At an article at War on the Rocks on the lost art of exiting a war, Adam Wunische opens with a pair of sentences that warm the cockles of my elderly heart:

The best way to ensure a speedy exit from a war is to have never intervened in the first place. The second-best option is to have an exit strategy.

For the last thirty years we had presidents that didn’t do exits and now we have one that doesn’t do planning. Isn’t there another alternative?

Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass remarks on Hunter Biden’s remarkable ability to garner cash from countries in which his father had responsibility for the foreign policy:

It was categorically wrong for then-Vice President Biden — as the Obama administration point man to Ukraine and China — to have his son Hunter cashing in on business deals in both countries, including $50,000 a month from Ukrainian gas company Burisma.

I don’t know if it was a crime, but it was a clear conflict of interest. The legendary Chicago boss Richard J. Daley leveraged his clout to help his sons. When asked about it, Daley told reporters to kiss his mistletoe. But Daley didn’t say mistletoe.

The reason the late Mayor Daley could be so blunt is that he was much more confident he would be elected than Joe Biden is.

VP Biden is reduced to scaling the Big Rock Candy Mountain with the other Democratic aspirants.

An article at USA Today warns that people are leaving San Francisco because they can’t afford it:

SAN FRANCISCO — Social media influencer Sarah Tripp and her husband, Robbie Tripp, moved to San Francisco in 2016 brimming with optimism.

“We thought, here’s a city full of opportunities and connections where you go to work hard and succeed,” says Tripp, 27, founder of the lifestyle blog Sassy Red Lipstick.

But after a year-long hunt for suitable housing in San Francisco only turned up “places for $1 million that looked like rundown shacks and needed a remodel,” the couple packed up and moved to Phoenix.

They went from paying San Francisco rents of $2,500 for a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment that was far from shopping and other amenities, to purchasing a newly constructed 3,000-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-bathroom home where they’ll raise their newly arrived baby boy.

“It was cool to be living near all those high-tech startups,” Tripp says of her Bay Area years. “But you quickly saw that if you weren’t part of that, you’d be pushed out. It’s just sad.”

They should be careful. There will be an assumption that if you aren’t in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, or Seattle, you’re third rate. If you’re so smart, why aren’t you in San Francisco? Not being there will not only make it harder to be seen as credible, it will make it harder for you to get financial backing should you need it.

In his Wall Street Journal column Andy Kessler remarks on the amusing and self-destructive impulse for all companies to become tech companies:

Does technology provide a competitive advantage? Companies are counting on it. In March McDonald’s spent $300 million buying an Israeli artificial-intelligence startup to personalize menus based on weather and trending items. Now they’re considering license-plate recognition systems for drive-through lanes. Based on your history they might offer to supersize your order, or just hand you your usual Happy Meal. CEO Steve Easterbrook says, “Technology is a critical element of our Velocity Growth Plan.”

The problem is that adopting a useful technology doesn’t mean your advantage will last. I’ve long been amused by a succession of Harvard Business Review pieces that demonstrate this point. In 1985 Michael E. Porter wrote “How Information Gives You Competitive Advantage,” then in 1990 came Max Hopper’s “Rattling SABRE—New Ways to Compete on Information,” and finally in 2013 we got Rita Gunther McGrath’s “The End of Competitive Advantage.” Each of these takes describes a different stage in the life cycle of corporate tech.

concluding

Today every company wants to reinvent itself as a tech firm, but they should be careful what they wish for. The surefire approach is using data to capture and keep customers, even for Big Macs. Once a company steps on the technology treadmill by investing in a new system, it better run fast. Tech investing used to be about chips and software, but as it becomes more about using technology more innovatively than your competitor, more companies are vulnerable to the Hopper syndrome of remaster or die.

Just because you’re able to use a smartphone does not mean you’re able to design one. It takes a certain culture to be technology-driven and, once they reach a certain size, even notionally technology companies tend to lose it. We already seen an object lesson in Boeing. Keeping costs low while increasing the high tech content of their products may have cost them the company. The fallout of their folly hasn’t ended yet.

IMO auto companies should make the best, best-selling, and most cost-effective cars they can, entertainment companies should make the best content they can, and so on rather than trying to refashion themselves as tech companies. Leave technology to startups. There is no such thing as a permanent advantage.

The editors of the Washington Post wonder why Democrats don’t enact a carbon tax:

If governments recycled the revenue back to low-income and vulnerable people, and cut economically inefficient taxes — such as income taxes — a $50-per-ton carbon tax would feel to the economy more like $20 per ton. The plan would help low-income households and place a higher burden on the upper-income bracket. There could also be money for essential research and development to aid the energy transition.

I think there are many reasons and they vary from legislator to legislator. Politicians tend to operate in the immediate—at best they address the problems of the here and now. They don’t handle long term problems well. Even with the measure the editors propose carbon taxes will be regressive. The only question is how regressive. They don’t want to irritate their donors, either.

However structured a carbon tax will inflict economic pain. That’s the point, isn’t it? That’s a risk that the Congressional Democrats would just as soon not take, especially not alone.

There are some who would rather have the issue to run against the Republicans on or don’t want to go on the record about something they’re pretty sure the Republicans will vote against. And there are probably some who don’t really believe there’s a crisis but know a good issue when they see it.

My own view is that a carbon tax however implemented will be disappointing. That was the experience in Europe where they mostly served as vehicles for rent-seeking. Note, too, that the results in Europe tended to be reckoned by measuring inputs and assuming outputs which isn’t necessarily an effective way of going about it. And even assuming a crisis and that a high enough carbon tax could be effective, I don’t believe that legislators have the guts to impose a tax high enough to be effective, preferring a painless system that doesn’t work over a complicated, painful one that does. That’s why I emphasize nuclear power and carbon capture in the solutions I propose.

Reuters reports that Angela Merkel has realized the that multiculturalism has failed in Germany:

POTSDAM, Germany (Reuters) – Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society has “utterly failed,” Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday, adding fuel to a debate over immigration and Islam polarizing her conservative camp.

Speaking to a meeting of young members of her Christian Democrats (CDU), Merkel said allowing people of different cultural backgrounds to live side by side without integrating had not worked in a country that is home to some four million Muslims.

“This (multicultural) approach has failed, utterly failed,” Merkel told the meeting in Potsdam, south of Berlin.

Merkel faces pressure from within her CDU to take a tougher line on immigrants who don’t show a willingness to adapt to German society and her comments appeared intended to pacify her critics.

She said too little had been required of immigrants in the past and repeated her usual line that they should learn German in order to get by in school and have opportunities on the labor market.

It’s too bad that it took her this long to learn that lesson. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has taken a harder stance, warning that Hungary would use force to repel immigrants from the Middle East.

So, multiple cultures living amicably side by side has failed. France’s policy of cultural assimilation has failed. What’s left for the ethnic states of Europe?

At The Hedgehog Review Greg Jackson muses about the rise and fall and rise of hipsters:

On the college campus where I have been living, the students dress in a style I do not understand. Continuous with what we wore fifteen years ago and subtly different, it is both hipster and not. American Apparel has filed for bankruptcy, but in cities and towns across the US the styles forged a decade ago at the epicenters of bohemia still filter out. Urban Outfitters is going strong. In Zürich, on the banks of the Limmat, elaborate tattoos cover the bodies of the children of Swiss bounty. The French use Brooklyn as a metonym for hip. In this context, in such saturation, hipster can no longer stand for anything, except perhaps the attempt or ambition to look cool. But since coolness venerates its own repudiation most of all, every considered choice bears hipster’s trace. Hipster is everything and nothing—and so it is nothing.

I think that for the last 50 years a considerable portion of the movement has been motivated by aspirations to be the “vanguard of the proletariat”. Contrary to the aspirations of vanguardists the real proletariat neither needs nor wants nor gives a damn about a vanguard.

I don’t think that any consideration of hipness particularly modern hipness is complete without mentioning Eric Hoffer’s observation:

Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.

Another observation from Hoffer, particularly relevant for today:

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

There is an article at The National Interest by Michael Lind that I found thought-provoking. Its subject is “geoeconomics”:

FOR DECADES, the study of international security has been divorced from the study of international trade and investment, along with domestic economic development. In political science departments on university campuses, self-described realists debate defense and diplomacy with idealists of various kinds. In the economics department next door, there is no debate; the academic economists almost unanimously agree that free trade and investment benefit all sides. They instead postulate an ideal world where national borders would be insignificant and there would be free flows of goods, services, money and labor.

Even before Donald Trump became the first president in living memory to explicitly promote U.S. economic nationalism, the wall that divided the national-security realists and the free-market economists was crumbling—mainly because of the rise of China, which has benefited from a version of statist economics while challenging U.S. military hegemony in Asia. Slowly but inevitably, debates about national security and the global economy are merging into a single dispute about relative national power. This marks a revival of what Edward Luttwak has called “geo-economics.”

The article includes observations with which I agree and some about which I am skeptical. For example, IMO this is obvious:

Any country which hopes to be an independent great power must be able to obtain and maintain its own state-of-the-art manufacturing sector, if only for fear of falling behind in the economic arms race inspired by the security dilemma.

except, presumably, to those who think the United States can remain an independent great power on the basis of finance, health care, and other service industries while diminishing its manufacturing sector.

I’m skeptical about this:

In the jejune version of Econ 101, which is all that most policymakers and pundits know of economics, all markets are naturally competitive and divided among many small producers. There are constant or diminishing returns to scale—that is to say, a bigger producer is not necessarily more efficient than a small one.

This assumption was valid in the pre-industrial era, when a single blacksmithing firm employing a thousand blacksmiths working side by side under one roof could not turn out horseshoes any better or more rapidly than a thousand self-employed blacksmiths. But modern mechanized manufacturing industries are characterized by increasing returns to scale. An automobile factory with assembly lines can churn out automobiles more efficiently and cheaply than a team of artisans assembling one automobile at a time by from scratch.

Based on my knowledge and experience, while businesses that have increasing returns of scale up to a point are commonplace, businesses that have increasing returns at any scale are extremely rare. If that were not the case natural monopolies would be very common. Study after study has found that they are vanishingly rare. In almost every case monopolies are a consequence of policy rather than of natural forces.

That is true for multiple reasons. For one thing, while the cost per unit of inputs may go down up to a certain point, they plateau. It’s generally cheaper although not a lot cheaper to buy 10 smartphones than it is to buy 1. Is it really a lot cheaper per unit to buy 100,000 smartphones than it is to buy 10,000?

Additionally, bureaucracies don’t increase in cost linearly with size but at best at n log n or, more likely at n². Consequently, I suspect that the likelihood of a business or an industry to realize increasing returns to scale depends on the relationship between the cost of inputs and the price of outputs at all scales.

I found this claim intriguingly vague:

In increasing-returns industries, including the manufacturing industries that are the basis of modern military power, Econ 101 does not apply. Markets are imperfect. Efficiency is produced by scale, not competition. Because bigger firms and establishments are more efficient, unchecked competition tends to drive out small firms, leading to oligopoly and perhaps to monopoly.

What are “increasing-returns industries”? Is there such a thing? This smacks of “no true Scotsman” to me. Going from the general to the concrete, are Chinese manufacturers able to produce less expensively than U. S. manufacturers because of economies of scale or because of lower labor costs per unit output?

I think there are unquestionably rent-seeking sectors in which managers are able to lobby to prevent competition. That is amazingly common. I wish Mr. Lind would name specific companies so I could test his hypothesis.

I also think that developments like improved communications and additive manufacturing are disrupting the operations of companies in practically every sector at a ferocious rate. While it is true that by 1920 an automobile assembly line could produce automobiles faster and less expensively than an individual artisan could in 1900, I’m not convinced that the same conclusions can be drawn about producing things in factories that can now be produced in the home using a 3D printer, especially when transportation costs are taken into account.

At Politico Aaron David Miller, Eugene Rumer, and Richard Sokolsky explain why removing our troops from Syria is the right course of action:

U.S. policy in Syria has been unclear, confused and unrealistic for nearly a decade—a never-ending mission impossible without realistic goals or the means to achieve them. Yes, people are rightly enraged at Trump’s willful abandonment of the Kurds and his disregard for U.S. credibility and interests. But this indignation should not obscure the fact: U.S. policy in Syria was headed for trouble. Chaotic and destructive as they are, Trump’s actions have served to lay bare some uncomfortable truths and realities about U.S. policy toward Syria. Yes, Trump has played the role of both arsonist and fireman. He can sanction Turkey and send Vice President Pence on any number of cease-fire missions. But there’s no going back. A new approach, and not a quixotic American vision of how we would like Syria to be, is now required.

They present five reasons:

1. The cooperation between the United States and Kurds in Syria has been purely pragmatic on the part of both parties. Now pragmatism points in another direction.
2. Allowing Russia to be the power broker in Syria is more in our interests than trying to assume that role ourselves.
3. Assad is not a good guy but he or his regime will remain in power in Syria for the foreseeable future and that’s better than the likely alternatives.
4. DAESH won’t go away but fighting terrorists in Syria won’t stop terrorist attacks in the United States.
5. Syria is not a vital U. S. interest.

The three authors of the article are genuine authorities in their fields with extensive credentials and experience; they are not partisan hacks. But they don’t represent the interventionist cabal that has dominated Washington foreign policy thinking for so long, either. If your antipathy for the Trump Administration is not based solely on the person of Trump and you wish that Trump would consult with some experts before acting, these three are precisely the sort of experts he should be heeding.