Those who do not know history are doomed to say stupid things about it, I guess. At UnHerd Wolfgang Munchau writes:

The greatest diplomats of all time were a Frenchman and an Austrian. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was a master of political opportunism, rivalled only by his Habsburg counterpart, Klemens von Metternich. Talleyrand and Metternich were the chief diplomats of global powers. After Napoleon’s defeat, France was a much-diminished country with no military leverage. Talleyrand’s masterstroke consisted of carving out a niche for France by playing everyone off against each other — the British against the Prussians, and the Austrians against the Russians. He did not exactly invent the notion of a balance of power, but he exploited it with unrivalled genius.

Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859) was born into the petty nobility and elevated to prince for his services to the Austrian Empire. He hated liberalism, democracy, and nationalism and was committed to the advancement of empire in Europe. The corresponding figure, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838) had a similar biography and views.

What would Metternich have done done about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? He would have gleefully engineered a division of Ukraine between Russia and Poland. As Mr. Munchau observes, he would have played China and the United States off against each other to the benefit of neither but fostering European imperialistic designs. He would have been delighted with a European Union, so long as it was ruled by an emperor and aristocrats. How he would have felt about the influx of Middle Easterners and Africans into Europe can only be imagined.

I suspect there are plenty of would-be Metternichs in Europe right now but they all belong to the Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) or the corresponding party in France, Rassemblement national (National Rally formerly National Front) or the corresponding parties in the Netherlands, Italy, etc. That’s something that grimly amuses me. I think it’s foolish for any American to seek fellowship with right-wing European parties. European politics is just too different from ours.

For the first time in years I took no pictures of the Sauganash Fourth of July parade. It rained immediately before the parade and during the first part of it and attendance was down, both by participants and viewers. There was only one band (the Shannon Pipers) and relatively few groups marching.

Still, quite a few of my neighbors paraded down the street—considerably more than the number in the audience. As I’ve said before “parade” is a verb here.

Nearly three-quarters of people with “white collar” jobs have four year college degrees or higher. Keep that in mind as you read this article by Chip Cutter and Haley Zimmerman at the Wall Street Journal:

CEOs are no longer dodging the question of whether AI takes jobs. Now they are giving predictions of how deep those cuts could go.

“Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.,” Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley said in an interview last week with author Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind.”

At JPMorgan Chase Marianne Lake, CEO of the bank’s massive consumer and community business, told investors in May that she could see its operations head count falling by 10% in the coming years as the company uses new AI tools.

The comments echo recent job warnings from executives at Amazon Anthropic and other companies.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a note to employees in June that he expected the company’s overall corporate workforce to be smaller in the coming years because of the “once-in-a-lifetime” AI technology.

“We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs,” Jassy said.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May that half of all entry-level jobs could disappear in one to five years, resulting in U.S. unemployment of 10% to 20%, according to an interview with Axios. He urged company executives and government officials to stop “sugarcoating” the situation.

Slight more than thirty years ago policy makers of both parties whole-heartedly embraced the notion that higher education was the key to a bright future. That has guided policy ever since. I have always thought it was short-sighted for relatively simple mathematical, psychological, and pragmatic reasons.

Those who benefit from a college education have IQs between one and two standard deviations above normal (less than 15% of the population). Individuals with IQs much below that struggle in college. Many will drop out having incurred considerable debt. Individuals with IQs much above that don’t actually need college. They’ll learn well enough without it.

In the olden days when I was in school about 10% of those of age went on to graduate from college. They were mostly pre-professional or pre-managerial. Nowadays nearly 40% of young people graduate from college and nearly 60% of young people have at least some college, degree or not. Many of them are doing jobs that would previously have been done without college educations.

No “white collar” jobs for them will not make them happy or erase their educational debts.

I suspect that “half” is understating the problem. I suspect that every “white collar” job that is not legally protected or that lacks the power to protect itself is at risk whether it makes sense or not. I doubt that many Fortune 500 CEOs will lose their jobs due to AI (even if AI could do those jobs better and cheaper).

That in turn will create a new problem. Why go to college? I daresay that most of those going to college do it as job preparation. What if college doesn’t prepare you for any jobs? Indeed, I suspect that problem is already here. Almost 90% of college students are already using AI. How much sense does it actually make to pay upwards of $50,000 per year to have AI do your work for you?

Oxford and the University of Bologna were founded in the 11th century. Cambridge and the Sorbonne were founded in the 13th century. In my view artificial intelligence presents an existential challenge to higher education greater than any they’ve faced in the more than a millennium during which higher education has existed.

It’s also called “hasty generalization”. An example of the persistence theory is “if it rained today, it will probably rain tomorrow”.

IMO a remarkable amount of bad policy relies on the persistence theory.

If you’re not familiar with it, ADP is the largest payroll processing company in the United States. As such its reports on payroll numbers garner some attention as Shannon Carroll reports at Quartz:

The U.S. labor market just hit a serious speed bump.

Private employers cut 33,000 jobs in June, according to fresh data on private payroll numbers from ADP — the worst showing in more than two years (since March 2023) and a surprise move in the wrong direction. After months of sluggish but steady hiring, the engine appears to have stalled.

The numbers came in sharply below economists’ expectations, which aimed for gains between 95,000 and 103,000. It’s a stark reversal from May’s revised modest growth of 29,000 jobs (down from 37,000).

And the losses weren’t spread evenly: June’s decline was largely driven by small- and medium-cap, service-producing companies. Large companies (with 500-plus employees) added jobs. Professional and business services took a massive hit, shedding 56,000 roles, while education and health services lost 52,000. Meanwhile, some traditionally volatile sectors — such as leisure and hospitality — managed to notch gains, suggesting a growing mismatch regarding where jobs are growing versus where they’re disappearing.

“Though layoffs continue to be rare, a hesitancy to hire and a reluctance to replace departing workers led to job losses last month,” ADP’s chief economist, Dr. Nela Richardson, said in a statement. “Still, the slowdown in hiring has yet to disrupt pay growth.”

I have a sneaking suspicion that artificial intelligence is a significant part of this downturn in more ways than one.

One of the ways, of course, is that firms don’t know whether the job for which they’re hiring will be more effectively done using generative or agentic artificial intelligence than a human employee or how soon. But there’s another way, too.

I think that employers are using AI for screening and applicants are using AI to prepare applications, resumes, etc. so widely that employers don’t know whether to hire the applicants or not.

John Halpin calls for a “party of responsible government”:

Events of the past week have clarified why America is in steady decline. One political party is determined to pass (perhaps today) a massive piece of partisan legislation that will explode federal budget deficits and kick millions of people off health care to finance tax cuts for the wealthiest households in the country, covered up by accounting gimmicks. The other party is rallying behind a guy to lead the largest city in America who, just a few short years ago, passionately described the end goal of politics as electing more socialists and “seizing the means of production.”

If you don’t think either of these approaches makes much sense, too bad, you’re old or out of touch or not MAGA enough or not “authentically” progressive. So-called populism, we’re told, is the only mode of politics. Anything goes, nothing matters, the crazier the better. Policies are just social media hooks. No one cares about good governance. Get with the program or get crushed.

There is an alternative method of politics consistent with our country’s long history and basic values. But it will require a true party of responsible government, which we currently do not have.

And we’re not going to get one. The parties we have are the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and no “responsible” upstart will arrive to save the day. We’re stuck with what we’ve got. The most a third party of responsible government will be to undermine the major party with which they have the most in common (and that may be different from state to state, locality to locality).

I’ve already explained why the Republicans and Democrats are so messed up. They are unable to enact federal legislation without intra-party compromised and some of their factions are quite extreme. Extremists on the Republican side include social conservatives and anarcho-capitalists. Those on the Democratic side include “democratic socialists” and some environmentalists. Compromises with such radicals are inevitably ugly and not particularly good policy.

I’ve been planning to post an additional observation on the psychology of elective office and this is as good a place as any. Running for elective office means you think that your being elected is good for the people. It’s one small step from that sentiment which every elected official has to believing that what is good for you, personally, is good for the people and that’s a step that nearly every politician takes. That’s why the Democratic Party has such a superannuated leadership. Not only do they believe they are good for the people but holding office is their business plan.

I think Conrad Black’s diatribe against the Democratic Party at the New York Sun, reprinted at RealClearPolitics, is one of the harshest I’ve seen. IMO most of it is excessive but there’s one passage with which I agree:

The great Democratic party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and even up to a point Clinton, has given way to an unfeasible ragtag of superannuated tyros, influence peddlers, decayed servitors, and now completely unacceptable extremists personified by the likely nominee to be mayor of New York City, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, an economic Marxist who does not accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and expresses sympathy for calls to globalize the intifada.

The Democrats have no plausible opponents to Mr. Trump, no policy except Trump-hate, and have carried to its logical extreme the great liberal death wish.

I’ll continue on a related topic in the next post.

At The Hill Rinzen Widjaja argues that high-speed rail is not a good strategy for solving transportation problems in the United States:

There is a fundamental conflict between the notion of connecting the whole of the U.S. with high-speed networks and the American tradition of decentralized infrastructure. The success of the Eisenhower Interstate System was not that it connected major cities but because it empowered Americans to traverse the entire country, aiding local economies along the way. The Eisenhower Interstate System also allowed Americans to live far away from city centers and helped cement America’s car culture. The vision for a high-speed rail within the U.S. imports the centralized planning of a nation with drastically different values and geography, fundamentally misunderstanding what has contributed to the historical success of the Eisenhower Interstate System.

Furthermore, the financial logic of high-speed rail networks simply does not hold up, as ongoing projects turned into what many city planners now describe as logistical and financial “nightmares.” Citizens Against Government Waste pointed to the mismanagement of California’s high-speed rail, which has faced rising costs every year since the project began. While the claim that it would cost $33 billion was never feasible, the current $113 billion estimate is already 23 percent higher than the $81.4 billion that organization had originally estimated it would actually cost. It cites the “opportunistic contractors” that have exploited the lack of foresight involved in the project, 88 of which were booted by Gov. Gavin Newsom far “too late.”

I suspect that Mr. Widjaja as an Australian doesn’t recognize how policies get enacted into law in the United States, at least at the federal level. We have two major political parties and neither of them is a “programmatic party” although in honesty they have moved considerably in that direction since the Interstate Highway Act was enacted during the Eisenhower administration which most Americans no longer even recall. Our parties are composed of different factions and whatever actually makes it into enacted law is a compromise among those factions.

The major factions in the Republican Party are Jacksonian social conservatives, Hamiltonian pro-business interests, and anarcho-capitalists.

The major factions in the Democratic Party are traditional machine politics Democrats, technocrats, and a host of special interests including environmentalists.

It is the intra-party politics that explains what does and does not get done. Republicans are unlikely ever to support high-speed rail. The anarcho-capitalists oppose it outright on principal, no government incentive would be large enough to induce the Hamiltonians to support high-speed rail, and the Jacksonians don’t care much one way or the other as long as the plan serves the communities where they live and they receive some of the money appropriated for it. Mr. Widjaja does a pretty good job of explaining why those requirements are unlikely ever to be met. And that’s why Republicans won’t get behind high-speed rail.

While the Democrats support high-speed rail such projects are less about actually building and completing such things than the process of administering and approving them because those are the causes of the machine politics Democrats and technocrats. Under such a rubric the costs can expand without limit and never actually accomplish anything. A high-speed rail project that never actually gets built satisfies environmentalists since nothing gets built, satisfies technocrats since they’re employed planning and administering it, and satisfies machine politicians for a host of reasons.

And that’s where we stand. The Republicans won’t support it and Democrats won’t complete it because doing either is destructive of their coalitions.

Although the headlines we’re seeing frequently don’t include them, there’s a lot still going on in the world.

The new Syrian government is murdering Alawites by the thousand. As I predicted it is also persecuting Christians and Druze.

The Houthi harassment of Red Sea shipping continues.

Israel’s campaign against Hamas and, by extension, the Gazans continues unabated.

The “ceasefire” between Iran and Israel is hardly worthy of the name.

The Russians have surrounded Sumy, the seat of Sumy oblast in northeastern Ukraine. They had occupied it early in their campaign against Ukraine but had been driven out by late spring of 2022.

This is one of the things that has griped me about the trope “mostly peaceful”. If you’ve ever read old newspaper coverage of World War II, it is quite obvious how scant the information people on the home front were receiving, how greatly delayed, and the war itself consisted of a series of relatively brief battles (the Battle of the Bulge took 41 days) that punctuated substantial periods of preparation and comparative quiet.

I commend the piece from ACLED in particular to your attention. It describes the statements by both the Houthis and the United States on the Red Sea actions as a “hall of mirrors”.