Policy « Isegoria

Conspiracies are normal and common

Thursday, July 4th, 2019

Moldbug’s Cathedral is not a conspiracy, Anomaly UK explains:

It makes more sense to say that the Cathedral is the opposite of a conspiracy. It is what you get when there are no conspiracies.

The word “conspiracy” is basically clickbait, but I’m going to stick with it anyway. Be aware, though, that I don’t mean anything really weird by it. The management of any company is a conspiracy, in that the members discuss plans in private and only publicise them if it is advantageous for them to do so. [Smug Misha] pointed out on twitter that HBO were able to keep the secret of the ending of Game of Thrones for months, despite hundreds of people needing to know it to make the episode.

In this sense, conspiracies are normal and common, though not quite as common as they used to be. That was my argument in the earlier piece: that as recently as a decade or so ago, a political party (or at least a faction within it) could agree an agenda in private and make confidential plans to pursue that agenda. That capability seems, since then, to have been lost. The key debates between leading politicians of the same party over what goals should be pursued and what means should be employed to pursue them are carried out in public.

I stand by that point. But on reflection I think it’s a much bigger deal. This is a recent development in a much longer trend. As I wrote yesterday in a comment, the Cathedral is defined by its lack of secrecy. The distinctive role of the universities and the press is to inform the public, and to do so with authoritative status. It is not defined by its ideology. However, its ideological direction is a predictable consequence of its transparency. A public competition for admiration causes a movement to the extreme: the most attractive position is the one just slightly more extreme than the others. This is the “holiness spiral”.

The breakdown of conspiracy, then, is not just a phenomenon of the last decade that has given us Trump and so on. It is the root cause of the political direction of the last few centuries.

What is the cause of the breakdown of conspiracy? If I had to guess and point at one thing it would be protestantism. That, after all, was largely a move to remove the secrecy from religion. Once democracy got going, that removed much more secrecy. But it’s still an ongoing process: democracy until recently was mediated by non-public formal and informal institutions. The opening of the guilds can be seen as part of the same trend. Many of the things I have written about in the past may be related — the decline in personal loyalty, for example.

That produces a feedback loop — a belief in equality and openness brings more decision-making into the public sphere, which leads to holiness spirals, which leads to ever increasing belief in equality and openness. But it seems to me that the openness comes first, and the ideology results from it. The Cathedral is a sociological construct, not an ideological one.

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However, the actual powers of the state were immediately in the hands of the civil service and political parties, who were not transparent, and exerted a moderating influence. There were self-perpetuating groups of powerful people — conspiracies — who could limit the choices open to the electorate and therefore slow the long-term political trends driven by the Cathedral. Today, as a result of internal democracy in political parties (particularly in the UK, a very recent development), and of unmediated channels of communication, those conspiracies have been broken open. A politician today is fundamentally in the same business as a journalist or a professor — he is competing for status by means of public statements. The internal debates of political parties are now public debates. In the past, in order to become a politician, other politicians had to accept you. Now you can be a TV star or a newspaper columnist today, and be a politician tomorrow. The incumbents can’t quietly agree to stop you, any more than they could quietly agree to have pizza for lunch.

Posted in Policy | 1 Comment »

A tough-on-crime WASP using torture, intimidation, and surveillance to bring down a media-savvy terrorist

Friday, June 28th, 2019

What might be called “Nolan’s enigma” began in earnest with The Dark Knight — which involved a tough-on-crime WASP using torture, intimidation, and surveillance to bring down a media-savvy terrorist:

The Dark Knight Rises took things one step further with Bane, a menacing mix of Robespierre and Ruthenberg, whose pseudo-Marxist coup unleashes all manner of mayhem upon Gotham: banishments and public hangings, street brawls and show trials, and — in a scene lifted straight out of the French revolution — the storming of Blackgate (Bastille) prison.

Not to be outdone, Marvel soon embraced its own brand of post-9/11 conservatism. In every Avengers film, Joshua Tait notes, “it really is 1938….The threats are real and the Avengers’ unilateral actions are necessary” to protect life, liberty, and democracy. Each hero thus functions as a kind of Cold Warrior, standing athwart would-be despots and authoritarians, while their enemies function as bland, unidimensional cannon-fodder, a convenient narrative pretext for blowing things up. (To be fair, the bad guys usually do possess weapons of mass destruction; this is fantasy, after all.)

By 2018, however, Marvel had ditched the neocon agitprop and gone full paleo. Black Panther — which Slate described as “the most feminist superhero movie yet” — is about the hereditary monarch of a monoracial ethno-state that keeps immigrants at bay with a high-tech border wall and faces no economic slowdown because of it. In fact, Wakanda becomes the richest country in the world without any international trade whatsoever, all while maintaining traditional religious customs and above-replacement fertility rates — a kind of black Israel. (It does eventually reconcile itself to foreign aid under T’Challa, but not to immigration.) Trouble only begins when Killmonger (a foreigner) challenges Black Panther’s claim to the throne — not because he thinks the current occupant is illegitimate, but because he wants to use Wakandan technology to launch a global, race-based revolution, with no regard for national boundaries.

Then in Avengers: Infinity War, Wakanda opens its border wall and promptly gets invaded by aliens.

So perhaps it is fitting that Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel movie to end all Marvel movies, is even more Burkean — and badass — than its predecessors, a sustained cinematic rejoinder to everything Hollywood believes. If you haven’t seen Endgame yet — or if you take comfort in the delusion that Marvel is “woke” — stop reading now.

Posted in Media, Policy | 7 Comments »

The only way to get good content out of the Internet is by having humans in the loop

Thursday, June 27th, 2019

Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, starts in the near future, where most of the Net has become a Miasma:

I saw someone recently describe social media in its current state as a doomsday machine, and I think that’s not far off. We’ve turned over our perception of what’s real to algorithmically driven systems that are designed not to have humans in the loop, because if humans are in the loop they’re not scalable and if they’re not scalable they can’t make tons and tons of money.

The result is the situation we see today where no one agrees on what factual reality is and everyone is driven in the direction of content that is “more engaging,” which almost always means that it’s more emotional, it’s less factually based, it’s less rational, and kind of destructive from a basic civics standpoint.

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I think the only way to get good content out of the internet is by having humans in the loop. The reason that social media systems are architected the way they are, as I mentioned before, is because humans are expensive and you can’t scale that kind of system to serve billions and billions of people. What that kind of implies is that if you did want a curated, edited stream, that you would have to pay for it.

So that means that access to that kind of higher-quality view of the world becomes a class-based situation where people who’ve got the money to pay for or partially pay for human editors and curators are getting higher-quality info, which I think is just a slight kind of magnification or intensification of the way things are now anyway.

(I’ve mentioned before that I have mixed feelings about most of Stephenson’s work.)

Posted in Media, Policy | 12 Comments »

The older woman recognized the warning signs

Wednesday, June 26th, 2019

We can learn from history, Jared Diamond argues (Upheaval) — both personal history and history history:

I write these lines just after spending an evening with two women friends, one of them a psychologically naïve optimist in her 20’s, the other a perceptive person in her 70’s. The younger woman was devastated by the recent break-up of her relationship with a fascinating man who had seemed so caring, but who suddenly, after several years, cruelly and without warning abandoned the woman. But as the younger woman related her story, even before reaching the devastating denouement, the older woman (without having met the man) recognized the warning signs that the man was a charming but destructive narcissist, of whom she had come to understand quite a few.

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Thucydides described how the citizens of the small Greek island of Melos responded to pressure from the powerful Athenian Empire. In a passage now known as the Melian Dialogue, Thucydides reconstructed the gut-wrenching negotiations between the Melians and the Athenians: the Melians bargaining for their freedom and their lives, attempting to convince the Athenians not to use force; and the Athenians warning the Melians to be realistic. Thucydides then briefly related the outcome: the Melians refused Athenian demands, just as the Finns two millennia later initially refused Soviet demands; the Athenians besieged Melos; the Melians resisted successfully for some time; but they eventually had to surrender; and—the Athenians killed all the Melian men and enslaved all the women and children.

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Focus just on birds and airplanes

Tuesday, June 25th, 2019

Jared Diamond shares a story (Upheaval) about how two nations, which don’t get along, were nonetheless able to solve a problem:

Israel has invaded and partially occupied Lebanon. Lebanon has served as a base for launching rocket attacks into Israel. Nevertheless, bird-watchers of those two countries succeeded in reaching a milestone agreement. Eagles and other large birds migrating seasonally between Europe and Africa fly south from Lebanon through Israel every autumn, then north again from Israel through Lebanon every spring. When aircraft collide with those large birds, the result is often mutual destruction. (I write this sentence a year after my family and I survived the collision of our small chartered plane with an eagle, which dented but didn’t bring down our plane; the eagle died.) Such collisions had been a leading cause of fatal plane accidents in Lebanon and Israel. That stimulated bird-watchers of those two countries to establish a mutual warning system. In the autumn Lebanese bird-watchers warn their Israeli counterparts and Israeli air traffic controllers when they see a flock of large birds over Lebanon heading south towards Israel, and in the spring Israeli bird-watchers warn of birds heading north. While it’s obvious that this agreement is mutually advantageous, it required years of discussions to overcome prevailing hatreds, and to focus just on birds and airplanes.

Posted in Animals, Policy | 4 Comments »

Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life

Tuesday, June 25th, 2019

Masha Gessen explains what HBO’s Chernobyl got right and wrong:

Before I get to what the series got so terribly wrong, I should acknowledge what it got right. In “Chernobyl,” which was created and written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, the material culture of the Soviet Union is reproduced with an accuracy that has never before been seen in Western television or film—or, for that matter, in Russian television or film. Clothes, objects, and light itself seem to come straight out of nineteen-eighties Ukraine, Belarus, and Moscow. (There are tiny errors, like a holiday uniform worn by schoolchildren on a non-holiday, or teen-agers carrying little kids’ school bags, but this is truly splitting hairs.) Soviet-born Americans—and, indeed, Soviet-born Russians—have been tweeting and blogging in awe at the uncanny precision with which the physical surroundings of Soviet people have been reproduced. The one noticeable mistake in this respect concerns the series makers’ apparent ignorance of the vast divisions between different socioeconomic classes in the Soviet Union: in the series, Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), a member of the Academy of Sciences, lives in nearly the same kind of squalor as a fireman in the Ukrainian town of Pripyat. In fact, Legasov would have lived in an entirely different kind of squalor than the fireman did.

Herein lies one of the series’ biggest flaws: its failure to accurately portray Soviet relationships of power. There are exceptions, flashes of brilliance that shed light on the bizarre workings of Soviet hierarchies. In the first episode, for example, during an emergency meeting of the Pripyat ispolkom, the town’s governing council, an elder statesman, Zharkov (Donald Sumpter), delivers a chilling, and chillingly accurate, speech, urging his compatriots to “have faith.” “We seal off the city,” Zharkov says. “No one leaves. And cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labor.” This statement has everything: the bureaucratic indirectness of Soviet speech, the privileging of “fruits of labor” over the people who created them, and, of course, the utter disregard for human life.

The final episode of “Chernobyl” also contains a scene that encapsulates the Soviet system perfectly. During the trial of three men who have been deemed responsible for the disaster, a member of the Central Committee overrules the judge, who then looks to the prosecutor for direction—and the prosecutor gives that direction with a nod. This is exactly how Soviet courts worked: they did the bidding of the Central Committee, and the prosecutor wielded more power than the judge.

Unfortunately, apart from these striking moments, the series often veers between caricature and folly. In Episode 2, for example, the Central Committee member Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgård) threatens to have Legasov shot if he doesn’t tell him how a nuclear reactor works. There are a lot of people throughout the series who appear to act out of fear of being shot. This is inaccurate: summary executions, or even delayed executions on orders of a single apparatchik, were not a feature of Soviet life after the nineteen-thirties. By and large, Soviet people did what they were told without being threatened with guns or any punishment.

Similarly repetitive and ridiculous are the many scenes of heroic scientists confronting intransigent bureaucrats by explicitly criticizing the Soviet system of decision-making. In Episode 3, for example, Legasov asks, rhetorically, “Forgive me—maybe I’ve just spent too much time in my lab, or maybe I’m just stupid. Is this really the way it all works? An uninformed, arbitrary decision that will cost who knows how many lives that is made by some apparatchik, some career Party man?” Yes, of course this is the way it works, and, no, he hasn’t been in his lab so long that he didn’t realize that this is how it works. The fact of the matter is, if he didn’t know how it worked, he would never have had a lab.

Resignation was the defining condition of Soviet life. But resignation is a depressing and untelegenic spectacle. So the creators of “Chernobyl” imagine confrontation where confrontation was unthinkable—and, in doing so, they cross the line from conjuring a fiction to creating a lie. The Belarusian scientist Ulyana Khomyuk (Emily Watson) is even more confrontational than Legasov. “I am a nuclear physicist,” she tells an apparatchik, in Episode 2. “Before you were Deputy Secretary, you worked in a shoe factory.” First, she’d never say this. Second, the apparatchik might have worked at a shoe factory, but, if he was an apparatchik, he was no cobbler; he has come up the Party ladder, which might indeed have begun at the factory—but in an office, not on the factory floor. The apparatchik—or, more accurately, the caricature of the apparatchik—pours himself a glass of vodka from a carafe that sits on his desk and responds, “Yes, I worked in a shoe factory. And now I’m in charge.” He toasts, in what appears to be the middle of the day: “To the workers of the world.” No. No carafe, no vodka in the workplace in front of a hostile stranger, and no boasting “I’m in charge.”

The biggest fiction in this scene, though, is Khomyuk herself. Unlike other characters, she is made up—according to the closing titles, she represents dozens of scientists who helped Legasov investigate the cause of the disaster. Khomyuk appears to embody every possible Hollywood fantasy. She is a truth-knower: the first time we see her, she is already figuring out that something has gone terribly wrong, and she is grasping it terribly fast, unlike the dense men at the actual scene of the disaster, who seem to need hours to take it in. She is also a truth-seeker: she interviews dozens of people (some of them as they are dying of radiation exposure), digs up a scientific paper that has been censored, and figures out exactly what happened, minute by minute. She also gets herself arrested and then immediately seated at a meeting on the disaster, led by Gorbachev. None of this is possible, and all of it is hackneyed. The problem is not just that Khomyuk is a fiction; it’s that the kind of expert knowledge she represents is a fiction. The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

In the absence of a Chernobyl narrative, the makers of the series have used the outlines of a disaster movie. There are a few terrible men who bring the disaster about, and a few brave and all-knowing ones, who ultimately save Europe from becoming uninhabitable and who tell the world the truth. It is true that Europe survived; it is not true that anyone got to the truth, or told it.

Posted in Media, Policy | 2 Comments »

Average per-capita consumption rates of resources are about 32 times higher in the First World than in the developing world

Monday, June 24th, 2019

Naturally Jared Diamond (Upheaval) is concerned about the environment — and about the rest of the world trying to live like us:

The most discussed primary effect of CO2 release is to act as a so-called greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. That’s because atmospheric CO2 is transparent to the sun’s shortwave radiation, allowing incoming sunlight to pass through the atmosphere and warm the Earth’s surface. The Earth re-radiates that energy back towards space, but at longer thermal infrared wavelengths to which CO2 is opaque. Hence the CO2 absorbs that re-radiated energy and re-emits it in all directions, including back down to the Earth’s surface.

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But there are two other primary effects of CO2 release. One is that the CO2 that we produce also gets stored in the oceans as carbonic acid. But the ocean’s acidity is already higher than at any time in the last 15 million years. That dissolves the skeletons of coral, killing coral reefs, which are a major breeding nursery of the ocean’s fish, and which protect tropical and subtropical sea-coasts against storm waves and tsunamis. At present, the world’s coral reefs are contracting by 1% or 2% per year, so they will mostly be gone within this century, and that means big declines in tropical coastal safety and protein availability from seafood.

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For instance, when non-poisonous chlorofluorocarbon gases (CFCs) replaced the poisonous gases previously used in refrigerators until the 1940’s, it seemed like a wonderful and safe engineering solution to the refrigerator gas problem, especially because laboratory testing had revealed no downside to CFCs. Unfortunately, lab tests couldn’t reveal how CFCs, once they got into the atmosphere, would begin to destroy the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet radiation.

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France has generated most of its national electricity requirements from nuclear reactors for many decades without an accident.

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Europeans are discouraged from buying expensive big cars with high fuel consumption and low gas mileage, because the purchase tax on cars in some European countries is set at 100%, doubling the cost of the car.

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Also, European government taxes on gasoline drive gas prices to more than $9 per gallon, another disincentive to buying a fuel-inefficient car.

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These various resources differ in four respects important for understanding their potential for creating problems for us: their renewability, and the resulting management problems; their potential for limiting human societies; their international dimensions; and the international competition that they provoke, including wars.

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There have already been some attempts to exploit all three: after World War One the German chemist Fritz Haber worked on a process to extract gold from ocean water; at least one attempt has been made to tow an iceberg from Antarctica to a water-poor Middle Eastern nation; and efforts are far advanced to mine some minerals from the ocean floor.

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Fresh water is also mobile: many rivers flow between two or more countries, and many lakes are bordered by two or more countries, hence one country can draw down or pollute fresh water that another country wants to use.

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Average per-capita consumption rates of resources like oil and metals, and average per-capita production rates of wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in the First World than in the developing world.

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The First World consists of about 1 billion people who live mostly in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, and who have relative average per-capita consumption rates of 32.

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Many decades ago, American diplomats used to play a game of debating which of the world’s countries were most irrelevant to U.S. national interests. Popular answers were “Afghanistan” and “Somalia”: those two countries were so poor, and so remote, that it seemed that they could never do anything to create problems for us.

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Among the ways in which globalization has made differences in living standards around the world untenable, three stand out. One is the spread of emerging diseases from poor remote countries to rich countries.

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Many people in poor countries get frustrated and angry when they become aware of the comfortable lifestyles available elsewhere in the world. Some of them become terrorists, and many others who aren’t terrorists themselves tolerate or support terrorists.

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Only in poor countries, where much of the population does feel desperate and angry, is there toleration or support for terrorists.

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They have two ways of achieving it. First, governments of developing countries consider an increase in living standards, including consumption rates, as a prime goal of national policy. Second, tens of millions of people in the developing world are unwilling to wait to see whether their government can deliver high living standards within their lifetime. Instead, they seek the First World lifestyle now, by emigrating to the First World, with or without permission: especially by emigrating to Western Europe and the U.S., and also to Australia; and especially from Africa and parts of Asia, and also from Central and South America. It’s proving impossible to keep out the immigrants.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 7 Comments »

We know of at least three false alarms given by the American detection system

Sunday, June 23rd, 2019

The most obvious crisis that the US has faced — and continues to face — Jared Diamond argues (in Upheaval) is nuclear armageddon:

For example, on the first day of the week-long Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy announced publicly that any launch of a Soviet missile from Cuba would require “a full retaliatory response [of the U.S.] upon the Soviet Union.” But Soviet submarine captains had the authority to launch a nuclear torpedo without first having to confer with Soviet leadership in Moscow. One such Soviet submarine captain did consider firing a nuclear torpedo at an American destroyer threatening the submarine; only the intervention of other officers on his ship dissuaded him from doing so. Had the Soviet captain carried out his intent, Kennedy might have faced irresistible pressure to retaliate, leading to irresistible pressure on Khrushchev to retaliate further…

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Once missiles have been launched, are underway, and have been detected, the American or Russian president has about 10 minutes to decide whether to launch a retaliatory attack before the incoming missiles destroy the land-based missiles of his country. Launched missiles can’t be recalled.

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We know of at least three false alarms given by the American detection system. For example, on November 9, 1979 the U.S. army general serving as watch officer for the U.S. system phoned then-Under-Secretary of Defense William Perry in the middle of the night to say, “My warning computer is showing 200 ICBMs in flight from the Soviet Union to the United States.” But the general concluded that the signal was probably a false alarm, Perry did not awaken President Carter, and Carter did not push the button and needlessly kill a hundred million Soviets. It eventually turned out that the signal was indeed a false alarm due to human error: a computer operator had by mistake inserted into the U.S. warning system computer a training tape simulating the launch of 200 Soviet ICBMs.

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We also know of at least one false alarm given by the Russian detection system: a single non-military rocket launched in 1995 from an island off Norway towards the North Pole was misidentified by the automatic tracking algorithm of Russian radar as a missile launched from an American submarine.

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U.S. policy towards Russia today ignores the lesson that Finland’s leaders drew from the Soviet threat after 1945: that the only way of securing Finland’s safety was to engage in constant frank discussions with the Soviet Union, and to convince the Soviets that Finland could be trusted and posed no threat (Chapter 2).

Posted in Policy, War | 6 Comments »

Americans spend three to four times more time watching TV together than talking with one another

Saturday, June 22nd, 2019

Jared Diamond argues (in Upheaval) that the US is facing a political and cultural crisis:

No one, in the 5,400-year history of centralized government on all of the continents, has figured out how to ensure that the policies implemented with enviable speed by dictatorships consist predominantly of good policies.

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I also acknowledge that democracy isn’t necessarily the best option for all countries; it’s difficult for it to prevail in countries lacking the prerequisites of a literate electorate and a widely accepted national identity.

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To understand the fundamental benefits of an immigrant population, imagine that you could divide the population of any country into two groups: one consisting on the average of the youngest, healthiest, boldest, most risk-tolerant, most hard-working, ambitious, and innovative people; the other consisting of everybody else. Transplant the first group to another country, and leave the second group in their country of origin. That selective transplanting approximates the decision to emigrate and its successful accomplishment.

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One friend of mine, nominated to a second-level position in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, withdrew his candidacy when he still hadn’t been confirmed after a year of waiting.

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Why has this breakdown of political compromise accelerated within the last two decades? In addition to the other harm that it causes, it’s self-reinforcing, because it makes people other than uncompromising ideologues reluctant to seek government service as an elected representative. Two friends of mine who had been widely respected long-serving U.S. senators, and who seemed likely to succeed once again if they ran for re-election, decided instead to retire because they were so frustrated with the political atmosphere in Congress.

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One suggested explanation is the astronomical rise in costs of election campaigns, which has made donors more important than in the past.

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As one disillusioned friend wrote me after retiring from a long career in politics, “Of all the issues that we face, I think that the skew of money in our political system and our personal lives has been by far the most damaging. Politicians and political outcomes have been purchased on a grander scale than ever before… the scramble for political money saps time and money and enthusiasm… political schedules bend to money, political discourse worsens, and politicians do not know each other as they fly back and forth to their districts.”

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Formerly, our representatives served in Congress in Washington during the week; then they had to remain in Washington for the weekend because they couldn’t return to their home state and back within the span of a weekend. Their families lived in Washington, and their children went to school in Washington. On weekends the representatives and their spouses and children socialized with one another, the representatives got to know one another’s spouses and children, and the representatives spent time with one another as friends and not just as political adversaries or allies. Today, though, the high cost of election campaigns puts pressure on representatives to visit their home state often for the purpose of fund-raising, and the growth of domestic air travel makes that feasible.

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Those of you American readers over the age of 40, please reflect on changes that you’ve seen yourself in American elevator behavior (people waiting to enter an elevator now less likely to wait for those exiting the elevator); declining courtesy in traffic (not deferring to other drivers); declining friendliness on hiking trails and streets (Americans under 40 less likely to say hello to strangers than Americans over 40); and above all, in many circles, increasingly abusive “speech” of all sorts, especially in electronic communication.

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American academic debates have become more vicious today than they were 60 years ago.

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Already at the beginning of my academic career, I found myself involved in scholarly controversies, just as I am now. But I formerly thought of the scientists with whom I disagreed on scientific matters as personal friends, not as personal enemies. For example, I recall spending a vacation in Britain after a physiological conference, touring ruined Cistercian monasteries with a nice and gentle American physiologist with whom I had strongly disagreed about the mechanism of epithelial water transport at the conference. That would be impossible today. Instead, I’ve now repeatedly been sued, threatened with lawsuits, and verbally abused by scholars disagreeing with me. My lecture hosts have been forced to hire bodyguards to shield me from angry critics. One scholar concluded a published review of one of my books with the words “Shut up!”

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All of these arenas of American life are facets of the same widely discussed phenomenon: the decline of what is termed “social capital.”

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“… social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called ‘civic virtue.’”

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But Americans have been decreasingly involved in such face-to-face groups, while becoming increasingly involved in on-line groups in which you never meet, see, or hear the other person.

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The telephone appeared in 1890 but didn’t saturate the U.S. market until around 1957. Radio rose to saturation from 1923 to 1937, and TV from 1948 to 1955. The biggest change has been the more recent rise of the internet, cell phones, and text messaging.

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Americans spend three to four times more time watching TV together than talking with one another, and at least one-third of all TV viewing time is spent alone (often on the internet rather than in front of a TV set).

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In a Canadian valley were three otherwise similar towns, one of which happened to be out of reach for the TV transmitter serving the area. When that town did gain reception, participation in clubs and other meetings declined compared to participation in that same town before TV arrived, down to levels comparable to participation in the other two towns already served by TV.

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In the remote areas of New Guinea where I do fieldwork, and where new communication technologies haven’t yet arrived, all communication is still face-to-face and full-attention—as it used to be in the U.S. Traditional New Guineans spend most of their waking hours talking to one another. In contrast to the distracted and sparse conversations of Americans, traditional New Guinea conversations have no interruptions to look at the cell phone in one’s lap, nor to tap out e-mails or text messages during a conversation with a person physically present but receiving only a fraction of one’s attention.

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One American missionary’s son who grew up as a child in a New Guinea village and moved to the U.S. only in his high school years described his shock on discovering the contrast between children’s playing styles in New Guinea and in the U.S. In New Guinea, children in a village wandered in and out of one another’s huts throughout the day. In the U.S., as my friend discovered, “Kids go into their own houses, close the door, and watch TV by themselves.”

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South Korean applicants for training as primary schoolteachers have to score in the top 5% on national college entrance exams, and there are 12 teachers applying for every secondary school teaching job in South Korea. In contrast, American teachers have the lowest relative salaries (i.e., relative to average national salaries for all jobs) among major democracies.

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All schoolteachers in South Korea, Singapore, and Finland come from the top third of their school classes, but nearly half of American teachers come from the bottom third of their classes.

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In all my 53 years of teaching at the University of California (Los Angeles), a university that attracts good students, I have had only one student who told me that he wanted to become a schoolteacher.

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For instance, Canada’s criteria for admitting immigrants are more detailed and rational than the U.S.’s. As a result, 80% of Canadians consider immigrants good for the Canadian economy—a far cry from the lacerating divisions in American society over immigration.

Posted in Education, Policy | 9 Comments »

The U.S. is resource-rich, self-sufficient in food and most raw materials, and large in area

Friday, June 21st, 2019

Jared Diamond argues (in Upheaval) that the US is facing its own crisis — but first a geography lesson:

The reason for the U.S.’s large population is its large area of fertile land. The only two larger countries, Russia and Canada, have much lower populations, because a large fraction of their area is Arctic, suitable only for sparse habitation and no agriculture.

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The reason for this apparent contradiction is that the U.S. is resource-rich, self-sufficient in food and most raw materials, and large in area, and has a population density less than 1/10th of Japan’s.

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The only countries in the world with per-capita GDPs or incomes higher than the U.S.’s are either small (populations of just 2–9 million: Kuwait, Norway, Qatar, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates) or tiny (populations of 30,000–500,000: Brunei, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and San Marino).

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Their wealth comes mainly from oil or finance, whose earnings are spread over few people, resulting in high GDP or income per person but a low rank in total national economic output (which equals output per person times population).

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As regards geography, we are fortunate to be endowed with excellent real estate. The U.S.’s lower 48 states lie entirely within the temperate zones, which are the world’s most productive zone for agriculture, and the safest from the perspective of public health.

[...]

Thus, North America’s wedge shape and history of repeated past glaciations, combined with the moderate rainfall prevailing over most of the continent today, are the underlying reasons why the U.S. has high agricultural productivity and is the world’s largest exporter of food.

[...]

The other major geographic advantage of the U.S. is our waterways, both coastal and interior. They constitute a big money-saver, because transport by sea is 10–30 times cheaper than transport overland by road or by rail.

[...]

Once barriers to navigation on those rivers had been engineered out of existence by construction of canals and locks, ships could sail 1,200 miles into the interior of the central U.S. from the Gulf Coast (Plate 9.4).

[...]

When one adds the intra-coastal waterway to the Mississippi / Great Lakes system, the U.S. ends up with more navigable internal waterways than all the rest of the world combined.

[...]

The other advantage of our sea-coasts is as protection against invasion.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 6 Comments »

Japan is, and prides itself on being, the most ethnically homogenous affluent or populous country in the world

Thursday, June 20th, 2019

Jared Diamond argues (in Upheaval) that modern Japan is facing a crisis, of sorts:

Japan today has the world’s third-largest economy, only recently overtaken by China’s.

[...]

Japan’s national output is high both because Japan has a large population (second only to that of the United States among rich democracies) and because it has high average individual productivity.

[...]

In relative terms, Japan’s proportion of its gross domestic product (abbreviated GDP) that it devotes to R & D, 3.5%, is nearly double that of the U.S. (only 1.8%), and still considerably higher than that of two other countries known for their R & D investments, Germany (2.9%) and China (2.0%).

[...]

Japanese life expectancy is the highest in the world: 80 years for men, 86 for women.

[...]

Japan is the world’s third-most egalitarian nation in its distribution of income, behind only Denmark and Sweden.

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Literacy and attained educational levels in Japan are close to the highest in the world.

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As foreign visitors to Japan quickly notice, its capital Tokyo rivals Singapore as the cleanest city in Asia, and is one of the cleanest in the world.

[...]

(Interpretative texts at Japanese archaeological sites sometimes proudly point out site evidence for Japanese cleanliness already in ancient times.)

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Visitors also notice the safety and low crime rates of Japanese cities.

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Ethnic tensions are low compared to the U.S. and Europe, because of Japan’s ethnic homogeneity and very small ethnic minorities.

[...]

Japanese agricultural productivity is high because of Japan’s combination of temperate climate, freedom from tropical agricultural pests, high rainfall concentrated in the summer growing season, and fertile volcanic soils.

[...]

As a result of all those environmental advantages, Japan was unusual in the ancient world in that, already at least 10,000 years before the adoption of agriculture, Japanese hunter-gatherers had settled down in villages and made pottery, rather than living as nomads with few material possessions.

[...]

Until Japan’s population explosion within the last century-and-a-half, Japan was self-sufficient in food.

[...]

The debt is currently about 2.5 times Japan’s annual GDP, i.e., the value of everything produced in Japan in one year.

[...]

First, most of the debt is not owed to foreign creditors, but to bond-holding Japanese individuals, Japanese businesses and pension funds (many of them owned by the government itself), and the Bank of Japan, none of which play tough with the Japanese government.

[...]

Despite all the debt that the Japanese government owes to Japanese themselves, Japan is a net creditor nation for other countries, which owe money to Japan.

[...]

Second, interest rates in Japan are kept low (below 1%) by government policy, in order to keep a lid on government interest payments.

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Finally, Japanese as well as foreign creditors still have so much confidence in the government’s ability to pay that they continue to buy government bonds.

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The other fundamental problems most often acknowledged by Japanese people themselves are the four linked issues of women’s roles, Japan’s low and declining birth rate, its declining population size, and its aging population.

[...]

Whereas women account for 49% of Japanese university students and 45% of entry-level job holders, they account for only 14% of university faculty positions (versus 33%–44% in the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, and France), 11% of middle-level to senior management positions, 2% of positions on boards of directors, 1% of business executive committee members, and less than 1% of CEOs.

[...]

Work obstacles for women include the long work hours, the expectation of post-work employee socializing, and the problem of who will take care of the children if a working mother is expected to stay out socializing, and if her husband is also unavailable or unwilling.

[...]

Instead, 70% of Japanese working women quit work upon the birth of their first child, and most of them don’t return to work for many years, if ever.

[...]

Little child care is available to Japanese working mothers because of the lack of immigrant women to do private child care (see below), and because there are so few private or government child-care centers, unlike the situation in the U.S. and in Scandinavia, respectively.

[...]

Low and dropping birth rates prevail throughout the First World. But Japan has nearly the world’s lowest birth rate: 7 births per year per 1,000 people, compared to 13 in the U.S., 19 averaged over the whole world, and more than 40 in some African countries.

[...]

For the whole world that number averages 2.5 babies; for the First World countries with the biggest economies, it varies between 1.3 and 2.0 babies (e.g., 1.9 for the U.S.). The number for Japan is only 1.27 babies, at the low end of the spectrum; South Korea and Poland are among the few countries with lower values.

[...]

Part of the reason for Japan’s falling birth rate is that Japan’s age of first marriage has been rising: it’s now around 30 for both men and women.

[...]

A bigger reason for the falling birth rate is that the rate of marriage itself (i.e., the number of marriages per 1,000 people per year) is falling rapidly in Japan. One might object that the marriage rate is also falling in most other developed countries without causing the catastrophic drop in the birth rate that Japan is experiencing, because so many births are to unwed mothers: 40% of all births in the U.S., 50% in France, and 66% in Iceland. But that mitigation doesn’t apply to Japan, where unwed mothers account for a negligible proportion of births: only 2%.

[...]

Japan is already the country with the world’s highest life expectancy (84, compared to 77 for the U.S. and just 40–45 for many African countries), and with the highest percentage of old people. Already now, 23% of Japan’s population is over 65, and 6% is over 80. By the year 2050 those numbers are projected to be nearly 40% and 16%, respectively. (The corresponding numbers for the African country of Mali are only 3% and 0.1%.)

[...]

Japan’s ratio of workers to retirees has been falling catastrophically: from 9 workers per retiree in 1965, to 2.4 today, to a projected 1.3 in 2050.

[...]

Japan is, and prides itself on being, the most ethnically homogenous affluent or populous country in the world. It doesn’t welcome immigrants, makes it difficult for anyone who wants to immigrate to do so, and makes it even more difficult for anyone who has succeeded in immigrating to receive Japanese citizenship.

[...]

As a percentage of a country’s total population, immigrants and their children constitute 28% of Australia’s population, 21% of Canada’s, 16% of Sweden’s, and 14% of the U.S.’s, but only 1.9% of Japan’s.

[...]

Among refugees seeking asylum, Sweden accepts 92%, Germany 70%, Canada 48%, but Japan only 0.2%.

[...]

Foreign workers constitute 15% of the workforce in the U.S. and 9% in Germany, but only 1.3% in Japan.

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For instance, it is not widely known that 10% of the victims killed at Hiroshima by the first atomic bomb were Korean laborers working there.

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The percentage of Japanese opposed to increasing the number of foreign residents is 63%; 72% agree that immigrants increase crime rates; and 80% deny that immigrants improve society by introducing new ideas, unlike the 57%–75% of Americans, Canadians, and Australians who do believe that immigrants improve society.

[...]

“Unlike Germans, the Japanese have not had a catharsis and rid themselves of the poison in their system. They have not educated their young about the wrong they had done. Hashimoto [a Japanese prime minister] expressed his ‘deepest regrets’ on the 52nd anniversary of the end of World War Two (1997) and his ‘profound remorse’ during his visit to Beijing in September 1997. However, he did not apologize, as the Chinese and Koreans wished Japan’s leader to do. I do not understand why the Japanese are so unwilling to admit the past, apologize for it, and move on. For some reason, they do not want to apologize. To apologize is to admit having done a wrong. To express regrets or remorse merely expresses their present subjective feelings. They denied the massacre of Nanking took place; that Korean, Filipino, Dutch, and other women were kidnapped or otherwise forced to be ‘comfort women’ (a euphemism for sex slaves) for Japanese soldiers at the war fronts; that they carried out cruel biological experiments on live Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, Russian, and other prisoners in Manchuria. In each case, only after irrefutable evidence was produced from their own records did they make reluctant admissions. This fed suspicions of Japan’s future intentions. Present Japanese attitudes are an indication of their future conduct. If they are ashamed of their past, they are less likely to repeat it.”

[...]

Until 1853, while Japan was closed to the outside world and did negligible importing, it was self-sufficient in natural resources.

[...]

Forced to depend on its own forests, and alarmed by their declines in the 1600’s, Japan pioneered in developing scientific forestry methods independently of Germany and Switzerland, in order to manage its forests.

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Japan is also the major country most dependent on imported food to feed its citizens. Japan today has the highest ratio (a factor of 20) of agricultural imports to agricultural exports among major countries.

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Japan appears to be the developed country with the least support for and the strongest opposition to sustainable resource policies overseas.

[...]

“In spite of my experiences during the Japanese occupation and the Japanese traits I had learned to fear, I now respect and admire them. Their group solidarity, discipline, intelligence, industriousness, and willingness to sacrifice for the nation make them a formidable and productive force. Conscious of the poverty of their resources, they will continue to make that extra effort to achieve the unachievable. Because of their cultural values, they will be lonely survivors after any catastrophe. From time to time they are hit by the unpredictable forces of nature—earthquakes, typhoons, and tsunamis. They take their casualties, pick themselves up, and rebuild.… I was amazed at how life was returning to normal when I visited Kobe in November 1996, one-and-a-half years after the [massive] earthquake. They had taken this catastrophe in their stride and settled to a new daily routine.”

Posted in Economics, Policy | 6 Comments »

The influence of those Asian immigrants has been far out of proportion to their numbers

Wednesday, June 19th, 2019

Australia has accepted many Asian immigrants, Jared Diamond notes (in Upheaval):

Under the Colombo Plan for Asian development, Australia accepted 10,000 Asian student visitors in the 1950’s.

[...]

The despised dictation test for prospective immigrants was dropped in 1958.

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The Migration Act of that same year allowed “distinguished and highly qualified Asians” to immigrate.

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Between 1978 and 1982 Australia admitted more Indochinese refugees, as a percentage of its population, than any other country in the world.

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By the late 1980’s, nearly half of Australians were either born overseas or had at least one overseas-born parent.

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By 1991, Asians represented over 50% of immigrants to Australia.

[...]

The influence of those Asian immigrants has been far out of proportion to their numbers: Asian students have come to occupy over 70% of the places in Sydney’s top schools, Asian university students appeared to account for a sizeable fraction of the students whom I saw strolling across the University of Queensland campus in 2008, and Asians and other non-Europeans now make up more than half of Australian medical students.

[...]

In 1986 Australia ended the right of final appeal to Britain’s Privy Council, thereby abolishing the last real trace of British sovereignty and making Australia fully independent at last.

[...]

In 1999 Australia’s High Court declared Britain to be a “foreign country.”

Posted in Economics, Education, Policy | 8 Comments »

It was regarded as a betrayal of Australia by its British mother country

Tuesday, June 18th, 2019

World War Two had immediate consequences for Australia’s immigration policy, Jared Diamond notes (in Upheaval):

But Australia’s main contribution to World War One was to contribute a huge volunteer force—400,000 soldiers, constituting more than half of all Australian men eligible to serve, out of a total Australian population under 5 million—to defend British interests half-way around the world from Australia, in France and the Mideast.

[...]

More than 300,000 were sent overseas, of whom two-thirds ended up wounded or killed.

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Almost every small rural Australian town still has a cenotaph in the town center, listing the names of local men killed in the war.

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Australia abolished the draft in 1930 and built only a small air force and navy.

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On February 15, 1942, the British general in command at Singapore surrendered to the Japanese army, sending 100,000 British and Empire troops into prisoner-of-war camps—the most severe military defeat that Britain has suffered in its history (Plate 7.7).

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Sadly, those troops surrendering included 2,000 Australian soldiers who had arrived in Singapore only three weeks earlier, on January 24, in order to serve in the hopeless task of its defense.

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In the absence of British ships to protect Australia, the same Japanese aircraft carriers that had bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor heavily bombed the Australian city of Darwin on February 19, 1942 (Plate 7.8).

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To Australians, the fall of Singapore was not just a shock and a frightening military setback: it was regarded as a betrayal of Australia by its British mother country.

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As a result, although Australia was attacked directly in World War Two but not in World War One, Australia’s casualties in World War Two were paradoxically less than half of those in World War One.

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After World War Two there unfolded a gradual loosening of Australia’s ties to Britain and a shift in Australians’ self-identification as “loyal British in Australia,” resulting in a dismantling of the White Australia policy.

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World War Two had immediate consequences for Australia’s immigration policy. Already in 1943, Australia’s prime minister concluded that the tiny population of Australians (less than 8 million in 1945) could not hold their huge continent against threats from Japan (population then over 100 million), Indonesia (just 200 miles away) with a population approaching 200 million, and China (population 1 billion).

[...]

All of Japan and Java is wet and fertile, and much of the area of those islands is suitable for highly productive agriculture. But most of Australia’s area is barren desert, and only a tiny fraction is productive farmland.

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But Australia’s prime ministers in the 1940’s were neither ecologists nor economists, and so post-war Australia did embark on a crash program of encouraging immigration.

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As a first step in that direction, Italian and German prisoners of war who had been brought to Australia were permitted to remain.

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Australia’s minister for immigration from 1945 to 1949, Arthur Calwell, was an outspoken racist. He even refused to allow Australian men who had been so unpatriotic as to marry Japanese, Chinese, or Indonesian women to bring their war-brides or children into Australia. Calwell wrote, “No Japanese women, or any half-castes either, will be admitted to Australia; they are simply not wanted and are permanently undesirable… a mongrel Australia is impossible.”

[...]

In 1947 Calwell toured refugee camps in post-war Europe, found that they offered “splendid human material,” and noted approvingly of the Baltic Republics, “Many of their people were red-headed and blue-eyed. There were also a number of natural platinum blonds of both sexes.” The result of that selective encouragement of immigration was that, from 1945 to 1950, Australia received about 700,000 immigrants (a number nearly equal to 10% of its 1945 population), half of them reassuringly British, the rest from other European countries.

[...]

The undermining of the White Australia policy that produced the Asian immigrants and Asian restaurants awaiting me in Brisbane in 2008 resulted from five considerations: military protection, political developments in Asia, shifts of Australian trade, the immigrants themselves, and British policy.

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To the shock of Australians, in 1967 Britain announced its intent to withdraw all of its military forces east of the Suez Canal. That marked the official end to Britain’s long-standing role as Australia’s protector.

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By the 1980’s Australia’s leading trade partner was—Japan!—followed by the U.S., with Britain far behind.

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Hence Britain applied to join the EEC. That application and its sequels constituted a shock to Australia’s and Britain’s relationship even more fundamental than had been the fall of Singapore, although the latter was more dramatic and symbolic, and lingers today as a bigger cause of festering resentment to Australians.

[...]

Britain’s Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962, actually aimed at halting Commonwealth immigration from the West Indies and Pakistan, avoided appearances of racism by ending the automatic right of all Commonwealth citizens (including Australians) to enter and reside in Britain.

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Britain’s 1968 Immigration Act barred automatic right of entry into Britain for all FOREIGNERS (Australians were now declared to be foreigners!) without at least one British-born grandparent, thereby excluding a large fraction of Australians at that time.

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In 1972 Britain declared Australians to be ALIENS (!).

[...]

From an Australian perspective, it may seem that Australian identity changed suddenly and comprehensively in 1972, when Australia’s Labour Party under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam came to power for the first time in 23 years. In his first 19 days in office, even before he had appointed a new cabinet, Whitlam and his deputy embarked on a crash program of selective change in Australia, for which there are few parallels in the modern world in its speed and comprehensiveness. The changes introduced in those 19 days included: end of the military draft (national conscription); withdrawal of all Australian troops from Vietnam; recognition of the People’s Republic of China; announced independence for Papua New Guinea, which Australia had been administering for over half-a-century under a mandate from the League of Nations and then from the United Nations; banning visits by racially selected overseas athletic teams (a rule aimed especially at all-white South African teams); abolishing the nomination of Australians for Britain’s system of honors (knighthoods, OBEs, KCMGs, and so on) and replacing them with a new system of Australian honors; and—officially repudiating the White Australia policy.

[...]

Once Whitlam’s whole cabinet had been approved, it then adopted more steps in the crash program: reduction of the voting age to 18; increase in the minimum wage; giving representation to both the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory in the federal Senate; granting legislative councils to both of those territories; requiring environmental impact statements for industrial developments; increased spending on Aborigines; equal pay for women; no-fault divorce; a comprehensive medical insurance scheme; and big changes in education that included abolishing university fees, boosts in financial aid for schools, and transfer from the states to the Australian Commonwealth of the responsibility for funding tertiary education.

[...]

Whitlam correctly described his reforms as a “recognition of what has already happened” rather than as a revolution arising out of nothing.

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In 1954 the first visit to Australia by a reigning British monarch, Queen Elizabeth, was greeted by an enormous outpouring of pro-British sentiment: over 75% of all Australians turned out on the streets to cheer her (Plate 7.9). But—by the time that Queen Elizabeth visited Australia again in 1963, two years after Britain’s first EEC application, Australians were much less interested in her and in Britain.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 7 Comments »

More British than Britain itself

Monday, June 17th, 2019

Jared Diamond first visited Australia in 1964, shortly after he had been living in Britain for four years (as he explains in Upheaval):

Australia then impressed me as more British than Britain itself—like the Britain of a few decades prior, frozen in time.

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Australian people were not just overwhelmingly white in their ancestry; they were overwhelmingly British white.

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In 1964 the fundamental fact of Australian society was still the contradiction between Australia’s geographic location on the one hand, and its population make-up and emotional and cultural ties on the other hand. Australia’s population and national identity were mostly British (Plate 7.1). But Australia is almost half-way around the world from Britain: in the Southern Hemisphere rather than in the Northern Hemisphere, and eight to 10 time zones east of Britain. The Australian landscape of kangaroos, egg-laying mammals, kookaburras, big lizards, eucalyptus trees, and deserts is the most distinctive (and least British) landscape of any continent inhabited by humans (Plate 7.2).

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However, 32 years later, in 1820, Australia’s European population still consisted of 84% of convicts and former convicts, and convict transport from Britain to Australia did not cease until 1868.

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Today, one-third of the world’s wool is grown by Australia’s abundant sheep population, five sheep for every human.

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Australia is a world-leading exporter of aluminum, coal, copper, gold, iron, lead, magnesium, silver, tungsten, titanium, and uranium.

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In other British colonies, such as the U.S., Canada, India, Fiji, and West Africa, British colonists dealt with native people either peacefully by negotiating with local chiefs or princes, or else militarily by sending British armies against local armies or sizeable tribal forces. Those methods did not work in Australia, where Aboriginal organization consisted of small bands without armies, chiefs, or princes.

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Aborigines lived a nomadic lifestyle and did not have fixed villages. To European settlers, that meant that Aborigines did not “own” the land. Hence European settlers simply took Aboriginal land without negotiation or payment.

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The first substantial group of non-British immigrants began to arrive in 1836 in South Australia. That colony had been founded not as a convict dump but by a land development company that carefully selected prospective settlers from Europe. Among those settlers were German Lutherans seeking religious freedom, a motive for immigration much more conspicuous in the early history of the United States than of Australia. Those German immigrants were skilled and white, developed market gardening and vineyards, adapted quickly to Australia, and aroused minimal opposition.

[...]

More controversial was the arrival of tens of thousands of Chinese in the 1850’s, drawn (along with many Europeans and Americans) by Australia’s first gold rush. That influx resulted in the last use of the British army in Australia, to quell riots in which a crowd beat, robbed, and even scalped Chinese.

[...]

A third wave of non-British arrivals arose from the development of sugar plantations in Queensland beginning in the 1860’s. The plantation workers were Pacific Islanders from New Guinea, other Melanesian islands, and Polynesia. While some of them were voluntary recruits, many were kidnapped from their islands by raids accompanied by frequent murders, in a practice known as black-birding (because the islanders were dark-skinned).

[...]

Such labor recruitment practices continued in New Guinea long into the 20th century: an Australian whom I met in Australian-governed New Guinea in 1966 told me that he was a labor recruiter, but he took pains to explain how he recruited only voluntary laborers to whom he paid cash bonuses. He proudly insisted that he was not a kidnapping black-birder (that was the word that he still used), whereas some of the other recruiters with whom he competed still were.

[...]

In any case, regardless of whether the dark-skinned workers on Australian sugar plantations from the 1860’s onwards had arrived voluntarily or involuntarily, they did not make Australia’s resident population less white, because they came on fixed-term contracts and were expelled from Australia at the ends of their terms.

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Still another group of non-British immigrants was a small number from the British colony of India.

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The Australian colonies achieved self-government with no objections from Britain, and never severed their ties with Britain completely.

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One is that Britain learned lessons from its expensive defeat in the American Revolution, changed its policies towards its white colonies, and readily granted self-government to Canada, New Zealand, and its Australian colonies.

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The resulting slowness of communication made it impossible for the British colonial office in London to exercise close control over Australia; decisions and laws had to be delegated at first to governors, and then to Australians themselves.

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In contrast, no European power competed with Britain to colonize the Australian continent, and Aborigines were few, without guns, and not centrally led. Hence Britain never needed to station a large army in Australia, nor to levy unpopular taxes on Australians to pay for that army; Britain’s levying taxes on the American colonies without consulting them was the immediate cause of the American Revolution.

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Still another factor was that Britain’s Australian colonies, in contrast to its American colonies, were too unprofitable and unimportant for Britain to care about and pay much attention to.

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By the late 1800’s, the only major right consistently reserved for Britain was the control of Australian foreign affairs.

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The appointed British governors frequently had to resolve disagreements between the upper and lower houses of a colonial legislature, had to broker the formation of parliamentary coalitions, and had to decide when to dissolve parliament and call an election.

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In fact, Australia arose as six separate colonies—New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, and Queensland—with far less contact among them than the contact among the American colonies that would later become states of the U.S.

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Not until 1917 did all five of the capital cities on the Australian mainland become connected by railroad.

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Each colony adopted a different railroad gauge (track separation), ranging from 3 feet 6 inches to 5 feet 3 inches, with the result that trains could not run directly from one colony into another. Like independent countries, the colonies erected protective tariff barriers against one another and maintained customs houses to collect import duties at colonial borders.

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In 1864 New South Wales and Victoria came close to an armed confrontation at their border. As a result, the six colonies did not become united into a single nation of Australia until 1901, 113 years after the First Fleet.

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Australians debating the federal constitution argued about many matters but were unanimous about excluding all non-white races from Australia.

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In 1896 the newspaper Melbourne Age wrote, “We wish to see Australia the home of a great homogenous Caucasian race, entirely free from the problems which have plunged the United States into civil war… there is no use in protecting our workers from the pauper labor of the Far East if we admit the paupers themselves.”

[...]

The motive behind these immigration barriers was mainly the racism of the times, but partly also that the Australian Labor Party wanted to protect high wages for Australian workers by preventing the immigration of cheap labor.

[...]

Contemporary Britain and continental European countries didn’t encourage or accept immigrants at all.

Posted in Policy | 4 Comments »

Bismarck was realistic enough to understand that he had achieved the most that was possible

Sunday, June 16th, 2019

Jared Diamond makes a few more observations (in Upheaval) about Germany:

Germany’s central geographic location surrounded by neighbors seems to me to have been the most important factor in German history. Of course, that location has not been without advantages: it has made Germany a crossroads for trade, technology, art, music, and culture. A cynic would note that Germany’s location also facilitated its invasion of many countries during World War Two.

[...]

The Thirty Years’ War, which was the major religious and power struggle between most of the leading nations of 17th-century Western and Central Europe, was fought mainly on German soil, reduced the population there by up to 50%, and inflicted a crushing economic and political setback whose consequences persisted for the next two centuries.

[...]

But we should not take for granted Germans’ rejection of the victim role and assumption of shame after World War Two, because it contrasts with the assumption of the victim role by Germans themselves after World War One and by Japanese after World War Two (Chapter 8).

[...]

But one can still argue that a World War Two instigated by Germany without Hitler would have been very different. His unusual evil mentality, charisma, boldness in foreign policy, and decision to exterminate all Jews were not shared by other revisionist German leaders of his era. Despite his initial military successes, his unrealistic appraisals led him repeatedly to override his own generals and ultimately to cause Germany’s defeat. Those fatally unrealistic decisions included his unprovoked declaration of war against the U.S. in December 1941 at a time when Germany was already at war with Britain and the Soviet Union, and his overriding of his generals’ pleas to authorize retreat by the German army trapped at Stalingrad in 1942–1943.

[...]

Once Germany had been unified in 1871, leaving millions of German-speaking peoples outside its borders, Bismarck was realistic enough to understand that he had achieved the most that was possible, and that other powers would not tolerate further German expansion.

[...]

Interestingly, recent German history provides four examples of an interval of 21–23 years between a crushing defeat and an explosive reaction to that defeat. Those four examples are: the 23-year interval between 1848’s failed revolutionary unification attempt and 1871’s successful unification; the 21-year interval between 1918’s crushing defeat in World War One and 1939’s outbreak of World War Two that sought and ultimately failed to reverse that defeat; the 23-year interval between 1945’s crushing defeat in World War Two and 1968’s revolts by the students born around 1945; and the 22-year interval between those 1968 student revolts and 1990’s re-unification.