Preferring a Pound of Cure

Voters prefer a pound of cure to an ounce of prevention, Bryan Caplan notes, citing Andrew Healy's recent paper:

Using comprehensive data on natural disasters, government spending, and election returns, I show that voters reward disaster relief spending but not disaster prevention spending. This aspect of voter behavior creates a large distortion in the incentives that governments face, since the data show that prevention spending substantially reduces future damage.
[...]
Given mean annual prevention spending of $195 million and mean disaster damage of $16.5 billion, the regression estimates that a $1 increase in prevention spending resulted in a $8.30 decrease in disaster damage, and this estimate captures only benefits that occur in the five years from 2000-2004.

Africa is giving nothing to anyone -- apart from AIDS

Irish write Kevin Myers speaks the unspeakable, and says that Africa is giving nothing to anyone — apart from AIDS:

No. It will not do. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again. It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia's (and Bob Geldof's) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.

So why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country?
[...]
Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.
[...]
Within 20 years of the [Irish] Famine, the Irish population was down by 30 [percent]. Over the equivalent period, thanks to western food, the Mercedes 10-wheel truck and the Lockheed Hercules, Ethiopia's has more than doubled.

Alas, that wretched country is not alone in its madness. Somewhere, over the rainbow, lies Somalia, another fine land of violent, Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts.

Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually hyperactive indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world.
[...]
How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity. But that is not good enough.

For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed.

It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates' programme to rid the continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating.

If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts. Oh good: then what?

(Hat tip to Dennis Mangan.)

The Depressive Realism Economy

Arnold Kling calls it The Depressive Realism Economy:

There are psychologists who argue that healthy people tend to have an inflated view of their abilities and how they are regarded by peers. In contrast, these psychologists contend, there is a tendency for depressed people to accurately assess where they stand. This hypothesis is called “depressive realism.” It explains our current economic gloom.
[...]
It now appears that we were living in a dream world a few years ago, with oil prices unsustainably low and house price inflation unsustainably high. Reality is less pleasant.

In theory, a student who suffers a blow to his or her self-esteem can continue to work hard and learn. In practice, educators worry that this will not happen.

Similarly, the asset revaluations that represent blows to our economic self-esteem could be shrugged off by workers and businesses. We still have all of the capital equipment and know-how for the U.S. economy to continue growing.

However, a significant reallocation of resources is required. For example, we need fewer construction workers. During the boom, the housing stock grew faster than the rate of family formation. It will take several years for this excess housing inventory, which some economists estimate may be as much 3 million units above its normal level, to be occupied.

Educational credentials that seemed useful four years ago may not be as valuable during the current transition phase.

Kling sees the problem through the unorthodox lens of macro without aggregate demand:

Orthodox Keynesian macroeconomics says that the cure for economic pessimism is for government to create an illusion. Congress can cut taxes or the Federal Reserve can print money in order to make people feel more prosperous.

What government cannot do, however, is figure out how to reallocate workers to new industries in a way that reflects long-term reality. Government does not know whether the journalism graduate should wait patiently for a relevant job or whether he needs to find a different career path.

Adapting to the reality of higher energy costs and an excess housing stock requires myriad complex adjustments, some of which may be obvious but many of which are subtle. Chances are, it will take several years to complete the transition. Meanwhile, there is little, if anything, that policymakers can do to hasten that process.

Science Has Become the New Frontier for Title Nine

This is terrifying. Science Has Become the New Frontier for Title Nine:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

A surprising dose of sanity from the Times:

Despite supposed obstacles like “unconscious bias” and a shortage of role models and mentors, women now constitute about half of medical students, 60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s. They earn the majority of doctorates in both the life sciences and the social sciences. They remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering. Even though their annual share of doctorates in physics has tripled in recent decades, it’s less than 20 percent. Only 10 percent of physics faculty members are women, a ratio that helped prompt an investigation in 2005 by the American Institute of Physics into the possibility of bias.

But the institute found that women with physics degrees go on to doctorates, teaching jobs and tenure at the same rate that men do. The gender gap is a result of earlier decisions. While girls make up nearly half of high school physics students, they’re less likely than boys to take Advanced Placement courses or go on to a college degree in physics.

These numbers don’t surprise two psychologists at Vanderbilt University, David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow, who have been tracking more than 5,000 mathematically gifted students for 35 years.

They found that starting at age 12, the girls tended to be better rounded than the boys: they had relatively strong verbal skills in addition to math, and they showed more interest in “organic” subjects involving people and other living things. Despite their mathematical prowess, they were less likely than boys to go into physics or engineering.

But whether they grew up to be biologists or sociologists or lawyers, when they were surveyed in their 30s, these women were as content with their careers as their male counterparts. They also made as much money per hour of work. Dr. Lubinski and Dr. Benbow concluded that adolescents’ interests and balance of abilities — not their sex — were the best predictors of whether they would choose an “inorganic” career like physics.

A similar conclusion comes from a new study of the large gender gap in the computer industry by Joshua Rosenbloom and Ronald Ash of the University of Kansas. By administering vocational psychological tests, the researchers found that information technology workers especially enjoyed manipulating objects and machines, whereas workers in other occupations preferred dealing with people.

Once the researchers controlled for that personality variable, the gender gap shrank to statistical insignificance: women who preferred tinkering with inanimate objects were about as likely to go into computer careers as were men with similar personalities. There just happened to be fewer women than men with those preferences.

The 100,000 most trustworthy and responsible adults in the country

Mencius Moldbug has been promoting the idea that a government is just a corporation, if a poorly run one, and that we really should declare our current state bankrupt, put it into receivorship, and transfer control to the 100,000 most trustworthy and responsible adults in the country:

By what process will we select these individuals? Who shall recruit the recruiters? It is difficult and expensive to find just one individual with these executive qualifications. Moreover, in a sovereign context, the filtering process itself will serve as a political football — many progressives might decide, for example, that only progressives can be trusted. It is impossible to end a fight by starting a new fight.

This insane recruiting process cannot occur either under [the current government] or under [the new sovereign corporation government]. It cannot occur under [the current government], because it will be subject to [current government] politics and will carry those politics, which are uniformly poisonous, forward into [the sovereign corporation]. At this point the reset is not a reset. But it cannot occur under [the sovereign corporation], because the trustees are needed to select the Receiver. And there can be no intervening period of anarchy.

But there is a hack which can work around this obstacle. You might think it's a cute hack, or you might think it's an ugly hack. It probably depends on your taste. I think it's pretty cute.

The hack is a precise heuristic test to select trustees. The result of the test is one bit for every citizen of [the country]: he or she either is or is not a trustee. The test is precise because its result is not a matter of debate — it can be verified trivially. And it is heuristic because it should produce a good result on average, with only occasional horrifying exceptions.

My favorite [precise heuristic test] defines the trustees as the set of all active, certified, nonstudent pilots who accept the responsibility of trusteeship, as of the termination date of [the current government]. The set does not expand — you cannot become a trustee by taking flying lessons, and any rejection or resignation of the responsibility is irreversible. In other words, to paraphrase Lenin: all power to the pilots. (There are about 500,000 of them.)

Let's look at the advantages of this [precise heuristic test]. I am not myself a pilot — I am neither wealthy enough, nor responsible enough. But everyone I've ever met who was a pilot, whether private, military or commercial, has struck me as not only responsible, but also independent-minded, often even adventurous. This is a particularly rare combination. To be precise, it is an aristocratic combination, and the word aristocracy is after all just Greek for good government. Pilots are a fraternity of intelligent, practical, and careful people who are already trusted on a regular basis with the lives of others. What's not to like?

Democoup

When it comes to reactionary restoration, Mencius Moldbug notes, the only alternative to a military coup is a political coup — or to be catchy a democoup:

In a democoup, the government is overthrown by organizing a critical mass of political opposition to which it surrenders, ideally just as the result of overwhelming peer pressure. Certainly the most salient example is the fall of the Soviet Union, including its puppet states and the wonderfully if inaccurately named Velvet Revolution. (Again, a reaction is not a revolution.) Other examples include the Southern Redemption, the Meiji Restoration, and of course the English Restoration.

In each of these events, a broad political coalition deployed more or less nonviolent, if seldom perfectly legal, tactics to replace a failed administration with a new regime which was dedicated to the restoration of responsible and effective government. Note that all of these are real historical events, which actually happened in the real world. I did not just make them up and edit them into Wikipedia. Yes, dear open-minded progressive, change can happen.

If there is one fact to remember about a restoration via democoup, it's that this program has nothing to do with the traditional 11th-grade civics-class notion of democratic participation. Obviously, we are not trying to replace one or two officials whose role is primarily symbolic. We are trying to replace not the current occupants of the temporary and largely-ceremonial "political" offices of [the government], but [the government] itself — lock, stock and barrel. Indeed, we are using democratic tactics to abolish democracy itself. (There is nothing at all ironic in this. Is it ironic when an absolute monarch decrees a democratic constitution?)

Again, this restoration has nothing to do with the traditional 11th-grade civics-class notion of democratic participation:

Our modern democratic elections are an extremely poor substitute for actual regime change. As we've seen, democracy is to government as gray, slimy cancer is to pink and healthy living tissue. It is a degenerate neoplastic form. The only reason America has lasted as long as she has, and even still has more than a few years left, is that this malignancy is at present encysted in a thick husk of sclerotic scar tissue - our permanent civil service. Democracy implies politics, and "political" is a dirty word to the civil-service state. As well it should be. Its job is to resist democracy, and it does it very well.

Therefore, any attempt to defeat the sclerotic Cathedral state by a restoration of representative democracy in the classic sense of the word, in which public policy is actually formulated by elected officials (such as the Leader, Mencius), is a bayonet charge at the Maginot Line. The Mencist Party could go all the way and elect President Mencius, and it would still be shredded into gobbets of meat by presighted bureaucratic machine guns. In short: a total waste of time. Much better to bend over and pretend to enjoy it.

When we think of a democoup instead of a democratic party, all of these problems disappear. (They are replaced by other problems, but we'll deal with those in their turn.)

The Island in the Wind

Elizabeth Kolbert calls the Danish island of Samsø the island in the wind because of its switch to renewable energy in 1997, after the Danish Ministry of Environment and Energy decided it had potential:

They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.

Some details:

All told, Samsø has eleven large land-based turbines. (It has about a dozen additional micro-turbines.) This is a lot of turbines for a relatively small number of people, and the ratio is critical to Samsø’s success, as is the fact that the wind off the Kattegat blows pretty much continuously; flags on Samsø, I noticed, do not wave — they stick straight out, as in children’s drawings. Hermansen told us that the land-based turbines are a hundred and fifty feet tall, with rotors that are eighty feet long. Together, they produce some twenty-six million kilowatt-hours a year, which is just about enough to meet all the island’s demands for electricity. (This is true in an arithmetic sense; as a practical matter, Samsø’s production of electricity and its needs fluctuate, so that sometimes it is feeding power into the grid and sometimes it is drawing power from it.) The offshore turbines, meanwhile, are even taller — a hundred and ninety-five feet high, with rotors that extend a hundred and twenty feet. A single offshore turbine generates roughly eight million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, which, at Danish rates of energy use, is enough to satisfy the needs of some two thousand homes. The offshore turbines — there are ten of them — were erected to compensate for Samsø’s continuing use of fossil fuels in its cars, trucks, and ferries. Their combined output, of around eighty million kilowatt-hours a year, provides the energy equivalent of all the gasoline and diesel oil consumed on the island, and then some; in aggregate, Samsø generates about ten per cent more power than it consumes.

Of course, this all treats the transition as free, which, of course, it isn't:

Each land-based turbine cost the equivalent of eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Each offshore turbine cost around three million dollars. Some of Samsø’s turbines were erected by a single investor, like Tranberg; others were purchased collectively. At least four hundred and fifty island residents own shares in the onshore turbines, and a roughly equal number own shares in those offshore. Shareholders, who also include many non-residents, receive annual dividend checks based on the prevailing price of electricity and how much their turbine has generated.

I need more policy details:

Thanks to a policy put in place by Denmark’s government in the late nineteen-nineties, utilities are required to offer ten-year fixed-rate contracts for wind power that they can sell to customers elsewhere. Under the terms of these contracts, a turbine should — barring mishap — repay a shareholder’s initial investment in about eight years.

If the investment pays for itself in eight years, that's a surprisingly good return on investment. To what extent are the Danish tax-payers subsidizing it?

The signature performance of the modern revolution

The signature performance of the modern revolution, Mencius Moldbug notes, is the irregular military parade:

Ie: cars or pickup trucks full of well-armed youths in their colorful native attire, driving up and down your street while (a) honking, (b) waving hand-lettered banners, (c) chanting catchy slogans, and (d) discharging their firearms in a vaguely vertical direction. Occasionally one of the vehicles will pull up in front of a house and discharge its occupants, who enter the building and emerge with an infidel, racist, Jew, spy, polluter, Nazi or other criminal. The offender is either restrained for transportation to an educational facility, or enlightened on the spot as an act of radical social justice. Yes, we can!

He plants his tongue even further in cheek when describing its reactionary counterpart:

Whereas in the ideal restoration, the transfer of power from old to new regime is as predictable and seamless as any electoral transition. With all rites, procedures and rituals correct down to the fringe on the Grand Lama's robe, the Armani suits on his Uzi-toting bodyguards, and the scrimshaw on the yak-butter skull-candle he lights and blows out three times while chanting "Obama! Obama! Llama Alpaca Obama!", the Heavenly Grand Council releases itself from the harsh bonds of existence, identifies its successor, asks all employees to remove their personal belongings from their offices, and instructs senior eunuchs to report for temporary detention.

How Many of You Expect to Die?

How Many of You Expect to Die?, Dr. Joanne Lynn asked:

The audience fell silent, laughed nervously and only then, looking one to the other, slowly raised their hands.

“Would you prefer to be old when it happens?” she then asked.

This time the response was swift and sure, given the alternative.

Then Dr. Lynn, who describes herself as an “old person in training,” offered three options to the room. Who would choose cancer as the way to go? Just a few. Chronic heart failure, or emphysema? A few more.

“So all the rest of you are up for frailty and dementia?” Dr. Lynn asked.

On the screen above the dais, she showed graphs describing the three most common ways that old people die and the trajectory and duration of each scenario. Cancer deaths, which peak at age 65, usually come after many years of good health followed by a few weeks or months of steep decline, according to Dr. Lynn’s data. The 20 percent of Americans who die this way need excellent medical care during the long period of high functioning, she said, and then hospice support for both patient and family during the sprint to death.

Deaths from organ failure, generally heart or lung disease, peak among patients 10 years older, killing about one in four Americans around age 75 after a far bumpier course. These patients’ lives are punctuated by bouts of severe illness alternating with periods of relative stability. At some point rescue attempts fail, and then death is sudden. What these patients and families need, Dr. Lynn said, is consistent disease management to head off crises, aggressive intervention at the first hint of trouble and advance planning for how to manage the final emergency.

The third option, death following extended frailty and dementia, is everyone’s worst nightmare, an interminable and humiliating series of losses for the patient, and an exhausting and potentially bankrupting ordeal for the family. Approximately 40 percent of Americans, generally past age 85, follow this course, said Dr. Lynn, and the percentage will grow with improvements in prevention and treatment of cancer, heart disease and pulmonary disease.

These are the elderly who for years on end must depend on the care of loved ones, usually adult daughters, or the kindness of strangers, the aides who care for them at home or in nursing facilities. This was my mother’s fate, and she articulated it with mordant humor: The reward for living past age 85 and avoiding all the killer diseases, she said, is that you get to rot to death instead.

You can see why people don't want to think about this.

Hitler's Democracy

Anyone interested in overthrowing democracy, Mencius Moldbug notes, desperately needs to read the great memoir of Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen, published in English as The Answers but better translated as The Questionnaire. (The title is a reference to the denazification questionnaires which all Germans seeking any responsible postwar position had to complete.)

Salomon, a strident nationalist but not a Nazi, shares some thoughts on the Nazis:

At that time — it was high summer of 1922 and the Oberammergau Passion Play was being acted — Munich was filled with foreigners. Even the natives had not the time to attend big political rallies. Thus I did not even have a chance to hear Hitler — and now I shall go to my grave without ever having once attended a meeting where I could hear this most remarkable figure of the first half of the twentieth century speak in person.

"What does he actually say?" I asked the Kapitän's adjutant.

"He says more or less this," the adjutant began, and it was significant that he could not help mimicking the throaty voice with the vengeful undertones, "he says, quite calmly: 'My enemies have sneered at me, saying that you can't attack a tank with a walking stick...' Then his voice gets louder and he says: 'But I tell you...' And then he shouts with the utmost intensity: '... that a man who hasn't the guts to attack a tank with a walking stick will achieve nothing!' And then there's tremendous, senseless applause."

The Kapitän said: "Tanks I know nothing about. But I do know that a man who tries to ram an iron-clad with a fishing smack isn't a hero. He's an idiot."

I know not whether the Kapitän, lacking in powers of oratory as he was, found Hitler's methods of influencing the masses as repugnant as I did, but I assumed this to be the case. I also obscurely felt that for the Kapitän, deeply involved in his political concept, to be carried forward on the tide of a mass movement must seem unclean. Policy could only be laid down from 'above,' not from 'below.' The state must always think for the people, never through the people. Again I obscurely felt that there could be no compromise here, that all compromise would mean falsification.

But it was precisely his effect on the masses that led to Hitler's success in Munich. He employed new methods of propaganda, hitherto unthought of. The banners of his party were everywhere to be seen, as was the gesture of recognition, the raised right arm, used by his supporters; the deliberate effort involved in this gesture was in itself indicative of faith. And everywhere was to be heard the greeting, the slogan Heil Hitler! Never before had a man dared to include his essentially private name in an essentially public phrase. It implied among his followers a degree of self-alienation that was perhaps significant; no longer could the individual establish direct contact with his neighbour — this third party was needed as intermediary.

This portion, from ten pages later, may lack colorful anecdotes, but it makes a jarring point:

The word 'democracy' is one that I have only very rarely, and with great reluctance, employed. I do not know what it is and I have never yet met anyone who could explain its meaning to me in terms that I am capable of understanding. But I fear that Hitler's assertion — that his ideological concept was the democratic concept — will prove a hard one to refute. The enlightenment of the world from a single, central position, the winning of mass support through convincing arguments, the legitimate road to power by way of the ballot-box, the legitimisation by the people itself of power achieved — I fear it is hard to deny that these are democratic stigmata, revelatory perhaps of democracy in a decadent and feverish form, but democratic none the less. I further fear that the contrary assertion — that the totalitarian system as set up by Hitler was not democratic — will prove a hard one to justify. The totalitarian state is the exact opposite of the authoritarian state, which latter, of course, bears no democratic stigmata but hierarchical ones instead. Some people seem to believe that forms of government are estimable in accordance with their progressive development; since totalitarianism is certainly more modern than the authoritarian state system, they must logically give Hitler the advantage in the political field.

In case Salomon isn't quite clear, Mencius paraphrases his theory of Hitler and the State:

Salomon, and his hero Kapitän Ehrhardt, were essentially militarists and monarchists, believers in the old Prussian system of government. In 1849 when Friedrich Wilhelm IV refused to "accept a crown from the gutter" (in other words, to become constitutional monarch of Germany under an English-style liberal system created by the Revolutions of 1848), he was expressing much the same philosophy.

While there is more mysticism to it, and anyone raised in a democratic society must cringe instinctively at the militaristic tone, Salomon's philosophy is more or less the same as neocameralism. (Understandably, since after all it was Frederick the Great who gave us cameralism.) Salomon's view of public opinion is mine: that it simply has nothing to do with the difficult craft of state administration, any more than the passengers' views on aerodynamics are relevant to the pilot of a 747. In particular, most Americans today know next to nothing about the reality of Washington, and frankly I don't see why they should have to learn.

In the totalitarian system as practiced by Hitler and the Bolsheviks, public opinion is not irrelevant at all. Oh, no. It is the cement that holds the regime together. Most people do not know, for example, of the frequent plebiscites by which the Nazis validated their power. But they do have a sense that Nazism was broadly popular, at least until the war, and they are right. Moreover, even a totalitarian regime that does not elicit genuine popularity can, like the Bolsheviks, elicit the pretense of popularity, and this has much the same power.

When describing any political design, a good principle to follow is that the weak are never the masters of the strong. If the design presents itself as one in which the weak control the strong, try erasing the arrowhead on the strong end and redrawing it on the weak end. Odds are you will end up with a more realistic picture. Popular sovereignty was a basic precept of both the Nazi and Bolshevik designs, and in both the official story was that the Party expressed the views of the masses. In reality, of course, the Party controlled those views. Thus the link which Salomon draws between democracy and the Orwellian mind-control state, two tropes which we children of progress were raised to imagine as the ultimate opposites.

Salomon is obviously not a libertarian, or at least not as much of a libertarian as me, and I suspect that what disturbs him is less the corruption of public opinion by the German state, than the corruption of the German state by public opinion. Regardless of the direction, the phenomenon was a feedback loop that, in the case of Nazism, led straight to perdition.

Our Electric Future

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, argues for Our Electric Future — with illustrations by John Hersey:









I find his history more compelling than his proposed future:

In the early 1970s, President Nixon kicked off Project Independence, defining a national goal in his State of the Union address: “At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need to provide our jobs, to heat our homes, and to keep our transportation moving.”

The failure to meet that goal was dramatic.

After Nixon, president after president set similar goals. Every target was missed. We became more and more dependent on imported petroleum. Net energy imports doubled between 1970 and 1980, and then again by 1990.

Extravagant Pensions Are Killing General Motors

Roger Lowenstein, writing in the New York Times, argues that extravagant pensions are killing General Motors — which is fairly uncontentious — before veering into brazenly political and self-contradictory territory:

The sorry decline of General Motors has proved Reuther right: the government is the better provider of social insurance. Let industry worry about selling products.

Unhappily, however, the fate of many public-sector pension plans is even worse than G.M.’s. Responding to the same temptation to offload expenses into the future, public employers have committed to trillions of dollars in future liabilities. In New Jersey, a huge pension liability has created a budgetary nightmare for the state. The city of Vallejo, Calif., burdened by police pensions, recently filed for bankruptcy.

Just as G.M.’s shareholders bore the burdens of its pensions, states and cities will have to force taxpayers to sacrifice in the form of service cuts, tax increases or both.

(Emphasis mine.)

Supremacy by Stealth

Robert Kaplan offers his rules for Supremacy by Stealth:

1. Produce More Joppolos
2. Stay on the Move
3. Emulate Second-Century Rome
4. Use the Military to Promote Democracy
5. Be Light and Lethal
6. Bring Back the Old Rules
7. Remember the Philippines
8. The Mission Is Everything
9. Fight on Every Front
10. Speak Victorian, Think Pagan

The last of those rules became one of the sub-titles of the Coming Anarchy blog:

Imperialism in antiquity was in many respects a strain of isolationism: the demand for absolute security at home led powers to try to dominate the world around them. That pagan-Roman model of imperialism contrasts sharply with the altruistic Victorian one, exemplified by Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone in his comment about protecting “the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan.” Americans are truly idealistic by nature, but even if we weren’t, our historical and geographical circumstances would necessitate that U.S. foreign policy be robed in idealism, so as to garner public support and ultimately be effective. And yet security concerns necessarily make our foreign policy more pagan. The idealistic shorthand of “democracy,” “economic development,” and “human rights,” by means of which the media make sense of events in distant parts of the world, conceals many harsh and complicated ground-level truths. Remember that even Gladstone’s vision was more effectively implemented by the realpolitik of statesmen such as Lord Palmerston and Benjamin Disraeli, who kept illiberal empires like Germany and Russia at bay and retook Sudan from Islamic extremists.

By sustaining ourselves first, we will be able to do the world the most good. Some 200 countries, plus thousands of NGOs represent a chaos of interests. Without the organizing force of a great and self-interested liberal power, they are unable to advance the interests of humanity as a whole…

Robert Conquest's Three Laws of Politics

Robert Conquest's Three Laws of Politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

John Derbyshire adds this:

Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the Church of England and Amnesty International as examples. Of the Third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actually is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies — e.g. the postwar British secret service.

John Moore thinks the third law is almost right; it should read "assume that it is controlled by a cabal of the enemies of the stated purpose of that bureaucracy."

Francis W. Porretto notes that Cyril Northcote Parkinson studied the same phenomenon of bureaucratic behavior:

Parkinson promulgated a number of laws of bureaucracy that serve to explain a huge percentage of its characteristics. They've exhibited remarkable predictive power within their domain. The first of these is the best known:

Parkinson's First Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson inferred this effect from two central principles governing the behavior of bureaucrats:

1. Officials want to multiply subordinates, not rivals.
2. Officials make work for one another.

Like most generalizations, these are not always true...but the incentives that apply specifically to tax-funded government bureaucracies make them true much more often than not. They make a striking contrast with the almost exactly opposite behavior observable in private enterprise.
[...]
That young bureaucrat will profit from deliberate ineffectiveness to the extent that he can get himself viewed as an asset by his superiors and a non-threat by his peers. His superiors want him to produce justifications for the enlargement of their domains. His peers simply ask that he not tread on their provinces.

Miltion Friedman noted that bureaucratic resource allocation involves spending other people's money on other people, so there are no compelling reasons to control either cost or quality — but a bureaucrat will learn, given time, how to "spend on others" in such a fashion that the primary benefit flows to himself.

To do this, bureaucrats must manage perceptions, so that their work seems both necessary and successful:

Von Clausewitz and others have termed war "a continuation of politics by other means," but when viewed from the perspective of the State Department official, war is the declaration that his organization has failed of its purpose. He sees it as bad public relations for his entire function. Thus, even when the nation's interests would be overwhelmingly better served by war than by the continuation of diplomacy, the State Department man will prefer diplomacy. It's in his demesne, and enhances his prestige by enhancing the prestige of his trade.

It's not too much to say that averting war regardless of its desirability or justifiability is near the top of every State Department functionary's list of priorities. In this pursuit, the State Department will often find itself opposing even peacetime operations of the military designed to improve its effectiveness, such as the acquisition of new weapons or the enlargement of its ranks.

Both Pills Claim To Be Red

Mencius Moldbug summarizes the problem of bad government — and progress:

The leading cause of violent death and misery galore in the modern era is bad government. Most of us grew up thinking we live in a time and place in which Science and Democracy, which put a man on the moon and brought him back with Tang, have either cured this ill or reduced it to a manageable and improving condition. That is, most of us grew up believing — and most Americans, whatever their party registration, still believe — in progress.

Both these statements are facts. But there are two ways to interpret the second. Either (a), blue pill, the belief in progress is an accurate assessment of reality, or (b), red pill, it isn't. Our pills correspond to visions of the future, and neither is my invention. The blue pill is marked millennium. The red pill is marked anakyklosis.

To choose (b), we have to believe that hundreds of millions of people living in a more or less free society, many of whom are literate and even reasonably knowledgeable, completely misunderstand reality — and more specifically, history. A hard pill to swallow? Not at all, because the blue pill tastes just as big going down. To believe in progress, you have to believe that similar numbers of our ancestors were just as misguided — enthralled by racism, classism, and other nefarious "ideologies," from which humanity is in the progress of cleansing itself.

Both pills, in other words, claim to be red. But when we note that progressive ideas flow freely through the most influential circles in our society, whereas reactionary ideas are scorned, marginalized and often even criminalized, we can tell the difference.

In case you're not familiar with his red- and blue-pill explanations, I've discussed them before.

Anyway, here's a thought experiment on progress:

Imagine that there had been no scientific or technical progress at all during the 20th century. That the government of 2008 had to function with the technical base of 1908. Surely, if the quality of government has increased or even just remained constant, its performance with the same tools should be just as good. And with better technology, it should do even better.

But without computers, cell phones or even motor vehicles, 19th-century America could rebuild destroyed cities instantly — at least, instantly by today's standards. Imagine what this vanished society, which if we could see it with our own eyes would strike us as no less foreign than any country in the world today, could accomplish if it got its hands on 21st-century gadgets — without any of the intervening social and political progress.

When we think of progress we tend to think of two curves summed. X, the change in our understanding and control of nature, slopes upward except in the most dire circumstances — the fall of Rome, for example. But X is a confounding variable. Y, the change in our quality of government, is the matter at hand. Extracting Y from X+Y is not a trivial exercise.

But broad thought-experiments — like imagining what would become of 1908 America, if said continent magically popped up in the mid-Atlantic in 2008, and had to modernize and compete in the global economy — tell a different story. I am very confident that Old America would be the world's leading industrial power within the decade, and I suspect it would attract a lot of immigration from New America. The seeds of decay were there, certainly, but they had hardly begun to sprout. At least by today's standards.

Surely a healthy, stable society should be able to thrive in a steady state without any technical improvements at all. But if we imagine the 20th century without technical progress, we see an almost pure century of disaster. Even when we restrict our imagination to the second half of the twentieth century, to imagine the America of 2008 reduced to the technology of 1950 is a bleak, bleak thought. If you are still taking the blue pills, to what force do you ascribe this anomalous decay?

Whereas the red pill gives us an easy explanation: a decaying system of government has been camouflaged and ameliorated by the advance of technology. Of course, X may overcome Y and lead us to the Singularity, in which misgovernment is no more troublesome than acne. Or Y may overcome X, and produce the Antisingularity — a new fall of Rome. It's a little difficult to invent self-inventing AI when you're eating cold beans behind the perimeter of a refugee camp in Redwood Shores, and Palo Alto is RPG squeals, mortar whumps and puffs of black smoke on the horizon, as the Norteños and the Zetas finally have it out over the charred remains of your old office park. Unlikely, sure, but do you understand the X-Y interaction well enough to preclude this outcome? Because I don't.

Swallowing the red pill leads us, like Neo, into a completely different reality. In reality (b), bad government has not been defeated at all. History is not over. Oh, no. We are still living it. Perhaps we are in the positions of the French of 1780 or the Russians of 1914, who had no idea that the worlds they lived in could degenerate so rapidly into misery and terror.

Is the abyss this close? I don't think so, but surely the materials are present.

Bureaucratic Sclerosis

Most observers interpret bureaucratic sclerosis as a sign of a government which is too powerful, Mencius Moldbug notes:

In fact it is a sign of a government which is too weak. If seventeen officials need to provide signoff for you to repaint the fence in your front yard, this is not because George W. Bush, El Maximo Jefe, was so concerned about the toxicity of red paint that he wants to make seventeen-times-sure that no wandering fruit flies are spattered with the nefarious chemical. It is because a lot of people have succeeded in making work for themselves, and that work has been spread wide and well. They are thriving off tiny pinhole leaks through which power leaks out of the State. A strong [sovereign] would plug the leaks, and retire the officials.

Outside the Communist bloc proper, of course, the ultimate in power leakage and resulting bureaucracy was India's infamous Permit Raj, which still to some extent exists. Needless to say, if the subcontinent was run on a profit basis, the Permit Raj would not be good business. In fact, quite amusingly and with no apparent sense of irony, our favorite newspaper recently printed an article in which the following lines appear:

Vietnam’s biggest selling point for many companies is its political stability. Like China, it has a nominally Communist one-party system that crushes dissent, keeps the military under tight control and changes government policies and leaders slowly.

“Communism means more stability,” Mr. Shu, the chief financial officer of Texhong, said, voicing a common view among Asian executives who make investment decisions. At least a few American executives agree, although they never say so on the record.

Democracies like those in Thailand and the Philippines have proved more vulnerable to military coups and instability. A military coup in Thailand in September 2006 was briefly followed by an attempt, never completed, to impose nationalistic legislation penalizing foreign companies.

“That sent the wrong signal that we would not welcome foreign investment — this has ruined the confidence of investors locally and internationally,” the finance minister Surapong Suebwonglee said in an interview in Bangkok.

The ironies! Of course, perhaps it is not so ironic after all, as perhaps the main reason that the old China Hands, the men (such as Owen Lattimore) who by "manipulating procedural outcomes" gave China to Mao, thought the Communists were the shizzle is that they were obviously so strong. America could really do great things in Asia with the ruthlessly indoctrinated divisions of the PLA on its side, as opposed to Chiang Kai-Shek, who looked like his main interests were opium and little boys.

After fifty million deaths and the annihilation of traditional Chinese culture, what still remains is that strength. There is not much antinomianism in China, which has reduced its totalitarian pretensions to one simple and easily-obeyed rule: do not challenge the Party for power. The result, though profoundly flawed, is the most successful capitalist country in the world. All things considered, it is certainly one of the best to do business in — as the article describes.

The Favorite Sport of Young Aristocrats

Why is antinomianism — clamoring for "change" — so popular?

Because people love power, and any movement with the power to destroy anything, or even just "change" it, has just that: power.

Antinomianism allows young aristocrats to engage in the activity that has been the favorite sport of young aristocrats since Alcibiades was a little boy: scheming for power. According to this article, for example, there are "over 7500 nonprofits" in the Bay Area, "3800 of which deal with sustainability issues." These appear to employ approximately half of our fair city's jeunesse dorée, occupying the best years of their lives and paying them squat. Meanwhile, container ships full of empty boxes thunder out the Golden Gate, along with approximately two trillion dollars a year of little green pieces of paper.

Interests and Convictions

In Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, H. W. Brands has this to say about interests and convictions:

In politics perhaps more than in most other arenas of human endeavor, interests and convictions tend to coincide. Whether convictions produce interests, or interests convictions, differs from person to person. But whatever their genesis, convictions and interests almost invariably end up pointing in the same direction. Those who can't master the coincidence don't succeed in politics, and they leave the game to those who can.

The Simple Anarchist

Mencius Moldbug notes that the most common species of antinomian — his term for Leftist — is the simple anarchist:

The most bloodthirsty and intrusive states of the 20th century were based on a philosophy — Marxism — which saw itself as fundamentally opposed to government. People really did believe that the socialist paradise would be something other than a state.

Near where I live, on one of the most fashionable shopping streets in the world, is an anarchist bookstore. On its side wall is a mural.

The mural contains two slogans:

History remembers 2 kinds of people, those who kill and those who fight back.

Anarchism strives toward a social organization which will establish well-being for all.

I am flabbergasted by how revealing these slogans are. History, at least when written by honest historians, remembers one kind of people: those who kill. It also notes that those who kill always conceive of themselves as "fighting back." As for "a social organization," it is simply our old friend, the State.

Thus, anarchism defines itself: it is an attempt to capture the state, and its juicy revenues, through extortion, robbery and murder. When it succeeds, it will distribute the loot among its accomplices, and "establish well-being for all." At least in theory.

As we've seen, the one thing an antinomian cannot abide is a formal and immutable distribution of the revenues of state. He must constantly redistribute, he must wash his hands on the stream of cash, giving to Peter and taking from Paul, or his supporters have no reason to support him. In other words, he is basically a criminal.

Businessman who grabbed a thug for smashing a window is charged with assault

I've heard enough stories like this to find it plausible. Businessman who grabbed a thug for smashing a window is charged with assault:

Mr Kink was sitting in his wife's town centre bar in Weymouth, Dorset, when he heard a security alarm go off.

He went outside and confronted two men stood near to the Phone Zone store which had a smashed window.

Mr Kink, who is registered disabled following a motorcycle accident 20 years ago, said he was met with a volley of abuse from the pair before being hit.

He said: '"I accused one of them of smashing the window and he said "'what the f*** has it got to do with you?"

'He then took a swing at me and punched me just under my left eye. I grabbed hold of him and managed to sweep one of his legs from under him and I held him there by putting the toe of my shoe on his shoulder blade.

'There were lots of other people around at this stage and somebody had hold of the other bloke he was with. When the police arrived I stepped back and he kicked off at them. When he was put in the police car he tried to kick in the windows.'

A few days later police turned up at Mr Kink's home. 'There were three police officers and a dog handler there. They told me I was being arrested for assault,' he said.

Just one more example of Britain slowly destroying itself, I suppose.

Rush Who?

Former-Finn Ilkka at The Fourth Checkraise asks, I wonder how many random people outside America, if you asked them, could tell you who Rush Limbaugh is:

Way less than one percent, I'm sure. Which is pretty amazing when you remember that he is currently the highest-paid media personality in America, having just signed a new contract worth $400 million. (How many other media figures well enough known to be household names would you need to add up to get to that?) Yet the media silence about him is absolutely airtight, almost as if he didn't even exist at all. Every other celebrity or political figure, major and minor, gets at least an occasional nod, but I really have to stretch my memory to remember the last time Rush got anything at all, other than that schadenfreude Oxycontin case. Perhaps this best illustrates the extent that society and media becoming deeply fragmented since those good old times when only the major networks existed and continuously parroted the official party line.

The present state of affairs is unsatisfactory

Antinomians — those seeking Change, in Moldbug's parlance — believe that the present state of affairs is unsatisfactory:

So, of course, do I. The nomos is horribly corroded and encrusted with all sorts of gunk. However, the pronomian's goal is to discern the real structure of order under this heap of garbage, scrape it down to the bare skeleton, replace any missing bones, and let the healthy tissue of reality grow around it.

To the pronomian, this structure is arbitrary. Weirdly-shaped borders? Leave them as they are. High taxes? All that tax revenue is paid to someone, who probably thinks of it as his property. Who am I to say it isn't? There are some property structures, notably patent rights, which I (like most libertarians) find very unproductive. If so, the government needs to print money and buy them back. Fortunately, it has a large, high-speed intaglio press.

The pronomian seeks to restore the nomos, whose outlines are clear under the mountain of byzantine procedure, wholesale makework and vote-buying, criminal miseducation, and other horrors of the liberal-democratic state. The antinomian sees many of the same horrors. But he does not share the pronomian's goal: minimizing the reallocation of property and authority. Where the pronomian simply wants to replace the management, reorganize the staff, and discard the inscrutable volumes of precedent that have absconded with the name of law, the antinomian wants to destroy power structures that he conceives as illegitimate.

And, of course, he wants to rebuild them according to his ideals. Unless he is a complete nihilist, which of course some are. But it is the destructive tendency that makes antinomianism so successful. The utopia is never constructed, or if it is it is not a utopia. Success is a precondition to utopia, and success involves achieving the power to destroy.

Jefferson Bible

I'm not sure why the LA Times would consider this news, but it just published a piece on the so-called Jefferson Bible:

Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper -- alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.

In a letter sent from Monticello to John Adams in 1813, Jefferson said his "wee little book" of 46 pages was based on a lifetime of inquiry and reflection and contained "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man."

He called the book "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Friends dubbed it the Jefferson Bible.

The big question, according to Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, is this:

"Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, 'I only believe these parts?'" [...]
In Jefferson's version of the Gospels, for example, Jesus is still wrapped in swaddling clothes after his birth in Bethlehem. But there's no angel telling shepherds watching their flocks by night that a savior has been born. Jefferson retains Jesus' crucifixion but ends the text with his burial, not with the resurrection.

The tactical error of the libertarian

The tactical error of the libertarian, Mencius Moldbug notes, is to believe that the state can be made smaller and simpler by making it weaker:

Historically, the converse is the case: attempts to weaken [a sovereign] either destroy it, resulting in chaos and death, or force it to compensate by enlarging, resulting in the familiar "red-giant state." The pronomian prefers a state that is small, simple, and very strong. It respects the rights of its clients not because it is forced to respect them, but because it has a financial incentive to respect them, and it obeys that financial incentive because it is managed responsibly and effectively.

Brilliant or a sham? Questions asked over Ingrid Betancourt rescue

Kidnapping is big business and has been for some time, but no one wants to admit that they pay off — and thus encourage — kidnappers.

It didn't take long for some to wonder, Was the Ingrid Betancourt rescue brilliant or a sham?

Swiss public radio cited an unidentified source “close to the events, reliable and tested many times in recent years" as saying the operation had in fact been staged to cover up the fact that the US and Colombians had paid $20 million for their freedom. [...]
French media have also raised questions about Ms Betancourt’s relatively healthy appearance after her release, compared with the gaunt and haggard look of her last video from captivity. French state radio suggested the hostages may have been given food and medicine to return them to health before their release. There was no suggestion that the hostages knew they were to be released.

Dominique Moisi, one of France's leading foreign policy experts, said that it was “probable” that the Farc had been paid money as part of the "infiltration" of their command. “They were bought in order to turn them around, like Mafia chiefs," he said on French state television, as Ms Betancourt's plane was taxiing up to the terminal in Paris.

This wouldn't be the first time a Latin American regime faked a rescue operation.

Kyklos

According to Polybius, the kyklos, or political cycle, rotates through three forms of government — democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy — and the degenerate forms of each of those three — ochlocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny:

Originally society is in anarchy but the strongest figure emerges and sets up a monarchy. The monarch's descendants, who because of their family's power lack virtue, become despots and the monarchy degenerates into a tyranny. Because the excesses of the ruler the tyranny is overthrown by the leading citizens of the state who set up an aristocracy. They too quickly forget about virtue and the state becomes an oligarchy. These oligarchs are overthrown by the people who set up a democracy. Democracy soon becomes corrupt and degenerates into mob rule, beginning the cycle anew.

The truth about left and right

Mencius Moldbug reveals the truth about left and right — or, as he refers to them, pronomian and antinomian, meaning for or against the formal promises — property rights and contracts — already in place in a society:

An antinomian is anyone who seeks, consciously or unconsciously, to disrupt or destroy the nomos. He is a breaker of oaths, a burner of deeds, a mocker of laws — at least, from the pronomian perspective. From his own perspective he is a champion of freedom and justice.

I admit it: I am a pronomian. I endorse the nomos without condition.

Mencius is almost a libertarian, and he considers libertarianism the most refined form of modern antinomianism:

Libertarianism is a fine example of the antinomian form, because the elements of the nomos that it attacks are specified with the elegant design sense that one would expect from the founder of modern libertarianism — probably the 20th century's greatest political theorist, Murray Rothbard.

Rothbardian libertarianism rejects two aspects of the nomos. First, it rejects the entire concept of [...] sovereignty. Rothbardians are called anarcho-capitalists for a reason: they deny the legitimacy of the state, unless operated according to strict Rothbardian principles. Note that they do not require, say, Disney to operate Disneyland according to libertarian principles. This is because, to a Rothbardian, Disney's title to Disneyland is legitimate, whereas (say) Iceland's title to Iceland is not.

Rothbard has an intricate system, borrowed originally from Locke, for determining whether or not a title is legitimate. To say that this system is unamenable to objective interpretation is to put it mildly. But the titles of existing [sovereigns] all appear to be illegitimate. This makes libertarianism a revolutionary ideology. Since its antinomianism is so restricted and its lust for blood is minimal, however, it is not an especially dangerous (or effective) one.

Antinomians who reject sovereignty have two main alternatives. Either they support private, amorphous, and even territorially overlapping "protection agencies" (a design whose military plausibility is, to put it kindly, small), or they believe that government is legitimate if and only if it obeys a set of "natural laws." Again here we see the proximity to the pronomian. But the Rothbardian concept of natural law misses the Hobbesian fact that in the true nomos, there is no party that can enforce a state's promises to its clients.

This matters, because legalism without sovereignty has a simple result: the personal rule of judges. The error is to imagine the existence of a superhuman legal authority which can bind a state against itself, enforcing a "government of laws, not men." As the bizarre encrustations of precedent that history builds up around every written constitution demonstrate, this is simply a political perpetual-motion device. All governments are governments of men. If final decisions are taken by a council of nine, these nine are the nine who rule. Whether you call them a court, a junta or a politburo is irrelevant.

(Emphasis mine.)

Japan Sees a Chance to Promote Its Energy-Frugal Ways

Japan Sees a Chance to Promote Its Energy-Frugal Ways — which it pursued even when energy prices were low:

With its towering furnaces and clanging conveyer belts carrying crushed rock, Taiheiyo Cement’s factory looks like an Industrial Revolution relic. But it is actually a model of modern energy efficiency, harnessing its waste heat to generate much of its own electricity.
[...]
Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which makes the waste heat generator at the cement factory in Kumagaya, started developing the technology in 1979. But the generators were too expensive to sell outside Japan while energy prices were low. But overseas orders took off three years ago, after energy prices began rising.

Since then, the company has sold 64 units, mainly through a joint venture in China.

“Japan rushed to embrace these technologies back in the 1980s,” said Katsushi Sorida, head of the waste heat plant department at Kawasaki Plant Systems, a subsidiary that markets and installs the units. “Now the rest of the world is finally catching up.”

I suppose the rest of the world is "catching up" because it finally makes sense to spend massive resources to reduce energy waste.

Japan's forced-conservation regulations led it to use less energy when energy was cheap:

According to the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, Japan consumed half as much energy per dollar worth of economic activity as the European Union or the United States, and one-eighth as much as China and India in 2005. While the country is known for green products like hybrid cars, most of its efficiency gains have been in less eye-catching areas, for example, in manufacturing.

Corporate Japan has managed to keep its overall annual energy consumption unchanged at the equivalent of a little more than a billion barrels of oil since the early 1970s, according to Economy Ministry data. It was able to maintain that level even as the economy doubled in size during the country’s boom years of the 1970s and ’80s.

Japan’s strides in efficiency are clearest in heavy industries like steel, which are the nation’s biggest consumers of power. From 1972 to 2006, the Japanese steel industry invested about $45 billion in developing energy-saving technologies, according to the Japan Iron and Steel Federation.

The results are visible at the Keihin mill on Tokyo Bay, run by Japan’s No. 2 steelmaker, JFE Steel. Massive steel ducts snake from the blast furnaces and surrounding buildings. These capture heat and gases that had previously been released into the air or burned off as waste. Now, they are used to power generators that produce 90 percent of the plant’s electricity. (The plant’s main fuel remains the coal used to heat its huge blast furnaces.)

Such innovations allow the mill to produce a ton of steel using 35 percent less energy than it did three decades ago, said Yoshitsugu Iino, group leader of JFE Steel’s climate change policy group. Mr. Iino calculates that if the global steel industry adopted Japanese conservation measures, it could reduce carbon emissions by some 300 million tons a year.

The cracks are showing

The cracks are showing, The Economist says:

For the past few years it has been hard to ignore America’s crumbling infrastructure, from the devastating breach of New Orleans’s levees after Hurricane Katrina to the collapse of a big bridge in Minneapolis last summer. In 2005 the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that $1.6 trillion was needed over five years to bring just the existing infrastructure into good repair. This does not account for future needs. By 2020 freight volumes are projected to be 70% greater than in 1998. By 2050 America’s population is expected to reach 420m, 50% more than in 2000. Much of this growth will take place in metropolitan areas, where the infrastructure is already run down.
[...]
America has a grand tradition of national planning, from Thomas Jefferson’s vision for roads and canals in 1808, which influenced policy for the next century (and led to America’s first transcontinental railway) to Dwight Eisenhower’s Federal Highway-Aid Act of 1956, which created the interstate system. Such plans stand in stark contrast to the federal government’s strategy today. America invests a mere 2.4% of GDP in infrastructure, compared with 5% in Europe and 9% in China, and the distribution of that money is misguided. The more roads and drivers a state has, the more federal money it receives, explains Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funds infrastructure research. This discourages states from trying to cut traffic. And because the petrol tax pays for transport projects, if America drives less, there is less money for infrastructure.

I'd hardly call it misguided to base interstate highway funding on "petrol" taxes, or to base maintenance funding on how many roads and drivers a state has.

Now basing other transportation funding on "petrol" taxes, sure, that doesn't make much sense — but funding them at all often makes little sense:

Even worse is the influence of the pork-barrel. Only around 20 states use cost-benefit analyses to evaluate transport projects; of these, just six do so regularly. Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere” is an infamous result of this sort of planning. But it is not exceptional. Two months after the bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, the Senate approved a transport and housing bill that included money for a stadium in Montana and a museum in Las Vegas.

It's not just transportation infrastructure that's crumbling — although that is definitely crumbling:

America’s ageing water infrastructure is sorely underfunded: the Environmental Protection Agency forecasts an $11 billion annual gap in meeting costs over the next 20 years. One heavy storm can cause ageing urban sewerage systems to overflow. Last summer an 83-year-old pipe in Manhattan burst, sending a geyser of steam and debris into the air. Competition for water itself has become vicious. Georgia and Tennessee are in an all-out brawl over it.

America’s transport network is similarly dysfunctional, says a recent Urban Land Institute report. Important gateways, such as the ports in Los Angeles and New York, are choked. Flight delays cost at least $15 billion each year in lost productivity. Commutes are more dismal than ever. Congestion on roads costs $78 billion annually in the form of 4.2 billion lost hours and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted petrol, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. Although a growing number of Americans are travelling by train, the railways are old. America’s only “high-speed” train runs between Boston and Washington, DC, on an inadequate track.

How can all this be fixed? In January a national commission on transport policy recommended that the government should invest at least $225 billion each year for the next 50 years. The country is spending less than 40% of that amount today.

Of course, we shouldn't be surprised that all sorts of groups find that the government should spend more money — generally federal money spent in a few cities or states.

It is acceptable to discriminate against Roma

Italy's highest appeal court has ruled that it is acceptable to discriminate against Romait is acceptable to discriminate against Roma [Gypsies] on the grounds that they are thieves:

The judgment, made public yesterday, comes amid a nationwide clampdown on the Roma community by Silvio Berlusconi's government. Last week his interior minister, Roberto Maroni, announced plans to fingerprint all of Italy's Roma, including children.

The ruling by the court of cassation, which appears to provide judicial backing for the government's policies, was handed down in March, but reported only yesterday. The judges overthrew the conviction of six defendants who signed a leaflet demanding the expulsion of Verona's Gypsies in 2001.

Among those convicted of racially discriminatory propaganda was Flavio Tosi, an official of the anti-immigrant Northern League, who has since become Verona's mayor. He was quoted by a witness at his trial as having said afterwards: "The Gypsies must be ordered out because, wherever they arrive, there are robberies."

The court of cassation decided this did not show Tosi was a racist, but that he had "a deep aversion [to Roma] that was not determined by the Gypsy nature of the people discriminated against, but by the fact that all the Gypsies were thieves". His dislike of them was "not therefore based on a notion of superiority or racial hatred, but on racial prejudice". The judges scrapped the two-month jail sentences and ordered that the case be reheard.

Spain awards apes legal rights

Spain awards apes legal rights:

The Spanish parliament's environment committee last week approved resolutions for chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans to gain some statutory rights currently applicable only to humans. It is thought to be the first time a national legislature has taken such action.

The resolutions, which passed with cross-party support and are expected to be approved as laws by the full parliament within a year, are based on the Great Ape Project, a framework designed by scientists and philosophers who believe that humans' closest biological relatives deserve the right to life, liberty and protection from torture.

The laws will ban potentially harmful research, ape trading, profiting from apes, and using apes in performances. Zoos could still legally hold apes, but living conditions must be “optimal”.

Will this appease Grodd?

The rise and fall of European and Arab cities

Maarten Bosker, Eltjo Buringh, and Jan Luiten van Zanden look at 1000 years of urban history and examine the rise and fall of European and Arab cities:

There were striking differences between the two urban systems that reveal interesting insights into the socio-political situation in the two regions. Cities in the Arab world were on average much larger than those in Europe, and the size of the “primate” city — the megapolis such as Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo or Istanbul — was much bigger; a fact that is indicative of a predatory state and low trade openness. Europe, on the other hand, developed a very dense urban system, with relatively small principle cities. Big cities in Europe were quite often located near the sea, being able to optimally profit from long-distance trade, whereas the largest cities in the Arab world were almost all inland.

The sociologist Max Weber introduced a distinction between ‘consumer cities’ and ‘producer cities’. Using this classification, Arab cities were — much more than their European counterparts — consumer cities.

The classical consumer city is a centre of government and military protection or occupation, which supplies services — administration, protection — in return for taxes, land rent and non-market transactions. Such cities are intimately linked to the state in which they are embedded. The flowering of the state and the expansion of its territory and population tend to produce urban growth, in particular that of the capital city.

In Europ