Arabian Shatter Zone

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Robert Kaplan considers the Arabian Peninsula a shatter zone:

The vast tract of land controlled by the Saudi royal family is synonymous with Arabia in the way that India is synonymous with the subcontinent. But while India is heavily populated throughout, Saudi Arabia constitutes a geographically nebulous network of oases separated by massive waterless tracts. Highways and domestic air links are crucial to Saudi Arabia’s cohesion. Though India is built on an idea of democracy and religious pluralism, Saudi Arabia is built on loyalty to an extended family. But while India is virtually surrounded by troubling geography and dysfunctional states, Saudi Arabia’s borders disappear into harmless desert to the north and are shielded by sturdy, well-governed, self-contained sheikhdoms to the east and southeast.

Where Saudi Arabia is truly vulnerable, and where the shatter zone of Arabia is most acute, is in highly populous Yemen to the south. Although it has only a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s land area, Yemen’s population is almost as large, so the all-important demographic core of the Arabian Peninsula is crammed into its mountainous southwest corner, where sweeping basalt plateaus, rearing up into sand-castle formations and volcanic plugs, embrace a network of oases densely inhabited since antiquity. Because the Turks and the British never really controlled Yemen, they did not leave behind the strong bureaucratic institutions that other former colonies inherited.

When I traveled the Saudi-Yemen border some years back, it was crowded with pickup trucks filled with armed young men, loyal to this sheikh or that, while the presence of the Yemeni government was negligible. Mud-brick battlements hid the encampments of these rebellious sheikhs, some with their own artillery. Estimates of the number of firearms in Yemen vary, but any Yemeni who wants a weapon can get one easily. Meanwhile, groundwater supplies will last no more than a generation or two.

I’ll never forget what a U.S. military expert told me in the capital, Sanaa: “Terrorism is an entrepreneurial activity, and in Yemen you’ve got over 20 million aggressive, commercial-minded, and well-armed people, all extremely hard-working compared with the Saudis next door. It’s the future, and it terrifies the hell out of the government in Riyadh.” The future of teeming, tribal Yemen will go a long way to determining the future of Saudi Arabia. And geography, not ideas, has everything to do with it.

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan, War | No Comments »

Procedural City Source Code

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Shamus Young has finished off his Procedural City project and released PixelCity v1.0 for download.

In case you missed the demo when I mentioned it recently:

Posted in Games, Technology, Urbanism | No Comments »

The Bourgeois Revolution

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Joshua Kurlantzick examines the bourgeois revolution — against democracy:

But the difference is that the protesters in the 1990s were fighting for democracy against a coup that had toppled an elected government [in Thailand]. Despite its name, the People’s Alliance is explicitly antidemocratic. In its platform, the group seeks election reform measures that are basically meant to slash the power of the rural poor, who comprise the majority of Thais. In the minds of the Thai middle class, poor voters only vote for politicians like the populist Thaksin because they’re offered incentives such as a few baht on voting day. One former U.S. ambassador to Thailand puts it bluntly: The middle class “disdain[s] the rural masses and see[s] them as willing pawns to the corrupt vote buyers.” Instead of fighting for democratic rights, in other words, the People’s Alliance is protesting against them.

The movement goes well beyond Thailand:

This shift from a reformist middle class to a reactionary one over a mere two decades should be surprising. But, unfortunately, Thailand is not alone. Across the developing world, from Russia to Venezuela to Mexico, as democracy faces new threats — elected leaders who disdain its institutions, rising corruption, and nationalistic economic plans — middle classes, once the vanguard of democracy, have increasingly turned against it. For the first time in decades, democracy activists are beginning to wonder whether building a strong middle class solidifies or threatens freedom’s global spread. Yet because the middle-class-equals-democracy theory has become so entrenched, if it is proven wrong, activists, democracy-promotion groups, and world leaders will not know how to replace it. In other words, they won’t have a clue about how to actually build democracy.

If the middle-class-equals-democracy theory is entrenched, what do we call the democracy-equal-freedom theory? Fortified?

The middle class’s newfound disdain for democracy is counterintuitive. After all, as political and economic freedoms increase, its members often prosper because they are allowed more freedom to do business. But, paradoxically, as democracy gets stronger and the middle class grows richer, it can realize it has more to lose than gain from a real enfranchisement of society.

Soon after acquiring democracy, urban middle classes often grasp the frustrating reality that political change costs them power. Outnumbered at the ballot box, the middle class cannot stop populists such as Thaksin or Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Once the middle class realizes it cannot stop the elected tyrants, it also comes to another, shattering realization: If urban elites can no longer control elections, all of their privileges — social, economic, cultural — could be threatened.

Are the urban elites concerned about social, economic, and cultural privileges, or are they concerned about rule of law — and keeping their own property?

(Hat tip to Bryan Caplan.)

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Libertarian Democraphobia

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Like Arnold Kling, I’m not impressed with Will Wilkinson’s attack on so-called libertarian democraphobia — but I enjoyed this comment from Grant Gould:

At the risk of getting all Turner Thesis on things, the availability of the frontier create a different sort of culture, which in turn creates people with different intuitions, even among those people are not on the frontier. I think seasteading is a great idea not because I want to live in the middle of the North Pacific but because I want to free ride off of its cultural effect on those of us on land.

To take up cvd’s point above, it is fairly easy right now for politicians to engage in a particular sort of populist, nationalist discourse, in which there are few hard choices and lots of easy answers, in part because through a sort of Bayesian updating a voter cannot help but notice that every other country seems to go in for roughly the same sort of thing, so it can’t really be that bad. So long as that is an easy line of discourse, we should expect it to keep winning elections. We aren’t going to beat the public choice incentives in this sort of world.

To counter this irrational (but perhaps “rationally irrational”) fondness for impractical populism and nationalism, libertarianism needs a similarly irrationally appealing notion. Of the ones that have been tried, it’s hard to see any that have worked as systemically as the frontier. The notion of a frontier has a romance that the state seldom has managed to harness or even match.

A few hundred Ron Paul lunatics on a leaky barge with Friedman and Thiel could do more good for democracy than a hundred Catos. And if it actually works — so much the better!

Posted in Arnold Kling, Policy | No Comments »

Culture May Be Encoded in DNA

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Culture may be encoded in DNA — zebra finch DNA, that is:

Normally, male finches learn their complex courtship songs (MP3) from their uncles and fathers. But if there are no vocal role models around, the song will deviate from the traditional song and be harsh to female finch ears (MP3). Each bird, then, must learn from his father or uncles, as they learned from their fathers, and so on — but this can only take us so far down the lineage.

“It’s the classic ‘chicken and the egg’ puzzle,” Mitra said. “Learning may explain how the son copies its father’s song, but it doesn’t explain the origin of the father’s song.”

Mitra’s team wanted to find out what would happen if an isolated bird raised his own colony. As expected, birds raised in soundproof boxes grew up to sing cacophonous songs.

But then scientists let the isolated birds give voice lessons to a new round of hatchlings. They found that the young males imitated the songs — but they tweaked them slightly, bringing the structure closer to that of songs sung in the wild. When these birds grew up and became tutors, their pupils’ song continue to conform, with tweaks.

After three to four generations, the teachers were producing strapping young finches that belted out normal-sounding songs.

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Shatter Zones

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Robert Kaplan argues that the greater Middle East comprises several shatter zones:

Like rifts in the Earth’s crust that produce physical instability, there are areas in Eurasia that are more prone to conflict than others. These “shatter zones” threaten to implode, explode, or maintain a fragile equilibrium. And not surprisingly, they fall within that unstable inner core of Eurasia: the greater Middle East, the vast way station between the Mediterranean world and the Indian subcontinent that registers all the primary shifts in global power politics.

The Indian subcontinent is the first such shatter zone he describes:

It is defined on its landward sides by the hard geographic borders of the Himalayas to the north, the Burmese jungle to the east, and the somewhat softer border of the Indus River to the west. Indeed, the border going westward comes in three stages: the Indus; the unruly crags and canyons that push upward to the shaved wastes of Central Asia, home to the Pashtun tribes; and, finally, the granite, snow-mantled massifs of the Hindu Kush, transecting Afghanistan itself. Because these geographic impediments are not contiguous with legal borders, and because barely any of India’s neighbors are functional states, the current political organization of the subcontinent should not be taken for granted. You see this acutely as you walk up to and around any of these land borders, the weakest of which, in my experience, are the official ones — a mere collection of tables where cranky bureaucrats inspect your luggage. Especially in the west, the only border that lives up to the name is the Hindu Kush, making me think that in our own lifetimes the whole semblance of order in Pakistan and southeastern Afghanistan could unravel, and return, in effect, to vague elements of greater India.

In Nepal, the government barely controls the countryside where 85 percent of its people live. Despite the aura bequeathed by the Himalayas, nearly half of Nepal’s population lives in the dank and humid lowlands along the barely policed border with India. Driving throughout this region, it appears in many ways indistinguishable from the Ganges plain. If the Maoists now ruling Nepal cannot increase state capacity, the state itself could dissolve.

The same holds true for Bangladesh. Even more so than Nepal, it has no geographic defense to marshal as a state. The view from my window during a recent bus journey was of the same ruler-flat, aquatic landscape of paddy fields and scrub on both sides of the line with India. The border posts are disorganized, ramshackle affairs. This artificial blotch of territory on the Indian subcontinent could metamorphose yet again, amid the gale forces of regional politics, Muslim extremism, and nature itself.

Like Pakistan, no Bangladeshi government, military or civilian, has ever functioned even remotely well. Millions of Bangladeshi refugees have already crossed the border into India illegally. With 150 million people — a population larger than Russia — crammed together at sea level, Bangladesh is vulnerable to the slightest climatic variation, never mind the changes caused by global warming. Simply because of its geography, tens of millions of people in Bangladesh could be inundated with salt water, necessitating the mother of all humanitarian relief efforts. In the process, the state itself could collapse.

Of course, the worst nightmare on the subcontinent is Pakistan, whose dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic. The Indus should be a border of sorts, but Pakistan sits astride both its banks, just as the fertile and teeming Punjab plain is bisected by the India-Pakistan border. Only the Thar Desert and the swamps to its south act as natural frontiers between Pakistan and India. And though these are formidable barriers, they are insufficient to frame a state composed of disparate, geographically based, ethnic groups — Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns — for whom Islam has provided insufficient glue to hold them together. All the other groups in Pakistan hate the Punjabis and the army they control, just as the groups in the former Yugoslavia hated the Serbs and the army they controlled. Pakistan’s raison d’être is that it supposedly provides a homeland for subcontinental Muslims, but 154 million of them, almost the same number as the entire population of Pakistan, live over the border in India.

To the west, the crags and canyons of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan, are utterly porous. Of all the times I crossed the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, I never did so legally. In reality, the two countries are inseparable. On both sides live the Pashtuns. The wide belt of territory between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River is really Pashtunistan, an entity that threatens to emerge were Pakistan to fall apart. That would, in turn, lead to the dissolution of Afghanistan.

The Taliban constitute merely the latest incarnation of Pashtun nationalism. Indeed, much of the fighting in Afghanistan today occurs in Pashtunistan: southern and eastern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. The north of Afghanistan, beyond the Hindu Kush, has seen less fighting and is in the midst of reconstruction and the forging of closer links to the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, inhabited by the same ethnic groups that populate northern Afghanistan. Here is the ultimate world of Mackinder, of mountains and men, where the facts of geography are asserted daily, to the chagrin of U.S.-led forces — and of India, whose own destiny and borders are hostage to what plays out in the vicinity of the 20,000-foot wall of the Hindu Kush.

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan, War | No Comments »

Prince of Ghor

Monday, May 4th, 2009

George Romero may be the King of Horror, Curzon notes, but one of his actors is the Prince of Ghor:

In today’s completely random note of trivia, it turns out that Scott Reiniger, a minor horror film actor best known for his role as the ill-fated police officer in the 1978 zombie cult film Dawn of the Dead (and who played a minor cameo role in the 2004 remake of the same name) is actually Afghan royalty!

Reiniger’s great, great, great grandfather, Josiah Harlan, was an American assisting several independent rulers of South Asia, and became the first American to set foot in Afghanistan on a punitive expedition against an Uzbek warlord. He set off with a completely modern army, and came into contact with Mohammad Reffee Beg, an ambitious prince of Ghor, located in the western part of today’s Afganistan. He and his retinue feasted for ten days with Harlan’s force, during which time they observed the remarkable discipline and organization of the modern army, while Harlan was amazed by the working feudal system and the gender equality.

At the end of Harlan’s visit, the two agreed that Harlan and his heirs would be the Prince of Ghor in perpetuity, in exchange for raising and training an army with the ultimate goal of solidifying and expanding Ghor’s power. (Harlan ended up leaving Afghanistan, enjoying a brief period of fame in the U.S., but then failed at several unique ventures and ended up working in San Francisco as a doctor, dying a forgotten man.)

Scott Reiniger is the current descendant of Harlan with claim to the title, but has stated that he considers the title a historical anecdote with no real world importance (and it seems unlikely that anyone in Kabul, or Ghor, would be ready to accept him as their sovereign).

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Processing Power Isn’t the Binding Constraint

Monday, May 4th, 2009

We’re at an interesting point in the development of computer technology, Cringely notes, because processing power isn’t what binds enterprise or Internet applications today:

I/O and disk access do that. Servers have one or two gigabit Ethernet connections, each of which could be easily saturated by an old Pentium 4. It’s the pipe that limits us, not our ability to pump bits through that pipe. Thanks to the gamers, I suppose, and to a surreal and not particularly useful competition between Intel and AMD the main server CPUs are barely sweating even though they are running the core business logic of the application. It’s the database server with its disk drives that is working so hard, grabbing data to feed the web servers seemingly just in time. But don’t blame the hardware here or even the disk drives — blame the database.

We’re at the apex of SQL database development. It’s 1890 and we make the best darned database buggy whips on Earth.

There is a better way to handle large volumes of data and that better way has been established, not surprisingly, by Google with its BigTable semi-structured database that essentially caches the entire Internet. HBase from Hadoop is the Open Source version of BigTable and both are rapidly making old SQL databases like Oracle and DB2 obsolete for certain users.

Amazon.com runs on an Oracle database, but one that was extended and optimized at a cost of more than $150 million. Amazon probably represents the most that one can do with SQL in terms of scalability. Anything bigger requires a completely new approach like BigTable.

Or maybe it isn’t so new at all. I recall something very analogous to BigTable during the network operating system wars of the 1980s. Microsoft had a couple dozen OEMs working on network operating systems based on the hierarchical file system of DOS 2.0 (Paul Allen’s last technical contribution to Microsoft). While a hierarchical file system may have made some sense for a workstation it made little to no sense for a server accessed by dozens of workstations in the view of the programmers at Novell, where Netware was being born at the time. Those guys ignored the hierarchy and wrote the entire File Allocation Table for each drive to memory as a single flat file called an Indexed Turbo FAT. Where the DOS-based network operating systems had to search the disk for files, Netware had the entire index loaded in memory and instantly knew where the target data could be found. The system was easily 100 times as fast. BigTable takes this a step further, I suppose, by ignoring the distinction between index and data, dramatically expanding the memory footprint but, at the same time, completely eliminating a retrieval step.

An irony of BigTable and Indexed Turbo FATs is that both Google and Novell were pretty upfront about what they were doing and why, yet competitors have remained bound to lower performing technologies because, well just because.

Which brings us back once again to Oracle buying Sun, a deal that has continued to bug me because it didn’t make sense… UNTIL I thought about it in terms of the scalability of SQL architectures and market positioning.

Right now almost every web application has an Apache server fronting a database box running MySQL or its closed source equivalent like Oracle, DB2, or SQL Server. The data bottleneck in all those applications is the SQL box, which is generally doing a very simple job in a very complex manner that made total sense for minicomputers in 1975 but doesn’t make as much sense today. Five years from now the situation will be very different with HBase running everywhere, the dedicated SQL box eliminated completely, and the database shared across redundant web servers like a micro-Google.

Where does this leave Oracle?

It leaves Oracle bleeding its big stupid corporate customers for another decade but eventually losing both the bottom half of the market and the very top where applications scale to tens of thousands of servers.

Part of the distinction here is between running a mobile phone billing system in one case and Facebook in another. In the mobile phone example you’d better get all those minutes or money will be lost. But in the Facebook example reality is more approximate and if an update propagates slower than expected, well big deal, so you missed Little Johnny’s birthday pictures for an extra 20 seconds. There are even business software cases where this philosophy applies. Progressive Insurance, for example, is always ready to give you a comparison price quote for auto insurance not because they can generate that quote (and the price quotes of their major competitors) on the fly, but because THEY GENERATE A SPECULATIVE PRICE QUOTE FOR EVERY CAR IN AMERICA EVERY NIGHT. They don’t generate a quote when you call, they just access it because it is already done.

So Oracle keeps the mobile phone company as a customer but doesn’t keep Progressive in this example. And in the long run there’s enough data redundancy built into the loosey-goosey HBase model that it becomes just as reliable as the more rigorous SQL model that it is inexorably replacing. That’s when Oracle loses the mobile phone company, too.

Larry Ellison won’t like that.

So what’s to be done? Buy Sun. Get into the database appliance business. Start selling highly-tuned database appliances that achieve the simultaneous goals of vertical integration (making profit on the hardware as well as the software), obfuscation (keeping the customers out of the lower-level code by encasing it in an appliance), and increased overall performance (putting off the inevitable loss of market dominance for another three years through a hardware tour du force).

IBM, as the other big SQL company, doesn’t really share Oracle’s problem, because IBM makes money from the hardware already. If DB2 gives way to something like HBase, IBM will run HBase on its premium iron — a luxury Oracle can’t share without buying Sun.

As hardware gets cheaper we extend performance by distributing software across more and more machines. But that distribution in itself undermines the lucrative software licensing system. So we introduce a new level of abstraction — the database appliance. Prices will go up a little while performance will go up a lot. Customers will think they are getting more for their money and they will be. But the ultimate comparison that has been at least postponed is between paid and free, where free always wins in the end.

And THAT’s why Oracle NEEDS Sun — to extend its current run by another three years, buying Larry time to write an Act II for his company.

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Procedural City

Monday, May 4th, 2009

As an exercise, Shamus Young decided to craft a Procedural City — that is, a program to generate a pretty-looking simulated city:

Posted in Games, Technology, Urbanism | No Comments »

Modern Principles: Macroeconomics

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have a new textbook coming out, Modern Principles: Macroeconomics. It has its own preview site with sample chapters, but more interesting is the associated blog, which combines online readings with textbook-style questions and answers. Take a look.

Posted in Economics, Education | No Comments »

Constantly Enraged Crowds

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

Robert Kaplan revises Sir Halford J. Mackinder‘s vision of the Eurasian “heartland” from his The Geographical Pivot of History to take into account the last century’s advances:

A Eurasia of vast urban areas, overlapping missile ranges, and sensational media will be one of constantly enraged crowds, fed by rumors transported at the speed of light from one Third World megalopolis to another.

Posted in Policy, Robert Kaplan, War | No Comments »

The future of cooperation

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

Alex Tabarrok discusses the future of cooperation — that is, globalization — with the folks at TED.

His classical liberal stance is neither conservative nor progressive, which probably rubs both the wrong way:

What do you say to the argument that the Third World will not develop because we don’t have the natural resources to sustain the development?

I utterly reject the view that the Third World is doomed to poverty and starvation. Not only is this wrong, I think this attitude verges on the immoral, like thinking that slavery is an unalterable facet of the human condition so why bother doing anything about it? Moreover, thinking of this kind — I call it the Lebensraum point of view — leads to war and destruction. The Lebensraum point of view, however, is rejected by evidence from the second half of the twentieth century. Peace and free trade are the routes to wealth — not a grab for “limited” resources.

I’m more inclined to say that peaceful free trade is one route to wealth — a route I endorse — but grabbing resources is another, less friendly, route.

I agree that the notion of natural resources is not as simple as it first appears:

“Natural resources” are not like a finite number of gifts under the Christmas tree. Nature is given but resources are created. Oil was around for millions of years before people realized it could power civilization. Who would have thought that an utterly common element like silicon would drive 21st century growth? Or that atoms could light homes? At any point in time, resources are limited but what counts as a resource changes over time. Perhaps in the future people will worry that we are running out of asteroids to mine! Of course, the ultimate “natural resource” is the power of the human mind, and more minds are going to come online in the 21st century than ever before.

Of course, the power of the human mind is highly variable, and bringing more minds online is helpful primarily because it means bringing a few more high-caliber minds online.

Tabarrok calls China “the world’s greatest anti-poverty program of the last few decades”:

With the death of Mao and the rise of Deng Xiao Ping, China began to grow at tremendous rates — 10 percent per year. Without any foreign aid to speak of, this “program” raised hundreds of millions of people out of the very worst kind of poverty. China in 1979 had among the highest poverty rates in the world. Its economic growth has brought several hundred million people from making less than a dollar a day out of that starvation-level poverty. Remember that, during the Great Leap Forward 30 to 40 million people starved in China.

Here’s his main point:

Economics does open your eyes to the fact that there is a massive amount of cooperation in the world. If you walk into a supermarket, you see grapes from Chile, apricots from Turkey, dates from India. All of these people from around the world — these farmers in India producing the dates for your consumption, for example — don’t know who you are, they don’t know where their dates are going, they might not even like you if they met you. (Laughs) Nevertheless, they are working for your benefit.

The 19th century economist Bastiat said, “It’s a miracle that Paris is fed, and yet every day Paris is fed.” The trucks arrive on time, the food is delivered. It’s an incredible amount of cooperation involving millions of people. Economics open your eyes to the big picture which can sometimes be overshadowed by these other events like wars and revolutions — which are actually not the big story.

Read the whole thing for his thoughts on drug legalization, police, and bounty hunters.

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The Revenge of Geography

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

Robert Kaplan calls it the revenge of geography:

When rapturous Germans tore down the Berlin Wall 20 years ago it symbolized far more than the overcoming of an arbitrary boundary. It began an intellectual cycle that saw all divisions, geographic and otherwise, as surmountable; that referred to “realism” and “pragmatism” only as pejoratives; and that invoked the humanism of Isaiah Berlin or the appeasement of Hitler at Munich to launch one international intervention after the next. In this way, the armed liberalism and the democracy-promoting neoconservatism of the 1990s shared the same universalist aspirations. But alas, when a fear of Munich leads to overreach the result is Vietnam — or in the current case, Iraq.

And thus began the rehabilitation of realism, and with it another intellectual cycle. “Realist” is now a mark of respect, “neocon” a term of derision. The Vietnam analogy has vanquished that of Munich. Thomas Hobbes, who extolled the moral benefits of fear and saw anarchy as the chief threat to society, has elbowed out Isaiah Berlin as the philosopher of the present cycle. The focus now is less on universal ideals than particular distinctions, from ethnicity to culture to religion. Those who pointed this out a decade ago were sneered at for being “fatalists” or “determinists.” Now they are applauded as “pragmatists.” And this is the key insight of the past two decades — that there are worse things in the world than extreme tyranny, and in Iraq we brought them about ourselves. I say this having supported the war.

So now, chastened, we have all become realists. Or so we believe. But realism is about more than merely opposing a war in Iraq that we know from hindsight turned out badly. Realism means recognizing that international relations are ruled by a sadder, more limited reality than the one governing domestic affairs. It means valuing order above freedom, for the latter becomes important only after the former has been established. It means focusing on what divides humanity rather than on what unites it, as the high priests of globalization would have it. In short, realism is about recognizing and embracing those forces beyond our control that constrain human action — culture, tradition, history, the bleaker tides of passion that lie just beneath the veneer of civilization. This poses what, for realists, is the central question in foreign affairs: Who can do what to whom? And of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.

Indeed, what is at work in the recent return of realism is the revenge of geography in the most old-fashioned sense. In the 18th and 19th centuries, before the arrival of political science as an academic specialty, geography was an honored, if not always formalized, discipline in which politics, culture, and economics were often conceived of in reference to the relief map. Thus, in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, mountains and the men who grow out of them were the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting, were only the second.

And yet, to embrace geography is not to accept it as an implacable force against which humankind is powerless. Rather, it serves to qualify human freedom and choice with a modest acceptance of fate. This is all the more important today, because rather than eliminating the relevance of geography, globalization is reinforcing it. Mass communications and economic integration are weakening many states, exposing a Hobbesian world of small, fractious regions. Within them, local, ethnic, and religious sources of identity are reasserting themselves, and because they are anchored to specific terrains, they are best explained by reference to geography. Like the faults that determine earthquakes, the political future will be defined by conflict and instability with a similar geographic logic. The upheaval spawned by the ongoing economic crisis is increasing the relevance of geography even further, by weakening social orders and other creations of humankind, leaving the natural frontiers of the globe as the only restraint.

So we, too, need to return to the map, and particularly to what I call the “shatter zones” of Eurasia. We need to reclaim those thinkers who knew the landscape best. And we need to update their theories for the revenge of geography in our time.

(Hat tip to Arnold Kling.)

Posted in Arnold Kling, Policy, Robert Kaplan, War | No Comments »

Don’t bet on the regulators

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

Don’t bet on the regulators, Arnold Kling says, in the OODA loop contest with financial traders — who are always a step ahead, Corine Hegland explains:

The transactions that turned some stupendously bad loans into a global calamity were designed to thread loopholes in the very regulatory, accounting, and legal regimes set up to prevent such things. Indeed, this is what bankers and financial traders always do, because they make a great deal of money from it. They call it arbitrage. In currency markets, arbitrageurs are constantly buying and selling currencies across borders to make money on small price fluctuations between dollars and yen, or euros and renminbi, for example. In “regulatory arbitrage,” the bankers and traders restructure transactions to take advantage of differing rules, and hence prices for risk, for various kinds of regulated financial products. It’s very hard — maybe impossible — for regulatory bodies to keep up with the arbitrageurs.

“The institutions are always ahead of the regulators,” said Kevin Jacques, who spent 14 years at Treasury before joining the faculty of Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio. “Whenever you fix a problem, you create an unintended consequence whereby you’ve just said to financial institutions, ‘OK, go out and figure out how you’re going to alter your portfolios.’ You’re fighting against yourself.”

The only novel aspect to this particular cat-and-mouse round is that the ruthlessly efficient financial markets stayed ahead of regulators long enough to swell Americans’ household debt to nearly 100 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, a feat accomplished only once before, in 1929. If regulators don’t come up with a game-changer of their own as they address the current crisis, the markets will win the next round as well. Careful regulatory alterations take years, but financial institutions adapt within months.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

There Is No Such Thing as Nuclear Waste

Friday, May 1st, 2009

The proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain has lost its funding, but William Tucker explains that the repository was only made necessary in the first place by our failure to understand a fundamental fact about nuclear power — there is no such thing as nuclear waste:

A nuclear fuel rod is made up of two types of uranium: U-235, the fissionable isotope whose breakdown provides the energy; and U-238, which does not fission and serves basically as packing material. Uranium-235 makes up only 0.7% of the natural ore. In order to reach “reactor grade,” it must be “enriched” up to 3% — an extremely difficult industrial process. (To become bomb material, it must be enriched to 90%, another ballgame altogether.)

After being loaded in a nuclear reactor, the fuel rods sit for five years before being removed. At this point, about 12 ounces of U-235 will have been completely transformed into energy. But that’s enough to power San Francisco for five years. There are no chemical transformations in the process and no carbon-dioxide emissions.

When they emerge, the fuel rods are intensely radioactive — about twice the exposure you would get standing at ground zero at Hiroshima after the bomb went off. But because the amount of material is so small — it would fit comfortably in a tractor-trailer — it can be handled remotely through well established industrial processes. The spent rods are first submerged in storage pools, where a few yards of water block the radioactivity. After a few years, they can be moved to lead-lined casks about the size of a gazebo, where they can sit for the better part of a century until the next step is decided.

So is this material “waste”? Absolutely not. Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is plain old U-238, the nonfissionable variety that exists in granite tabletops, stone buildings and the coal burned in coal plants to generate electricity. Uranium-238 is 1% of the earth’s crust. It could be put right back in the ground where it came from.

Of the remaining 5% of a rod, one-fifth is fissionable U-235 — which can be recycled as fuel. Another one-fifth is plutonium, also recyclable as fuel. Much of the remaining three-fifths has important uses as medical and industrial isotopes. Forty percent of all medical diagnostic procedures in this country now involve some form of radioactive isotope, and nuclear medicine is a $4 billion business. Unfortunately, we must import all our tracer material from Canada, because all of our isotopes have been headed for Yucca Mountain.

What remains after all this material has been extracted from spent fuel rods are some isotopes for which no important uses have yet been found, but which can be stored for future retrieval. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains — from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy — beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.

The supposed problem of “nuclear waste” is entirely the result of a the decision in 1976 by President Gerald Ford to suspend reprocessing, which President Jimmy Carter made permanent in 1977. The fear was that agents of foreign powers or terrorists groups would steal plutonium from American plants to manufacture bombs.

That fear has proved to be misguided. If foreign powers want a bomb, they will build their own reactors or enrichment facilities, as North Korea and Iran have done.

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