Technological Hype and the Military Balance

Originally published through SSRN, June 3, 2018

The modern world has seen profound technological change, but it has also seen equally profound technological hype—extravagant, intensive publicity and promotion not merely of new technologies, but technologies merely thought to be near realization, which has tended to go hand in hand with the exaggeration of their maturity, their capabilities and their implications for actual life. Relative to how large—and often, how damaging—a role such hype has played in recent history, and how big a factor it is in contemporary thinking today, the subject has been little studied. Its implications for the military sphere are no exception to this rule.

This article is intended as an examination of that subject, beginning with a consideration of the factors that make today's observers susceptible to technological hype. It will then consider the implications of such hype for thinking about the distribution of power among nations—both the ways in which they affect economic and geopolitical thinking generally; and in which they affect thinking about military technology more narrowly. From there the discussion proceeds to a consideration of the present—the past few years, and very likely, a good many of the years ahead—as a period of particular vulnerability to such hype.

Understanding Technological Hype
To better appreciate the actual pervasiveness and weight of technological hype, it is helpful to consider four factors from which it derives its strength: our prolonged experience of technological upheaval; the "rumors of the future" we get from futurology, science and technology reporting, and to a greater degree than is widely appreciated, science fiction; popular understandings of technological research and development; and the culture of commerce.

Prolonged Experience of Technological Upheaval
It would be impossible to exaggerate the significance of the shift from a predominantly agrarian, rural, pre-industrial civilization to an urbanized, industrial civilization founded on the expansion of human capability through machinery powered by inanimate power sources (coal-fired steam engines, internal combustion engines, electricity). That change, which in much of the world is still ongoing, and even in the most advanced countries still less than perfectly complete, has been recent enough and dramatic enough to create a general expectation of such change as a constant in modern life.1

It may well be the case that this has led to the overrating of what are arguably the more modest changes seen since that time, like the revolution in digital computing and communications, so often accorded a significance comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution, which has exaggerated the impression of the rate and depth of more recent technological change.2 Such exaggeration may be reinforced by a weak historical sense on the part of the public (especially among younger people), and perhaps the popular obsessions with entertainment, social media, consumerism and "lifestyle" generally.3 However one explains it, in the end the perception of such continuous change is there, and interacts with other factors, not least the fact that more such change is continually promised to them in the media.

"Rumors of the Future"
The preoccupation with the ways in which the future will be different from the present, and still more, the investment of rigorous effort in working out those differences were in the late nineteenth century still a novelty. Works like Stanley Jevons' The Coal Question, Ivan Bloch's The Future of War, and H.G. Wells' Anticipations, as well as the stories by Jules Verne and other early proponents of science fiction, all owe their place in cultural and intellectual history partly to that novelty. However, during the twentieth century professional futurology became a massive industry, and while its prestige may have fallen somewhat since its peak in the post-World War II period, its presence is perhaps more strongly felt than ever before.4 In the discussion of topics ranging from nuclear proliferation to climate change, from the rate of economic growth to the space program, even the casual consumer of news comes into contact with more or less sophisticated extrapolations not only about what has happened or is happening, but what will happen years or decades hence, and the implications of those possibilities for the present—and so frequently that they scarcely even notice the fact. With news outlets routinely devoting full sections of their papers, magazines and web sites to "Science" and "Technology" News, discussion of technologies only in development, perhaps only very early development, are often the explicit focus of a substantial portion of news coverage itself.

At the same time, the imagery of imaginary technologies has become virtually pervasive across popular culture. In recent years, any list of the highest-grossing movies at the box office tends to consist primarily of action-adventure films packed with futuristic vehicles and other technologies, like the Star Wars and Marvel Comics Universe films. Charles Gannon has usefully characterized such imagery as "rumors of the future," habituating us to the thought of technologies that do not yet exist.5 Indeed, that such technologies actually do exist, if only somewhere, in secret, is a staple of science fiction, which routinely presents intelligence agencies and other such organizations as secretly carrying on ultra-advanced programs to explore space and the like in the present day. (This is the view that the "future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed."6)

Popular Conceptions of Science and Technology
Even while the products of science, hypothetical as well as real, have become ubiquitous in cultural life, the actual process that is science remains poorly understood by non-scientists on the whole. The reality is that engineering work of the kind relevant to this discussion is often a collaborative, cumulative, slow-moving activity, which may be straining against the limits not only of what has been done, but what is possible with the existing state of the art. It also tends to occur within a business, economic and political context, where imperatives besides mere feasibility are operative, and people who are not scientists or engineers—who may in fact be ill-educated in these matters—are often in control. (The corporation that cuts its R & D budget to make this quarter's earnings report look better is not unknown.7) And even in the best of circumstances technological research and development can be subject to fits and starts, dead ends and flashes-in-the-pan, often resulting in a device that exists but is virtually unworkable in any real-life conditions, or perhaps simply stillborn at the concept stage.

However, the popular image of such work envisions such work as highly individualistic and speedy, with revolutionary breakthroughs cheap and easy. This is, again, partly a matter of fiction favoring the simple, heroic, dramatic story over a more complex reality.8 Yet, fiction is not the sole source of this thinking, greatly encouraged by the manner in which journalism has tended to portray real-life developments, epitomized by the conception of the computing revolution. While the history of mechanical computing goes back centuries, with key computing concepts dating very far back in them (Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Leibniz, Charles Baggage laying down essential groundwork), and electronic computers to the 1940s, after which they were the object of massive government R & D efforts that led to still more key innovations (ENIAC, SAGE, NLS, ARPANET), there is a tendency to imagine it all as having emerged out of garages in California without help from anyone else. This view of technological development as such a quick, simple matter, makes it the easier to imagine that a technology only "in development," and which on closer examination may be a very uncertain or distant prospect, is almost ready for commercial employment.

The Culture of Commerce
Interacting with and reinforcing past experience of technological age, "rumors of the future," and the prevalent, oversimplified view of how technologies are realized in practice, is what one may term the "culture of commerce." It is, of course, the business of advertisers to make the wares on sale appear as attractive and compelling as possible, and one obvious and commonly taken course is to present those wares as being as new and revolutionary as possible—as a practical matter, more new and revolutionary than they really are. Still, this indisputably distorts understanding of the matter. It does not help that journalism is increasingly virtually indistinguishable from advertising, a tendency epitomized by those media outlets that carry what is euphemistically referred to as "paid" or "sponsored" content. However, the mentality pervades even more conventional journalism, dependent as it is on capturing audiences with exciting headlines. Especially when this imperative is combined with a weak grasp of the process by which concepts actually become viable technologies, it easily creates an exaggerated picture of the technology's feasibility. Indeed, the fostering of expectations inflated far beyond what will ever be met are virtually built into the process by which technologies enter into use, the "Gartner Hype Cycle" based on studies of technologies going back to railroads positing a sequence of technological breakthrough drawing attention before the production of usable, commercial products; inflated expectations; a period of disillusionment; a second, rising trend of genuine usage; and then a "plateau" of productivity, in which the technology makes a genuine contribution, if less spectacular than what the optimists imagined during that earlier period of inflated expectations.

The cases of single technologies apart, the pattern of such reportage has a profound shaping influence on perceptions. Any viewer of the news is subject to constant, specific claims of explosive change in one area or another. The individual claims (which tend not to stand up to scrutiny) are forgotten, but the overall impression of that rate of change remains. Moreover, when the old claims which produced that impression are critically examined, the evaluation is often generous—overly generous, the bar for "prophecy" set low, with an obvious example the assessment of Raymond Kurzweil's forecasts.9

When despite this a prediction, or mass of them, proves to have been clearly wrong, a typical response is to shrug off the exaggerations, and suggest that those taking the more critical view of "missing the forest for the trees." Yes, they say, the futurists were wrong that time (and that time, and perhaps that time too), but they "know" that the overall reading of the trend as one of explosive change is correct. (The ruthless mockery to which those bullish about the pace of change subject those who dare to ask "Where are the flying cars?" is exemplary of this.10)

Techno-Hype and the Balance of Power
In private economic life, technological hype often leads to the misallocation of economic resources—to questionable purchases of goods and assets that can in the most extreme cases lead to speculative bubbles that disrupt whole economies, from the wonders claimed for the South Sea Company in its heyday, to the information technology bubble that burst in 2000. However, hype about such technologies has implications well beyond the purely civilian sphere. It has often had implications for perceptions about the prosperity of particular nations, and the power they derive from it, including the military power that in the modern world is founded on economic and industrial power. There has in fact been a recurring tendency to take an exaggerated view of the implications of an extraordinary lead in one or a few technologies for the wealth and power of a particular country closely identified with that technology, imagining that a disproportionate market share here can readily translate to a wildly disproportionate prosperity or power. This has frequently been reinforced by a tendency to claim that the country in question possesses some unique comparative advantage that will make its lead in that technology enduring.

An obvious case is Britain in the post-World War II period. Despite its post-war economic situation and decolonization, expectations existed that British accomplishments in cutting-edge fields as computers, aerospace and nuclear energy would sustain its economic and strategic position in the post-war world. Reality fell far short of such hopes in a history which saw such disappointments as the de Havilland Comet, the "Magnox" gas-cooled nuclear reactor, and the Concorde, which showed its advantages to be less robust than imagined, and the exploitation of these advantages more complex and uncertain.11

The tendency has grown more rather than less pronounced over time, with Japan's extraordinary dominance in microchips during the late 1980s another, even more germane example. Despite accounting for less than 3 percent of the world's population, 12 percent of world GDP and 16 percent of manufacturing, the country produced over half the world's chips at the time.12 In this context Japanese politician Shintaro Ishihara created a sensation with the claim in his book The Japan That Can Say No that Japan's strength in microchips put the Cold War balance of power in its hands, and would be a pillar of its enduring stature in the post-Cold War era.13 (This was to see it draw the former Soviet sphere into its own orbit, and manage the world's affairs jointly with the United States as the "Group of Two.")

While Ishihara's predictions have on the whole fared very poorly, it is notable that the country's extraordinary lead in microchip production proved fragile and brief, in part because it rested on quite different, more complex and less enduring foundations than he imagined. Japan's position as a microchip producer was based on its position as an exporter of consumer electronics more generally—the makers of such goods buying their chips from domestic producers, underlining the reality that its exceptional market share reflected a broader industrial supremacy, though even that proved fleeting. When Japanese consumer electronics lost their market dominance, the share they represented of the chip market declined. Moreover, the highly touted virtues of Japanese management and workers were nowhere near enough to compensate for a badly flawed restructuring of the industry amid a more competitive environment in the 1990s.14

While its power has been broader-based and more enduring, the United States, too, has been susceptible to such hype, similarly based on misconceptions about computer technology, and perceptions of the United States as more fitted than others to develop and use it. A pointed example is Ralph Peters' vision of the U.S. enjoying complete, continuous, global battlespace dominance based on a space-based military system so extensive and powerful its

attack systems deployed in near space . . . can, on order, destroy the vehicles, aircraft, missiles, and ships of any aggressor anywhere on the planet the moment a hostile actor violates or even threatens the territory of another state or entity—or uses military means to disrupt the internal rule of law in his own state.15

The means for paying for this system were to be the "revolution of technological and informational wealth creation," if the marketplace, and a crackdown of corruption, succeeded in taming the excesses of defense contractors.16 Such explosive expectations of "New Economy" technological and economic growth, and at least as much, the idea that they would so thoroughly conduce to the power of the United States relative to other nations, have long since become passé.17

Ultimately, each case has been a reminder of the reality that a single technology is too narrow a base for any nation to retain a preponderant share of the world's wealth and power, and in any event, technological capabilities tend to diffuse. Perhaps especially when the technology in question is evolving and its market growing, and the technology is a consumer's rather than a producer's technology, that diffusion is especially prone to be rapid and deep. The result is that in the longer run a nation's weight tends toward what is suggested by that bigger complex of factors, from the extent and richness in natural resources of a nation's territory, to the size and education of its population, to the commitment of its government to such policies as make for industrial success or failure, rather than narrow and fleeting technological advantages.

Techno-Hype in the Military Sphere
Each of the factors operative in the civilian sphere is also operative in discussions of technologies designed specifically for military use. However, discussions of military technology here have their own, distinct tendencies, including the exaggerated idea of what a particular technology could do for the party that developed it. Generally, what has occurred is the idea of a technology's capability far outrunning its actuality because of the perceived desirability of that capability. Since World War I in particular there has been a preoccupation with the possibility of new technologies providing a means to quick, cheap, decisive military victory in a major interstate contest. This is exemplified by the '20s and '30s-era futurology regarding "mechanization," specifically the ability of small armored and air forces to substitute for large armies and total war efforts, with Basil Liddell Hart boldly claiming that planes and tanks would end the era of "'absolute war' and . . . its fungus growth—'the nation in arms,'" by enabling swift knockout blows by one power against another.18 Guilio Douhet was still more extravagant, claiming that a fleet of even twenty operational planes put a nation's "aero-chemical arm" in a position "to break up the whole social structure of the enemy in less than a week, no matter what his army and navy may do."19

While not going as far in the development of these technologies as some critics may suggest, expectations of the revolutionary nature of mechanization did shape national policies. In the interwar period Britain's leaders invested in the largest air force and most mechanized army of the day.20 Likewise, an expansion-minded Nazi leadership relied on these technologies as the only way in which its program of European conquests could be plausible, reflected in the emphasis on the Luftwaffe, and the development of an armored corps proficient in operating in the manner prescribed by the new theorists.21

When the war actually came armor and air power did indeed revolutionize the battlefield, but they fell far short of that ideal of quick, cheap, decisive victory. The simple reality is that technologies diffuse quickly in the modern world, and with similar speed spur the development of countermeasures that neutralize them.22 Consequently Germany, helped by an implausible combination of a high-risk strategy with a profoundly mismanaged French defense, won a quick, cheap victory in the 1940 Battle of France.23 However, already at that date other armies were taking note and learning to use their mechanized forces in the same offensive manner, or apply similar techniques to the problem of defense. The result was that Germany did not see another comparable victory for the rest of the war, with the failure of German operations to achieve the desired speedy victory in the early phase of Operation Barbarossa dooming it to the long war that virtually spelled defeat.

Likewise, even with air forces vastly larger, better-equipped and deployed in far more sophisticated fashion than anything Hart or Douhet discussed, strategic bombing was an attritional affair, practiced not just massively but over the extreme long term, with results that were ultimately ambiguous—in part because of the advent of radar, and its use to direct similarly larger and more capable forces of fighter aircraft. As a result Britain withstood prolonged German bombing in 1940-1941, and Germany itself withstood such prolonged bombing which, whatever else can be claimed for it, did not secure the promised speedy collapse of German willingness or ability to prosecute the war.

Ultimately it was not Liddell-Hart or Douhet who was proven right, but rather the less well-known and less heeded Vladimir Triandafillov, who much more astutely realized that the next war would be both a high-tech affair, and a mass affair, continuing even longer and taking a greater toll in blood and treasure than that First World War against which they reacted so strongly.24 Indeed, new technologies did not so much supplant earlier methods of war-fighting as increase the stock of weapons, systems, capabilities that a major power needed to fight its war. Armored fighting vehicles did surprisingly little to reduce the need for infantry able to fight dismounted, with the advent of man-portable anti-tank weapons actually necessitating their escort by protective infantry. At the same time air forces did not eliminate the need for armies or navies—the Luftwaffe not only proving no substitute for a German navy able to land a large invasion force on British soil, while when the tide turned, the Combined Bombing Offensive did not spare the Allies the need to invade Europe and ultimately take Berlin.

As it went with mechanization, so did it go with virtually every significant later development, because either the reality of the capability fell short of the promise, or because the diffusion of the technology, or the development of countermeasures to it, complicated the matter. The extent to which nuclear weaponry could substitute for other kinds of military power proved greatly exaggerated, witness the reform of the U.S. armed forces in the 1950s, and then the backing away from those changes in the period afterward, as the Soviet Union narrowed the nuclear gap, and the rigidities of a policy based on Massive Retaliation became increasingly apparent—as well as its irrelevance to the situations of insurgency that seemed to be of rising importance.25 Strategic arsenals did not eliminate the need for conventional forces of all the known types (land, air, sea), with their increasingly sophisticated expensive equipment, while the problem of insurgency encouraged the advent of special operations forces for dealing with these as well. For cash-strapped post-war Britain, air mobility, "commando carriers" and tactical nuclear weapons also appeared a cheap way of sustaining a worldwide military presence, an illusion repeatedly shown up until the pretension was abandoned in the withdrawal from "east of Suez."26

Time and again, space-based weaponry has been an object of such hype, particularly after the expectations of extremely cheap, reliable, regular space access created by the space shuttle in the 1970s. While this proved false the Strategic Defense Initiative renewed the hype in this area in the 1980s, enduring even after the Cold War (for which many erroneously accord it the credit), and resurging yet again around the turn of the century (the technology itself, as well as buoyant expectations of enduring New Economy boom, key to claims like Peters')—the command of the highest ground of all, again, making major war seem winnable.27 The exaltation of the technologies of the "Revolution in Military Affairs," notably its combination of digital computing and communications with increasingly advanced electronic sensors and precision-guided munitions, has in the view of many analysts led to exaggerated ideas of the capacity of policymakers to substitute them for more expensive and politically problematic commitments of ground forces.28

Hype Resurgent?
There seem two particular reasons for special concern at the present moment. The first is that such hype tends to go through cycles of boom and bust, with a recent bust seemingly being followed by a new boom at the time of this writing. The second would be the stresses of the international environment as it is today, which may leave anxious policymakers more than usually eager to grasp at illusory solutions to their problems.

Boom and Bust and Boom Again?
The late 1990s was a period of particular boom for technological hype, as personal computing, cellular telephony and Internet access became staples of everyday life for the advanced industrial nations' middle classes, and increasingly other groups as well. It was also accompanied by explosive expectations in areas like artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, nanotechnology and genetic engineering, and reinforced by the experience of relatively rapid economic growth in the 1995-2000 period. However, the "tech bubble" burst. The advances in computing and cell phones became increasingly incremental. At the same time other technologies proved less immediately feasible than anticipated, with advances in neural networks proving sluggish, and advances in nano-machinery more elusive than their proponents suggested. Additionally, the spiking of commodity prices and energy prices especially evoked Malthusian catastrophe rather than Wellsian super-technology, and the experience of the "Great Recession" dampened expectations yet again. Rather than explosive technological change, prophecies of ecological doom resurged.

Since then progress in a number of key technological areas, particularly artificial intelligence, but also materials science and renewable energy, has revived expectations of deep, wide, near-term changes, particularly the automation of a great deal of economic activity, with the self-driving car perhaps the most emblematic at the moment. Such developments are already having significant cultural and intellectual effects, evident in the amount of time given to discussing their implications, as seen in the explosion of writing in the press regarding such subjects as appropriate governmental responses to the development of robots years or decades more advanced than anything now in existence. The prospect of mass unemployment as a result of the new technologies, for example, is already being discussed as if it were already a matter of immediate urgency in pieces by the most orthodox of thinkers running in the most mainstream of publications.29 (Indeed, it can seem that future unemployment resulting from automation is treated more earnestly than the current, actual problem of unemployment or underemployment.) One might well argue that such writers are getting ahead of themselves.

An "Easy" Out?
The second factor to be considered here is that such hype may be especially seductive in a period of constrained resources. This may especially be the case when a power which has been predominant, and particularly given to reliance on high technology, finds its position challenged—as the case of Britain dealing with its own decline in the early and mid-twentieth century strongly suggests.

Today the U.S. is similarly facing a changing distribution of wealth and power. In 1992 the U.S. economy was six times' the size of those of Russia and China combined. Today China's economy alone is larger than the U.S.'s when measured in Purchasing Power Parity terms. All of this is increasingly reflected in the hard reality that military capabilities and advantages the U.S. has long held a monopoly on are increasingly within the reach of other states. At the time of this writing, not only has China put its first squadron of fifth-generation (stealth) fighter aircraft into service, but Russia has sent such fighter planes to Syria operationally.30 None of this means that the U.S. has ceased to be the leading military power, or will cease to be that any time soon. It does not even mean that the U.S. has ceased to be the pace-setter for other military powers. However, the combination of quantitative and qualitative superiority it enjoyed in the 1990s is a thing of the past, and unlikely to return. Especially given the extent to which the United States has relied on cutting-edge technology as a basis for military strength, not only in the recent past, but historically; and the continued tendency to think of innovation, especially in the area of computers, as somehow uniquely American; the temptation to imagine some leap in weapons technology recovering the old edge may be great.

However, it should also be remembered that the U.S. is not the only actor susceptible to such illusions by any means, virtually every military power of note today in a comparable condition. Russia endeavors to be a world military power in a manner comparable with its Soviet-era stature, but on the basis of only a small fraction of its power base.31 China is by some measures the largest economy in the world today, but seeing its growth slow down markedly while its per capita income remains 15-30 percent that of the U.S.. The same goes even for less ambitious states. European states like Britain, France and Germany, and Japan, have become more committed to investing in military power, but from a position of slow economic growth and massive and growing indebtedness.32

Additionally, virtually all advanced nations are today anxious about populations which are aging, and perhaps also a decline of civic militarism, and hoping to substitute money and technology for manpower in this as in other areas. Moreover, none of these states has been averse to technophilia, or technological hype—as Vladimir Putin's widely publicized remarks on the prospect of global dominance going to the nation that leads the way in artificial intelligence make all too clear.33 Rather than revolutionary weaponry overturning the global balance, we should expect continued advances in weapons technology among a circle of powers determined by the possession of more traditional foundations of power—not least, scale in population, territory, natural resources, its manufacturing base and financial strength.

Conclusions
The problem of technological hype does not admit of tidy policy solutions. Rather the most that can be hoped for is a greater alertness to the problem on the part of analysts, which would be helped by a remembrance of a handful of lessons strongly suggested by many a reading of history: that hype is virtually built into the cycle of technological adoption; that the road from laboratory demonstration to practical use, let alone really effective use, is long and uncertain; and that a single technology is too narrow a basis for durable power, economic or military. Certainly the track record for new military technologies delivering swift, cheap, decisive victory in anything resembling a conflict between peers is dismal.

None of this is to deny that technology will continue to advance, that those advances will matter, or that those who fail to keep up will suffer untoward consequences. However, the experiences of the past century and above all its most calamitous war demonstrates, the price of acting on excessive expectations of what a technology can do will be just as high.

1 To cite only one of the more obvious metrics, the world's population was only 55 percent urbanized as of 2017, well below the norm for the developed countries. Central Intelligence Agency, "World," CIA World Factbook (Washington D.C.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2018). Accessed https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/xx.html.
2 The most notable exponent of this line of argument is perhaps Robert J. Gordon. See Gordon, "Does the 'New Economy' Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 No. 1 (Fall 2000), 49-74; The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
3 A search of the New York Times archive in March 2018 showed that where the word "lifestyle" was virtually unused before the late 1960s, its usage increased through the twentieth century, and exploded in the twenty-first. By 2007 it was appearing in the paper a thousand times a year, and has generally stayed near that figure since.
4 For a brief overview of the relevant history, see Nicholas Rescher, Predicting the Future: An Introduction to the Theory of Forecasting (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1998), 19-33.
5 Charles E. Gannon, Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary Agenda-Setting in American and British Speculative Fiction (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
6 The quotation is commonly attributed to author William Gibson, who used it on multiple occasions, among them a 1999 appearance on U.S. National Public Radio. See "The Science in Science Fiction," Talk of the Nation, National Public Radio, 30 Nov. 1999. Accessed at https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1067220.
7 The tendency is much-noted in the small but growing literature on "short-termism." See Angela Black and Patricia Fraser, "Stock Market Short-termism—An International Perspective," Journal of Multinational Financial Management 12.2 (April 2002), 135-158. One study found that 80 percent of executives would sacrifice R & D for the sake of the "smooth earnings" that are the object of such behavior. John R. Graham, Campbell R. Harvey, and Shivaram Rajgopal, "The Economic Implications of Corporate Financial Reporting," Journal of Accounting and Economics 40 (2005), 3–73.
8 Critics of science fiction actually have a term for such a narrative—John Clute coining the term "Edisonade." See John Clute and Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London, Orbit, 1993).
9 A case in point is Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, noteworthy both for containing many specific, testable forecasts, and the wide attention they have received. Alex Knapp offered a rare, critical examination of those forecasts in 2012, and this was sufficiently novel that Kurzweil himself elected to respond personally to Knapp in his own publication. Alex Knapp, "Ray Kurzweil's Predictions for 2009 Were Mostly Inaccurate," Forbes, 20 Mar. 2012. Accessed at https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzweils-predictions-for-2009-were-mostly-inaccurate/#789884b73f9a. Ray Kurzweil, "Ray Kurzweil Defends His 2009 Predictions," Forbes, 21 Mar. 2012. Accessed at https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/21/ray-kurzweil-defends-his-2009-predictions/#95811a94852e.
10 For an example of the tendency on the part of one well-known science fiction author more attentive to these matters than most, see Charles Stross, "Let's Put the Future Behind Us," Antipope.com, 23 Nov. 2014. Accessed at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2006/10/lets_put_the_future_behind_us.html.
11 Correlli Barnett, The Verdict of Peace: Britain Between Her Yesterday and the Future (New York: Macmillan, 2001); David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain 1920-1970 (New York: University of Cambridge Press, 2006).
12 Martin Fackler, "Japan's Chip Makers Search for a Strategy," New York Times, 2 Jan. 2006. Accessed at https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/technology/japans-chip-makers-search-for-a-strategy.html. GDP and manufacturing output data from United Nations, "Per Capita GDP at Constant 2010 Prices in U.S. Dollars," National Accounts Main Aggregates Database, Dec. 2017. Accessed at https://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnlList.asp.
13 Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say No, trans. Frank Baldwin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).
14 See Fackler.
15 Ralph Peters, Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1999), 200.
16 Peters, 201.
17 Had the U.S. economy grown at its New Economy boom (1995-2000) rate, per capita GDP circa 2016 would have been 20 percent higher. Derived from UN, "Per Capita GDP."
18 Basil Liddell Hart, Paris, or The Future of War (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1927), 85.
19 Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (New York: Coward-McCann, 1942), 142.
20 Donald Kagan and Frederick Kagan, While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness and the Threat to Peace Today (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), 48-49, 56; Edgerton, Warfare State and Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
21 For a discussion of the limitations imposed by the German economy's weaknesses on rearmament, see Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2006).
22 For a discussion of the tendency of weaponry's failure to provide lasting advantage, also see Martin van Creveld, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present (New York: the Free Press, 1989).
23 William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969).
24 Vladimir K. Triandafillov, The Nature of the Operations of Modern Armies, trans. William A. Burhans (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1994).
25 Frederick W. Kagan, Finding the Target: the Transformation of American Military Policy (New York: Encounter Books, 2006).
26 See Phillip Darby, British Defence Policy East of Suez (London: Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1973); William P. Snyder, The Politics of British Defense Policy 1945-1962 (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1964).
27 See Nader Elhefnawy, "Space War and Futurehype," Space Review, 22 Oct. 2007. Accessed at http://www.thespacereview.com/article/984/1. Elhefnawy, "Revisiting Island One," Space Review, 27 Oct. 2008. Accessed at http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1238/1. Elhefnawy, "Space War and Futurehype Revisited," Space Review, 14 Nov. 2011. Accessed at http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1969/1. Elhefnawy, "Why We Fall for the Hype: Contextualizing Our Thought on Space Warfare," Space Review, 26 Mar. 2012. Accessed at http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2052/1.
28 Exemplary of such hopes was the course of action taken by the U.S. and its allies against Yugoslavia in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001; and Harlan Ullman's "shock and awe" theory.
29 Lawrence H. Summers, "Larry Summers: The Robots Are Coming, Whether Trump’s Treasury Secretary Admits It or Not," Washington Post, 27 Mar. 2017. Accessed https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/27/larry-summers-mnuchins-take-on-artificial-intelligence-is-not-defensible/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.aa2a87408a98.
30 Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer, "China's J-20 stealth fighter jet has officially entered service," Popular Science, 18 Feb. 2018. Accessed https://www.popsci.com/chinas-j-20-stealth-fighter-officially-enters-service. Alex Lockie, "Russia thinks its new advanced fighter jet in Syria will scare off other countries — but nobody's afraid of it," Business Insider, 27 Feb. 2018. Accessed http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-su-57-syria-deter-scaring-nobody-2018-2.
31 Circa 1980 the Soviet Union had, according to one estimate, 15 percent of the world's manufacturing output. Today Russia has perhaps 1 percent, about the same as Indonesia or the Netherlands. For the 1980 figure see Bairoch, Paul, "International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980," Journal of European Economic History 11 (Fall 1982), Table 9. For the more recent one, see Chris Rhodes, "Manufacturing: International Comparisons," House of Commons Library Briefing Paper, No. 05809, 5 Jan. 2018. Accessed https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN05809#fullreport.
32 Department of Finance, Canada, Fiscal Reference Tables, Sep. 2017, Table 54. Accessed at https://www.fin.gc.ca/frt-trf/2017/frt-trf-17-eng.asp.
33 David Meyer, "Vladimir Putin Says Whoever Leads in Artificial Intelligence Will Rule the World," Fortune, 4 Sep. 2017. Accessed at http://fortune.com/2017/09/04/ai-artificial-intelligence-putin-rule-world/.

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Just Out . . . The Neoliberal Age in America: From Carter to Trump

As we enter 2020 it seems as if the country's politics are undergoing nothing less than a tectonic shift—one result of which is that the word "neoliberalism" has passed out of the usage of academics, into general parlance. Those trying to make sense of it all find that the market is flooded with public affairs books—but most are longer on political hacks' rants than substance, or too busy telling colorful stories, to offer answers to such obvious and essential questions as

•Just what is neoliberalism anyway? (And why is there so much confusion about this anyway?)

•What did the Reagan administration actually do, and what were the results?

•What was the policy of the Clinton administration, and did it justify its characterization by critics as neoliberal? (Ditto Obama.)

•What was the country's economic record before and after "the neoliberal turn?"

However, THE NEOLIBERAL AGE IN AMERICA: FROM CARTER systematically examines Federal policy from the 1970s through the Presidencies of Carter, Reagan, the two Bushes, Clinton and Obama, emphasizing specifics and hard data to offer a picture of just what happened in these years as a matter of practical policy, and its consequences—answering these questions and more as we confront this era of crisis, and what may be a historic election this upcoming November.

Available in ebook and paperback formats at Amazon and other retailers.

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Nikolai Fedorov and the Climate Crisis

Decades ago I had perhaps my first real brush with transhumanist thought in a rather unlikely place--Nikolai Berdyayev's The Russian Idea. In that study of the Russian philosophical tradition he mentioned a nineteenth century thinker named Nikolai Fedorov who argued for the resurrection of the dead through scientific means as humanity's mission.

Not long after I found my way to more recent work in the field, reading Moravec, Kurzweil, Vinge, and the rest, but it did seem to me that there was something significant in that older line of thought, and investigated it further. Alas, Fedorov is not an easy thinker for one to get to know, especially in English, but scholar George Young did produce notable secondary works about the thinker, and the tradition in which he wrote. And a contact with Young did lead me to a useful translation of some of Fedorov's material, on which I based my own summary of Federov's ideas for the Future Fire publication.

As might be guessed by anyone familiar with all these works, all this was much on my mind when I wrote "Tales From the Singularity," and the novel-length development of that novella, Surviving the Spike, and the associated stories collected in the Paris in the Twenty-First Century anthology. (Those interested in a preview can, of course, check out Tales and Paris at Wattpad, and "Tales" at Inkitt as well, in addition to checking them out at Amazon and other retailers.)

All these years later I still have occasion to think back to Fedorov's arguments when transhuman and posthuman questions come up. Still, what has me turning back to Fedorov now is his call on humanity to move past fossil fuels like coal to renewable energy like solar, and take control of the Earth's climate, a project he recognized as requiring global cooperation. In 2019, with this course looking like our only hope for even the short-term survival of human civilization, it seems that we really should have been paying far more attention to his work--and more broadly, that early and underrated line of transhumanist thought flourishing in Russia long before the term was even coined.

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A Return to Weltpolitik?

The question of Germany's possession of, and attitude toward, world power status has been ceaselessly jawed about for a century and a half now. The issue, however, has not always been equally topical. It seems to have become more so this past decade, in the wake of an embrace of economic neoliberalism at home that had the conventionally-minded in the business press and economic analysis nodding approvingly; its championing of the same in Europe's fiscal crisis in which it has been seen as a leader (in part, because of the slighting of the international character of the bailout that the U.S. alone furnished); and in a context of intensifying conflict in Eastern Europe and the Greater Middle East (and neocon doubts about America's commitment to its old role), the increasing militarization of German policy. (Thousands of German troops are now deployed in about a dozen other countries from Mali to Afghanistan, while German defense ministers propose new missions to the Middle East, with more of the same on the way as the country ramps up its defense spending and openly discuss policy changes from a renewal of conscription to the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal.)

At its most extravagant some of the talk has a whiff of Kaiser Wilhelm about it ("taskmaster of Europe,", "newest superpower," "indispensable nation," "too rich, too big, too powerful, to shrink from its responsibilities"). And considering it all I find myself comparing Germany's position with respect to hard power then and now. Looking at Angus Maddison's historical data, and Paul Bairoch's oft-cited historical data on manufacturing shares, it seems that in 1913 Germany had a little under 4 percent of the world's population, and about 15 percent of its manufacturing output--making it number one in Europe and second only to the United States in the latter area.*

Moreover, there were significant potentials for further expansion, under the right conditions. A Pan-German movement that it was imagined could peacefully bring the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Low Countries and Scandinavia into some sort of union with Germany, had it accomplished its maximum goals, would have given the new entity about 7 percent of the world's population, and at least 22 percent of its industry, while assuring the continued dynamism of German manufacturing through its access to raw materials and markets, leaving it more populous than America, and even more narrowly competitive with it industrially. Expansion beyond those possibilities, militarily at the expense of France and Russia, for example, held out still greater potentials.

Even realizing such possibilities only partially would have considerably extended Germany's preponderance in Europe, which was still the center of the world in a good many respects--with the continent accounting for nearly three-fifths of the planet's industrial output, while the empires seated there exerted formal control over most of Africa and Asia as well. In short, there was some foundation for the great power aspirations, even if, as Bloch, Wells and others rightly observed at the time, pursuit of them was virtually certain to result in catastrophe (as indeed it did). To a lesser extent this was still the case in the 1930s when a German government made its second bid for global power (which ended even more catastrophically, not least for a Germany that was divided and occupied for a half century after).

By contrast today Germany accounts for little more than 1 percent of the world's population, and 7 percent of its manufacturing--punching above its weight by an even greater margin than it did a century ago, but all the same, in a rather lower weight class. An expanded Pan-German entity is a fantasy confined only to the most extreme nationalists. And however powerful Germany could become in Europe from its limited base within the structures of the European Union or informally, Europe is far from being the power base it once was, in a world full of other power centers, while the trend toward broader multipolarity seems nearly certain to continue.

Of course, if some of the talk echoes that of an era long past, even the most aggressive German commentators today do not proclaim anything like the agenda of formal imperialism inside and outside Europe that the country's Establishment did circa 1913. Still, all things considered, the rhetoric can seem disconnected from reality.

* Germany's lead over Britain can appear slight (14.8 to 13.6 percent according to Paul Bairoch's figures), but there was a significant qualitative disparity. Britain's manufacturing base was, if large, comparatively backward, being disproportionately invested in old lines like textiles and of deteriorating competitiveness in regard to productivity and quality of output in areas like steel; and heavily dependent on defense orders and colonial markets for its sales.

Has the American Right Changed its Mind About Europe?

Recently I had occasion to revisit the theme of the passing of the "European dream"--the hope, or rather, the illusion that in a world where the United States had come to be identified with neoliberalism and neoconservatism the countries of Europe, individually and also collectively through the European Union (EU), would provide an alternative model more appealing to progressives--no leftist paradise, it is true, but still, socially more egalitarian, ecologically more sustainable, in foreign policy less militaristic, certainly to a degree that would matter and, from this standpoint, leave the world better off.

Such views derived some support from the inability of successive European governments to do more than chip away at protections for workers that looked extravgant to Anglosphere eyes; from Germany's successfully pioneering methods for pioneering the expansion of renewable energy, and the EU's emissions trading schemes; from the French and German opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And the expectation was shared by people in and outside Europe--the term "European dream" I use here the title of a book by Jeremy Rifkin making exactly this case, while the sociologist Emmanuel Todd made the same case, not least in his book on the anticipated decline of the "American empire," in which drama the last act would be Europe's own ascendance as Britain with its financial weight and Russia with its military might and natural resources joined in the building of an even greater community extending from "sea to shining sea."

Of course, all this quickly waned after 2008 as European elites, long fantasizing about remaking the continent in the image of post-Thatcher Britain or post-Reagan America, not only grappled with an economic crisis of colossal proportions, but saw an extraordinary opportunity to cram neoliberalism down the throats of a public that had more strongly resisted the policy than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. They did not hesitate to be brutal with the working classes of the continent, especially in its smaller and poorer nations--with not only their claims to social and economic rights, but their more classically liberal civil and political ones trampled. I am no admirer of Silvio Berlusconi, but the EU's squeezing him out of office was hardly democratic, and even as one prone to think of talk of Fourth Reichs and the like as melodramatic, it was impossible not to get the feeling watching Berlin impose its diktat on a horrifically brutalized Greece--and a French President who had kind words for Vichy unleashed the state security apparatus in a brutal assault on protesters against his predictably centrist "fake left, go right course."

At the same time Germany, while in respects paving the way for a world getting its energy from renewable sources, has seen its policy substantially remain in the grip of coal barons, whose filthy, polluting production has meant that even as the solar panels and the wind turbines spread, the country's greenhouse gas emissions remained high--in spite of that emissions trading scheme, which did not amount to very much. And the European states that balked at invading Iraq in 2003 did not hesitate to back regime change in Libya, Syria, Ukraine; or display great viciousness in a militarized response to the refugee crisis to which those "regime change" attempts contributed so much.

As one considers all this it is worth remembering that the more progressive, greener, pacifistic version of Europe was the object of enormous contempt on the part of right-wing American commentators. Remember Eurosclerosis? Remember Donald Rumsfeld's witless, illiterate rhetoric about "Old Europe and New Europe?" Remember the inanity that was the renaming of french fries and french toast Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast? One hears less of such things than before, and that does not seem accidental. It would be an exaggeration to say that the American right has come to love Europe. But, as Europe has changed in accordance with their ideals, they have at least come to be more accepting of it.

The German Economic Miracle (?)

I remember the hype back in the 1980s and 1990s regarding the reported ascent of the German and Japanese economies--how it seemed they were edging the U.S. out of the number one spot. I remember, too, how that talk faded during the '90s amid fuss over globalization and the New Economy, and how supposedly the Eurosclerotic Germans with their unaffordable welfare states, and the rigid Japanese, were missing that train as such dynamic firms as Enron were, in Thomas Friedman's words, "discovering the equivalent of cyber-oil."

Of course, that hype faded in its turn (even as it remained the conventional wisdom), but the appraisal of at least the German economy became less harsh as it turned out to be, after all, a global champion in manufacturing exports (doubling the share of these in its GDP in 1990-2009, and outdoing the four times' larger U.S. to become number one in the world), and weathered the Great Recession better than just about anyone else, and laid down the law in the European economic space it dominated. (It was also far from trivial to the essentially neoliberal commentariat that its government increasingly embraced their preferred theories, not least in the Hartz IV labor reforms, cheered by the economically orthodox, not so cheered by, you know, actual working people in Germany or anywhere else.)

Naturally one hears, from time to time, reference to not just the country's successes of the present, but those of its past, touching in particular on its recovery from the Second World War, which they are quick to chalk up in a vaguely racialist way to German propensity for hard and attentive work, and to the home-grown variant on neoliberal, supply-side economics, "ordoliberalism."

Of course, as is always the case, the reality is more complex than this morality tale so beloved of those observers who like to talk about "culture," and the virtues of hard work and right-wing economic prescriptions--as I was reminded when researching Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity (principally about Britain's economic history, of course, but its premise was that what the country's rivals did mattered, making Germany's ascent part of Britain's own story).

The reality is that before the war Germany had been the world's number two industrial power for decades, substantially due to the opportunities afforded by its unique geographic position in nineteenth century Europe (and the ways in which it improved on them through conquest, especially in the Franco-Prussian War, not least its scoring the continent's richest industrial territory as spoils).

Moreover, catastrophic as World War II was for the world, and for the tens of millions of Germans killed, maimed and rendered homeless or even stateless, and virtually all the rest whose lives were stunted or scarred by the experience, German industry did relatively well for itself. In the 1930s and 1940s German industry gorged itself on military spending and the spoils of war to such a degree that even after the losses of wartime destruction and post-war occupation and confiscations the German industrial base was still ahead of where it was pre-war. In itself that would seem to have been enough to lay the foundations for German industry's leap into the "Fordist" era, while it did well, too, out of the post-war, which is to say, the early Cold War in which it was all too clear that a strong Germany was far more useful to the Western alliance than a weak one. The result was astonishing debt relief; the Marshall Aid that compensated for confiscations by the Allies and enabled its trading partners to afford its products; and the very light defense burden it bore compared with America, Britain, or even France; along with the massive stimulus of America's military Keynesianism in the Korean War period and after. (Far from insignificant, too, was German capital's finding the country awash in cheap labor with all those millions of ethnic Germans expelled from the East refugees in the West, and millions more guest workers come north from the shores of the Mediterranean. Oh, and an undervalued currency, too.)

All that made the miracle possible, a miracle that it must be remembered was only one miracle among others in that period. (There was an even more spectacular Japanese miracle, after all, and great leaps on the part of the Italians and French and even Soviets in these decades, while the U.S. economy, the biggest and richest of all, went on exploding.) And like all the rest the German miracle was running its course by the 1970s, Germany like all the others slowing down as post-war boom turned to post-post-war bust. Still, starting out in a different place Germany's advance put it well ahead of the rest of the European pack (and save for the U.S. and Japan, the world pack) at a moment when the terms of the race changed profoundly. (The market got crowded, the rate of profit fell, the rate of growth slowed, and the neoliberal turn delivered an age of anemic growth indeed.) That left rather little room for anyone to make up the distance, perhaps especially within the framework of the European Union whose consumption of German goods has been so crucial to its success.

We Need To Talk About Geoengineering

Already the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has not only elevated temperatures and increased the frequency of extreme weather events to a disruptive, damaging degree. They have produced a variety of second-order effects which are, in turn, contributing to further warming, and the damage generally. The melting of the polar ice caps means open water where there was ice cover that had previously reflected solar radiation, and the release of methane previously trapped in permafrost, as well as directly raising sea levels. The increased droughts are killing forests that had been great carbon sinks, while the burning trees and rotting wood that result contribute yet more such emissions. And of course, there is the acidification of the carbon dioxide-saturated oceans. The most ambitious decarbonization of our energy and transport system, our industry and food production, is likely to still see positive emissions for decades to come, exacerbating the pattern.

The result is that anything remotely resembling a livable situation requires going beyond zero emissions. The two most obvious courses are negative emissions--the extraction of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere--and the management of solar radiation. Where negative emissions are concerned the most obvious courses are reforestation and afforestation, which can extend to wetlands and undersea kelp "forest" (the latter, offering the nice bonus of directly reversing one of the more worrisome consequences of warming, the acidification of the oceans), and management of the soil. Such natural means can also be supplemented by direct air capture technology, which currently operates on a small scale. Many of these options have the added benefit of generating useful products, with kelp notable as a potential source of animal feed capable of reducing the methane emissions of cattle-raising, and biofuels; while carbon recovered from the atmosphere can be converted into "buckytubes" with potentially wide applications, from computer chip architectures to large-scale construction and engineering.

Solar radiation management can be carried on through some of the same techniques, with greenery cooling the immediate area, while other methods entail the reflection of a higher proportion of solar radiation into space. One promising approach is the dispersal of silica across ice to increase its reflection of the sun's rays. More broadly, the conservation and expansion of ice cover is useful in this regard, with the thickening of ice packs through water-spraying one plausible option. Another is the construction of "cooling tunnels" in areas subject to melting, such as Greenland, and the building of sills which prevent warm water from getting underneath them. Additionally melting glaciers and ice shelves can be kept from running off into the sea with the use of walls. (And of course, anything that preserves the ice ameliorates the risk of rising sea levels.)

All this, of course, does not exhaust the full range of options. Others, many more radical (like the fertilization of the ocean with iron, or the use of aerosols to reduce the entry of solar radiation into the atmosphere) also exist. They all seem considerably riskier, but I do not rule them out, especially if the prognosis continues to worsen at the rate it has this past, exceedingly depressing decade. Still, the more modest options discussed above seem to me to offer an ample basis for a comprehensive geoengineering plan, without which any plan to redress climate change cannot be considered anywhere close to complete in the circumstances in which we now found ourselves.

Is Bernie Sanders a Socialist?

Socialism calls for the economy to be managed collectively, for the sake of the well-being of all of society's members; rather than its driving force being the decision-making of private actors pursuing private profit (what its proponents, not always coherently, call "the market").

By contrast, social democracy accepts the private, capitalist economy as its baseline, but simply takes the position that in real life markets require rules to permit them to function, and that optimal economic outcomes may come from channeling market forces; that there may be areas where markets simply do less well than alternative modes of organization, for example, in cases of natural monopoly; and that optimal social outcomes tend to require remedial action to protect the public against the harsher consequences of the market.

Thus one has regulations to protect the worker, the consumer, the natural environment; one has subsidy of various kinds; one has public services, going beyond the traditional minimum of armed forces, law enforcement, a postal service, infrastructure, to the realms of education and health and perhaps public ownership of enterprises like utilities or transport systems; one has a social safety net. Accordingly one also sees a fairly large state, supported by relatively high taxes. Still, the economy remains largely and usually private and proft-driven.

There is a world of difference between socialism as described here, and social democracy as described here. The really hardline anti-Communist may claim not to understand that difference, or make slippery slope arguments about any impurity of a capitalist society putting it on the train straight to Stalintown or somesuch. Yet, the fact remains that, whatever one makes of such arguments, they are two different social models, in their principles and their workings.

By and large what we in the United States are hearing described as "socialism" is just social democracy. Thus does it even go with Sanders' call for the expansion of the publicly owned electric grid on the basis of enlarged investment in renewable power in his vision of a Green New Deal. The end result would be that the American government would be the principal provider of electricity to the consumer. Yet, those who know something of the history of social democracy will remember that other states went rather further in this direction before--even post-war Britain, which far from building up a government-owned electric grid, did not hesitate to nationalize the existing one, along with the coal, gas and oil sectors (which remained government-owned until the privatizations of the Thatcher era).

Simply put, Sanders' plan in this area, and others, looks much more radical than it is because of how modest the social democratic element in the U.S. was even at its peak (the extent of regulation, the social safety net, public ownership never coming close to what was seen even in safely capitalist Europe), and because of how far to the right the Democratic Party has marched since the 1970s, especially under the Presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, a march that the party's neoliberal elite (whose stance is epitomized by Nancy "Paygo" Pelosi) are utterly intent on continuing. The result has been to pit that elite against the party's more left-leaning base, a conflict which cost the party dearly in 2016. Should the elite get their way again, it seems likely the party will pay the price yet again in 2020.

Just Out: Complexity, Stagnation and Frailty: Understanding the Twenty-First Century

Back in 2004 I published "Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security" in the journal International Security. (The journal is paywalled, but you can access a copy on my blog, here.)

The argument, which built on Joseph Tainter's thesis in The Collapse of Complex Societies, boiled down to its absolute basics, was that modern civilization was getting more complex, by and large in ways that were offering less and less benefit, leaving it more strained and more vulnerable to disruption, all as the costs of protecting it kept going up.

This sounds abstract, but there were fairly concrete ways in which this was the case. The ever-rising volume of trade, travel, communication, information production and processing show our society's increasing complexity. The profound slowdown in economic growth in recent decades, the routinization of colossal deficits, the explosion of debt, testify to a society whose resources are badly strained. And of course, the "tight coupling" of our contemporary systems, the preference for leanness in the name of "efficiency" (at the expense of resiliency) also suggested rising vulnerability. This was evident, too, in the standard deemed necessary for protection--with the old idea of nuclear deterrence giving way to an obsession with not deterring but neutralizing the abilities of "irrational" actors, which entailed such things as preventive wars and missile defense. Meanwhile, way below that threat level there was the burgeoning expenditure on law enforcement, emergency services, private security.

As is often the case with a piece of published research, it was a starting point for me rather than an end to a line of speculation, in particular the first aspect of it--the way society was getting more complex but stagnant and strained, as declining growth and rising deficits and debt suggested. One result was a more thoroughly worked out and heavily updated version of the argument in 2008 which I was releasing just as the mortgage crisis demonstrated the stagnation and frailty of the globalized, financialized, twenty-first century economy, with the paper. (You can find it here on my blog, a PDF version here at SSRN.)

Still, that was not the end of it. I returned to the same theme later, and more recently produced three papers, also published through SSRN--one offering a yet more thorough and more up-to-date version of that argument in early 2018; an accompanying piece which probed deeply into the multiple available data sets regarding post-World War II growth in Gross World Product; and finally one which endeavored to relate our economic stresses to the sharp deterioration of the "liberal international order" that respectable mainstream talking heads remark so much but do so little to help anyone understand.

My new book, Complexity, Stagnation and Frailty: Understanding the Twenty-First Century, brings this later research together in a single, convenient volume, in both Kindle and paperback editions, available at Amazon and other retailers.

Get your copy today.

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Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal: A First Take, Part I

As you are likely already aware, Bernie Sanders has released his document regarding a Green New Deal. In contrast with the resolution sponsored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey earlier this year, which merely outlined the standards a plan of action ought to meet, but a detailed outline of the plan itself, presenting a comprehensive set of proposals.

As I write the plan has been available to the public for mere hours, and it is long and intricate, some 14,000 words. I do not claim to be anywhere near done close-reading and thinking about it, but it does seem possible to say some things regarding the plan in light of my earlier thoughts about such a Green New Deal.

I previously asserted here that any plan worthy of serious consideration must abide by four principles, namely scale, global thinking, pragmatism, and equity. This plan appears to abide by all four of them. The authors realize that serious action means nothing less than the production of 100 percent electricity from renewable energy by 2030, the fuller decarbonization of the energy and transport sector, and an overhaul of agriculture, which will not come cheaply, but will require that World War II-level effort of which so many speak but which few seem to actually understand. The plan acknowledges that the U.S. must do its part to solve the problem of climate change, but cannot do it alone, acknowledging the need to enlist the cooperation of the other major governments, and the revision of trade agreements, while aiding less developed nations in making the transition. Its authors do not hesitate to speak of the necessary means for carrying out such action, however squeamish orthodox opinion may be about them--going beyond pious talk of "supporting research" or somehow inducing business to do the job to public construction and ownership of the needed power capacity (via the Power Marketing Associations). And it is certainly attentive to equity, not only between rich countries and poor as acknowledged above, but in regard to working people who risk dislocation in the energy transition because of the sectors in which they happen to work; and the responsibility of the fossil fuel sector for the "externalities" it has generated.

All of that has naturally got my attention.