Much is being made of President Biden’s remarks regarding Taiwan yesterday. From Reuters:

BALTIMORE, Oct 21 (Reuters) – The United States would come to Taiwan’s defense and has a commitment to defend the island China claims as its own, U.S. President Joe Biden said on Thursday, though the White House said later there was no change in policy towards the island.

“Yes, we have a commitment to do that,” Biden said at a CNN town hall when asked if the United States would come to the defense of Taiwan, which has complained of mounting military and political pressure from Beijing to accept Chinese sovereignty.

While Washington is required by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, it has long followed a policy of “strategic ambiguity” on whether it would intervene militarily to protect Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack.

On the one hand that would appear to be a change in U. S. policy, away from “strategic ambiguity”. On the other hand it’s almost verbatim what President Bush said back in 2001. I thought it was imprudent then and I think that strategic ambiguity was a better policy. But I think we can now pronounce the policy officially dead.

Things are different than they were in 2001. China is assuming a “near peer” status, some would even say their forces are superior to ours. Why poke the bear? I can only speculate that President Biden sees some need to reassure Taiwan. I’m unconvinced that’s the right policy.

Bjørn Lomborg, the bête noire of climate change activists, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he suggests that mitigation strategies other than those being proposed by activists as better suited to the situation we face:

Adaptation doesn’t make the cost of global warming go away entirely, but it does reduce it dramatically. Higher temperatures will shrink harvests if farmers keep growing the same crops, but they’re likely to adapt by growing other varieties or different plants altogether. Corn production in North America has shifted away from the Southeast toward the Upper Midwest, where farmers take advantage of longer growing seasons and less-frequent extreme heat. When sea levels rise, governments build defenses—like the levees, flood walls and drainage systems that protected New Orleans from much of Hurricane Ida’s ferocity this year.

Nonetheless, many in the media push unrealistic projections of climate catastrophes, while ignoring adaptation. A new study documents how the biggest bias in studies on the rise of sea levels is their tendency to ignore human adaptation, exaggerating flood risks in 2100 by as much as 1,300 times. It is also evident in the breathless tone of most reporting: The Washington Post frets that sea level rise could “make 187 million people homeless,” CNN fears an “underwater future,” and USA Today agonizes over tens of trillions of dollars in projected annual flood damage. All three rely on studies that implausibly assume no society across the world will make any adaptation whatever for the rest of the century. This isn’t reporting but scaremongering.

You can see how far from reality these sorts of projections are in one heavily cited study, depicted in the graph nearby If you assume no society will adapt to any sea-level rise between now and 2100, you’ll find that vast areas of the world will be routinely flooded, causing $55 trillion in damage annually in 2100 (expressed in 2005 dollars), or about 5% of global gross domestic product. But as the study emphasizes, “in reality, societies are likely to adapt.”

By raising the height of dikes, the study shows that humanity can negate almost all that terrible projected damage by 2100. Only 15,000 people would be flooded every year, which is a remarkable improvement compared with the 3.4 million people flooded in 2000. The total cost of damage, investments in new dikes, and maintenance costs of existing dikes will fall sixfold between now and 2100 to 0.008% of world GDP.

The prevailing narrative in the media is between “denialists” on the one hand and “warmists” on the other, yin and yang, evil vs. good. Although he’s sometimes characterized as a “denialist”, I think his view is a bit more nuanced than that. He doesn’t question anthropogenic global warming as such but rather the time and degree projections and the mitigation strategies being proposed.

My own view is that I think that diverse sources of power are a good idea with nuclear providing a lot more baseline power than is presently the case and that carbon capture and sequestration is probably a better strategy than austerity. Easier to sell, too. I also remain skeptical that the production of electric vehicles can be scaled up to the level and at the rate necessary but that’s another subject.

I think they kind of buried the lede in this piece by Justin Rowlatt and Tom Gerken at BBC/i> on countries lobbying the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

A huge leak of documents seen by BBC News shows how countries are trying to change a crucial scientific report on how to tackle climate change.

The leak reveals Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia are among countries asking the UN to play down the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels.

It also shows some wealthy nations are questioning paying more to poorer states to move to greener technologies.

This “lobbying” raises questions for the COP26 climate summit in November.

The short version is that fossil fuel-producing countries or major users of fossil fuels want the UN to downplay climate change understandably enough. To my eye the lede is that these UN reports are produced after extensive lobbying. Kind of throws a damper on the notion of these agencies as technocratic in nature, doesn’t it?

I found this piece by Dominick Reuter at Business Insider interesting:

So Holz, a former food-service worker and charter-boat crewman, decided to run an experiment.

On September 1, he sent job applications to a pair of restaurants that had been particularly public about their staffing challenges.

Then, he widened the test and spent the remainder of the month applying to jobs — mostly at employers vocal about a lack of workers — and tracking his journey in a spreadsheet.

Two weeks and 28 applications later, he had just nine email responses, one follow-up phone call, and one interview with a construction company that advertised a full-time job focused on site cleanup paying $10 an hour.

But Holz said the construction company instead tried to offer Florida’s minimum wage of $8.65 to start, even though the wage was scheduled to increase to $10 an hour on September 30. He added that it wanted full-time availability, while scheduling only part time until Holz gained seniority.

Holz said he wasn’t applying for any roles he didn’t qualify for.

Some jobs “wanted a high-school diploma,” he said. “Some wanted retail experience,” he added. “Most of them either said ‘willing to train’ or ‘minimum experience,’ and none of them were over $12 an hour.”

Anecdotal but interesting. I wish Mr. Holz had provided more details about the applications he made. It’s possible he included some disqualifying item, whether accidentally or deliberately. For example, he might have included enough details that the total amount of time he reported having worked gave away that he was a 37 year old looking for an entry level job which might have raised some eyebrows.

But it does provide a little evidence for my speculation that a certain number of the jobs being advertised are fishing expeditions.

I’m not sure how one would go about quantifying that or testing it other than the method Mr. Holz used.

I have a basic problem with Jeff Webb’s observations at Human Events:

While the idea of supply chain is often associated with manufacturing and the required parts needed to assemble something, the concept is much broader and simpler than that. Simply put, the supply chain (think visually of an actual linked chain) is every part of the process that gets what is needed to arrive at its final destination. That final destination is different for every participant in the economic product or service life cycle.

The Nobel Prize winning economist and champion of free enterprise, Milton Friedman, used to famously refer to the short, fable-like story known as “I, Pencil” written by Leonard Read and published in 1958. In that clever piece, Read traces the family tree of a typical wooden pencil. He mentions all the raw material required, the parts of the world from which they are mined or harvested, and how they are assembled. His point, which Freidman took to a much higher level, was that no one person in the world could make, or knew how to make, a pencil. Only a free marketplace could get all of the necessary components delivered to the final manufacturing point.

Wood, metal, graphite, the harvesting and refining of those items, the shipments of the various parts, and so on, are all part of the supply chain. For the pencil manufacturing company, the supply chain end point is the one at which all of the components necessary to make that pencil arrive. For the consumer who wants to buy a pencil, the supply chain ends when the pencil is placed on the store shelf for their purchase.

Use your imagination and you can instantly see how complex this is even for something as basic as a wooden pencil. Now, extend that to millions of products needed all over the world to produce necessities like food, gasoline, and appliances. Further complicate with the fact that the components for all of them come from all different parts of the world. The complexity is overwhelming. How, might you ask, can anyone figure out how to solve these problems.

The answer is that they can’t. The point Read was making and the point that Freidman rode to fame was that no central planner, no bureaucracy, no star chamber, no politician, can figure out how to choreograph a supply chain. It defies central design. It needs to be developed by individual participants in the marketplace, each acting in their own self-interest, and each finding a way to get that pencil to the shelf without ever necessarily envisioning a pencil.

Said differently, government can’t make pencils and it can’t stock shelves with bread. It can only cause people to wear out pencils filling out forms and create lines of people waiting for bread. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg says that this supply chain problem could last for “years and years.” Years and years? We’ll starve! Buttigieg personifies the general level of incompetency throughout the Biden administration. The last thing we need to do is to deploy that incompetency to solve supply chain problems.

which is that it’s a free flight of fancy, a fantasy. When was this time when private businesses managed their own supply chains without any government involvement? Hint: not in my lifetime which is getting to be nearly a century. It wasn’t 2019 or 1979 or even in 1958 when the article to which Mr. Webb refers was written. The late Dr. Friedman couldn’t even remember such a time. We had them but you need to go back to the 19^th century when things were much, much simpler to find them.

The alternatives aren’t limited to a free and unfettered private enterprise on the one hand and centralized planning on the other. That is what is called in the trade the “tertium non datur fallacy”. The challenge lies not in freeing private enterprise to do what only it can do but in having appropriate regulations coupled with incentives to ensure that private enterprises will indeed do what they are better at than government.

No, we shouldn’t have a centrally planned economy but we shouldn’t have laissez-faire capitalism, either. The right solution is the messy, imperfect working of government together with private businesses that constantly needs readjustment and retuning.

I wanted to pass along the conclusion of strategist James Holmes’s reaction to China’s having tested a hypersonic missile system:

Such are the vagaries of strategy in the second nuclear age. More and more competitors of different shapes, sizes, and strategic cultures join the nuclear-weapons club, complicating the geometry of deterrence. And as newcomers join the club, oldtimers from the first nuclear age, a.k.a. the Cold War, ponder whether to reduce, hold static, or expand their nuclear inventories.

Asymmetry and complexity abound.

And yet. Strategy is a process of interaction among antagonists bent on imposing their will on rivals, preferably without resorting to armed force, but resorting to force should they feel driven to it. A seesaw, back-and-forth dynamic characterizes strategic competition as the parties to the competition try to outdo one another. China’s nuclear-capable hypersonic missile appears impressive from the sketchy information available to date.

There is no cause for panic. Let’s think strategically, allocate resources, and reply to the China challenge.

My own view is congruent with that but somewhat different. Walt Kelly said it best: we have met the enemy and he is us. I am a lot less concerned about the “China challenge” than Dr. Holmes and much more concerned about the forces within the United States that prevent us from doing the things we need to do. They extend from Ike’s “military-industrial complex” to the massive complex of social services NGOs which live one government grant to the next to business executives who refuse to employ sufficient digital security on their businesses’s networks because it would cost too much (in one way or another) or elect to move manufacturing facilities offshore to save a few pennies on the dollar to progressives in Congress for whom military spending is an impediment to their spending what they want to domestically to hawks who never met a challenge they didn’t want to apply military force to solve. That conflict is a multi-front one which will be difficult to wage.

Intel is still the industry-leading semiconductor company. It is not, however, the world’s biggest fabricator of chips. That would be Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. It isn’t even close. That by way of preface to my comments on Tom Friedman’s most recent New York Times column:

TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it builds the chips that lots of different companies design — particularly Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and even Intel. Over the years, TSMC has built an amazing ecosystem of trusted partners that share their intellectual property with TSMC to build their proprietary chips. At the same time, leading tool companies — like America’s Applied Materials and the Netherlands’ ASML — are happy to sell their best chip-making tools to TSMC. This ensures that the company is always on the cutting edge of the material science and lithography that go into building and etching the base of every semiconductor.

And since it is the main supplier of chips for Apple products, TSMC is constantly being pushed to go beyond the frontiers of innovation to accommodate Apple’s nonstop and short product cycles for new phones and iPads. It forces the whole TSMC ecosystem to get better and better, faster and faster. So TSMC’s costs keep going down, the value of its ecosystem keeps going up and the number of people who can join and benefit from it keeps getting wider and wider.

“TSMC always acted like a start-up — it was driven — and it was always synthesizing the best of everyone,” explained Steve Blank, a semiconductor innovator, who runs a course at Stanford on the geopolitics of advanced technologies. Intel, America’s premier chip maker, kind of lost its way, making everything by itself and for itself, added Blank. “So it did not have customers pushing it, because Intel was its own customer, and as a result it became complacent.” Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s new C.E.O., has begun to reverse that.

I used to worry that Xi’s big idea — “Made in China 2025,” his plan to dominate all the new 21st-century technologies — would leave the West in the dust. But I worry a little less now. I have great respect for China’s manufacturing prowess. Its homegrown chip industry is still good enough to do a lot of serious innovation, supercomputing and machine learning.

But the biggest thing you learn from studying the chip industry is that all its most advanced technologies today are so complex — requiring so many inputs and super-sophisticated equipment — that no one has the best of every category, so you need a lot of trusted partners.

And if China thinks it can get around that by seizing Taiwan just to get hold of TSMC, that would be a fool’s errand. Many of the key machines and chemicals TSMC uses to make chips are from America and the European Union, and that flow would immediately be shut down.

I found that incredibly naïve. The missing consideration is something called “hierarchy of values”, the relative importance of various considerations that drive President Xi.

I did not understand President Trump’s hierarchy of values. I do not understand President Biden’s hierarchy of values. And I certainly do not understand President Xi’s hierarchy of values but I am quite certain he has one and I can speculate. My speculation is that it would be something like (in descending order of importance):

• Maintaining and extending his own power and authority
• Maintaining and extending the CCP’s power and authority
• That China be considered the most important and powerful country in the world by other countries
• That China be the most important and powerful country in the world
• The welfare of China and the Chinese people
• Anything else

The question then is not whether “seizing Taiwan” is the right thing to do or not or whether doing so would actually allow China to achieve technological dominance but how doing so would fit into his hierarchy of values and I don’t believe the prospect is quite as remote as Mr. Friedman appears to. I also don’t believe that the U. S. would make a meaningful response should China do so any more than it made a meaningful response when China asserted complete political control over Hong Kong but that’s a topic for another post.

At The American Prospect David Dayen asks a reasonable enough question. Will the “Build Back Better” bill actually build back better? What if it’s worse?

I find it hard to muster up much energy for Build Back Better right now, though this is likely the low point in the negotiations. Maybe something like a compromise that sets apart tax cuts from spending can be reached, with more money available to execute the remaining programs correctly. But that’s a faint glimmer of hope. The Manchin path is one that Builds Back Worse, on long-standing issues on which we cannot afford to skimp.

In a similar vein but with a largely opposite thrust John Cochrane dares to go where no one has gone before and actually reads the childcare portion of the bill. His conclusion?

So what will all this do? I’ll hazard a forecast. This will create a big state bureaucracy. The majority of child-care operators, especially those who work for actual poor and disadvantaged people, in poor and disadvantaged areas, will look at this mess and say no thanks, we don’t take federal money. (All of these are couched as requirements conditioned on receiving federal funds, as they must be given what’s left of the commerce clause.) They take cash, hire who they want, and operate under the current slightly less restrictive set of rules. Or, they operate underground. As the wealthy send their kids to private schools, they send their kids to high cost private day care also outside the system to avoid price caps.

The US creates one more of thousands of programs with take-up rates in the low single digits. Politicians get to feel good about offering child care, without actually doing it. Costs of the official programs balloon. But overall costs may not end up that large, because it reaches so few people. On the margin, though, a few more people work less, to avoid losing benefits, to avoid losing coveted spots in half decent child care facilities, and a few less people get married.

or, said another way, that provision might well be named “No Bureaucrat Left Behind”.

Taken together these two posts highlight the paradox of these large spending bills. The individual components are poorly constructed, overly expensive, and with lots of obvious adverse run-on effects. But as you peel away the layers one by one activist support for the measures wanes.

The graph above, illustrating the Dow-Jones Industrial Average compared to GDP, courtesy of Macrotrends, should reinforce something you already know: the DJIA is not the economy. They are farther apart now that at any time in history.