It is possible to gain the benefits of extraordinary talent with almost no immigration at all

August 5th, 2025

Unlike economics or science, geopolitics is zero sum , Arctotherium reminds us — it doesn’t just matter what the United States is capable of, but what the United States is capable of compared to its competitors:

Objectively, the USA is far more powerful in 2025 than in 1945, but geopolitically it is much weaker.

It’s not impossible for states to deliberately use brain drain for geopolitical gain. This usually takes the form of what I call the “foreign experts model”. You identify specific areas in which national industry is inferior to foreign counterparts, and then invite small numbers of foreign experts in these areas (often many fewer than 10,000) to come and teach locals their skills, usually by paying them. The key components of the foreign expert model are:

  1. It is demographically insignificant.
  2. Foreign experts are expected to transfer their skills and knowledge to native students.
  3. Foreign experts are recognized as foreign. There’s no expectation that they naturalize (though in some cases they do, and because of (1) this doesn’t matter much) and they’re usually excluded from political positions. They may have influence and authority in their domains of expertise, but not over the nation as a whole. This is crucial because giving up control of the state to gain geopolitical power is putting the cart before the horse.
  4. Foreign experts are paid large sums of money or otherwise rewarded (usually above market value) for their expertise.

An illustrative example of the foreign experts model comes from the history of Saudi Aramco. Saudi Arabia has massive and easily-exploitable oil reserves, but did not have the local expertise to drill them after WWII. Relying on a wholly American-operated company would have left the country dependent on American goodwill and with little leverage. Iran and Venezuela chose to destructively nationalize their foreign-operated oil companies, while Equatorial Guinea and Nigeria allow foreign oil companies to operate autonomously in exchange for bribes and payouts. The Saudis took a wiser path:

At the very start of Aramco, the company was entirely owned and operated by Americans aside from menial labor. However, the Saudi government inserted a clause into their contract with the corporation requiring the American oil men to train Saudi citizens for management and engineering jobs. The Americans held up their end of the bargain, and over time, more and more Saudis took over management and technical positions. This steadily increased the bargaining power of the Saudi government, which periodically renegotiated its contract with the Americans over decades to get a greater share of the profits in exchange for more oil exploration or diplomatic concessions.

In 1973 and 1974, the Saudi government authorized two big final buy-outs of Aramco. The prices were not disclosed publicly, but the consensus is that the American oil companies were well-compensated, and that’s after they had made enormous profits for 30 years. This left the oil companies on good terms with the Saudis who were happy to employ them as consultants and specialists. Today, 80% of Aramco’s employees are Saudi, as well as all executives, though surprisingly not all board members.

History is full of similar examples. The English government invited German John Hurdegen to serve as “master of the assays of our mines” in 1545, paying him a salary of 40 pounds per year (approximately 32 times the annual wages of an English laborer at the time) and developed several other mines using German expertise. Small numbers of German engineers, surveyors, and managers brought superior German mining techniques to England, where they taught their skills to locals. Contrast this with the approach favored by Eastern European rulers, who transplanted entire colonies of Germans into their domains for their mining (and other) skills rather than having them teach locals.

The Russian state under Peter the Great recruited 60 Dutch shipbuilders and around 750 Western European officers, technicians, and academics to found the Russian Navy. While we lack precise information on most of them, one English hydraulic engineer, John Perry, was offered 300 pounds (approximately 60 times the annual cash wages of an English laborer in 1700) plus expenses and bonuses for completed projects, for his service.

Meiji Japan used European and American military and industrial experts to build up their army and economy and colonize Hokkaido. The total number of “hired foreigners” (O-yatoi, a term coming from Yatoi, meaning “person hired temporarily”) was 2,000-3,000, and their combined salaries reached a third of the national budget in 1874. The Japanese government “did not consider it prudent to let them settle in Japan permanently,” and they were replaced by Japanese students once the latter finished training and learning.

The People’s Republic of China pays foreign experts in many fields enormous sums of money to come to China temporarily and share their skills with the Chinese, despite China having the lowest proportion of foreign-born inhabitants on the planet.

[…]

America has its own history of taking in small numbers of extraordinarily talented immigrants. The two most famous examples are the 1930s exodus of European scientists to the US (where they were extremely important to the Manhattan Project) and Operation Paperclip. Both fit the foreign experts model.

The total number of European scientific emigres in the 1930s, which included such luminaries as Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, Edward Teller and Albert Einstein, was demographically insignificant—only a few thousand (less than half of the number of illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border every single day under the Biden Administration). In fact, the 1930s are the only decade in American history with net-negative immigration.

Far from immigration being America’s superpower, the exodus of European scientists shows how it is possible to gain the benefits of extraordinary talent with almost no immigration at all.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Evil, when it appears, is distinguished by refinement and good breeding

August 4th, 2025

The rise of the young-adult novel is the most significant literary event of this century, Tanner Greer argues:

The story takes place in a world not quite modern. Different devices might be used for this purpose. In some series, this means a future so dystopic that the earth has retrogressed to an earlier age; in others, fully modern settings serve as camouflage for a clandestine society whose language, dress, and grooming evoke a more aristocratic past. Thus, Harry Potter’s wizarding world has steam locomotives but not a single television set, Bella’s love interest is literally an Edwardian gentleman, and the dystopian landscape of The Hunger Games is a pastiche of Dust Bowl America and interwar Europe. Other YA series take the genre’s love affair with the turn of the twentieth century even further, placing their teenage heroes in a steampunk-inspired or magic-infused Victorian past. In all cases, the fictional society of the YA novel is classy. Beneath its repressed social rules and rigid social hierarchies is an elegance not found in the mundane humdrum of twenty-first-century America. Evil, when it appears, is distinguished by refinement and good breeding.

From Harry Potter onward, the speculative YA novelist has been enthralled by dreams and nightmares of the clandestine. Under the surface of normal life exists a hidden world more vital, dazzling, and dangerous than most people ever realize. The YA heroine may enter this society as a stranger, but eventually discovers that she (more often, the hero is female) is the fulcrum upon which this new world turns — and becomes aware of the many powerful individuals in this world plotting to use her to turn it.

This is the defining feature of the YA fictional society: powerful, inscrutable authorities with a mysterious and obsessive interest in the protagonist. Sometimes the hidden hands of this hidden world are benign. More often, they do evil. But the intentions behind these spying eyes do not much matter. Be they vile or kind, they inevitably create the kind of protagonist about whom twenty-first century America loves to read: a young hero defined by her frustration with, or outright hostility toward, every system of authority that she encounters.

[…]

The modern-day fairy tale is not at peace with HR. Our fairy realm’s preoccupation with the problems of the micromanaged life resonates. Its paranoia reflects a culture that has lost faith in its own ruling class. The YA novel’s adolescent attitude toward authority speaks to the experiences of the many millions shaken by their own impotence. The mania for dystopia is a literary sensation custom-made for the frustrations of our age.

Posted in Media, Policy | 3 Comments »

It’s basically a stretched-out, stripped-down all-terrain vehicle without doors or a roof with seating for as many as nine soldiers

August 3rd, 2025

The Army’s new Infantry Squad Vehicle, successor to the Humvee, is built by GM Defense, based on the Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 midsize truck, using 90% Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) parts — including Chevrolet Performance off-road racing components:

It’s basically a stretched-out, stripped-down all-terrain vehicle without doors or a roof with seating for as many as nine soldiers.

[…]

Thousands of pounds lighter and $80,000 cheaper than the Humvee, the Infantry Squad Vehicle is based on the Chevrolet Colorado truck built in Missouri.

Infantry Squad Vehicle

“You can repair it anywhere on earth as long as you have access to commercial parts rather than a special military vehicle with special military parts,” said Miller, the Army’s top technical adviser.

[…]

The vehicle isn’t meant to withstand an attack, the official said. It’s designed to whisk soldiers within a few miles of the frontline and allow them to walk a short distance to the fight.

[…]

Its lighter weight, relative to a Humvee, means the Infantry Squad Vehicle can be carried by a Black Hawk helicopter for a short distance with a sling. A twin-rotor Chinook helicopter can carry two of the trucks inside its cargo bay for a greater distance. A Humvee’s weight requires a Chinook, and then just one can be carried in a sling.

Posted in War, Weapons | 12 Comments »

It was much less than our total over-all spending in a normal week

August 2nd, 2025

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesIn September, 1942, Leslie Groves was serving as Deputy Chief of Construction of the Army Corps of Engineers, overseeing all Army construction, at home and abroad, but he wanted to get in on the real action. Instead, as he explains in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, he was offered a role in Washington:

“I don’t want to stay in Washington.”

“If you do the job right,” Somervell said, “it will win the war.”

My spirits fell as I realized what he had in mind. “Oh, that thing,” I said.

[…]

Though a big project, it was not expected to involve as much as $100 million altogether. While this was more than the cost of almost any single job under my jurisdiction, it was much less than our total over-all spending in a normal week.

[…]

“The basic research and development are done. You just have to take the rough designs, put them into final shape, build some plants and organize an operating force and your job will be finished and the war will be over.”

[…]

In the course of our discussion, we agreed that, because the Pentagon was so nearly finished and because I had had so much to do with it, I would continue to control its construction, despite my new assignment. There were two reasons for this. First, my sudden disappearance from the work on the Pentagon would attract much more notice than would my absence from my other Army construction activities. Second, because of the natural interest in the Pentagon displayed by a number of Congressmen, it would be better for me to continue to carry the responsibility for that job than to pass it on to someone else who was unfamiliar with its past problems and their many political ramifications.

[…]

I thought that there might be some problems in dealing with the many academic scientists involved in the project, and I felt that my position would be stronger if they thought of me from the first as a general instead of as a promoted colonel. My later experiences convinced me that this was a wise move; strangely enough, it often seemed to me that the prerogatives of rank were more important in the academic world than they are among soldiers.

At the time I was brought into the picture, research on the uses of atomic energy had been going on at a gradually accelerating pace since January, 1939, when Lise Meitner explained that the uranium atom could be split.

[…]

Virtually all laboratory research until this time had been aimed at achieving a controlled chain reaction, using U-235, a rare isotope of uranium which comprises less than one percent of the metal in its natural state. This isotope has the property of fissioning readily—a property which the far more abundant form of uranium, U-238, does not display. But it soon became apparent that unless unprecedented quantities of this material could be produced in a much purer state, a U-235 chain reaction would be impossible. The basic problem was to arrive at an industrial process that would produce kilograms of a substance that had never been isolated before in greater than sub-microscopic quantities.

[…]

The way for a major breakthrough was open as a result of studies that suggested the theoretical feasibility of transmuting U-238 into a highly fissionable new element, plutonium, which might then be separated from the parent uranium by chemical means. The hope was that this would be easier to do than to isolate or concentrate the rare U-235 by physical means. The group headed by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg at the University of California undertook to prepare extremely small amounts of plutonium, and in March of 1941 succeeded in creating the first submicroscopic amounts of Plutonium-239. Later that month the California group confirmed the theory that under neutron bombardment plutonium atoms fissioned as readily as atoms of U-235.

[…]

The entry of the United States into World War II caused the abandonment of all projects aimed at developing atomic energy as a source of power and gave added impetus to the efforts to build an atomic bomb.

[…]

It is to their everlasting credit that Bush and his colleagues had the discernment to recognize the limitations of their own organization as well as the moral fortitude to admit them in the national interest. Very few men, confronted with a similar situation, would have done so.

Consequently, when the Top Policy Group met on December 16, 1941, Bush recommended that the Army Corps of Engineers carry out the construction work, and asked that a competent Army officer become thoroughly familiar with the project.

[…]

When the Corps of Engineers started its work, its job was simply to build and operate the production plants. The problems involved in the development of the bomb and its delivery were for the time being largely ignored.

Nor was the full magnitude of the project generally appreciated. No one thought of it as entailing expenditures running into the billions of dollars.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

A Chinese blockade could cripple Taiwan’s electricity

August 1st, 2025

A Chinese blockade could cripple Taiwan’s electricity, recent war games suggest:

“Energy is the weakest element in Taiwan’s resilience against coercion,” warned the report by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The overwhelming preponderance of energy must be imported and is thus vulnerable to a blockade.”

China could supplement a blockade with attacks on Taiwan’s electrical grid, as Russia has done with some success in Ukraine.

“Total electricity production might be reduced to 20 percent of pre-blockade electricity levels,” CSIS said. At that level, all manufacturing ceases – including computer chips vital to the U.S. and the global economy.

These conclusions came from a series of 26 war games run by CSIS to test a blockade of Taiwan, an attractive option for Beijing that offers the prospect of Taiwan agreeing to “reunify” with China, without the need for a bloody and risky Chinese amphibious invasion.

[…]

Taiwan can also reduce its dependence on imported energy. This could include boosting its reserves of oil, natural gas and coal, and even reopening its last nuclear plant, which shut down in May. Meanwhile, the island’s electrical grid could be hardened, including stockpiles of spare parts such as transformers and turbines.

For its part, the U.S. could increase its air transport capacity for a Berlin 1948-style airlift. While insufficient to meet all of Taiwan’s needs, “in some circumstances, an airlift could have a powerful moral effect and provide some breathing room,” CSIS said. In addition, the U.S. Navy will need to improve its capability for convoy escort.

They shut down their last nuclear reactor in May?

Posted in Policy, War | 6 Comments »

Third World was a reference to the Third Estate

July 31st, 2025

I remember being confused as a kid by the term Third World for poor or primitive. I was also confused that we were First World, and they were Third World. Were there intermediate Second World countries that just never came up?

The demographer, anthropologist, and historian Alfred Sauvy, in an article published in the French magazine L’Observateur, August 14, 1952, coined the term third world (tiers monde), referring to countries that were playing a small role in international trade and business.

His usage was a reference to the Third Estate (tiers état), the commoners of France who, before and during the French Revolution, opposed the clergy and nobles, who composed the First Estate and Second Estate, respectively (hence the use of the older form tiers rather than the modern troisième for “third”). Sauvy wrote, “This third world ignored, exploited, despised like the third estate also wants to be something.”

In the context of the Cold War, he conveyed the concept of political non-alignment with either the capitalist or communist bloc.

I nonetheless have zero memory of anyone referring to the Soviet Bloc as the Second World.

Posted in Policy | 4 Comments »

You can bring the Old World’s knowledge and technology to the new, but if geography is against you, then you will have limited success

July 30th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallLatin America, particularly its south, is proof, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), that you can bring the Old World’s knowledge and technology to the new, but if geography is against you, then you will have limited success, especially if you get the politics wrong:

In the United States, once the land had been taken from its original inhabitants, much of it was sold or given away to small landholders; by contrast, in Latin America the Old World culture of powerful landowners and serfs was imposed, which led to inequality. On top of this, the European settlers introduced another geographical problem that to this day holds many countries back from developing their full potential: they stayed near the coasts, especially (as we saw in Africa) in regions where the interior was infested by mosquitoes and disease. Most of the countries’ biggest cities, often the capitals, were therefore near the coasts, and all roads from the interior were developed to connect to the capitals but not to one another.

In some cases, for example in Peru and Argentina, the metropolitan area of the capital city contains more than 30 percent of the country’s population.

[…]

Mexico is growing into a regional power, but it will always have the desert wastelands in its north, its mountains to the east and west, and its jungles in the south, all physically limiting its economic growth. Brazil has made its appearance on the world stage, but its internal regions will remain isolated from one another; and Argentina and Chile, despite their wealth of natural resources, will still be far farther away from New York and Washington than are Paris and London.

[…]

Their total population (including the Caribbean) is 600 million people, and yet their combined GDP is equivalent to that of France and the UK, which together comprise 120 million people.

[…]

At its widest point, west to east, from Brazil across to Peru, it is 3,200 miles. On the western side is the Pacific, on the other the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic. None of the coastlines have many natural deep harbors, thus limiting trade.

Central America is hill country with deep valleys, and at its narrowest point is only 120 miles across. Then, running parallel to the Pacific, for 4,500 miles, is the longest continuous mountain chain in the world—the Andes. They are snow-capped along their entire length and mostly impassable, thus cutting off many regions in the west of the continent from the east. The highest point in the Western Hemisphere is here—the 22,843-foot Aconcagua Mountain—and the waters tumbling down from the mountain range are a source of hydroelectric power for the Andean nations of Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. Finally, the land descends, forests and glaciers appear, we are into the Chilean archipelago, and then—land’s end. The eastern side of Latin America is dominated by Brazil and the Amazon River, the second longest in the world after the Nile.

[…]

The relative flatland east of the Andes and temperate climate of the lower third of South America, known as the Southern Cone, are in stark contrast to the mountains and jungle farther north and enable agricultural and construction costs to be reduced, thus making them some of the most profitable regions on the entire continent—whereas Brazil, as we shall see, even has difficulty moving goods around its own domestic market.

[…]

In the nineteenth century, many of the newly independent countries broke apart, either through civil conflict or cross-border wars, but by the end of that century the borders of the various states were mostly set. The three richest nations—Brazil, Argentina, and Chile—then set off on a ruinously expensive naval arms race, which held back the development of all three.

[…]

Particularly bitter is the relationship between Bolivia and Chile, which dates back to the 1879 War of the Pacific in which Bolivia lost a large chunk of its territory, including 250 miles of coastline, and has been landlocked ever since. It has never recovered from this blow, which partially explains why it is among the poorest Latin American countries. This in turn has exacerbated the severe divide between the mostly European lowlands population and the mostly indigenous peoples of the highlands.

[…]

Despite the fact that Bolivia has the third-largest reserves of natural gas in South America it will not sell any to Chile, which is in need of a reliable supplier. Two Bolivian presidents who toyed with the idea were thrown out of office and the current president, Evo Morales, has a “gas to Chile” policy consisting of a “gas for coastline” deal, which is dismissed by Chile despite its need for energy. National pride and geographical need on both sides trump diplomatic compromise.

[…]

Guatemala claims Belize as part of its sovereign territory but, unlike Bolivia, is unwilling to push the issue. Chile and Argentina argue over the Beagle Channel water route, Venezuela claims half of Guiana, and Ecuador has historical claims on Peru.

[…]

In its far north, Mexico has a two-thousand-mile-long border with the United States, almost all of which is desert. The land here is so harsh that most of it is uninhabited.

[…]

All Mexicans know that before the 1846–48 war with the United States the land that is now Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona was part of Mexico. The conflict led to half of Mexico’s territory being ceded to the United States. However, there is no serious political movement to regain the region and no pressing border dispute between the two countries. Throughout most of the twentieth century they squabbled over a small piece of land after the Rio Grande changed course in the 1850s, but in 1967 both sides agreed the area was legally part of Mexico.

[…]

Mexico’s major mountain ranges, the Sierra Madres, dominate the west and east of the country and between them is a plateau. In the south, in the Valley of Mexico, is the capital—Mexico City—one of the world’s megacapital cities with a population of around 20 million people.

On the western slopes of the highlands and in the valleys the soil is poor, and the rivers of limited assistance in moving goods to market. On the eastern slopes the land is more fertile, but the rugged terrain still prevents Mexico from developing as it would like. To the south lie the borders with Belize and Guatemala.

[…]

The cartels responded by creating a land route—up through Central America and Mexico, and into the American Southwest. This in turn led the Mexican drug gangs to get in on the action by facilitating the routes and manufacturing their own produce. The route partially follows the Pan-American Highway, which runs south to north up the continent. Originally designed to move goods in each direction to a variety of countries, it is now also used to move drugs north to the United States. The multibillion-dollar business sparked local turf wars, with the winners using their new power and money to infiltrate and corrupt the Mexican police and military and get inside the political and business elites.

[…]

Central America has little going for it by way of geography but for one thing. It is thin. So far, the only country to gain advantage from this has been Panama, but with the arrival of new money from China that may be about to change.

[…]

In 1914, the newly built, fifty-mile-long, American-controlled Panama Canal opened, thus saving ships an eight-thousand-mile journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and leading to economic growth in the canal region. Since 1999, the canal has been controlled by Panama, but is regarded as a neutral international waterway that is safeguarded by the US and Panama navies. And therein, for the Chinese, lies a problem.

[…]

The Panama Canal may well be a neutral passageway, but at the end of the day, passage through it is dependent on American goodwill. So, why not build your own canal up the road in Nicaragua? After all, what’s $50 billion to a growing superpower?

[…]

In the fall of 2016 the project was not going well. Mr. Wang lost an estimated 85 percent of his fortune in the Chinese stock market crash of September 2015. Most construction work was delayed, but all sides insisted the project would succeed.

[…]

Beijing now sells or donates arms to Uruguay, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Peru, and offers them military exchanges. It is trying to build a military relationship with Venezuela, which it hopes will outlast the Bolivarian revolution if and when it collapses. The arms supplies to Latin America are relatively small-scale but complement China’s efforts at soft power. Its sole hospital ship, Peace Ark, visited the region in 2011. It is only a three-hundred-bed vessel, dwarfed by the American one-thousand-bed version that also visits, but it was a signal of intent and a reminder that China increasingly “gets” soft power.

Posted in Crime, Economics, Policy | 5 Comments »

Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, and color, but also on the grounds of ability

July 29th, 2025

Tom Lehrer just passed away at the age of 97. I associate him with “New Math” and “Werner von Braun,” but Matthew Petti of Reason says he’s best known for his periodic table song and his Harvard fight song:

Lehrer’s comedic career took off in the 1950s, in between his military service and his mathematics studies at Harvard. Then, suddenly, he retreated from the public eye, refusing all publicity—except for an occasional sarcastic take about how pointless everything is. “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” he quipped after Kissinger won the prize in 1973. “I don’t want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them,” Lehrer declared in 2003.

[…]

“Every great war produces its great hit songs…It occurred to me that if any songs are going to come out of World War III, we’d better start writing them now. I have one here,” Lehrer said in the introduction to “So Long Mom,” a song by a nuclear bomber pilot promising to see his mother “when the war is over, an hour and a half from now.”

An even more nihilistic variation on the same theme, “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” promises the end of all suffering, because “if the bomb that drops on you/gets your friends and neighbors too/there’ll be nobody left behind to grieve.”

Some of Lehrer’s songs touch on a very specific anxiety of the early Cold War, the sense of whiplash from watching (West) Germany transform from an enemy into an ally. “Once all the Germans were warlike and mean/But that couldn’t happen again/We taught them a lesson in 1918/And they’ve hardly bothered us since then…Heil—uh, hail, the Wehrmacht—I mean the Bundeswehr,” he sang in “Multilateral Force Lullaby.”

There was a rumor that Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi rocket scientist turned NASA manager, sued Lehrer for singing that von Braun was “a man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience” and should receive some credit for “the widows and cripples in old London town who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.” Lehrer later clarified that the lawsuit never happened.

[…]

Given the frequent nuclear themes in his songs, many had assumed that Lehrer’s military service had to do with nuclear weapons, especially because he spent time at Los Alamos National Laboratory. But Lehrer revealed in a 1994 interview that he had actually been drafted into the National Security Agency (NSA), the shadowy electronic eavesdropping organization that Edward Snowden blew the whistle on decades later.

At the time Lehrer worked there, the very existence of the NSA was classified information. (NSA stands for “No Such Agency,” he joked to his former Harvard classmate Jeremy Bernstein, who wrote about the quip in Quantum Profiles.) While the NSA values mathematicians for their codebreaking skills, Lehrer was not exactly the model intelligence officer.

When he learned that alcohol would be banned at his base’s Christmas party, Lehrer and a friend mixed vodka into gelatin to get drunk on the sly. The event is often considered the invention of the Jell-O shot, though Lehrer himself laughed off the idea that he should get all the credit.

“The Army has carried the American democratic ideal to its logical conclusion in the sense that not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed, and color, but also on the grounds of ability,” Lehrer said in the introduction to “It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be a Soldier,” his proposed new U.S. Army anthem.

Posted in Media, Policy | 4 Comments »

This doesn’t sound a lot like culture

July 28th, 2025

Culture Transplant by Garett JonesGarett Jones has finished his Singapore Trilogy, Hive Mind, 10% Less Democracy, and The Culture Transplant:

One way to think about the book is to think of the person vs. situation debate in psychology. The question was this: what explains people’s behaviors better, their current life situation broadly speaking or their stable persona? The latter we now call trait theory — because it is about people’s stable psychological dispositions — and won the evidence debate, at least, academically. Things haven’t improved much for situationism since then with the downfall of previously popular experiments such as the Stanford prison experiment, and Rosenhan’s psych ward study. So instead of thinking just about typical westerners, we can also think of humanity at large. Sometimes people move around (immigrate). Thinking of each ethnic group as a person to be explained, we can thus look at whether the same ethno-person behaves similarly in different situations, say, whether they live in Somalia, Sweden, or USA. Here we must clarify that there are some issues with measurement of many psychological traits. We don’t really, in general, have perfect scales so that we can track people’s absolute standing on some trait across time and place (we simply don’t know how to construct such tests). We can, however, track relative differences. So we can see whether Somalis living in Somalia (taken as a country) perform well economically, and we can check whether Somalis who moved to USA or Sweden perform well economically. In each case we find that they do rather poorly everywhere we find them, again, taken as a group. We can repeat this method for any other set of natio-ethno groups across various countries, to see whether the relative differences remain relatively consistent across situations.

[…]

Anyway, so if you count patents or anything else really, you will find that a few large and relatively productive countries produce most of everything new in the world.

[…]

The world in general depends on the right tail inventing, innovating, researching, and building. This is just as true within a country as it is between them. As such, everybody loses when the few clusters in the world that contain the most such right tail people are disrupted. We see this disruption all over the Western world, but especially in the most critical places. Time and money is wasted on diversity (read: anti-meritocratic) hiring, communist-like indoctrination, and the parading of the mentally ill in public spaces (drag shows, pride events). This must come at a cost of progress. Criminal and unproductive foreigners are imported to the most productive places on Earth where they can cause maximum disruption (the capitals of Western Europe, Californian cities). This is crazy and not even in migrants’ own long-term interest. However, modern Western politics seems to have forgotten everything about long-term interests (massive COVID debts, short-sighted democratic vote buying). I could go on, but you get the point.

Jones spends a chapter talking about the unique Chinese experience in Asia. This is basically just the thesis of
World on Fire by Amy Chua, but from a positive perspective. Not about ethnic conflict, but about how much better off the South Asians with more Chinese neighbors are. The Chinese may own most of their countries, but if their own salaries and standard of living increases by some substantial percentage, we have to ask ourselves how much self-determination is worth.

[…]

Obviously, ‘culture’ that transfers with people even when they lose their native language (and native culture in any normal sense), and also stays present across sometimes 200+ years in a new country, this doesn’t sound a lot like culture, but it does sound like genetics.

[…]

He seems to want to stay within the Overton window, but go pretty close to the edge, so that the reader will draw their own conclusions, and perhaps seek out some of the evidence slightly to the right of the evidence the book covers

Posted in Economics, Policy, Science | 3 Comments »

Oceania’s geopolitical logic is obvious

July 27th, 2025

The main driver of the rise of empires, Peter Turchin argues, is interstate competition:

The intensity of this competition, in turn, is dialed up by advances in military technologies. Each military revolution, thus, generates a set of mega-empires. Today we live in the historical shadow of two most consequential military revolutions.

The iron-cavalry revolution dates to about 1000 BCE.

[…]

To cut the long story short, the iron-cavalry revolution transformed the Great Eurasian Steppe into an engine of imperiogenesis. This continental heartland was the home of nomadic pastoralists, whose main military force consisted of horse archers.

[…]

The other consequential revolution was, of course, the one that originated in Western Europe around 1400 CE. Its two components were gunpowder weapons and ocean-going ships. So I refer to it as the “Gunship Revolution.” The parallels between the two revolutions are quite striking. Inner Asians rode horses and shot arrows, while Europeans rode ships and shot cannon balls. The world ocean played the same role as the “sea of grass.” Historians noted these similarities. For example, the historian of Southeast Asia, Victor Lieberman, referred to Europeans as “White Inner Asians.”

Readers, who are familiar with geopolitical theories of Mackinder, Mahan, Spykman, and others (if not, check out this Wikipedia article), will immediately recognize the similarities between what I am talking about here and various geographical concepts central to these theories (the Heartland, the Rimland, the Islands…).

[…]

Thus, the Great Steppe (which is treated as a pivotal region by several geopolitical theories) today is of little significance, except for its historical effect. By 1900 it was completely taken over by Russia and China. Today it’s home to a bunch of weak and geopolitically insignificant states, such as Mongolia and the “Stans.” The successors of old mega-empires, which arose on the Steppe frontiers, is where Eurasian power now resides.

The second pole of power is “Oceania,” which originated on the western shores of Eurasia during the sixteenth century (Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and the British Isles), then spread across the Atlantic, and now is a global empire, ruled from Washington and Brussels as a secondary capital (although there are cracks between these two seats of power due to Donald Trump’s policies). A good way to visualize this geopolitical entity is a map of American military bases.

Oceania’s geopolitical logic — encirclement of Eurasian empires — is obvious.

Posted in Policy, War | 6 Comments »

We made certain that each member of the project thoroughly understood his part in our total effort — that, and nothing more

July 26th, 2025

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesIn the introduction to Leslie Groves’ Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller painted a picture of the general. The general himself opens with a foreword:

I have recorded here only that which I am qualified to write about — my own experiences during the development of atomic energy between September 17, 1942, and December 31, 1946, the period during which I was in charge of the Manhattan Project.

[…]

Gradually more and more of the details of our work have been declassified and, with the issuance of an executive order in May, 1959, the curtain was drawn aside on the story of the project.

[…]

The command channels of the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) — the name given to the atomic bomb project — had no precedent. They grew up with the project and were changed as conditions changed. Yet the basic concept — that of always keeping authority and responsibility together — never changed.

[…]

We made certain that each member of the project thoroughly understood his part in our total effort — that, and nothing more.

[…]

Dr. Vannevar Bush, Chairman of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), and Dr. James B. Conant, Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), a subdivision of OSRD, were primarily responsible for President Roosevelt’s decision to transform the atomic energy development program from a research project into a program aimed at producing a decisive military weapon. Once the military purpose of the project became governing, Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, Chief of the Army Services of Supply, and Major General W. D. Styer, his Chief of Staff, entered the picture. Within a few months they brought me in to head up the project, subject, of course, to the personal approval of General Marshall, Secretary of War Stimson, and, finally, the President.

[…]

At first, I was responsible only for the engineering, construction and operation of the plants to produce bomb materials. Had our work been routine and clearly defined, my responsibility probably would have ended there. However, it soon became evident to Dr. Bush and to me that if serious delays to our work were to be avoided the MED should expand its research activities, and take over control of all the atomic research projects then under the management of the OSRD, thus uniting authority with responsibility. This transfer was effected without friction during the fall and winter of 1942 by the simple device of allowing the OSRD contracts to continue in force until they expired, at which time they were replaced by new ones in which the MED was the contracting agency. The transition was so smooth, indeed, that, as I have read accounts of that period by some of the people involved, I have been struck by the fact that they did not seem to be aware of just when the transfer of authority actually took place.

[…]

Thus I became responsible, particularly to General Marshall, Secretary Stimson and President Truman, for the over-all success of the use of the bomb against Japan. This assignment included selecting the target cities, subject to the approval of the Chief of Staff and the Secretary of War; preparing the orders and instructions for the bombing operations; and arranging for Army and Navy units to provide the necessary support to our overseas effort.

Posted in War | No Comments »

The mice that received psilocybin had a 30% increased lifespan

July 25th, 2025

Researchers have discovered that the active compound in psychedelic mushrooms can extend lifespan and reduce cellular aging by 50% in human cells and 30% in elderly mice:

The team from Emory University are calling it the first ever long-term study evaluating the systemic effects of psilocybin in aged mice. The animals were the equivalent of 60 to 65 in biological human years, and exhibited hair loss and greying, as well as reduced physical activity.

The mice were dosed with psilocin, the active ingredient in psilocybin that appears once the latter is broken down during digestion. The mice received a low level at first, and eventually with a higher dose of 15 milligrams once a month for 10 months.

Within the first 3 months, the mice receiving psilocybin exhibited signs of youth, including fewer instances of greying and hair loss — including a reversal of these symptoms — and a general improvement in physical activity. By trial’s end, the mice that received psilocybin had a 30% increased lifespan on average than the control group.

To date, more than 150 clinical studies have been completed or are ongoing for examining psilocybin in the treatment of various clinical conditions, including anxiety, depression, addiction, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, chronic physical pain, and more.

The authors cite a study from 2020 which found that a single-dose of psilocybin can improve debilitating physical and psychological symptoms with improvements lasting up to and beyond 5 years post-dosage.

[…]

The scientists also tested the effects of psilocin on human fibroblast cells from the lung in vitro, continually dosing them with the psychoactive compound or a placebo until they reached replicative senescence, or the point at which the cell has divided around 50 times and then stopped.

Psilocin treatment of 10 micrograms resulted in a 29% extension of cellular lifespan, characterized by delayed exhaustion of proliferative potential, increased cumulative population doublings, and decreased population doubling time. Strikingly, when increased to 100 micrograms, 29% lifespan extension became 57%.

The psilocin-dosed fibroblasts were also observed to have increased SIRT1 activity, and a preserved telomere length.

Posted in Science | 4 Comments »

Only six commercial towers over 300 metres were built in the US in the first two decades of this century

July 24th, 2025

The first two decades of the 21st century marked a phenomenal shift in skyscraper construction from the United States to Asia:

Only six commercial towers over 300 metres were built in the US in the first two decades of this century. In contrast, since 2000, China has built a staggering 1,575 skyscrapers, accounting for 60 percent of the world’s new high-rises. By 2021, Asia housed 80 percent of the world’s skyscrapers, with China leading the Asian skyscraper boom. Fuelled by its spectacular economic growth, rapid urbanisation and a yearning to display its financial and technical capability, China found the construction of skyscrapers as a fitting symbol to announce its prowess to the world.

China also exhibited almost an obsessive drive to build the tallest structures. This appears to be linked to the country’s target of 60 percent urbanisation by 2020, and relocating about 100 million workers from villages to towns by granting them urban resident status by then. The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that China invested over ¥1 trillion (US$1.37 billion) annually in redeveloping run-down urban areas with landmark towers to showcase the successes of urbanisation. By the second decade of the century, China had eclipsed all other countries in skyscraper production, boasting the largest number of such high-rises in the world.

The Chinese local governments have played a significant role in this skyscraper boom. Local governments were lush with capital and strongly incentivised by the Chinese national government; the sub-national officials within local governments in China promoted major urban projects. These officials had reason to believe that such projects would attract investments and propel their careers up the high slope. As a consequence, local governments subsidised skyscraper development through discounted land prices, up to 40 percent below market rates, to encourage the development of new urban agglomerations. Evidence suggests that China’s largest cities competed with each other in building taller, which then spread out of megacities to smaller cities by Chinese standards.

[…]

Many Chinese skyscrapers were marred by lax construction and fire standards. For instance, one of China’s tallest skyscrapers, the Shenzhen Electronics Group Plaza, was evacuated in May 2021 after it began to shake. The Chinese government was also not enthused by the local culture of constructing ‘copycat’ buildings aping Western architecture, which often neglected the Chinese cultural identity and the urban context in which they were built. Additionally, the government was frustrated by ‘vanity projects’— skyscrapers built to make a statement without assessing the actual demand for additional floorspace in the city. Other cities faced a situation where half-built skyscrapers remained incomplete as local government ran out of funds to complete them.

Around the same period, China found itself engulfed in a real estate crisis.

Posted in Urbanism | 2 Comments »

Japan is 120 miles from the Eurasian landmass

July 23rd, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallThe Japanese are an island race, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), with the majority of their 127 million people living on the four large islands that face Korea and Russia across the Sea of Japan and a minority inhabiting some of the 6,848 smaller islands:

At its closest point, Japan is 120 miles from the Eurasian landmass, which is among the reasons why it has never been successfully invaded. The Chinese are some five hundred miles away across the East China Sea; and although there is Russian territory much closer, the Russian forces are usually far away because of the extremely inhospitable climate and sparse population located across the Sea of Okhotsk.

In the 1300s, the Mongols tried to invade Japan after sweeping through China, Manchuria, and down through Korea. On the first occasion they were beaten back and on the second a storm wrecked their fleet. The seas in the Korea Strait were whipped up by what the Japanese said was a “Divine Wind,” which they called a kamikaze.

So the threat from the west and northwest was limited, and to the southeast and east there was nothing but the Pacific. This last perspective is why the Japanese gave themselves the name Nippon, or “sun origin”: looking east there was nothing between them and the horizon, and each morning, rising on that horizon, was the sun.

[…]

The territory of the Japanese islands makes up a country that is bigger than the two Koreas combined, or, in European terms, bigger than France or Germany. However, three-quarters of the land is not conducive to human habitation, especially in the mountainous regions, and only 13 percent is suitable for intensive cultivation. This leaves the Japanese living in close proximity to one another along the coastal plains and in restricted inland areas, where some stepped rice fields can exist in the hills. Its mountains mean that Japan has plenty of water, but the lack of flatland also means that its rivers are unsuited to navigation and therefore trade, a problem exacerbated by the fact that few of the rivers join one another.

[…]

By the beginning of the twentieth century Japan was an industrial power with the third-largest navy in the world, and in 1905 it defeated the Russians in a war fought on land and at sea. However, the very same island-nation geography that had allowed it to remain isolated was now giving it no choice but to engage with the world. The problem was that it chose to engage militarily.

Japan had few of the natural resources required to become an industrialized nation. It had limited and poor-quality supplies of coal, very little oil, scant quantities of natural gas, limited supplies of rubber, and a shortage of many metals.

[…]

It was the thirst for these products, notably iron and oil, that caused Japan to rampage across the far-less developed Southeast Asia in the 1930s and early ’40s. It had already occupied Taiwan in 1895 and followed this up with the annexation of Korea in 1910. Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931, then conducted a full-scale invasion of China in 1937. As each domino fell, the expanding empire and the growing Japanese population required more oil, more coal, more metal, more rubber, and more food.

[…]

This was a massive overstretch, not just taking on the United States, but grabbing the very resources, rubber, for example, that the United States required for its own industry.

[…]

If the terrain had been easier the Americans’ choice may have been different—they might have fought their way to Tokyo—but they chose the nuclear option, unleashing upon Japan, and the collective conscience of the world, the terror of a new age.

[…]

The postwar agreement imposed by the United States limited Japan’s defense spending to 1 percent of the GDP and left tens of thousands of American forces on Japanese territory, thirty-two thousand of whom are still there.

[…]

The 2015 defense budget was its biggest to date, with the yen mostly going to naval and air equipment, including six US-made F-35A stealth fighters. In the spring of 2015, Tokyo also unveiled what it called a “helicopter-carrying destroyer.” It didn’t take a military expert to notice that the vessel was as big as the Japanese aircraft carriers of the Second World War, which are forbidden by the surrender terms of 1945. The ship can be adapted for fixed-wing aircraft, but the defense minister issued a statement saying that he was “not thinking of using it as an aircraft carrier.”

[…]

The military infrastructure at Okinawa, which guards the approaches to the main islands, will be upgraded. This will also allow Japan greater flexibility to patrol its Air Defense Zone, part of which overlaps with China’s equivalent zone after an expansion was announced by Beijing in 2013. Both zones cover the islands called the Senkaku or Diaoyu (in Japanese and Chinese, respectively), which Japan controls but that are claimed by China, too. They also form part of the Ryukyu island chain, which is particularly sensitive as any hostile power must pass the islands on the way to the Japanese heartlands; they give Japan a lot of territorial sea space, and they might contain exploitable underwater gas and oil fields.

[…]

China’s expanded Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea covers territory claimed by China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. When Beijing said that any plane flying through the zone must identity itself or “face defensive measures,” Japan, South Korea, and the United States responded by flying through it without doing so.

[…]

Japan also claims sovereignty over the Kuril Islands in its far north, off Hokkaido, which it lost to the Soviet Union in the Second World War and that are still under Russian control. Russia prefers not to discuss the matter, but the debate is not in the same league as Japan’s disputes with China. There are only approximately nineteen thousand inhabitants of the Kuril Islands, and although the islands sit in fertile fishing grounds, the territory is not one of particular strategic importance.

[…]

Japanese statisticians fear that the population will shrink to under 100 million by the middle of the century. If the current birth rate continues, it is even possible that by 2110 the population will have fallen below the 50 million it was in 1910.

[…]

Even if they do go on to solve a problem like Korea, the issue of China will still be there, and this means the US 7th Fleet will remain in Tokyo Bay and US Marines will remain in Okinawa, guarding the paths in and out of the Pacific and the China seas.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

His own advice about self-reliance was actually worth taking in his own case

July 22nd, 2025

Diamond Age by Neal StephensonThe most relevant aspect of Neal Stephenson‘s work to an audience of AI researchers was the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from his 30-year-old novel The Diamond Age:

At the beginning of this book we see a conversation between Lord Finkle-McGraw, who is an Equity Lord in a futuristic neo-Victorian society, and John Hackworth, an engineer who works in one of his companies.

Finkle-McGraw is a classic founder. He didn’t come from a privileged background, except insofar as having a stable family and a decent basic education confers privilege. But when he was young he was brilliant, ambitious, hard-working, and had a vision. He built that into something valuable and as a result became rich and powerful. As so often happens, he used his money to make life good for his children by sending them to the right schools, connecting them to the right people, and so on.

He wasn’t entirely happy with the results. His kids didn’t end up having the traits that had made him successful. He suspects it’s because they didn’t have to work hard and overcome obstacles. Now he has a granddaughter. He knows that the parents are going to raise this girl in the same way, with the same results. He can’t interfere in a heavy-handed way. But the parents can’t possibly object if he gives his granddaughter an educational book. So he commissions Hackworth to make the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an interactive book that will adapt as the user grows and learns. This book is powered by molecular nanotechnology, but any present-day reader will immediately recognize it as an AI system.

As the plot unfolds, three copies of the Primer are made and bestowed on girls from very different backgrounds. In two cases the result is a sort of fizzle. The Primer works as it’s supposed to for a while, but these girls lose interest and set it aside. The third copy falls into the hands of a girl from an abusive and underprivileged background, and it ends up giving her close to superhuman abilities.

Thirty years on, I think I have enough distance on this to grade my performance. I’m happy with the fact that the Primer, as described in the novel, doesn’t invariably produce great results. That seems like a measured and realistic outcome. Nevertheless it’s clear that when I wrote this thing I was influenced by a strain of techno-utopian thinking that was widespread in the mid-1990s, when the Internet was first becoming available to a mass audience. In those days, a lot of people, myself included, assumed that making all the world’s knowledge available to everyone would unlock vast stores of pent-up human potential.

That promise actually did come true to some degree. It’s unquestionably the case that anyone with an Internet connection can now learn things that they could not have had access to before. But as we now know, many people would rather watch TikTok videos eight hours a day.

[…]

The gist of it is that the system we’ve traditionally used for evaluating students’ performance — homework and tests — just happens to be exquisitely vulnerable to being hacked by students who simply use conversational AI systems to do all the work for them. And they are doing so on a massive scale, to the point where conventional education has essentially stopped functioning. The only way to fairly evaluate how much a student has learned now is by marching them into a classroom with no electronics, handing them a pencil and a blank blue book, and assigning them an essay to write or a math problem to solve. Even this is impractical given that many students never really learned to write by hand.

[…]

This question sent me down a rabbit hole on the topic of self-reliance. After all, if AI-driven education does nothing more than make students even more reliant on AI, then it’s not education at all. It’s just a vocational education program teaching them how to be of service to AIs. The euphemism for this role is “prompt engineer” which seems to be a way of suggesting that people who feed inputs to AIs are achieving something that should be valorized to the same degree as designing airplanes and building bridges.

If such a system actually did its job it would have the paradoxical effect of making students less, rather than more, reliant on the use of AI technology.

[…]

My thought last week was that Self-Reliance might contain some wisdom applicable to the challenge of how to educate people in the modern world to rely upon their own knowledge and skill set rather than using AI all the time.

Reader, I did not find anything like that upon re-reading this essay. More the opposite. The overall drift of what Emerson is saying here — and he says it over and over — is that each mind is uniquely positioned to see certain insights. The self-reliant person shouldn’t ignore those merely because they don’t match the conventional wisdom. “The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray…God will not have his work made manifest by cowards….He who would gather immortal palms (i.e. be honored for great achievements) must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

That is all intoxicating stuff for a smart young man who styles himself as a free thinker and nonconformist, which is why, when I was in my early twenties, I inhaled it like fentanyl fumes off hot foil. But during the same years as I was poring over this essay and jotting down quotes in my notebook, I was writing by far the worst novel I have ever written—a book that has never been published and never should be.

Emerson grew up in Boston, attended Boston Latin and Harvard, then traveled around Europe and visited England where he hung out with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. His brain was preloaded with the best knowledge base that could possibly have been given a young person of that era. He’d been trained to think systematically and rigorously and to express himself with great fluency in English and probably Latin and other languages as well.

So, yes, when an idea popped into Emerson’s head, chances are it was a pretty damned good one. His own advice about self-reliance was actually worth taking in his own case. And I’d guess that the audience for this essay was similarly well educated. By the time any young person happened upon Self-Reliance, they were probably 99% of the way to being an intellectually mature, highly capable person, and just wanted a bit of self confidence to follow through on good ideas that were coming into their heads—as a result of being that well educated and trained.

When the same advice falls on the ears of people who are not as well informed and not as good at thinking systematically, though, it’s rubbish.

When I first read Self-Reliance, only a few years had passed since the premier of the first Star Wars movie. There’s a pivotal moment in that film when Luke Skywalker is piloting his fighter through the trench on the Death Star, making his bombing run against impossible odds, and he hears Obi-Wan Kenobi’s voice in his head telling him to use the Force. Luke switches off his targeting computer to the consternation of the brass in the ops center. We all know the outcome. It’s a great moment in cinema, and it perfectly encapsulates a certain way of thinking emblematic of the 1970s late hippie scene: the seductive proposition that no one needs a targeting computer, that all we need to do is trust our feelings. Who doesn’t love to hear that? I loved hearing it from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and spent a couple of years of my life building a terrible novel on that foundation.

I have discussed The Diamond Age before.

Posted in Education, Technology | 1 Comment »

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