Five Things, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-01-30 Mo

My disappointment wiþ þe Biden administration’s failure to revoke Trump’s China tariffs... "friendshoring"... wisdom in "Source of Soviet Conduct"... narrow & deep flaws in neoliberalism... little...

FOCUS: Five Things:

First, let me continue to beat the drum about my disappointment with the Biden administration’s failure to revoke the Trump admimistration’s China tariffs. It is conventional for those who talk to the economics and economic security side of the National Security Council to say that the tariffs “did little” to improve the situation. They did not “do little”. They shot us in the foot. We need a clear-eyed view that managing our relationship with China entails getting our share of the immensely valuable surplus from our trade relationship with China, plus guarding our national security and reinforcing peace in Pacific Asia. That means we should not continue policies that do not work: we should not keep shooting ourselves in the foot. In addition to revoking the destructive Trump China tariffs, we also should rethink security-motivated “reshoring” from China. We need not “reshoring”, but “friendshoring”, for a very expansive definition of “friends”. I am not hearing the Biden NEC and CEA weighing in on this loudly enough.

Second, let me also beat the drum for “friendshoring” in general, not just in the case of the China relationship. We need friends. We need to strongly reject zero-sum thinking vis-à-vis our friends, for, as I said, a very expansive definition of friends. And, again, I am not hearing the Biden NEC and CEA weighing in on this loudly enough.

Third, stepping back, taking a broader view, and accepting that we may well find ourselves engaged in a new and very real but also a very different kind of Cold War with China. But one thing remains the same: the key to the original Cold War was coexistence. There was and is lots of wisdom in George Kennan’s “Sources of Soviet Conduct”. Kennan said: be our best self, tamp down conflict, and see how the situation evolves. This is, Kennan noted, doable because in the Cold War both sides think the world is going their way. Thus things that are hard to do now will be easier in a generation, and things that consume resources now to accomplish will be trivial in a generation. Therefore, unless there is a substantial immediate interest at stake, we wait and let the apples fall into our lap, in time. That applied in the 1950s. That applies today.

If we are right, and if liberalism-as-democracy is the wave of the future, the Chinese party-state oligarchs—and it is worth saying “Chinese party-state oligarchs” rather than “China” on almost all occasions—will be left with no good cards to play. The only card that will remain in their hand is that they are better friends to market and non-market oligarchs. Hopefully that will be a losing pitch.

Fourth: globalism and globalization are still of immense value. Yes, neoliberalism has been a disaster. But it has been a disaster because of flaws that are deep and destructive and few. There are, I think, only three major failures of neoliberalism: (1) Failure to recognize the value of and the importance of nurturing communities of engineering practice. (2) Failure to redistribute wealth through investment in people and in communities under threat of being ground under the millstones of creative destructive. (3) Failure to take neoliberalism’s mission of ensuring opportunity seriously—most destructively by our NIMBYism, our raising the collective unaffordabiilty gates to keep people from moving to the twenty or so globalizing metropolises in the United States for which neoliberal globalization was such a huge win. Had we dealt with those—well, then it really wouldn’t have been “neoliberalism”, would it?

Fifth: my tolerance for the New York Times continues to decline from a very low level. Someone who wishes me ill tells me to go read Pamela Paul in the New York Times. I find her writing about Jeannine novel American Dirt:

Pamela Paul: The Long Shadow of ‘American Dirt’: ‘If the proposal for American Dirt landed on desks today, it wouldn’t get published... riskier work that now gets passed over.... "You can’t stand up for Jeanine Cummins?” Ann Patchett said.... “The whole thing makes me angry, and it breaks my heart.” Much remains broken…. Jeanine Cummins may have made money, but at a great emotional, social and reputational cost. She wrote a book filled with empathy. The literary world showed her none...

WAIT! WHAT?

The greatest infliction of “emotional, social and reputational cost” inflicted on Jeanine Cummins in the kerfluffle over her book was inflicted on her by… Pamela Paul, who edited and published a very mean-spirited review by Parul Seghal <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/books/review-american-dirt-jeanine-cummins.html> of American Dirt.

JUST WHAT IS GOING ON HERE!?!?

And why is someone whose book sold three million copies—even if she did spend, unfairly, time in the barrel as the target of a mean-spirited Mean Girl literary mob—seen as a victim here? She wrote a book that a huge number of people liked. She collected something like $6 million, or more. That’s a large enough capital sum to give her a base income tranche of $300,000 a year for life, and the social power to live her life and pursue her dreams that that grants. Yes, lots of people threw verbal sticks-and-stones. Yes, she should think about how the publication process meant that she and her book sucked away all the energy that might otherwise have gone to boost other Latin Ameri can-themed books, some of which surely deserved a good chunk of the audience she grabbed for her book, in the year of its publication.

I would write to the New York Times’s umboðsmaðr for reasons not to conclude the worst of Paul, and the editors who let her publish this. But I cannot, because it does not have one.

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Glory Liu, Sean Illing, & Adam Smith melded into a single anthology intelligence, by Stable Diffusion via NightCafe

ONE AUDIO: Revisiting þe Faþer of Capitalism wiþ Glory Liu & Sean Illing:

<https://overcast.fm/+QLhUp7E7A>

Sean Illing talks with Glory Liu, the author of Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher became an Icon of American Capitalism. Smith is most well-known for being the “father of capitalism,” but as Liu points out in her book, his legacy has been misappropriated — especially in America. They discuss his original intentions and what we can take away from his work today.

• Glory Liu: Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher became an Icon of American Capitalism (Princeton; 2022)

• Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations (1776)

• Adam Smith: Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

• Adam Smith: Lectures on Jurisprudence (1763)

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MUST-READ: Gilgamesh: A New rendering in English Verse, by David Ferry:

The Story

Of him who knew the most of all men know;
Who made the journey; heartbroken; reconciled;

Who knew the way things were before the Flood,
The secret things, the mystery; who went

To the end of the earth, and over; who returned,
and wrote the story on a tablet of stone.

He built Uruk. He built the keeping place
Of Anu and Ishtar. The outer wall

Shines in the sun like brightest copper; the inner
Wall is beyond the imagining of kings.

Study the brickwork; study the fortification;
Climb the great ancient staircase to the terrace;

Study how it is made; from the terrace see
The planted and fallow fields; the ponds and orchards.

This is Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh
The Wild Ox son of Lugalbanda, son

Of the Lady Wildcat Ninsun, Gilgamesh
The vanguard and the rearguard of the army,

Shadow of Darkness over the enemy field,
The Web, the Flood that rises to wash away

The walls of alien cities, Gilgamesh
The strongest one of all, the perfect, the terror.

It is he who opened the passes under the mountains;
And he who dug deep wells on the mountainsides;

Who measured the world; and sought out Utnapishtim
Beyond the world; it is he who restored the shrines;

Two-thirds a god, one third a man, the king.
Go to the temple of Anu and Ishtar:

Open the copper chest with the iron locks;
The tablet of lapis lazuli tells the story...

<https://archive.org/details/gilgameshnewrend00ferr/page/3/mode/1up?view=theater>

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ONE AUDIO: “Where Is My Mind?” from PMJ:

Something good has apparently happened to John Scalzi: <https://whatever.scalzi.com/2023/01/27/where-is-my-mind/>

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ONE IMAGE: Þe Dover Circle: Þe Cockpit of þe Human Escape from its Ensorcellment by þe Devil of Malthus:

Within 400 miles from Dover…

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Very Briefly Noted:

• MGI: Pixels make the picture: A guided tour through the granular world…

• Martin Sandbu: The EU should welcome a green subsidy race: ‘Europe must not let itself be spooked by the US commitment to bankroll the climate transition…

• Tracy Alloway: Where the bullwhip effect stands now: ‘The bullwhip effect is the tendency for small changes at one end of the supply chain to lead to big swings at the other end.... Higher inventories contributed 1.5 percentage points to better-than-expected growth in the fourth quarter. Retail inventories, meanwhile, now stand at a record...

• Franklin Ford (1953): Robe and Sword: The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy after Louis XIV…

• Ethan Mollick: A prosthesis for imagination: Using AI to boost your creativity…

• Jeremy Tuloup: Jupyter Everywhere…

• Glenn Fleishman: Mastodon: A New Hope for Social Networking: ‘f you can set up an email account and have signed up for email lists throughout your time on the Internet, you can settle into Mastodon fairly quickly. In many ways, Mastodon even resembles email, albeit with more of the plumbing exposed…

• Glenn Fleishman: Is Your Future Distributed? Welcome to the Fediverse!: ‘Mastodon and the Fediverse represent something far better than Web 2.0—and vastly better than what’s already seen as the ill-fated, ridiculously branded metaverse/crypto-focused Web3. The Fediverse is more like Web 1++: what you liked back in the early days, only modern and much more of it...

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¶s:

Harold James: The Poverty of Anti-Capitalism: ‘It is easiest to see where the hostility toward markets came from. Markets depend on prices, but prices have become a source of anxiety and puzzlement for many people. Not only have prices risen, but many twenty-first-century marvels have no obvious price at all. Consumers are now accustomed to universal internet connectivity and freely available services…. At the same time, expansive fiscal and monetary policies, along with supply-chain disruptions stemming from the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have fueled inflation, making everyday existence (energy, food, housing) feel more expensive. We have a vision of the future in which everything is free, yet our current reality feels unaffordable and exploitative…. The new anti-growth manifestos at least try to offer a blueprint for an alternative, non-price-based, non-globalized economy…. The market mechanism derives its power from the way it generates a multitude of dynamic, interacting responses—an emergent phenomenon that cannot be replicated by any planner in an economy of scarcity. The externalities of economic action need to be priced in so that the market can function properly. Transforming the economy for the better calls for boldness and imagination, but it also requires the kind of concrete knowledge that only the price mechanism can generate. Growth provides the resources we need to tackle big problems. But to achieve it, we also need markets and interconnectivity…

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Timothy Snyder: The Specter of 2016: ‘The Russian operation to get Trump elected in 2016 was real.  We are still living under the specter of 2016, and we are closer to the beginning of the process or learning about it than we are to the end.  Denying that it happened, or acting as though it did not happen, makes the United States vulnerable to Russian influence operations that are still ongoing, sometimes organized by the same people.  It is easy to forget about 2016, and human to want to do so.  But democracy is about learning from mistakes, and this arrest makes it very clear that we still have much to learn.

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Charlie Warzel: Trump and Facebook’s mutual decay: ‘Each thrives by hijacking attention and monetizing outrage, and they’ve benefited each other: The Trump campaign spent millions of dollars on more than 289,000 Facebook ads over the span of just a few months in 2020…. But lately, both appear to have lost the juice. Many people still support Trump, and many people still use Facebook products, but the shine is gone—and that matters… kneecapped last year by changes Apple made to limit tracking… Trump’s 2024 campaign has been, to date… “low energy”….

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Jay Willis: The Second-Funniest Part of the Supreme Court’s Leak Investigation Report: ‘This characterization of the inquiry as thorough is, to put it generously, generous…. The justices and their spouses—some of whom have histories of allegedly leaking opinions and/or powerful motivations to do so here—got the kid-gloves treatment…. Today, though, I want to focus on a less important but equally hilarious takeaway from the report: the revelation that the Supreme Court—ostensibly a sacrosanct temple of justice presided over by the country’s nine sharpest legal minds—apparently relies on an IT infrastructure cobbled together with toothpicks and chewing gum during the Reagan administration…. Obviously, the Court faces more serious problems than its reliance on a Windows 95-ass computer network. (I would argue that “being controlled by a supermajority of right-wing weirdos whose views are significantly out of step with the American public” is chief among them.) And I don’t envy anyone who has to teach two-factor authentication to cantankerous septuagenarians, much less to literally Samuel Alito…. The Court’s cartoonishly shambolic IT is emblematic of the institution’s unfailing belief in its ability to regulate itself, despite all available evidence to the contrary…