I found this backgrounder about the complexity of maritime interdiction operations against North Korea at the Proceeding of the U. S. Naval Institute interesting. Here’s a snippet:

China and Russia both maintain strategic relationships with North Korea and likely will turn a blind eye to evasion of sanctions. The Arabian Gulf is a confined waterway, approximately 600 miles end to end, and all maritime traffic has to pass through the narrow Strait of Hormuz. One of the most difficult challenges there was stopping vessels that tried to avoid interdiction by sailing through Iranian territorial waters. North Korea’s ports and waterways connect directly to “safe-harbor” Chinese and Russian territorial waters, which extend for thousands of miles in either direction and lead directly to open ocean. With summertime melting of Arctic ice increasing, a ship could depart a North Korean port and travel through the Russian Northern Sea Route all the way to Norway—the first such transit without an icebreaker occurred in August 2017.

Developing interoperability and complementary rules of engagement among the 16 navies enforcing UNSC resolutions took many years in the Gulf. While the Navy continues to work with other naval services routinely, starting MIO operations with a new coalition of navies adds a significant layer of complexity. This will take time, and DPRK shipping doubtless will exploit any cracks in the coalition’s capabilities until they are made seamless.

Expect calls for a naval blockade of North Korea to increase.

In response to Joseph Postell’s complaints about situational constitutionalism and Congressional inaction at the Library of Law and Liberty, I would point out that the end of the “Golden Age of Congress” and the beginnings of the imperial presidency coincided with the capping of the number of Congressmen in the Appointment Act of 1911.

The Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 played a role, too, but that’s a subject for another post.

I found this article at the Wall Street Journal interesting for several reasons. Let’s start with an excerpt:

Ms. Komisar, 53, is a Jewish psychoanalyst who lives and practices on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. If that biographical thumbnail leads you to stereotype her as a political liberal, you’re right. But she tells me she has become “a bit of a pariah” on the left because of the book she published this year, “Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters.”

The premise of Ms. Komisar’s book—backed by research in psychology, neuroscience and epigenetics—is that “mothers are biologically necessary for babies,” and not only for the obvious reasons of pregnancy and birth. “Babies are much more neurologically fragile than we’ve ever understood,” Ms. Komisar says. She cites the view of one neuroscientist, Nim Tottenham of Columbia University, “that babies are born without a central nervous system” and “mothers are the central nervous system to babies,” especially for the first nine months after birth.

What does that mean? “Every time a mother comforts a baby in distress, she’s actually regulating that baby’s emotions from the outside in. After three years, the baby internalizes that ability to regulate their emotions, but not until then.” For that reason, mothers “need to be there as much as possible, both physically and emotionally, for children in the first 1,000 days.”

The regulatory mechanism is oxytocin, a neurotransmitter popularly known as the “love hormone.” Oxytocin, Ms. Komisar explains, “is a buffer against stress.” Mothers produce it when they give birth, breastfeed or otherwise nurture their children. “The more oxytocin the mother produces, the more she produces it in the baby” by communicating via eye contact, touch and gentle talk. The baby’s brain in turn develops oxytocin receptors, which allow for self-regulation at a later age.

Women produce more oxytocin than men do, which answers the obvious question of why fathers aren’t as well-suited as mothers for this sort of “sensitive, empathetic nurturing.” People “want to feel that men and women are fungible,” observes Ms. Komisar—but they aren’t, at least not when it comes to parental roles. Fathers produce a “different nurturing hormone” known as vasopressin, “what we call the protective, aggressive hormone.”

One of the aspects of the story that I found interesting is that I think it’s practically a Rorschach test for political views. If you’re an absolutist about equality between the sexes, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you found this story highly objectionable. So what if men and women are different?

A traditionalist conservative on the other hand will probably read this story as a vindication of his or her views of gender roles and the family. And so on.

It seems to me that, assuming the claims made in the article are correct, the empirical questions are what are the implications of this for child development and how persistent are they? Are the social changes of the last thirty or forty years in the developed world producing lasting psychological or emotional problems for our people? It would seem to that these matters should be verifiable but in all likelihood so politically volatile that they’re unlikely to be investigated.

The question it raises for me is that, again assuming that the claims made in the article are correct, there is no substitute for the relationship between mother and child, and that the harm is lasting, is what is the correct policy?

In the areas of parental leave and maternal leave the United States is, as in so much else, an outlier. Although employers may provide paid or unpaid parental or maternity leave as a benefit, they are not obligated to do so. Every OECD country other than the United States provides for some sort of obligatory paid maternal, in many cases paid by social insurance, i.e. the government. I hasten to note that by the standards articulated by Ms. Komisar (9 months after a child’s birth) no OECD country’s policy provides for adequate maternal leave.

I also don’t see how a reasonable policy governing maternal can be formulated without goring an entire herd of sacred cows. What I think is clear is that our present policies are inadequate.

What to say about the contretemps in Spain? In case you’re just tuning in here’s what’s happened so far:

1. The political leaders of the wealthy Catalan province of Spain decided to conduct a plebiscite on independence for the province.
2. The Spanish government asserted that the plebiscite was illegal under the present Spanish constitution.
3. A very large majority of a very small minority of the eligible voters in Catalonia voted in favor of independence.
4. Madrid condemned the result.
5. The Catalan regional government declared independence.
6. Madrid dissolved the Catalonian regional government and assumed direct rule.

Madrid has acted as expected, as it must, and as it should. It’s somewhat as though Silicon Valley had declared its independence from the State of California.

I’ve already asked my questions about this before. Does Catalonia really have a history distinct from Spanish history? My casual researches don’t suggest that it does. A linguistic community isn’t necessarily a country.

What’s the unit of measure of sovereignty? The province? The city? The block? The individual? Whatever the answer how is that to be managed?

IMO countries aren’t granted sovereignty, they seize it. Maybe things are different in Europe.

Update

If Catalonia’s police force remains neutral, Madrid’s takeover of the provincial government will stand.

In his gloomy long-term forecast on the return on investments at Forbes William Baldwin lost me a bit when he wrote this:

Stocks have returned a glorious 7% annually over the past century (total return, net of inflation). Continuing on the same course, they’d deliver very comfortable golden years to you. But they won’t do that. The stock market is now poised to deliver not even half its historical return.

because he perpetuated a widespread misunderstanding. Consider the chart of the performance of the Dow-Jones Industrial Average from 1915 to 2017, displayed above. It’s true that the average returns since the end of World War II have been about 7%.

What were the average returns from January 1966 to April 1995? They were zero over a twenty-nine year period. In other words if you started investing in a DJIA-indexed fund at age 35 in January of 1966 (if there had been such things at the time) and retired at age 64 your investments would have realized exactly nothing. Unless dividends were paid but that’s another story.

How about if you put money into a DJIA-indexed fund in December of 1999 and withdrew it in May of 2013? How much would you have realized. Again, zero.

The DJIA doesn’t increase in with smooth, dependable regularity but in fits and starts. Unless there’s a compelling reason to think otherwise we should expect that to continue for the foreseeable future or, in other words, we simply can’t predict what the value of an investment will be that far out. It depends not only on your acumen (or the acumen of your investment advisor—another topic for a post) but on your timing.

That’s why I believe that some form of social insurance is necessary. Putting your money into 30 year Treasuries is just about the equivalent of burying it in the ground and, unless you’re willing to accept higher levels of risk, the likelihood of your losing your money rises as you climb the “risk ladder” seeking higher returns. Some will be winners and some will be losers.

Unless you’re willing to allow the losers to starve, some form of social insurance is necessary. It also explains why I think the Fed’s strategy has been so damaging but that, too, is a topic for another post.

CNN has filed a story saying that special counsel Robert Mueller has received approval from a federal grand jury of the first charges in his investigation of Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election. No word yet on what the charges are or who they’re levied against. Also no identification of the source or sources for the story or independent corroboration from other sources or outlets.

You don’t have to look very hard for glowing characterizations of the numbers on housing sales for September. Jeffrey Snider provides a more dour view in his latest lengthy offering at RealClearMarkets:

The unadjusted sales estimate, that 52,000, was up almost 20%, too, but year-over-year rather than month on month. It sounds impressive but it’s actually more typical of the last few years, suggesting there wasn’t anything all that special about September’s builder activity. There really isn’t any good way, especially in a very noisy data series like home sales, to compare one month to the next.

There is much less for statistics in comparing September 2017 new home sales to those in September 2016, as I did above, or to those in September 1995. In fact, there were fewer new homes sold last month than in the same month twenty-two years ago; 52,000 vs. 54,000.

That’s the part to really focus on, and the one no one ever does in tying 20% growth to something it truly isn’t. The numbers that relate to the comparison, or should if there weren’t something else going on, are staggering. Between September 1995 and September 2017, the Civilian Non-institutional Population, the BLS’s estimate of potential laborers in the US, expanded by 56.6 million people.

How is it possible, then, that fewer new homes were sold in a “very good” month just recently than almost a generation ago?

By population alone there should have been something like 70,000 new homes sold in September (+56.6mm population represents a 28% gain, so 54,000 new homes sold in 1995 should lead to 69,300 new homes sold in 2017 for a constant demographic). The easy answer is the housing bust, meaning that twelve years ago and before there was a rush of new homes built that really should not have been; for some time, the US housing stock was overdone.

That explanation, however, doesn’t follow in the demographics, either. It has been, again, twelve years since that peak, and for almost all of those twelve years since then housing construction has remained at a rate well-below historical trends. By all counts, after so much time, the oversupply of those housing units has been absorbed and then some.

Basically, although the population has grown people don’t have enough money to buy houses, either because they don’t have jobs or because the jobs they do have don’t pay enough to buy houses.

To his analysis I would add one thing, something I haven’t mentioned in a while. When the factors of production are themselves portable Ricardo’s analysis of international trade is no longer operative. Comparative advantage no longer matters because what conveys that advantage may then move from country to country. All that matters is absolute advantage.

I didn’t even need to read Elizabeth Drew’s article at The New Republic, “Who Knew Trump Would Be a Weak President?”, to answer it. Anybody who’d been observing the presidency with an informed eye for any period of time knew.

In my opinion we’ve had at most four strong presidents in the post-war period, the strongest by far having been Johnson. Others I think were definitely strong presidents were Nixon and Reagan. Others can be argued.

I think it’s difficult to argue that we haven’t had three consecutive weak presidents, culminating in Donald Trump.

Can Trump recover? Can he become a strong president? Beats me. He claims to be a quick study but so far I haven’t seen it. I do not believe that any president can be a strong president without the ability to bend the Congress to his or her will and in the legal phrase, res ipsa loquitur.

A question for the interested student: are strong presidents good presidents?

Yesterday I sketched out how the Democrats are responding to their election loss last year. What has not been sufficiently pointed out is that both political parties are behaving as though they lost the presidential election for a very simple reason. Trump was elected president because enough voters in enough states to elect a president repudiated the positions of the political establishments of both major political parties in specific policy areas.

Now both Democrats and Republicans are hurriedly trying to underscore their past errors. I’m not sure how they think this will benefit them but they apparently think it will.