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

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

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

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community's effective resistance to and reversal of regulations, such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 which repealed Glass-Steagall), and the irresponsibility of the Federal Reserve as overseen by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How Long Till Human-Level AI?"

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

The Return of Neo-Medievalism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$123 trillion by 2040?

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

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

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

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

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

Of "Geek Shortages"-and "Geek" Dissent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sixth-Generation Fighter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global Energy Crunch

Jorg Friedrichs-whose earlier paper "Global Energy Crunch: How Different Parts of the World Would React to a Peak Oil Scenario" I mentioned on this blog back in October-has a new paper out on the same issue, "Peak Oil Trajectories: Same Crisis, Different Responses." Setting aside the case for and against the peak oil theory (referring the reader to other papers, my own "The Impending Oil Shock" included, for a quick overview), it similarly concentrates on reactions to the situation.

Tracking three possible trajectories, "predatory militarism, totalitarian retrenchment and socioeconomic adaptation" (based on the cases of Japan, North Korea and Cuba examined in the previous paper, and revisited here), much of its analysis will be familiar to those who read the first paper, but this second one offers a more comprehensive and polished set of projections-which are, perhaps predictably, "not a cosy world to imagine" as Friedrichs notes. However, as he rightly notes, the scenario (which differs from my own in key points, not least of them his predictions of how the standing of Europe and Japan would shift relative to that of the U.S.) nonetheless should not be treated dismissively.

The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2009

The latest edition of the annual State of Food Insecurity in the World report from the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization has just come out, and is getting a fair amount of attention-not least, because it is presenting a side of life overlooked by those given to ecstasies over globalization. Not only is it the case that the attainment of the heavily-hyped Millennium Goals seems very unlikely, but the number of "undernourished" people is actually rising, crossing the 1 billion person mark this year for the first time. As noted in the report, "The increase in food insecurity is not a result of poor crop harvests but because high domestic food prices, lower incomes and increasing unemployment have reduced access to food by the poor."

Particularly worth noting is that the progress of the '70s, '80s and early '90s was, despite the slowing of the world's population growth (p. 11), reversed in the middle of that decade (not incidentally, when Thomas Friedman-style hucksterism and mindless tech-boom hype came to dominate economic dialogue), with hunger increasing in the Asia-Pacific region, the Near East and Africa (p. 9).

Simply put, structural factors are at work, not least that "developing countries today [are] more financially and commercially integrated into the world economy than they were 20 years ago, [so that] they are far more exposed to shocks in international markets" (p. 4), and a pattern of falling private and public investment (with agricultural investment not exempt) amid the budgetary pressures (p. 39) which have been widely acknowledged as the norm in the post-'73 period.

The deterioration worsened during the "food and fuel crisis of 2006-2008," a result of which was that

domestic staple food prices [were] . . . on average, 17 percent higher in real terms than two years earlier. The price increases had forced many poor families to sell assets or sacrifice health care, education or food just to stay afloat (p. 4).

Given the precariousness of the world's economic recovery, and the likelihood that another fuel crisis may not be too far off (even if the decline in oil prices and the explosion of the mortgage crisis diverted attention, the foundations of the argument that peak oil may not be far away have not vanished), the possibility that things might get worse still has to be taken seriously-and offers all the more reason to ask questions too long avoided.

Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914, by Gabriel Kolko

New York: The New Press, 1994, pp. 546.

In Century of War, noted historian and foreign policy commentator Gabriel Kolko focuses on the effect of war on civilian populations, and the political consequences of those effects. Predictably it devotes considerable attention to writing history from the "bottom-up," not a new idea by any means (a hundred years ago, Peter Kropotkin was offering such a take on the events of 1789 in The Great French Revolution), but it remains the rarity--too rare, to go by the content of pop history, which is absolutely dominated by "great man history" and "gentlemen's history." Military history (a robust, if incomplete, critique of which can be found in Jeremy Black's study of the field) has been perhaps more wide-ranging, but has only rarely taken this tack.

Kolko is wary of offering general theories, and stresses the need to pay attention to the specifics of historical situations. Nonetheless, he identifies significant recurring patterns, not least of them the impact of domestic class structures on policymaking, and in particular that:

* The pursuit of concrete foreign and defense policy objectives of states necessarily interacts with the domestic (e.g., class) interests of national elites.
* Careerist pressures, and the socialization of decisionmakers more broadly, tend to weed out those capable of seeing the holes in the "conventional wisdom," and willing to call it, so as to sharply narrow the range of ideas and options regarded as "realistic" and "serious"-and to undermine any institutional learning processes, and lead to the repetition of the same mistakes.
* The remainder of society (e.g. the working classes) acquiesces to the lead of elites out of apathy (or risk-avoidance) at least as much as approval, their primary concern being their own private lives.

In the twentieth century, war has been the great accelerant of otherwise slow social processes, because it disrupts the day-to-day lives of the usually passive majority, frequently making politicization a matter of life or death, without which it is difficult to understand crucial developments in this period, such as the rise of fascism, or the wave of decolonization which followed the end of World War II. Kolko notes as particularly significant the effects of military mobilization, inflation-the great traumatizer of the middle class-and demographic shifts that may ensue as a result of related economic developments, or deliberate military action. He also points to the role that war has played in concentrating business, a process Kolko has long described as not simply a reflection of Marxist "laws of economics," but also of state action (as in his classic study of the Progressive era, The Triumph of Conservatism), the military build-ups involved leading to government-assisted consolidations of industrial enterprises and contributing powerfully to their accumulation of capital through government orders.

In Kolko's view these patterns have much to do with the nature of twentieth century warfare, and in particular its tendency to defy the expectations of leaders (typically exemplifying the worst of what Kolko describes in their socialization process, and frequently obsessed with their "credibility") planning on quick, cheap victory. Time and again those leaders instead find their countries embroiled in conflicts that escape their control--despite their increasingly developed technology and expanded firepower, which serve only to make war more expensive, more destructive and more brutal (as in its explicit targeting of civilians). The result is that not only do the wars started by such elites prove much more costly in economic, human and political terms than they imagined, but they drive the consensus within their societies to (and often beyond) the breaking point.

The revolutions that followed in the wake of these disasters (as with those in Russia, Germany, China and Vietnam, all examined in some depth) have tended to be less a matter of a group bringing down an order through its actions than the collapse of that order, following which a new group (typically that most capable of articulating the desires of their countrymen, and making fewer tactical and strategic mistakes than its rivals) steps in. They typically fail to deliver the changes they promise, however, because political movements such as these too draw their fair share of ambitious, self-serving, opportunist careerists; while Kolko also sees the elitism of the Leninist political model (centered on a small "vanguard party" of activists rather than really mass-based movements) as having been a poor foundation for deep, broad, progressive change.

Indeed, in his view they have been such a drag on these movements that where at this time Francis Fukuyama was proclaiming "the end of history" (essentially, the victory of capitalism-democracy over all other social models), Kolko, who went so far as to speculate that socialism may have had a better track record of success without the 1917 Russian Revolution, saw the "bankruptcy" of Marxism and Leninism at the end of the Cold War as clearing the way for a reconstruction of socialism along new lines.

It is putting it mildly to say that a great many readers will find that prognosis doubtful (more now, perhaps, than at the time of the book's writing). However, Kolko's book--which is meticulously researched and argued, combines great breadth with great attention to detail, and for all that is highly readable--still offers a great deal that should be of interest to readers of all ideological persuasions for its attention to the interactions between war and the rest of social, political and economic life. Those interested in Kolko's larger body of work will find this a particularly significant piece of his longstanding project of critiquing the Marxist legacy from the left.