's four-pager in the New York Times last month.)

That the matter of employment is still being discussed as something apart and different from the broader issue of an economic recovery, the "conventional wisdom" from before "the Great Recession" still going strong.

February 5, 2010
The (seasonally adjusted) figures for January have the U-3 unemployment rate at 9.7 percent-a small drop from the previous month's figure of 10 percent, and down further still from the recent peak of 10.2 percent reported late last year (since revised down to 10.1 percent).

The U-6 figure also fell back to 16.5 percent.

In short, the numbers seem slightly better. However, they remain essentially lousy, and a detailed examination of the picture hardly improves its appearance.

For one thing, as Steve Schaefer reports in a market brief at Forbes.com reports, there has been no actual job growth-with the economy overall suffering job losses (20,000, with gains in retail and temp hiring overcome by declines in employment in transport and warehousing).

This is notable, especially in light of a bit of buzz last month regarding reports of a 5.7 percent GDP growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2009-which, as Schaefer notes, was due mainly to the restocking of inventories (3.4 percent of that 5.7 percent increase in output) rather than some revival of consumer demand (where would it come from, with unemployment, anxiety and credit as they are?) or really new investment. In short, it's not likely to last, and a really substantive recovery from "The Great Recession"-even to the mediocre state of things antecedent to 2007 (so easily forgotten given the past-quarter, this-quarter, next-quarter perspective of too much business journalism)-far from realized.

March 6, 2010
The U-3 unemployment rate held steady until last month, remaining officially at 9.7 percent-a point which is of course being spun in the usual ways-like "Wasn't that a close one? We thought it'd be worse!" or "We've stabilized, which means we can only go up from here!"

Less noted was the fact that the broader U-6 rate, after seasonal adjustment, actually saw a slight uptick-from 16.5 to 16.8 percent.

It may be that the Census (which will see the hiring of a half million workers) will trim the numbers slightly in the next few months, but this is a short-lived blip, while observers continue to wait for signs of real strength in critical sectors. Construction suffered last month, still shedding plenty of jobs-64,000 is the figure I'm seeing-but economists chalk that up to the unusually rough winter weather. (Given the trend over the last year, however, I'm not sure how much difference it made.) Manufacturing has seen some hiring, but the car industry clearly saw job losses-10,000 in February after the uptick of the previous month, and John Schmid of the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel is right to refer to the sector's "erratic fluctuations," of which this may simply be one.

Even the relatively upbeat report from Business Week does not question the widespread expectation of a slow labor market recovery-a pessimism that affects not only the officially unemployed, but the underemployed as well, according to Gallup tracking polls from January. Notably, the pessimism is far stronger among those with postgraduate degrees than those who just have "some college or vocational school," with sixty-five percent in the former category giving the "not optimistic" answer, compared to forty-two percent in the latter. (Those looking for broader coverage of those confronting such downward mobility can check out Peter S. Goodman's four-pager in the New York Times last month.)

That the matter of employment is still being discussed as something apart and different from the broader issue of an economic recovery, the "conventional wisdom" from before "the Great Recession" still going strong.

April 2, 2010
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest figures on unemployment have the U-3 rate holding steady at 9.7 percent, while the U-6 rate has ticked upward to 16.9 percent (from 16.8 the previous month).

Hiring is supposed to be a bit stronger, with employers adding 162,000 jobs in March (touted as the largest addition in three years).

This is not bad news, but unspectacular news. Given that the recession added another 8 million jobless, simply to return to where the economy was in 2007-never mind alleviating the situation of those who had already been unemployed or underemployed, or accommodating new entrants to the job market-will take fifty months of progress at that rate, over four years without setbacks.

Of course, trends are rarely so constant-and deceleration or reversal seem more plausible than acceleration. One positive sign is that manufacturing payrolls increased, but only by about 17,000 (10% of the total). Meanwhile, as the Los Angeles Times notes, "about 30% of the payroll increases over the last month, or 48,000 jobs, were created by the Census Bureau"-helpful, but temporary, and far from being proof of robust long-term job growth in the private sector.

John Canally of LPL Financial is quoted in the Christian Science Monitor as saying that the natural job growth rate (which this data would support) is more along the lines of 100,000 jobs a month-at which rate it would be some eighty months, or almost seven years, to return to pre-recession employment levels-2017, before the market recovers to where it was in 2007.

Even those numbers, however, merit some extra scrutiny. On top of the Census jobs, there were another 40,000 private sector temp jobs in that payroll increase-better than nothing (and a sign of improvement), but not an unambiguously positive sign for those concerned with the underemployment the U-3 figures overlook. After all, it seems only too plausible that this recession will mean a long-term increase in the percentage of the work force working as temps who wish they were full-timers.

And of course, there is the continued tightness of credit and the implausibility of much increase in consumer spending so long as people remain jobless, or insecure in their jobs.

In short, even if things do start to brighten, the effects of this decade's financial disaster will almost certainly be felt for years to come.

October 8, 2010
Last month the National Bureau of Economic Research declared the "Great Recession" officially over as of June 2009.

Still, you wouldn't know it to look at the unemployment data that came out today. "Labor underutilization"'s at 9.6 percent according to the U-3 measure, 17.1 percent according to the U-6--which not only represents a 0.4 percent rise over August, but is actually slightly higher than last September's figure (a flat 17 percent).

As Steve Schaefer of Forbes notes, the slight increase in the number of unemployed that resulted in this figure was due mainly to government layoffs, "split almost evenly between the end of temporary census jobs and cuts at the state and local levels." This overwhelmed the slight rise in private sector hiring, mostly in the service sector, health care and food services in particular (the two, adding some 24,000 and 34,000 jobs respectively, almost equal to the total increase of 64,000 by themselves). Construction and manufacturing are still shedding jobs (those sectors down by 21,000 and 6,000 respectively last month, the improvement in manufacturing earlier this year really just about restocking inventory after all).

The fact that government is still cutting so many jobs--with jobs in education "declining substantially due to budget woes" (as Joshua Shapiro of MFR Inc. has noted)--is a worrisome sign, and Jay Feldman of Credit Suisse would seem all too right when he notes that "The state and local fiscal crisis is clearly leaving a deeper imprint on aggregate economic activity." The decline in construction and manufacturing, those two crucial engines of employment and growth, is likewise telling, as is the predictable obverse of the fact, namely that the increase in private-sector employment has been mainly "in bar and restaurant jobs . . . not exactly known for the good pay and benefits," as Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics notes.

Taken together they all indicate the frailty of the job market, and reminders not only of the continued weakness of demand, but the likelihood that demand will remain weak for some time to come.

It's all getting awfully monotonous (which is one reason why this is no longer a monthly feature of this blog).

Meanwhile, in other (related) economic news:

* Banks have failed even faster in 2010 than they did in 2009 (bringing the total since Washington Mutual's collapse in September 2008 up to 279 this past month) and there is little sign of the rate falling off, as Randall Smith and Robin Sidel of the Wall Street Journal note in their "anniversary" piece from two weeks ago.

* The issue of income inequality inside the United States has got more than the usual amount of attention in the press in recent weeks, due primarily to two events. One is the U.S. Census Bureau's annual publication of its data on income distribution. (The country's Gini index, as it happens, is now 0.468, which would make the U.S. equal to Rwanda, according to the CIA World Factbook.) The other is the release in September (just two days before the Census report came out) of Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker's book Winner-Take-All-Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned its Back on the Middle Class, described in a piece in the Atlantic Wire sampling response to it as "a synthesis of recent studies" of the subject. (Ezra Klein, blogging at the Washington Post, also takes a look at the book, presenting Pierson and Hacker's data regarding what the current picture would have looked like "if growth had been equal" in graph form.)

Review: The Organization Man, by William H. Whyte

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956, pp. 429.

When I picked up William H. Whyte's The Organization Man I expected to find a musty curiosity. Back when Whyte was writing the country was undergoing sustained, rapid economic expansion such as America has not approached since (averaging 5 percent GDP growth a year for twenty years); the New Deal State was going strong and expected to go on doing so forever, the conservatives fulminating against it apparently hopeless yearners for a past that was never coming back; and a new hire of the kind he was writing about expected to be able to stay not just in their field, but at the same company, for life.1 Indeed, Whyte worried that the great danger of the organization to the individual was that being an "organization man" was too comfortable, the company environment too "beneficent" (to use his favored term) for the good of the organization men, or their organizations. By contrast the post-1973 period has been characterized by mediocre growth through decade after recession-filled decade; by a shift in the character of government's role in economic life that in Whyte's day had been widely thought an inconceivable regression; by the stagnant salaries and generalized insecurity that have left working people caught up in a revolution of falling expectations. The result of all this is that the pressures of the workplace would today seem to be something quite different.

Yet, while much has changed, much has also remained constant, and much of the analysis of this book, sophisticated yet accessible in a way that makes so much of our current pop social science seem embarrassingly dumbed down, could have been written today. Barbara Ehrenreich's writing in books like Bait and Switch (2005) and Bright-Sided (2009), its description of the pressure to be "optimistic" and agreeable while on the job, and the submergence of individuality beneath sociability in the workplace; the self-help tradition and its special place in the culture of salesmanship; the use, misuse and abuse of personality tests by employers; is a reminder that much of what was problematic about the world of work Whyte described remains with us. Similarly relevant is his description of how the middle class handled its finances in his day, the portrait he paints one of people with little knack for managing their own money generally living beyond their means to maintain their social status (a reminder that this hasn't solely been a feature of the slow economic growth we have taken for granted since the '70s). Likewise, there is the rightward political shift among those leaving the city for suburbia, the similarly motivated "ex-urbanites" today repeating the process.

An even bigger surprise for me was Whyte's characterization of education. Reading his comments on the conservatism and non-intellectualism or anti-intellectualism of college students; the decline of the humanities and liberal arts (and even the short shrift given the fundamental sciences) not only as majors but as components of the average student's education as training became more narrowly vocational; the weaknesses of teacher recruitment and teacher training, with its low stress on subject area knowledge; the hysteria that some challenge by another nation requires us to produce more engineers, to lament that more students don't study the necessary subjects, and to (disingenuously) blame "softer" majors for that lack; the concern that business's grant-giving is having undue influence on education, and that academics are only too inclined to cater to what they think businessmen want; it certainly seemed to me that there had been very little change on campus, for all the celebration and condemnation of the 1960s as some watershed. I think, too, of what Whyte said of business's bias against liberal-arts majors at hiring time, even as business leaders call for more broadly educated employees, the author observing that

At the rate things are going, it would seem liberal arts is well on its way toward being made into a specialty--a preprofessional training considered useful only for those who intend to lead the gentle life (105).

And of course, there is the issue at the bottom of it all, summed up in the words beneath the title on the cover: "The clash between the individualistic beliefs he is supposed to follow and the collective life he actually lives--and his search for a faith to bridge the gap. Of course, that clash was not a new issue in Whyte's time. Arguably, Frederick Jackson Turner writing a half century and more earlier wrestled with the same issue in the wake of the frontier's close, anticipating the replacement of earlier, more libertarian economic thinking by a world of big business and big labor and big government, the older resource profligacy by something like sustainable growth--and an America looking more like Europe. The failure to reconcile the contradiction between reality and ideology, which may be starker now than ever before, makes Whyte's take on the problem even more relevant now than when it was first written. A century after the great merger movement and the trusts, during which time the trends such writers saw have only advanced, our rhetoric on issues from space development to the welfare state still recalls frontier-style individualism. Simply put, we haven't really dealt with the contradiction, and I wonder if we ever will.

NOTES
1. This is my own calculation using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, adjusted for inflation.

A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century, by Jacques Attali

New York: Arcade Publishing, 2009, pp. 291.

True to its title (how often does a book refer to itself as "brave and controversial?"), Jacques Attali's A Brief History of the Future opens with an introduction that will strike most as self-confident to the point of arrogance. The author quite flatly tells us that he will "demonstrate . . . that history obeys laws that allow us to make predictions and channel its course" (x). To be fair, this is hardly an exceptional claim--just one made with less than the level of humility demanded by the anti-teleological bent of contemporary intellectual life.

Nor is Attali's claim regarding the nature of those laws particularly unusual. As Attali argues,

Viewed from an extremely long-range standpoint, history flows in a single, stubborn, and very particular direction . . . from century to century, humankind has asserted the primacy of individual freedom over all other values (xii-xiii).

In practical, tangible terms this has manifested itself in the "progressive rejection of all forms of servitude," the development of labor-saving technical advances, and the "liberalization of lifestyles, political systems, art, and ideologies" (xiii), increasingly empowering the individual to "plan and master his fate free of all constraints--except respect for the rights of his fellow man to the same freedoms" (xiii).

Related to this growth of freedom has been a pattern of shift in the balance between the three historically dominant social forces--religion (in a theologically-oriented "ritual order"), violence (in a territorially-oriented "imperial order") and money (in an individualistic "mercantile order")--or to put it another way, the priest, the soldier and the merchant--with the dominance of religion giving way to the dominance of violence, and the dominance of violence in turn giving way to the dominance of money. The ritual order predominated through pre-history, increasingly giving way to an imperial order in the third millennium B.C., when the first empires emerged. The advent of empires headed by princes was a crucial moment in the development of human freedom--the "concept of an individual . . . born with the ruling prince, and it is under his dictatorial sway that the dream of freedom begins" (p. 14). (Attali identifies China's Huang Di as the first such prince, though he appears to have come along later than Egypt's Menes, the first to unite Upper and Lower Egypt, whom Attali also mentions.)

The third order makes its first appearance as a dominant force some two millennia later, in the eastern Mediterranean during the first millennium B.C., among the Greeks, Phoenicians and Israelites. For these peoples, "human life comes before anything else"--which is to say that their outlook is a worldly one--and "every man is equal to his neighbor" (even if full humanity is accorded only a very narrow group), two ideas not held by the previous orders. Additionally, the acquisition of wealth is regarded as a worthy goal, and there are the first glimmerings of the idea of progress, going along with which is a valuing of the new. Attali calls this package of ideas the "Judeo-Greek ideal," and the social model growing out of it the "market democracy."

The mercantile order developed inside the successive Roman and Islamic empires that dominate the Mediterranean region. The "leading edge of the mercantile order," however, passed from Moorish Cordoba to the West in the twelfth century (p. 31), after which point the "core" shifted from place to place as a result of crisis or war.1 Still, the core was invariably, a port city with a substantial agricultural and industrial hinterland, the "hard power" to "exert . . . control over hostile minorities, lines of communications, and sources of raw materials" (p. 105), cutting-edge financial institutions and a comparative openness to outsiders. These enable it to attract and retain an "innovative class," which advances the industrialization and automation of economic life, and expands the definition of human freedom. Indeed, each core's ascendance is typically connected with the appearance of a central new technology, which did not necessarily originate there--contrary to the prevailing pieties about innovation--but which is implemented there more thoroughly than anywhere else.2

At the start of this period the cores generally appear in the Low Countries and northern Italy--Bruges, Venice, Antwerp, Genoa and Amsterdam successively being the locale from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries--after which it passes to London and then crosses the Atlantic to Boston, New York and finally Los Angeles. The last is the core in the age of the microchip, which has seen the Pacific supplant the Atlantic as the hub of the world economy.

It is here that Attali turns from what has been essentially a history of capitalism (comprising the first third or so of the text, 86 of my edition's 278 pages), to the future of capitalism and everything else. Today L.A.'s tenure as a world core is three decades old, and the "American empire" of which L.A. is a part is, Attali notes, beleaguered by mounting debt, overfinancialization, deindustrialization and a widening gap between rich and poor. Attali predicts the continued extension of market democracy and rapid worldwide economic growth for two decades to come, but believes L.A. (and the American empire) will have seen its day by the 2030s. Attali contemplates the possibility of a tenth core (perhaps also to appear in California, just as the U.S. had two successive cores on the East Coast, Boston and New York), examining numerous possibilities, but in the end judges a shift to a polycentric world of regional leaders more likely, while the United States, after the end of empire, becomes either a North European-style social democracy, or a dictatorship.3 (Indeed, he raises the possibility of a broader, if only partial, reversal of market democracy's gains by the spread of market authoritarianism.)

That particular process will be reinforced by three waves, all of which are already sweeping the world, which will define the twenty-first century more than the accomplishments (or misdeeds) of any one state. The first, which Attali calls "planetary empire," is the continued expansion of the size and pervasiveness of the market to the point where the power of money unshackles itself from everything else, including the nation-states it will all but dismantle (the U.S. included), and even the family unit (as the atomization and proletarianization of human beings approaches its greatest imaginable extreme).

The ultimate conclusion is a super-capitalist "super-empire" with an internationalized, ultra-mobile elite at the top (hypernomads) moving as their interests suit them, as nations are reduced to "oases competing with one another to attract passing caravans" (183). The sedentary, who cannot or will not embrace a life of such mobility, are necessarily marginalized. Virtually all services will be supplied on a private basis only, an order conducing to the benefit of the richest hypernomads at the expense of everyone else. Meanwhile, the governance of business will be almost entirely private--both by the associations industry will be forced to set up for itself, and the increasingly powerful insurance business. (In the provision of insurance against ecological disturbances, as well as the rising cost of scarce energy, water and other resources, the market will even end up taking a measure of responsibility for the environment--though not enough to take care of the problem.) Related to this development will be the emergence of an unprecedented surveillance society, with business pursuing any and all information about "employees, clients, suppliers, competitors and risks" (173), while individuals take enormous pains to verify their continued acceptability to employers, insurers and the like through an adherence to the norms set for them. Ultimately, human beings will be commodified (209) as genetic engineering, cloning and the technology to transfer a human consciousness from one body to another make a posthuman existence feasible (an outcome Attali views with great revulsion, and expects to be key in prompting subsequent backlash against the first wave).

The second wave, "planetary war," is the sub-state, intra-state and interstate violence which will emerge out of an unequal, aggrieved world struggling with sharpening resource scarcity and climate disruption, as well as the "super-empire's" assaults on traditional cultures and institutions (like religion). Far from emphasizing one type of conflict, just about every kind of conflict defense intellectuals have predicted makes an appearance in this part of the book, with some relatively outré possibilities included (like the prospect of new Volkerwanderungs by heavily armed refugees), and the array of weapons involved including exotic new possibilities (like nanite-based systems). This could well culminate in the intense, perhaps omnicidal, violence of "hyperconflict."

The third wave, "planetary democracy," is the growth of the "relational enterprises" of civil society (led by "transhumans," a fourth "sector" after the priests, soldiers and merchants), which he expects will not only salve the damage done by the first two waves, but tame the first wave of super-capitalism and suppress the second wave of hyperconflict, revitalizing democracy, and laying the foundations for meaningful global governance (through revived but more open states, and international organizations). The protection and extension of the "common good"--"the things that make life possible and worthwhile--climate, air, water, freedom, democracy, culture, languages, fields of knowledge" will be the priority for that new order, while a "universal intelligence" greater than the sum of its parts, and perhaps leading to a "hyperintelligence of the living" (implicitly transcending humanity technologically) will emerge. Everything essential to leading a full and rich human life and "participat[ing] in the common good" (274) will become available to all, including not just a more developed version of the rights of the classical liberal kind (like "freedom"), or more recent and even less often realized social and economic rights (information and a clean environment will be part of the package), to such things as "respect" and "compassion" in a more prosperous, more sustainable and freer world than has ever existed before. Attali terms this "hyperdemocracy," and is optimistic about the likelihood of the happy ending to the trajectory his book charts--but there is a range of possibility regarding how long it will take to get there, and how much worse things will get before they start to get better.

A Brief History is not a particularly dense read (those accustomed to this sort of futurology should be able to breeze through it), but there's no arguing the sweep of its narrative, or the range of its influences. Perhaps first and foremost, there's quite a bit of Hegel here: the idea of history as the story of freedom's growth, in which we can see a movement from one being free (in the despotic regimes of those first princes), to some being free (in the more or less aristocratic societies that emerged since), to all being free (at the "end of history"). It's evident too in the westward progression of the cutting edge from one "world-historical" people to another, China giving place to the eastern Mediterranean, after which Western Europe (and eventually the United States) picks up the torch; the characterization of East and West, and Asia and Europe he presents; and the dialectical movement of that history, with action and reaction compelling a higher synthesis (as the second wave pushes back against the first, and the third pushes back against both those preceding it).

There's also a good bit of Hegel-by-way-of-Marx, there being a fair amount of Marxism here, explicitly acknowledged. The Marxist critique of capitalism (which Attali regards as substantially validated by recent history) is key to the narrative, not least the market's tendency to create innumerable problems (cartels, disruptive speculation, wasted natural resources, etc.), failure to resolve other problems older than itself (poverty, joblessness, etc.), and dissolve all things in the cash nexus, while ultimately its thrust is unsustainable. He does not suggest the possibility of a revival of Marxism or even socialism as political forces (or propose any overarching secular alternatives which might occupy their former place), but he predicts that the failures of the market will become increasingly obvious as such, and feed the reaction against them he described above.

The inspirations and parallels, however, are not to be found exclusively in these classics of nineteenth century German philosophy. Even if the rise and fall of capitalism's cores is not precisely the same story as the rise and fall of the world-system's hegemonic great powers (a story told numerous times by historians like William McNeill, and Paul Kennedy, and Charles Kindleberger), the parallels between them are considerable, with the principal exceptions Attali's focus on key cities rather than key countries in his account of the core's progress, and the short shrift (perhaps too short) he gives to the Iberian powers more typically viewed as dominant in the sixteenth century, Portugal and Spain.

Finally, I got a sense that when he first wrote this book in 2003 (the French edition came out in 2006, and the English edition only three years later) he'd distilled the preceding decade or so of writing about the post-Cold War order. The book his three waves actually put me most in mind of is perhaps Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld (1996)--corporate globalization (wave one) colliding with an often violent ethno-religious-traditionalist reaction (wave two), while a reinvigoration of civil society (wave three) offers our best hope for a way out of this mess. (I can point to Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999) as well, though in keeping with its far less critical approach, Friedman's later book offers Lexuses and olive trees as comparatively gentle variations on McWorld and Jihad, respectively.) A lot of other '90s-era ideas are evident here as well, like Francis Fukuyama's version of the "end of history" argument. (Indeed, Attali explicitly states that the "End of History . . . will certainly come about" as a result of economic growth, increasing transparency and the expansion of the middle classes (p. 165), though as demonstrated above, there are considerable differences between his reading of events, and Fukuyama's neoconservative triumphalism.) There are echoes of Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations," Robert Kaplan's "Coming Anarchy," and also Thomas Homer-Dixon and Michael Klare's writing on ecologically-driven conflict, in Attali's description of hyperconflict.4

To Attali's credit, the result is a sense of synthesis rather than the incoherence into which such an effort might easily have collapsed, and even if many of his own insights appeared in his previous books (his three-orders concept, among others, can be found in previous books by this author, like 1992's Millennium), they do contribute usefully to the whole. His treatment of ecological issues and the stagnation of technological progress in recent years (the latter an especially underappreciated matter) is on the whole quite persuasive. Attali also recognizes the challenges laying ahead of a Chinese or Indian path to world leadership, and his idea that the twenty-first century will see multiple, regional cores rather than a single global one is quite plausible. Some of Attali's predictions also seem to have already been validated, particularly those about a reversal of democracy in some quarters (as suggested in John Kampfner's 2009 book Freedom for Sale) and the increased scale of criminal activity (as in the intensity and ambition of piracy off the Horn of Africa in recent years).

As a discussion of the growth of democracy out of the market his book offers a rare degree of balance and nuance, certainly in comparison with the more triumphalist, sanitized versions American writers tackling the theme (like Walter Russell Mead in God and Gold) are prone to offer--these being far less likely to acknowledge the ways in which an increase in the freedom of a few has gone hand in hand with a decrease in the freedom of others. This is certainly the case with his analysis of contemporary globalization, in contrast with the many writers--like Thomas Friedman--prone to focus on "winners" and ignore or brush aside "losers" in the game.

Nonetheless, Attali's book has a number of significant weaknesses. One is that Attali's discussion of economics all too often reflects hype rather than substance--for instance, when he approaches the subject of how well the world economy did during the last three decades, the author of this book claiming that in the years since 1980 Gross World Product increased "by more than 4% per year, a rate never before achieved in history" (p. 94). (In actuality the world economy didn't even come close, the more generous measures putting it at 3 percent, and a good many more nuanced indicators putting it well below that. It might also be pointed out that the world did better during the late 1940s to the early 1970s, when it actually achieved and even exceeded the aforementioned 4 percent rate, as I show in my own article on the subject here.) He is equally prone to accept hype where it is negative, as with the claims for "Eurosclerosis," which he takes at face value. His discussion of the economics of energy production and use is particularly superficial--blithe about the prospects of extracting unconventional oil, dismissive of renewables, and overly precise about the intrinsically speculative matter of the commercial prospects of nuclear fusion, which he simply states "will certainly not be practicable before the end of the twenty-first century, at best" (p. 137). (I covered some of the deficiencies of such an outlook in an article I published in Survival two years ago, available here.)

Further, while there is much that is useful in the basic vision of three waves, there is much in the details that strikes me as doubtful. It seems to me that privatization cannot and will not go to the extremes Attali describes, not least because of the problems he describes. As Thomas Frank notes, the actuality of neoliberalism has been the capture and reorientation of states, rather than their outright suppression. I have a hard time picturing this actually changing, and I would expect that states will go on having their place, and indeed, remain large and powerful entities in their own right.

Where recent trends are concerned, again, my view has been that we saw anemic world economic growth and technological stagnation, and that barring some change unforeseen in this discussion, this will continue for the foreseeable future, especially as ecological shocks and financial instability worsen. (In particular one has to wonder if a posthumanity such as he imagines will become feasible within the time frame he describes--technological stagnation working against this outcome--and how it actually will be received. The kind of rebellion he describes does not seem necessarily assured.)

I have my doubts, too, that religion will play quite the role he imagines in hyperconflict, and certainly about its participation in an anti-capitalist backlash. By and large, the revival of fundamentalism has been socioeconomically as well as socioculturally conservative, and my guess would be its cooptation by the first wave, so that its prominence in an overt, explicit anti-capitalist movements; would have little precedent (and Attali fails to make an argument adequate to explain why things will be different this time). I wonder also if religion will not prove a more hollow force during this century than is commonly suspected (especially if secular critiques of the status quo turn out to be less sterile than he imagines).5

I wonder, too, what effect the aging of the world's population Attali acknowledges will have on the propensity to resort to violence, if it will not produce an opposing tendency toward a less bellicose world.6

Finally, while I do not denigrate the accomplishments of the "fourth sector" which constitutes the main source of hope in his story (as it does in so many others written in recent decades), Attali offers little reason to think it will really have the wherewithal to come to the rescue in the face of super-empire and hyperconflict, especially given the resistance the first two waves will put up, and the lack of a clear, overarching vision to bring them together. (As a participant in wave three, Attali, the founder of the non-profit organization PlaNet Finance, may be prone to overstate their weight.)

If I had to make a guess it would be that the first wave will crest earlier than predicted here, and the second too, powerful as they will be. The third wave may prove even more limited than that. I certainly don't rule out catastrophe (indeed, it still seems quite plausible given that balance of forces), but I suspect the run-up to it is likely to be less dramatic than the portrait he paints, even if the result is just as bad. At the same time, it strikes me as all too likely that our happy ending might end up being not much more than our somehow muddling through, and that if a way out of our mess is to be found, it will almost certainly be along lines quite different from what he imagines.

NOTES
1. As the reader may have noted, the narrative is an essentially Eurocentric one. Attali's explanation is that, roughly at the time of the advent of the mercantile order, Asia and Europe parted ways, the East setting "out to free man from his desires, while the West seeks to make him free to realize them" (24). Such an analysis is problematic: both drives clearly exist in both cultures. Additionally, there is considerable evidence for the dynamism of East and South Asian capitalism down to the end of the eighteenth century--much of it assembled in Andre Gunder Frank's study ReOrient (1998). (Indeed, as Frank notes, Adam Smith repeatedly referenced contemporary China as a model capitalist economy in his classic The Wealth of Nations.)
2. Where those technologies are concerned, a recurring theme is the "industrialization of services," which is to say the creation of goods that replace services earlier performed by people--for instance, frozen meals in place of cooking--in contrast with the prevailing thinking regarding a split between a declining manufacturing economy, and an ascendant service economy. (As with the discussion of the three orders, Attali presented this in earlier form in Millennium.)
3. Where the decline of the U.S. is concerned, Attali predicts a massive financial crisis playing a key role, one which he predicts for the 2025-2030 period. In a footnote included in my addition, however, he suggests that the 2008 financial crisis may be the event (155), though he does not go beyond this to a broader updating of the prediction.
4. Of course, there is ample precedent for his conception in fiction, as with cyberpunk science fiction and its successors from the 1980s on. The title and theme also resemble a tradition originating with H.G. Wells (in novels like The World Set Free and The Shape of Things to Come) in which the excesses of capitalism and nationalism threaten to destroy the world, with salvation emerging in a humane new global order. The late Wells scholar W. Warren Wagar penned an updated version of the story (albeit a more explicitly Marxist one) in the similarly titled A Short History of the Future (first published in 1989, with a new edition coming out in 1993).
5. That Attali was writing in 2003, shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks, may in fact have made him exaggerate the place of religious conflict in international relations.
6. The prospect of hyperviolence, furthermore, would seem another argument in support of markets preserving states, if only because private actors would be unwilling or unable to foot the security bill.

Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the World Economy, by Joseph Stiglitz

New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010, pp. 361.

As the title of the book makes clear, Joseph Stiglitz tells the story of the housing bubble's emergence and bursting.

Stiglitz points out now-familiar problems, and in particular runaway securitization in a lack of transparency, an excess of complexity, poor corporate governance, the "too big to fail" syndrome and the rest. He also notes the lax regulation that permitted such things as "questionable" accounting, massive information asymmetries, predatory lending and of course, the conflicts of interest in the inclusion of commercial banking and investment banking in the same firm-in cases a matter of regulation failing to keep up with innovation in the development of financial devices, though in others a matter of the financial community's effective resistance to and reversal of regulations, such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 which repealed Glass-Steagall), and the irresponsibility of the Federal Reserve as overseen by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke. (Stiglitz also provides effective and accessible critiques of the intellectual background to the situation, in the orthodox teaching of economics.)

He then moves on to analyze the Federal government's response to the mess. Just as the Clinton administration continued along the economic course set under Reagan-Bush I (as Stiglitz noted in his earlier book, The Roaring Nineties), he finds continuity rather than rupture in the transition from the Bush administration to Obama's tenure-which symbolically saw the return of right-winger Larry Summers to the Treasury, but not more liberal figures like Robert Reich, or this book's author.

In the chapter titled "The Great American Robbery" he details the story of how the bail-outs essentially pumped money into the system with virtually no strings attached, and in the absence of the kinds of meaningful reform that would resulted in a sounder financial system over the long term, while the Federal Reserve massively expanded the money supply. (Showing how different things could have been, Stiglitz discusses alternative approaches to the problem, such as a "trickle-up" bail-out approach which would have helped the banks by helping homeowners meet their obligations. He also offers a wide array of ideas for reorganizing the financial system on a more sustainable basis, not least the restoration of Glass-Steagall "in some form," as well as the establishment of an Electronic Funds Transfer System that would enable everyday financial transactions to occur outside the banks, and a Financial Products Safety Commission to facilitate tighter regulation of activities like mortgage lending and the packaging and selling of derivatives.) Stiglitz also examines the stimulus program and finds it to be too slow in arriving, too small, too short-term and too poorly directed-especially in the parts going into tax cuts, and the others that are (incompletely) filling in the holes in state budgets rather than launching new initiatives-or doing anything meaningful about the mortgage problem.1

Stiglitz is a Keynesian, and the influence of Keynesian theory on his thought is not merely acknowledged but quite apparent. However, a prior knowledge of it is not essential for understanding the book, Stiglitz's concern being practical rather than theoretical, and Stiglitz quite ably explains the relevant concepts in what is overall a lucid and useful account of the story as it recently stood-as well as some real ideas about what might plausibly be done to avoid a repeat.

Still, at the end it struck me that Stiglitz provides rather modest grounds for optimism about corrective action to address the situation-certainly in contrast with Keynes's earlier confidence about the chances that ideas had against the power of vested interests (even as Keynes famously owned up to the influence those vested interests had on the "marketplace of ideas"). Stiglitz assumes the inevitability of change, given the alternatives, in fact comparing the collapse of Lehman Brothers to the fall of the Berlin Wall, what the latter spelled for Communism marking the same for neoliberalism. Nonetheless, it still seems to me that the latter still has rather a long life ahead of it.

NOTES
1. It may seem odd to describe an $800 billion stimulus as "too small." However, divided over two years, it pumped a mere $400 billion into a $14 trillion annual economy-equal to about 3 percent of GDP. The New Deal, even while falling far short of the initial vision, saw a much greater (and more sustained) rise in government spending, the size of the Federal government relative to GDP quadrupling between 1929 and 1940.

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes's work has been receiving renewed attention these last two years. Much of what has been said about Keynes's work has, of course, been wildly inaccurate, and a reappraisal of Keynes's ideas as he expressed them himself only too timely.

Keynes's key book is, of course, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which I suspect is yet another of those old, large books routinely mentioned but rarely read--the more in as it has a reputation for difficulty. In the preface Keynes informs the reader that he is chiefly addressing his fellow economists, even if he hopes "that it will be intelligible to others." His intellectual starting point, in his presentation of his argument, and indeed, his thought process, is the neoclassical state-of-the-art as it stood in the 1930s, much of it recognizable to anyone acquainted with marginalism, but many of his references and much of his terminology is comparatively obscure now, especially to non-specialists.

Nonetheless, the difficulty of Keynes's manner of presentation is not a reflection of some great obscurity on the part of the book's ideas, which are actually fairly simple, and it should be noted, presented quite accessibly at a number of points inside the text itself (such as the outline offered in chapter three, and the summary in chapter eighteen).

Essentially, Keynes's argument is that the classical, "Ricardian," supply-side view of economics, is wrong. Consumption is the end of all economic activity, and without consumption--without "effective demand" (a concept Keynes borrows from Thomas Malthus)--there is no incentive to produce. Demand depends on income, but not only income, because of a crucial, previously unconsidered factor--that the "propensity to consume," both that of the community and the individual, declines with increasing wealth, making society vulnerable to shortfalls in this area. The money in the hands of working people is the money most completely and reliably spent on consumption, making effective demand dependent on employment, which in its turn is dependent on investment, while investment is dependent on the incentive to invest (i.e. purchase capital assets out of income). This, in turn, depends "on the relation between the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital and the complex of rates of interest on loans of various maturities and risks."

In other words, businessmen have to expect that the return on their investment will be higher than the cost of the capital involved for investment to appear worthwhile--and this confidence a fickle thing because of two related aspects of life economics had previously tended to overlook in its fixation on the idea of unfailingly rational, utility-maximizing Economic Man. This is the reality that human beings make decisions in conditions of uncertainty, one result of which is "that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic." And that, in turn, means that "economic prosperity is excessively dependent on a political and social atmosphere which is congenial to the average business man," and also that "slumps and depressions are exaggerated in degree" as was the case with the Depression during which Keynes was writing.

This image of economic life naturally led to certain prescriptions, perhaps the most famous of which is the pursuit of a low interest rate, so that the marginal efficiency of capital, and with it, employment-creating investment, are attractive. (Indeed, Keynes specifically suggests in chapter twenty-two the path of remedying the trade cycle by lowering the interest rate, ideally "abolishing slumps and keeping us permanently in quasi-boom.") However, as he states in the final chapter (where he offers his most focused treatment of his theory's implications for policy), it also seems to him that merely tinkering with interest rates would be inadequate to attain that goal, and so he called for "a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment . . . [as] the only means of securing an approximation to full employment." (Indeed, a drastic redistribution of income is a step governments might take to stimulate consumption as booms go on--again, rather than putting an end to growth.)

Keynes makes very clear in his book that he did not anticipate the abolition of inequality or private initiative, let alone economic individualism (even if he viewed the reduction of inequality as an object that was both desirable and achievable). He also anticipated the socialization he described as coming about slowly, and still leaving the economy relatively decentralized.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, Keynes also recognized the limits of his ideas. There was, as he noted in chapter fifteen, limits to what the monetary authorities could do--cases where governments could do little to increase or decrease liquidity. Similarly, there is virtually no discussion of deficit spending in this book. (Indeed, this only gets one mention in chapter eight, where it is discussed as a situation in which governments might find themselves while providing unemployment relief in hard times, not as some cornerstone of his theory.) Given the emphasis on putting money into the hands of those who have least and therefore can be counted on to spend what they can get, it is also quite clear that upper-class income tax cuts are a dubious form of economic "stimulus" from the standpoint of his theory.

Why all the confusion, then? Given how often ideas like these are received secondhand, a measure of distortion was inevitable, especially given the hostility they have attracted in some quarters. This would seem to have been exacerbated by the broader inattention to macroeconomics common in the field, the fact that the "synthesis" of Keynes's thought with the neoclassical thinking he set up his theory against became so pervasive, and the subsequent evolution of Keynesianism into successor schools (some quite far removed from the initial theories). When all that is taken into account, the errors seem tiresomely predictable rather than surprising.

"How Long Till Human-Level AI?"

H+ magazine recently carried an article regarding a small-scale survey of experts (twenty-one of the attendants at the 2009 Artificial General Intelligence conference) on the question of when general artificial intelligence will arrive, and specifically when it will attain four milestones-Turing-level intelligence, the intelligence of a third-grader, the intelligence needed to do Nobel Prize-quality work, and finally the key Singularitarian outcome of superhuman intelligence. Interestingly, fifteen of the twenty-one-seventy percent-of them predict a computer will pass the Turing test by the 2040s. A significant percentage answered "never," however, particularly in regard to the question of when a computer would achieve superhuman intelligence-nine of the twenty-one answering in this way, the greatest unanimity the survey finds on any point. However, that still leaves the doubters of that particular outcome in the minority, eleven of the twenty-one predicting this actually happening by the 2040s. (Incidentally, the second most popular guess was that computers would be doing Nobel-quality science by the 2020s, with a full third of the respondents giving that answer.) Of course, this is a limited examination of the views of a small, pre-selected group (these all being AI specialists rather than a more general sampling of computer scientists), and this is a particularly tricky kind of prognostication, so that my guess would be a likelihood on their part to err on the side of overoptimism rather than the reverse. Nonetheless, that such a view is common is well worth noting, and the discussion (as well as the magazine more generally) well worth a look from those interested in the issue.

The Return of Neo-Medievalism?

A piece by Parag Khanna in Foreign Policy magazine (which came to my attention by way of Bruce Sterling, through Paul Raven of Futurismic) makes the case for a "neo-Medieval" vision of the "future that looks like nothing more than a new Middle Ages, that centuries-long period of amorphous conflict from the fifth to the 15th century when city-states mattered as much as countries," with all the disorder such a state of affairs may entail.

Khanna points to the long list of dysfunctional states; the weight of corporations, the absorption of states by international institutions like the European Union-as well as the concentrations of wealth in major cities that may be independent actors for all practical purposes; and the privatization of security implicit in gated communities "from Bogota to Bangalore."

This is quite a lot to think about, of course. Khanna, however, offers little that is new. There was a lot of this sort of talk back in the 1990s, for instance, and not just in post-cyberpunk science fiction novels like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, or Ken MacLeod's The Star Fraction (and of course, a good bit of Sterling's own writing). Robert Kaplan penned a couple of pieces about the key trends, his well-known "The Coming Anarchy" and his worthwhile but less often cited "Was Democracy Just a Moment?", while Martin Van Creveld penned a book titled The Rise and Decline of the State. And of course, two decades earlier, Hedley Bull raised the point (and used that terminology) in his classic study of international relations, The Anarchical Society (1977).

Still, reading the piece, I wonder: might this sort of talk be making a comeback, along with the declinist rhetoric which also happened to be popular in the early '90s (a fairly fresh example of which Paul Krugman has just given us in the New York Times), shades of the decline of Rome in stark contrast with the "New Rome" triumphalism of the neocons earlier in this decade (not unquestioned, some seeing the seeds of Roman-style decline in Roman-style imperium, but still a predominant note then in a way that it is not today)?

Writing in the Summer 2009 Parameters, P. Michael Phillips, in the article "Deconstructing Our Dark Age Future," argued for a connection, with the worries about a new dark age coming from a link-up of anxiety about American decline with an exaggerated view of the influence of non-state actors.

Phillips struck me as overly sanguine in his assessment, but at the same time, it is easy to exaggerate the sense of rupture (and Bull's discussion, ultimately dismissive of the idea, made plenty of good points about this).

For a start, state dysfunctionality and private violence do not really translate to neo-Medievalism unless power and to some extent, authority and legitimacy, clearly devolve from the state unto actors below its level-a relatively rare and aberrant occurrence today, even if not unknown. Additionally, while private military corporations are justly grabbing headlines, it may be quite a stretch to picture them playing lead combat roles in conventional military operations (though admittedly this may not matter much if such operations are regarded as a thing of the past, with "real" warfare the "low-intensity" stuff where the PMCs can be big players), or exercising primary control over really large tracts of territory. At the same time the "Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere" and the North American Union of which Khanna writes would seem a long way away from approaching the European Union, an institution which I think will prove more robust than its critics expect, but which also has real limitations. Meanwhile, state capitalism made a big comeback as the resource politics game heated up (natural resources, because of their "placeness," lend themselves to territorial control, and have certainly given statism in nations like Russia more room for maneuver), while those giant corporations came hat in hand to-who else?-the state for trillions of dollars in bail-out money amid the duress of the 2008 crisis.

In short, we're not quite living out Snow Crash. But it's also a mistake to overlook many of the trends (economic privatization, regional economic inequalities, state vulnerability, etc.) involved, which could translate to exactly that if the going gets tough enough-and are already far from trivial.

$123 trillion by 2040?

Robert Fogel writing in Foreign Policy magazine, makes a case for a $123 trillion (that's actually the piece's title) Chinese GDP by 2040. This gives it an incredible $85,000 per capita GDP.

Spectacular claims like this naturally grab my attention, but the article predictably struck me as falling far short of that promise. His supporting arguments contain little that is really new-he points simply to improvements in education and labor productivity, while pointing to ways in which Chinese output, private initiative and consumerist tendencies may have been underestimated. Interesting, to be sure, but hardly a convincing case that China will repeat its performance over the last thirty years in the three decades to come-a questionable proposition given the evidence seen to date, as well as China's considerable internal problems (ecological, social, political) and a little thing called the law of diminishing returns, all of which suggest the curve flattening long before that point (even if China is left with a relatively high standard of living).

However, it is far from the only questionable stat on offer. Fogel estimates that this would give China forty percent of a Gross World Product of $300 trillion (which would make today's First World income levels the average)-which presumes the sustenance of a scorching hot 5 percent a year global growth rate for the next thirty years.

Fogel offers even less explanation for this more subtly introduced, but almost equally spectacular claim. The world sustained something like this through the 1960s, admittedly, but that was a different and much briefer period, and even before "the Great Recession," the prospects for a repeat were dim. Indeed, he offers at least one good argument against it. While the U.S. also does well in his projection (tripling its GDP to some fourteen percent of the global total he predicts, a feat requiring it to reenact its spectacular post-World War II boom), he predicts European stagnation, actually wasting a quarter of his space rehashing the familiar claims of Euroskeptic conservatism, denigrating Europe's relatively labor-friendly economic policies, and heaping disdain on the Europeans for their preference of leisure time to the more extreme forms of consumerism, and their low birth rates (though to his credit he acknowledges China's demographic issues as well).

For a corrective, one should probably check out Minxin Pei's "Think Again" article, which offers a lucid refutation of the kind of hype Fogel promotes. (Also recommended to those willing to consider Pei's argument is a 2006 piece in the same magazine by Pei on corruption, waste and elite irresponsibility in China.)

Of "Geek Shortages"-and "Geek" Dissent

According to Kate Drummond of Wired's Danger Room, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is worried that young Americans are losing interest in computer science. (Drummond quotes the Computer Research Association to the effect that "computer science enrollment dropped 43 percent between 2003 and 2006.")

Of course, we hear this kind of thing all the time, and much of it is misleading, because of

* The cherry-picking of data. The year 2003 was a peak for the enrollment of U.S. citizens in IT training, according to the National Science Foundation. In fact, it was the crest of the field's mid-'90s spike-a trend confirmed by the CRA's own historical stats. The drop in the number of IT students following the end of the tech boom euphoria was perfectly natural.

* International comparisons which fail to take proper account of demographic differences or differing definitions of key terms across countries, as in the widely cited 2004 figures which had China producing 600,000 engineers to the U.S.'s 70,000-promptly and convincingly debunked by this Duke University study. And finally,

* The tendency to focus exclusively on supply, ignoring questions of demand-which is to say, whether or not there is actually a demand for all those trained personnel (and therefore, a real paucity of IT-trained personnel such as is implied in the headline).

All of this led the usually bland Robert Samuelson (normally given to repeating the usual neoliberal pieties) to write of "A Phony Science Gap."

That's certainly not to say I think all is well, but I think this sort of rhetoric confuses more than it clarifies, with the error generally on the side of alarmism and sanctimonious speeches about how "the kids" are signing up for easy but useless majors (ironically, often coming from journalists who steered clear of math and science majors during their own college days, like Tom Friedman) that distract from more significant economic problems, and more relevant and practical courses of action.

Far more interesting to me than the piece itself is the commentary left by readers, some 136 posts so far.1 The dominant note in these threads is the frustration of computer scientists at outsourcing, H-1 visa policy, stagnating incomes and alienating workplaces-a far cry from that '90s-era image of hip, freewheeling start-ups and nineteenth-century Edisonade dreams the media still sells in the twenty-first century, and rather more in line with what Barbara Ehrenreich describes in her study of college-educated, "high-skill" workers who find themselves looking at the same insecurity, underemployment, lousy conditions and crummy compensation as their less-credentialed brethren, 2005's Bait & Switch.

The common response to critiques of what was once called "the New Economy"-and in particular the lot of workers within it-was that while unskilled workers might have to just "suck it up" (empathy was not a strong suit of this rhetoric), the remaining twenty percent-essentially, those who went to college and got marketable four year degrees-would share in the benefits of growth, growth, growth!

It would be going too far to call this a social contract; call it an understanding instead. But the results of playing by these rules (and it is hard to picture anyone who hewed more closely to those rules than those who went into the field that was supposed to be the New Economy's crowning glory) have not been as advertised. Especially in this moment of record job dissatisfaction, it may be a sign of the times that the web site of a magazine traditionally associated with Silicon Valley libertarianism is a scene for the expression of these very considerable discontents.

1. Incidentally, a second thread of commentary regarding this very same article, and proceeding along much the same lines, can be found at the Huffington Post.

A Sixth-Generation Fighter?

As of late, there has been talk about a "sixth-generation jet fighter," the conversation apparently getting a shot in the arm from the halting of the U.S.'s order of the F-22 fighter at 187 planes (making industry watchers look ahead to the next round of big programs, and feeding speculation in some quarters that a more advanced plane is due to come out of a black program somewhere).

Of course, this way of dividing the development of the jet fighter into phases is not unproblematic. This kind of classification - which assumes the existence of generations one through five, with their distinguishing features - is a fairly recent development, and the categories are only approximate (as is the case with almost any system when looked at closely enough). There are differences in ideas about what were the most essential traits, and sometimes which generation a particular aircraft belongs to.

Nonetheless, there is a core of rough consensus about these phases, and what they entail, which I'm offering below (with the key traits of each generation highlighted in bold lettering).

First-generation jet fighters appeared in the '40s (with the British Meteor and German Me-262 at the end of World War II) and continued to serve in front-line roles through the '50s (like the MiG-15 and F-86, famous from the Korean War). Powered by turbojets, they are capable of subsonic maximum speed, and generally armed with guns (cannon or machine guns), optically targeted without the aid of electronic sensors. Where broader innovation is concerned, this was the first generation of aircraft to be equipped with ejection seats, while swept wings also became commonplace at this time, and hydraulic flight control systems were in the process of supplanting earlier, mechanical control systems.

Second-generation fighters, which started appearing in the 1950s, were built with an emphasis on nuclear war-fighting, for which reason their designers deemphasized dog-fighting (and the agility that went with it) and ground attack capability (left to dedicated "fighter-bombers") in favor of fast, quick-climbing, point-defense interceptors, the design of which was often dedicated specifically to countering the threat from nuclear bombers. They are powered by afterburning turbojet engines that give them maximum speeds in the supersonic (Mach 2) range while in level flight at high altitude. Radar (range only, meaning it just gave a target's location), infra-red sensors, and air-to-air missile armament (generally short-range, usually infra-red-seeking, and primarily effective in the tail chase mode) entered into the package. (Other features, like delta wings, also began to appear at this time, while hydraulic control systems were standard at this point.) Planes like the French Mirage III, the British Lightning interceptor, the Soviet MiG-21 and the American F-104 Starfighter are examples of this stage of development. (Their fighter-bomber counterparts included planes like the American F-105, and the Soviet Sukhoi-7.)

Third-generation fighters, most of which emerged out of the 1960s, tend to be multi-role in contrast with the specialized interceptors of the previous era, in part due to higher performance-not improving their maximum speed much (still generally in the Mach 2 range), but enabling them to carry larger payloads and cover greater ranges. (Compare, for instance, the third-generation F-4 Phantom to the F-104 Starfighter as they stack up against one another in these respects.) They were equipped with more sophisticated, pulse-Doppler radar, enabling them to determine not only a target's location, but its radial velocity (range-rate); and also to fire medium-range, semi-active-radar guided missiles at beyond-visual range targets. It is also in this generation that innovations like Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) and variable-geometry wings begin appearing, while electronic countermeasures started to play something like their present role. Besides the aforementioned F-4, the Soviet MiG-23, and the French Mirage F-1, are good examples of such fighters.

Fourth-generation fighters, coming out of the 1970s, represented the next stage of advance, embodied in the "air superiority" fighters that have dominated the skies ever since. Building on the multi-role capabilities of third-generation fighter jets, there was a renewed emphasis on dogfighting capability in response to the actual conduct of battle over Southeast Asia and the Middle East (one aspect of which was the development of more agile aircraft, able to handle 8, 9 and 10-G maneuvers). It was also with this generation that fighters started to become truly effective in beyond-visual range engagements. (In most of the air wars of the '60s and early '70s, most of the kills achieved by the second- and third-generation fighters involved were actually achieved at short-range, with guns and infra-red-seeking missiles. By contrast, the U.S. Air Force in the 1991 Gulf War achieved most of its aerial kills using radar-guided Sparrow missiles.)

In more strictly technological terms, while the performance of fourth-generation fighters as measured by speed, range and payload did not change much, turbojets were largely supplanted by more efficient turbofans, and earlier hydraulic control systems by lightweight, redundant fly-by-wire systems. Additionally, look-down/shoot-down capability became standard in their radars. Aircraft controls also changed, with hands-on-throttle-and-stick (HOTAS) configurations (putting buttons and switches on the throttle and control stick so the pilot can access them without removing their hands from them) and Multi-Function Displays (in place of earlier strips and dials) increasingly the norm, bringing about the advent of the "glass cockpit." Datalinks also became a regular feature, the better to facilitate the coordination of large-scale battles by airborne command and control systems (a function performed in the American case by the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System).

Most of the fighter jets in front-line service today-such as the American F-15, F-16 and F/A-18, the French Mirage 2000, the British-German-Italian Tornado, and the Soviet MiG-29 and Sukhoi-27-fall into this category.

Fifth-generation fighters are only beginning to appear now, with the only one actually in service the American F-22. (No other proposed fifth-generation plane has even flown as a prototype, though the Russian-Indian Sukhoi-PAK program has reportedly produced three prototypes, with the plane expected to fly within the year.)

Fifth-generation fighters are distinguished from fourth-generation fighters (on the multi-role character of which they build) primarily by their incorporation of all-aspect stealth and supercruise capability (essentially, they can fly at supersonic speed without using afterburners, not changing their maximum speed much but making for a much higher cruising speed, 1,140 miles an hour for the F-22, compared with just half as much for the F-15). The thrust-vectoring capabilities that were once unique to specialized aircraft (like the Harrier), helmet-mounted displays, Active Electronically Scanned Array (or phased array) radars (the use of multiple radiating elements, which not only permits more contol over scans, but makes their signal difficult to detect passively, and more difficult to jam), Infra-Red Search and Track (IRST) systems in place of older Forward Looking Infra-Red (FLIR) sensors and "sensor fusion" (integrating data from multiple sensors), also seem to be standard on these.

That said, it seems easy enough to tell the difference between a fifth-generation F-22 and a first-generation F-86, for instance, or a fourth-generation MiG-29 and a second-generation MiG-21, but there are plenty of points in between where the line is harder to draw. Aircraft upgrades confuse the issue, in instances, by giving the aircraft of one generation some of the capabilities of more modern aircraft; for example, later versions of the first-generation F-86 were equipped with the air-to-air missiles associated with second-generation aircraft. Likewise, there are cases where technologies that only later became standard appeared in an earlier generation of aircraft-like the HOTAS control configuration or the supercruise capabilities of the second-generation Lightning, or the helmet-mounted sights and IRSTs featured in fourth-generation Soviet jets like the MiG-29 and Sukhoi-27 (while in other respects lagging a bit, the MiG-29 relying on older-style hydraulics rather than fly-by-wire).

Some aircraft also represent intermediate stages from their beginnings on the drawing board, as is now the case with many of the planes competing for contracts with premier air forces-like the American F-35, the French Rafale, the Eurofighter Typhoon, and the Swedish Saab-39 (all of them "generation 4.5" or "4+ and 4++" jets), just as the "Super Hornet" derivative of the F-18, and the later variants of the MiG-29 and Sukhoi-27 do. Simply put, they are designed with a mix of fourth- and fifth-generation capabilities-for instance, supercruise capability and phased array radar, but only limited stealth (as with the Typhoon).

Nonetheless, despite the ambiguities it seems that the divisions still have some value, and make the point that a sixth-generation fighter would have to incorporate not merely quantitative improvements over a fifth-generation plane like the F-22 (for instance, its having more bandwidth), but qualitative changes in its propulsion, sensors, controls and other fundamental areas of its design and performance comparable to those described above.

What might those be? For the time being the writing on the subject is rather vague and speculative, but John A. Tirpak writing in Air Force Magazine in October 2009 mentions key traits as including the capacity to change its shape in flight, hypersonic speed and directed-energy weaponry. (Incidentally, those who check out his article can examine a slightly different version of the schema given above, which gives special attention to the middle ground between generations four and five.)

One might also guess that its stealthiness will extend to new spectra, perhaps to include invisibility to the naked eye. (Going by an article I read in the May 1997 Popular Science which described, among other things, an experiment with a modified F-15-"Hiding in Plane Sight"-I figured we'd be way past that point by now.) Given the strain the performance of these aircraft may place on a human pilot, and what is suggested about the progress of artificial intelligence, they may be unmanned and even autonomous.

Perhaps. However, I find myself wondering if there really will be call for a sixth-generation fighter circa 2030, for three reasons.

#1. The Actual Rate of Technological Change (Slower or Faster).
On the one hand, it may be that the requisite technologies will never quite be realized-the incorporation of hypersonic flight, for instance, proving to be further off than expected. Indeed, the argument has already been made for the "senility" of major conventional weapons systems like combat aircraft.

On the other hand, it may be that so much else will take place between now and then with regard to high-end war-fighting systems that even a substantially more evolved fighter aircraft will have little place in the battlespace-for instance, because of a rapid evolution of space war-fighting systems that renders old-fashioned air superiority moot.

#2. Economic Stagnation.
Regardless of the uncertain limitations to technological advance over the next generation or two, it is worth noting that each succeeding generation of jet aircraft has been more expensive, resulting in fewer purchases and shorter production runs, even as the number of types built as part of any one generation has shrunk-which cannot but have consequences. It can be pointed out, for instance, that while an F-22 may cost five times as much as an F-15C, it can do things five F-15s cannot-but at the same time, there will be situations where the larger number of aircraft has its uses, and these may be more plausible, so that the combination of budgetary constraints, cost-and mission (see below)-will make a larger number of less-sophisticated aircraft more attractive.

It is conceivable that the rising cost of military systems (especially if the world economy stagnates in the 21st century) will result in a next-generation fighter being prohibitively expensive for even the largest powers. As things stand, even the most affluent governments increasingly rely on international collaboration and international sales to cover the costs of their high-tech weapons programs. Britain, which once produced its own jet fighters domestically, had to partner with Germany and Italy to produce the Tornado, and an even larger-scale collaboration to produce the Typhoon. Russia, even with its economy bouyed by higher energy prices, partnered with India to produce its fifth-generation fighter. The U.S. is relying on a broad international partnership (including the U.K., Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Norway) in the development and production of the F-35 (as well as the foreign sales they will bring). This seems especially likely to be the case in the event of the above two factors being operative, especially should they also combine with the stagnation of the world economy in the 21st century (or depending on one's outlook, its continuing to stagnate).

#3. Changing Military Missions.
Large-scale conventional warfare between states-and especially great powers-may exercise a smaller influence over the priorities of the major militaries. Of course, it is commonly considered ahistorical complacency to deemphasize interstate warfare, but the fact remains that two decades have passed since the Cold War's end without the U.S. trading fire with a "large peer competitor." A host of factors, like the spread of nuclear weapons (and in particular, robust strategic nuclear arsenals complete with second-strike capabilities) and international economic integration (most evident in Europe, but significant elsewhere), work against such a prospect ever getting closer. Meanwhile, counterinsurgency, peacekeeping and other, "alternative" missions-to which late-generation fighters contribute little-continue to dominate the actual, practical life of the major militaries. This trend may not be irreversible (indeed, it has been speculated that intensified resource competition, or the hijack of a major state by a radical clique may "turn the '20s into the '30s"), but the shift would nonetheless make a difference to which projects got R & D money, which systems got ordered. Not only is this worth noting given the current high profile of generation 4.5 aircraft, but signs of renewed interest in even much less-sophisticated systems, with the U.S. Air Force (admittedly, at civilian direction) taking a new interest in small war gear like "light fighters." In short, fifth-generation systems would be just as irrelevant as if they had been superseded by a fundamentally new technology.