Tag Archives: history

Why does Civ VI AI feel so incompetent? Part 1: Examining the AI in its natural habitat.

I’ve talked before about Civ IV and Civ VI, two great entries in the much-beloved Civilization series of video games.  I’ve talked before about how the Civ IV AIs feel like they’re a lot “better” at playing Civ IV than the Civ VI AIs are at playing Civ VI.   

Civ IV AIs aren’t smart, they make dumb mistakes, but they are competent and threatening both to the player and each other.  Civ VI AIs are incompetent and unthreatening, they simply don’t know *how to win* even if they are OK at surviving and acting as a speed bump.   

Let me get deeper into how the AIs could “threaten” you in Civ IV.  I don’t know if “threaten” is the right word, but we’ll go with that.

The most obvious way an AI can threaten your empire is they could go to war with you.  A warlike leader like Alexander the Great could just build military units nonstop and attack you.   

But that’s not the only thing AI leaders could do, they could also build wonders that you wanted to build.  In Civilization, there are these unique buildings called “Wonders” which can only be built once in the entire world.  Think of the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or the Statue of Liberty.  Every Civ in the game gets a chance to build these wonders, but whoever built it *first* gets the wonder and all the benefits of that wonder, while everyone else gets a crummy consolation prize.   

These wonders gave powerful benefits, The Great Wall for instance would completely stop barbarians from entering your territory.  You might really want that wonder to protect yourself.  So let’s say you start building the Great Wall, but another Civ across the map finishes their own Great Wall mere moments before you were about to finish yours. They get the Great Wall with all its benefits, you get no Great Wall and a crummy consolation prize, AND you invested a lot of production into that wonder that you could have spent on something else.   

An industrious leader like Rameses had the perfect traits to outbuild you in wonders.  So if he was on your map, you had to really plan and strategize how you were going to beat him to get those wonders for yourself. 

AI leaders could also threaten you culturally.  Civ IV had an elegant way of using culture, in that culture decided what parts of the map your empire controlled, and thus what parts you could extract resources from. 

Consider two AI leaders, Julius Caesar of Rome and Louis XIV of France.  They settled their cities right next to each other, and between the Roman and French cities lies a gold resource.  Gold is incredibly valuable, not only does it give you money in Civ IV, but it also counts as a luxury resource that makes every city in your empire happier.  Controlling that gold is key to building a wealthy and powerful nation. 

Caesar is a warlike leader though, he’ll be building non-stop military units in his city.  Louis is a more cultural leader, he’ll build libraries, theatres, that kind of stuff.  These cultural buildings put cultural pressure on the people living between the two Empires, those people will start to adopt more and more French fashion, language, taste, and more and more of them will call themselves French and not Roman.  Because they call themselves French, they’ll work for the French Civ and not the Roman Civ, thereby giving France control over the gold.   

So through the power of culture, France will control the gold and Caesar won’t.  And since Caesar never builds anything but military, he won’t put out the cultural pressure needed to counteract the French culture pressure.  Eventually, French culture might be so strong that the people Rome might get converted into being French, they’ll want to join the French Civ rather than remain Roman because French culture is so dominant.  It will take a lot of military police for Caesar to keep the his people in line, and even then they may revolt out from under him. 

Which is why Caesar usually declares war on cultural Civs that settle next to him. 

But anyway, this cultural pressure is *yet another way* for Civ IV AIs to threaten you.  It’s not enough that you settled powerful cities in good spots, you also have to keep your citizens happy and build then some cultural buildings.  If you don’t, an AI like Louis can settle on your border and convert them all out from under you. 

All these three things: wonders, culture, military, are ways that the AI in Civ IV could affect and threaten you.  You weren’t just playing a game all on your own, Civ IV had AIs on the board who would mess up your every plan at the slightest opportunity, with their military, their wonder-building, and their culture.

Military, wonder-building, and culture all still exist in Civ VI, but the AI can’t really use them to affect a human player. 

Let’s go back to our war example with Alexander.  In Civ IV, Alexander’s main mode was to declare war by marching a force across his enemy’s border that was twice as large as their entire army.  All of these military units could move and attack together, so 20 units could move right next to an enemy city and attack the single archer that was guarding it.  With such a large force, Alexander was basically guaranteed to conquer several cities in his path before his enemies could mount a counter-attack. 

In Civ VI, Alexander is still a warlike AI who likes building units.  But Civ VI has 1-unit-per-tile (abbreviated 1UPT), so all those 20 units are spread out across a very wide area, and they get in each other’s way when they try to move.  If the unit at the front is attacking a city, every unit behind it is blocked from moving forward, and they have to all awkwardly shuffle around to find their own vectors of attack.   

Rather than overwhelming his enemies 20-to-1 like Civ IV Alexander, Civ VI Alexander has his units attacking piecemeal, one-at-a-time, because he can’t get them all into the same place at the same time.  You’d think his 20-to-1 advantage would still ensure he eventually wins, but Civ VI has so many defender advantages, and so many ways to heal units, that his attacks end up petering out in most cases. 

Civ IV Alexander would conquer Civ after Civ until he faced someone with enough of a technology edge to counter his numerical edge.  Civ VI Alexander rarely even takes border cities, and almost never conquers entire Civs.  

How about that wonder example from earlier?  In Civ IV, wonders require a certain technology in order to unlock them, and can be built faster if you have a special resource like Marble or Stone.   

Rameses’s MO was therefore to bee-line for technologies that let him build wonders, try to grab any Marble or Stone he could find, and build his wonders in whatever city he had the most production in.  That was usually enough to net him most of the wonders, and you’d have to bee-line those technologies yourself and outpace him in raw production if you wanted to get any. 

In Civ VI, Rameses is still in the game, still obsessed with building wonders, but he is now MUCH worse at it.  The thing is that wonders now have a lot of specific requirements in order to build them.  You can’t just build the Colosseum in whatever city you choose, you can ONLY build it on FLAT land NEXT TO an entertainment district that ALSO has an Arena in it.   

AIs are really bad at building districts, they always seem to have way fewer than they should and often those districts are placed nonsensically.  The AI also doesn’t plan ahead with their districts, they will happily place their entertainment district in a spot surrounded by hills and mountains so that they have no flat land to build the Colosseum.   And even if the AI builds an entertainment district next to flat land, there’s no guarantee they’ll eventually build the Arena in that district that is required to build the Colosseum.

Many of the wonders in the game have strict requirements like this, so aside from the few wonders with very loose requirements, Civ VI Rameses is just structurally incapable of building wonders.  The Colosseum unlocks in the classical age, and it is a very powerful building, you’d think Rameses would want to build it.  But I can still lazily pick it up in the industrial age *centuries later* because AIs like Rameses will simply *never satisfy the requirements to build it*.   

In Civ VI I don’t need to bee-line technologies, or have super high production.  I just need to be mindful of the wonder’s requirements, and I can build almost any of them at my leisure. 

Finally let’s talk about Culture.  Louis XIV isn’t in Civ VI, but Eleanor of Aquitaine is.  When Eleanor leads France, they should be a cultural powerhouse just like under Louis, right?  Not really. 

See, there’s no cultural struggle in Civ VI like there was in Civ IV.  France can’t settle next to you and steal your gold tile away with culture.  Instead Civ VI works on a first-come-first-served basis, if you get the gold tile first, it’s yours forever barring some unbelievably rare circumstances.   

And in fact, the map is so open in Civ VI that you’ll rarely see a Civ next to you at all.  Civ IV was a mad dash to settle the map before anyone else.  If you were slow, all the good resources (like the gold) would already be taken before you could get to them, leaving you with no resources of your own.  At that point, the only way to get your resources in Civ IV would be either war (like Alexander) or culture (like Louis). 

But Civ VI has more resources than it knows what to do with, I often stop settling cities not because there’s no more room but because I no longer want to have another city to manage.  If someone does take a gold resource, well that sucks, but I can probably find another gold resource somewhere close by.

So my cities very rarely are right on the border with another Civ’s, meaning that even if she wanted to, Eleanor couldn’t steal my tiles like Louis could.   

And besides, the AI can’t build culture any more than it can build wonders.  As I said, the AI doesn’t build enough districts, and they certainly don’t produce enough culture from those districts to matter.  You can’t culture flip tiles, but you can still culture-flip cities, and Eleanor’s special ability in Civ VI is supposed to let her better at this than anyone else.  She’s so good, Civs can’t even use their military to keep cities in check the way Caesar could in the Civ IV example.   

But when I’ve played against AI Eleanor, she never has any success with culture-flipping.  She doesn’t produce enough culture districts, she doesn’t produce enough culture, and her cities are usually so far away from mine that her culture-flipping couldn’t happen even if I ignored culture entirely and went for a pure military victory. 

I wanted to make this point about how the AIs in Civ VI don’t seem to play their game as well as in Civ IV.  I’ve harped on this point a lot over the years, but I wanted to bring in some specifics because in my next post, I’d like to tackle the *why*.  I don’t know for sure, but I think that a very important change in the Civ series made coding AIs for it a MUCH bigger headache, and that has led to stupider AIs overall. 

Stay tuned… 

The Great Disruption Part 2: A laundry list of failed predictions

I wrote earlier about The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding, a book which claimed to be an unerringly scientific prediction of the future of our climate’s future, but was in reality a pseudo-religious call to action in favor of degrowth ideology, with every counter-argument ignored without even a retort. I’ve meant to write for a while but all I have is a laundry list of grievances against the book. This is the streams of my consciousness, so let’s go.

The author understands a tiny bit of economics, and understands that technology does not destroy jobs but rather lowers costs. The powered loom didn’t destroy jobs in the clothing industry, more people work in this industry today than before it’s invention. Rather the powered loom lowered the price of clothes such that all of us can afford many more pairs of clothes than could our ancestors. Lower prices, more efficiency, more consumption.

But he considered our human drive for technology to be a “pathology” because “it doesn’t work” (in what way?). He seems to claim that our lives are not tangibly better than our predecessors, we just have “more stuff.” I strongly disagree, I live a life of much more comfort an ease than did my parents on the 20th century, and I can even point towards tangible benefits since he wrote his book in 2008. The ability to call my family no matter where either of us are has greatly eased my mind when my family are taking a long cross-country trip. I no longer worry that they may be stuck or stranded without help, or that they’ve taken a wrong turn and gotten lost. Both of those are impossible as long as smart phones exist.

Furthermore, Paul believes that we reached the limits of resource extraction in *2005*, and that the 2008 crash was proof of this. This is again laughable, US oil production has nearly tripled since 2005, China has increased its demand for coal and iron, even food production has continued to increase. There is no way in hell to defend the idea that 2005 was the point where we reached maximum resource extraction, we’ve easily breached that mark every year since 2010. In 2008 when he wrote his book, the global economy was in a recession, and his thesis may have been believable. But with 20 years of growth since then, his claim is clearly bunk.

He claims that he predicted the 2008 crash by looking at resource constraints and ecological changes. Desertification, bleaching of corals, global warming, these were all signs that humanity was reaching the limits of growth and our economy would eventually crash.

But since 2020 our economy has boomed, even if the bottom 99% haven’t felt it. So question for Paul: have those ecological changes stopped? Because if desertification, coral bleaching, and global warming all predict an economic crash, then the only way to account for our economy *not* crashing is to say that those things are no longer happening. Or perhaps Paul’s prediction was bunk and ecological changes *do not* predict economic ones.

Paul also falls into what I call the Paradox of the Evil Billionaire. On the one hand, Paul claims that we all know how billionaires don’t have a shred of patriotism in their bodies, and would gladly sell out their own countrymen to make a quick buck. On the other hand, Paul and others claim that Foreign Billionaires will buy up American farms and send all the food back to their home countries, even though they’d make much more money by continuing to sell that food in America. Note that American food prices are *much much much higher* than in places like China or India, food is worth a lot more here than it is there.

So why are these Evil Billionaires, who *only* care about making more money and *definitely* will sell out their own countrymen for a buck, suddenly being secret patriots by taking a loss in order to send American food back to their home countries instead of selling it for a profit in America?

It’s because Paul (and others) believe in conspiracies more than facts, and the conspiracy that “foreigners are out to get us” is a much more powerful one than “all rich folks are amoral bastards.”

So Paul has this fantasy that in the future, countries will be forced to enact harsh laws on who can own farmland, because there won’t be enough food to go around and people will be sending food to their homelands instead of selling it for the highest price. In reality, farm production has continued to increase and food is still affordable for most Americans. Egg prices for one have crashed in 2025, making them much more affordable than last year.

Paul brashly contends that “2008 was the year that growth stopped.” LOL. LMAO even.

Paul contends that 2008 was only the beginning of a sustained economic downturn and global emergency which would last decades. Here’s some of his predictions, and the results of the past 20 years:

  • Food demand will increase but agricultural output will decrease, causing skyrocketing food prices. Hasn’t happened
  • Fresh water, fisheries, and arable land will run out leading to sky-high prices for food and water. Nope, hasn’t happened.
  • “Sustained and rapid increases in oil prices as peak oil is breached.” LMAO, no.
  • He does claim that “there could be” a global pandemic which shuts down air travel, so he weasels his way into one correct prediction. Still, the pandemic is over and air travel is back, so it didn’t lead to any lasting effects like he claimed.
  • He also puts the global pandemic right alongside “terrorists attacks wiping out a major city,” so I think clearly he was just making shit up that sounded scary. Again no, terrorists haven’t wiped out any major cities.
  • He claims there will be a “dramatic drop in global [stock] markets and a tightening of capital supply.” Again, no.

So basically all of his predictions are bad. He’s a degrowther, after all.

He essentially predicted a mass global crisis because we’d run out of oil and coal. He wasn’t really an environmentalist either, he didn’t think renewables could ever bridge the gap. Rather he just wanted the economy to be *smaller*, and so he created a bunch of fanciful predictions that proved it would become smaller in the future. He was wrong of course, the global economy has never been larger.

Here are also some of the changes he thinks society must make, and WILL make, to stave off the catastrophe, along with my commentary:

  • He thinks the societies that will best cope with the catastrophe will be the ones that start to “ration electricity.” In reality, rationing electricity is a sign that your society is *failing*, not succeeding, at coping with the present.
  • He wants to “erect a wind turbine and solar plant in every town.” This is just stupid on top of everything else. Not every town is suitable for wind or solar power, and besides power generation is done best using *economies of scale*, where lots of power is generated all in one place and then distributed to the markets far away. His idea would be inefficient and bad, so of course it hasn’t happened.
  • He wants to “ration the use of ICE cars,” “ground 1/2 of all aircraft,” “shop less, live more.” No, no, and no. And what does he mean by “live more?” People buy things they want because they think it will improve their lives. When he says “live more” he just comes across as a boomer complaining that society is too fast-paced for his old back to handle, and that he doesn’t like how women wear so much makeup these days. Most of his complaints come across as cultural rather than economic, and these are severely *conservative* cultural complaints at that.
  • He thinks we must (and therefore WILL) stop using fossil fuels by 2024. Hasn’t happened.
  • He thinks that as of 2008 there is “no significant future for coal or oil, short of some surprising breakthrough technology.” Was fracking really all that surprising?
  • “The market hasn’t priced in that all coal and oil companies will be worthless.” LMAO, nope. I’m sure he’s moved the goal-posts by now, but these companies have continued chugging along regardless.

Paul also says “I talk to people all the time who understand this *common sense*, they know that despite so-called “experts” saying their lives are improved these past few decades, they don’t feel any better off.” He has just discovered nostalgia, and thinks he’s the only one who understands. Again, he is fundamentally a cultural conservative, things were better in the “good old days.”

Anyway these are just my thoughts on Paul’s book. It really is not worth a read as anything other than blog fodder. It is badly written, badly argued, and hasn’t stood the test of time. I’m glad I didn’t pay for it, I got it at the library instead. But they should really discard it and put something better on their shelves.

EDIT: one final aside: when I posted this post, WordPress suggested I add additional tags to increase it’s reach. They suggested “faith” and “Jesus” as appropriate tags. Why?

The Great Disruption: A Degrowth Apocalypse

In 1972, a report on “the limits to growth” was published laying out a detailed argument that there simply weren’t enough resources in the world for economies to continue growing.  In 2008, the fruits of that 1972 paper came to pass, as every grifter who’d read it published a book saying that the financial crisis was proof that economic growth was now at an end.  Richard Heinberg said this in 2010, and in 2011 Paul Gilding did the same.

In a blurb, “The Great Disruption” by Paul Gilding is just like “The End of Growth” By Richard Heinberg, which I reviewed previously.  The two books both claim that resources, *especially fossil fuels* are running out (or rather, ran out back in 2010-2011 when these books were published).  Both books claim that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by this resource constraint (and *not* by the sub-prime mortgage crisis which actually caused it).  And both claim that since we’ve reached the limits of growth (back in 2010…) we now have to live in a world where no more growth is possible.  We instead need to adopt Degrowth, where we eliminate fossil fuels entirely and shrink out economies and our livelihoods in order to continue living on this earth.

But unlike “The End of Growth,” this book is much more than a thesis, it’s a sermon.  In my opinion, “The Great Disruption” is Paul Gilding’s stab at writing a Degrowther Book of Daniel.  

For those of you who aren’t faithful, the Book of Daniel is one of the primary “apocalypse” books of the old testament.  An apocalypse doesn’t really mean the “end of the world,” rather it literally means “revealing,” and an apocalypse book is when the truth of the future is revealed to a prophet and he writes that truth down for all to read.

In the Book of Daniel, Daniel foresees the rise and fall of several earthly empires, culminating in the rejuvenation of Israel and the eternal reign of God.  It doesn’t matter, says Daniel, that the current world is ruled by tyrants and that the situation seems hopeless.  God will destroy the evil and restore the righteous, and it *will* happen just as Daniel says it will.

In “The Great Disruption,” Paul Gilding foresees the inevitable fall of capitalism and the liberal world order, culminating in a degrowther paradise where we all agree to consume at little resources as possible to maintain the world’s stability.  It doesn’t matter, says Gilding, that the current world is ruled by capitalism and the situation seems impossible.  “We have no other choice” he says, and so everything he says *will* happen, just as he says it will.

This comparison to scripture isn’t an idle one.  The whole time I read “The Great Disruption” I kept noting how it felt like a sermon, not a argument.  Paul Gilding doesn’t really try to persuade the reader that his plan for a degrowth future is the best one, instead he repeatedly asserts that “we have no other choice” and that everyone *will eventually accept* that “we have no other choice.”  And so, once Government, Corporations, and People eventually accept that we “we have no other choice,” they will all begin acting exactly as he thinks they should act, by cutting off fossil fuels, travel, and all consumer goods in order to degrow the economy.

He tries to persuade the reader of some things, yes.  He works to persuade us that climate change needs to be addressed, that there are limits to growth, and that the 2008 financial crisis was the moment when Growth Finally Stopped for all time.  

But he doesn’t ever try to persuade the readers that his degrowth future is possible, feasible, or better than the other options.  He doesn’t even try to persuade us that it will actually happen.  He keeps writing anecdotes about people questioning the possibility and feasibility of his plans and predictions, and he keeps responding the same way: “we have no other choice.”

This is the hallmark of a sermon, or an apocalypse.  In such works as these, The Truth (capital Ts) isn’t something you argue or persuade, but something you announce and reveal, with no room for questioning or doubt.  Any quibbles about the details are brushed aside because “it will happen, don’t question it.”  Instead, the focus is on laying out this revealed future, what will it look like, who will be punished, and who will be rewarded.

I’ll try to write more on Paul Gilding’s book, but I can’t recommend it as anything other that a hoop to be dunked on.  Paul’s predictions and prognostications are all wildly off-base, he doesn’t understand economics *or* energy, and everything he said Will Happen simply Hasn’t.  He wanted to impart a moral imperative into the Degrowth movement, with a vision of the future that was as utopian as it was unquestioned.  But his predictions for the future have all been disproven by our present, and he looks as mad as the Malthusians who believed we’d run out of food in the 19th century.

Overall this book is what I’ve come to expect from degrowthers.  Every single prediction of theirs has been disproven, yet they keep pretending that history is on their side.  I don’t know if they’ll ever learn. But their books give me something to dunk on.

Ten Episodes in China’s Diplomacy: the uncanny resemblance between communist countries and monarchies

I’m reading Ten Episodes in China’s Diplomacy, a written account by former Chinese Diplomat Qian Qichen of ten episodes when China made a name for itself on the world stage. What strikes me though is how much of communist diplomacy in the 1980s revolved around funerals.

I don’t know how true this is, but I was told that funerals were important parts of diplomacy for European monarchs and states. The funeral of a sovereign is a time when even old enemies can be temporarily reconciled in a shared expression of mourning. The Christian funeral service allows the separate nations to find familiarity in their shared religious observances, and the priest may even give a sermon reminding us that every death is a new beginning: a time to bury the hatchet and forge bonds anew.

The event of a ruler dying in office, and of their neighbors coming together under the banner of their shared religion, gives a chance for old enemies to make amends. If the sovereign themselves had enemies, those enemies might take the opportunity to make nice with the sovereign’s successor. Or if his neighbors were enemies with each other but friends with him, they can at least exchange pleasantries at the Christian funeral and perhaps promise to meet again and bury the hatchet.

All this to say: this kind of funeral diplomacy was a key part of Chinese diplomacy in the 1980s. China was severely isolated in the 1980s, they had almost no relations with Russia, they had fought a war with Vietnam, their main ally was the economic basket case North Korea, and the West hated them only marginally less than their fellow communists.

But under Deng Xiaoping, China wanted to reset its foreign relations and normalize its borders in both the North and the South. But while Deng was ready, his fellow communists were non-committal. In fact Qian Qichen’s book makes clear how little China spoke to the other communist countries, and how little those countries listened to China.

But several moments came together to allow China to approach its neighbors in a more friendly manner. Several leaders of both the USSR and Vietnam died in rapid succession, and each funeral was a chance for the communist world to come together to mourn the leaders’ passing and forge new ties of friendship. China rapidly sent an emissary to Leonid Brezhnev’s funeral to make clear that they wanted to reset Sino-Soviet relations. And the death of Le Duan in Vietnam allowed the Chinese and Soviet ambassadors a chance to speak privately, even if they avoided each other in public.

The parallels between this communist “funeral diplomacy” and the Christian “funeral diplomacy” I outlined above are quite striking. And it does put into perspective how many communist countries acted like monarchies. Unlike in a Democracy, monarchies assume the ruler will reign until death, and reign undisputed. There are very few opportunities in a monarchy for policy change because the guy in charge probably believes the same things he believed 20 years ago. So the death of a monarch is a rare opportunity to bring about a policy change.

And like in the old Christian tradition, these communist monarchs could come together under a shared banner of mourning. They may denounce each other in public, but once a communist leader dies his fellow communists can usually agree that at least he was a Marxist instead of a capitalist. That alone creates a shared ideology which can underpin the “let’s bury the hatchet” feeling during the funerary events. Just as a priest may remind the attendants of their shared Christianity, so too may a communist orator remind the attendants of their shared communism.

Qian Qichen naturally asserts that it was China’s skillful policy and diplomacy that brought about the positive resolution to these 10 events, but many of the early events were mostly matters of circumstance. Leonid Brezhnev was a hardliner, so of course he wouldn’t accept resolving the Sino-Soviet border dispute in China’s favor, nor would he or Le Duan accept resolving Cambodia in China’s favor. But Gorbachev was a reformer (or a lightweight if you believe his critics) who was happy to make deals in China’s favor in order to reduce the political and military pressure on the Soviet Union while he tried to reform it economically.

In the end it’s likely all of these events would have been resolved one way or another as China industrialized and became a real player on the world’s stage. But communist funeral diplomacy allowed Deng Xiaoping to resolve most of these disputes in the 80s when China was still a mostly agricultural nation that still had to import food to survive.

It’s something to think about.

What exactly *isn’t* Ezra Klein’s “Abundance Agenda?”

Answer: It isn’t neoliberalism.

Unfortunately, Klein killed my joke. Because between my last post and this one, he made his own post in the New York Times where he clarified that “Abundance” is *not* about neoliberalism. Be warned, I’m writing at night again so this post will be more streamsofconsciousness-y than the last.

First, an intro paragraph: Ezra Klein says the problem with America (and especially Blue States) is that they are Unable To Build. They can’t build rail, or houses, or energy infrastructure. And while nowhere in America can build these well, Blue States are doing *especially badly*. This inability to build means our transport is expensive, our houses are expensive, our energy bills are expensive, and we need to embrace Abundance (aka “build more stuff”) in order to fix our economy. Abundance means building lots of stuff to bring down prices and make everyone happier.

I’ve been amused to see “Abundance” described as some form of rebranded “neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism is a slippery term, but the shackling of the state was a thoroughly neoliberal project.

The above is a quote from Klein, but here he himself falls into the trap of “neoliberalism is whatever I don’t like.” No wonder neoliberalism been described as an “ideological trashbin,” neoliberalism is the political equivalent of a wastebasket taxon.

He describes this “shackling of the state” as the reason we Can’t Have Nice Things in this country, or rather it’s the reason all of our government building projects are way over-time and way over-budget. He does think that some deregulation should be done to allow the free market to build things (like houses), but he is still a partisan Democrat and believes that the government should always take the first step in transportation and energy. Secretly I also think he wants to flex his left-of-center bonafides so he can quell accusations that he’s a secret Reganite, but regardless, he says we cannot have Abundance simply by deregulating, we also have to “unshackle the state.” But what does it mean to “unshackle the state?”

See, the “shackling of the state” as he calls it was really a reaction to the post-World War 2 economic consensus. It was common consensus after World War 2 the State should be allowed to buy up land and invest in infrastructure whenever it wanted, which is exactly what Klein says they should do now, and exactly what Biden said he would do from 2020 to 2024. But the authority of the state is unchecked, it has a “monopoly on the use of force” as they say in poli-sci. So eminent domain aka *forcing people to sell their land* was the common way for the state to build infrastructure, since forced sales (rather than negotiations) are always the best way to make a project happen on-time and under-budget.

We can debate whether or not eminent domain was a bad thing, but in my experience it’s basic Democratic Party orthodoxy that it was *really really bad*. You may recall former Secretary of Transport Pete Buttigieg talking about how the highways were racist by design. This quote was wildly taken out of context, but what he meant was that the government eminent domain’d poor neighborhoods in order to build our highways. Now, in American, eminent domain still requires you to pay a “fair value” to the people whose house or land you buy up. So when using eminent domain, the government buys poor neighborhoods instead of rich ones because poor ones are cheaper to buy, this is obvious. But since minorities are more likely to be poor, this means the poor neighborhoods that were bought up and paved over to build highways were more likely to be minority ones. Hence eminent domain = bad.

In reaction to eminent domain, America “shackled the state.” The power to use eminent domain was massively curtailed, and demands were placed on the state and elected leaders to find other ways to complete infrastructure without this kind of forced-sale.

But unshackling the state is exactly what Klein wants to do to enact the “Abundance Agenda,” and that would mean allowing minority neighborhoods to be bought up and their residents displaced so the government can build infrastructure. It would also mean the government can do other things it did under the pre-shackled consensus, like flooding native tribal land to build the Hoover Dam, floodiung rural Tennessee to build the Tennessee Valley Authority dams, and in many many cases of displacing people who would rather have stayed where they were.

This unshackled state was seen as an injustice by the socially-minded on the left, and so they pushed for strong laws that would prevent the government OR ANYONE ELSE from being able to do this again. The so-called “shackling of the state” was done in the name of Social Justice, not neoliberalism.

And here is a point I would like to make: Klein routinely fails to grapple with the trade-offs that his “Abundance Agenda” would create. He says that we need to “unshackle the state” in order to build lots of good things and bring about Abundance. He says that we *used* to be a country that could do this, and points to the New Deal and the Eisenhower Interstate System as proof of this, and as a model Democrats (and America) should follow. But he doesn’t realize or fails to mention that this unshackling would cause all the problems that are still complained about to this day, bulldozed neighborhoods and displaced people.

Ezra Klein wants to build railroads in the way Eisenhower built interstates, but that’s going to mean blasting through poor neighborhoods in order to get a rail line into the city, just as Eisenhower did. That’s going to mean building across Native land because that’s the shortest way to build a line between many of our Western cities. And since minorities in America are still more likely to be poor, that means the neighborhoods you’ll be blasting through will be minority ones, and you’ll be fought every step of the way by the groups who worked to “shackled the state” in the first place.

Klein is very clearly interested in social justice, but he paints a picture in which the shackling of the state was just caused by misguided leftists and hairbrained libertarians, not his social justice co-partisans. He refuses to grapple with the question of “is it just to bulldoze a poor, black neighborhood to build infrastructure that will be used by millions?” Unless he has an answer for that, then he doesn’t actually have an answer for how to “unshackle” the state.

This refusal to grapple with trade-offs runs rampant through Klein’s Abundance Agenda. He frequently makes the claim that we just need to cut red tape and *get building* and that this will allow us to achieve our every dream. But what exactly is stopping us from building, and who demanded that red tape in the first place?

The sources of Red Tape can be discussed, but I want to keep in mind a few things:

  • Every source of Red Tape *agrees that we need to cut Red Tape*
  • Every source of Red Tape thinks that *their objectives are the most important*
  • Every source of Red Tape just thinks *someone else’s objectives are the ones that should be cut* in order to cut the Red Tape and achieve Abundance
  • Klein falls into the trap of imagining a sort of Red Tape “Legion of Doom” who just stop government projects because they’re evil and don’t like government. But in fact Red Tape is always put there at the behest of some interest group that is trying to protect its members wherever possible

The sources of red tape I’d like to discuss are, in order:

  • Local democracy
  • Environmentalism
  • Taxpayers
  • Unions

Local Democracy is the one that Klein and the Abundance folks feel the strongest in attacking. Everyone hates NIMBYs, but local democracy is more than just them. As I said in the previous post, there are usually listening sessions for any new building project to get neighbor buy-in. These sessions are a great way for NIMBYs to stop projects by demanding so many listening sessions that the project becomes too expensive to be profitable, but any other interest group can also use the demand for listening sessions in order to hamstring an unwanted project.

When framed as “NIMBYs vs infrastructure,” I’m sure it’s easy to get online consensus that local democracy should be crushed beneath the Federal boot. But your political opponents will always try to frame the argument in their way, and supporters of local democracy will frame it in terms of democracy (duh) but also minority rights (why should their minority neighborhoods and native land be forced to bear the burden of all this construction?), social justice (why are these things always built in poor neighborhoods?) and local knowledge (the DC bureaucrats need to listen to the locals because they don’t understand the needs of this area).

If you don’t have a response for these framings, then you won’t be able to bulldoze the NIMBYs and build your railroads. The problem for Klein is that this is a trade-off, are we willing to sacrifice social justice and build our railroads through a poor minority neighborhood, just like we built our highways? It’s easy to attack NIMBYs in the abstract, much harder when we have actual history telling us what happens when we *do* let the Federal Boot stamp on local democracy. And while the Interstate System is widely loved, it has seen a lot of pushback by Ezra’s ideological allies, and Ezra himself is pretending that their concerns over local democracy won’t affect his Abundance Agenda.

Next let’s discuss environmentalism, which is another soft target for the Abundance folks. Abundance folks like Klein laments that “surely we shouldn’t have years of environmental review slowing down our *wind farms*. Surely we shouldn’t allow people to block solar panels in *the dessert*”. But reframed in terms of unknown environmental risks and biodiversity and it gets a lot thornier.

The Abundance Agenda seems to argue we should be fine with building a new railroad/wind farm/solar farm without the years of environmental review demanded by environmentalists. Environmentalists will hit back that we don’t know 100% what chemicals might seep into the water lines, or how many species will go extinct due to habitat destruction, or how much deforestation and de-greening the new construction will cause. I trust the engineers to do their due diligence, and I trust the EPA to monitor situations as they come up. But can Ezra really sell that to America and the environmental movement at large?

The whole point of environmental review is preventing those kinds of “chemicals in the water/mass deforestation” catastrophes, even if the review takes years or decades (in the case of California High Speed Rail). It only takes one research paper to assert that a new train *may* lead to elevated Lithium levels in the rivers of southern California, and then you’ve lost public buy-in for the project at large. And of course if the railroad *does* lead to Lithium in the water, what then? It’s easy for Klein to talk about “cutting environmental review” but he never grapples with how to respond to the claims *within his own coalition* that doing so will make America more sick.

Abundance is an ideology that to some extent wants to be bipartisan. Klein uses Red States as his model to harangue Blue states, and congress recently created a bipartisan Abundance Caucus to champion Klein’s ideas. Although this bipartisan group still voted overwelmingly for the exact kind of anti-abundance legislation that Klein laments, so whatever. But still, I’ve used this post to discuss the conflicts between the Abundance agenda and some parts of Klein’s otherwise partisan orthodoxy, I’d like to use the next post to discuss some of its conflicts with other orthodoxies.

I’d meant these to all be one post, but couldn’t get my thoughts out in time. See you again soon.

Forecasting 101: all good trends will continue forever

This is a small addendum to yesterday’s post about forecasting.

Whenever you’re forecasting future trends, there are two general rules for the hack forecaster:

1. Every good trend will continue forever

2. Every bad trend will turn around soon

This doubly true when your forecasting has a political purpose, in which “good” and “bad” can be thought of as “supports” and “doesn’t support” your chosen narrative. A certain twitterati demonstrated this succinctly in their egg prices prediction from earlier this year:

Source

Now I don’t want to dunk too hard on this prediction (the man died between when I first saw this and when I finally got around to posting about it), but it seems like the clearest cut case of motivated reasoning I can find.  The writer was a political blogger who didn’t like the current US administration.  Saddling the administration with ever-rising prices sends a strong signal that “this administration is bad for the economy.”  So that was the prediction they wanted, and that was what they ran with.

Unfortunately for motivated reasoning, this is the chart of US egg prices since the start of the year.

Source, that 3.0958 just rounds to $3.10 by the way

Trends don’t usually continue monotonically forever.

Why does this matter?  Well it doesn’t matter much, this is a small post.  But I wanted to make clear that forecasting is easy to do when you don’t expect accountability.  It’s the easiest thing in the world to draw a trendline continuing forever to support your narrative, and if you ever get pushback later for being wrong you can attack the complainers for “focusing on the past.”  

I think there needs to be a lot more social accountability in forecasting.  We need to stop giving a microphone to people who constantly proclaim a doom or paradise that never comes.  And our society needs to be willing to hold people accountable for their predictions. 

Back when 538 still existed and was run by Nate Silver, the thing that impressed me most about their predictions was the honesty with which they *scored* those predictions after-the-fact.  Every election cycle they looked at every race for which they made a prediction and compared the predictions to the actual outcomes.

And surprise surprise, predictions from an actual data scientist were quite accurate.  People hate on Nate Silver for predicting Trump had a 30% chance of winning in 2016 (instead of 100%, since he *did* win, or 0% since so many people claimed he could *never* win).  But true to form, any event that 538 gave a 30% chance to had about a 30% chance of happening.  Over the hundreds of elections that they predicted, they gave out a lot of 30% chances, and yes those 30% events did happen 30% of the time. They didn’t *always* happen, they didn’t *never* happen, they happened about 30% of the time.

That’s the kind of accountability we need, and its a shame that we lost it along with 538.  

When will the glaciers all melt?

Glacier National Part in Montana [has] fewer than 30 glaciers remaining, [it] will be entirely free of perennial ice by 2030, prompting speculation that the park will have to change its name – The Ravaging Tide, Mike Tidwell

Americans should plan on the 2004 hurricane season, with its four super-hurricanes (catagory 4 or stronger) becoming the norm […] we should not be surprised if as many as a quarter of the hurricane seasons have five super-hurricanes – Hell and High Water, Joseph Romm

Two points of order:

  • In 2006, when Mike Tidwell wrote about glaciers, Glacier national park had 27 glaciers. It now has 26 glaciers, and isn’t expected to suddenly suddenly lose them all in 5 years.
  • Since 2007, when Joseph Romm wrote about hurricanes, just four hurricane seasons have had four so-called “super-hurricanes,” and just one season has had five. The 2004 season has not become the norm, and we are averaging less than 6% of seasons having five super-hurricanes

I do not write this to dunk on climate science, I write only to dunk on the popular press. The science of global warming is fact, it is not a myth or fake news. But the popular press has routinely misused and abused the science, taking extreme predictions as certainties and downplaying the confidence interval.

What do I mean by that? Think of a roulette wheel, where a ball spins on a wheel and you place a bet as to where it will land. If you place a bet, what is the maximum amount of money you can win (aka the “maximum return”)? In a standard game the maximum amount you can win is 36 times what you bid, should you pick the exact number the ball lands on. But remember that in casinos, the House Always Wins. Your *expected* return is just 95/100 of your bid. You’re more likely to lose than to win, and the many many loses wipe out your unlikely gains, if you play the game over and over.

So how should we describe the statistical possibilities of betting on a roulette wheel? We should give the expected return (which is like a mean value how much money you might win), we should give the *most likely* return (the mode), and we should give the minimum and maximum returns, as well as their likelihood of happening. So if you bet 1$ on a roulette wheel:

  • Your expected return is 0.95$
  • Your most likely return is 0$ (more than half of the time you win nothing, even if betting on red or black. If you bet on numbers, you win nothing even more often).
  • Your minimum return is 0$ (at least you can’t owe more money than you bet), this happens just over half the time if you bet on red/black, and happens more often if you bet on numbers
  • Your maximum return is 36$. This happens 1/38 times, or about 2.6% of the time.

But would I be lying to you if I said “hey, you *could* win 36$”?

By some standards no, this isn’t lying. But most people would acknowledge the hiding of information as a lie of omission. If someone tried to entice someone else to play roulette only by telling them that they could win 36$ for every 1$ they put down, I would definitely consider that lying.

So too does the popular press lie. Climate science is a science of statistics and of predictions. Like Nate Silver’s election forecasting, climate modeling doesn’t just tell you a single forecast, they tell you what range of possibilities you should expect and how often you should expect them. For instance, Nate Silver made a point in 2024 that while his forecast showed Harris and Trump with about even odds to win, you shouldn’t have expected them to split the swing states evenly and have the election come down to the wire. The most common result (the mode) was for either candidate to win *all* the swing states together, which is indeed what happened.

Bad statistics and prediction modellers will misstate the range of possible probabilities. They will heavily overstate their certainties, understate the variance, and pretend that some singular outcome is so likely as to be guaranteed.

This kind of bad statistics was central to Sam Wong of the Princeton Election Consortium‘s 2016 prediction, which gave Hillary Clinton a greater than 99% chance of victory. Sam *massively* overstated the election’s certainty, and frequently attacked anyone who dared to caution that Clinton wasn’t guaranteed to win.

Nate Silver meanwhile was widely criticized for giving Hillary such a *low* chance of victory, at around 70%. He was “buying into GOP propaganda” so Sam said. Then after the election Silver was attacked by others for giving Clinton such a *high* chance, since by that point we knew she had lost. But 30% chance events happen 30% of the time. Nate has routinely been more right than anyone else in forecasting elections.

I don’t doubt that some people read and believed Sam Wong’s predictions, and even believed (wrongly) that he was the best in the business. When he was proven utterly, completely wrong, how many of his readers decided forecasting would never be accurate again? How much damage did Sam Wong do to the popular credibility of election modeling?

However much damage Sam did, the popular press has done even more to damage the statistical credibility of science, and here we return to climate change. Climate change is happening and will continue to accelerate for the foreseeable future until drastic measures are taken. But how much the earth will warm, and what effects this will have, have to be modeled in detail and there are large statistical uncertainties, much like Silver’s prediction of the 2016 election.

Yet I have been angry for the last 20 years as the popular press continues to pretend long-shot possibilities are dead certainties, and to understate the range of possibilities. Most of the popular press follows the Sam Wong school.

In the roulette table, you might win 36$, but that’s a long-shot possibility. And in 2006 and 2007, we might have predicted that all the glaciers would melt and super-hurricanes would become common. But those were always long-shot possibilities, and indeed these possibilities *have not happened*.

The climate has been changing, the earth has been warming, but you don’t have to go back far to see people making predictions so horrendously inaccurate that they destroy the trust of the entire field. If I told you that you were dead certain to win 36$ when putting 1$ on the roulette wheel, you might never trust me again after you learned how wrong I was. Is it any wonder so many people aren’t trusting the science these days, when this is how it’s presented? When we were told 20 years ago that all the glacier in America would have melted by now? Or that every hurricane season would be as bad as 2004?

And it isn’t hard either to find numerous even more dire predictions couched in weasel words like “may” and “possibly.” The oceans “may” rise by a foot, such and such city “may” be under water. It’s insidious, because while it isn’t *technically* wrong (“I only said may!”) it makes a long-shot possibility seem far more likely than it really is. Again, it’s a clear lie of omission, and it’s absolutely everywhere in the popular press.

We have to be accurate when modelling our uncertainty. We have to discuss the *full range of possibilities*, not just the possibility we *want* to use for fear-mongering. And we have to accurately state the likelihoods for our possibilities, not just declare the long-shot to be a certainty.

Because the earth *has* warmed. A glacier has disappeared from Glacier national park and the rest are shrinking. Hurricane season power is greater than it was last century. But writers weren’t content to write those predictions, and instead filled books with nonsense overstatements that were not born out by the data and are easily disproven with a 2025 google search. When it’s so easy to prove you wrong, people stop listening. And they definitely won’t listen to you when you “update” your predictions to match the far less eye-catching trend that you should have written all along. Lying loses you trust, even if you tell the truth later.

I think Nate Silver should be taken as the gold standard for modelers, statistician, and more importantly *the popular press*. You *need* to model the uncertainties, and more importantly you need to *tell people* about those uncertainties. You need to tell them about the longshots, but also about *how longshot they are*. You need to tell them about the most likely possibility too, even if it isn’t as flashy. And you need to tell them about the range of possibilities along the bell curve, and accurately represent how likely they all are.

Nate Silver did just this. In 2016 he accurately reported that Trump was still well within normal bounds of winning, an average size polling error in his favor was all it would take. He also pointed out that Clinton was a polling error away from an utter landslide (which played much better among the twitterati), and that she was the favorite (but not enough of the favorite to appease the most innumerate writers).

In *every* election Silver has covered, he has been the primary modeller accurately measuring the range of possibilities, and preparing his readers for every eventuality. That gets him dogpiled when he says things that people don’t like, but it means he’s accurate, and accuracy is supposed to be more important than popularity in science.

So my demand to the popular press is to be more like Nate Silver and less like Sam Wong. Don’t overstate your predictions, don’t downplay uncertainties, don’t make extreme predictions to appeal to your readers. Nate Silver has lost a lot of credibility for his temerity to continue forecasting accurately even in elections that Democrats don’t win, but Sam Wong destroyed his credibility in 2016 and has been an utter joke ever since. If science is to remain a force of informing policy, it needs to be credible. And that means making accurate predictions even if they aren’t scary enough to grab headlines, or even if they aren’t what the twitterati would prefer.

Lying only works until people find you out.

Would you work more hours if it meant you didn’t have to do housework?

I don’t have a catchier title, but this *is* a question I’ve been pondering. When I was young I thought that having someone else do housework for you was the height of luxury, but these days it doesn’t seem to be that uncommon. I don’t know anyone who paints their own fence, mows their own yard, or cleans their own roof. These jobs used to be seen as just part of owning a house, either you did it or you forced your kid to do it as part of their chores. But it seems nowadays most people hire professionals to do it instead.

Even the most basic housework has been outsourced, with services available to clean your bathroom and kitchen twice a month, or your whole house if you like. And of course think about restaurants and fast food: eating outside your own home has almost doubled in the past 50 years. That’s a lot less meals that people have to cook, a lot less dishes they have to clean, and even less groceries that they have to buy.

So housework is being outsourced, and is it related to how Americans seem to work many more hours than the rest of the developed world?

Shifting gears now, I’ve written before about the Europe vs America economic debates. Inevitably in such debates, the conversation shifts to working hours, workers in Europe work less hours than workers in America.

But Josh Barro on twitter has pushed back against claims about European quality-of-life: they don’t have dryers. Reddit too has a huge thread about the lack of dryers and high-energy appliances in Europe. Can a place without such creature comforts really be comfortable?

I don’t want to dwell on the dryer debate. Yes Europeans can dry their clothes in the sun. Yes, it may be cheaper. But does it require more work? Is an electric dryer not a labor-saving device that lets you cut out the work of hanging up your clothes and taking them down?

And coming back to housework, doesn’t paying someone to do your housework also save you from doing that labor? And if so, how much is your time worth it to you? To restate the question from the title of this post: if working 45 hours a week instead of 40 meant you never had to do housework, would you take it?

Some people like doing housework, I get that. But for most people, it’s a chore. And so I wonder if Americans on the whole have made a choice: they work more at work so they can work less at home, and I wonder if anyone has quantified this. European’s extra housework may not show up in the metrics, but it should still be quantified to know if Americans really do “work more hours.”

Working at work vs working at home is a dichotomy any student of economic history understands. When women first entered the private sector workforce, it didn’t mean that women *started working*, and that they weren’t working before that. Women had been doing work at home without pay since the dawn of time. If you calculate the labor done by homebound women and compare it to the paid labor plus housework done by working women, women’s’ overall working hours went down when they entered the workforce. They could use the money they made at work to pay for other people’s labor or labor-saving devices at home.

Men had also taken this leap from housework to paid work centuries before. During the days of subsistance farming, men, women, everyone had to do a hell of a lot of odd jobs to keep themselves housed, clothed, and fed, even when they weren’t actively “working” on their farm. This is why claims of how few hours medieval farmers worked are so misleading: they had many “holidays,” sure, but besides attending church those days would still be spent doing work around the house even if they wouldn’t be spent in the field.

If you were a medieval peasant, you might have a roof that needs mending, food that needs preserving, you need a new chair to fix the old one, a new patch to cover the hole in your cloak, and you had to do all this yourself or it wouldn’t get done. It didn’t show up in “hours worked” because it’s housework in the home. But it still needed to be done to maintain quality of life.

When men started moving from farms to factories, they traded their labor in for money, and could then use that money to *have their roof fixed, buy their own food, buy a new chair, or have their cloak patched*. They could use money to get someone else to do labor for them. They started working *less hours* when you account for both house work and factory work.

Factories workers worked a *lot*. But subsistence farmers worked far more for far less. But if you only calculate “hours worked” using work *outside* the house, then you’d wrongly conclude that subsistence farmers lived cushy lives and that women’s liberation destroyed women’s free time. Nothing could be further from the truth, instead, people these days work much more outside the house in exchange for working much less in it.

And I wonder how much that feeds in to the America vs Europe debate on working hours. How much labor do Europeans do around their homes that Americans *don’t* do. How much labor do Americans save by using dryers, by hiring landscapers, by hiring homecleaners, and are they happy with the extra hours they work to afford that? Do Americans work more hours to save themselves from housework?

Not knowing your Enemies

One of the oldest maxims in military strategy is this: know your enemies. Colonel Santiago of the Spartans added “do not forget above all to yourself.” It’s amazing how badly people fail at this most basic maxim when “knowing your enemy” requires understanding their political goals and ideology instead of just guessing how many tanks and artillery pieces they have on hand.

a nuclear explosion

I’ve been watching a lot of Indy Neidell recently. For those who don’t know, he’s a youtube historian who presents a lot of programs where he recounts the history of a conflict in chronological order. He has presented “World War 1: Week by Week,” “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Day by Day,” and “The attack on Pearl Harbor: Minute by Minute.” It’s the Cuban Missile Crisis I’d like to talk about today.

I’m sure you all know the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis: the Soviet Union puts nukes in Cuba and the world sits on the brink of Armageddon as America and the Soviets decide if they want to nuke each other or not. Eventually the Soviets agree to remove the nukes on Cuba in exchange for America removing its nukes in Turkey, and a direct phone line is established between DC and Moscow so the leaders of the two superpowers can try to hash things out more peacefully in the future.

But what’s striking about the crisis is that no one involved understood each other’s motives, and that nearly led to ruin.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was the first mover. He was upset that America could threaten him with nukes from Turkey while he couldn’t threaten America with a similar first-strike. He placed nukes in Cuba so he could have such a threat in his back pocket.

Castro was mostly a bystander in the crisis, a sad state of affairs since it was his nation that the crisis was about. Castro was sold the idea that the nukes were there to protect Cuba from any future Bay Of Pigs style invasion. He thought the nukes were primarily for his benefit, and urged the Soviets to give him operational control over them.

When America found out about the nukes, they completely misunderstood things. They seemed primarily worried about West Germany, and thought the nukes were there to distract them from an upcoming West Berlin crisis. Or that the nukes were to dissuade them from coming to Germany’s aid if the Soviets invaded there. Throughout the crisis, many American decision-makers remained stuck on the question of “how does this relate to West Berlin?”

It’s somewhat understandable that the American thought this way, since West Berlin was so important to them. It was the shining beacon of freedom in the middle of Soviet Communism. And every East German who escaped to West Berlin was a diplomatic coup, proof positive that the Western system was better, and that Communism was *so bad* that it was the first government in history that needed to build a wall to keep citizens *in*.

But this fixation caused America to dangerously misjudge the USSR during the crisis. They didn’t understand that Khrushchev and Castro had their own motives for doing this, and American policy-makers were constantly looking for a West Berlin connection. America made plans to knock out the nuclear missiles in Cuba either with air strikes or a ground invasion. These ideas were ultimately shelved partly because “what if the Soviets want to tie us down here while they invade West Berlin?”

But what America *should* have realized was that the Soviets weren’t going to install nuclear missiles on Cuba without a *lot* of troops to guard them. The proposed American ground invasion would have been *severely* outnumbered by the USSR Red Army troops that America didn’t know were on the island. And that’s without even mentioning the tactical nukes that were also there to guard the strategic nukes. An American invasion would have been a slaughter, possibly including the use of said tactical nukes against the US Navy, but the Americans assumed Cuba was a small sideshow because that was how they saw it themselves.

And while the USSR was *more* interested in Cuba than the Americans thought, they were *less* interested in Cuba than Castro thought. When the USSR was moving the nukes out, Castro threw a fit and tried in vain to retain control of the tactical nukes. This earned him no favor in Moscow, as the USSR wanted to bring everything home and put the whole thing put behind them. The end of the crisis created a lot of bad blood between Cuba and the USSR, when it could have been a unifying moment instead.

In fact, I saw much the same level of American misunderstanding in Indy Neidell’s series on the Korean War. Yet again the Americans began this war being most worried about Germany, “what if they want us to pull our troops from Europe into this war in Korea?” This hamstrung troop movements and decision-making in the crucial early stages when South Korea was being overrun.

Later on, the Americans showed another failure of understanding that I’ve seen repeated in the modern day: the assumption that their enemies were united and working in lock-step against them.

The idea went like this: the USSR, China, and North Korea were all Communist. Communists were all opposed to America, and thus Communists all moved in lock-step to work against America. It became clear early on that the USSR wasn’t moving its European troops to support North Korea, and that the USSR would *not* join the Korean War with ground forces. That proved (in America’s mind) that the Korean War *was* just a side-show, and that they had to remain focused on protecting West Berlin.

It *also* proved that the “Forces of Communism” were willing to cut North Korea loose and not support them if US troops occupied the North. If the USSR wasn’t supporting them, you could be damn well sure China wasn’t supporting them either, because the two moved in lock-step. And that meant no ground forces would swoop in to aid North Korea, meaning America was free to occupy the whole country.

The USSR certainly treated Korea with less importance than its European commitments. But the Communists were *not* operating in lock-step, and China was willing, even eager to send ground forces to Korea. More than just fighting the Capitalists, China wanted to prove that the “Century of Humiliation” was over, and that the Communists had brought China back to being a super-power on the world’s stage, able to go toe to toe with anyone.

America took the lack of USSR ground troops as proof that the Forces of Communism were in no way prepared to fight them face to face in Korea. American generals and planners ignored the massive amount of Chinese ground troops even as those troops moved into Korea to start fighting. America failed to understand: China was willing to fight even if the Soviets weren’t.

This strange idea, that our enemies are all united and move in lock-step against us, is a common one amongst small-minded jingoists. Jingoists are often too intellectually stunted to understand other people having motives that don’t involve them. In the 50s that meant they didn’t realize how important Korea was to China, because Korea was a sideshow for the jingoists. In the modern day, I’ve seen jingoists propose that Iran, China, and Russia are acting in unison to oppose American interests, rather than each nation acting in its own interests even if their interest sometimes align with each other.

When Iran launched missiles at Israel, it was suggested by morons that this was in part because Russia wanted to take America’s attention and effort away from Ukraine. When the Houthis shut down Red Sea Trade, this was supposedly done because Iran wanted to help Russia by hurting Europe. And the whole war in Ukraine itself is supposedly part of China’s big strategy to put pressure on America and Europe so China can swoop in and take Taiwan.

Let’s get one thing clear: this is nonsense cooked up by morons. Russia, Iran, China, the Houthis, they all have their own beliefs, goals, and strategies. China is no more ordering Russia around than the USSR ordered China around in the Korean War. Iran is supporting the Houthis but the Houthis act mostly on their own initiative.

And this misunderstanding continues on to suggestions of strategy. There is a stupid video-game ideology that goes through the heads of jingoists: if we cut off the command center we end the rest of the war. So they propose war in Iran to stop the Houthis and war in Russia to contain China.

Yet history tells us that we time and time again misunderstand the motives of our enemies. America thought the Cuban missile crisis revolved around Europe, and believed that a resolution to the crisis must be sought there.

They were wrong.

Khrushchev offered to remove his nukes from Cuba in exchange for American nukes from Turkey, because that was what he was focused on all along. This surprised the Americans. In fact Khrushchev announced this “deal” before Kennedy and co had even agreed to it, or even heard of it, they learned it from the newspapers and were obliged to go along with it as the best way to exit the crisis.

Throughout the entire Cuban Missile Crisis and Korean War, America misunderstood its enemies, believed them to be united in opposing America, and was fixated only on what *it* saw as important. This led to failures and near catastrophe, as they didn’t predict China would enter Korea and didn’t think the Soviets would send tens of thousands of troops to guard a strategic “backwater” like Cuba.

If America had understood that China and the USSR were not joined at the hip, they might have stopped their troops half-way up the Korean peninsula and allowed the Republic of Korea to invade north on its own, since China had said that they wouldn’t attack if only Korean forces came north. Maybe Korea would have been unified. And if America had understood that the USSR was more worried about American nukes in Turkey than American bases in Germany, then they wouldn’t have courted disaster with a plan to send a few thousand troops against a vastly superior Red Army garrison in Cuba.

I’d hope that modern jingoists would take these lessons to heart, and understand that our enemies have initiative and agency all their own. Sadly most do not.

Carter and Thatcher: Champions of deregulation

When people talk about the British economy, one complaint floats to the top of the internet discourse: the Financial Sector. According to the Twitterati, the UK spent too much money “building up” a sector of the economy that has done nothing but push up inequality, force everyone into London, and doesn’t even do anything useful.

You’ll hear it said that while finances pay most of the taxes and provide most of the GDP of the UK, this was due to a stupid choice the Government made not a fact of nature. Britain should have been more like Germany, investing in industry so they could have more middle class jobs spread around the whole country. Instead they invested in Finance and got one single city filled with rich people and their servants while the entire rest of the country goes to waste.

This complaint is wrong in many ways, but the most direct falsehood is that successive Governments *did not* “invest in” or “build up” the Financial services industry, services succeeded so rapidly because the Government *kept out*. For a long time, British financial services were heavily regulated and weren’t much larger than than what was available on the continent. But then the Government stepped away from the sector, dropped its regulations, and the sector thrived. The Government didn’t put money and time *into* finances, instead the Government was taken *out* of finances.

Maybe the Government should have gotten out of more industries?

But I’m getting ahead of myself, the changes to Britain’s financial sector all happened in a “Big Bang,” named such because instead of piecemeal deregulation over many years, there was massive, sweeping deregulation all at once. The sudden drop of onerous requirements made the sector highly competitive, and drove massive investment into London/the UK at the expense of the rest of Europe.

But most people look askance at “deregulation.” They think there must be some “catch” to this story. What regulation was dropped, and how did this secretly allow Bankers to suck blood from the unions and the working class? Well here are a few regulations that were dropped:

Broker price fixing: before the big bang, if you wanted to buy a stock from a broker they were required to charge you a minimum price for the service of selling you the stock. This price was set by the Government, and it was illegal to offer lower prices. This is bad for consumers and bad for business, I mean should the Government set a *minimum price* for food? For rent? Hell no. So why a minimum price for stocks?

Ending the price fixing meant suddenly bankers had to compete on price. The price to trade a stock went lower and lower, and this had the effect of opening up the stock market to the common people as well. Suddenly there wasn’t some onerous price on top of any stock you wanted to buy, you could pay for just the stock plus a paltry service fee of a few pence. And in time, even this few pence fee went away, as brokers offered fee-less trading in an attempt to compete on volume.

Price ceilings are terrible, but leftist will still argue they are at least good for the consumer. Price *floors* are exactly as terrible, and I hope even leftist realize they aren’t good for the consumer.

Electronic trading: before the big bang, it was mandated that to buy or sell a stock, two people had to meet in person and agree to the sale. You put in your order to a broker, they wired the order to someone else, and eventually your order would make its way to two people standing on a crowded floor screaming at each other to haggle over the price of your stock. They weren’t screaming in anger, but just to be heard over everyone else on the floor, who was also screaming.

The big bang introduced electronic screens with prices and volumes, and allowed orders to be made totally electronically. This helped end the monopoly of overpaid men screaming at each other. It made ordering easier, allowed it to be done from anywhere, and by cutting out the middlemen it helped bring down the price for buying and selling stock. Once again, this helped democratize the stock market, few workers today would be able to invest for their retirement on the stock market if prices to buy and sell were still as high as the 70s.

Foreign ownership: the big bang allowed foreign companies and individuals to act as brokers. Much like electronic trading, this broke the monopoly on overpaid men screaming at each other, and lowered prices; are you seeing a pattern here? Anyway foreign banks and brokers could now bring outside investment and outside technology to the British stock market, where before they’d been banned.

The ban on foreign brokers had been done solely to “protect” the profits of British banks and British brokers. But like tariffs, it did not help the British economy nor protect British wages. It was just another facet of a Government sanctioned oligarchy, which allowed only certain, connected individuals to profit from Britain’s stock market. Foreign investment created competition, and it also created a flood of incoming money, which boosted demand for workers and drove up British wages. These new brokers needed buildings, needed computers, needed employees etc. The flood of incoming money was a great boon for workers and builders in every sector of the British economy.

These are just a few of the deregulations brought on by Thatcher’s big bang, but they all had the same theme. They broke the monopoly of the overpaid bankers and brokers, and brought in competition that brought down prices and democratized the stock market. The financial industry grew like never before, eclipsing every other sector of the British economy. And it did so not through Government support, but because the Government *kept out*.

But let us turn now to Jimmy Carter.

Deregulation is too often seen as a boogieman of the right wing. The conservative party (whichever party it is in your country), wants to deregulate because they secretly want to destroy the environment and make workers their slaves. It is a too-common dogma on the left that any regulation is necessary and sacrosanct for the good of the economy, and that deregulation doesn’t even help GDP but merely lets well-connected CEOs impose a monopoly that makes everyone poorer.

So I thought I’d push against that view with a man no one could accuse of being a right-wing conservative: Jimmy Carter. Jimmy came to the presidency at a time of great difficulty. Inflation, oil crisis, stagflation even, the American economy was nuts in the 70s. There was even fear that the USSR would overtake America. Jimmy would fix that.

One of Carter’s signature policies was deregulating the airline industry. Once again, a modern leftist might see this as a betrayal: what did Carter’s deregulation do to break the unions, harm the workers, and price-gouge the people, and how much did the airlines pay him to do this? But nothing could be further from the truth. Prior to Carter’s deregulation, the airline industry worked like a Gilded Age trust, with strict rules that protected the big players at the expense of workers, people, and anyone trying to get a foot in the door.

First, to make a new airline route, companies had to submit their request to a centralized body. This body would then look to see if the new route created too much competition with any other airline’s route, and if it did, the route was forbidden. Imagine if Walmart could forbid anyone from opening a store within 5 miles of their own, that was basically what this law did.

The airline submitting the new route had to basically get a hospital-style “certificate of need” proving that there weren’t enough flights for the amount of passengers who *wanted* to travel. This was of course very difficult to prove, and the airlines already serving that route could try to maintain their monopoly by promising to increase flights, so usually the monopoly was protected.

In addition, a centralized agency set a price floor on airline tickets. Like we discussed earlier: price floors are bad. They only serve to enrich the big players by making it impossible for new companies with better tech to come in and compete on price.

In fact, even *starting a new airline company* was all but impossible, as any new company had to get permission to run airlines. Imagine if Walmart could forbid the creation of Costco solely on the basis of “we were here first.”

Airlines in America had a ton of overregulation that only served to protect the big players at the expense of everyone else. No one benefited from this, not the workers, not the fliers, not the American economy, no one except the big boys who lobbied hard to prevent deregulation from passing.

In the end, deregulation democratized flight in America the way same way it democratized the stock market in Britain. Adjusted for inflation, the average New York to LA flight was 1,200$ in 1970, today you can fly that route for under 300$. There is no question in my mind that the American people are better off without being price-gouged by airline lobbyist. And Carter made all that possible.

So my final thought is this: deregulation is a dirty word, but it shouldn’t be. Regulations are not necessarily good. They are not necessarily bad either, but don’t assume they are always good. Deregulation is likewise value neutral. It is good to remove bad regulations, it is bad to remove good regulations.

Britain has a lot of bad regulations holding it back, that’s why I suggested deregulation to Keir Starmer. Starmer has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change Britain for the better. He’s got a big majority, there is wide agreement that his predecessors were bad for the economy, and he’s hemmed in by debt and deficits preventing any big spending. This is the perfect time for deregulation.

So I say cut the red tape, kick out the cartels, and trample all over the lobbyists who want to protect their corporate fiefdoms. If Britain is going to build, it needs change, the kind of change that Jimmy Carter understood. And even if Thatcher deregulated, that doesn’t mean deregulation is always bad. Would you like to pay 10 pounds every time you wanted to purchase a stock? Would you like to pay 4 times as much to fly to another city? Starmer should cut costs for the working folk, and deregulation can make that happen.