onohoku

How Wired is Ethan? 2:19 behind the curve

2005-08-23T21:49:00.000-07:00

Per sent me an email at 9:35 about Google Talk. I checked Battelle for the gold standard on Google news; he posted at 7:30pm. Since Technorati apparently uses relative pointers on their search URLs (bad, Dave, bad!) by the time you read this post, this search will probably no longer point to the two-hours-ago transition from "preview" to "released" in the blogosphere; but I clock in at 2:19 behind that moment as I write this.

Despite the fact thatTechnorati was built on the premise, "who first and how fast" usually isn't a very interesting a question. But admit it, every once in a while, you want to see how fast your car gets from 0 to 60, don't you?

Outsourcing Services and punctuated equilibrium

2005-02-01T10:30:00.000-08:00

Kevin Drum writes about a new trend of "medical tourism" where people fly to India for $8000 heart operations, rather than $25,000 operations in the United States.

I know a young lady who just got accepted into Cambridge (Kings College) for undergraduate. It will cost her a total -- room, board, tuition -- of $6000 per year to go there. Compare that to Harvard.

America has benefitted for decades --arguably, a century -- by being the world's focal point for all sorts of high-value services, from the dedicated "Saudi Sheikh" ward at the Cleveland Clinic for heart bypass operations, to the massive overseas enrollment in US universities, to the massive overseas employment in Silicon Valley technology corporations. All this is an incredibly important driver in our economy.

The day after tomorrow, savvy high-school prospects from California are going to be applying for admission to IIT Bangalore. Not only is it just as good as MIT, it is probably (if they will let you in, and if you can *get* in) one tenth the cost. And since India is a very big, high-growth part of the world's future, the "fringe benefits" for our young California prospect of going there are considerable - learn the local language, learn the local culture... does this sound like America, post-WWII to anyone? It does to me.

The reason half the title of this post is "punctuated equilibrium" is that the evolutionary model of that name posits sudden environmental changes that presage significant effects on organisms, rather than gradual, linear development.

When America runs out of credit, runs out of cash, runs out of international goodwill, and loses its competitive advantage in a whole host of fields, the many invisible benefits of being #1 will *all* simultaneously vanish, and the many invisible costs of someone else being #1 (who says that hot engineering prospect from California will ever come back from Bangalore after he meets a charming dark-eyed beauty from Rajistan?) will suddenly assert themselves -- all at once.

Then we'll spend two generations, or five decades, being desperately poor, as England did from 1945 - 1995. And have plenty of time to contemplate the sheer folly of having elected Pied Piper Bush as president... once.

It's time to derail Social Security privatization

2004-12-13T22:18:00.000-08:00

In a nutshell:

1) Social Security was never designed to many any retiree rich. It was designed to prevent every retiree from being destutite. For about 70 years, it has worked just fine.

2) Social Security is not broken. The Social Security administration itself estimates that the trust fund has no problems at all before 2042. As Kevin Drum has pointed out, this is a highly conservative estimate, and that over the past decade, the SSA has consistently predicted the 'zero point' to be about 35 years in the future. In fact, since 1994 it's gone from 35 years to 38 years away. Nice!

3) Every "plan" to "fix" Social Security rests on one of two fallacious assumptions. Some plans rest on both of them. These fallacious assumptions are:
a) Assuming that under the current system, worker contributions will grow at a certain rate (say, 2%) but that under a new system, investments would grow at a larger rate (say, 4.6%). Over time, the growth in the value of investments closely matches the growth of the economy as a whole, and many attempts to justify privatization rely on using different numbers for the two cases.
b) Assuming that borrowing money 35 years in the future (when the 'zero point' is reached) is a Very Bad Thing, but that borrowing money now to pay for 'transition costs' in the trillions of dollars is a Perfectly Fine Thing. Wouldn't you rather defer borrowing trillions to a point at least 35 years in the future, especially when that point might shift ever farther into the future, as it has done for the past decade?

Well, enough. Democrats are going to have to be ballsy if they want to prevent the destruction of another sensible American ideal. We need to fight back, and we need to start now -- for the radical right is certainly starting now. Here is a handy primer from Digby about how the Republicans destroyed Clinton's healthcare reform -- when the Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

We should all read, learn, plan, and act NOW.

Quote from the Digby piece:

"September 19, 1994 - The New York Times reports remarks -- never subsequently denied -- that Bob Packwood made to his Republican senatorial colleagues during closed-door strategy sessions while he was managing the Republican attack during the summer. "We've killed health care reform," Packwood told his fellow Republican senators. "Now we've got to make sure our fingerprints are not on it." For many this is the "smoking gun": proof of a carefully plotted, and secret, Republican strategy."

Thug Rule II: Feral Cities

2004-12-13T14:04:00.000-08:00

The New York Times Magazine has an article in its annual 'ideas' issue about so-called "Feral Cities".

Quote from the Times:

"The police in Brazil have fallen back on a containment policy against gangs ruling the favelas, while the rich try to stay above the fray, fueling the busiest civilian helicopter traffic in the world (there are 240 helipads in S-o Paulo; there are 10 in New York City). In Johannesburg, much of downtown, including the stock exchange, has been abandoned to squatters and drug gangs. In Mexico City, crime is soaring despite the presence of 91,000 policemen. Karachi, Pakistan, where 40 percent of the population lives in slums, plays host to gangland violence and to Al Qaeda cells."

Building on the ideas posted in my previous "Thug Rule" post, I will note that the breakdown of social order in the face of thugs armed with the real weapons of mass destruction -- cheap guns, ammunition, and explosive -- is one of the most pressing technological issues of our era. It's worth noting that the balance between order and chaos has historically tipped one way or the other based on available technologies and the political will to apply them. Rome, in the fading days of its glory, was ruled by the mob, because no military technology existed at the time which could be usefully applied in an urban context where preservation of property value was important. Millenia later, Louis XIV demolished entire neighborhoods of Paris (I believe Colbert was the architect both of the policy and the new boulevards) to creat long, wide, straight streets converging to plazas, which could be policed in extreme cases with cannon and musket fire. These new lines of sight/fire replaced the easily mobbable warren that had been the Paris streetscape before, and the application of technologies of urban design, scientific policing, and the general rise in prosperity brought on by the industrial era caused thug power to decline dramatically. Now we appear to be on the verge of the post-industrial era, and the emergence of thug rule at both the national level and the urban level will be one of the greatest problems of the 21st century. One answer is totalitarian methods of control. Louis XIV pioneered these as well. As one wanders the Louvre, it's worth remembering that its gigantic (literally palatial) halls were created to house the bureaucracy of governmental control pioneered by the "L'etat, c'est moi" state of the Sun King. Today, with electronic surveillance and database technologies, combined with highly precision weapons of policing/combat, highly centralized government can fight back -- but the middle-class middle ground of civil society is lost, for the social and technological factors which made this middle layer so powerful over the past two centuries are fading away.

Fallujah: Haystack demolished, 4000 needles found

2004-11-30T11:06:00.000-08:00

The U.S. Marine Corps has posted a slideshow report to the web about the now-mostly-complete operation in Fallujah. I was pointed to this report by Juan Cole, who characterizes the thinking behind it as a mindset of "classic conservatism" which ignores the realities of insurgencies and their popular support. I can't speak to mindsets, but the facts in the report worry the hell out of me. The triumphal table in one of the later slides lists about 4000 individual munitions -- tank shells, mortar shells, rockets -- as being captured. If we assume very generously an average weight of 200 lbs. for each individual munition (many are 60mm mortar shells that might weigh 20 lbs), that means that the Marines fought a pitched battle lasting weeks, lost 50 dead, and captured a grand total of 400 tons of explosive badness. Now remember that Fallujah was supposed to be the epicenter of the Sunni revolt.

That is, pardon my bluntness, a pimple on the ass of an elephant.

The ability of the insurgents in Iraq to create chaos is almost directly proportional to the access to explosives. Guns (AK-47s, etc.) are a secondary chaos factor, but explosives are the real thing that distinguishes today's mess in Iraq from the relative peace that reigned in India under British occupation a hundred years ago. A minority of upset people without high explosives are a rabble; a minority with high explosives are a headache of the first magnitude and a complete block to peace and progress. If you doubt that, look at the dystopian examples of Palestine/Israel and Northern Ireland before 1999. For a city which was supposedly the belly button of badness in the whole Sunni uprising, we found diddly squat in terms of the real core dangerous stuff that makes effective insurgency possible.

How do we know this? The Defense Department told us themselves.

Remember that tempest in a teapot about the ultra-high-explosive RDX and HDX that went missing from Al-Qaqaa, a story which broke right before the election? The total amount of just the most dangerous explosives missing there was 380 tons, which seemed like an enormous amount -- just as the 400 tons captured from Fallujah now seems like a lot. However, as part of its Al-Qaqaa damage control efforts, the Defense Department released numbers stating just how much high-explosive badness was floating about Iraq -- and the numbers simply boggle the mind. Estimates of 250,000 tons missing are moderate out of a total of perhaps a million tons present before the war -- and these bombs, shells, and rockets were stored in hundreds of munitions depots which stood unguarded for months after the invasion, prey to all sorts of extremist bomb-snatchers who are now staggering under the weight of their accumulated badness and have their sights on complete chaos in Iraq.

In fact, in response to Al-Qaqaa, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita stated that the 380 tons represented just “one 1,000th of the material that we are aware of”. 1/1000th is .1%. Congratulations to the U.S. Marine Corps. They've cleared Fallujah, taken 50 KIA, and eliminated .1% of the problem facing Iraq. That is very depressing math.

Two facts are critical to recall here if we are to have accountability:

1) All those explosive were stolen because Donald Rumsfeld convinced George W. Bush that we'd win this war fast and on the cheap with few troops. So when we invaded, we didn't have enough men to police the most important weapons sites.

2) Whatever munitions might have been in Fallujah were probably moved out weeks in advance, along with most of the insurgent fighters in the town, after George W. Bush pre-announced the impending military action by several weeks, apparently for personal political gain.

If we are ever to extract ourselves from Iraq with something resembling a victory, or at least a stalemate, these incompetent yahoos are going to need to learn from their past major mistakes and stop making so many in the future. Let's hope, but don't hold your breath. Though turning Blue might be a good thing for some people in this country to consider.

Never Forget: With Bush, Politics Trumps Security

2004-11-15T14:41:00.000-08:00

From the NYTimes: "Throughout the 19-month war, the insurgents have demonstrated an uncanny adaptability in the face of vastly superior American firepower. That has not changed with the storming of Falluja. American commanders acknowledge that insurgent leaders fled Falluja in the run-up to the invasion and have likely been organizing the deadly counteroffensive unfolding in cities across the north and around the capital."

The reason that there was a "runup" to the invasion of Fallujah was that the Bush Administration didn't want to invade before the election and risk that mess becoming a campaign issue -- but also felt compelled to state publicly that they *would* invade Fallujah after the election, so that their inaction wouldn't become a campaign issue. These guys always put politics first, and America is much the worse for it.

Sound familiar? It should.

Via Spencer Ackerman, check out what Marine Lt. Gen. James Conway (recently appointed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff) has to say about the laughable attack-and-pull-back, then create-'Fallujah-Brigade' strategy of this past spring:

After taking control of Al Anbar province from the 82nd Airborne, Conway wanted to apply a dual strategy to defeat the insurgents of mixing discrete military operations with an infusion of visible, and lucrative, reconstruction. When four Blackwater contractors were lynched in Falluja at the end of March, Conway wanted to "let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge." Instead, he was ordered to attack the city. During the siege laid by Conway's forces, Falluja quickly became a symbol of resistance to the occupation. Yet while the Marines were preparing to finish the job--planning a full attack on the city that all sides recognized would produce serious civilian casualties--he was suddenly told to pull back. Then he was told to create the Falluja Brigade, a force to control the city led by Saddam-era officers--which, before its ultimate collapse, incorporated the insurgents or had non-sympathetic elements within the brigade purged by them.

"I would simply say that when you order elements of a Marine division to attack a city, that you really need to understand what the consequences are, and not perhaps vacillate in the middle of something like that. ... Once you commit, you've got to stay committed."

[Gen Conway] would not say where the order to attack originated, only that he received an order from his superior at the time, Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the overall commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Some senior U.S. officials in Iraq have said the command originated in the White House.

Bush: Politics. Always. Trumps. Security.

Mea Culpa

2004-11-15T14:40:00.000-08:00

So, I got that wrong. Well, we live and learn. Here's some dead space as a memoriam for the election... and to give my next post a little distance:

Sigh.

Why Bush Lost

2004-11-02T14:02:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am writing this at 2pm PST on Tuesday. So what, it's over.

Bush lost for a very simple reason: First pissing off, and then motivating, nearly every part of the electorate outside your very core support is a bad, bad, idea.

He pissed off my Mom -- what Molly Ivins calls "the Episcopalian vote" (though Mom is Lutheran) with his non-reality-based rhetoric, his right-wing evangelical agenda.

He pissed off my brother -- a young swing state male -- by lying about his $300 tax cut (remember that in 2002, he gave a $300 refund and a $300 "advance" which had to be paid back in 2003? that hurt some people who didn't budget for it...)

He pissed of my friend Jim by actually being crap in the war on terror and crap on fiscal sanity - Jim is a Buchanan Republican who knows a sheep from a goat. or a Pet Goat.

He apparently has pissed off Hispanics (according to this post) by being crap on immigration.

He pissed off the national security voters by invading Iraq, being wrong about WMD, and not getting bin Laden.

I could go on... but the point is, huge chunks of the "big tent" Republican majority defected this year, because Bush pissed them off.

Memo to President Kerry: You have created a historic coalition of groups with some disparate agendas and a burning desire for retribution after four painful years. Do NOT give in to their demands for redress, but rather consider how to both maintain, and expand, your coalition of governance over the next four years -- or we will be seeing the pendulum swing back in 48 months.

And finally.... Hurrah!!

The New Democracy

2004-11-02T10:38:00.000-08:00

Right now I am working on a big strategy project for a non-U.S. telco. Our central thesis is that the convergence of new communications technologies means that they must focus on user participation and user-created-content in order to be successful. The democratization has begun, driven by massive user particpation.

The list of examples is endless. Measurements of data flows on the world's networks show that the vast majority is user-created communications traffic. Email remains the killer app of the Internet. Multi-player online games, with the content created almost entirely by users, are growing at an extraordinary rate. eBay, with all of its content created by users, is one of the most successful and profitable companies of the new generation.

Here in America, I am seeing incredible changes in our electorate. Via email, via bundled cell phone minutes, via blogs and online papers, via a multiplicity of cable channels, we are seeing an incredible groundswell of involvement, of participation, of awareness, of democracy. This is a new new thing, and reminds me of nothing so much as two old things; the Philadelphia described in Ben Franklin's Autobiography, and the explosion of published tracts during the Protestant Reformation in Europe, kicked off by Martin Luther and rocket-propelled by the new technology of the printing press. I've just returned from a trip to explore the Reformation, and I assure you that the visceral impact of walking from a hand-lettered bible to a room absolutely full of printed cheap paper flyers is incredible. That previous revolution changed society to its core, and this one is doing the same.

In the past 18 hours, I have talked to swing voters in two different swing states; sent emails to a Yahoo group which have travelled around the globe; read first-hand reports from hundreds of voters in the comment sections of sites like the Daily Kos and Washington Monthly's Political Animal; and posted my thoughts here more than once.

And then... I open my browser to Google in a vain attempt to do some work, and there, right on their famously terse home page, is a link to the Google Election Page, telling everyone to get out and vote!

This stuff is pervasive, it is unescapable, it is changing our world for the better. Welcome to the future of democratic content, collective action, and widespread conversation. Props to Larry Lessig; we've just remixed.

Turnout looks to be massive in Ohio

2004-11-02T06:58:00.000-08:00

Just talked to Ben, my brother in Ohio, who spent an hour and 15 minutes in line to vote. He's one of those younger "won't bother" voters who are all bothered about Bush. It sounds like a wild carnival atmosphere there... his roomate appears to have ended up with a date with a gal he met at the polls, and local radio and TV stations were reporting lines as long as 400 voters by 7AM.

Franklin County (where Ben is) is traditionally Republican -- just how many of those hundreds of early birds are Democratic, I can't say. But my gut tells me, way more than Karl Rove can stomach.

Kerry in a landslide.

More predictions and turnout

2004-11-01T19:15:00.000-08:00

Oregon has 62% turnout through Sunday - on track for some big numbers!! (Note: PDF link)

Kerry takes Florida and Ohio, and at least one wildly unexpected state like Tennessee or Virginia
National turnout at least 65%, and yes I really do know that is outrageous by historic standards

Interesting note: In the "oh my god the world is ending" 1980 election between ineffectual malaise and a new morning in America, just 48.5% voted, and Reagan rolled. See, the CW is right - low turnouts do support Republicans. Too bad, guys.

Kerry in a landslide

2004-11-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

Kerry to win by at least 5%, at least 50 electoral college votes (i.e. >295:244)

From TPM:

According to Gallup's mega-ultra-final poll out Sunday evening, 30% of registered voters in Florida have already voted, either through early voting or by absentee. Of those who have already voted, Kerry leads President Bush 51% to 43%.
According to the Des Moines Register poll out late Saturday evening, 27% of Iowa adults have already voted. And among those Kerry leads 52% to 41%.

(Edited Monday afternoon)

More data: Among actual voters -- and close to 20 percent of voters surveyed by FOX nationwide said they had already voted -- Kerry bested Bush by 5 percent, 48 to 43. With actual voters in Florida and Iowa also giving the lead to Kerry in surveys, this is starting to look like a trend.

Yes, Fox News! Kiss it goodbye, George W!

Thug Rule

2004-10-31T18:46:00.000-08:00

Originally posted on April 1, 2003 to my "Liberty Politics" list at Yahoo Groups.

28IVOR1841
Originally uploaded by onohoku.

As we're gripped by a telegenic "clash of civilizations" in the cradle of civilization itself, it's easy to miss one of the biggest political trends in the world today.
A vast percentage of the globe is ruled by thugs -- or, even more worrisome, is a battleground between competing gangs of thugs, without a clear ruler.
A major war has caused us to ignore a major world event -- the leader of a country assassinated by crooks. Why was Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic killed? The Washington Post doesn't beat around the bush: "Djindjic had made enemies by declaring war on organized crime."

In the world of thugocracy, Serbia is small potatoes. It's easy to make the case that Russia is run by thugs -- I cannot think of a single person I know who's done business there who says anything else. In our "Washington consensus" worldview, Russia is now a stable, responsible, market democracy -- which just happens to be run by a former senior KGB official; the secret police is apparently the only organization that can stay one step ahead of Russia's mobsters.
Most of the former Soviet sphere breaks down into one of three models; lawless chaos, oligarchic warlords, or centralized thugocracies. This is quite simply rule by power, and it jumps past several hundred years of political thought right back to Hobbes and nature red in tooth and claw.
It's not just the former Communists that are having problems; most of Africa is in the same state. Sometimes it's state-sponsored thugs, as in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, but even more depressing is the wholly grass-roots thug phenomenon visible in such war-torn places as the Ivory Coast.

The NYT writes, in an incredibly depressing article, 'The Child Soldiers of Ivory Coast Are Hired Guns,'

"Dancing between the tables, another boy, his dirty T-shirt stenciled with the face of the lewd American rapper Sisqo, dangles a Kalashnikov from one hand, a loaded clip from the other. A third child soldier sits clutching a hand grenade the way a teenager in a saner place might hold a cellphone. ... Here in Ivory Coast's wild west, in the most volatile theater of this country's conflict, the detritus of globalization meets the logic of war, West African style. A far cry from the war occupying international attention, this is how the world's other half fights today."

The next time you hear someone bemoaning the violence of teenage boy's music or video games, point out to them what teenage boys do when left to their own devices in a continent littered with weapons.

Oh yes, the weapons... those true weapons of mass democratized destruction, cheap guns and explosives. The world is simply full of the stuff, the detritus of a century of mass production, mass ideology, and mass conflict. Despite the quixotic attempts of American gun aficianados to buy up the world's entire stock of ex-military arms, a great many of them get sold at incredibly low prices to whoever wants them.

A recipe for thugocracy.

Somalia. Afghanistan. Ethiopia. Eritrea. The Hutus and the Tutsis (who skipped the guns and went straight to machetes). A large portion of Africa is ruled by thugs as well.
How do you combat this trend? Well, as the U.S. government demonstrated with Waco and David Koresh, even the sophisticated resources of a highly advanced nation may not be enough to deal with well-armed locals determined to have their own way. Koresh, though no angel, wasn't a thug; his equally well-armed counterparts in other nations of the globe have larceny in their hearts, and very little to lose. Their hired (often child) soldiers have even less constraint.
Most of these people are not fighting for anything more than plunder, loot, pillage, or simply pay. They have no ideals; no goals; no positive vision of how society should be organized or structured. They are the antithesis of civilization. If we're to have a war of civilization, perhaps we might think about fighting this one, instead of setting the more developed and cultured and law-abiding bits of the world against each other.

There are many other movements in other part of the world which do combine a goal or a mission with thug tactics. These rarely bring much better results; ideals are apparently a poor buffer to automatic weapons. I understand what the Palestinians are fighting for, but their methods are those of the gutter. The rebels of Columbia, and Bolivia, and Aceh in Indonesia, want their fair share of the resources of their own country. The newly exploited oil fields of central Africa are driving the same dynamic. People who have been left off the gravy train, or who feel a grievance, taking up weapons ready at hand to get what they want. The Irish Republican Army. Timothy McVeigh.

These are all of a sort. They have ideas - usually negative ideas of what they *don't* want -- and yet they do not have either the capacity, or the will, to carry out their objectives by any means other than violence. Are they right? Have their intransigent foes left them no other recourse? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It's never simple. But the result, in every case, is an absence of law and order; death, bloodshed, and misery.

Democratized destruction in the form of guns and bombs is here to stay, and thug rule today covers as much as a quarter of the globe. The countries where this depressing order is in place can participate in the world system only in the most base and resource-extractive ways -- as even the mostly civilized Soviet Union is demonstrating, as it sinks to a position of agricultural subsistence and mining for profit. It is very much in our interest, and the interest of evey civilized country, to bring these areas, and their people, into something resembling the rule of law. Not just for their sake, but for ours.

What are we going to do about this?

It's not a problem that can be solved with cruise missiles and the "giant hammer" mentality.
It's not a problem that can be solved with the market and "shock therapy."
It's not going away, unless we fix it.

Do we have better things to do? Apparently.

Democratization of Realpolitick - AAA comes up to the big leagues

2004-10-31T18:39:00.000-08:00

Originally written on August 11th, 2003 for my "Liberty Politics" list on Yahoo Groups. Reposted here as an extension of my comments to a recent post over at Yelnick's Politick

I've gone on [elsewhere] at some considerable length about the
'democratization of destruction' that global technological and social trends
have brought about.

What has been less discussed in this forum, but is equally important, is the
levelling of the playing field between the 'first tier' of countries and the
second-third tier. It's as if, in American baseball terms, the AAA teams
began to play in the major leagues. Or for all you Brits, if the Premier
League and the first division were suddenly integrated.
Here is a list of the top 22 countries by population, 2003:

1 China 1,286,975,468
2 India 1,049,700,118
3 United States 290,342,554
4 Indonesia 234,893,453
5 Brazil 182,032,604
6 Pakistan 150,694,740
7 Russia 144,526,278
8 Bangladesh 138,448,210
9 Nigeria 133,881,703
10 Japan 127,214,499
11 Mexico 103,718,062
12 Philippines 84,619,974
13 Germany 82,398,326
14 Vietnam 81,624,716
15 Egypt 74,718,797
16 Iran 68,278,826
17 Turkey 68,109,469
18 Ethiopia 66,557,553
19 Thailand 64,265,276
20 France 60,180,529
21 United Kingdom 60,094,648
22 Italy 57,998,353

handy USG link for forward and backward population projections:

Here are the ranks for 2020:
1 China 1,424,064,346
2 India 1,296,848,219
3 United States 336,031,546
4 Indonesia 287,890,561
5 Brazil 211,507,717
6 Pakistan 199,744,808
7 Bangladesh 189,861,451
8 Nigeria 189,118,674
9 Russia 138,977,962
10 Mexico 124,653,623
11 Japan 123,254,059
12 Philippines 111,343,388
13 Vietnam 99,894,445
14 Egypt 97,294,896
15 Congo (Kinshasa) 92,008,771
16 Ethiopia 85,965,178
17 Iran 82,151,319
18 Germany 81,422,373
19 Turkey 79,678,914
20 Thailand 71,893,534
21 United Kingdom 63,068,016
22 France 62,817,497

What we see here is that Europe and Japan are falling off the map; the
United States is hanging in there as a major player; a whole new 'second
tier' of regional powers are growing, and will likely challenge the current
status quo in their attempts to assert a more balanced international role;
and that China and India are bigger than nearly everyone else put together.
The other obvious point here is that many of the emerging regional powers
are Islamic, Asian, and have huge oil reserves.

Islamic, 2020 population list:

4 Indonesia 287,890,561
6 Pakistan 199,744,808
7 Bangladesh 189,861,451
8 Nigeria (partial) 189,118,674
14 Egypt 97,294,896
16 Ethiopia (partial) 85,965,178
17 Iran 82,151,319
19 Turkey 79,678,914

That's 1.2 billion Muslims in just 8 countries.

Asian, 2020 list:

1 China 1,424,064,346
2 India 1,296,848,219
4 Indonesia 287,890,561
6 Pakistan 199,744,808
7 Bangladesh 189,861,451
11 Japan 123,254,059
12 Philippines 111,343,388
13 Vietnam 99,894,445
20 Thailand 71,893,534

That's 3.7 billion Asians.

Major oil producers, 2020 list:

4 Indonesia 234,893,453
5 Brazil 182,032,604
6 Pakistan 150,694,740
7 Russia 144,526,278
9 Nigeria 133,881,703
11 Mexico 103,718,062
16 Iran 68,278,826
21 United Kingdom 60,094,648

That's a billion people attached to a majority of the world's oil. Note
that none of those billion people are Americans, and only a handful of them
are white Europeans.

None of those three lists (Islam, oil, Asia) are dominated by the sorts of
"first tier" countries we Americans are used to thinking about. Places like
Russia, Japan, Germany, and Britain -- the major players of the past 150
years, the guys who had railroads and tanks and top hats and colonies. They
are dominated by former colonies, regional powers with big and growing
populations, strong cultures which are divergent from our own (Asian or
Islamic), and often, by ownership of significant resources which we *need*
to continue our current way of life. This is a changing landscape, which
will have dramatic impact on how we conduct our foreign relations.
Our little war in Iraq (and the absence of war in North Korea) have
dramatically demonstrated three key points to the world:

1) America can overthrow any government/military in the world, with little
effort or cost, in very short order, simply by invading with our amazing
technology.

2) America cannot afford, either fiscally or emotionally, to commit to the
level and volume of interaction over long periods of time which is required
to truly change the social/political situation within any country.

3) If you have nukes, and preferably missiles as well, America will not
overthrow your government, out of fear of your reprisals and response on its
own territory, allies, and interests.

That is a high-level stand-off, just like the democratized power to destroy
is a lower-level standoff. We can take out any government, but we can't fix
any country -- we can destroy but not make. Any government can be
overthrown by us, but nearly any society can resist our attempts to change
it, simply by inertia and guerilla tactics. This means that while there may
be fuss and bother around the edges, the major trend over the next few
decades will be the solidification and formalization of a system of regional
powers, which will almost entirely be driven by the triple weighting factor
of strong culture, population size, and resources. You can predict how the
world will look in 2020 by seeing who are the large, wealthy,
civilized/cultured countries in any given region.

This leads to new (for us) and strange (for us) situations like Liberia,
where we are currently heavily depending on Nigeria (Nigeria?!) to sort out
local democracy and stability issues. Nigera is a mess, but it's a huge
regional power, which has huge energy resources, and also coincidentally has
major internal issues with Islamic fundamentalism which have brought it into
the "global war on terror" as both an object and an actor. Regardless of
the morality of the situation, realpolitik means that we need Nigeria on our
side; in the same way we need Indonesia, Pakistan, and Russia on our side,
but can take or leave Britain, Germany and France.

Slate has an interesting article on Nigeria and its peacekeeping entry into Liberia:

What's most important to us all is that America both manage its own position
within the emerging world order, and manage a relatively smooth and peaceful
transition of that emerging world order. That's the big problem of the day,
and of the decade.

Here is my top list of global players, 2020 (in approximate order)

1) America
2) India
3) China
4) Nigeria
5) Indonesia
6) Russia
7) Iran
8) Brazil
9) Mexico

Wild cards here include coalitions (if the EU sorts itself out as a single
entity, it can be a major player) and regional competition effects -- e.g.
what influence will China and India have upon each other, and how will the
combination of China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines sort itself out as
they collide over resources, economic production, etc.? Will Japan
reinvigorate itself, or fade away?

It's going to be an interesting world. May we be blessed with good luck and
great leaders.

Duncan made me do it

2004-10-31T18:20:00.000-08:00

OK, 18 months after I created my first blog, focused on technology, Duncan has again nudged me to create a public forum for my thoughts. This one will be entirely focused on politics and international relations, increasingly my first love.

GIGO, game theory, and Nash dominant strategies

2004-10-31T18:01:00.000-08:00

Firstly, a little historical note: Despite the PR boost that a box-office hit movie can create, John Nash did not create game theory; in fact he's hardly even a leading light of the field, despite the Nobel Prize for his equlibrium observation. In fact, rumors within the [small and close-knit] scholarly field are that the Sylvia Nasar biography and subsequent Russell Crowe-starring biopic were part of a deliberate PR strategy by Nash's friends to rehab his then rather battered image to coincide with a back-room push for the prize. In fact, the canonical text of game theory is John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's classic 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, which like most truly revolutionary texts, was a complete bust when it was first published, but in fact laid out not just the seeds, but an entire prescription for a new field. After von Neumann and Morgenstern, the second key text of game theory has to be Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, one of "the three great negative results of the 20th century" according to my friend Raja Sengupta. (Heisenberg's uncertainty being the second; can you guess the 3rd?)

Secondly, a direct response to the guest game theorizing of Ahpah on Yelnick (is that you lurking behind that screen name, PM?)

1) The vast statistical advantage of Bush in the coin-flip scenarios (~ 2/3 - 1/3 vs. Kerry) is entirely dictated by Bush's 19 electoral vote lead in "solid" states, 222 - 203. Thus Bush only needs an additional 48 electoral votes to reach the magic 270, whereas Kerry needs 67.

So what, you say?

Well, let us turn to a historical example for elucidation. As discussed at great length in the excellent book Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, which happens to have been written by my ex-wife and copy-edited by me, game theory was invented by von Neumann and Morgenstern and almost immediately applied by them and a host of other RAND-affiliated researchers to the problem of nuclear strategy. The most notable policy success of this group, any of whom could have aced the GLAT (or, more likely, written it - von Neumann invented computer science as we know it) , was to convince first the proto-Kennedy administration, and later much of the governing establishment of the United States, of the existence of a "missile gap" between the well-armed Soviet Union and the weakly-thewed United States.

The only problem with this policy 'success' was that while the math was impeccable, the data was sadly lacking. All intelligence estimates regarding Soviet capabilities were wildly overstated, and in fact all that the build-to-catch-up missile strategy of the United States accomplished was a serious escalation of the Cold War. The recently departed Paul Nitze, author of the seminal NSC 68 and a founding member of this game-theoretic cadre, perhaps realized the folly of the strategy late in his life, when he significantly departed from form with his famous "walk in the woods" at an arms control summit under Ronald Reagan, where he attempted to set aside tried-and-dead-end strategies and cut a sensible deal.

But I digress.

The real point here is that ahpeh's analyis is based entirely on Rasmussen polling data, which spots Bush a formidable 19 vote electoral lead before the calculation even begins. This year, we have empirical evidence that reputable polls are returning both externally (to each other) and internally (to themselves over short time periods) inconsistent data. We further have logical evidence that the polls are systematically mis- or under-counting huge groups of voters, including cell-phone-only, caller-ID screening, not-answering, living-at-home, etc. Finally, there is systematic bias in any "likely voter" poll calculation, given today's (or rather, Tuesday's) highly "unlikely" voter climate.

Garbage In = Garbage Out, and the precision of the calculation mechanism only improves the seductive fineness of the trash. Based on my HUMINT from the field, a long-forgotten and implicitly discredited tactic in governmental (and, to our detriment, CIA) circles, I will boldly state that someone is going to win big on Tuesday, and that someone is almost certainly John Kerry.

- Ethan