I’m sorry to say that I found George P. Shultz’s Wall Street Journal op-ed about China, notionally about the “troubles” the country faces going forward, a combination of anodyne observations and wishful thinking. I did better with more detail and more insight 15 years ago. Over the intervening years China has failed to address any of its problems but doubled down on its trade and military policies.

Take this for example:

Americans long underestimated China’s progress and its leaders’ ambitions. I reluctantly accept that today’s China is different from the one I once worked with constructively.

Is it that China has changed or that we have? Its leaders’ objectives have largely remained the same even as their military and economic strength has grown. I challenge the notion that he worked with the Chinese “constructively”. It was constructive so long as the Chinese leadership wanted something from us and we had something to offer.

He points out, correctly, China’s shrinking workforce, a consequence of its “One Child Policy”, and the numerical imbalance between the sexes caused by culling unwanted females but fails to note that those females are now workers prized for fine assembly work—an ongoing problem in rebuilding the declining workforce. Or the possibility of social unrest due to the sexual imbalance.

I found this interesting:

State-owned China Railway took on nearly $1 trillion in debt to build that sprawling network; a few major lines are profitable, but most are not, and interest payments alone exceed operating revenues.

Rail isn’t the only area to have this problem. China presently has considerable overcapacity in producing cement, steel, and autos. That overcapacity has costs—both the opportunity costs of creating it as well as the costs of servicing the debt taken on to create it and keep it up. How much overcapacity? Chinese auto factories have the productive capacity to satisfy the entire world’s demand for autos for the foreseeable future.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry about this:

China misunderstands us, too. To reduce the temptation for opportunism by anyone, including China, Americans must do better on our own challenges: government debt, stagnating and inequitable educational outcomes in disciplines that will define our future prosperity and security, and the demographic need for a reasonable and consistent immigration policy.

What, precisely, are “disciplines that will define our future prosperity and security”? I honestly have no idea what he means. Doesn’t he think that young people pursue incentives? Wages for engineers and IT workers have been flat for quite a while because companies have the choice of either importing the workers they need or offshoring the activities entirely. And Mr. Shultz apparently doesn’t see the conflict between his attribution of U. S. economic strength with immigration and his emphasis on “inequitable educational outcomes”. That’s the thing about importing workers: little of their education takes place here. As long as you’re going to import workers to suit what difference does our educational system make?

His conclusion distressed me:

We should quietly develop specific off-ramps from conflict with China—e.g., rules of the road for military ships and aircraft with a communication mechanism to address any incidents; stockpiling of important traded goods such as pharmaceuticals, rare earths or agricultural products—that would improve mutual stability. It is important that leaders here—and leaders there—work from a realistic view of China’s position, our own position, and our collective future.

Has he actually learned nothing over the last several decades? What would induce China to conform to such “rules of the road” if its leaders thought it were in China’s interest to do otherwise?

We don’t just need stockpiles of strategic goods; we need our own productive capacity for them and more than anything else we need supply chains that don’t run through China at all.

The fourth night of protests in Kenosha appears to have passed peacefully. We’ll wait for the weekend there with bated breath.

Of the three alternatives—ongoing riots, vigilante justice, and rigorous law enforcement—I think the last is by far the best alternative. I don’t have much else to say about the situation in Kenosha.

In her Washington Post column Helaine Olen tries to strike a middle ground between James Altucher (“New York is doomed”) and Jerry Seinfeld (“New Yorkers are tough”):

New York City has always been a tough and expensive place to live, but there’s always been an unspoken deal: Put up with it, and you’ll get a front-row seat to the most vital city in the United States, with round-the-clock entertainment and unparalleled opportunities. But that’s gone, and the date of return is still to be determined. No wonder home sales are soaring in the nearby suburbs while Manhattan apartment vacancies are at a record high. Instead of insulting Altucher, those of us who love New York City might want to take his words as a warning — and a call to action.

but I find her prescription for “action” which require either a federal bailout, a better New York City mayor and New York governor, or both. Or, at least, for New York’s governor and mayor to start cooperating rather than posturing.

On the first point I absolutely, positively do not believe that the federal government should bail out New York just as I believe it should not bail out Chicago (Illinois) or Los Angeles (California). If there are federal bailouts they should be for all states or, at least, according to some formula that does not reward the profligate and punish the thrifty. A quick look at the balance sheets of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles or New York, Illinois, and California should be enough to convince you they fit into the first category rather than the second.

As to the second issue I’m not optimistic. While Andrew Cuomo will be running for reelection in 2022 Bill Deblasio’s successor will be elected in 2021. New Yorkers are stuck with the leaders they’ve elected for a while. And successful people tend not to change the things that have made them successful or that they think have made them successful so don’t expect them to change the way they operate.

In my entire life I have never been so miserable about the state of our country. Those who liken it to 1968 are just wrong. I remember 1968. This is much worse. Violence and hatred are much more widespread and with less reason. Those rioting and looting in the name of blacks killed by the police are making a darned good argument for an idea I thought was dead with Marcus Garvey.

Some blacks have demanded segregation in the name of “equity”—the diction preferred now over “equality”. Some people are actually arguing with a stragiht face that the scientific method, civility, and the family structure are tools of white supremacy.

For the last few minutes I’ve been having fun looking at the COVID-19 test positivity rates for various states at the site of the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. I’m filled with questions.

For example, although Illinois’s statewide test positivity rate has risen since the middle of June it hasn’t risen a lot and it remains quite low. Gov. Pritzker says he is making his decisions based on science. What science is he basing his decisions on? I’m guessing political science but I’d like to know.

Or take a look at the test positivity rates for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. If that isn’t “herd immunity” I would very much like to see what “herd immunity” would look like.

Can someone explain Washington State to me? That looks like an artifact—as though the state were only reporting the numbers of positive tests.

Oregon is a mess and I assume it will get worse. Its test positivity rate is graphic evidence that you can, in fact, contract COVID-19 while “demonstrating”.

Hawaii looks to me like exactly what you’d expect after relaxing a successful containment strategy.

Check out your own states and see what that tells you.

In his regular Wall Street Journal column, Jason L. Riley offers President Trump some advice on wooing black voters. After pointing out that the Trump campaign’s messaging in 2020 is better than it was in 2016 he observes:

If he wants to improve on his performance among blacks four years ago, it’s not impossible but he’ll have to pick his spots. Exit polls show that he did better among black men than black women, for instance. We also know that, historically, black immigrants are less wedded to the Democrats, as are younger black voters as opposed to the older blacks who played such a key role in Joe Biden winning the Democratic nomination.

What we’ve witnessed this week during the Republican National Convention is certainly an improvement over Mr. Trump’s 2016 version of black outreach: “What the hell do you have to lose?” Still, much of it amounts to using Democratic tactics to win minority votes, appealing to blacks as blacks rather than as Americans who share the same concerns—job opportunities, good schools, safe neighborhoods—as other groups. Those minority voters who are open to overt appeals based on race, gender, sexual orientation and so forth are probably lost to the GOP because the Democrats are much better at identity politics.

To that end, Kim Klacik’s convention promise to be more responsive to the working-class needs of blacks was probably more effective than Herschel Walker’s reassurances that Mr. Trump isn’t a racist. Ms. Klacik, a long-shot candidate for a Maryland congressional seat, highlighted the lengthy and disastrous record of liberal governance in Baltimore and offered a new approach.

By contrast, people who think Mr. Trump is a white supremacist aren’t voting for him, no matter what a former football star says. The president’s challenge isn’t to convince black voters that he’s a good person because he has black friends. It’s to convince them that he’s the best candidate to lead the country back to the record-low rates of unemployment and poverty among minorities that we enjoyed before the pandemic.

I remain unconvinced that defections of black voters from the Democratic ticket to the Republican will make a difference in states carried anywhere although I’m willing to be persuaded on that subject. Where I think it will make a difference is in the popular vote.

That isn’t insignificant. A Trump victory in which in 2020 Trump carries the popular vote as well as the Electoral College would be significantly different than one in which as in 2016 he prevails in the Electoral College but loses the popular vote.

There were two fatalities in last night’s riots in Kenosha, the third consecutive night. NBC reports:

Two people were killed and one was injured as shots rang out during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, just before midnight Tuesday, according to the city’s police department, amid anger over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man.

Kenosha police issued a statement early Wednesday morning confirming that two people were dead while another sustained serious but non-life-threatening injuries on the third consecutive night of protests. An investigation is underway and the victims’ identities have not yet been released, the statement said; no announcement was made of any arrests.

The sound of gunfire was captured shortly before midnight in a video posted by a reporter for NBC affiliate WTMJ. It was not clear what preceded the shots, who fired or how many people were involved or injured.

In another video shared on Twitter, which has been verified by NBC News, a man can be seen sitting in the middle of a street aiming a gun at people who were running along the road.

One person appeared to attempt to grab the weapon, then a shot was fired and the individual was seen to collapse a few feet from the shooter.

At least one other person appeared to be shot before the shooter got up and started walking down the street.

The video did not make it clear what happened in the moments before it began. NBC News has not confirmed whether the incident is the same shooting described by police.

I believe that unless these riots are ended quickly the situation will get still worse. We’ll have pitched battles in the streets. And it could well grow worse than that.

I presume you’re all aware of the problems in Kenosha, Wisconsin. If not, I’ll quickly summarize it for you. There is a report here that strikes me as pretty good.

Kenosha, Wisconsin is a town of about 100,000 people just north of the Illinois-Wisconsin border. Two days ago police responded to a domestic disturbance call. After that things get a bit hazy. The Kenosha police ended up shooting a young black man. He is presently in stable condition in the hospital. The shooting was caught on video; the video has “gone viral”.

There was a night of rioting, burning of businesses in Kenosha. There are expected to be more.

A man shot and millions of dollars of damages done are bad enough but I wonder if people understand how risky this cycle is? Rushes to judgment about a shooting followed by taking vengeance on people who haven’t harmed you? It wouldn’t take much for it to get completely out of control and I don’t mean just in Kenosha.

After pointing out in her Washington Post op-ed that media outlets have incentives to exaggerate dangers and underreport successes, economist Emily Oster provides what may be the best advice I’ve seen on making strategic decisions about SARS-CoV-2:

In the absence of complete information on risks, our overreactions can have serious consequences. One example is the Three Mile Island nuclear event, which has not been conclusively linked to any long-term negative health outcomes but did terrify Americans about nuclear power. People simply didn’t have enough baseline information about the number of nuclear plants operating safely on a given day to realize that the probability of a nuclear disaster was vanishingly small. The result was that nuclear power — a plentiful, carbon-free energy source — never reached its potential in the United States, leading to needless overreliance on dangerous fossil fuels.

We risk making similar mistakes with the coronavirus. Keeping children out of school harms their development. Shuttering businesses destroys livelihoods. These downsides may be offset by the benefits of limiting covid-19. But we cannot rationally assess the trade-offs when we have only partial information.

What we really need to know is not the anecdotes that news reports provide, but the full picture. What share of schools have cases? Moreover, what differentiates places with cases from those without? Is it differences in prevention measures? Demographic and economic characteristics? The prevalence of community-spread events?

To answer these questions, we need systematic data collection and reporting — the sort that lets us evaluate risks in all kinds of situations, from driving cars to flying on planes to, yes, ocean swimming. It should be possible to do this. As schools open, districts will have counts of at least detected covid-19 cases, as well as information on the overall enrolled population. This data could be combined in public databases with user-friendly dashboards and maps. Since this type of data collection has not been spearheaded by central authorities, I’ve partnered with a set of national educational organizations and a data team to try to put it together.

I would fault President Trump for not providing that kind of leadership but not only President Trump. Few governors have emphasized “systematic data collection and reporting” sufficiently—Indiana appears to be an exception. Our own governor seems to be collecting the data and ignoring it quite assiduously.