The climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann has written of climate "inactivism"--a shift on the part of opponents of action on the problem of climate change from relying principally on denying the existence of climate change to ward off such action to a more variegated and in many respects subtler strategy. Yes, the inactivists admit, climate change exists after all, and yes, it is caused by humans--but it is a small problem, too small to worry about so much about it for now; or we've blown our chances to do anything about it and so can only "grieve" over what we have lost; or any number of other things that all have in common the effect of undermining the will to do something about the problem in one way or another (the trivializers by encouraging us to brush it off, the doomists by breaking our wills), which is after all what the opponents of action are really after. And just as when the preferred strategy was denialism, and the mainstream media indulged this with its very selective "both sidesism," that media has been complicit in the promotion of inactivism every step of the way. (It is no accident that expert-on-nothing Jonathan Franzen was able to publish a high-profile piece of doomist propaganda in The New Yorker, that the media so loves giving time to Bill McGuire and his counterblasts at those calling out doomism as "appeasers" as, contemptuous of those pointing out how doomism has counterproductively demoralized the public, he tells us that the only thing we have to fear is an insufficiency of fear itself.)
The New York Times has been no exception to this pattern via figures like "hippie puncher" Bret Stephens. Perhaps mindful, perhaps not, of the banality that "You never get a second chance to make a first impression," he made that first impression on the paper's readership in 2017 with a piece of denialism that outraged it by, in the tradition of "concern trolling," smarmily employing that "singularly obnoxious rhetorical trick" of pretending to share climate activists' goals while working to undermine those activists' efforts. Then as if publishing such a piece were not bad enough in itself the Times' public editor Liz Spayd answered the outrage that column provoked with an astonishingly sanctimonious piece that implicitly equated their readers' questioning the appropriateness of their publishing in their pages the scientifically baseless climate denialism-behind-a-front-of-concern of a very well-known right-wing ideologue playing the all too familiar game--and indeed their simply not taking "at face value" Stephens' long-beyond-bankrupt attack on climate science as an expression of honest "skepticism"--with intolerance of views other than their own that made them stereotypical "contemptuous liberals" all but justifying the sneering of conservatives like Stephens at their kind. ("You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" she all but said.)
All of this was quite controversial at the time, with many across the media remarking the Times' open disrespect for its readers (dare I say, the contempt of which Ms. Spayd accused them?) in a vile cause. One reader particularly prominent in the dialogue, the aforementioned Dr. Mann, canceled his subscription in reply to Spayd's reply. Of course, all this has not altered the Times' conduct a whit, the paper continuing to not just publish Stephens, but often shove his columns in the faces of its readers, which one can, not incidentally, interpret as being in line with the shift in strategy that Dr. Mann described. When Stephens shifted from what he referred to as his "agnosticism" on the subject of climate change to accepting its reality he went from denying the problem existed at all to instead denying that anything should be done about it in an item in 2022 that, very heavy on page-filling graphics that the reader has to keep clicking through, grabs the reader's attention with the remark that "Yes, Greenland's Ice is Melting," after making them click the down button several times to get much more, only then shows the byline as that of Stephens, making yet another case against action on the problem; a piece in which Stephens, while saying "Okay, you've got us, global warming exists," also says, "but we had best leave resolving the problem to the market," certainly not doing anything such as would inconvenience Big Oil et. al., so that nothing really changes, in what Molly Taft called a "bad faith climate conversion" all too much of a piece with the "concern trolling" that sparked the controversy of five years earlier.
Had the editorship of the Times' presented the piece so that its nature was evident at the very top--so that from the first the reader saw that this was just another column by Stephens, and his essential argument clear at a glance, so that those who actually care about the issue would not have looked any further--his writing about his "bad faith conversion" would have been one thing. However, instead they put on a lavish production that gave every impression of being for the sake of forcing on the unsuspecting another round of the inactivism of a Stephens whose outlook and conduct had not discernibly changed one iota in the five years since his hiring, and I do not doubt that this factored into the particular annoyance many felt with the article, with Stephens, and with the paper that hired him and kept him on its payroll in a display of open contempt for its ostensible audience that just goes on and on in a manner all too telling of how the media really works--and accordingly, just who counts with it, and who does not.
Wednesday, June 5, 2024
Monday, June 3, 2024
The Materiality of Life and What it Means for What the Real Revolution in Artificial Intelligence Will Look Like
Back in the 1980s Alvin Toffler promulgated visions of an "information age" which would see the birth of an information civilization in which work, wealth, consumption and everything else would be increasingly "dematerialized." Material goods would still exist, of course, but the point was that we would become much, much more efficient at extracting, processing and consuming them, as we substituted information for "crude matter." Indeed, reading Toffler's books The Third Wave and Powershift it seems clear that we were supposed to be on the road toward a world where our manufacturing would become so successful in replacing the scarce and expensive and awkward with the abundant and cheap and convenient; and rigidity with flexibility; as to approach an ideal of cost-effectively making anything out of anything else, an object underlined by the bold declaration opening the preamble of the "Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" he coauthored with like-minded colleagues George Gilder, George Keyworth and Esther Dyson: "The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter . . . physical resources . . . losing value and significance" in economic and political life, for "[t]he powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things."
Alas, from the standpoint of the 21st century's third decade things look quite different from Toffler's vision of a dematerialized information age. As we have been reminded again and again since that supposed overthrow of matter physical resources still have immense, even decisive, significance in economic and political life. We were so reminded amid the commodity price boom that, not least by enabling the recovery of Russian power, helped redraw the geopolitical map, while plunging much of the world into a crisis of food and fuel prices. We were so reminded again as the pandemic, disrupting work processes, underlined the continued importance of persons doing physical labor to produce physical things and render physical services at particular physical locations, with the subsequent price shocks showing how little capacity we still had to adapt to a situation in which those persons did not perform those tasks in the same old ways. We had another reminder in the way that the entirety of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with a manufacturing "value added" twenty-four times that of Russia, failed to match Russian production of plain old artillery shells--showing how far from that perfect fungibility of productive capacity real-world manufacturing remains. And we had perhaps the most fundamental reminder in the way that "overshoot day" came earlier and earlier each year, as the failure of business to become more efficient at using and making goods and services accelerated and deepened the ecological crisis on just about every front.
All this is something to keep in mind as we consider the revolution in Artificial Intelligence (AI) supposed to be imminent, if not already ongoing, the more in as the more astute analysts of information technology have for decades stressed particular areas where the technology has proven of limited utility, and which have thus translated to its effect on the economy being a far cry from the hype. Chief among these is the capacity of machine intelligences to "sense" the world around them so as to navigate it safely and handle objects in it with dexterity, especially in situations where the environment and the task is complex, variable and requires a steady stream of responses tailored to the individual situation--robots useful on assembly lines producing high value added items like cars, but a robot which can do your laundry elusive.
Back at the height of the "tech boom" euphoria Robert Gordon lucidly pointed this out as thus far limiting the impact of the innovations of the "New Economy," and likely to go on doing so. It is a testament to his grasp of the issue that surveying the possibilities of automation many years later after that particular boom of techn-hype went bust Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne acknowledged these same problem areas as the critical bottlenecks to automation--if in the expectation that progress was being made here, enough so as to trigger something like panic in some quarters. However, a decade on it still seems that this has been an area where, again, progress of the kind they thought was happening has proven slow indeed, exemplified by the failure to produce the really viable self-driving car in the years since that Frey and Osborne seem to have been rather sanguine about in their study, never mind a robot that can do your laundry.
Indeed, it seems telling that the recent surge of hype about artificial intelligence has had nothing to do with any breakthrough producing machine intelligences capable of observing, navigating, manipulating the world around them with human-like versatility, reliability and efficiency. Rather that hype has revolved around Large Language Models--and while at one end of the discourse some people dismiss them as "glorified autocompletes," and at the other some scream that they are Lovecraftian demons to which Silicon Valley has opened the portal, no one denies their limitations in interacting with the physical world. One result is that these artificial intelligences so ill-suited to physical tasks yet (their proponents say) becoming as good as, if not better than, humans at many mental tasks have inverted the cliché about what those "technologically displaced" in the job market must do to go on getting a paycheck--the truck driver not having to "learn to code," but the now superfluous coder needing to learn to drive a truck.
Of course, AI that really does prove to be good enough to replace coders would be consequential, the more in as a stronger artificial intelligence of that type can be used in cases where innovators figure out ways to design the physical activity out of tasks--just as we did with filing. Rather than an office robot that picks through a filing cabinet to get a desired manila folder, computers store electronic files in electronic memories, and it is far from clear that we have done all we can here. (Consider, for instance, how "generative" artificial intelligence may be able to replace physical TV and film production by conjuring up video from a prompt the way Sora is intended to do--a capability that may by the time you are reading this item already have reached the consumer in a crude form.)
Nevertheless, in this material world what will really, really matter is what will happen when--if?--the progress of artificial intelligence reaches the point at which a robot can be counted on to pick up your socks off the floor, add them to the pile of clothes already in the laundry hamper, then take them off for laundering and bring them back to you clean and dry.
Alas, from the standpoint of the 21st century's third decade things look quite different from Toffler's vision of a dematerialized information age. As we have been reminded again and again since that supposed overthrow of matter physical resources still have immense, even decisive, significance in economic and political life. We were so reminded amid the commodity price boom that, not least by enabling the recovery of Russian power, helped redraw the geopolitical map, while plunging much of the world into a crisis of food and fuel prices. We were so reminded again as the pandemic, disrupting work processes, underlined the continued importance of persons doing physical labor to produce physical things and render physical services at particular physical locations, with the subsequent price shocks showing how little capacity we still had to adapt to a situation in which those persons did not perform those tasks in the same old ways. We had another reminder in the way that the entirety of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with a manufacturing "value added" twenty-four times that of Russia, failed to match Russian production of plain old artillery shells--showing how far from that perfect fungibility of productive capacity real-world manufacturing remains. And we had perhaps the most fundamental reminder in the way that "overshoot day" came earlier and earlier each year, as the failure of business to become more efficient at using and making goods and services accelerated and deepened the ecological crisis on just about every front.
All this is something to keep in mind as we consider the revolution in Artificial Intelligence (AI) supposed to be imminent, if not already ongoing, the more in as the more astute analysts of information technology have for decades stressed particular areas where the technology has proven of limited utility, and which have thus translated to its effect on the economy being a far cry from the hype. Chief among these is the capacity of machine intelligences to "sense" the world around them so as to navigate it safely and handle objects in it with dexterity, especially in situations where the environment and the task is complex, variable and requires a steady stream of responses tailored to the individual situation--robots useful on assembly lines producing high value added items like cars, but a robot which can do your laundry elusive.
Back at the height of the "tech boom" euphoria Robert Gordon lucidly pointed this out as thus far limiting the impact of the innovations of the "New Economy," and likely to go on doing so. It is a testament to his grasp of the issue that surveying the possibilities of automation many years later after that particular boom of techn-hype went bust Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne acknowledged these same problem areas as the critical bottlenecks to automation--if in the expectation that progress was being made here, enough so as to trigger something like panic in some quarters. However, a decade on it still seems that this has been an area where, again, progress of the kind they thought was happening has proven slow indeed, exemplified by the failure to produce the really viable self-driving car in the years since that Frey and Osborne seem to have been rather sanguine about in their study, never mind a robot that can do your laundry.
Indeed, it seems telling that the recent surge of hype about artificial intelligence has had nothing to do with any breakthrough producing machine intelligences capable of observing, navigating, manipulating the world around them with human-like versatility, reliability and efficiency. Rather that hype has revolved around Large Language Models--and while at one end of the discourse some people dismiss them as "glorified autocompletes," and at the other some scream that they are Lovecraftian demons to which Silicon Valley has opened the portal, no one denies their limitations in interacting with the physical world. One result is that these artificial intelligences so ill-suited to physical tasks yet (their proponents say) becoming as good as, if not better than, humans at many mental tasks have inverted the cliché about what those "technologically displaced" in the job market must do to go on getting a paycheck--the truck driver not having to "learn to code," but the now superfluous coder needing to learn to drive a truck.
Of course, AI that really does prove to be good enough to replace coders would be consequential, the more in as a stronger artificial intelligence of that type can be used in cases where innovators figure out ways to design the physical activity out of tasks--just as we did with filing. Rather than an office robot that picks through a filing cabinet to get a desired manila folder, computers store electronic files in electronic memories, and it is far from clear that we have done all we can here. (Consider, for instance, how "generative" artificial intelligence may be able to replace physical TV and film production by conjuring up video from a prompt the way Sora is intended to do--a capability that may by the time you are reading this item already have reached the consumer in a crude form.)
Nevertheless, in this material world what will really, really matter is what will happen when--if?--the progress of artificial intelligence reaches the point at which a robot can be counted on to pick up your socks off the floor, add them to the pile of clothes already in the laundry hamper, then take them off for laundering and bring them back to you clean and dry.
Looking Back at Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave
The name Alvin Toffler (1928-2016) does not seem to be spoken much these days, but in the latter decades of the twentieth century that associate editor of Fortune magazine was one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the day. The Accenture study of the top business intellectuals at the turn of the century, when he had been associated with figures like George Gilder in missionary work for the digital age, and Newt Gingrich when he became Speaker of the House at the head of the 1994 "Republican Revolution," actually ranked Toffler at #8 on their list--well ahead of figures like Lester Thurow, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Alfred Chandler and John Naisbitt. Indeed, looking back one is struck by how references to him came up even in pop culture, figures from cyberpunk "godfather" Bruce Sterling to comics giant Alan Moore making casual mention of Toffler's work and even quite specific reference to his ideas in their essays and interviews.
Toffler's very considerable reputation rested heavily on the strength of the ideas he set forth in such bestselling books as Future Shock and The Third Wave (1980)--the latter apparently the single work that did most to popularize and shape conceptions of the "information age." The book's wide influence makes it well worth looking back at what Toffler had to say in that particular book about the matter, starting with just what he meant by the term "Third Wave" in the first place.
As Toffler explained it, human civilization had emerged and overspread the Earth in three waves. The first wave was the agrarian civilization that started well before the dawn of recorded history. The second was the Industrial civilization that emerged in the Western world in the seventeenth century. The third was the "information civilization" that he saw as similarly emerging by the middle of the twentieth century.
Each civilization has its "hidden code" of operating principles. Toffler did not have much to say about First Wave agrarian civilization, but much of his book does address the differences in code between the Second and Third Waves--the industrial and information civilizations--that reflect the organization of their basic economic activities, and in the process color their broader societal organization and cultures in the substructure-structure-superstructure mode familiar to the student of sociology. Toffler identifies the Second Wave, industrial, civilization with the working up of raw materials by using "simple electromechanical principles" using large amounts of materials, energy, and low-skill, repetitive, labor. Making the most of this saw the organization of the work process on the basis of the principles of centralization, concentration, synchronization, standardization, specialization and "maximization"--the exploitation of "economies of scale" that made for a drive toward bigness of facility, of enterprise, of output and run and market. Thus was the old merchant subcontracting manufacturing work to artisans working in their own homes replaced by the factory where the workers were all expected to come to one facility at the same time for the same shift (concentration, centralization), where instead of each making a complete good by themselves the production task was broken up into different steps carefully distributed among the workers, one of whom did their same piece of the task over and over and over again (specialization) so that the next worker could do their own bit of it in turn (synchronization). The result was an elaborate arrangement of people and equipment that could only be changed with difficulty and expense, creating an incentive to avoid such change as much as possible, while for the sake of plain and simple profit amortizing the investment over as much production as possible with the existing arrangement--in the form of as long a run of the same product as possible (standardization, maximization). The case in the cotton cloth-producing textile mill of the eighteenth century, it was as much the case in a twentieth century "integrated" steel mill where armies of workers use vast amounts of coal-derived coke and iron ore to produce in blast furnaces the metal undergirding virtually all the products that distinguished modern life. And its logic culminated in the way electrification and the internal combustion engine remade energy, transport, the daily terms of living and work, and everything having to do with them, from the assembly line to the auto-suburban-consumerist version of middle class existence to the massification of culture and politics as seen in ways from the ascent of the business corporation and nation-state to the status of the era's master institutions, to ideologies such as capitalism and nationalism.
By contrast with that resource processing-oriented Second Wave industrial civilization the Third Wave information civilization was centered on the substitution of "information" (or to use Toffler's preferred term, the "refined information" that is "knowledge") for those inputs of materials, energy, labor the Second Wave civilization used so lavishly.* Of course, substituting information for other inputs is what technological progress had always been about, arguably even before one could speak of agricultural civilization, while innovation of that kind had become systematized and deliberate in the Second Wave--with the codification of the scientific method, the "invention of invention," and the increasingly institutionalized and intensive pursuit of invention in an age of mass scientific education, and formal private and public research efforts. What made the Third Wave different was this form of civilization being centered on this as a result of two factors--the increasing awareness of the practice and its possibilities, and the ecological crisis as the Second Wave civilization hit the limits of expanding in its resource-profligate old way. (Consider, for instance, how oil consumption was doubling every decade or so in the post-war boom years. Had the growth of that consumption continued at the same rate we would be burning through over two billion barrels of oil a day now--twenty times the actual rate of production, a practical impossibility even before we get to the environmental effects.) Of course, that new form of civilization was supposed to be just emergent, but the expectation was that as it developed, the activity of work, creation of value, possession of wealth would increasingly consist of the gathering, processing, storage, movement, usage, ownership of information relative to the gathering, processing, storage, movement, usage, ownership of things.
One may expect from all of the foregoing that third Wave civilization would have a very different code from its Second Wave predecessor, and indeed Toffler anticipated that it would be virtually the opposite of that of the Second Wave industrial civilization he wrote about. Rather than centralization, concentration, synchronization, standardization, specialization and "maximization" he anticipated that its principles would be decentralization, dispersal, flexibility, adaptiveness, and variety and even smallness of scale. Thus instead of everyone showing up to a centralized workplace at the same time one might have people telecommuting from home, and not necessarily all working at the same time, in a more idiosyncratically arranged work process during which the workers, supplying more than repetitive physical labor under the direction of an overseer had to coordinate with each other and solve problems as the group worked on highly customizable and customized products. Seemingly most plausible in areas such as the creation of software or the provision of financial services where the essential products are intangible, the same principles carry over to material production, with steel an example worth considering again--the mini-mill with its electric arc furnaces as against the giant integrated operations that characterized past steelmaking, the work being done to produce "green steel" today, suggestive of a Third Wave approach even to heavy industry. So too does it go with the renewable energy sector, which had a particularly important place in Toffler's predictions--Toffler anticipating that where the Second Wave civilization had been powered by a voracious consumption of finite fossil fuels, the Third Wave civilization would ultimately be renewables-powered, with this feat the simpler to bring about in a world where the substitution of information for things brought about a significant "dematerialization" of life. For example, the idea of replacing individual ownership of gas-burning cars with "Transportation as a Service" accessed through conveniently on-call self-driving electric cars can seem exemplary of Toffler's thinking (even if he did not make that particular prediction).
All that said, when we compare the world we actually live in with the world of his anticipations, how does it measure up? Consider such matters as the spread of telecommuting, and the "energy transition" to renewable energy. One might hail Toffler as a prophet for discussing such contemporary-seeming things in 1980--but the reality is that the world went very little way toward these developments compared with what he predicted. The frenzied, awkward, improvisation in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic showed us how, in spite of the advances in telecommunications, there had been very, very little shift toward telecommuting in the decades since he wrote, while the ferocious resistance of employers to continuing in the practice any longer than they thought they absolutely had to made clear that they had every intention of keeping the workplace "Second Wave" to the extent that they had anything to say about the matter. Meanwhile the energy transition has been a far slower thing than Toffler anticipated. Where he characterized Big Oil, Gas and Coal as dinosaurs likely to fall in the 1980s, and predicted that we would have a renewables-powered civilization by 2025 (just next year!), the fact remains that any such transition remains far closer to its beginning than its end as the fossil fuel industry, as colossal, profitable and powerful as ever, fights back with the help of innumerable partners, allies and hirelings across the world of business, the media and politics.
In all this it seems that we would seem, at best, a long way from the "dematerialization" Toffler described--and indeed thinking about the state of the world it has seemed much more Second Wave than Third in the material foundations of life. One may take from this different conclusions--perhaps that there was really no civilizational shift ongoing the way Toffler thought there was, what he thought a Third Wave civilization a mere tweaking of the Second, which some have simply sought to play up because they thought it would serve their particular political agendas. Or perhaps such a shift is ongoing, but much more slowly than he anticipated--perhaps because he underestimated the force of the opposition to some of the associated changes.
In either case the lack of change is reflected at those structural and superstructural levels. Where Toffler saw the dominance of the large corporation and the nation-state giving way to more diverse, idiosyncratic and commonly smaller entities in economic and political life that arrange and rearrange themselves as immediate requirements dictate, the reality is that we still live in a world of the same sorts of organizations as before, with the same ideologies leading to the same politics and conflicts as before. Thus is one of the key divisions of our time the resurgence of that old division between capitalists of more cosmopolitan mind and the globalization they pursued so ardently, and the resurgence of nationalism now threatening to tear the global economy apart. It also seems to be all too telling that amid the multiplying and intensifying trade wars one of the most conspicuous recent acts has been a massive tariff on imports of those electric cars that were supposed to help take us into that new age of renewable energy, an action all too likely to further slow that already far too much delayed energy transition.
* This definition of information comes from Toffler's later, less well-remembered, but still bestselling 1990 book Powershift, which can be described as rounding out a "trilogy" he began with Future Shock and continued with Third Wave.
Toffler's very considerable reputation rested heavily on the strength of the ideas he set forth in such bestselling books as Future Shock and The Third Wave (1980)--the latter apparently the single work that did most to popularize and shape conceptions of the "information age." The book's wide influence makes it well worth looking back at what Toffler had to say in that particular book about the matter, starting with just what he meant by the term "Third Wave" in the first place.
As Toffler explained it, human civilization had emerged and overspread the Earth in three waves. The first wave was the agrarian civilization that started well before the dawn of recorded history. The second was the Industrial civilization that emerged in the Western world in the seventeenth century. The third was the "information civilization" that he saw as similarly emerging by the middle of the twentieth century.
Each civilization has its "hidden code" of operating principles. Toffler did not have much to say about First Wave agrarian civilization, but much of his book does address the differences in code between the Second and Third Waves--the industrial and information civilizations--that reflect the organization of their basic economic activities, and in the process color their broader societal organization and cultures in the substructure-structure-superstructure mode familiar to the student of sociology. Toffler identifies the Second Wave, industrial, civilization with the working up of raw materials by using "simple electromechanical principles" using large amounts of materials, energy, and low-skill, repetitive, labor. Making the most of this saw the organization of the work process on the basis of the principles of centralization, concentration, synchronization, standardization, specialization and "maximization"--the exploitation of "economies of scale" that made for a drive toward bigness of facility, of enterprise, of output and run and market. Thus was the old merchant subcontracting manufacturing work to artisans working in their own homes replaced by the factory where the workers were all expected to come to one facility at the same time for the same shift (concentration, centralization), where instead of each making a complete good by themselves the production task was broken up into different steps carefully distributed among the workers, one of whom did their same piece of the task over and over and over again (specialization) so that the next worker could do their own bit of it in turn (synchronization). The result was an elaborate arrangement of people and equipment that could only be changed with difficulty and expense, creating an incentive to avoid such change as much as possible, while for the sake of plain and simple profit amortizing the investment over as much production as possible with the existing arrangement--in the form of as long a run of the same product as possible (standardization, maximization). The case in the cotton cloth-producing textile mill of the eighteenth century, it was as much the case in a twentieth century "integrated" steel mill where armies of workers use vast amounts of coal-derived coke and iron ore to produce in blast furnaces the metal undergirding virtually all the products that distinguished modern life. And its logic culminated in the way electrification and the internal combustion engine remade energy, transport, the daily terms of living and work, and everything having to do with them, from the assembly line to the auto-suburban-consumerist version of middle class existence to the massification of culture and politics as seen in ways from the ascent of the business corporation and nation-state to the status of the era's master institutions, to ideologies such as capitalism and nationalism.
By contrast with that resource processing-oriented Second Wave industrial civilization the Third Wave information civilization was centered on the substitution of "information" (or to use Toffler's preferred term, the "refined information" that is "knowledge") for those inputs of materials, energy, labor the Second Wave civilization used so lavishly.* Of course, substituting information for other inputs is what technological progress had always been about, arguably even before one could speak of agricultural civilization, while innovation of that kind had become systematized and deliberate in the Second Wave--with the codification of the scientific method, the "invention of invention," and the increasingly institutionalized and intensive pursuit of invention in an age of mass scientific education, and formal private and public research efforts. What made the Third Wave different was this form of civilization being centered on this as a result of two factors--the increasing awareness of the practice and its possibilities, and the ecological crisis as the Second Wave civilization hit the limits of expanding in its resource-profligate old way. (Consider, for instance, how oil consumption was doubling every decade or so in the post-war boom years. Had the growth of that consumption continued at the same rate we would be burning through over two billion barrels of oil a day now--twenty times the actual rate of production, a practical impossibility even before we get to the environmental effects.) Of course, that new form of civilization was supposed to be just emergent, but the expectation was that as it developed, the activity of work, creation of value, possession of wealth would increasingly consist of the gathering, processing, storage, movement, usage, ownership of information relative to the gathering, processing, storage, movement, usage, ownership of things.
One may expect from all of the foregoing that third Wave civilization would have a very different code from its Second Wave predecessor, and indeed Toffler anticipated that it would be virtually the opposite of that of the Second Wave industrial civilization he wrote about. Rather than centralization, concentration, synchronization, standardization, specialization and "maximization" he anticipated that its principles would be decentralization, dispersal, flexibility, adaptiveness, and variety and even smallness of scale. Thus instead of everyone showing up to a centralized workplace at the same time one might have people telecommuting from home, and not necessarily all working at the same time, in a more idiosyncratically arranged work process during which the workers, supplying more than repetitive physical labor under the direction of an overseer had to coordinate with each other and solve problems as the group worked on highly customizable and customized products. Seemingly most plausible in areas such as the creation of software or the provision of financial services where the essential products are intangible, the same principles carry over to material production, with steel an example worth considering again--the mini-mill with its electric arc furnaces as against the giant integrated operations that characterized past steelmaking, the work being done to produce "green steel" today, suggestive of a Third Wave approach even to heavy industry. So too does it go with the renewable energy sector, which had a particularly important place in Toffler's predictions--Toffler anticipating that where the Second Wave civilization had been powered by a voracious consumption of finite fossil fuels, the Third Wave civilization would ultimately be renewables-powered, with this feat the simpler to bring about in a world where the substitution of information for things brought about a significant "dematerialization" of life. For example, the idea of replacing individual ownership of gas-burning cars with "Transportation as a Service" accessed through conveniently on-call self-driving electric cars can seem exemplary of Toffler's thinking (even if he did not make that particular prediction).
All that said, when we compare the world we actually live in with the world of his anticipations, how does it measure up? Consider such matters as the spread of telecommuting, and the "energy transition" to renewable energy. One might hail Toffler as a prophet for discussing such contemporary-seeming things in 1980--but the reality is that the world went very little way toward these developments compared with what he predicted. The frenzied, awkward, improvisation in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic showed us how, in spite of the advances in telecommunications, there had been very, very little shift toward telecommuting in the decades since he wrote, while the ferocious resistance of employers to continuing in the practice any longer than they thought they absolutely had to made clear that they had every intention of keeping the workplace "Second Wave" to the extent that they had anything to say about the matter. Meanwhile the energy transition has been a far slower thing than Toffler anticipated. Where he characterized Big Oil, Gas and Coal as dinosaurs likely to fall in the 1980s, and predicted that we would have a renewables-powered civilization by 2025 (just next year!), the fact remains that any such transition remains far closer to its beginning than its end as the fossil fuel industry, as colossal, profitable and powerful as ever, fights back with the help of innumerable partners, allies and hirelings across the world of business, the media and politics.
In all this it seems that we would seem, at best, a long way from the "dematerialization" Toffler described--and indeed thinking about the state of the world it has seemed much more Second Wave than Third in the material foundations of life. One may take from this different conclusions--perhaps that there was really no civilizational shift ongoing the way Toffler thought there was, what he thought a Third Wave civilization a mere tweaking of the Second, which some have simply sought to play up because they thought it would serve their particular political agendas. Or perhaps such a shift is ongoing, but much more slowly than he anticipated--perhaps because he underestimated the force of the opposition to some of the associated changes.
In either case the lack of change is reflected at those structural and superstructural levels. Where Toffler saw the dominance of the large corporation and the nation-state giving way to more diverse, idiosyncratic and commonly smaller entities in economic and political life that arrange and rearrange themselves as immediate requirements dictate, the reality is that we still live in a world of the same sorts of organizations as before, with the same ideologies leading to the same politics and conflicts as before. Thus is one of the key divisions of our time the resurgence of that old division between capitalists of more cosmopolitan mind and the globalization they pursued so ardently, and the resurgence of nationalism now threatening to tear the global economy apart. It also seems to be all too telling that amid the multiplying and intensifying trade wars one of the most conspicuous recent acts has been a massive tariff on imports of those electric cars that were supposed to help take us into that new age of renewable energy, an action all too likely to further slow that already far too much delayed energy transition.
* This definition of information comes from Toffler's later, less well-remembered, but still bestselling 1990 book Powershift, which can be described as rounding out a "trilogy" he began with Future Shock and continued with Third Wave.
A Glance Back at the Northrop F-5 Fighter
Starting in 1959 the Northrop Corporation produced over 2,600 copies of the various versions of the F-5 fighter over a period of nearly three decades (the last F-5 rolling off the production line in 1987).* Those planes entered service with the armed forces of over thirty countries, including the United States' Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps; the air forces of fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization members Canada, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway and Turkey; and beyond the NATO alliance, those of other important American allies such as South Korea, South Vietnam, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and (the Shah's) Iran. In the service of those forces flyers of that plane saw action in several conflicts, including a number of interstate wars (the largest and most important of them likely the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, but also the 1977 Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia, and the 1979 Yemenite war between what were then North and South Yemen).**
With the help of upgrades many of those militaries which acquired the aircraft continue to fly them down to this day.
Still, the plane's profile seems relatively low in aviation history, at least in American discussion. One reason may be the anomalous character of the aircraft given how we think about fighter aircraft "generations"--a light fighter that did not quite fit in with the trend already evident in its day with the second-generation interceptors' increasingly stressing high-technology combat in that way epitomized by planes like the U.S. Air Force's "Century Series" aircraft and the U.S. Navy's F-14 Tomcat, heavier multirole aircraft like the third-generation F-4 Phantom, and the fourth-generation F-15 Eagle. This is all the more the case in as, in spite of the plane's finding so many takers, there having been no real follow-up, the F-20 Tigershark that was a further development of the aircraft ultimately canceled for lack of customers (as, instead, the higher-tech F-16 and F-18 triumphed in the marketplace). Indeed, it is worth remembering that in U.S. service the plane's primary usage was as an "aggressor" aircraft, simulating Soviet MiG-17s and MiG-21s, rather than as a front-line fighter (all as, ironically, the Soviets seem to have used the F-5s they got from Ethiopia and Vietnam after those countries' changes in government in the same role, as aggressor aircraft against which to train their own pilots). All of that has the plane off the main path of fighter development--even if it may be credited with playing a noteworthy part in the post-World War II history of the fighter aircraft.
* The F-5 lineage includes both the earlier F-5 A and B "Freedom Fighter" and the later F-5 E and F "Tiger II," a larger, heavier plane with a more powerful engine that also incorporated the radar lacking in the Freedom Fighter, but remained a light jet next to others like the "Century Series" fighters, or the F-4 Phantom. (Even the first of the Century Series, the F-100 Super Sabre, is twice as heavy as the F-5 Tiger when empty.)
** Iran received its F-5s (like its F-4 Phantoms and the F-14 Tomcats for which it was the only customer but the U.S.) in the era of the Shah's rule, but the planes have apparently remained in service with the country's successor government down to the present.
With the help of upgrades many of those militaries which acquired the aircraft continue to fly them down to this day.
Still, the plane's profile seems relatively low in aviation history, at least in American discussion. One reason may be the anomalous character of the aircraft given how we think about fighter aircraft "generations"--a light fighter that did not quite fit in with the trend already evident in its day with the second-generation interceptors' increasingly stressing high-technology combat in that way epitomized by planes like the U.S. Air Force's "Century Series" aircraft and the U.S. Navy's F-14 Tomcat, heavier multirole aircraft like the third-generation F-4 Phantom, and the fourth-generation F-15 Eagle. This is all the more the case in as, in spite of the plane's finding so many takers, there having been no real follow-up, the F-20 Tigershark that was a further development of the aircraft ultimately canceled for lack of customers (as, instead, the higher-tech F-16 and F-18 triumphed in the marketplace). Indeed, it is worth remembering that in U.S. service the plane's primary usage was as an "aggressor" aircraft, simulating Soviet MiG-17s and MiG-21s, rather than as a front-line fighter (all as, ironically, the Soviets seem to have used the F-5s they got from Ethiopia and Vietnam after those countries' changes in government in the same role, as aggressor aircraft against which to train their own pilots). All of that has the plane off the main path of fighter development--even if it may be credited with playing a noteworthy part in the post-World War II history of the fighter aircraft.
* The F-5 lineage includes both the earlier F-5 A and B "Freedom Fighter" and the later F-5 E and F "Tiger II," a larger, heavier plane with a more powerful engine that also incorporated the radar lacking in the Freedom Fighter, but remained a light jet next to others like the "Century Series" fighters, or the F-4 Phantom. (Even the first of the Century Series, the F-100 Super Sabre, is twice as heavy as the F-5 Tiger when empty.)
** Iran received its F-5s (like its F-4 Phantoms and the F-14 Tomcats for which it was the only customer but the U.S.) in the era of the Shah's rule, but the planes have apparently remained in service with the country's successor government down to the present.
Saturday, March 16, 2024
Emmanuel Todd's La Défaite de l’Occident Gets Noticed By the American Press
As I previously remarked, the response to Emmanuel Todd's latest (La Défaite de l’Occident--in English, The Defeat of the West) seems to have been strongest on the right, which was predictably delighted by much of what Todd (though not a rightist, and in the past and even the new book having said much not pleasing to the right) wrote here about religion, gender and education. Indeed, the first review of his book I spotted in a major English-language publication was Scott McConnell's in The American Conservative, while when The New York Times recently ran a guest essay about Todd's book it was by the Claremont Institute's Christopher Caldwell (in yet another reminder of just how off the mark are those who think the Times a "left" or even a "liberal" paper rather than the centrist one it actually is, and just what exactly "centrism" means in a media outlet where who gets a platform and who does not are concerned).*
It was accordingly noteworthy that Michael Ledger-Lomas reviewed the book for the Jacobin (a publication hardly likely to turn to a far right commentator for their view of this book).
Ledger-Lomas' piece is notable for its attentiveness to Emmanuel Todd's history as a social scientist, from his formative influences in his youth, to his embrace of the "anthropological turn" in French intellectual life and establishment of a reputation for himself as a thinker with 1976's The Final Fall to the present--albeit with a distinct slant. Skipping over Todd's After the Empire, which seemed to me an important stepping stone toward this book's argument (and skipping over, too, Todd's Lineages of the Feminine, which also seems to me important given what he argues here), Ledger-Lomas slights the more material aspects of Todd's case as he (perhaps not unreasonably) emphasizes their more-discussed claims about the passing of the Protestantism of America and northern Europe from the "zombie" stage to the "zero" stage and its implications--which Ledger-Lomas treats rather critically. Indeed, Ledger-Lomas contends that while Todd's "portrait of America and Europe's post-Christian nihilism" can be "gripping" and even "overwhelming," and may even appear "vindicated" by particular foreign policies, the book is also "less scientific and more anecdotal" than Todd's prior works, with this posing special risks inasmuch as Todd's book is so much devoted to the "power of a political unconscious" in which "the analyst will find . . . whatever they find amusing or convenient to put there." Ledger-Lomas particularly argues for the hugely important discussion of "dechristianization" suffering from a "breezy crudity," reflected in Todd's identification of the "zero moment" for Protestantism with the acceptance of gay marriage seeming to him "strangely arbitrary." Indeed, Ledger-Lomas finds Todd's optimism about Russia and pessimism about Europe both misplaced--and along with these, the expectation of some form of German-Russian rapprochement implausible.
The result is that while it seems to me that there is much here that seems to me essential to the book and meriting more mention than it got in an over three thousand word review (Ledger-Lomas making only the slightest reference to Todd's discussions of Western deindustrialization, and none at all to Russia's soft power, for example), in discussing what he does regard as the core of the book Ledger-Lomas eschews both the uncritical embrace of those on the right who find Todd's argument a validation of their views, and the sneering dismissal of critics like Le Monde's Florent Georgesco, to offer that rarity--a balanced consideration of this French bestseller now getting so much press in a country where books not available in English are usually not even recognized as existing at all.
It was accordingly noteworthy that Michael Ledger-Lomas reviewed the book for the Jacobin (a publication hardly likely to turn to a far right commentator for their view of this book).
Ledger-Lomas' piece is notable for its attentiveness to Emmanuel Todd's history as a social scientist, from his formative influences in his youth, to his embrace of the "anthropological turn" in French intellectual life and establishment of a reputation for himself as a thinker with 1976's The Final Fall to the present--albeit with a distinct slant. Skipping over Todd's After the Empire, which seemed to me an important stepping stone toward this book's argument (and skipping over, too, Todd's Lineages of the Feminine, which also seems to me important given what he argues here), Ledger-Lomas slights the more material aspects of Todd's case as he (perhaps not unreasonably) emphasizes their more-discussed claims about the passing of the Protestantism of America and northern Europe from the "zombie" stage to the "zero" stage and its implications--which Ledger-Lomas treats rather critically. Indeed, Ledger-Lomas contends that while Todd's "portrait of America and Europe's post-Christian nihilism" can be "gripping" and even "overwhelming," and may even appear "vindicated" by particular foreign policies, the book is also "less scientific and more anecdotal" than Todd's prior works, with this posing special risks inasmuch as Todd's book is so much devoted to the "power of a political unconscious" in which "the analyst will find . . . whatever they find amusing or convenient to put there." Ledger-Lomas particularly argues for the hugely important discussion of "dechristianization" suffering from a "breezy crudity," reflected in Todd's identification of the "zero moment" for Protestantism with the acceptance of gay marriage seeming to him "strangely arbitrary." Indeed, Ledger-Lomas finds Todd's optimism about Russia and pessimism about Europe both misplaced--and along with these, the expectation of some form of German-Russian rapprochement implausible.
The result is that while it seems to me that there is much here that seems to me essential to the book and meriting more mention than it got in an over three thousand word review (Ledger-Lomas making only the slightest reference to Todd's discussions of Western deindustrialization, and none at all to Russia's soft power, for example), in discussing what he does regard as the core of the book Ledger-Lomas eschews both the uncritical embrace of those on the right who find Todd's argument a validation of their views, and the sneering dismissal of critics like Le Monde's Florent Georgesco, to offer that rarity--a balanced consideration of this French bestseller now getting so much press in a country where books not available in English are usually not even recognized as existing at all.
The Talent Disrupted Study on College Graduates' Employment Outcomes: Some Thoughts
The Strada Education Foundation's new study of the employment outcomes of four-year college graduates, "Talented Disrupted," is making the rounds of the news.
The content of the study, which concentrates on "underemployment" among these graduates (their working jobs that do not require four-year college degrees a year after graduation), affirms the conventional wisdom on many a point. Yes, a humanities degree is more likely to lead to underemployment than, for example, an engineering degree. Yes, certain demographics suffer more than others (with no surprises to be found here regarding which ones), while the problem is bigger in some U.S. states than others (and, again, nothing striking me as very surprising on that score here). And so on and so forth. Yet there was much in the numbers, at least, that will seem surprising to those who abide by the conventional wisdom, not least that
* Over half of college graduates are underemployed, such that a college graduate has a less than even chance of being employed in a job actually requiring a college degree (never mind their particular degree) a full year after graduation.
* The major a student chooses is more important than the school they went to--a student with an in-demand major from an "inclusive" school less likely to be underemployed than a student with a less in-demand major from a selective, elite, school (contrary to stupid claims such as "a Harvard graduate who majors in somersaults will be able to find some kind of job to pay the bills").
* Where differences in the employment prospects of majors are concerned even those majors with the lowest rate of underemployment still leave the degree-holder a 1 in 4 chance of being underemployed.
* There is significant underemployment among the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) majors, with engineering graduates having a 26 percent rate of underemployment, the figure 35 percent for majors in mathematics and statistics, and 36 percent among computer science graduates--while the underemployment rate is an appalling 44 percent for physical science majors and 47 percent for majors in biology and the biomedical fields.
* The underemployment rate among business majors differs immensely depending on how "math-intensive" their subject is. Those business majors that are math-intensive, like finance and accounting, have a "low" underemployment rate of 29 percent, but those that are not math-intensive, like marketing or management, have a rate of 57 percent--which is actually slightly worse than the figure for such "useless" majors as the social sciences (51 percent), communications, journalism and related programs (53 percent), psychology (53 percent), the visual and performing arts (54 percent), and the humanities (55 percent).
In short, the prospects for underemployment of college graduates are worse than fifty-fifty, the "safest" majors still carry significant risk (worse than 1 in 4 for engineering graduates!), while many "STEM" and business majors are in almost as much danger on this score as the despised social sciences-communications-arts-humanities majors, and attendance of an elite school falls short of saving those who picked their majors without an eye to their later economic prospects. Moreover, all this matters because those who become underemployed have a hard time "escaping" that condition, especially if they were likely to end up underemployed to begin with.
Considering the situation in, as the study terms it, a "historically tight" labor market, with all that implies for these being particularly good times rather than bad ones, it seems far from unreasonable that many young people are becoming much more cautious about college than before--both what they choose to study, and whether they decide to go at all. Indeed, as I have remarked before, we may be starting to see a fundamental change in the way we think about higher education--one arguably long overdue.
The content of the study, which concentrates on "underemployment" among these graduates (their working jobs that do not require four-year college degrees a year after graduation), affirms the conventional wisdom on many a point. Yes, a humanities degree is more likely to lead to underemployment than, for example, an engineering degree. Yes, certain demographics suffer more than others (with no surprises to be found here regarding which ones), while the problem is bigger in some U.S. states than others (and, again, nothing striking me as very surprising on that score here). And so on and so forth. Yet there was much in the numbers, at least, that will seem surprising to those who abide by the conventional wisdom, not least that
* Over half of college graduates are underemployed, such that a college graduate has a less than even chance of being employed in a job actually requiring a college degree (never mind their particular degree) a full year after graduation.
* The major a student chooses is more important than the school they went to--a student with an in-demand major from an "inclusive" school less likely to be underemployed than a student with a less in-demand major from a selective, elite, school (contrary to stupid claims such as "a Harvard graduate who majors in somersaults will be able to find some kind of job to pay the bills").
* Where differences in the employment prospects of majors are concerned even those majors with the lowest rate of underemployment still leave the degree-holder a 1 in 4 chance of being underemployed.
* There is significant underemployment among the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) majors, with engineering graduates having a 26 percent rate of underemployment, the figure 35 percent for majors in mathematics and statistics, and 36 percent among computer science graduates--while the underemployment rate is an appalling 44 percent for physical science majors and 47 percent for majors in biology and the biomedical fields.
* The underemployment rate among business majors differs immensely depending on how "math-intensive" their subject is. Those business majors that are math-intensive, like finance and accounting, have a "low" underemployment rate of 29 percent, but those that are not math-intensive, like marketing or management, have a rate of 57 percent--which is actually slightly worse than the figure for such "useless" majors as the social sciences (51 percent), communications, journalism and related programs (53 percent), psychology (53 percent), the visual and performing arts (54 percent), and the humanities (55 percent).
In short, the prospects for underemployment of college graduates are worse than fifty-fifty, the "safest" majors still carry significant risk (worse than 1 in 4 for engineering graduates!), while many "STEM" and business majors are in almost as much danger on this score as the despised social sciences-communications-arts-humanities majors, and attendance of an elite school falls short of saving those who picked their majors without an eye to their later economic prospects. Moreover, all this matters because those who become underemployed have a hard time "escaping" that condition, especially if they were likely to end up underemployed to begin with.
Considering the situation in, as the study terms it, a "historically tight" labor market, with all that implies for these being particularly good times rather than bad ones, it seems far from unreasonable that many young people are becoming much more cautious about college than before--both what they choose to study, and whether they decide to go at all. Indeed, as I have remarked before, we may be starting to see a fundamental change in the way we think about higher education--one arguably long overdue.
American-Style Centrism and French Politics
In writing about centrism my emphasis has generally been on American political discourse, and the American political spectrum, over the course of American history. However, reflecting the fact that centrism is an updated classical conservatism extending far beyond the American tradition (indeed, originated in Western Europe), and that American politics has unavoidably influenced politics elsewhere (especially within other Western nations), it is easy enough to find similar thinking elsewhere--and indeed I had occasion to write about such centrism in the British Labour Party, and especially the evidences of it under Keir Starmer's leadership.
Some time ago Jacob Collins had occasion in a profile of Bernard-Henri Lévy to point out the presence of the essentially tendency in French politics, with Lévy a key exponent via his particular brand of anti-leftism equating all social change with totalitarianism horseshoe theory-style, and exalting a "pragmatic" capitalist model as the only viable path for modern societies. Indeed, Collins explicitly points out the specifically American precedent, mentioning Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology, Hannah Arendt's theorizing, and others that made Lévy a latecomer to the game back in the 1970s, but nevertheless joining it in a moment in which, in France at least, doing so could be the basis of a long run as an intellectual "rock star" due to the epochal turn then just getting underway in the political life of France and the rest of the world.
Some time ago Jacob Collins had occasion in a profile of Bernard-Henri Lévy to point out the presence of the essentially tendency in French politics, with Lévy a key exponent via his particular brand of anti-leftism equating all social change with totalitarianism horseshoe theory-style, and exalting a "pragmatic" capitalist model as the only viable path for modern societies. Indeed, Collins explicitly points out the specifically American precedent, mentioning Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology, Hannah Arendt's theorizing, and others that made Lévy a latecomer to the game back in the 1970s, but nevertheless joining it in a moment in which, in France at least, doing so could be the basis of a long run as an intellectual "rock star" due to the epochal turn then just getting underway in the political life of France and the rest of the world.
Britain's Defense Policy and Armed Forces (Post-1945)
This page lists my Social Science Research Network (SSRN) working papers addressing the subject of the post-1945 history of Britain's defense policy.
"The Evolution of Britain's Defense Posture From 1945 to the Present: An Outline." (2022)
"The Evolution of Britain's Defense Posture, 1945-1979." (2019)
"Foundations of Semi-Superpower Status: Financing Britain's Defense Posture, 1945-1971." (2018)
"The Restructuring of Britain's Navy, 1945-1979." (2019)
"The British Carrier Force, 1945-1979." (2019)
"The British Defence Reviews of the 1990s and Their Legacy." (2021)
The 2021 British Defence Review and the British 'Tilt to the Indo-Pacific.'" (2021)
"'Is the Debate About Reviving Conscription in Britain Really About Conscription at All?' A Note on the Recent Discourse About Conscription in Britain." (2024)
"The Evolution of Britain's Defense Posture From 1945 to the Present: An Outline." (2022)
"The Evolution of Britain's Defense Posture, 1945-1979." (2019)
"Foundations of Semi-Superpower Status: Financing Britain's Defense Posture, 1945-1971." (2018)
"The Restructuring of Britain's Navy, 1945-1979." (2019)
"The British Carrier Force, 1945-1979." (2019)
"The British Defence Reviews of the 1990s and Their Legacy." (2021)
The 2021 British Defence Review and the British 'Tilt to the Indo-Pacific.'" (2021)
"'Is the Debate About Reviving Conscription in Britain Really About Conscription at All?' A Note on the Recent Discourse About Conscription in Britain." (2024)
My SSRN (Social Science Research Network)-Published Papers
I have been publishing through the Social Science Research Network since 2018, and the total number now up came to 170 at last count.
Given the number it seems to me appropriate to do something about organizing them for the reader--and so I have decided to here organize them by subject, allotting a page of this blog to each of those subjects that I have found myself writing about time and again. Where its subject matter makes this appropriate, I have listed some papers on more than one page, or even under more than one heading.
The links to those subject pages are listed below in alphabetical order.
Britain's Defense Policy and Armed Forces (Post-1945).
Deindustrialization.
Economic Growth After 1973.
The "Information Age."
The "Middle Class."
The 1990s.
Neoliberalism.
Political Centrism.
The Politics of the Media.
"The Unipolar Moment."
Given the number it seems to me appropriate to do something about organizing them for the reader--and so I have decided to here organize them by subject, allotting a page of this blog to each of those subjects that I have found myself writing about time and again. Where its subject matter makes this appropriate, I have listed some papers on more than one page, or even under more than one heading.
The links to those subject pages are listed below in alphabetical order.
Britain's Defense Policy and Armed Forces (Post-1945).
Deindustrialization.
Economic Growth After 1973.
The "Information Age."
The "Middle Class."
The 1990s.
Neoliberalism.
Political Centrism.
The Politics of the Media.
"The Unipolar Moment."
Deindustrialization
This page lists my Social Science Research Network (SSRN) working papers addressing the subject of deindustrialization in the United States and other countries, particularly the U.S. and Britain.
Most of the papers are concerned with attempts to quantify manufacturing output in various ways (and in cases, other material aspects of deindustrialization susceptible to quantification, like the trend in regard to manufacturing equipment stocks) for the purposes of better understanding the issue.
Deindustrialization (U.S.)
"Discussing Deindustrialization: A Note." (2024)
"'What Do the Numbers Actually Say?': American Per Capita Manufacturing Output 1947-2018, the Consumer Price Index, and the Question of Deindustrialization." (2022)
"'American Per Capita Manufacturing Output 1947-2018, the Consumer Price Index, and the Question of Deindustrialization': A Supplementary Data Set and Associated Notes." (2024)
"Keynesian Fordism, Neoliberal Financialization and the Restructuring of the Economy: A Survey of the Data." (2022)
"Private Fixed Assets, Value Added and the Trade Balance: A Note on the Trends in the U.S. Manufacturing and FIRE Sectors at the Per Capita Level." (2022)
"'What Do the Numbers Actually Say?': A Decade-By-Decade View of U.S. Manufacturing Value Added." (2022)
"The Deindustrialization of Michigan: Notes on the Available Data." (2022)
"The Deindustrialization of Los Angeles? A Note." (2022)
"The Complexities of Deindustrialization: A Note." (2022)
"'Do We Still Make Things in America?': Are Perceptions of Deindustrialization Exaggerated?" (2022)
"Comparative Deindustrialization: A Note on American and British Manufacturing Since the 1970s." (2021)
"Per Capita Manufacturing Output From 1970 On: The United States, Britain, Germany and Japan." (2022)
Deindustrialization (Other Countries)
"Assessing Manufacturing Output Over Time: A Note on The Case of Britain." (2022)
"'Did Margaret Thatcher Destroy British Manufacturing?': A Note." (2021)
"Comparative Deindustrialization: A Note on American and British Manufacturing Since the 1970s." (2021)
"The Deindustrialization of the French Economy: A Note." (2023)
"Per Capita Manufacturing Output From 1970 On: The United States, Britain, Germany and Japan." (2022)
"Is the G-7 Ceasing to be Relevant?" (2022)
Most of the papers are concerned with attempts to quantify manufacturing output in various ways (and in cases, other material aspects of deindustrialization susceptible to quantification, like the trend in regard to manufacturing equipment stocks) for the purposes of better understanding the issue.
Deindustrialization (U.S.)
"Discussing Deindustrialization: A Note." (2024)
"'What Do the Numbers Actually Say?': American Per Capita Manufacturing Output 1947-2018, the Consumer Price Index, and the Question of Deindustrialization." (2022)
"'American Per Capita Manufacturing Output 1947-2018, the Consumer Price Index, and the Question of Deindustrialization': A Supplementary Data Set and Associated Notes." (2024)
"Keynesian Fordism, Neoliberal Financialization and the Restructuring of the Economy: A Survey of the Data." (2022)
"Private Fixed Assets, Value Added and the Trade Balance: A Note on the Trends in the U.S. Manufacturing and FIRE Sectors at the Per Capita Level." (2022)
"'What Do the Numbers Actually Say?': A Decade-By-Decade View of U.S. Manufacturing Value Added." (2022)
"The Deindustrialization of Michigan: Notes on the Available Data." (2022)
"The Deindustrialization of Los Angeles? A Note." (2022)
"The Complexities of Deindustrialization: A Note." (2022)
"'Do We Still Make Things in America?': Are Perceptions of Deindustrialization Exaggerated?" (2022)
"Comparative Deindustrialization: A Note on American and British Manufacturing Since the 1970s." (2021)
"Per Capita Manufacturing Output From 1970 On: The United States, Britain, Germany and Japan." (2022)
Deindustrialization (Other Countries)
"Assessing Manufacturing Output Over Time: A Note on The Case of Britain." (2022)
"'Did Margaret Thatcher Destroy British Manufacturing?': A Note." (2021)
"Comparative Deindustrialization: A Note on American and British Manufacturing Since the 1970s." (2021)
"The Deindustrialization of the French Economy: A Note." (2023)
"Per Capita Manufacturing Output From 1970 On: The United States, Britain, Germany and Japan." (2022)
"Is the G-7 Ceasing to be Relevant?" (2022)
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