At Foreign Policy Matthew Kroenig, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, says that international relations theory predicts that great power war is on the horizon:

For decades, international relations theory provided reasons for optimism—that the major powers could enjoy mostly cooperative relations and resolve their differences short of armed conflict.

Realist IR theories focus on power, and for decades, they maintained that the bipolar world of the Cold War and the unipolar post-Cold War world dominated by the United States were relatively simple systems not prone to wars of miscalculation. They also held that nuclear weapons raised the cost of conflict and made war among the major powers unthinkable.

Meanwhile, liberal theorists argued that a triumvirate of causal variables (institutions, interdependence, and democracy) facilitated cooperation and mitigated conflict. The dense set of international institutions and agreements (the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, etc.) established after World War II—and expanded and depended on since the end of the Cold War—provided forums for major powers to work out their differences peacefully.

Moreover, economic globalization made armed conflict too costly. Why quarrel when business is good and everyone is getting rich? Finally, according to this theory, democracies are less likely to fight and more likely to cooperate, and the major waves of democratization around the world over the past 70 years have made the globe a more peaceful place.

At the same time, constructivist scholars explained how new ideas, norms, and identities have transformed international politics in a more positive direction. In the past, piracy, slavery, torture, and wars of aggression were common practices. Over the years, however, strengthening human rights norms and taboos against the use of weapons of mass destruction placed guardrails on international conflict.

Unfortunately, nearly all of these pacifying forces appear to be unraveling before our eyes. The major driving forces of international politics, according to IR theory, suggest that the new Cold War among the United States, China, and Russia is unlikely to be peaceful.

I found this claim verged on the comic:

The free world is recognizing that it is too economically dependent on its enemies in Moscow and Beijing, and it is decoupling as fast as it can. Western corporations pulled out of Russia overnight. New legislation and regulations in the United States, Europe, and Japan are restricting trade and investment in China. It is simply irrational for Wall Street to invest in Chinese technology companies that are working with China’s People’s Liberation Army to develop weapons intended to kill Americans.

Define “free world”. At best the G7 and at that Germany is dithering, in what I believe to be a Wimpy strategy. But this is a very good point:

But China is also decoupling from the free world. Xi is prohibiting Chinese tech firms from listing on Wall Street, for example, because he doesn’t want to share proprietary information with Western powers. The economic interdependence between the liberal and illiberal worlds that has served as a ballast against conflict is now eroding.

China is completely capable of “decoupling” from Europe and the U. S. without notice. In case all of that isn’t discouraging enough for you, every war game of conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries has resulted in a nuclear exchange. Every. Even in its reportedly dilapidated present state Russia has more than enough nuclear weapons in its arsenal to level all major American cities. China has enough nuclear weapons to level New York, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

One of the things I have noticed in reading what people write about other countries, generally comparing the United States unfavorably with them, is how different their expectations are from mine. I’ve written about this before. My mom and my dad came from very different backgrounds.

My dad’s family was very middle class, arguably upper middle class, and politically connected. Although they weren’t wealthy they didn’t worry about when they would have their next meal, either. I’ll give you an example. My paternal grandfather died quite young—just before the beginning of the Great Depression. Through the Depression my dad attended college and law school; his mother didn’t work. They were able to live and pay their bills based on the assets they owned and what my dad inherited from his paternal grandfather (who also died just before the start of the Great Depression). They owned the two-flat in which they lived.

My mom’s background could hardly have been more different. My maternal grandmother grew up very poor, on the brink of destitution, indeed, sometimes over it. They lived in the cheapest housing in St. Louis—a houseboat on the Mississippi without plumbing or central heating, basically a single room for her mother, herself, and her three siblings. Her three younger siblings spent parts of their childhoods in orphanages because my maternal great-grandmother couldn’t support them and my maternal great-grandfather had deserted the family. No wonder my maternal grandmother ran off to join a vaudeville troupe! My mom was working before she could walk. After vaudeville, my maternal grandmother worked as a seamstress (she had made all of the costumes for the troupe as well as being one of its headliners). I don’t honestly know how my mom scraped together enough money to pay for college.

I combine both of my parents. I am highly entrepeneurial (I treat everything as a business) but internally I assume I’m going to be poor. When I compare myself with people in other countries I don’t imagine that I would be among the elites there or well-to-do. I assume I’d be average or even poor.

IMO it’s harder to compare the U. S. with other countries than you might think. Consider China. Despite China’s highly-touted percentage of people who own their own homes (90% or more), Chinese people actually own very little as we understand it. Fee simple ownership is practically unheard of. I believe that what they have is closer to fee tail. Very few people own automobiles. Mopeds are pretty common and taking the subway even more so.

Healthcare is even more difficult to compare. China actually has two different health care systems: western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine which we would hardly consider medicine at all. Most people in cities pay out-of-pocket for health care. The U. S. has almost twice as many medical doctors per capita as they do in China (we have half as many as Norway does).

I’ll write about Germany some other time. It’s more like the U. S. but different in a lot of ways, too.

Most commentators on China fall into one of two categories. There are permahawks (like Gordon Chang) for whom China is always on the verge of collapse and, simultaneously, threatening to start World War III. And then there are the permadoves (many among business leaders and in the U. S. State Department) For whom the 21st century will be the Chinese century and China is a model for other countries to emulate.

I don’t think Michael Pettis is either a permahawk or a permadove but rather I think he provides frank and informed assessments of China. I encourage you to read his most recent offering at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the challenges facing the Chinese economy. So much of it is so excellent it’s hard to find representative snippets. Here’s an example:

This means, among other things, that even if the property market recovers next year as a consequence of the end of pandemic lockdowns, the recovery can only be partial and temporary. In the medium term, property prices will continue to decline, and insolvencies will keep on emerging. Until the systemic problem is addressed and resolved, there can be no permanent stabilization of China’s property market or of its economy more generally.

At the heart of this credit-deterioration process is the way in which the form and structure of economy activity in China has evolved over the past ten to twenty years. In most countries, GDP is a measure of the output delivered by economic actors over a specified period, whereas in China GDP is an input determined politically at the beginning of a time period. Once China sets its GDP target, local governments (and, until recently, the property sector) have had the responsibility of delivering enough economic activity to bridge the gap between the GDP growth target and what Beijing usually calls “high-quality growth”—that is, the underlying growth rate delivered by the private economy, consisting mainly of consumption, exports, and business investment.

Bridging the gap between the two was not a problem for the Chinese economy during the first thirty years of the period known as reform and opening up (the late 1970s until the late 2000s), mainly because China was seriously underinvested in property, infrastructure, and manufacturing capacity, so the investment that the GDP growth target required was, for the most part, productive.

or

This has always been the hardest part of rebalancing (as I discuss here). China, like other counties that have followed this model, found itself politically and institutionally unable to manage the transfers. It did, however, keep investment growth rates high and—again, like nearly every other country that has followed this model—China began to overinvest systematically in projects that contributed less to the economy than they cost. The result was a sharp increase in the country’s debt burden: it is only when debt is used to fund nonproductive investment that debt rises faster than a country’s debt-servicing capacity, for which GDP is a proxy.

I encourage you to read the whole thing. He predicts that the strategy used in China to address its economic problems is likely to result in increased centralization of political power.

Although I think I’m pretty closely aligned in my views with Mr. Pettis. My own view is that I think that what has happened in China over the last 40 years has been widely misunderstood in the West. IMO the Chinese have largely followed the Soviet model—growth by moving unproductive labor assets from the agricultural sector to the manufacturing sector. To their credit the Chinese authorities managed to do so without the decrease in productivity in the agricultural sector that happened in the Soviet Union. However, like the Soviet Union they have reached the limits of that process without becoming a rich country like the United States, the UK, France, or Germany.

In my last post I posed a question: what’s next in the story of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. I provided three potential answers.

The greater problem I see is that each of those scenarios leaves some substantial faction of Americans angry. If Trump is indicted (and presumably convicted), his supporters will be angry. If he is not indicted, his opponents will be angry. And if the search if found to have had procedural and/or legal flaws which prevent Mr. Trump from being prosecuted on that basis, both will be angry.

I just don’t see any outcome in which some substantial faction isn’t more angry than they are now as foreseeable.

The very heavily redacted affidavit that the FBI used to secure a warrant to search President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence has been made public. What will be the outcome?

1. Not much. President Trump won’t be indicted for anything found in the search or otherwise related to it.
2. President Trump will be indicted on charges related to the search.
3. Procedural and/or legal flaws in the issuing of the warrant and the subsequent search will cause any charges brought on Trump to be dismissed.

or maybe something else.

That’s the best summary I can come up with of this post by Pamela Feliciano at STAT on her and her team’s findings on the genetic bases of autism. Yes, it’s 60-90% genetic but it’s complicated. Here’s a snippet:

Over the past six years, I have worked with a team to build SPARK, a study supported by the Simons Foundation that has assembled the largest sequencing data set in autism to date: 35,000 people with the condition, along with thousands of their parents and siblings. Beyond identifying an increasing number of genes involved in autism, the study is also learning more about the kinds of genetic variants that cause autism in its many forms. The picture that is emerging is one of a heterogenous condition that is different in every person because the genetic factors involved differ in every person.

In a new study published in Nature Genetics on Thursday, the SPARK team examined more than 42,000 people with autism (individuals from SPARK plus previously published genetic data) and, in a first for autism genetics, identified four genes associated with autism that are mostly due to inherited variants. We looked for variants in genes that showed non-random patterns of inheritance from parents to children with autism and identified four genes in which inheritance of loss-of-function variants — those that lead to a non-working copy of the gene — were seen more than 50% of the time, but only among children with autism.

Read the whole thing.

We’ve come a long way since the 1950s on this subject. Then autism was unfairly blamed on “refrigerator mothers” (Bettelheim’s theory of autims), the idea that insufficient “maternal warmth” produced autism in children. Perhaps some day research like this will lead to better treatments for autism. I’m afraid that day remains far in the future.

This post at RealClearPolicy by Ivan Eland is a sort of counterpoint to the article previously cited. In it the author argues that the United States should not overtly pledge to defend Taiwan:

The current deliberate policy ambiguity of what the American response would be in that event had the purpose of not encouraging Taiwan to recklessly declare its independence, thus triggering an apoplectic Chinese response. Yet on several occasions, President Joe Biden has gone off script and pledged or implied a US defense of Taiwan, with aides rushing to walk that back by saying that U.S. policy toward Taiwan had not changed.

In fact, the United States should be headed in the opposite direction: helping Taiwan to become strong enough to run a “porcupine strategy” against any possible Chinese attack. Taiwan would not need to be able to defeat a much larger Chinese military but merely to deter it from attacking by being able to inflict unacceptable damage to it. Even the policy of U.S. ambiguity has encouraged Taiwan over the years to buy too many sexy, high-tech weapons, such as fighter aircraft, at the expense of the glue that holds militaries together and makes them effective fighting forces. That glue would be better mobilization of Taiwanese society for defense and improvements in for example, military training, logistics, electronic warfare, cyber defense, and command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I). In addition, Taiwan needs to be able to threaten vulnerable Chinese surface warships with more investment in mine warfare, anti-ship missiles, fast patrol ships, and diesel submarines.

Finally, instead of U.S. hysteria over a possible Chinese attack, Americans should realize that the Chinese military may have made the same mistake as the Russian and Taiwanese militaries by developing or buying high tech systems while neglecting more important “glue” items. After the Russian debacle in Ukraine, if Xi has any sense, he should be fearful that the formidable-looking Chinese military also could be a Potemkin village when the shooting starts — especially if it tried to conduct an amphibious assault, which is one of the most difficult military operations to master. Thus, the United States should not be hysterical about the Chinese threat to Taiwan and rush to pledge to defend the island. Instead, U.S. policy should concentrate on helping a military reform-minded Taiwanese leader, Tsai Ing-wen, to convince a stodgy Taiwanese military that it should prepare to actually fight a war instead of being mesmerized by high-tech toys. Ukraine’s success against Russia should be an inspiration.

I am wary of security pledges and alliances for the simple reason that I strongly suspect that our allies will subject any move on their part to cost-benefit analysis where I’m not sure that we will.

There is apparently some controversy within the U. S. Marine Corps over the best strategy were we to find ourselves attempting to defend Taiwan. At Military.com Gary Anderson gives us his point-of-view:

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger believes that the threat of having Marines leapfrogging from island to island plinking at Chinese warships in the South China Sea with anti-ship missiles will either deter China from starting a war or will be decisive in winning it.

He is wrong.

China’s warships are a very expendable part of its overall strategy. The Chinese believe their mobile missile launchers, high endurance drones, reconnaissance satellites and swarms of attack aircraft, combined with attack submarines, would be sufficient to create a bubble that would prevent Americans from interfering with an invasion of Taiwan.

The Chinese view their surface navy as mere pieces on the chessboard. Americans should realize that the key to deterring a war or winning it will be to deconstruct the Chinese recon-strike complex and use attack submarines to first sink Chinese amphibious ships attacking Taiwan and then strangle Chinese overseas maritime commerce.

After expanding on that thought he concludes quite forcefully:

Inciting a war is not deterrence. Real deterrence means not only showing credible military capability, but the will to use it. Unfortunately, that would require a bipartisan consensus that is sadly lacking at this time.

I’m honestly not sure which is worse: a strategy predicated on bad assumptions, inciting a war with China, or being unable to resolve our differences in a productive manner.

Noah Smith has an intriguing post in support of what he terms the “elite overproduction hypothesis”, i.e. expectations of what a college degree will do for you are exceeding reality. After lots of interesting analysis he begins his conclusion with this:

So if the Elite Overproduction Hypothesis is broadly correct, how do we get out of this mess? If happiness equals reality minus expectations, simple math tells us that we basically have two options for pacifying our educated youth — improve reality, or reduce expectations.

Improving reality is very hard, but we’re working on it. The industrial policies of the Biden administration are aimed at jump-starting faster economic growth, and more progressives are talking about an “abundance agenda” that would reduce the cost of living for Americans of all classes. But barring a lucky break like the simultaneous tech boom and cheap oil of the 1990s, boosting growth and abundance will be painstakingly slow going. It will also require overcoming the opposition of a whole lot of vested interests — particularly local NIMBYs — who themselves will be disappointed and angry if the government railroads their parochial preferences to fulfill its national objectives.

A more feasible strategy is to reset expectations to a more realistic — or even pessimistic — level. If we take humanities majors as a measure of economic optimism, we can already see this happening, as young people turn to more practical degrees. Interestingly, Google Ngrams for “a fulfilling career” have now ticked down as well. The over-optimistic angry Millennial generation may soon be supplanted by a Generation Z whose modest expectations echo those of their Gen X parents in the late 70s and early 80s.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but switching from poli sci or art history majors to computer science, business, or engineering won’t help. The reason that big tech firms want more H1-B workers is not that there are no homegrown programmers or engineers. It’s that imported workers accept lower wages and job security. That will continue until the wages in India, Pakistan, the Philippines, etc. match those here.

Said another way a college degree is not a panacea.