LT #15 - Top Links - July 2023
The politics of depression, polarization in the military industrial complex, the Second Cold War, declining inflation against historic growth and unemployment, different models of AI regulation
Cultural Wars and Psychology
The Internet’s Town Square is Dead - Excellent article about Erik Hoel and the return to a disaggregated and decentralized internet.
“In hindsight it seems inevitable: a single overarching internet is impossible.” - Erik Hoel
The Pathologization of the Pandemic - why youth mental health is surging, and especially among liberals and women.
Remember how Leftism de-emphasizes human agency in the name of equality? Research shows conservatives tend to have an internal locus of control, which means they believe that their decisions, as opposed to external forces, control their destiny. Liberals, meanwhile, tend to have an external locus, which means they believe their lives are determined by forces beyond their control.
People with an internal locus of control, believing they control their destiny, tend to be happier and have healthier habits, like good diets and frequent exercise, while people with an external locus of control, believing they’re at the mercy of fate, have higher rates of anxiety and depression and are more likely to abuse drugs and neglect their health. When you believe you have no control, you don’t.
Military and Defense
The $850 Billion Chicken Comes Home to Roost - Responsible Statecraft delves into the waste in Pentagon spending produces dangerous military unpreparedness.
Chartbook 229: America’s Unhappy Militarism - the $866 billion bone of contention - Adam Tooze delves into declining trust in the military in the United States, and how it is increasingly being caught up in the culture wars.
Global Trade
The Semiconductor Trade War - Global semiconductor manufacturing contraction, and 1-year in - the results of Biden’s assault on Chinese semiconductors.
Is cobalt the ‘blood diamond of electric cars?’ What can be done about it? - most supply chains are terrible, but this one is especially dark… and so critical to mitigating climate change.
EU, China, US: Three Different Attitudes Towards AI Regulation
EU: Chasing the Brussels Effect
China: Regulate Like a Startup
US: Laissez-Faire and Learn
Chartbook 228: Polarization - The bigger (and more familiar) problem lurking behind China's youth unemployment numbers. Adam Tooze delves into the tensions facing China with a declining real estate sector, an increasingly educator labor force, and the difficulty faced by all nations to avoid the middle income trap:
But as out of touch as Xi seems, It would be a mistake to over-personalize this impasse. Or indeed, to see it as a specifically Chinese problem. Only a handful of relatively small economies - the likes of South Korea and Ireland - have successfully navigated the kind of structural impasse, which Rozelle et al’s work points to. Nor are the problems confined to countries we think of as caught in the “middle-income trap” - Mexico, for instance. The logic of polarization that is beginning to play out in China, is powerfully at work in the UK, Germany and the United States. And we can hardly say that any of them has come up with a good answer. Instead, perversely, leadership on both sides - in both the American-led West and in China - are locked in on a range of industrial policy programs that may (or may not) matter for grand strategic competition, and may shape the energy transition and the high-tech frontier of the future, but have an indirect bearing on the sectors in which the vast majority of their citizens earn their livings in the 21st century. It is not just in politics but in economic policy too that the new era of polycrisis - climate, geopolitics & worries “blue-collar” work - seems to be taking us all back to the future.
Statecraft
Book Review: Secret Government - a compelling case for why government should deliberate and vote in secret… to limit the power of lobbyists and special interests groups to free up politicians to pursue what they believe in.
If all groups are equally uninformed, loud, well-informed, well-organized special interest groups would no longer have an outsized influence on the political process. It would not be clear which legislators were and were not cooperating, so there would be no information for the members of the interest group to act on. This would increase political equality.
ICE Disobeyed Biden’s Order to Drop Trump’s Blanket Deportation Policy - the ‘Deep State’ seems to cut both ways. Or maybe it’s just the banality of bureaucracy and organizational culture.
No, NEPA really is a problem for clean energy - how the biggest barriers to climate change protection is environmental law. Years to review projects = higher costs and time spent delaying progress.
The American Economy
Sticking the Soft Landing - incredibly… inflation is down, unemployment is looking great, GDP is growing faster than usual. The Phillips curve seems to have been escaped.
I Was Wrong About the American Rescue Plan - an admission that though this may have driven inflation, it also drove economic growth and the current scenario is far preferable to a recession or the lost decade of the 2010s due to under-response to the 2008 financial crisis.
The Most Important Disinflation Indicator - rent price growth is slowing!
Pushback on Industrial Policy has Begun - the many reasons why re-shoring and friend-shoring manufacturing in the United States are worth the costs.
Judge rules for Microsoft: Mergers are Good - a remarkably shoddy decision
Understanding the Student Loan Restart - with the Supreme Court striking down Biden’s attempt to cancel student debt, here’s the impact this will have.
That’s all for July! See you next month!
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