Why I'm Sick of Hearing About STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math)

First let's get out of the way what I am not going to be talking about. I am not here to express a lack of respect for the subjects (awkwardly) lumped together under the STEM heading (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), which certainly have their intellectual demands, and are indispensable to the functioning and development of material civilization and everything else resting on it, and the expansion of human knowledge more broadly--of all of which I certainly count myself appreciative. As everything I have published should make clear, I am no Luddite by any stretch of the imagination--and indeed, even in teaching the humanities have found it very useful to draw on science in doing so, again and again (as my book on English composition shows).

I am also not here to denounce the stereotypical smug STEM majors who delight in "taking a dump" on the humanities. This is because while I have known many STEM majors I have not encountered people suffering from this particular impulse in person--while even among purely online acquaintances I have had the impression that people who really see the world this way are a rarity, many STEM majors quite aware that other fields of endeavor merit some respect, and even require important abilities that others may have in greater quantity than themselves, with this also meriting some respect. Indeed, if others look at their majors and say "I couldn't handle all that math!" they look at what the English major reads and say "I couldn't handle all that reading!" (Certainly I saw a lot of this in the response I got to my piece "Science Fiction and the Two Cultures" back when The Fix was a going concern.) Powerfully reaffirming the impression is the fact that the genuine humanities-bashers I have read have all too clearly been David Alonzo Jimmon types ("Jimmon" really needs to become a popular usage) with profound delusions of their omnicompetence and hypercompetence. (In their imagination they're the kind of "man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel tower out of metal, and brawn" and don't want you to forget it for even a second, even though in reality they're the kind of man who can't even operate a toaster. The others have often been humanities majors hypocritically shooting their mouths off.)

I am also not going to complain about the tendency to see college as an "investment" given that, while I do believe in the value of a trained and cultured mind, and of a broad and deep education in producing such a mind, it is the hope of a "better job" alone that can provide practical justification for the time and energy that cash-strapped, hard-pressed working class persons unable to afford intellectual and cultural "luxuries" are expected to put into getting a college degree. And I am not going to deny the validity of STEM as a career choice, not only because the work is important, but because those starting out in it admittedly do have higher chances of finding a job in their field, and having a higher starting salary.

Rather my initial reaction against the chatter about STEM was my usual suspicion when anything is reduced to a slogan glibly and ubiquitously uttered in that way more indicative of piety than thinking, with the endurance of glib talk about STEM striking me as irksome in three particular ways:

1. By way of its handy slogan-ness, the raving about STEM has played its part in perpetuating that foolish and harmful insistence on making a hierarchy of intellectual endeavor that has math, computers and physics at the top, other physical sciences below (those lowly medical researchers!), still other social sciences below them (no matter how much science, technology and math knowledge they actually involve, which can be quite a lot), humanities below that (because clearly only morons would bother to read books and learn languages), and art dead last (because it's all just the brain-farts of the floopy). Well-educated people may not think in such simple-minded and frankly stupid ways--may even deny that anyone does (certainly many who answered my "Science Fiction and the Two Cultures" essay denied it to a degree that made me wonder just how cut off they were from the political-cultural mainstream)--but it is the "conventional wisdom," and if one takes "conventional wisdom" to mainly mean "what stupid people think about something" the fact that most of those who live in the world certainly espouse opinions that can be called stupid, and certainly most of those who have any significant amount of power in the world give every evidence of being stupid to a sub-human degree, makes the stupidity in question something one does better to acknowledge, and if possible debunk, rather than dismiss. This is all the more the case in that the hierarchy of intellectual endeavor has had social consequences, not least with regard to the justification of inequality and callousness toward the less fortunate--with "tech billionaires" worshipped as demigods and the disenfranchised sneeringly told "learn to code," with those who will not, or cannot, do so deserving what they get. One can even add that all this has been bad for STEM itself--science, in the end, a philosophy, and the inability to understand the premises of that philosophy for lack of the proper training has been cited as a factor in the reality that so much of the scientific work now ongoing by fully credentialed and employed scientists is of such poor quality as to cripple the productivity of their fields.

2. The glib STEM talk has enabled obfuscation of the bigger issue of individual returns to higher education generally. It has seemed to me for some time that the formula college=middle classness, which may always have had an element of blinkeredness, wishful thinking or outright evasion about it (e.g. telling people to take out loans for college instead of doing things that directly help working people, because that's not what they're really about), and which has been taken so far as to produce a situation of financial bubble in significant respects, is in an advanced state of decay. Putting it bluntly, people go to college, more often than not make somewhat more money as a result, but fall far short of the comfortable life they are led to expect. And the fuss over STEM, again, makes it easy to pretend that it is a matter of people "studying the wrong things" rather than the flaws of the bigger conception, from which STEM graduates have not been immune. If they are less likely to be underemployed than their peers in other fields 1 in 3 STEM majors still finds their first job after college in a non-STEM field, while if their starting salaries are better their longer-run earnings are not--because in contrast with someone in a non-STEM field who can expect to get more proficient at their task with experience, in a good many such fields (e.g. information technology) skills obsolesce quickly. The result is that if their skills are especially valuable in the job market at the outset the "premium" on them quickly falls away, earnings growth slows, while at any rate they rise into management jobs where their actual STEM skills are less relevant than skills of other types, or (because of the comparative lack of reward) leave their field altogether. At that stage of things they are no better off than the non-STEM types--which is just one reminder that the issue of what working people can expect today is far, far more complicated than the question of their having picked their majors "poorly" or "wisely." Pretending otherwise makes the issue that much less likely to be addressed.

3. The STEM talk has aided in the diversion of the public from substantive discussion of the causes of economic problems. As we have been seeing since at least the decline of Britain as a manufacturing power over a century ago talk of "education," while acknowledging an essential to a country's engineering prowess, can easily be a cheap way of avoiding the larger subject. One should also not forget that there are many ways of thinking about the problem of improving education in STEM or any other area, while even if one does a sound job here it takes a lot more than a well-educated work force for a country to succeed as an industrial power. Quite the contrary, attention to a whole complex of issues is required--with, as a practical matter, a thoroughgoing industrial policy typically required for development, and countries which abandon that, and leave their manufacturing to sink or swim on its own usually seeing it do the former rather than the latter (as the records of Britain and the U.S. in particular have shown, especially when measured against those of Germany and Japan). Indeed, for as long as I can remember talk of "education" has played this part in the U.S., enabling our neoliberal politicians and media to overlook how, for example, government policies in such areas as trade, infrastructure, regulation of the financial sector and the distribution of "corporate welfare" have produced a financialized, speculation-oriented economy about "making money from money" in favor of flinging accusations at schoolteachers as incompetent gold-brickers (the better to advance the crush-the-public-unions-and-privatize-everything agenda so dear to them), and maligning young people as lazily steering clear of "tough" STEM majors in favor of "soft" subjects. And in making those accusations the accusers (Public Intellectuals who studied the same soft subjects themselves, and did very well out of their careers or we wouldn't have to hear their idiocies) can lay it on very thick indeed.

That such nonsense is treated with respect says a great deal about the abysmal intellectual level of public debate and the news media so crucial to it--which no amount of STEM education would alleviate by itself.

Were the '90s Declinists Right About Germany and Japan?

The anxieties about American competitiveness during the late 1980s and early 1990s were for the most part about American competitiveness vis-a-vis Germany and Japan. In looking back at that period one should not make the dialogue out to be any more sophisticated or daring than it was. Considering it I am struck by its superficiality--by the extent to which such things as the history of the German and Japanese economies was neglected in favor of the speaking of much drivel about "management style," and the lazy, shallow, frankly self-serving way of explaining industrial success that reduces everything to "culture" (mainly because one could no longer speak of "race" and still be respectable). In the process those who did so attributed to both countries strengths and faults they did not possess.

Still, for all its failings it was an acknowledgment that the "American way" of doing things was not necessarily perfect, that the country may have had some things to learn from others in the manufacturing field on which Americans had long prided themselves as the world's leaders (for a long time, very justly), and that perhaps change was called for. Of course, such concerns came to seem passé amid the tech boom, amid Eurosclerosis and Japan's "lost decade," but a generation on the situation looks rather different from how it did in the mainstream's "vacation from reality" of the late '90s.

In fairness, neither Germany nor Japan did so well as some hoped and some feared they would do. Germany gained less by reunification than some expected. Japan's "lost decade" turned into a "lost generation." And indeed, recently considering the implications of a devotion of a larger portion of their Gross Domestic Product to defense spending it seemed to me worth pointing out that the two countries are, in terms of their weight in the world's economic life and power potential relative to others, a long way from where they had been circa 1995 (when an Eamonn Fingleton could make the case for Japan's becoming the biggest economy on Earth by the end of the decade, and get Bill Clinton's own endorsement on the dust jacket of the book in which he made that case).

Still, the two countries have had their successes--not least in that manufacturing arena. Germany proved itself a force to be reckoned with here, as made clear by any look at the list of the world's "hidden champions"--while it fostered the development of an economic "greater Germany" across Central and Eastern Europe that has given it the scale of a superpower in this sphere (the more in as it enables it to leverage the still-larger European Union in its preferred direction), all of which has compelled Anglosphere commentators of even the most sneering type to show some respect. Japan does not seem to have done much less well. (We talk about who is installing the most industrial robots, but would do well to remember that Japan is the number one builder of those robots, accounting for almost half the global production. And while microchips are talked about as "the new oil," it is worth remembering which country leads in making the silicon wafers and photoresist chemicals and any number of other products essential to chipmaking--Japan again.) Indeed, when one controls for their demographic profiles, adjusting the figures for their working-age populations, one finds that in the twenty-first century Germany was actually faster-growing than the U.S. or Britain, and Japan did about as well as those two states. By contrast the dominant trend in those years has (in the case of the U.S., in spite of the lift it got from its immense defense spending and its shale boom), generally been a matter of a stagnant or eroding manufacturing base (in Britain's case, fairly steadily eroding since the financial crisis of 2007), as they owe such gains as they seem to make to FIRE sectors a lot less solid than the manufacturing successes of the others.

Indeed, if the twenty-first century has been a less than thoroughly booming period for Germany and Japan, just as it has generally been for the advanced industrialized nations, or for that matter the world at large, it seems possible to say that those who argued for Germany and Japan as sowing the seeds for manufacturing success in a way that the U.S. and Britain were not--for all the limits to their understanding of what Germany and Japan were actually doing--can claim at least some validation from how things have actually gone this century.

Centrism and the Debates of the Early '90s

To those old enough to remember the period the early '90s can seem like a time of relatively vigorous public debate in the U.S. over the country's economic and social life, certainly compared with what came afterward. Indeed, Emmanuel Todd speaks of debate over the economy in the U.S. having come to an end in 1995, which exactly matches my personal memory of the time.

Still, considering that debate critically in recent years I have been struck by just how limited that debate was--and indeed, limited in very specific ways, conducted according to the centrist pattern in the neoliberal and rightward-moving America of the '90s. Four featurs of that pattern stand out in my memory as particularly relevant, namely

1. A hostility to big picture, theoretically-informed, systemic thinking, and indeed a disapproval of those who find connections between one thing and another and important realities beneath the surface. All of this reduces the problems of our collective life from, for example, the failings of an economic system to a handful of disconnected concrete problems to be separately treated. (One can speak of, for example, the problem of housing or health care--but one had best leave the economic system out of the discussion.)

2. A view of politics as properly "pluralist," "pragmatic" and "civil," which means that ethical judgments about such matters as inequality and injustice are not welcome--society instead a collection of interests all assumed to be equally legitimate, and none of which are assumed to have more power than the others. (Significantly the claims of the poor have no moral weight than those of the rich, of workers no more than those of investors, while the question of whether corporate interests have too much power is treated as flat-earthism. Equally one had better be very careful about accusing anyone of bad faith--for instance, using junk science to advance an anti-consumer or anti-environmental agenda.) Given equal legitimacy, the only way is compromise (with, again, no one asking questions about whether the course taken is right or wrong from an ethical perspective or even the standpoint of "solving the problem," or worrying about whether the "consensus" by which the centrist sets so much store is not simply the powerful doing what they want and then saying it's what everyone wants).

3. In line with all of the above, an inclination toward minimalism in the address of said issues--opting for course adjustment rather than deeper reform. (If the job report is disappointing adjusting monetary policy to make lending to investors cheaper is one thing--but a public employment program that must be paid for with taxes is something taken much less lightly, so much so that even in the "Keynesian" era there was very little of this.) And finally,

4. The necessity of excluding anyone not accepting these rules from the discourse as an "ideologue" and an "extremist"--with the interpretation of those rules typically hitting the left, its conventional wisdom being, as none other than Irving Kristol remarked, that ideology is a leftist failing and not a conservative one.

Thus was it not only that capitalism was not up for discussion as such, but, amid a popular backlash against neoliberalism, neither was that version of it (the term little used by non-academics at this time, and virtually unheard of in the mainstream press). Thus was it that one heard of factories closing, but only rarely heard of "deindustrialization"; one heard about, for example, other countries handling their manufacturing bases differently, but less often of "industrial policy" as such, and this typically as an exotic and un-American notion with which many quite rightly said we ought have naught to do.

Likewise, while one heard complaints that the policies of the Reagan era had made "the rich richer, the poor poorer," talk of a more equal or fairer society tended to be hazy, especially in relation to many of the more concrete matters. The concern for America's perceived failings in "education" had less to do with the right of individual to develop, or equalize economic opportunity, but rather "competitiveness." So did it also go in health care, where, if it was impossible to wholly overlook the tens, even hundreds, of millions whose needs were being unmet, a prime issue was the drag that a bloated insurance sector and high bills imposed on employers and the economy at large relative to America's foreign competitors. One might add that the squeamishness about calling out the agendas of the rich and powerful was very much in evidence here, as in that matter of education--virtually no one pointing out that panic over failing schools was a matter of blaming supposedly gold-bricking or incompetent schoolteachers and kids "too lazy" to study engineering in college so as to avoid blaming the investors and executives who preferred speculation to "real economy" investment, chasing cheap labor abroad to raising productivity at home, etc., etc.; while often being a cover for the crush-the-teacher's-unions-and-privatize-everything crowd (whose agenda became so mainstream that a Democratic administration made it its first order of business in the Netflix remake of the BBC's House of Cards).

And of course those same centrist traits were evident in the slightness of the proposed remedies, reflected in a comparison of Bill Clinton's record with Jimmy Carter's sixteen years earlier. Carter delivered a stimulus package in his first month in office that expanded the public employment program he inherited from Republican Richard Nixon, and signed a Full Employment Act into law. By contrast Bill Clinton treated a comparable stimulus package as so large and radical a policy that his supporters were asked to choose between it and his health care plan (which he failed completely to deliver, and never tried to deliver again), while anything like Nixon's public employment program, let alone the Full Employment Act (which was admittedly not respected by the Carter administration, and dead by the Reagan era) was not even to be talked about.

As all this implied the dialogue was thoroughly bounded indeed, with not only the left that the centrist has always treated as the prime enemy shut out of the dialogue, but what had even been plausible for the center-right a mere fifteen years earlier (as, again, one sees when looking at Nixon's policies, and remembers that Carter was from the more conservative wing of his own party). Indeed, it does not seem unfair to say that the dialogue came down to a debate between plain old enthusiastic neoliberals, and more grudging neoliberals who tempered their neoliberalism with a bit of pragmatic economic nationalism. Clinton showed the latter face on the election trail--and in office, consistently acted the former, crowing in his administration's Reinventing Government reports that "the era of big government is over" in the most Reaganite conceivable language. In short, the change was really no change at all. And that can only make the skeptic wonder just how much substance there really was to that debate--if it was not indeed a pseudo-debate, in the end only underlining the sheer force of the neoliberal turn at the time, and what that may mean for us now as some talk of life beyond that model in a world where, love it or hate it, there is no denying the fact of the model's grinding on ever more creakily and painfully, without serious indications that the world's muddling its way toward anything else as yet.

The Composite Index of National Capability as a Measure of Russian Power

Recently considering the matter of the international balance of power--and in particular the military-industrial balance between Russia and NATO--I had occasion to think about differing ways of approaching the matter, like Correlates of War project founder David J. Singer's Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) and its formula for measuring national power. Simply put, this adds up a country's shares of the world's population, urban population, defense spending, military personnel, iron and steel production and energy consumption and divides the result by six to get a numerical score.

As the great weight accorded steel and iron production, and energy consumption, suggests, it is an old measure reflective of a different economic world than most of us regard ourselves as now inhabiting, but it is still much used--and it has Russia looking more formidable than many would guess. After all, Russia's steel output approached twice that of manufacturing heavyweight Germany (72 million vs. 39 million tons), while its production of iron was at least as great (8 million tons of direct reduced iron to Germany's 500,000, and 51 million tons of pig iron to Germany's 25 million). Russia also consumed more than two-and-a-half times as much energy as Germany (773 million tons of oil equivalent vs. Germany's 273 million, which even in per capita terms works out to about 60 percent more energy consumption in a country almost twice as populous).

The result is that one might expect to see that Russia is at least twice as big an industrial power as Germany, and thus an industrial superpower by any reasonable measure, ranking as even an aggregate producer after only the much more populous China and the U.S. (and in America's case, behind it by rather less than was ever the case for the whole of the Soviet Union in the Cold War era). However, when one goes by the United Nations' statistics what one finds is that Germany's manufacturing value added was in 2019 almost four times that of Russia ($738 billion to $204 billion in current dollars), with the divergence greater when one considers medium and high-tech manufacturing--Germany's output being in the vicinity of nine times' Russia's. In the area of machinery and transport equipment Germany outproduced Russia by a factor of eleven or so when value added is the standard, and in terms of the number of vehicles produced, by a factor of almost three (4.7 million to 1.7 million vehicles), while, reverting once more to current dollar figures, just a few years ago Germany was actually outproducing Russia by a factor of twenty-seven in the particularly exacting area of machine tools.

Altogether this adds up not to the profile of a Big Three superpower, but rather one on the level of Mexico or Turkey.

Of course, none of that is to deny that Russia has capacities Germany lacks, and of course Mexico and Turkey lack, and indeed virtually every state on Earth but the U.S. lacks--in aerospace, for example. But the overall situation is nevertheless profoundly different than one might expect, with much of Russia's admittedly high steel production simply exported to foreign markets, rather than being used to make goods "higher up the value chain."

"But what about the energy consumption?" one may ask. Alas, those accustomed to such figures are likely to have noticed that a country with particularly cold weather; difficult transport due to long distances, terrain (e.g. limited water transport choices) or both; a high economic reliance on economic activity that may be energy-intensive but fairly "far down" the value chain, like raw materials processing; a high reliance of its industry of whatever type on older plant and infrastructure; and, due to richness in fossil fuels, comparative profligacy with them; is apt to have a much more energy-intensive economy per unit of GDP. And as close examination of the matter demonstrates, Russia is no exception to the pattern (according to one calculation consuming fifty percent more than the none-too-efficient U.S., and twice as much as the more efficient European states).

The result is that, if one accepts the other data cited here as a basis for sound calculation, this would appear a case where the old formula, for all its uses, misleads greatly.

German Defense Policy: Two Major Stories

A couple of weeks ago Der Spiegel broke a story about the German government's new "Operational Guidelines for the Armed Forces" document. Pretty much ignored in the English-speaking press, and especially the American press (in spite of its obvious significance) it specifically calls for a break from the post-Cold War German (and European) norm of emphasizing lighter forces for brisk out-of-area interventions to large combat forces in the NATO area for resisting major attack.

This sounded to me like a shift to something more like the Cold War-era sizing and structure of its forces.

Just to see how big a shift this would be consider the West German armed forces pre-reunification. These approached a half million personnel, with an army of over 300,000 organized into a dozen divisions, ten of them "heavies," and six of those armored. These were backed up by 700,000 reservists.

Today's German army is more like 60,000, with three divisions. Two of them are officially "armored" divisions, but only if one uses the term loosely--combining the armored assets of the two getting you at best only one underpowered armored division. Meanwhile the reserves are down by 99 percent. The result is that if they were totally mobilized you would have, instead of an army of 1 million, a mere 70,000 personnel.

Especially given the operational deficiencies of the German armed forces as they exist now (at least, assuming the reports of low readiness, decrepit facilities, etc. are not just a ploy by officers and industrialists and right-wingers angling for a bigger defense budget), the need to replace aging equipment with very expensive new stuff (F-35s to replace Tornados), plans for pricey new strategic capabilities (anti-ballistic missiles do not come cheap), and grand R & D programs (like Europe's own sixth-generation fighter), it seemed to me that there was a significant gap between even the announced increase of German defense spending, and any serious expansion of the German armed forces.

Moreover, now it seems that the budgetary increase announced back in February will not be forthcoming.

Under that aforementioned announcement the defense budget was supposed to be ramped up to 2 percent of GDP by 2023, while the government this year committed to a 100 billion euro "one-off" supplement to that projected spending (the equivalent of an extra 2.5 percent). However, the 2 percent target has officially been kicked down the road (to 2025 if one pays the spokesman's "cautious optimism" any heed), while that 100 billion euros, the value of which has already been eroded by the plummeting of the euro's value and plain old inflation so that it is already worth less than it was in February, is, if committed, far from actually being used.

Thus far it seems this failure to use the money is not for lack of interest on the part of the government. Instead the principals are giving everyone the old runaround that makes so many the world over hold bureaucrats and politicians in contempt, with the Defense and Finance Ministries each sniveling that "it's the other ministry's fault," all as some bizarrely accuse German industry of failing to move more briskly. ("Is it up to the industry to increase capacity first, or should the government have placed orders more quickly?" asks Deutsche Welle's Ben Knight--while I ask "Since when were profit-making private companies supposed to sacrifice their bottom lines to enlarging capacity in anticipation of orders that might or might not come?")

Of course, one may suspect more than that is going on. I have yet to see mention of the continent's energy woes as a possible factor in slowing the "rearmament" process, or the broader problems manufacturers generally are having with their supply chains post-COVID and post-war, or the way in which rising labor strife and inflation and interest rates and looming recession (so grave that some are speaking of a threat of deindustrialization!) may make business leerier of moving ahead here without bottom line-protecting guarantees. However, it seems implausible that such are not posing some problems for these plans--just as it is by no means implausible that the government would not rush to publicize them. And nor would the media, connecting the dots rarely ever having been a strength of theirs.

* The 100 billion euro commitment was announced as equivalent to $113 billion. Now it is down to $105 billion, while the U.S. dollar has itself lost perhaps 7 percent of its purchasing power between the announcement and the time of this writing (assuming the inflation rate observed in March-October 2022 holds) so that the sum may already amount to 13 percent less in real terms than it did in February. All the signs point to its losing a good deal more of its real value before all the money is spent.

The British Tempest Fighter: An Update

Today Prime Minister Rishi Sunak paid a visit to RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire and officially announced the "Global Combat Air Programme."

That announcement did not offer any great surprises regarding the countries involved, the capabilities of the aircraft, or the schedule for the aircraft's development and deployment. It is a tri-national program bringing the British government together with its Italian and Japanese counterparts for the purpose of developing "a next-generation jet enhanced by a network of capabilities such as uncrewed aircraft, advanced sensors, cutting-edge weapons and innovative data systems." The developmental process is to be underway by 2025, the plane to fly by 2035 and replace the Typhoon when it retires (at some unspecified date).

Still, I do have the following four observations to offer:

#1. Hearing about Italy and Japan as partners at this stage raises the question of that fourth country oft-mentioned in discussion of the project, Sweden. Perhaps the Swedish government is still interested, but for the time being it would appear to not be a full-fledged participant.

#2. The details given confirm the sketchiness of the vision for the aircraft. The statement said that the three countries "will now work intensively to establish the core platform concept and set up the structures needed to deliver this massive defence project, ready to launch the development phase in 2025" (emphasis added). So basically the "core platform concept" does not actually exist yet.

#3. The details also confirm the lowered expectations for sixth-generation fighters compared with what we were hearing circa 2010. As the statement reminded us, where once we were told such aircraft would be "optionally manned" now they are expected to be manned aircraft which merely fly with accompanying drones (the aforementioned "uncrewed aircraft"). And finally,

#4. The Prime Minister's remark that the "partnership we have announced today with Italy and Japan . . . underlin[es] that the security of the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific regions are indivisible" recalled the British government's announcement of a "tilt to the Indo-Pacific" as the focus of its military planning (its naval dispositions, etc.) in its 2021 defense review, and seemed to affirm that tilt even in the face of recent events (i.e. the war in Eastern Europe). In so doing it makes an interesting contrast with, if Der Spiegel's report about the new German "Operational Guidelines for the Armed Forces" is accurate, Germany's moving in the opposite direction, away from the out-of-area focus which prevailed through the Cold War, and toward an emphasis on large combat forces for in-area operations, and particularly large-scale, conventional conflict to repel attack by another state.

The implications of all this seem to me to warrant some serious consideration from those who comment on these matters.

I wonder if we will actually see any.

The Economic Outlook and the Prospects for Automation

In reconsidering the hugely influential 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne study The Future of Employment it is worth remembering the contrast between what the study's authors were supposed to have said according to its publicity, and what the actual study said. The press (and those commentators who took their understanding of the study from it, which included a great many "experts" who probably could have understood the report but were too lazy to read it) took it to mean that half of the country would be out of work by the 2030s. What the report really said was that, according to the authors' method of evaluating the matter (which undeniably contained a great many highly uncertain assumptions that can now seem optimistic, entailed unavoidable simplifications in its task assessment that seem wide open to question, and produced a number of projections that frankly struck me as odd) half of the country's jobs had a two-thirds chance of proving to be automatable in principle over an unspecified period of time that may well be a decade or two--a very different and much more modest claim indeed. After all, even if they were right about the in-principle feasibility of that automation being there, the perceived or actual cost-effectiveness of automating particular tasks, the problems of fitting a task into the larger functioning of an industrial or commercial enterprise, customer attitudes, the inclination to let others take the lead and see how they do, the hesitation to invest in the newest and latest when one already has a working set-up, etc., etc., etc. would slow down the practical engineering and implementation of the possibility.

Moreover, the broader macroeconomic situation would count for a lot. A situation of slow economic growth and frequent and severe recession, high unemployment and underemployment, slight and ineffectual annoyance to employers from government regulation or organized labor, mean a "disciplined," low-wage work force--workers being that much cheaper and easier to employ, and automation having to be that much more cost-effective to be an attractive option than if growth is brisk and steady, the job market tight, standards with regard to labor conditions stringent, workers assertive, wages high. Likewise a situation where it is easier and more attractive to try and make money speculating on assets like stock or real estate is one where investors have that much less incentive to put their money toward some R & D project promising a better robot.

Which of those scenarios sounds more like the economy we have known these past decades? And, all other things being equal, expect in the decades to come?

Considering the obvious answers to those question I find myself wondering how much further we might have come in different circumstances--and suspecting that, all other things again being equal, we will progress much less swiftly in this important area than we might be able to do in other circumstances.

The Rise of the (Industrial) Robots: Pondering the Latest Statistics

As the pandemic reminded everyone the world's economy is still far from being thoroughly automated--or even automatable--with the hype about progress in this area in the years before the pandemic, and the hype about some rush to automate in the wake of the disruption, both a stark contrast with the little changed reality of 2022.
A glance at the statistics supplied by the International Federation of Robotics this very week makes the point. In 2021 the world still had just one industrial robot for every seventy manufacturing workers.

Still, if we are far away from that world some long for and others fear in which robots will relieve us of drudgery and put us out of our jobs it is still the case that the use of robots is rapidly increasing in this area--for if one robot for every seventy workers does not sound terribly impressive, it is a near doubling of "robot density" in six years' time. (The figure had been 1 per 150 manufacturing workers in 2015.)

Moreover, this global average conceals significant disparities. At last report Russia had perhaps 1 robot for every 1600 workers, and even Britain just 1 for every 100. But in the U.S. the figure was more like 1 for every 36, in China 1 for every 31, in Germany and Japan 1 for every 25--while in South Korea (an outlier here as in so many other areas) it is 1 for every 10.

Indeed, as this list suggests one can already argue for the "robot/worker" ratio in industry as a useful index of a country's level of industrialization, and especially how much high-capital, high-tech, high-productivity manufacturing it does (it being no accident that fields like cars and electronics are especially robot-intensive). And it seems a safe bet that, even if the progress in automation continues to run far behind the extravagant claims of fashionable futurists about how far it will go, how fast, it seems a safe enough bet that that index's usefulness will only grow in the coming years.

As Britain Approaches a New Round of Austerity Let's Look Back at the Old . . .

My study of the neoliberal turn in British economic and social policy since Thatcher's time took the story only up to the brink of the Great Recession--which broke out fifteen years ago.

The period before had plenty of pain--but I suspect that what happened afterward made a great many positively nostalgic for the earlier era.

I have a fuller account of that decade of "austerity" (2010-2019), with the requisite citation, here. In lieu of that consider these highlights:

* A significant increase in the Value Added Tax, to 20 percent. (By contrast the VAT was 17.5 percent pre-crisis, and while the top income tax bracket was raised from 40 to 50 percent, swiftly knocked back down to 45 percent. Meanwhile they actually cut the Corporate Tax from 28 to 19 percent.)

* Significant changes in Social Security. Two major welfare reform acts (2012 and 2016, the latter amending the former) replaced a large number of the social safety net's former benefits with a less accessible and less generous system of Universal Credit, and Personal Independence Payments, while other benefits were likewise eliminated, or made less generous or accessible (as with the elimination of the Council Tax Benefit that helped low-income persons pay their local tax bill, or the introduction of means-testing for Child Benefit). There was also repeated capping and freezing of Social Security more broadly.

* Austerity (as well as privatization) in the National Health Service, not least at the level of funding increases--likewise, held to below the inflation rate, and so working out to real cuts over time, as hospitals coped with an aging population's higher demand for medical care, and paying for those Private Finance Initiatives a certain prior government treated in the manner of a simpleton who thinks credit cards mean "Buy Now, Pay Never."

* The continuation of the movement away from tuition-free university attendance toward an American-style system of paying for higher education, with the cap on tuition raised from the £3225 it had been under Gordon Brown to over three times as much (£9250 pounds at present).

* The continued raising of the state pension age (66 for men and women as of 2020, with the raising of the age to 67 brought forward a decade in each case, from 2036 to 2026).

* The sharp reduction of government investment in housing (at the level of both the number of units and investment per unit) as "social" housing is marginalized (rather than being a main product of the program, "only to be supported in exceptional cases").

* Deep reductions in funding for public programs ranging from legal aid, to regulators providing consumer protection (the Food Standards Agency suffering a 51 percent cut in 2009-2019) and environmental protection (i.e. Natural England and the Environmental Agency).

* The across-the-board capping and freezing of public sector worker pay (which, apart from affecting the performance of the above duties, affects the incomes of the one-sixth of the British labor force which is part of this category), producing a long-term decline in median wages among such persons as doctors, teachers and police officers.

* The reduction of central government support to local councils (by 60 percent in 2010-2020 according to the Local Government Association), which have had to depend more heavily on their own resources --with the result higher council-set taxes (and a heavier reliance on sales, fees and charges), along with a significant drop in per capita spending (taxes up 8 percent and per capita spending down 23 percent according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies). Additionally, even as "statutory duties" received increased emphasis, the diminution of resources generally led to significant cuts to the most "protected" services, such as social care. (Social care saw a 10 percent drop in spending even as there was a 20 percent+ rise in the number of elderly, and the gap may have played a part in some 120,000 "excess deaths" by 2017 alone.) Meanwhile other services were cut still more steeply (with regulatory services and transport and culture and recreation subject to cuts of over 40 percent, and housing of over 50 percent).

And of course, while we consider all that remember the "synergies" that combined to make these cuts more painful (like the fact that Council Tax Benefits were cut just as Council Tax went up, or how the fact that public libraries were being closed down in record numbers meant that people who needed libraries for computer access and help with their applications for UC did not have them).

Of course, all that was before the pandemic, its own even sharper recession, the energy and broader price shocks of 2021-2022, Britain's having the kind of old-style currency crisis out of which the British right made a legend when it happened back in '76, and, under the third British government in as many months, a new round of austerity coming that, we are told by Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (whose valuable work I cited above, and not for the first time), will mean "the largest fall in real household disposable income per head (4.3%) since the late 1940s" in 2023, and the year after that, "the second-largest fall (2.8%)." Indeed, "[a]verage household income per head is due to be the same in 2027-28 as it was in 2018-19, and 31% below where it would have been if the pre-2008 trend had continued"--or, as Johnson's colleague Tom Waters observed, "if we'd kept to trend, we'd be 47% richer. Imagine your income being 47% higher!"

If people aren't already nostalgic for the pre-Recession era, lousy as it was, they may--after Rishi Sunak's "austerity on steroids"--well find themselves thinking warmly of the '00s.

Or even the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad '10s.

Keir Starmer and the Ten Pledges

A politician's presenting a leftish platform with the intent of outflanking an opponent who is actually more leftish, or winning over vacillating leftist voters, and then in the spirit of "adults-in-the-room," "electability"-minded pragmatism dispensing with that platform, has been Standard Operating Procedure for center-left parties through the neoliberal era.

What distinguishes Keir Starmer's conduct in regard to said platform--his ten pledges--is how quickly and brazenly he ditched his pledges, which underlines the centrist ideologue's stance in regard to such matters.

I think the relevant bits can be boiled down to three principles, namely:

1. Politics is for professionals--and the general public is unfit to judge what professionals do beyond casting its vote for one of the (two) candidates presented it on the ballot on election day, without whining about how little they differ because from a centrist standpoint that's a feature, not a bug. (Yay, consensus!)

2. Politics is a pragmatic activity, not an ethical activity--and so complaining about a politician's breaking promises out of bounds is simple-minded, unrealistic and illegitimate. And finally, in line with the extension of this principle not only to the methods of politicians but the content of politics,

3. Politics should be civil rather than ideological--making the left and its principles inherently illegitimate, and anything done to defeat it, like making and breaking a bunch of lefty promises, not just acceptable, but a duty for a responsible, electable, adult-in-the-room politician who, as he constantly says, WANTS TO BE PRIME MINISTER!

Of course, not everyone feels the same way about all of this--and it is not for nothing that, in 2022, Starmer eschews Tony Blair's blatant disrespect for Old Labour and open disdain for talk about class and inequality, blending his centrist positions with gestures toward something more leftward, which on close inspection proves to be radical rhetoric, not radical policies (Starmer banging on about the 1 percent as if he were some Occupy Wall Street activist, and then proving himself New Labour to the core).