Expanding on what I wrote in my last post, I’d like to make two points. First, China is an enormous country. 30% of China = 100% of the U. S.

The second is the important of our having a diversified economy. Just as 100% of Chinese people are not capable of doing college-level work so 100% of Americans are not capable of doing college level work. At most 40-50% of Americans can do that. The only repeat only way to change that is to debase higher education in a China-like solution in which what a college education means depends on your “station in life”, something I believe that Americans would and should reject.

For three decades college preparation has been the objective of high school education. I believe that has been a grave error. Not only does it set the bar at a point that too many people just can’t clear, setting the stage for disappointment, it gives a free pass to business leaders and politicians to create a stratified economy, separated into the educated and the rest. What are we going to do, write off 40-50% of the population?

Either they’ll be left in poverty or they’ll be supported by the rest. Those who can prosper in that Brave New World will ultimately tire of that and idleness inevitably leads to mischief as the old proverb has it.

That’s why we need a diversified economy with agriculture, primary production, manufacturing, low end service jobs, white collar jobs, and professionals. And along with it we need a re-emphasis on the nobility of work.

At Bloomberg Michael Schuman points out something else I’ve commented on from time to time:

An examination of the population more broadly, especially in the country’s vast rural hinterland, reveals that China compares poorly with many of its peers when it comes to education.

The startling findings can be found in a recent paper by scholars from Stanford University and China’s Shaanxi Normal University. Analyzing Chinese 2015 census data, the authors determined that a mere 30% of the country’s workforce — defined as all adults aged 25 to 64 — had some high-school education. Researchers argue that is a sound measure of both those workers’ skills and their ability to learn new ones on the job.

That share compares unfavorably with developed economies, where the comparable average is 78%. The proportion in the most advanced countries, including the U.S., Germany and Japan, is even loftier — over 90%.

Of course, China is a poorer country and has been for some time, so that disparity may not come as a surprise. However, China also stands up badly against other emerging economies that managed the leap into the rich leagues in the past half century, such as South Korea and Singapore. Those countries enjoyed a much higher level of high-school education before they broke through to developed status –– on average about 72% in 1980.

Nor does China match up especially well with its middle-income competitors. For instance, 46% of the working-age population in Brazil attended high school, 36% in Turkey and 34% in Mexico. China’s share is similar to much poorer Indonesia’s, at 31%.

I think that will be a persistent problem as long as China remains China. Despite its claim that 95% of its population is literate that’s a pious fiction, finessed by using a slippery definition of “literacy” that changes based on “station in life”. I would not be a bit surprised if its actual literacy rate were closer to 50% than 95%.

In Singapore most schools teach in English. South Korean schools teach in Korean using the beautiful, elegant, and ingenious Hangul writing system. China faces major impediments in education not related to poverty and even after adopting the simplified writing system presently used on the mainland those will not easily be overcome.

Barry Ritholtz at Bloomberg:

If the U.S. labor market really were tight, wage pressure would be sending pay much higher. Instead, increases have been modest, barely keeping up with the country’s 2% inflation rate. This is evidence of widespread underemployment, which is keeping a lid on wage pressures.

which may sound familiar because it’s what I’ve been pointing out for years. Since the unemployment rate does not take the labor force participation rate into account and does not measure underemployment, it is quite possible to have low unemployment and underemployment.

There is no mystery here. It’s the classical economics explanation for what we’re seeing right now. It also contradicts any notion that the demand for labor is such that we need to import more workers.

One complication is that there is no “labor market” as such but lots of small labor markets, both geographical and within sectors of the economy. Still, what we’re seeing does not suggest any broad labor shortages.

I am no longer able to resist commenting about the breathless reporting on Jeffrey Epstein and his death (if he is, in fact, dead). I have not attempted to organize these thoughts.

The bumper crop of “conspiracy theories” surrounding it is flabbergasting so far I have encountered the following

• He committed suicide with the complicity of a guard or guards.
• He was murdered. (by the Clintons or any of the other powerful individuals with whom he was linked)
• He was spirited away (by the Clintons, Mossad, etc.) and the body is a double.
• Accidental death, the result of autoerotic hypoxia.

Have I missed any of the major strains? My only advice is to heed Occam’s Razor and Hanlon’s Razor. I don’t know what happened and barely care. It will be the subject of investigation for years and speculation for decades.

“Pedophilia” is properly used to refer to sexual attraction to prepubescent individuals. “Ephebophilia” is the term used to describe sexual attraction to adolescents aged 15-18. That is not a defense.

Why has no one pointed out the societal sexualization of children in connection with this matter? Examples abound. Two of the highest-paid female recording artists jump-started their careers as pre-teenagers or young teenagers with materials and acts with sexual content. Many couture models are rather young teenagers. What’s the dividing line between aberrance and acceptability? As another example look at the recent treatment of Dora the Explorer. As one individual I know put it, Dora should be more Shirley Temple and less Lupe Velez. Hollywood has managed to sexualize material that is very much not sexualized in the original.

I wonder when it’s going to dawn on those who genuinely believe that carbon emissions are a threat to human existence that the only practical solution to the problem is carbon capture? The editors of the Washington Post come dangerously close to realizing that:

Climate change is usually associated with power plant smokestacks pumping out carbon dioxide. But a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions results from agriculture and related changes in the way people use land. A study released last month by the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank, found that if agriculture gets no more efficient before mid-century, humans will have to wipe out most of the rest of the world’s forests, kill off countless species and blow past dangerous global warming thresholds to feed the expanding population. Even if agricultural productivity rises at typical rates, humans will still need to clear land equivalent to twice the size of India. Meanwhile, reforesting land, not clearing it, is high on the to-do list for restraining global greenhouse gas emissions, since growing plants absorb and store carbon dioxide.

Environmentalists have stressed that meat-heavy diets tend to produce lots of emissions, since grazing animals require lots of cleared land, and they produce methane — a potent greenhouse gas — as they digest. One of the study’s authors found that the average European’s diet produces as many greenhouse gas emissions as her consumption of everything else. Unsurprisingly, the report recommends moderating — though far from eliminating — consumption of red meat.

But that is not the only answer. Humans have to get much better at growing more on less land. Raising cows more quickly, through better managing their feed and other measures, would mean less time grazing and emitting methane before they produce meat for market. New feed additives could also cut how much methane is emitted by grazing animals. Using new gene editing techniques could produce crops that boost farm efficiency and produce fewer greenhouse emissions. Employing new food preservation technologies on produce would prevent useless rot and waste.

A new and more accurate accounting method enabled one of the researchers, Princeton University’s Tim Searchinger, to calculate that biofuels are actually environmental villains: “Using ethanol or biodiesel contributes two to three times the greenhouse gas emissions of gasoline or diesel over more than 30 years,” he found. Government subsidies for biofuels should end. Meanwhile, governments should enforce strict protections for existing forests, keeping their biodiversity unharmed and tons of carbon dioxide sequestered in their plant growth. Agricultural lands on the margins of usefulness should be restored as forests or peatlands.

My guess is that it will still take awhile. Neo-Malthusianism will continue to hold sway for a while yet. That, uncomfortably, preaches that India and Nigeria and the other countries of sub-Saharan Africa need to lower their birthrates.

Every single measure proposed to reduce carbon emissions will produce carbon emissions: ending the consumption of meat, building electric cars, expanding the power grid to support electric cars, rebuilding and refurbishing all of the present buildings, wind and solar power. The only measure that doesn’t is carbon capture.

I think that the editors of the Washington Post make assumptions about the Chinese leadership all too common among Western pundits:

The right answer for President Xi Jinping and for Ms. Lam, if she remains in office, is to open serious negotiations with the protesters on their demands, which are quite reasonable. Cinching the noose ever tighter, as the Chinese government has done in recent weeks, is the pathway to a dead end that could harm both Hong Kong and mainland China economically as well as politically. A cliff looms, and China’s leaders should turn back before it is too late.

which is that the forces that impel the Chinese leadership are similar to those of Western politicians and their attitudes are much like their own. That’s an error. The Chinese leadership has political motivations but it has nothing to do with popular politics are the esteem of Western elites. We don’t know what the political forces are within the Politburo but they certainly exist. That’s the only politics that matters to the Chinese leadership. It is only important to them to keep the Han Chinese people docile and their regard for non-Han Chinese people is even lower. I’m surprised they’ve treated the Uighurs as gently as they have.

So far there are few signs of unrest within mainland China or at least few visible to us so the plans of the leadership seem to be working just fine.

Rather than posting on the scandals and news stories to which the media are devoting so much attention today, I’d prefer to ask a question. What are the most important issues of the day for the United States? I think they are

• Immigration
• Our overextended military
• Health care costs
• General government misfeasance and incompetence
• Cybersecurity
• Hyperpoliticization for its own sake

What do you think the big issues are?

The slug of the thought-provoking piece by polymath Irvin Studin at GlobalBrief is:

Will America survive this century? How can it channel its most brilliant qualities and suppress its worst pathologies? What has it still to teach the world, and what must it learn to learn?

which you may notice echoes some of the themes I’ve been touching on here lately. Read the whole thing—it defies meaningful excerpting. He ends on a highly gloomy note:

We can be certain that, with China – geographically far closer to the US and continental North America than Washington or New York might imagine – returning to the strategic centrality and confidence it enjoyed before the Opium Wars that preceded the American Civil War in the 19th century, with the melting of the Arctic bringing Russia immediately to the borders of North America, and with today’s and tomorrow’s military and industrial technology making the US eminently ‘reachable’ – even by smaller powers, in the context of conventional warfare, asymmetric warfare and warfare by other means – there will be conflict on American soil in a foreseeable future.

Will America be clever enough to anticipate, avert or otherwise thwart (emerge victorious from) such conflict? That much, again, is not obvious at the time of this writing. The incurious bombast of present-day Americana does not bode well. Much will depend on whether the US is able to improve hugely its analytics and – as part of its capabilities – its strategic and political judgement. And if it does not, then America’s reaction, pre-emptive or retaliatory, to any surprising violation of its unique exemption from the world’s most terrible conflicts will be exceedingly ferocious – several orders of magnitude greater than the response to the discrete attacks of 2001.

Who knows what the world would look like the day after such a series of exchanges? What would America itself look like, if it were to survive at all? A curious possible end to the most brilliant and productive of modern countries would not be so shocking in the historical scheme of things… Of course, it could well be largely avoidable, in this same historical scheme of things…, if only this same country could bring itself to ask the right questions. Or to ask questions at all.

His perspective is interesting but I think it reflects a preoccupation with Russian points-of-view. I agree that “conflict on American soil” is incresingly likely. It may already have started and it’s likely to be street-to-street rather than facing foreign invaders.

One of Will Rogers’s most famous wisecracks was, when asked if he were a member of an organized political party, he responded “No, sir. I’m a Democrat”. Some things never change. At Atlantic Todd Purdum remarks on divisions among Democrats:

Rahm Emanuel, the former Clinton adviser and Obama chief of staff, told me he likens the current environment to the period following 1968, when Lyndon B. Johnson was succeeded by Richard Nixon, in a right-wing victory that exploited and exacerbated deep internal divisions in the Democratic Party, just as Trump’s ascendance has. Emanuel acknowledged that Johnson’s war in Vietnam makes the analogy imperfect—“unless you think the surge in Afghanistan counts as that, and I don’t”—but added, “We have seen this movie before.”

“Here’s the thing,” Emanuel told me. “Today’s progressives are more angry at Clinton and Obama than they are at Bush 43. Whether it’s Clinton’s ‘small ideas’ and welfare reform, or Obama’s Affordable Care Act without a public option—those are the things where they feel like there were missed moments for big, bold ideas. Really? And that’s what drives the energy. Yes, they’re angry at Trump. Yes, they’re angry at Bush. But a lot of the energy is directed at the fact that they don’t love those two presidents—which I’d remind everybody are the only two Democrats to get reelected since Franklin Roosevelt.”

Read the whole thing. Presently, black voters are far more supportive of Biden ‘s presidential candidacy than they are of any of the other Democratic candidates including the two black candidates running for president, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. That he was Obama’s vice president is not the only reason for that. I suspect they believe he is the most electable of the candidates running.