This post by Karen Dolan at The Hill for all the world looks to me like my story of the three merchants. Or the cat and rat farm. The author’s claim is that we can greatly reduce poverty permanently by maintaining measures put in place on an emergency basis when the lockdowns for COVID-19 were imposed indefinitely:

The U.S. Census data for 2021 demonstrates that poverty is a political choice. We chose during the pandemic to take it head-on relatively effectively. Now we must reaffirm that choice.

Repeat after me: perpetual motion does not work. It might appear to work in the short term but it does not work.

The author has failed to notice the inflation and the hardships created by it that the Fed is presently contending with or the hardships that are being created by raising interest rates. Those are at least in part a consequence of too much spending subsidized by expanding the money supply, i.e. issuing credit to ourselves for the spending.

All of that said I agree with the author’s claim that poverty is a political choice. More than 2,000 years ago Aristotle maintained that politics was the “master science” in that it was the underlying explanation in all human actions.

The author might consider that poverty has been chosen as the lesser evil. There are many, many ways of reducing poverty. For example, not bearing children until one has completed high school and is married are known ways of combatting poverty. Today it is fashionable to condemn that observation as anti-woman and racist but the condemnations do not make it less true.

We should also keep in mind the observation that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. That pertains to poverty as well. The decision to attempt to strike a balance between encouraging poverty and making the lives of the poor less burdensome is a political one as is the decision on where the proper balance resides.

We could raise taxes so that revenue pays for anything which we might wish to spend. Our failure to do that is a political decision, based, in part, on the trade-offs involved.

I wanted to make two additional observations related to Putin’s speech. First, Russia is estimated to have about 25 million “reservists”, defined as people who’ve been through military training. How many of those are actually available is unknown but that’s still a substantial pool.

Second, and this is something I have alluded to before, the role of NCOs and junior officers in the Russian military (most of the world to be honest) is quite different than in ours. Since the Civil War the U. S.has used a platoon system in which very small units are led by a junior officer and an NCO. These platoons have substantial operational latitude.

That isn’t the case with the Russian military which is very much more top-down. That’s why so many of their general officers are getting killed. They must go to the front to direct operations.

David P. Goldman, AKA “Spengler”, has a good post at American Mind I wanted to call to your attention. In it he lists five myths about China:

1. America is making China rich, and can weaken it by reducing imports, investment, and so forth.
2. China depends on stolen American technology.
3. China faces demographic collapse.
4. China wants to take over Taiwan because it is led by an expansionist Marxist-Leninist party that hates and fears democracy.
5. We can deter China by shifting military forces to Asia and adding to conventional capabilities.

For the details read the whole thing. He also makes five prescriptions:

• We need to fund federal R&D at the Reagan level, that is, an additional 1% of GDP, or roughly $2 trillion over ten years;
• We need a radical revision of tax and regulatory policy to favor capital-intensive manufacturing;
• We need selective subsidies for mission-critical industries;
• We need to shift in educational priorities toward engineering and hard science; and
• We need to shift defense priorities away from legacy systems toward innovation, including space-based missile defense, directed-energy weapons, cyber war, and drone swarms.

He also makes some solid observations. For example:

Six trillion dollars of stimulus bought Chinese rather than American goods, because our creaky supply chains can’t meet a surge in demand.

which aligns with observations I have been making since long before the pandemic. We don’t make enough consumer goods domestically for consumption subsidies, e.g. “stimulus packages”, to have the effect our political leaders seem to think they will have. They are more likely to stimulate the Chinese economy than they are ours. Except for Jeff Bezos, the Wall family, and a few others.

I don’t agree with everything he says and I think there are some omissions. For example:

There are two possible remedies for a declining work force: import young workers, or export capital to where young workers live. China’s Belt and Road Initiative plans to assimilate more than a billion people from the Global South into China’s economic sphere.

Neither of those strategies will revitalize the American economy. The immigrants we will attract in the greatest numbers can contribute to agriculture and manual labor. That will continue our transition to a peasant society. That will be more like an early 20th century America than a 21st century America.

Also, burn this into your brain. Production engineering follows production; design engineering inevitably follows production engineering; junior engineers today become senior engineers tomorrow. It isn’t enough to “shift educational priorities”. The reason more kids aren’t studying engineering in the U. S. is because engineering is hard, not everybody can do it, and you must be able to recoup the investment made in time and money over the course of a stable career. Seeing the jobs you might have sought

Another point about R&D investment. The best strategy is to establish a long-term objective and create a bipartisan commitment to fund that objective. Example: the moon race. The objective must be feasible, agreed upon, and funded. Basic research is good but a mass engineering project is better. A “war on cancer” won’t do for two reasons. The first reason is that particular “war” has been going on for 50 years and the second reason is that we have reached the point of decreasing returns to scale.

What can we infer from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech? I think there are at least two things.

First, the Ukrainian counter-offense damaged the Russians. At least politically and strategically and possibly tactically. And second the Russians are serious—they are unlikely to back down easily

How will the U. S. respond? I’m concerned that most pundits will call for a redoubling of aid to Ukraine and oppose negotiations at this point on the grounds that it would be rewarding Putin and/or Russia.

That might be characterized as “calling Putin’s bluff” except I don’t believe that he is bluffing.

I also found this research, presented by Emory Universtiy, on how dogs think thought-provoking:

Scientists have decoded visual images from a dog’s brain, offering a first look at how the canine mind reconstructs what it sees. The Journal of Visualized Experiments published the research done at Emory University.

The results suggest that dogs are more attuned to actions in their environment rather than to who or what is doing the action.

One possibility that may not have been considered is that dogs my derive information from their senses differently than we do. Actions may be identified by sight where objects are identified by scent.

I found this article at the Institute for Art and Ideas by Conor Bronsdon interesting enough to share:

If we’re still sprawling outwards as populations grow, we’re not going to be able to achieve the efficiency needed in transportation and housing to meet our climate and space needs. We’ll also deeply damage our environment, getting rid of green space for single-family housing, cutting down trees that are doing important work filtering carbon from the atmosphere, and poisoning our rivers and streams with the heavy metals present in car tires.

The short version: you don’t need to just take my word for it. Even if you believe that global climate change is a risk, even if you believe it is an issue, electric vehicles are at best a patch and at worst a false step and a waste of effort.

The author’s view is that we should be aiming at greatly reducing vehicular transport. My own view is that the first step shouldn’t be EVs but to stop subsidizing sprawl. WFH may be a good step in that direction by allowing those workers who are able to eschew commuting entirely thereby reducing the public support for the interstates that enable sprawl.

I wanted to bring this post at Foreign Affairs by Nicholas Eberstadt and Evan Abramsky to your attention. Its basic point is that the United States is lagging behind many other countries in terms of educating its people which it documents. One particular passage particularly caught my eye:

The emerging economies that will challenge or surpass Western nations in the decades ahead are now achieving higher levels of educational attainment than most advanced Western economies did in the early postwar era. For example, 16 percent of 24- to 64-year-olds in Mexico are college educated—roughly twice the U.S. rate in 1950—and in Turkey, the share of this age cohort with some higher education is 22 percent, close to Germany’s share at unification in 1990.

What made me think in that passage was that the percentage of the working age population in Mexico with “some higher education” is higher than the percentage of Hispanics in the United States who also have “some higher education”.

There are all sorts of ways of explaining that, some more benign than others. For one thing I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if an increasing percentage of younger people in Mexico are pursuing college educations. For another something more like an “apples to apples” comparison would be the percentage of Guatemalan immigrants in Mexico who have some higher education.

The less benign explanation is that those coming here might not be drawn from the ranks of those with higher education and might be a lot more interested in working and supporting themselves and their families than they are in going to college. Also consider “cholo culture” which is of some significance among Hispanics.

Something else the article made me reflect on was that there are more people in India with college educations than there are people in the United States. Importing people with college educations from India is not a winning proposition for the United States, particularly considering that so many of the jobs being created here don’t actually require higher education.

The title of this post is taken from a highly influential essay written about 60 years ago during the height of the “space race”.

In economics a “substitute” is a good or service that can be used in place of another good or service. The classical examples include that you can use a $5 bill or five singles (fungibility) or that Coca Cola may be consumed as a substitute for Pepsi and vice versa. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the two goods or services are identical—just that one may be used in place of the other.

Substitution pertains to the labor market as well. Pyramids can be built using 20,000 workers dragging huge shaped stones, teams of draft animals and teamsters, or a relatively small number of workers operating machinery. You can get your hair cut by a barber or a hairdresser. You can be treated by a licensed physician or an unlicensed, untrained quack. The choices are governed by law, by availability, and by preference.

Returning to my post on unemployment yesterday, over the last half century in this country the availability of a reliable stream of low cost labor provided by immigrants, especially those who are in the country illegally, has had a substantial impact on the overall economy. We are growing crops we would not otherwise grow or growing and harvesting them in ways we would not otherwise use, building buildings that would not otherwise be built or would be built in a different way, and operating restaurants we would not otherwise be operating or in a way in which they would not otherwise be operated. All of those are forms of labor substitutions.

Furthermore, people are hiring nannies, maids, and gardeners to perform tasks they would otherwise perform themselves. In some cases this allows them to work at jobs themselves which they would not otherwise do. Using nannies or maids has observable effects on child development which may well be unforeseen.

The problem with all of this is that it is unsustainable. We are requiring more housing, transportation, security services, K-12 education, and healthcare than would otherwise be necessary and for people being paid wages too low to pay for them on their own. There are only a handful of ways of addressing that. We can pay those workers enough that they can be self-supporting. That will have material impact on the decision to engage those workers at all. In some cases the very fact that the workers function outside the law may influence the decision to engage them. We can continue to pay those workers low wages but augment their earnings with various forms of government subsidies, increasing taxes accordingly. That means we will be subsidizing certain sectors and the costs will be paid by people who may not benefit at all which is simultaneously unjust and inefficient. Or we can continue to pay wages too low for the people to live, creating a permanent underclass.

There’s a very good opinion piece by Shlomo Ben-Ami at The Strategist, the blog of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which aligns very closely with my own views. Its entire thesis is summed up in these two sentences:

Despite Ukraine’s recent impressive counteroffensive around Kharkiv, the war with Russia has reached a prolonged deadlock. But there is one clear winner: the US arms industry.

Depending on your operative definition of “good”, I guess that’s good news. The U. S. is the world’s leading exporter of arms by a substantial margin. I suspect that margin has become even greater given the sanctions imposed on the second greatest supplier (Russia).

That reminds me of an old joke.

Question: When a mafioso goes to see a gangster movie, who does he root for?

Answer: The popcorn concession