What do lathes have to do with world manufacturing supremacy?
A lot, actually.
First, let us get out of the way what a lathe actually is. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a lathe is "a machine in which work is rotated about a horizontal axis and shaped by a fixed tool."
It is thus an example of what are called "machine tools," which cut, grind or otherwise shape metal and other materials.
This may sound like a very simple and humble piece of equipment, but that simplicity is both what makes it important--and very deceptive. That it is so basic a device (lathes have been used for thousands of years) is what makes it indispensable to industrial life, machine tools the machines that we use to make everything else.
At the same time, far from their production being like, for example, textile production, in its easy transfer to developing nations with little capital and lots of cheap labor, their production tends to be the purview of the most advanced industrial powers.
Why? Simply put, making the machines that make everything else is a very exacting business. And it is the needs of those doing the most manufacturing, and the most exacting manufacturing, that drive the industry. They are thus great consumers of the tools--and given that no one has their capacity to provide the supply (and that location still matters in the economic world we live in) great producers of them as well, such that for all their consumption of the tools they are typically also great net exporters of them. In fact, a country's machine tool consumption, production, export, is a good index of where it stands within world manufacturing generally--especially when we look to the "per capita" figures that make allowances for the difference in size between a Singapore on the one hand, and a China on the other.
Consider, for example, the contents of the Gardner 2016 Machine Tool Survey. According to that document in 2015 the six largest net exporters of the tools were, by order of ranking, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Italy, Switzerland and South Korea. Where per capita consumption was concerned the top three were Switzerland, Germany, South Korea, with Singapore, Taiwan and Italy in the top ten, and Japan at #11.
A rising profile here is indicative of progress--with China, if still a net importer, an increasingly important producer, manufacturing almost as much of the tools as Japan and Germany put together to make the #1 spot in that year, while ranking #4 among exporters.
Equally a declining profile is indicative of, well, things going the other way. As late as the 1980s the U.S., a longtime champion here, was, in spite of some fairly deep problems, still the world's largest producer of such tools. By the 1990s it had slipped to the #4 position--behind Germany, Japan and Italy. By 2015 it had slipped behind China and South Korea as well. It was down to #8 on the list of exporters (behind Switzerland and Taiwan too), and running a big trade deficit in this area--even as its per capita consumption was not very high. Against Switzerland's $127 per capita consumption of the tools, and the figures of $79 for Germany, $76 for South Korea, $51 for Italy and $46 for Japan the U.S. figure was just $23--which put it just a little way ahead of developing China ($20), Mexico ($17), Thailand ($17).
Compared against the broader picture of U.S. industry over these decades it seems all too telling--the figures I calculated from the data showing American manufacturing value added growth, slowing in the late 1960s and 1970s, really stagnating in the 1980s and 1990s, and pretty much flatlining in the twenty-first century, as its makeup changed profoundly. The output of the heavy and Fordist type of industry long the foundation of U.S. industrial strength actually shrank after 1978--the output of metal and electrical goods and motor vehicles and machinery, which ought to have grown in a supposedly growing economy (and a country whose population expanded by 50 percent), instead falling by a quarter. What filled the gap was not really high-tech production (U.S. output of computer and electronics products peaked back around the turn of the century, then fell hard after), but a more basic processing of raw materials--the main areas of expansion in output petroleum and coal products, and the related field of chemicals, with all this reflected in the export profile. (World Bank figures actually have the percentage of "high-tech" in U.S. manufacturing exports falling from 30 percent in 2007 to 18 percent in 2022.)
The country's going from its earlier standing as a producer of classic heavy-Fordist manufacturing durables (and computer products!) to a producer of more oil and more chemicals is a far cry from the smug promises of "information age" propagandists who blew off the shutdown of so many of the country's steel mills and auto plants as merely the decline of "sunset" industries as rising new high-tech sectors replaced them. But that is what has happened in reality--as that changing profile of the country's consumption, production and trade in machine tools testifies.
Indeed, the web site of Summit Machine Tools sums it up nicely, explaining that "a map of modern lathe makers mirrors a map of global heavy industry," for "rudimentary" as a particular lathe may be, modern lathe-making is anything but--while regrettably, "the heyday of American-made lathes . . . passed" as part of the passing of much else.
Sunday, February 25, 2024
The Sixth-Generation Fighter: How Does its Progress Stand in 2024?
Every now and then I turn my attention back to the matter of the sixth-generation fighter I first took up in 2010. Back then all I could reasonably discuss was background (explaining the system of "generations"), the desiderata that were being discussed for the next generation of fighters (hypersonic and near space-flying, AI-piloted, intercontinental-range aircraft that change shape in flight and blast the enemy with directed-energy weapons), and my thoughts as to the likelihood of such aircraft being realized in anything like the time frame being discussed.
At the time I expected that the twenty-first century would be an era of slow technological progress (certainly in the more relevant areas), making the Wunderwaffen of which the sixth-generation theorists dreamed implausible, while contributing to the slow economic growth that was going to make such aircraft unaffordable even were they to prove technically feasible. (Think fighters costing a billion dollars or more each in a time of unending austerity.) I also thought such aircraft, even if feasible and affordable, as likely to be remote from the actual needs of the major militaries in an era of muted great power conflict and "small wars."
Revisiting the issue a few years ago it seemed to me that I had been right--mostly. It has indeed been an era of slow technological progress, and weak economic growth, such that the wonder-planes people talked about circa 2010 simply were not going to happen by 2030--let alone prove affordable in any meaningful quantity. But great power conflict resurged in a big way, and in the process led to intensified interest internationally in a new generation of combat aircraft.
So where did that leave things? Between the desire for new aircraft--and the fact of slow technical progress and strained means--it seemed that there was a considerable lowering of the bar where expectations of the new aircraft were concerned. Rather than, for example, hypersonic jets they were thinking Mach 2 aircraft (with the same top speed fighters have had since the 1950s) which merely launch hypersonic missiles.
One of the more interesting developments was a turn by the U.S. Air Force back to the approach it took with its second-generation fighters--the famed "Century" series where it pursued a rapid development of a next-generation fighter it bought in some quantity, followed by another, more advanced fighter it bought in its turn using the lessons learned from the last, and so on (going from the F-100 Super Sabre to the F-106 Delta Dart in not much more than a half decade), in contrast with its later approaches (the long development, production, employment of the third-generation F-4, fourth-generation F-15 and F-16, and so on).
The reuse of the strategy pursued in the development of the second-generation planes had many critics from the start, put off by the poor image many of its aircraft have had, while being unconvinced by the buzzword-heavy arguments made for advances in digital design techniques permitting the rapid design of aircraft to be procured in small batches to be cost-effective. Still, for all the misgivings some had, it did seem the program was going ahead, the more in as in late 2020 the public was told that an actual sixth-generation jet had flown (even if no source I know of reported any more than that).
Since then, however, the Air Force seems to have shifted back toward its more conventional acquisitions process--but otherwise things remain as they appeared in 2020, no fundamental breakthrough suggesting the imminent appearance of those super-fighters that had people talking in 2010, or for that matter, any great public disclosure making it much clearer what the next-generation jet really will look like when all is said and done.
At the time I expected that the twenty-first century would be an era of slow technological progress (certainly in the more relevant areas), making the Wunderwaffen of which the sixth-generation theorists dreamed implausible, while contributing to the slow economic growth that was going to make such aircraft unaffordable even were they to prove technically feasible. (Think fighters costing a billion dollars or more each in a time of unending austerity.) I also thought such aircraft, even if feasible and affordable, as likely to be remote from the actual needs of the major militaries in an era of muted great power conflict and "small wars."
Revisiting the issue a few years ago it seemed to me that I had been right--mostly. It has indeed been an era of slow technological progress, and weak economic growth, such that the wonder-planes people talked about circa 2010 simply were not going to happen by 2030--let alone prove affordable in any meaningful quantity. But great power conflict resurged in a big way, and in the process led to intensified interest internationally in a new generation of combat aircraft.
So where did that leave things? Between the desire for new aircraft--and the fact of slow technical progress and strained means--it seemed that there was a considerable lowering of the bar where expectations of the new aircraft were concerned. Rather than, for example, hypersonic jets they were thinking Mach 2 aircraft (with the same top speed fighters have had since the 1950s) which merely launch hypersonic missiles.
One of the more interesting developments was a turn by the U.S. Air Force back to the approach it took with its second-generation fighters--the famed "Century" series where it pursued a rapid development of a next-generation fighter it bought in some quantity, followed by another, more advanced fighter it bought in its turn using the lessons learned from the last, and so on (going from the F-100 Super Sabre to the F-106 Delta Dart in not much more than a half decade), in contrast with its later approaches (the long development, production, employment of the third-generation F-4, fourth-generation F-15 and F-16, and so on).
The reuse of the strategy pursued in the development of the second-generation planes had many critics from the start, put off by the poor image many of its aircraft have had, while being unconvinced by the buzzword-heavy arguments made for advances in digital design techniques permitting the rapid design of aircraft to be procured in small batches to be cost-effective. Still, for all the misgivings some had, it did seem the program was going ahead, the more in as in late 2020 the public was told that an actual sixth-generation jet had flown (even if no source I know of reported any more than that).
Since then, however, the Air Force seems to have shifted back toward its more conventional acquisitions process--but otherwise things remain as they appeared in 2020, no fundamental breakthrough suggesting the imminent appearance of those super-fighters that had people talking in 2010, or for that matter, any great public disclosure making it much clearer what the next-generation jet really will look like when all is said and done.
James Kenneth Galbraith's Take on the Russian Economy at War
As readers of this blog may remember I have for many years been attentive to the work of the economist James Kenneth Galbraith, who a decade ago just so happened to join Emmanuel Todd in a Harper's magazine round table regarding Germany's "conquest" of Europe. As it happened this would seem to not have been Todd's last contact with Galbraith's ideas. As one (rather sneering) reviewer of Todd's latest book observes, a paper by Professor Galbraith has been an important touchstone for his thinking about the Russian economy's potentialities within the current conflict.
The April 2023 paper in question, provocatively titled "The Gift of Sanctions", compares Russian Establishment-produced analyses of Western sanctions against Russia with American Establishment analyses of the same subject and finds that, while they argue from the same facts they draw very different conclusions. The American analysts he discussed were consistently insistent that the sanctions would devastate the Russian economy, while the Russian analysts, while recognizing in the sanctions a significant problem, saw at least the possibility of Russia adapting to cope with the situation--and possibly even make gains as a result. As Galbraith explains the matter those Western sanctions could be looked at as imposing on Russia some of the conditions that those calling for vigorous Russian redindustrialization on the basis of a robust industrial policy had called for--like quotas or tariff walls, eliminating competing sources of supply. Coming within the wartime situation they also make politically palatable the establishment of the rest of the conditions--war making politically possible forms of economic intervention that had been fiercely opposed in peacetime by groups too powerful for the Russian government to ignore (the oligarchs, to name the most obvious), with the dislocations involved in the process inhibiting even beyond such groups (a measure of pain for the Russian public in the short-term, and maybe not so short-term, unavoidable as imports are cut off, and local industry takes time to fill the gap).
Considering the possible outcome of such a reindustrialization effort Galbraith seems relatively optimistic that it would work--more than I would have expected recalling his rather orthodox aversion to government "picking winners" back in his 1989 book Balancing Acts. But then it has been a rather eventful three decades since, after which Galbraith seems less willing to concede so much to what his father called the "conventional wisdom," and anyway Russia seems to him to have many a point in its favor as it makes the attempt. Among these is Russia's size and level of development, which mean that sanctions would have a very different effect on it than they did in a Cuba or Iraq (utterly devastated by them), or even 1980s-era South Africa and 1990s-era Yugoslavia--the more in as Russia is so rich in essential resources extending beyond its obvious physical wealth to a wealth of "scientific and engineering talent." Still another is the way foreign firms became deeply established within Russia for decades, such that even in exiting Russia they leave behind their trained personnel, their organization, their plant (the car makers Nissan and Renault each selling their operations to Russia for a mere euro and ruble, respectively), as well as developed "indigenous competencies"--so that "scientific and engineering talent" by no means has to start from scratch as they seek to fill in the gaps opened up by those firms' exit and the sanctions. The result is that the war, in the absence of a completely devastating outcome for Russia (Galbraith, unlikely many, is not unmindful of the risk of nuclear war that hangs over the entire crisis), could set the country well on its way to the achievement of a modern manufacturing base that has so long eluded it.
Does the case hold up? Considering Galbraith's vision of Russian reindustrialization one should note that the sanctions acting like tariff walls not only keep foreign competitors that would price budding Russian manufacturers out of the market out, but also prevent Russian products from getting out. It is an "import substitution"-type industrialization that Galbraith writes of here, an approach to the matter that even those economists bucking a neoliberal orthodoxy tend to take a dim view, emphasizing that East Asian countries like South Korea that industrialized successfully did so on an "export-led" rather than import substitution basis, which they identify with the less happy results of such efforts in post-war, pre-neoliberal Latin America.
There is, too, the difficulty posed by the fact that in contrast with a country establishing tariff walls in normal peacetime conditions this is, again, a situation of NATO-Russia proxy war, which not only entails that much more difficulty in trading with the rest of the world, but the prioritization of the armed forces' needs, a factor that has, of course, undermined Russian development in the past. Of course, it is only fair to acknowledge that countries have also been known to make exactly this kind of progress under wartime conditions--because, just as in the case Galbraith discusses here, war allows government to make investments and engage in interventions that would be politically impossible for them in peacetime, especially when those governments' demand for weapons and other supplies permits business to go "all-out" in trying to meet them. Indeed, looking back to the World War Two era it is worth noting that the U.S. made extraordinary progress during the conflict, massively enlarging and modernizing its manufacturing base, while Germany and Japan laid key foundations of their post-war prosperity, not least by beginning their assimilation of the "Fordist" mass-production technique the U.S. had pioneered. However, one may doubt the validity of any analogy between those countries and the Russia of today--as the U.S. was already the country out on the "production frontier" and a late entry into the war rather less subject to disruption than the other participants due to the immunity of its territory to attack and Allied control of the oceans and so much of the world's resources; while Germany and Japan each had the mastery of much of a conquered continent, which they exploited ruthlessly for the sake of resourcing their wars, and the associated industrial efforts. Neither the American situation, nor the German and Japanese one, bears much resemblance to Russia's, which does not have any obvious compensating factors on its side. One may also add that the 2020s are not the 1940s, with a case existing that technological capacity has become much less transferable than before--Andrea and Mauro Gilli pointing out that in an age of simpler, less scientifically intensive, less specialized, production methods it was much easier to catch up. Simply put, in the early twentieth century if you could build a sewing machine or a bicycle you could develop a car industry; and if you could build a car you could build a fighter plane, because in each case the skills were usefully transferable from one area of industrial production to another. It does not go that way today at the high end of the technological spectrum, complicating any import substitution scheme in many a key area, in many ways--for instance, the way that military-industrial successes may be less and less transferable to civilian production to any useful end; with all that implies for such an industrialization process.
The result is that there seem to me considerable grounds for at least a greater measure of skepticism about the prospects of such an initiative than Galbraith displays here--much as he makes a thought-provoking case worthwhile as an alternative to the views too much taken for granted.
The April 2023 paper in question, provocatively titled "The Gift of Sanctions", compares Russian Establishment-produced analyses of Western sanctions against Russia with American Establishment analyses of the same subject and finds that, while they argue from the same facts they draw very different conclusions. The American analysts he discussed were consistently insistent that the sanctions would devastate the Russian economy, while the Russian analysts, while recognizing in the sanctions a significant problem, saw at least the possibility of Russia adapting to cope with the situation--and possibly even make gains as a result. As Galbraith explains the matter those Western sanctions could be looked at as imposing on Russia some of the conditions that those calling for vigorous Russian redindustrialization on the basis of a robust industrial policy had called for--like quotas or tariff walls, eliminating competing sources of supply. Coming within the wartime situation they also make politically palatable the establishment of the rest of the conditions--war making politically possible forms of economic intervention that had been fiercely opposed in peacetime by groups too powerful for the Russian government to ignore (the oligarchs, to name the most obvious), with the dislocations involved in the process inhibiting even beyond such groups (a measure of pain for the Russian public in the short-term, and maybe not so short-term, unavoidable as imports are cut off, and local industry takes time to fill the gap).
Considering the possible outcome of such a reindustrialization effort Galbraith seems relatively optimistic that it would work--more than I would have expected recalling his rather orthodox aversion to government "picking winners" back in his 1989 book Balancing Acts. But then it has been a rather eventful three decades since, after which Galbraith seems less willing to concede so much to what his father called the "conventional wisdom," and anyway Russia seems to him to have many a point in its favor as it makes the attempt. Among these is Russia's size and level of development, which mean that sanctions would have a very different effect on it than they did in a Cuba or Iraq (utterly devastated by them), or even 1980s-era South Africa and 1990s-era Yugoslavia--the more in as Russia is so rich in essential resources extending beyond its obvious physical wealth to a wealth of "scientific and engineering talent." Still another is the way foreign firms became deeply established within Russia for decades, such that even in exiting Russia they leave behind their trained personnel, their organization, their plant (the car makers Nissan and Renault each selling their operations to Russia for a mere euro and ruble, respectively), as well as developed "indigenous competencies"--so that "scientific and engineering talent" by no means has to start from scratch as they seek to fill in the gaps opened up by those firms' exit and the sanctions. The result is that the war, in the absence of a completely devastating outcome for Russia (Galbraith, unlikely many, is not unmindful of the risk of nuclear war that hangs over the entire crisis), could set the country well on its way to the achievement of a modern manufacturing base that has so long eluded it.
Does the case hold up? Considering Galbraith's vision of Russian reindustrialization one should note that the sanctions acting like tariff walls not only keep foreign competitors that would price budding Russian manufacturers out of the market out, but also prevent Russian products from getting out. It is an "import substitution"-type industrialization that Galbraith writes of here, an approach to the matter that even those economists bucking a neoliberal orthodoxy tend to take a dim view, emphasizing that East Asian countries like South Korea that industrialized successfully did so on an "export-led" rather than import substitution basis, which they identify with the less happy results of such efforts in post-war, pre-neoliberal Latin America.
The result is that there seem to me considerable grounds for at least a greater measure of skepticism about the prospects of such an initiative than Galbraith displays here--much as he makes a thought-provoking case worthwhile as an alternative to the views too much taken for granted.
Sunday, January 28, 2024
Social Withdrawal as Protest, Again
Writing about the issue of social withdrawal--certainly writing about social withdrawal in the sense of individuals' withdrawal from the job market, marriage market, family-raising that they are conventionally expected to treat as the ends of "grown-up" life I have argued again and again over the years that the growth of the tendency has been a response to broader social conditions. Simply put, finishing school, getting a job and devoting the rest of one's life to it as they bear the conventional burdens of being a householder is just not a terribly attractive or pleasant thing for most--and as that has grown less so all the time these past several decades. The neoliberal age, after all, has meant working people giving more and getting less, enough so that college looks less and less the ticket to middle classness that it was supposed to be (I have actually found it appropriate to speak of the pursuit of college degrees as having become comprehensible in the terms we ordinarily apply to economic bubbles), all as those who do get middle-class jobs likely find themselves less and less able to afford the middle-class living standard supposed to go with them in an age of heavier student debts, greater insecurity, and the exploding costs of essentials like housing and health care. (Indeed, it seems worth noting that Emmanuel Todd has gone so far as to correlate a country's being an economic success in neoliberal terms with the plunging of its fertility rate as middle-class people find raising a family in what middle class people traditionally regard as decent conditions, with a minimum of security, increasingly implausible.)
The COVID-19 pandemic has, of course, heightened attention to the issue--as the self-isolation many pursued for extended periods to stay safe, the shift of many jobs to a "telecommuting" basis, the "burn-out" workers in many fields suffered, the loss of employment, the way crises and even just the jolting of people out of their routines compels them to reassess their lives, etc. found expressions ranging from resistance to a shift back to the office as telecommuting-hating employers demanded a reversion to the status quo ante, historic levels of resignation by workers, and signs of a new "wave" of Americans "turning hikikomori."
Still, if the issue has got more attention the thinking about it did not change. The tendency remains just as it was before to see those withdrawing as suffering from psychological problems, or simply "refusing to grow up," rather than in any way responding to limited and unattractive choices, or worsening social conditions. The result is that I was quite struck by an essay by one Nicky Reid about the matter in which she dared to argue that "Adulthood is a Racket That Millennials are Right to Reject." I doubt that her argument will make any of "the sanctimonious adults" she talks about question their attitude toward young people who refuse to fall in line with societal expectations--but anyone more open-minded about the possibility that something more complex is happening here than simply "kids with bad attitudes" acting out ought to give her concise, forceful, and never dull essay a read.
The COVID-19 pandemic has, of course, heightened attention to the issue--as the self-isolation many pursued for extended periods to stay safe, the shift of many jobs to a "telecommuting" basis, the "burn-out" workers in many fields suffered, the loss of employment, the way crises and even just the jolting of people out of their routines compels them to reassess their lives, etc. found expressions ranging from resistance to a shift back to the office as telecommuting-hating employers demanded a reversion to the status quo ante, historic levels of resignation by workers, and signs of a new "wave" of Americans "turning hikikomori."
Still, if the issue has got more attention the thinking about it did not change. The tendency remains just as it was before to see those withdrawing as suffering from psychological problems, or simply "refusing to grow up," rather than in any way responding to limited and unattractive choices, or worsening social conditions. The result is that I was quite struck by an essay by one Nicky Reid about the matter in which she dared to argue that "Adulthood is a Racket That Millennials are Right to Reject." I doubt that her argument will make any of "the sanctimonious adults" she talks about question their attitude toward young people who refuse to fall in line with societal expectations--but anyone more open-minded about the possibility that something more complex is happening here than simply "kids with bad attitudes" acting out ought to give her concise, forceful, and never dull essay a read.
Looking Back at Emmanuel Todd's Record of Prediction
Recently Pepe Escobar, alert to Emmanuel Todd's difficulties finding publishers and media opportunities in his native France, wrote of Todd's publication of his latest book there as a "small miracle." Perhaps this is an overstatement on Mr. Escobar's part, but it is definitely the case that the intellectual climate in that country is none too friendly to Todd these days, with the reviews of La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West) beginning to appear looking all too predictably brutal. Exemplary is the piece by Florent Georgesco in Le Monde, who from his title forward appeals to cheap and stupid "What the hell do you know?"-type epistemological nihilism by mocking Emmanuel Todd as having since 1976 "exerce le métier de prophète" (exercised the profession of prophet") so that he can beat up on him by way of beating up on the pretensions of prophets generally (rather than judging Todd as a social scientist who, like any other social scientist, after studying the past and present, draws conclusions about what will happen on the basis of logical cause-and-effect reasoning from the facts).
Considering this rather shabby piece of "reviewing" I found myself looking back at the two books that, as Mssr. Georgesco acknowledges in the most sneering tones, made Todd's reputation, starting with The Final Fall. In that book Todd was not the first to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, Todd did register that it was slipping into a phase of economic stagnation (evident in demographic data testifying to ultimately short-lived but nevertheless notable stresses) under an elite that had long ceased to truly take the official ideology seriously, leaving them a pack of self-seekers at the head of a troubled system; and that the increasing pressure for reform would compel liberalization that would open a space for centrifugal forces that would first tear away the Soviet Union's Warsaw Pact satellites (a rich "periphery" to its poor "core," with all the untenability of the situation that implied), and then the non-Russian republics.
All of this actually did happen in this way in the years that followed, with the process running its course within fifteen years of the publication by Todd of his book. Because Todd did not simply say "The Soviet Union will be gone in fifteen years" but explained how and why this would happen in terms sufficiently precise that one can check them against the facts of the historical record--statistically evidentiated stagnation leading to a high-risk reform process leading to break-up in the sequence he stated (satellites first, non-Russian republics second)--it seems fair to, even if Todd did not cover every part of the story (one should not overlook the extent to which the Soviet Union's dissolution was a result of that self-seeking elite deciding that being capitalist oligarchs was better than being apparatchiks in a degenerated worker's state, and he did not deal with this here), credit Todd with having had a good deal of insight into the reality rather than merely "getting lucky" because events happened to broadly correspond to some vague claim on his part.
Todd's other principal work of "prophecy" is After the Empire--the success of which I think is rather more debatable. As I noted his vision of a U.S. "living beyond its means" losing its hegemonic position as a result of being forced to accommodate itself to its more limited power base after the dollar loses its privileged place in the international monetary order due to the rise of Europe (in which Britain's signing on with the European project and Europe reaching an accommodation with Russia would play their part) simply did not come to pass even two decades on (or, arguably, even begun to happen in an unambiguous way, such as may have been claimed for his Soviet prediction years before the Soviet bloc's collapse). Still, if events have not validated Todd's thesis, one can still say that at a time in which not only Americans but other Frenchmen spoke of the U.S. as a "hyperpower," question the dynamism and substance of the U.S. economy in the late 1990s,;and if the U.S. economy was not revealed as a collection of Enrons the way he thought possible, the tech boom proved blip rather than new normal, the growth of the U.S. slower and its economy increasingly open to charges of hollowness as deindustrialization and its ill effects became an increasing factor in the U.S.' domestic and international situation. And just as Todd was right about that, he was (even as many persons getting much more respect in the Western press continued to predict Russian collapse) right about Russia's decline having bottomed out about the turn of the century, with its military capacities again becoming a factor in international life. It seems fair, too, to acknowledge that Todd was right about the U.S. becoming less universalist and more differentialist in its domestic life as in its attitude toward the rest of the world--all as the country had ceased to meaningfully debate its problems many years earlier (Todd correctly identifying 1995 as that turning point, and rather properly calling out Paul Krugman as a "fake nonconformist").
All of this is far from nothing--and if it did not translate to the kind of dramatic, qualitative shift in the U.S. positon that Todd predicted, it did at least correspond to the U.S. facing a different (from a power standpoint, much less favorable) situation than the one fancied by theoreticians of a "unipolar moment" who had been far more fashionable at that time (even as one who disagrees with much that Todd has said over the years, and not least the arguments he makes in his latest), and like Todd's analysis it bespoke a fairly solid grasp on many important realities, rather more solid than that of many of his contemporaries--such that for all the book's limitations, After the Empire remains worth reading now, in a way that few books on international relations from 2002 about the international scene still are a near-quarter of a century after their first publication.
Considering this rather shabby piece of "reviewing" I found myself looking back at the two books that, as Mssr. Georgesco acknowledges in the most sneering tones, made Todd's reputation, starting with The Final Fall. In that book Todd was not the first to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, Todd did register that it was slipping into a phase of economic stagnation (evident in demographic data testifying to ultimately short-lived but nevertheless notable stresses) under an elite that had long ceased to truly take the official ideology seriously, leaving them a pack of self-seekers at the head of a troubled system; and that the increasing pressure for reform would compel liberalization that would open a space for centrifugal forces that would first tear away the Soviet Union's Warsaw Pact satellites (a rich "periphery" to its poor "core," with all the untenability of the situation that implied), and then the non-Russian republics.
All of this actually did happen in this way in the years that followed, with the process running its course within fifteen years of the publication by Todd of his book. Because Todd did not simply say "The Soviet Union will be gone in fifteen years" but explained how and why this would happen in terms sufficiently precise that one can check them against the facts of the historical record--statistically evidentiated stagnation leading to a high-risk reform process leading to break-up in the sequence he stated (satellites first, non-Russian republics second)--it seems fair to, even if Todd did not cover every part of the story (one should not overlook the extent to which the Soviet Union's dissolution was a result of that self-seeking elite deciding that being capitalist oligarchs was better than being apparatchiks in a degenerated worker's state, and he did not deal with this here), credit Todd with having had a good deal of insight into the reality rather than merely "getting lucky" because events happened to broadly correspond to some vague claim on his part.
Todd's other principal work of "prophecy" is After the Empire--the success of which I think is rather more debatable. As I noted his vision of a U.S. "living beyond its means" losing its hegemonic position as a result of being forced to accommodate itself to its more limited power base after the dollar loses its privileged place in the international monetary order due to the rise of Europe (in which Britain's signing on with the European project and Europe reaching an accommodation with Russia would play their part) simply did not come to pass even two decades on (or, arguably, even begun to happen in an unambiguous way, such as may have been claimed for his Soviet prediction years before the Soviet bloc's collapse). Still, if events have not validated Todd's thesis, one can still say that at a time in which not only Americans but other Frenchmen spoke of the U.S. as a "hyperpower," question the dynamism and substance of the U.S. economy in the late 1990s,;and if the U.S. economy was not revealed as a collection of Enrons the way he thought possible, the tech boom proved blip rather than new normal, the growth of the U.S. slower and its economy increasingly open to charges of hollowness as deindustrialization and its ill effects became an increasing factor in the U.S.' domestic and international situation. And just as Todd was right about that, he was (even as many persons getting much more respect in the Western press continued to predict Russian collapse) right about Russia's decline having bottomed out about the turn of the century, with its military capacities again becoming a factor in international life. It seems fair, too, to acknowledge that Todd was right about the U.S. becoming less universalist and more differentialist in its domestic life as in its attitude toward the rest of the world--all as the country had ceased to meaningfully debate its problems many years earlier (Todd correctly identifying 1995 as that turning point, and rather properly calling out Paul Krugman as a "fake nonconformist").
All of this is far from nothing--and if it did not translate to the kind of dramatic, qualitative shift in the U.S. positon that Todd predicted, it did at least correspond to the U.S. facing a different (from a power standpoint, much less favorable) situation than the one fancied by theoreticians of a "unipolar moment" who had been far more fashionable at that time (even as one who disagrees with much that Todd has said over the years, and not least the arguments he makes in his latest), and like Todd's analysis it bespoke a fairly solid grasp on many important realities, rather more solid than that of many of his contemporaries--such that for all the book's limitations, After the Empire remains worth reading now, in a way that few books on international relations from 2002 about the international scene still are a near-quarter of a century after their first publication.
Paris and its Relation to the Rest of France: A Few Notes
Reading the classics of nineteenth century French literature one quickly gets a sense of just how central the city of Paris was within French life--or at least, those aspects of life to which the more privileged were attentive, the young provincial looking to make a career for himself always seemingly heading to Paris. Thus does, even in that tale of two centuries earlier, Alexander Dumas open the saga of young D'Artagnan with a scene of him making his way there on horseback--while in novels by Balzac such as Lost Illusions (in the story of Lucien du Rubempre another tale of a young provincial going to the capital), or The Two Brothers, it is the case that simply going from Paris to the provinces, or from the provinces to Paris, is enough to rattle a person's standards of beauty, elegance, grace (in Lost Illusions, where Lucien and Madame de Bargeton do not look so good to each other after a very short time sitting in a Parisian opera house, just the beginning of an eventually disastrous train of events).*
The sense of the city's centrality endures today, not least where the composition of the uppermost levels of government is concerned--such persons apt to have been born, raised, schooled and worked their whole lives within a few square miles within Paris, and in the view of their critics, knowing or caring little or nothing of the rest of the country (in the words of Simon Kuper, "treat[ing] the rest of France almost like a colony, inhabited by smelly peasants").
Considering this one may make a comparison with the U.S.. The United States has always had its regional differences, and resentments--North and South, East and West, interior and coast, etc.--but there was never any period in which a single city loomed so large, never mind for so long. Indeed, construction on the palace of Versailles was underway before the founding of the first real American metropolis, Boston, while that city was not very long in being challenged or eclipsed by others--most obviously New York, all as the functions of a national capital tended to be widely distributed. Thus Washington D.C. became the seat of government--even as the United Nations headquarters went to New York. If New York has a stronger standing as the financial capital of the country, Chicago is to commodities what New York is to the stock market. If New York has a status as cultural capital, while it dominates publishing, theater, fashion and the visual arts, Los Angeles is the central location in film and television production (even as that is being diffused about the country), music is even more dispersed (not just a Los Angeles but even a Nashville is a center here), and the most prestigious national university lies outside its boundaries (back in old Boston, even as it has slid below Oklahoma City in population, and Phoenix in the population of its larger metro area). Indeed, even such sneering terms as "flyover country" bespeak the diffusion of the nation's life. If those living in the major urban centers of the East coast have no interest in large parts of the United States, they do acknowledge the existence of important centers on the West coast. By contrast Parisian centrality in French life seems far less qualified--and with it the sharpness of the divide between center and provinces, containing, among much else, frequent reminders that ignorance about the larger world is pretty much a feature of elite life wherever one goes on the planet.
* In The Two Brothers after having journeyed from Paris to Issoudun the painter Joseph Bridau, gazing upon the woman they have come to stop from swindling his uncle out of his fortune, is so taken with her beauty that he declares at once his eagerness to paint her, and then being criticized his relatives for the remark amid a family crisis admits that he "did wrong," then adds (less than diplomatically) "you must remember that ever since leaving Paris I have seen nothing but ugly women."
The sense of the city's centrality endures today, not least where the composition of the uppermost levels of government is concerned--such persons apt to have been born, raised, schooled and worked their whole lives within a few square miles within Paris, and in the view of their critics, knowing or caring little or nothing of the rest of the country (in the words of Simon Kuper, "treat[ing] the rest of France almost like a colony, inhabited by smelly peasants").
Considering this one may make a comparison with the U.S.. The United States has always had its regional differences, and resentments--North and South, East and West, interior and coast, etc.--but there was never any period in which a single city loomed so large, never mind for so long. Indeed, construction on the palace of Versailles was underway before the founding of the first real American metropolis, Boston, while that city was not very long in being challenged or eclipsed by others--most obviously New York, all as the functions of a national capital tended to be widely distributed. Thus Washington D.C. became the seat of government--even as the United Nations headquarters went to New York. If New York has a stronger standing as the financial capital of the country, Chicago is to commodities what New York is to the stock market. If New York has a status as cultural capital, while it dominates publishing, theater, fashion and the visual arts, Los Angeles is the central location in film and television production (even as that is being diffused about the country), music is even more dispersed (not just a Los Angeles but even a Nashville is a center here), and the most prestigious national university lies outside its boundaries (back in old Boston, even as it has slid below Oklahoma City in population, and Phoenix in the population of its larger metro area). Indeed, even such sneering terms as "flyover country" bespeak the diffusion of the nation's life. If those living in the major urban centers of the East coast have no interest in large parts of the United States, they do acknowledge the existence of important centers on the West coast. By contrast Parisian centrality in French life seems far less qualified--and with it the sharpness of the divide between center and provinces, containing, among much else, frequent reminders that ignorance about the larger world is pretty much a feature of elite life wherever one goes on the planet.
* In The Two Brothers after having journeyed from Paris to Issoudun the painter Joseph Bridau, gazing upon the woman they have come to stop from swindling his uncle out of his fortune, is so taken with her beauty that he declares at once his eagerness to paint her, and then being criticized his relatives for the remark amid a family crisis admits that he "did wrong," then adds (less than diplomatically) "you must remember that ever since leaving Paris I have seen nothing but ugly women."
Who is Reading Emmanuel Todd Now?
Those commentators on public affairs who want to avoid a particular political label often display pretenses to greater idiosyncrasy in their outlooks than they really possess--and get away with it the more easily in America, at least, because in the hypocritical squeamishness about "ideology" that has prevailed for decades our politics are so much a matter of responses to disconnected issues, with the reality that larger premises about the world are involved in their responses is relentlessly downplayed. (Indeed, the so-called punditry seems scarcely able to use terms like "conservatism" and "liberalism" correctly--and compounds its disservice to all dependent on it by vehemently defending its own incoherence and ignorance in the name of "common usage.")
Still, it does seem to me fair to say that Emmanuel Todd's politics have genuinely defied easy labeling--and certainly when one looks at the longer sweep of his career. Reading The Final Fall, for example, one finds that Todd is no Marxist, or even socialist--but he was prepared to credit Marx with identifying some of capitalism's weaknesses, and capitalist reformers with redressing them, such that I think he could be safely identified with support for the post-war "Keynesian" compromise and the center-left as it stood then. He also seems to have adhered to this position in subsequent decades, even as the center-left increasingly accommodated itself to neoliberalism, and neoconservatism, of which Todd became a staunch critic, certainly as seen in works like After the Empire, and his commentary up to the present.
In the process Todd came to seem "left" of what had become center-left, even if not necessarily "left" in the old sense. Meanwhile, it is the case that in looking at less solidly material aspects of life he has set himself apart from many at this end of the spectrum. While Todd has been a formidable opponent of racial and religious bigotry, who has explicitly declared himself on the side of both women's liberation and gay and lesbian liberation, the fact remains that he has also turned a critical eye on American "multiculturalism," the #MeToo movement, the discourse about trans persons, and the decline of religiosity, all of which would seem to have been unhelpful to him in these quarters--while actually appearing to get him attention from some quarters of the right.* Certainly surveying the press Todd has got for his latest book it has seemed to me that it has been publications of the right that have been more likely to mention his work, favorably citing his remarks about the consequences of Protestantism's decline in its old North European and North American core--even as they take little interest in the rest of what he has to say.
* Todd specifically raised the matter of multiculturalism in After the Empire, where he saw it as indicative of an America that was becoming less universalist and more differentialist--while arguing that the American multicultural model was failing (interestingly, on the basis of infant mortality data such as was so important to his famous argument about Soviet failure), and also having some critical words for American feminism on this score. Todd has been more attentive to the matter of gender in Lineages of the Feminine, and The Defeat of the West.
Still, it does seem to me fair to say that Emmanuel Todd's politics have genuinely defied easy labeling--and certainly when one looks at the longer sweep of his career. Reading The Final Fall, for example, one finds that Todd is no Marxist, or even socialist--but he was prepared to credit Marx with identifying some of capitalism's weaknesses, and capitalist reformers with redressing them, such that I think he could be safely identified with support for the post-war "Keynesian" compromise and the center-left as it stood then. He also seems to have adhered to this position in subsequent decades, even as the center-left increasingly accommodated itself to neoliberalism, and neoconservatism, of which Todd became a staunch critic, certainly as seen in works like After the Empire, and his commentary up to the present.
In the process Todd came to seem "left" of what had become center-left, even if not necessarily "left" in the old sense. Meanwhile, it is the case that in looking at less solidly material aspects of life he has set himself apart from many at this end of the spectrum. While Todd has been a formidable opponent of racial and religious bigotry, who has explicitly declared himself on the side of both women's liberation and gay and lesbian liberation, the fact remains that he has also turned a critical eye on American "multiculturalism," the #MeToo movement, the discourse about trans persons, and the decline of religiosity, all of which would seem to have been unhelpful to him in these quarters--while actually appearing to get him attention from some quarters of the right.* Certainly surveying the press Todd has got for his latest book it has seemed to me that it has been publications of the right that have been more likely to mention his work, favorably citing his remarks about the consequences of Protestantism's decline in its old North European and North American core--even as they take little interest in the rest of what he has to say.
* Todd specifically raised the matter of multiculturalism in After the Empire, where he saw it as indicative of an America that was becoming less universalist and more differentialist--while arguing that the American multicultural model was failing (interestingly, on the basis of infant mortality data such as was so important to his famous argument about Soviet failure), and also having some critical words for American feminism on this score. Todd has been more attentive to the matter of gender in Lineages of the Feminine, and The Defeat of the West.
Where Did the "European Dream" Come From Anyway?
Not long ago I again took up the issue of the "European Dream" some left-leaning observers of the international scene held in the earlier part of this century--their hope that if the U.S. was unlikely to deviate from the neoliberal-neoconservative path they found troubling the European Union could play a more constructive role in international affairs, helping in peacemaking, facilitating international development, and leading the way on climate change in the ways the U.S. had signally failed to do.
Such hopes have long since waned as Europe has proven to be led by an elite just as neoliberal and neoconservative as its American counterpart, as seen not only in the legacy of the reforms they were already instituting in the early 2000s (as with the Harz reforms in Germany), but their conduct in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis (exemplified by the brutalization of Greece); and their propensity for military intervention in Libya and elsewhere. (One may say that this turn has been evident, too, in the way that the American press has laid off the formerly furious Europe-bashing to display a much more approving attitude of European conduct.)
In hindsight it seems to me the expectation of a Europe being a center-left alternative to the right-wing U.S. in international life was implausible, and I found myself wondering why so many held it, focusing on the American (and more broadly, Anglosphere) observers who thought this way. My conclusion was that their expectation was, frankly, a function of a simple-minded view of Europe rooted in cartoonish stereotype and plain ignorance. In spite of ancestry and familial links; their tendencies with regard to travel in the case of tourism, study, business, military service; the foreign languages they are most likely to acquire and foreign literature they are most likely to read (if admittedly they are monolingual and don't read much" of anything, let alone literature, in any language); the American policy elite (and that of other closely associated nations) tend to be profoundly ignorant about Europe on the whole, such that even if they do not need to be told that "Europe is not a country" the way they do Africa, their knowledge about it would not seem to extend much further than that.
One aspect of this is their obliviousness to such things as the differences not just between European nations but within European nations. Even in an era in which Thatcherism, deindustrialization, Brexit have given regional differences within England itself a new topical, how many know Cornwall from Yorkshire, let alone either from Surrey? (Indeed, the American commentariat's obliviousness to such parts of England is underlined by how Thomas Frank correctly saw it as worthwhile to head to the industrial heartland of north England in Brexit's wake.) How many grasp the lingering differences between "Ossi" and "Wessi" in Germany (especially insofar as they are unable to see German reunification in terms of anything but Cold War triumphalism)? Of the relations between Paris and the "provinces?" Few indeed--which is just one factor in their having a grossly oversimplified picture, along with the tendency to, at least as much as anywhere else, equate Europe with its ultra-privileged upper crust (as seen in the equation of the Englishman with the "English gentleman"), reinforced by European high fashion and the like. (Thus do American advertisers insult their viewers' intelligence by saying of some such good that "It's European!" expecting the American to say "Ooh, I'll take it!"--to the point of getting a man who would never carry a purse to . . . carry a purse.)
All of this has served that commentariat poorly in thinking about Europe in the past (to the extent that they were trying to do their jobs at all rather than play courtier). It continues to serve them poorly now--and will likely do only worse in the years ahead, promising as they do a far more difficult and dangerous international scene.
Such hopes have long since waned as Europe has proven to be led by an elite just as neoliberal and neoconservative as its American counterpart, as seen not only in the legacy of the reforms they were already instituting in the early 2000s (as with the Harz reforms in Germany), but their conduct in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis (exemplified by the brutalization of Greece); and their propensity for military intervention in Libya and elsewhere. (One may say that this turn has been evident, too, in the way that the American press has laid off the formerly furious Europe-bashing to display a much more approving attitude of European conduct.)
In hindsight it seems to me the expectation of a Europe being a center-left alternative to the right-wing U.S. in international life was implausible, and I found myself wondering why so many held it, focusing on the American (and more broadly, Anglosphere) observers who thought this way. My conclusion was that their expectation was, frankly, a function of a simple-minded view of Europe rooted in cartoonish stereotype and plain ignorance. In spite of ancestry and familial links; their tendencies with regard to travel in the case of tourism, study, business, military service; the foreign languages they are most likely to acquire and foreign literature they are most likely to read (if admittedly they are monolingual and don't read much" of anything, let alone literature, in any language); the American policy elite (and that of other closely associated nations) tend to be profoundly ignorant about Europe on the whole, such that even if they do not need to be told that "Europe is not a country" the way they do Africa, their knowledge about it would not seem to extend much further than that.
One aspect of this is their obliviousness to such things as the differences not just between European nations but within European nations. Even in an era in which Thatcherism, deindustrialization, Brexit have given regional differences within England itself a new topical, how many know Cornwall from Yorkshire, let alone either from Surrey? (Indeed, the American commentariat's obliviousness to such parts of England is underlined by how Thomas Frank correctly saw it as worthwhile to head to the industrial heartland of north England in Brexit's wake.) How many grasp the lingering differences between "Ossi" and "Wessi" in Germany (especially insofar as they are unable to see German reunification in terms of anything but Cold War triumphalism)? Of the relations between Paris and the "provinces?" Few indeed--which is just one factor in their having a grossly oversimplified picture, along with the tendency to, at least as much as anywhere else, equate Europe with its ultra-privileged upper crust (as seen in the equation of the Englishman with the "English gentleman"), reinforced by European high fashion and the like. (Thus do American advertisers insult their viewers' intelligence by saying of some such good that "It's European!" expecting the American to say "Ooh, I'll take it!"--to the point of getting a man who would never carry a purse to . . . carry a purse.)
All of this has served that commentariat poorly in thinking about Europe in the past (to the extent that they were trying to do their jobs at all rather than play courtier). It continues to serve them poorly now--and will likely do only worse in the years ahead, promising as they do a far more difficult and dangerous international scene.
Monday, January 22, 2024
How Young People Get Their News
We have heard much in recent years about people increasingly getting their news from less conventional sources--and amid this, much about the evolution of media.
The aspect of this that interests me most at the moment is the attitude toward reading rather than watching the news.
I personally prefer to read my news--because it is easier and quicker to take an initial survey of a piece of text in systematic fashion (or as they say in composition courses, "preview" it), figure out in advance what it has to offer and whether it is worth my time, go straight to the material that seems most likely to be relevant, go back over the rest of the text if I decide it warrants a fuller examination that may extend to a proper read through, etc., than to do these things with a video, with this all the more the case if watching the video at all requires me to first sit through an obnoxious, three-times-as-loud piece of advertising. In fact, if I click on a link in a news aggregator or elsewhere expecting an article and am instead led to a video my usual response is to simply not bother with the item and go on looking until I find an article.
Apparently this is the norm. But it seems that it is less the norm with younger groups, who incline more toward video.
It seems worth asking why that is the case. Is it that, perhaps, they have become more adroit than their elders at extracting useful information from video? Or is it that they are just that much more averse to reading--find it so much a pain that they will just sit through a video instead if the opportunity is available? (And, perhaps, that because they are less experienced and less willing and poorer readers, that they lack the kind of "close reading" skills that enable many to find reading rather than watching more efficient?)
What are your thoughts on that, readers?
The aspect of this that interests me most at the moment is the attitude toward reading rather than watching the news.
Apparently this is the norm. But it seems that it is less the norm with younger groups, who incline more toward video.
It seems worth asking why that is the case. Is it that, perhaps, they have become more adroit than their elders at extracting useful information from video? Or is it that they are just that much more averse to reading--find it so much a pain that they will just sit through a video instead if the opportunity is available? (And, perhaps, that because they are less experienced and less willing and poorer readers, that they lack the kind of "close reading" skills that enable many to find reading rather than watching more efficient?)
What are your thoughts on that, readers?
How Far Has China Gone Toward "Exceeding the UK?"
"Exceeding the UK, catching the USA" was apparently a slogan of industrial development in China during the Maoist era.
Where "exceeding the UK" in manufacturing was concerned China would seem to have done that by the end of the 1970s--in the aggregate. In per capita terms the UK, with a population about one-seventeenth of China's at the time, was still the far greater producer.
However, as might be expected given China's rapid growth as a manufacturing power (and Britain's troubles in this era, worsened by the course the country has taken since the Thatcher era, with the trend especially bad since the Great Recession), has seen it close the gap in per capita terms as well.
Back in 2018 it appeared that China's per capita manufacturing value added equaled about 70 percent of Britain's. Checking the most recent figures I found that in 2022 China's per capita value added in that area was 93 percent that of Britain ($3600 vs. $3900 in current dollars).
At that rate it is likely that within the mid-2020s China will catch up Britain in per capita terms. One may add that it will catch up France (whose own process of deindustrialization has left it in about the same place) as well.
In doing so China, which has long ago left well behind even the more advanced of the developing countries such as Mexico, Turkey and Thailand, or even a Malaysia, when judged by this metric, will be on par with the bottom of the Group of Seven advanced industrialized nations. A significant testament to the distance that China has traveled developmentally, it is also a testament to the decline of some of the older industrial powers, and the shifting of the distribution of the world's industrial and economic power in the process.
Where "exceeding the UK" in manufacturing was concerned China would seem to have done that by the end of the 1970s--in the aggregate. In per capita terms the UK, with a population about one-seventeenth of China's at the time, was still the far greater producer.
However, as might be expected given China's rapid growth as a manufacturing power (and Britain's troubles in this era, worsened by the course the country has taken since the Thatcher era, with the trend especially bad since the Great Recession), has seen it close the gap in per capita terms as well.
Back in 2018 it appeared that China's per capita manufacturing value added equaled about 70 percent of Britain's. Checking the most recent figures I found that in 2022 China's per capita value added in that area was 93 percent that of Britain ($3600 vs. $3900 in current dollars).
At that rate it is likely that within the mid-2020s China will catch up Britain in per capita terms. One may add that it will catch up France (whose own process of deindustrialization has left it in about the same place) as well.
In doing so China, which has long ago left well behind even the more advanced of the developing countries such as Mexico, Turkey and Thailand, or even a Malaysia, when judged by this metric, will be on par with the bottom of the Group of Seven advanced industrialized nations. A significant testament to the distance that China has traveled developmentally, it is also a testament to the decline of some of the older industrial powers, and the shifting of the distribution of the world's industrial and economic power in the process.
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