Tag Archives: U.S. decline

the U.S. constitution’s resilience? or rigidity?

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Flexible things can bend without breaking, while strong, rigid things can withstand a lot of force up to a point, then break catastrophically. Is the U.S. Constitution the latter? This Lawfare podcast on the Constitution made some interesting points, and I wish they would post a transcript.

  • The U.S. Constitution is just outdated. Countries around the world looking to write a new constitution used to look to the U.S. Constitution as a model, but this is no longer the case. One U.S. Supreme Court justice in an interview suggested South Africa’s latest constitution as a good modern model.
  • Constitutions around the world are amended on average about every 20 years. Some even lay out regular time tables for review and updating.
  • The U.S. Constitution is the world’s hardest constitution to amend. Newer constitutions tend to make the most important rights hard to amend, but less important details easier to amend, with a few tiers of how large a majority is needed to approve various proposed amendments.
  • The U.S. Constitution mostly lays out negative rights, in other words things the government can’t do to you like take away your gun. Newer constitutions include positive rights, like a right to health care or a clean environment.
  • Interestingly, individual U.S. state constitutions are much more modern in terms of rights, and many are updated regularly.

The Congressional Research Service did a report in 2016 on the constitutional convention process, which is one way the constitution can be amended, theoretically by the states and outside the direct control of Congress. Here are a couple interesting paragraphs:

From the 1960s through the early 1980s, supporters of Article V conventions mounted vigorous unsuccessful campaigns to call conventions to consider then-contentious issues of national policy, including a ban on school busing to achieve racial balance, restrictions on abortions, apportionment of state legislatures, and, most prominently, a requirement that the federal budget be balanced, except in wartime or other extraordinary circumstances. Although they came close to the constitutional requirement, none of these campaigns attained applications from 34 states.

With the failure of these efforts, interest in the Article V Convention alternative declined for more than 20 years, but over the past decade, there has been a gradual resurgence of attention to and support for a convention. Advocacy groups across a broad range of the political spectrum have embraced the convention mechanism as an alternative to perceived policy deadlock at the federal level. Using the Internet and social media to build campaigns and coalitions that once took much longer to assemble, they are pushing for a convention or conventions to consider various amendments, including the well-known balanced budget requirement, restrictions on the authority of the federal government, repeal of the corporate political contributions elements of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and others.

Sure, Citizens United has to go. Rather than the ghosts of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson whispering in the ears of our nine unelected Supreme Leaders to tell us what the First Amendment and all the other amendments mean in 2024, we should come to consensus on new words that say clearly what we want them to say. But even more fundamental would be to amend the constitution to make it easier to amend in the future. Reviewing constitutions around the world for modern best practices sounds like a great idea. Instituting tiers for the level of consensus needed to pass various types of amendments sounds like a great idea. And adding a time table for regular review of the constitution seems like a good idea. For example, maybe Congress would have to vote on amendments proposed by the states at least once per session or once every X years, or else a constitutional convention would automatically be triggered.

(slightly less) depressing stats on the U.S.: suicides

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Here are some suicide stats from Our World in Data. It would be nice if they would add some more groupings like OECD, but I have chosen a somewhat arbitrary sample of peer countries. It surprised me that even though we are hearing about “deaths of despair”, the U.S. is not doing terribly on this metric compared to peers. We are doing a bit worse than our close cultural cousins Canada and Australia. The UK does surprisingly well on this metric, even a bit better than Germany and Denmark. Latin America (I picked Mexico because they’re our neighbor and Brazil because they’re big) doesn’t seem to have a big issue with suicide. The two Asian countries I picked do seem to have an issue – Japan has a higher suicide rate than all the European countries I picked. Then there is a big jump to the two worst countries (that I picked arbitrarily), South Korea and Russia. Russia is the worst, but has brought its rate down a lot if you buy into this data analysis.

2021: Year in Review

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As per usual, I’ll list out and link to the stories I chose as the most frightening, most hopeful, and most interesting each month in 2021. Then I’ll see if I have anything smart to say about how it all fits together.

Survey of the Year’s Stories and Themes

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: A China-Taiwan military conflict is a potential start-of-World-War-III scenario. This could happen today, or this year, or never. Let’s hope for the latter. This is a near-term existential risk, but I have to break my own “rule of one” and give honorable mention to two longer-term scary things: crashing sperm counts and the climate change/fascism/genocide nexus.
  • FEBRUARY: For people who just don’t care that much about plants and animals, the elevator pitch on climate change is it is coming for our houses and it is coming for our food and water.
  • MARCH: In the U.S. upper Midwest (I don’t know if this region is better or worse than the country as a whole, or why they picked it), electric blackouts average 92 minutes per year, versus 4 minutes per year in Japan.
  • APRIL: One of the National Intelligence Council’s scenarios for 2040 involves “far-reaching changes designed to address climate change, resource depletion, and poverty following a global food catastrophe caused by climate events and environmental degradation”.
  • MAY: The Colorado River basin is drying out.
  • JUNE: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.
  • JULY: The western-U.S. megadrought looks like it is settling in for the long haul.
  • AUGUST: The U.S. is not prepared for megadisasters. Pandemics, just to cite one example. War and climate change tipping points, just to cite two others. Solutions or at least risk mitigation measures exist, such as getting a health care system, joining the worldwide effort to deal with carbon emissions, and as for war, how about just try to avoid it?
  • SEPTEMBER: The most frightening climate change tipping points may not be the ones we hear the most about in the media (at least in my case, I was most aware of melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, collapse of ocean circulation patterns). The most damaging may be melting permafrost on land and methane hydrates underwater, both of which contain enormous amounts of methane which could set off a catastrophic and unstoppable feedback loop if released in large quantities.
  • OCTOBER: The technology (sometimes called “gain of function“) to make something like Covid-19 or something much worse in a laboratory clearly exists right now, and barriers to doing that are much lower than other types of weapons. Also, because I just couldn’t choose this month, asteroids can sneak up on us.
  • NOVEMBER: Freakonomics podcast explained that there is a strong connection between cars and violence in the United States. Because cars kill and injure people on a massive scale, they led to an expansion of police power. Police and ordinary citizens started coming into contact much more often than they had. We have no national ID system so the poor and disadvantaged often have no ID when they get stopped. Everyone has guns and everyone is jumpy. Known solutions (safe street design) and near term solutions (computer-controlled vehicles?) exist, but are we going to pursue them as a society? I guess I am feeling frightened and/or depressed today, hence my choice of category here.
  • DECEMBER: Mass migration driven by climate change-triggered disasters could be the emerging big issue for 2022 and beyond. Geopolitical instability is a likely result, not to mention enormous human suffering.

Most hopeful stories:

  • JANUARY: Computer modeling, done well, can inform decisions better than data analysis alone. An obvious statement? Well, maybe to some but it is disputed every day by others, especially staff at some government regulatory agencies I interact with.
  • FEBRUARY: It is possible that mRNA technology could cure or prevent herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer, HIV, Zika and Ebola (and obviously coronavirus). With flu and coronavirus, it may become possible to design a single shot that would protect against thousands of strains. It could also be used for nefarious purposes, and to protect against that are ideas about what a biological threat surveillance system could look like.
  • MARCH: I officially released my infrastructure plan for America, a few weeks before Joe Biden released his. None of the Sunday morning talk shows has called me to discuss so far. Unfortunately, I do not have the resources of the U.S. Treasury or Federal Reserve available to me. Of course, neither does he unless he can convince Congress to go along with at least some portion of his plans. Looking at his proposal, I think he is proposing to direct the fire hoses at the right fires (children, education, research, water, the electric grid and electric vehicles, maintenance of highways and roads, housing, and ecosystems. There is still no real planning involved, because planning needs to be done in between crises and it never is. Still, I think it is a good proposal that will pay off economically while helping real people, and I hope a substantial portion of it survives.
  • APRIL: Giant tortoises reach a state of “negligible senescense” where they simply don’t age for a long time. Humans are distant relatives of giant tortoises, so maybe we can aspire to this some day. They are not invulnerable to injury and disease.
  • MAY: An effective vaccine for malaria may be on the way. Malaria kills more children in Africa every year than Covid-19 killed people of all ages in Africa during the worst year of the pandemic. And malaria has been killing children every year for centuries and will continue long after Covid-19 is gone unless something is done.
  • JUNE: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.
  • JULY: A new Lyme disease vaccine may be on the horizon (if you’re a human – if you are a dog, talk to your owner about getting the approved vaccine today.) I admit, I had to stretch a bit to find a positive story this month.
  • AUGUST: The Nordic welfare model works by providing excellent benefits to the middle class, which builds the public and political support to collect sufficient taxes to provide the benefits, and so on in a virtuous cycle. This is not a hopeful story for the U.S., where wealthy and powerful interests easily break the cycle with anti-tax propaganda, which ensure benefits are underfunded, inadequate, available only to the poor, and resented by middle class tax payers.
  • SEPTEMBER: Space-based solar power could finally be in our realistic near-term future. I would probably put this in the “interesting” rather than “hopeful” category most months, but I really struggled to come up with a hopeful story this month. I am at least a tiny bit hopeful this could be the “killer app” that gets humanity over the “dirty and scarce” energy hump once and for all, and lets us move on to the next layer of problems.
  • OCTOBER: The situation with fish and overfishing is actually much better than I thought.
  • NOVEMBER: Urban areas may have some ecological value after all.
  • DECEMBER: Covid-19 seems to be “disappearing” in Japan, or at least was before the Omicron wave. Maybe lessons could be learned. It seems possible that East Asian people have at least some genetic defenses over what other ethnic groups have, but I would put my money on tight border screening and an excellent public health care system. Okay, now I’m starting to feel a bit depressed again, sitting here in the U.S. where we can’t have these nice things thanks to our ignorant politicians.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • JANUARY: There have been fabulous advances in note taking techniques! Well, not really, but there are some time honored techniques out there that could be new and beneficial for many people to learn, and I think this is an underappreciated productivity and innovation skill that could benefit people in a lot of areas, not just students.
  • FEBRUARY: At least one serious scientist is arguing that Oumuamua was only the tip of an iceberg of extraterrestrial objects we should expect to see going forward.
  • MARCH: One study says 1-2 days per week is a sweet spot for working from home in terms of a positive economic contribution at the national scale. I think it is about right psychologically for many people too. However, this was a very theoretical simulation, and other studies attempting to measure this at the individual or firm scale have come up with a 20-50% loss in productivity. I think the jury is still out on this one, but I know from personal experience that people need to interact and communicate regularly for teams to be productive, and some people require more supervision than others, and I don’t think technology is a perfect substitute for doing these things in person so far.
  • APRIL: Hydrogen fuel cells may finally be arriving. Not so much in the U.S., where we can’t have nice things.
  • MAY: I learned about Lawrence Kohlberg, who had some ideas on the use of moral dilemmas in education.
  • JUNE: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.
  • JULY: “Cliodynamics” is an attempt at a structured, evidence-based way to test hypotheses about history.
  • AUGUST: Ectogenesis is an idea for colonizing other planets that involves freezing embryos and putting them on a spaceship along with robots to thaw them out and raise them. Fungi could also be very useful in space, providing food, medicine, and building materials.
  • SEPTEMBER: Philip K. Dick was not only a prolific science fiction author, he also developed a comprehensive theory of religion which could possibly even be the right one. Also, possibly related but not really, if there are aliens out there they might live in creepy colonies or super-organisms like ants or termites.
  • OCTOBER: I thought about how to accelerate scientific progress: “[F]irst a round of automated numerical/computational experiments on a huge number of permutations, then a round of automated physical experiments on a subset of promising alternatives, then rounds of human-guided and/or human-performed experiments on additional subsets until you hone in on a new solution… [C]ommit resources and brains to making additional passes through the dustbin of rejected results periodically…” and finally “educating the next generation of brains now so they are online 20 years from now when you need them to take over.” Easy, right?
  • NOVEMBER: Peter Turchin continues his project to empirically test history. In this article, he says the evidence points to innovation in military technologies being driven by “world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding“. What does not drive innovation? “state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication“. As far as the technologies coming down the pike in 2022, one “horizon scan” has identified “satellite megaconstellations, deep sea mining, floating photovoltaics, long-distance wireless energy, and ammonia as a fuel source”.
  • DECEMBER: Time reminded us of all the industries Elon Musk has disrupted so far: human-controlled, internal-combustion-fueled automobiles; spaceflight; infrastructure construction (I don’t know that he has really achieved any paradigm shifts here, but not for lack of trying), “artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, payment systems and cryptocurrency.” I’m not sure I follow a couple of these, but I think they missed satellites.

Continuing Signs of U.S. Relative Decline

Signs of U.S. decline relative to our peer group of advanced nations are all around us. I don’t know that we are in absolute decline, but I think we are now below average among the most advanced countries in the world. We are not investing in the infrastructure needed in a modern economy just to reduce friction and let the economy function. The annual length of electric blackouts in the U.S. (hours) compared to leading peers like Japan (minutes) is just one telling indicator. In March, I looked at the Build Back Better proposal and concluded that it was more like directing a firehose of money at a range of problems than an actual plan, but I hoped at least some of it would happen. My rather low but not zero expectations were met, as some limited funding was provided for “hard infrastructure” and energy/emissions projects, but little or nothing (so far, as I write this) to address our systemic failures in health care, child care, or education. The crazy violence on our streets, both gun-related and motor vehicle-related, is another indicator. Known solutions to all these problems exist and are being implemented to various extents by peer countries. Meanwhile our toxic politics and general ignorance continue to hold us back. Biden really gave it his best shot – but if this is our “once in a generation” attempt, we are headed down a road where we will no longer qualify as a member of the pack of elite countries, let alone its leader.

The Climate Change, Drought, Food, Natural Disaster, Migration and Geopolitical Instability Nexus

2021 was a pretty bad year for storms, fires, floods, and droughts. All these things affect our homes, our infrastructure, our food supply, and our water supply. Drought in particular can trigger mass migration. Mass migration can be a disaster for human rights and human dignity in and of itself, and managing it effectively is difficult even for well-intentioned governments. But an insidious related problem is that migration pressure can tend to fuel right wing populist and racist political movements. We see this happening all over the world, and the situation seems likely to get worse.

Tipping Points and other Really Bad Things We Aren’t Prepared For

We can be thankful that nothing really big and new and bad happened in 2021. My apologies to anyone reading this who lost someone or had a tough year. Of course, plenty of bad things happened to good people, and plenty of bad things happened on a regional or local scale. But while Covid-19 ground on and plenty of local and regional-scale natural disasters and conflicts occurred, there were no new planetary-scale disasters. This is good because humanity has had enough trouble dealing with Covid-19, and another major disaster hitting at the same time could be the one that brings our civilization to the breaking point.

So we have a trend of food insecurity and migration pressure creeping up on us over time, and we are not handling it well even given time to do so. Maybe we can hope that some adjustments will be made there to get the world on a sustainable track. Even if we do that, there are some really bad things that could happen suddenly. Catastrophic war is an obvious one. A truly catastrophic pandemic is another (as opposed to the moderately disastrous pandemic we have just gone through.) Creeping loss of human fertility is one that is not getting much attention, but this seems like an existential risk if it were to cross some threshold where suddenly the global population starts to drop quickly and we can’t do anything about it. Asteroids were one thing I really thought we didn’t have to worry much about on the time scale of any human alive today, but I may have been wrong about that. And finally, the most horrifying risk to me in the list above is the idea of an accelerating, runaway feedback loop of methane release from thawing permafrost or underwater methane hydrates.

We are almost certainly not managing these risks. These risks are probably not 100% avoidable, but since they are existential we should be actively working to minimize the chance of them happening, preparing to respond in real time, and preparing to recover afterward if they happen. Covid-19 was a dress rehearsal for dealing with a big global risk event, and humanity mostly failed to prepare or respond effectively. We are lucky it was one we should be able to recover from as long as we get some time before the next body blow. We not only need to prepare for much, much worse events that could happen, we need to match our preparations to the likelihood of more than one of them happening at the same time or in quick succession.

Technological Progress

Enough doom and gloom. We humans are here, alive, and many of us are physically comfortable and have much more leisure time than our ancestors. Our social, economic, and technological systems seem to be muddling through from day to day for the time being. We have intelligence, science, creativity, and problem solving abilities available to us if we choose to make use of them. Let’s see what’s going on with technology.

Biotechnology: The new mRNA technology accelerated by the pandemic opens up potential cures for a range of diseases. We need an effective biological surveillance system akin to nuclear weapons inspections (which we also need) to make sure it is not misused (oops, doom and gloom trying to creep in, but there are some ideas for this.) We have vaccines on the horizon for diseases that have been plaguing us for decades or longer, like malaria and Lyme disease. Malaria kills more children worldwide, year in and year out, than coronavirus has killed per year at its peak.

Promising energy technologies: Space based solar power may finally be getting closer to reality. Ditto for hydrogen fuel cells in vehicles, although not particularly in the U.S. (I’m not sure this is preferable to electric vehicles for everyday transportation, but it seems like a cleaner alternative to diesel and jet fuel when large amounts of power are needed in trucking, construction, and aviation, for example.)

Other technologies: We are actually using technology to catch fish in more sustainable ways, and to grow fish on farms in more sustainable ways. We are getting better at looking for extraterrestrial objects, and the more we look, the more of them we expect to see (this one is exciting and scary at the same time). We are putting satellites in orbit on an unprecedented scale. We have computers, robots, artificial intelligence of a sort, and approaches to use them to potentially accelerate scientific advancements going forward.

The State of Earth’s Ecosystems

The state and trends of the Earth’s ecosystems continue to be concerning. Climate change continues to churn through the public consciousness and our political systems, and painful as the process is I think our civilization is slowly coming to a consensus that something is happening and something needs to be done about it (decades after we should have been able to do this based on the evidence and knowledge available.) When it comes to our ecosystems, however, I think we are in the very early stages of this process. This is something I would like to focus on in this blog in the coming year. My work and family life are busy, and I have decided to take on an additional challenge of becoming a student again for the first time in the 21st century, but somehow I will persevere. If you are reading this shortly after I write it in January 2022, here’s to good luck and prosperity in the new year!

Saying something smart about Afghanistan?

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As I write on Monday, August 16, it appears the government of Afghanistan has surrendered to the Taliban with no or few shots fired. I am sure there will be an enormous number of words written about this in the coming decades, and many of them will be smarter than anything I could say now. Nonetheless, here are a few thoughts:

  1. Invading the Graveyard of Empires is not a good idea. Check on the current status of the British and Russian empires. Maybe we will look back on this moment in retrospect as the symbolic end of the U.S. empire (long live the republic!)
  2. I am not sure there is any such thing as humanitarian war. Both the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions were sold on humanitarian objectives, but both almost certainly caused more death and suffering among civilians than they prevented. Diplomacy, economic and trade pressure, humanitarian and peace-keeping missions may be the better way to go, even when they seem frustrating and relatively ineffective.
  3. I still think the Powell doctrine of limited objectives, overwelming force, may be right after all. That was unsatisfying in the case of the first Gulf War, but it was a quick, relatively successful conflict. What would that have looked like in Afghanistan? Well, if we had captured bin Laden early on, there might have been an excuse to leave. When that didn’t happen, we got bogged down with no way out that would not cause chaos. In the end, we just got out and let the chaos unfold. This looks bad for Biden, but it took some guts to make the call and carry it through.
  4. The U.S. just really doesn’t understand other countries. We seem to have trouble putting ourselves in other peoples’ shoes. I don’t fully trust what I see on the news, not because I necessarily think it is lies, but because I don’t trust our government and media to appropriately interpret events and present them to me. I don’t know what to do about this other than seek out a lot of different types of information and try to piece it together. Study history, travel and interact with people from other places when practical. Give expert opinion some weight, while also evaluating the evidence independently using tools like logic and system thinking. By the way, I don’t think censoring the internet is a way out of this. I want access to information and freedom to interpret it, even if there is some danger in everyone having these freedoms at the same time.
  5. What other lessons do we need to heed from past conflicts? Should we maybe invade Russia from Eastern Europe, or engage in some Pacific island hopping, hoping it will put pressure on a large, powerful, proud opponent to give in short of nuclear war? NO!!! Let’s not do this.

What do I think the U.S. should do? Unwind the empire, close foreign bases while providing training and equipment (not necessarily for free) to allies who really want that. Focus on diplomacy and trade. Reinvigorate the UN, or replace it with something better. Make sure we can defend our physical shores, and up our intelligence, cybersecurity and biosecurity games. Dial back and eventually eliminate the nuclear weapons worldwide, and figure out a plan to deal with bioweapons long-term. A war tax is an idea – fund all emergency appropriations with a clear tax that Americans see every day, for example a sales tax that is printed on our receipts, credit card statements, and pay checks. If we don’t deal with short-term geopolitical instability, it will occupy all our attention and leave us no capacity to deal with the longer term threats like food security and inundation of coastal population centers.

another indicator that the U.S. is falling behind

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The Atlantic has an article on just how badly the United States has dropped the ball on testing people for the novel coronavirus compared to other developed countries. We can add this to list along with overall life expectancy, child and maternal mortality, mass incarceration, depression, suicide, drug overdoses, blackouts, traffic delays, educational outcomes, drinking water quality, poverty, and the list goes on. We were great once, in the sense that we were the world’s leader on most or all of these categories. Over the last decade or two, we have not just lost that leadership position, we have fallen to the bottom of the pack and continue to lose ground. True patriots don’t just say their country is great again and hope that makes it true in the face of contrary evidence, they face the facts and do something about it.