Those crossing through the Holland Tunnel see the most time savings

Monday, February 10th, 2025

New York City’s congestion pricing program has been in place for one month, implementing tolls on drivers who enter certain, often gridlocked, areas of Manhattan:

And so far, the results are “undeniably positive,” transit officials say, with measurably reduced traffic and more commuters choosing public transit.

The traffic mitigation plan covers a “congestion relief zone” that spans almost all of Manhattan below 60th street and includes major routes like the Lincoln, Holland, and Hugh L. Carey Tunnels and bridges that go into both Brooklyn and Queens. Since its launch on January 5, one million fewer vehicles have entered that zone than they would have without the toll, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

Passenger cars with an E-ZPass that travel through that zone face a $9 toll during peak hours, from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends, and a $2.25 toll overnight. Tolls are more expensive for commercial traffic, and vehicles without E-ZPass face a 50% premium.

Those charges are meant to reduce traffic in the city and also raise funds for $15 billion worth of transit repairs to the MTA. By cutting traffic and ushering more commuters onto public transit, the program will also reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s the first such plan in the United States, though congestion pricing has been successfully used in London, Stockholm, Singapore, and other cities. In Stockholm, traffic levels dropped about 25%, and the city saw less pollution and more investment in local infrastructure. And though business owners and residents there criticized the program before its pilot began — much like they did in New York — a majority of voters ended up making that toll permanent.

New Yorkers are already seeing an impact one month in. Along with fewer drivers in general, the vehicles that still travel through the area are dealing with less traffic. Those crossing through the Holland Tunnel see the most time savings, with average trip times down 48% during peak morning hours. The Williamsburg and Queensboro Bridges are both seeing an average of 30% faster travel times. During afternoon peak hours, drivers in the entire zone are seeing travel times drop up to 59%.

More commuters are opting for buses to cross Manhattan, and those buses are now traveling more quickly, too. Weekday bus ridership has grown 6%, while weekend ridership is up 21%, compared to January 2024. (Subway ridership has also grown by 7.3% on weekdays and 12% on weekends, part of a larger trend in ridership growth happening since the fall, per the MTA. Anecdotally, some subway riders have said they’ve seen more packed trains on their morning commutes.) Buses entering Manhattan from Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx are saving up to 10 minutes on their route times, which also makes their arrivals more reliable.

Napoleon had read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in translation in 1802

Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025

Napoleon ofby Andrew RobertsThe Peace of Amiens gave Napoleon a breathing space to pursue plans to stimulate economic growth through state intervention and protectionism, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), a policy originally pioneered by Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert:

Napoleon had read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in translation in 1802, but considered Britain’s Industrial Revolution too advanced for France to be able to compete against her in open markets. Instead he put his faith in government subsidies in strategic industries, technical training schools, prizes for inventions, visits to British factories (that is, industrial espionage), technology fairs, the improvement of the Jacquard silk-weaving process, an industrial exhibition in Paris (at which the cotton-spinning business of Richard Lenoir took 400,000 francs’ worth of orders) and the setting up of twenty-two chambers of commerce across France in December 1802. Yet by the end of his reign, France had reached only the level of industrialization that Britain had enjoyed in 1780, an indictment of revolutionary, Directory and Napoleonic economic policy and the Colbertism they all followed.

[…]

The Colbertian use of tariffs furthermore skewed trade so that high customs barriers in Italy meant that raw silk from Piedmont which used to go to Lombardy was instead sent to Lyons; Dutch producers had to pay duties on goods sold in France, but not vice versa, and so on.

[…]

Napoleon had managed greatly to increase confidence in France’s finances and in her ability to honour her government’s bonds, but even so they never managed to match Britain’s in this period. At his best, he was forced to borrow at higher rates than Britain at its worst.

We don’t like to admit signaling motivations

Sunday, January 12th, 2025

We want people to think we’re smart, healthy, and rich, Robin Hanson notes, but we tend to signal indirectly:

For example, we signal wealth via visible consumption, instead of via directly showing our asset portfolios or bank accounts. We signal intelligence and knowledge via large vocabularies, mansplaining, and school degrees. We signal health via sport achievement, surviving harsh environments, and drinking heavily without falling down.

All of these activities take up big fractions of our time and energies. So why don’t we instead signal in more direct cheaper ways?

A simple explanation that I’ve often heard, and which makes sense to me, is that we don’t like to admit signaling motivations.

[…]

But if we were each willing to admit that most other people do a lot of signaling, even if we personally do not, we should be open to coordinating to promote more direct signals. For example, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland have all at times given the public access to (parts of) individual tax records. And the easier we made it to look up someone’s income or wealth, the less people would need to signal those things via consumption.

We could similarly require health tests, and annual IQ and/or knowledge tests, and post their results for all to see.

We keep everything we used to have and add some more

Friday, January 10th, 2025

In Praise of Commercial Culture by Tyler CowenWhen Bryan Caplan first read a draft of Tyler Cowen’s In Praise of Commercial Culture 15 years ago, he thought Cowen was mostly crazy:

A combination of my reverence for classical music and Randian contempt for modern culture made me strongly reject Tyler’s claim that the state of the arts has never been better.

Fifteen years later, I have to admit that he was largely right. From the standpoint of the consumer, the supply of great art has clearly never been better. And even from the standpoint of the producer, it is easy to argue that, overall, this is the best of times

[…]

First with digitization, and now with the Internet, consumers’ situation practically has to improve every year, because we keep everything we used to have, and add some more.

[…]

When I was a kid, if it wasn’t at the local store, you basically couldn’t get it. You probably wouldn’t even hear about it. This is truly an area where the Internet has changed everything.

[…]

If your goal is to communicate with informed, thoughtful people who share your tastes, the Internet has made that incredibly easy. It’s probably a lot easier to find someone to discuss Mahler today than it was during Mahler’s heyday.

[…]

One of Tyler’s best points: The past often looks better than the present if you compare the best to the best. There is no living composer as great as Bach. Nevertheless, the present looks much better than the past if you compare the fifth-best to the fifth-best. Who even wants to listen to the fifth-best Baroque composer? But the fifth-best punk rock band (say, the Dead Kennedys) is excellent.

Why is India still so poor?

Wednesday, January 8th, 2025

India is by far the poorest country Bryan Caplan has ever visited:

While I am well aware that life in India has drastically improved since 1991, the poverty that remains is still pretty horrifying. Uber drivers were lucky to net ten dollars a day. In every city I visited, I saw children under the age of ten begging in the midst of chaotic street traffic. Sometimes they were with their moms or older siblings, but these pitiful kids usually seemed to be all on their own. While most of them were inured to their plight, I also witnessed a few sidelined child beggars crying their hearts out with no one to comfort them. All Effective Altruism aside, I was tempted to hand each of them a day’s worth of rupees. But I didn’t. The situation was so hellish I felt paralyzed.

Why is India still so poor? “Lack of human capital” is only a minor problem. Even the lowest-skilled Indian workers I saw could easily prosper in the United States as drivers, waiters, cooks, maids, and janitors. “Dysfunctional culture” is also a distraction. Ordinary Indians have a great work ethic, grace under pressure, and passable English.

OK, so why is India still so poor? All libertarian bias aside, India’s central problem is absurd regulation and state ownership. Absurd how? To start: The Indian government strictly protects legal employees, so 90%+ of Indians work “informally.” Our bus driver to Agra was required to take a rest stop every two hours — in a country packed with tuk-tuk drivers zooming around like maniacs. The government caps the maximum size of farms — and bars foreigners (including Non-Resident Indians!) from owning farms at all. A great way to strangle the food supply and impoverish farmers at the same time. The Indian government also crushes construction, most notably with its infamous Floor Area Ratio regulation — in a country where plenty of people sleep on the streets. Developers aren’t even allowed to build skyscrapers in slums — and housing prices in major cities rival those in top Western cities. What about state ownership? Locals told me that private Indian schools cost parents one-tenth as much as public Indian schools cost taxpayers.

Indians often speak of British influence, for good and ill. No one, however, spoke of Soviet influence, which was strong from India’s independence until the USSR’s 1991 collapse. Independent India aped the Soviets’ “Five-Year Plans” until 2017, which probably explains the crazier agricultural policies. For me, the Soviet influence was most blatant at the airports. Not only are they ridiculously bureaucratic, with two or three times the normal number of redundant paperwork checks; India is also the only country I ever visited that makes it hard to leave. Seriously, what were they planning on doing to me if my exit papers were not in order?

India is the most unequal country I have ever visited. Officially, granted, it’s more equal than the U.S. But I strongly disbelieve the official statistics. In India, the worst slums I’ve ever seen are walking distance from some of the most lavish malls I’ve ever seen. These malls were vast and packed, their prices were as high as northern Virginia’s, and almost none of the customers were foreign. The upshot is that plenty of rich Indians were spending as much on a fast food lunch or a two pints of ice cream as an Uber driver earns all day.

India is the filthiest country I have ever visited. Outside a few prime locations, garbage and rubble line the streets. Skinny stray animals — including stereotypical sacred cows — abound. 98% of the inhabited areas I saw were comparable to the bottom third of Palermo, Italy. And that’s saying a lot!

India has the most frightening traffic of any country I have ever visited. Walking from one tourist site to another — or even from your hotel to the closest restaurant — is almost impossible. Usable sidewalks are virtually non-existent. Except in the dead of night, the roads are jammed with a kaleidoscope of buses, cars, tuk-tuks, pushcarts, bicycles, horse-drawn wagons, random cattle, and stray dogs. The three times I tried walking, I ended up fleeing for safety in a matter of minutes. My taxi driver assured me that the Jama Masjid was only two minutes away on foot. But after vainly trying to navigate the traffic, I beat a hasty retreat without even gazing upon the famous mosque.

If there was a correlation with HR and improved outcomes it would be rational for leaders to invest more

Tuesday, December 31st, 2024

Pamela Dow explains how human resources captured the nation of Great Britain:

Until I started working in the Cabinet Office in 2020 I hadn’t paid much attention to human resources (HR). I had rolled my eyes at more time wasted circumventing another rigid recruitment policy, which, although introduced to make things better, was in fact making them worse. I assumed HR was unavoidable in large organisations, and mostly there to help.

My role was to restore relevance and rigour to civil service training, from entry to leadership. It brought me close to the gatekeepers of employee relations.

[…]

Why were recruitment processes taking so long? To ensure fairness. Who decides what’s fair? The Public Sector Equality Duty, in precedents set by courts and interpreted or pre-empted by employment lawyers and HR advisers.

Why were so many employee grievances settled at such great expense, before and after employment tribunals? Because there were so many transgressions of HR policy, often by the very people who had codified the rules.

Why did every internal meeting start with a lengthy “emotional check-in”? For psychological safety. Where are people learning about that, and similarly subjective concepts? In acquiring vocational credentials from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and other HR representative bodies, and attending their courses. In September, Sam Bowman, Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes published their “Foundations” essay, which attracted significant attention in the national policy debate. It details how Britain is an outlier, lagging behind comparable G7 nations since the financial crisis, and struggling with growth, productivity, and weak state capacity.

The authors explain why, with clarity and precision: private investment is over-regulated and distorted by complex tax codes; infrastructure projects are stymied by lobbyists and lawyers; and the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act removed the incentive for local councils to permit building infrastructure.

The essay does not mention that Britain is also an international outlier in its dominant and expanding HR sector. We have one of the largest in the world, second only to the Netherlands. HR jobs have been growing steadily in most Western countries but the UK is top of the league* (turn over to see tables evidencing this). The British Labour Force Survey (LFS) shows a steady, 83 per cent increase, from just under 300,000 workers in 2011 to more than 500,000 in 2023. Might this also be an explanation for our national sluggishness?

[…]

Alongside good pay and job security, in many organisations HR allows influence on high-status topics, incommensurate with position: global social justice and identity campaigns.

[…]

In Britain the share of HR directors on boards has increased sharply, from 47 per cent in 2005 to 85 per cent in 2017. More than 70 per cent of FTSE 100 companies have a chief HR or people officer on their executive committee.

The UK legal and policy framework has also been fertile ground for HR growth over the past 20 years. The Equality Act assigns rights that have been interpreted well beyond their intent of fair opportunity, and definitions of “protected characteristics” are increasingly unhelpful. For example, graduates checking “disability” on their application to the Civil Service Fast Stream rose from 11 per cent in 2014 to 23 per cent in 2020. At the time, this allowed candidates to skip an assessment stage, perhaps an incentive to disclose an anxiety disorder. The civil service now is less certain how many people are blind, bipolar, using a wheelchair, or with self-diagnosed ADHD. It’s not a great leap to appreciate both the work this creates for HR, as well as the impact it has on productivity.

If we could track trends towards higher retention, happier workers, fewer grievances, this growth would be welcome. If there was a correlation with HR and improved outcomes it would be rational for leaders to invest more. There is evidence for the opposite. As HR roles have increased so too have the number of tribunals and days lost to work-related illness, while productivity has flatlined. HR expansion is not coinciding with desirable things and appears to be coinciding with undesirable ones.

U.S. higher education is going to muddle through

Saturday, December 28th, 2024

With apologies to Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowan believes U.S. higher education is going to muddle through:

Adjusting for grants, rather than taking sticker prices at face value, the inflation-adjusted tuition cost for an in-state freshman at a four-year public university is $2,480 for this school year. That is a 40% decline from a decade ago…

As might be expected, the trajectory for student debt is down as well. About half of last year’s graduates had no student debt. In 2013, only 40% did. That famous saying from economics — if something cannot go on forever, it will stop — is basically true. Due to changes in the formula, aid for Pell Grants is up, which helps to limit both student debt and the expenses of college.

The scale was almost comical

Friday, December 27th, 2024

Last month, Dwarkesh spent two weeks in China, visiting Beijing, Chengdu, Dujiangyan, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Hangzho:

It’s funny how China has basically the inverse problem as America. We subsidize demand and restrict supply. They subsidize supply and restrict demand. We can’t rebuild fallen bridges. They build bridges to nowhere. In the most desirable cities in this country, every random Victorian house and park bench is a historic site that can’t be disturbed. There, they’ll bulldoze a 500 year old temple to build an endless skyscraper complex that no one wants to live in.

My overwhelming first impression was: wow this place is so fucking big. Travel often teaches you things about a country which you honestly should have intuited even without visiting. Obviously, I knew that China is a big country, with over 1.4 billion people. But it was only after I visited that the visceral scale of the biggest cities was impressed upon me.

Even in Dujiangyan, a city of just half a million people (considered a quaint countryside town by Chinese standards), we found a Buddhist temple of staggering proportions. The scale was almost comical — we’d enter what seemed like an impressively large compound, only to discover it was merely the entrance to an even grander structure right behind it. This pattern repeated 5 or 6 times, each subsequent building larger and more ornate than the last, like some kind of inverse nesting doll.

I asked a monk at the temple how they funded this massive site in a city of just half a million people. He told us that it was simply through donations. We probed further about how such an enormous project could have been financed by just ordinary people’s donations. He responded, “We’ve got a lot of supporters, dude”, and changed the topic.

Chongqing is by far the coolest city I’ve ever visited. It’s this insane cyberpunk multi-level metropolis of over 20 million people. I wouldn’t know how to begin describing it, but there’s a bunch of great YouTube videos which will show you what I mean. I got a really nice nice 2-floor hotel room that overlooked two rivers and one of the most insane skylines in the world for 60 bucks – highly recommend visiting Chongqing if you get the chance.

America lags behind its peer countries largely due to obesity and its comorbidities, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and needless risk-taking

Friday, December 13th, 2024

Crémieux says that it’s time to grade the short manifesto written by the suspected killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson:

Firstly, the U.S. does not spend all that anomalously much on healthcare. It is just vastly wealthier than its peer countries.

Others have explored this in greater depth, but the gist of it is that Americans are richer than everyone else and healthcare is a superior good, etc. etc., so they simply consume a lot more healthcare—and I mean “more” very literally, because Americans do not just suffer from higher prices. For example, you can predict America’s high health spending from the amount of surgeries it does.

With that out of the way, secondly, America’s poor life expectancy has little to do with its healthcare system, and what amount it does have to with the healthcare system likely favors America. Compared to other rich countries, Americans do live shorter lifespans, but about 90% of the gap for men and two-thirds of the gap for women is explained by a handful of well-known observables.

America lags behind its peer countries largely due to obesity and its comorbidities, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and needless risk-taking. But notice: it generally leads in screenable and treatable cancers.

[…]

The 2024 John’s Hopkins Life Expectancy Report reiterated these facts. It reported that 57% of the life expectancy gap between the U.S. and the U.K. was down to cardiovascular disease, another 32% was down to drug overdoses, 20% was down to firearm-related homicides and suicides, and 17% was due to motor vehicle accidents. But, as the above treatable/screenable cancer note suggested, the report also concluded that, if anything, America is ahead when it comes to mortality from conditions the healthcare system can actually affect—namely, COVID and cancer.

Joe Rogan interviews Marc Andreessen

Wednesday, November 27th, 2024

I’ve been watching fascinating snippets of this interview with Marc Andreessen, and he makes some alarming points:

Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?

Tuesday, November 26th, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallThe Chinese look at society very differently from the West, Tim Marshall reminds us (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World):

I once took a Chinese ambassador in London to a high-end French restaurant in the hope he would repeat Prime Minister Chou En-lai’s much quoted answer to President Richard Nixon’s question “What is the impact of the French Revolution?” to which the prime minister replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” Sadly, this was not forthcoming, but I was treated to a stern lecture about how the full imposition of “what you call human rights” in China would lead to widespread violence and death and was then asked, “Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?”

The deal between the party leaders and the people has been, for a generation now, “We’ll make you better off — you will follow our orders.” So long as the economy keeps growing, that grand bargain may last. If it stops, or goes into reverse, the deal is off. The current level of demonstrations and anger against corruption and inefficiency are testament to what would happen if the deal breaks.

Another growing problem for the party is its ability to feed the population. More than 40 percent of arable land is now either polluted or has thinning topsoil, according to their Ministry of Agriculture.

[…]

There are now around five hundred mostly peaceful protests a day across China over a variety of issues. If you introduce mass unemployment, or mass hunger, that tally will explode in both number and the degree of force used by both sides.

Human Challenge Trials aren’t riskier than Randomized Controlled Trials

Saturday, November 23rd, 2024

Keller Scholl, who spent time at GMU working with Robin Hanson and hanging out with the gang, just came out of quarantine from a Human Challenge Trial:

Scholl’s symptoms might be uncomfortable, but they are also of his own making. That’s because he signed up to be a volunteer in the first human ‘challenge trial’ involving Zika virus, a mosquito-borne pathogen that can cause fever, pain and, in some cases, a brain-development problem in infants. In standard infectious-disease trials, researchers test drugs or vaccines on people who already have, or might catch, a disease. But in challenge trials, healthy people agree to become infected with a pathogen so that scientists can gather preliminary data on possible drugs and vaccines before bigger trials take place. “Accelerating a Zika vaccine by a month, a few days, that does a lot of good in the world,” says Scholl, who studies at Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, California.

Alex Tabarrok reminds us that Human Challenge Trials aren’t riskier than Randomized Controlled Trials:

The rest of the article uncritically repeats the usual claims from so-called “bioethicists” that human challenge trials (HCTs) are unethical because they involve risks. Of course, HCTs carry risks—so what? Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) also require that participants are exposed to risk. Indeed, for participants in the placebo arm of an RCT, the risks are identical. Furthermore, since RCTs require more participants to achieve statistical validity than HCTs, they must expose more people to harm and, as a result, it’s even possible that more participants are harmed in an RCT than an HCT. Thus, HCTs are not necessarily more risky to participants than RCTs and, of course, to the extent that they speed up results, they can save many lives and greatly reduce risk to everyone else in the the larger society.

In my talk, The Economic Way of Thinking in a Pandemic (starting around 10:52, though the entire presentation is worthwhile), I explain the real reason why bioethicists and physicians hesitate over human challenge trials: they fear feeling personally responsible if a participant is harmed. “We exposed this person to risk, and they died.” Well, yes. But my response is, it’s not about you! Set aside personal emotions and focus on what saves the most lives.

Once, the majority of the population of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang were ethnically Manchurian, Mongolian, and Uighur

Tuesday, November 19th, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallIf we look at China’s modern borders, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), we see a great power now confident that it is secured by its geographical features:

The population of Manchuria is 100 million and growing; in contrast, the Russian Far East has only seven million people and no indications of population growth.

[…]

Indeed, the recent Western sanctions against Russia due to the crisis in Ukraine have driven Russia into massive economic deals with China on terms that help keep Russia afloat, but are favorable to the Chinese. Russia is the junior partner in this relationship.

[…]

Vietnam is an irritation for China. For centuries the two have squabbled over territory and, unfortunately for both, this is the one area to the south that has a border an army can get across without too much trouble—which partially explains the thousand-year domination and occupation of Vietnam by China from 111 BCE to 938 CE and their brief cross-border war of 1979. However, as China’s military prowess grows, Vietnam will be less inclined to get drawn into a shooting match and will either cozy up even closer to the Americans for protection or quietly begin shifting diplomatically to become friends with Beijing.

[…]

The Himalayas run the length of the Chinese-Indian border before descending to become the Karakoram Range bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. This is nature’s version of a Great Wall of China, or—looking at it from New Delhi’s side—the Great Wall of India. It cuts the two most populous countries on the planet off from each other both militarily and economically.

[…]

China claims the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh, India says China is occupying Aksai Chin; but despite pointing their artillery at each other high up on this natural wall, both sides have better things to do than reignite the shooting match that broke out in 1962, when a series of violent border disputes culminated in vicious large-scale mountain fighting.

[…]

Very little trade has moved between China and India over the centuries, and that is unlikely to change soon.

[…]

If China did not control Tibet, it would always be possible that India might attempt to do so. This would give India the commanding heights of the Tibetan Plateau and a base from which to push into the Chinese heartland, as well as control of the Tibetan sources of three of China’s great rivers, the Yellow, Yangtze, and Mekong, which is why Tibet is known as “China’s Water Tower.” China, a country with approximately the same volume of water usage as the United States, but with a population five times as large, will clearly not allow that.

[…]

In the 1950s, the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army began building roads into Tibet, and since then they have helped to bring the modern world to the ancient kingdom; but the roads, and now railways, also bring the Han.

It was long said to be impossible to build a railway through the permafrost, the mountains, and the valleys of Tibet. Europe’s best engineers, who had cut through the Alps, said it could not be done. As late as 1988 the travel writer Paul Theroux wrote in his book Riding the Iron Rooster: “The Kunlun Range is a guarantee that the railway will never get to Lhasa.” The Kunlun separated Xinjiang province from Tibet, for which Theroux gave thanks: “That is probably a good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realized that I liked wilderness much more.” But the Chinese built it. Which, perhaps, only they could have done. The line into the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, was opened in 2006 by the then Chinese president Hu Jintao. Now passenger and goods trains arrive from as far away as Shanghai and Beijing, four times a day, every day.

[…]

Once, the majority of the population of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang were ethnically Manchurian, Mongolian, and Uighur; now all three are majority Han Chinese, or approaching the majority. So it will be with Tibet.

[…]

Just as the Americans looked west, so do the Chinese, and just as the iron horse brought the European settlers to the lands of the Comanche and the Navajo, so the modern iron roosters are bringing the Han to the Tibetans.

[…]

Southeast of this Kazakh border is the restive “semiautonomous” Chinese province of Xinjiang and its native Muslim population of the Uighur people, who speak a language related to Turkish.

[…]

There was, is, and always will be trouble in Xinjiang. The Uighurs have twice declared an independent state of “East Turkestan,” in the 1930s and 1940s. They watched the collapse of the Russian Empire result in their former Soviet neighbors in the stans becoming sovereign states, were inspired by the Tibetan independence movement, and many are now again calling to break away from China.

Interethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to more than two hundred deaths. Beijing responded in three ways: it ruthlessly suppressed dissent, it poured money into the region, and it continued to pour in Han Chinese workers. For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites. The territory is also key to the Chinese economic strategy of “One Belt, One Road.” The road is, oddly enough, the sea route: the creation of an oceangoing highway for goods, the belt is the “Silk Road Economic Belt,” a land-based route based on the old Silk Route that goes straight through Xinjiang and will in turn connect down southward to the massive deep-water port China is building in Gwadar in Pakistan. In late 2015, China signed a forty-year lease on the port. This is part of the way in which “the belt and the road” will be connected.

Most of the new towns and cities springing up across Xinjiang are overwhelmingly populated by Han Chinese attracted by work in the new factories in which the central government invests. A classic example is the city of Shihezi, eighty-five miles northwest of the capital, Ürümqi. Of its population of 650,000, it is thought that at least 620,000 are Han. Overall, Xinjiang is reckoned to be 40 percent Han, at a conservative estimate—and even Ürümqi itself may now be majority Han, although official figures are difficult to obtain and not always reliable due to their political sensitivity.

[…]

In early 2016, local government officials said that deradicalization efforts had “markedly weakened” the nascent Islamist movement. However, given that the Turkish army said it had arrested 324 suspected jihadists from Xinjiang en route to Syria in 2015, that seems unlikely.

The mirage of conquest seemed attractive for sustaining overly large defense establishments without having to pay for them

Saturday, November 16th, 2024

The apparent resilience of the Russian economy has confounded many strategists who expected Western sanctions to starve its war effort:

Russia continues to export vast quantities of oil, gas, and other commodities — the result of sanctions evasion and loopholes deliberately designed by Western policymakers to keep Russian resources on world markets. So far, clever macroeconomic management, particularly by Russian Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina, has enabled the Kremlin to keep the Russian financial system in relative health.

At first glance, the numbers look surprisingly strong. In 2023, GDP grew by 3.6 percent and is expected to rise by 3.9 percent in 2024. Unemployment has fallen from around 4.4 percent before the war to 2.4 percent in September. Moscow has expanded its armed forces and defense production, adding more than 500,000 workers to the defense industry, approximately 180,000 to the armed forces, and many thousands more to paramilitary and private military organizations. Russia has reportedly tripled its production of artillery shells to 3 million per year and is manufacturing glide bombs and drones at scale.

On the other hand:

Already, about around half of all artillery shells used by Russia in Ukraine are from North Korean stocks. At some point in the second half of 2025, Russia will face severe shortages in several categories of weapons.

Perhaps foremost among Russia’s arms bottlenecks is its inability to replace large-caliber cannons. According to open-source researchers using video documentation, Russia has been losing more than 100 tanks and roughly 220 artillery pieces per month on average. Producing tank and artillery barrels requires rotary forges — massive pieces of engineering weighing 20 to 30 tons each — that can each produce only about 10 barrels a month. Russia only possesses two such forges.

In other words, Russia is losing around 320 tank and artillery cannon barrels a month and producing only 20.

[…]

Open-source researchers have counted the loss of at least 4,955 infantry fighting vehicles since the war’s onset, which comes out to an average of 155 per month. Russian defense contractors can produce an estimated 200 per year, or about 17 per month, to offset these losses. Likewise, even Russia’s expanded production of 3 million artillery shells per year pales in comparison to the various estimates for current consumption at the front. While those estimates are lower than the 12 million rounds Russian forces fired in 2022, they are much higher than what Russian industry can produce.

[…]

Defense spending has officially jumped to 7 percent of Russia’s GDP and is projected to consume more than 41 percent of the state budget next year. The true magnitude of military expenditures is significantly higher. Russia’s nearly 560,000 armed internal security troops, many of which have been deployed to occupied Ukraine, are funded outside the defense budget — as are the private military companies that have sprouted across Russia.

[…]

Rather than demobilizing or bankrupting themselves, Russian leaders could instead use their military to obtain the economic resources needed to sustain it — in other words, using conquest and the threat thereof to pay for the military.

Plenty of precedents exist. In 1803, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte ended 14 months of peace in Europe because he could not afford to fund his military based on French revenues alone — and he also refused to demobilize it. In 1990, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein similarly invaded oil-rich Kuwait because he could not afford to pay the million-man army that he refused to downsize. In both cases, the mirage of conquest seemed attractive for sustaining overly large defense establishments without having to pay for them.

The ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat

Tuesday, October 29th, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall Russia’s most powerful weapons now, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), are not its army and air force, but gas and oil:

Russia is second only to the United States as the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas, and of course it uses this power to its advantage. The better your relations with Russia, the less you pay for energy; for example, Finland gets a better deal than the Baltic States. This policy has been used so aggressively, and Russia has such a hold over Europe’s energy needs that moves are afoot to blunt its impact. Many countries in Europe are attempting to wean themselves off their dependency on Russian energy, not via alternative pipelines from less aggressive countries but by building ports.

On average, 25 percent of Europe’s gas and oil comes from Russia; but often the closer a country is to Moscow, the greater its dependency. This in turn reduces that country’s foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland, and Estonia are 100 percent reliant on Russian gas; the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Lithuania are 80 percent dependent; and Greece, Austria, and Hungary 60 percent. About half of Germany’s gas supply comes from Russia, which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticize the Kremlin for aggressive behavior than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 percent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months’ supply.

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In the north, via the Baltic Sea, is the Nord Stream route, which connects directly to Germany. Below that, cutting through Belarus, is the Yamal pipeline, which feeds Poland and Germany. In the south is the Blue Stream, taking gas to Turkey via the Black Sea. Until early 2015 there was a planned project called South Stream, which was due to use the same route but branch off to Hungary, Austria, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Italy. South Stream was Russia’s attempt to ensure that even during disputes with Ukraine it would still have a major route to large markets in Western Europe and the Balkans. Several EU countries put pressure on their neighbors to reject the plan, and Bulgaria effectively pulled the plug on the project by saying the pipelines would not come across its territory. President Putin reacted by reaching out to Turkey with a new proposal, sometimes known as Turk Stream.

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Poland and Lithuania are constructing LNG terminals; other countries such as the Czech Republic want to build pipelines connecting to those terminals, knowing they could then benefit not just from American liquefied gas, but also supplies from North Africa and the Middle East. The Kremlin would no longer be able to turn the taps off.

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LNG is unlikely to completely replace Russian gas, but it will strengthen what is a weak European hand in both price negotiation and foreign policy. To prepare for a potential reduction in revenue, Russia is planning pipelines heading southeast and hopes to increase sales to China.

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A lot was made of the economic pain Russia suffered in 2014 when the price of oil fell below $ 50 a barrel, and lower still in 2015. Moscow’s 2016 budget—and predicted spending for 2017—was based on prices of $ 50, and even though Russia began pumping record levels of oil, it knows it cannot balance the books. Russia loses about $ 2 billion in revenue for each dollar drop in the oil price and the Russian economy duly took the hit, bringing great hardship to many ordinary people, but predictions of the collapse of the state were wide of the mark.

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The days when Russia was considered a military threat to China have passed and the idea of Russian troops occupying Manchuria, as they did in 1945, is inconceivable, although they do keep a wary eye on each other in places in which each would like to be the dominant power, such as Kazakhstan.

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What seems like an odd example came in May 2015 when they conducted joint military live fire exercises in the Mediterranean. Beijing’s push into a sea 9,000 miles from home was part of its attempt to extend its naval reach around the globe. Moscow has designs on the gas fields found in the Mediterranean, is courting Greece, and wants to protect its small naval port on the Syrian coast. In addition, both sides are quite happy to annoy the NATO powers in the region, including the American 6th Fleet based in Naples.

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The average life span for a Russian man is below sixty-five, ranking Russia in the bottom half of the world’s 193 UN member states, and there are now only 144 million Russians (excluding Crimea).

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It doesn’t matter if the ideology of those in control is czarist, Communist, or crony capitalist — the ports still freeze, and the North European Plain is still flat.