porcelain

A memoir by the DJ and musician, Moby (2016).  It tracks his life in NYC in the 1980's and 90's, when being in SoHo, Tribeca and Chelsea might mean taking your life into your own hands.  I have a reverence for that period in NYC, and kind of caught the tail end when I was in college and law school.  Needless to say (I use that term of phrase quite a bit, I think), I enjoyed this one.

A Peace to End All Peace

The subtitle is The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East and the author is David Fromkin (1989).

I first heard about this book back when I read the daisy chain of Doug Casey publications, with reference to it as some great exposition on why the Middle East is constantly on the precipice of war and decay.  And the basic point that the author makes, simply by reporting over and over on how European powers simply assumed that their values and mores would stick in the region, is that the maps were redrawn to reflect a foreign perspective without much consideration for the local populations.  Moreover, in deposing the Ottoman Empire, the age-old imperial order that the region had grown accustomed to, and to replace it with the European model of secular states (a structure that itself took fifteen-hundred years to take hold finally on the Continent), was to throw any balance out of whack.  And much of it was driven by the “Great Game”, that is the pursuit of European powers to thwart any Russian designs on Asia, manifested in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 that carved up the Middle East well before the War had been won.  This agreement, in concert with others that followed, created guiding mandates for the world after the War that simply took for granted the realities on the ground between native groups, much less any changes that had occurred simply in the progression of war.  None of these issues went away, and the legacy of these prior mistakes are still evident for all to see.

"The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!"

While I don’t watch the news or read the newspaper, I am keenly aware that Putin Derangement Syndrome has gone next level lately, particularly among the Democrats in Washington.  While I believe that an opposition is an important feature of our system, I think the distinction needs to be made between offering an alternative versus simply trying to re-write history and re-litigate the election.  Needless to say, I don’t think the angle currently being pursued is going to dethrone Mr. Trump in 2020.  And, as always, the folks at Geopolitical Futures offer a healthy and reasoned perspective on what the story really is with respect to Russia:

“The media and Trump’s opposition present this openness toward dialogue and Trump’s own personal admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin as evidence of his collusion with Russia.  But the only difference between Trump’s approach to Russia and that of his predecessors has been style, not substance. A year after Russia undermined confidence in U.S. security guarantees in the 2008 Georgian war, U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration tried to “reset” Russian relations. It failed miserably. President George W. Bush said in 2001 that he had met Putin, looked him in the eye, gotten “a sense of his soul,” and found him to be straightforward and trustworthy. Bush got it wrong too.

U.S. presidents always try to improve the relationship with Russia, and they always fail. In this sense, Trump is typical. Part of the reason successive U.S. presidents keep making this mistake is that presidents, like the electorate, tend to personalize everything. Trump wants to get along with Russia; Obama wanted a fresh start; Bush felt he knew Putin’s soul. They view Russia as something that can be handled by sheer force of personality. But the individuals and their personal preferences don’t matter, which is something Russia understands better than the United States does. Relationships between countries aren’t like relationships between people. Countries can’t be trusted to act any way except in their own self-interest.

U.S. presidents have been unable to improve U.S.-Russia relations because the two countries have opposing interests… [Russia] is a highly vulnerable country. To protect its core – around Moscow – from potential enemies, it must expand outward into Central Asia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe to develop buffer zones. (The U.S. is fortunate to have the Atlantic and Pacific oceans protecting it.) Russia will always push to have control over these areas, no matter who is serving as its president. If a liberal democratic revolution were to usher an opposition figure like Alexei Navalny into power tomorrow, or if Trump were impeached next week, the U.S. and Russia would still be at odds in the exact same parts of the world…

Despite the allegations of collusion against members of the Trump administration, the U.S. has not softened its policy toward Russia in Eastern Europe. Much has been made of Trump’s tough line on NATO, but the U.S. continues to solidify bilateral relations with countries like Poland, Romania and the Baltic states, all of which are crucial to establishing reliable defenses against potential Russian aggression. A U.S. armored brigade deployed to Poland as scheduled right before Trump’s inauguration and has not been withdrawn. Trump met with Romania’s president on June 9, and he plans to visit Poland in early July. Secretary of Defense James Mattis was in Lithuania last month. And Ukrainian media have reported that President Petro Poroshenko will visit Washington on June 19-20. Contrary to the media narrative, Russia’s position in Eastern Europe is weakening.”

The Rise and Fall of American Growth

The subtitle is The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War and the author is Robert J. Gordon (2016).

The overarching premise is that American growth apexes in the period from 1870-1970, and has been in steady decline ever since (with a short blip in the period from 1994-2004).  Part of the explanation is that many of the most important innovations and inventions that improved quality of life happened in that period, and were the sorts of the things that could only happen once – such as the internal combustion engine that brought cars and railroads to replace horses, electricity and the light bulb, clean water and municipal sewer systems, and refrigeration that enabled far less contamination of food.  All of these contributed to efficiencies in productivity and improvements in mortality rates and the overall standard of living, drawing people off the farms and into urban centers.

By contrast, in looking at the period since 1970 (defined as the “computer age”), beyond seeing only incremental improvements to the earlier ideas, the presence of greater income inequality has also compounded problems when looking at more recent growth and productivity statistics.  With respect to technological innovation, the author feels that good, steady, middle-level jobs have been lost to robots and algorithms, but also to the accompanying globalization and outsourcing, leaving behind mostly lower wage positions.  And in drawing the nexus to a more prevalent wage inequality since 1970, the author suggests looking at it top down and bottoms up.  In other words, at the higher end, Gordon believes that incomes have increased meaningfully because of changing economics for superstars, changing incentives for executive compensation, and capital gains on real estate and stocks.  Looking at the other end, he sees weakened labor unions, increased automation, declining purchasing power of the minimum wage, greater imports hollowing out the manufacturing sector, and greater immigration as contributors to lower wage rates for everyone outside the top percentiles.  What’s interesting, though, is in looking at the golden age of growth from 1945-1975, the author attributes the rise of unionization and the decline of global trade and immigration as explanations to the greater wage equality.  Ponder that last bit.

Anyway, as a last point, the author delves into an area that I find interesting, which is the question of whether WW2 brought economic prosperity to this country after the Great Depression.  He does generally support the premise, but with seemingly more nuance than the typical economist who says that any spending will do as fiscal stimulus, regardless of the purpose in mind.  To put a finer point on it, it was not simply the act of government spending in the war effort, it was in the technological innovation that came out of firms that were forced to boost output in spite of limited capital and labor.  Those innovations and changes did not regress simply because the war ended, and therefore, when paired with pent-up demand after wartime rationing, allowed productivity to remain high.  In other words, without that level of technological innovation, fiscal stimulus, even on the scale of war, does not automatically produce the ends that are often ascribed to it.

Lawyer Hat

In the midst of a professional pivot, I find myself very interested in brushing up on the law.  Such was the decision to pick up The Supremes’ Greatest Hits, a book by Michael Trachtman that provides a non-legalese understanding on 34 of the Supreme Court’s most important decisions over time (as an important disclaimer, it was published in 2006, so any decisions since then are not covered).  And while I do not have any specific needs to be a constitutional scholar with what I am working on, it can’t hurt to re-introduce myself to some of the important legal principles that guide the Court and make ours “a government of laws, not men”.  Those include judicial review, the commerce clause (and how it was cleverly wrapped into a basis for the Civil Rights Act), and the imagined yet realized right of privacy that enabled Roe v. Wade.  Fun stuff.

Paris Agreement

Far be it for me to act like any kind of expert on climate change, but I do get amusement out of the outrage at Trump’s “incomprehensible” decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement – mostly because the accords themselves were largely symbolic and without any real teeth to enforce the proposed mandates.

The United States is already a country that has reduced its carbon footprint because it stands at the forefront of technological innovation – the problem really lies with China and India, countries that are looking to emulate the United States but with far larger populations, and who will no doubt allow their economic imperatives to trump any stipulations that the Paris Agreement may announce.  To that line of reason, I think Stratfor summed it up well: “Geopolitical forces, rather than international deals, have shaped the United States’ incorporation of cutting-edge technologies since long before Trump was elected, and they will continue to do so long after his tenure ends.”  Thus, I don’t think there is real risk to the United States’ withdrawal, and it does not mean that the conversation about climate change and how to address it will end.  Nevertheless, I don’t think the current environment is conducive to that kind of nuance and reason, so instead we will just get vitriol and hot air about what to make of the situation.