David Deming on information economics and work; Martin Gurri on Obama-Harris foreign policy; Conor O'Brien and Adam Ozimek on manufacturing jobs; Scott Sumner on industrial policy
Napoleon marched into Russia using army boots supplied by British traders that had smuggled them past the Continental Blockade.
His own Marshals made a killing smuggling through the blockade. And all sorts of special interests in French society were able to get special legal exemptions for this or that "critical" thing to be imported.
There was a period very early on in the Continental system where a had bad harvest been combined with more pressure maybe the British could have been broken, but France's own legal exceptions got them through it. All of his attempts to bully and invade allies into joining it were spectacularly counter productive and never would have worked anyway had they gone well. If he put his own brother on the throne of Russia it would have gone no better than his brother on the thrown of Holland.
Stopping profitable trade is hard. Sanctions are just one instance. Many opponents of sanctions do, however, express some incoherence or cognitive dissonance in their rhetoric. Sanctions are somehow both futile and impossible to enforce so have zero impact, and at the same time, horrendously cruel causing the suffering of hundreds of thousands which their states are helpless to prevent. They are somehow both too harsh and not harsh enough.
US sanctions are also the reason hard left Latin American regimes do so poorly, economically. Chavez's policies weren't ruinous at all; it was trade sanctions that caused all the trouble!
I think they are harmful to the ordinary people of the countries affected. The governments have the money to get the things they need, even if it means pinching their people to get it. The people, not the war machine, gets hurt.
Maybe on some very very long timeline you might starve a country out like Britain did to Germany in WWI, but that's one of those "everyone loses" total war scenarios.
Beyond mere diversion of resources from people to regime, there is the additional problem of these regimes strategically arranging things to hurt certain of their disfavored sub-populations to as great an extent as possible while plausibly blaming them on the sanctions, while perversely leveraging the suffering of people they don't even care about to pressure sanctions-imposing countries to relent. In general my impression is that the idea that sanctions are an available foreign policy lever that is low cost and effective is one that just seems too tempting and leads to far more involvement and intervention in foreign matters than can be justified.
There is an excellent discussion of spillover benefits from foreign direct manufacturing investment in this recent "Billion Dollar Factories" report - https://ipc.mit.edu/research/manufacturing/ - but I get the impression that establishment economists are indifferent to considerations of long term economic stability for working class people.
"They start out with an anecdote about how US bombers destroyed most of Germany’s ball bearing production in 1943. This was supposed to cripple their war machine. Unfortunately, it had almost no effect."
No, that's not what happened with the Schweinfurt bombing efforts. Indeed, the analysis from the late 50's that "ball bearings didn't matter anyway" was a kind of revisionist sour grapes rationalization to cover up a fiasco. Even at the time they tried to cover for it by exaggerating German air losses by 300%, and the 'unimportance' is belied by the intelligence collected of the Germans thinking that, yeah, actually, the plants were important, especially since the industry was concentrated in just a few huge factories in one region "the bottleneck", and furthermore inferrable by their reallocation of robust amounts of scarce military resources to protect them, and a snap campaign to disperse production elsewhere in Germany as fast as possible specifically to reduce the vulnerability to expected subsequent bombings, an effort which proved prescient and successful. The first attempt in August 43 took out about a third of production but at very high cost in lost air power as by then the Germans were getting better and better at air defense, despite not having RADAR. That did indeed threaten to hit the German war machine hard - and had the mission been twice as efficient it could have indeed crushed the German war machine early, but the chance was missed, and the Germans had the opportunity to recover. The Germans had enough spare reserve stock and undamaged capacity to keep going while they rebuilt production, and, as you can probably guess, continue to substantially augment the air defense for it. Yes, they were able to replace lost capacity and buy some bearings from abroad from neutral countries, but this was hardly an equivalent substitute, as much more delayed, risky, and costly. The US had to wait two months to try again, this time thinking the addition of a lot more fighter escorts would help, but instead it was a total disaster, "Black Thursday", with a quarter of aircraft destroyed, another 40% damaged, 650 highly-trained bomber pilots and crewmen (a quarter) lost. The 305th BG was entirely annihilated. The gain was to shut down all bearing production in the region until 44, but by then there were new plants elsewhere and the loss was so great the US -lost- air superiority over Germany as a consequence for four months until "Big Week" in late February helped set the stage for D-Day.
The other problem, if I recall what I read correctly, is that factories proved far more resilient to high explosive bombing than Allied planners anticipated with most damage actually caused by the resulting fires. Firebombing as in Japan would have been more effective, probably at the cost of causing Dresden levels of civilian casualties (the Brits, again IIRC, were a lot more bloodthirsty about this and expected their nighttime raids to take out the civilian workforce)
My father participated in the strategic bombing campaign against Germany. His war records show that all of his sorties took place in March and April of 1945, shortly before Germany surrendered. Even at that late stage in the war, however, he said that he saw bombers on both sides of his B-24 get shot down.
Before jet engines it was hard to get aircraft carrying lots of fuel and heavy bombs to fly high and fast enough and with enough maneuverability to reduce vulnerability to both agile interceptors and air defense artillery. The B-29s (like the Enola Gay) were better but fewer in number and mostly sent to the Pacific because they had nearly double the max range of a B-24, just enough for a round trip to bomb Tokyo from the Mariana Islands but not enough from the closest base in Chengdu, China. At the end of 1943 it was decided to capture the Marianas in order to put the XXI BC and nearly all the B-29s there to keep pummeling and incinerating mainland Japan around the clock until the end of the war, and drop countless sea mines on their naval lanes and ports to shut down their maritime fighting and logistical capability in the aptly named "Operation Starvation." The Battle of the Philippine Sea was thus the D-Day of the Pacific, and just as important though much less famous, and began with the invasion of Saipan only 9 days after the first landings at Normandy. By luck, American intelligence got a hold of the penultimate Z version of the A-Go plan, which followed (recently decreased) Admiral Koga's vision for one decisive naval engagement that would crush the American Pacific Fleet. But the US Navy had the plan, used the invasion of Saipan to draw in the Japanese and provoke them into launching A-Go, leading to the biggest battles between carrier groups in history, and a crushingly asymmetric Japanese defeat even worse than Midway, destroying 90% of remaining Japanese carrier air group strength in -just two days- sinking almost all their carriers, destroying most of their aircraft, and killing almost all their trained, experienced pilots. Just three weeks earlier McArthur had launched the invasion of strategically critical Biak from Australia as the foothold on the southern Phillipine Sea needed for the recapture of the Philippines. But he did it with too few naval assets and the Japanese sent two of their most powerful battleship groups to crush him, which they would have, had they not been withdrawn at the critical moment to participate in A-Go, which, interestingly, they both survived.
Thanks very much for the historical/technical details. One of my father's older brothers was a pilot in the Pacific theater. I don't know what he flew, but his plane disappeared somewhere over the Pacific. We have a letter from the Department of the Army, basically saying they don't know what the hell happened. My father remained vehemently against war all his life, and unlike the stereotypical member of the 'Greatest Generation,' he was not proud of his service. Perhaps you may disagree, but I have no patience for all this 2nd-guessing about nuking Japan, like Tucker Carlson's complaining because supposedly Japanese Christians were concentrated in Nagasaki (he only seems to care about war victims when they are Christians). They can GFT, for all I care. My father survived, and I got to live.
I recall that the revisionist case is that destroying the ball bearing production didn't work, but hampering oil transmission and refinery capacity did. On the other hand, German industrial production set records all the way until end of 1944-45.
It's a biased source (since he was trying to suck up to his captors) but Speer claimed 6 more weeks of bombing on the ball bearing plants would have shortened the war by a year.
Well, they tried really hard and it wasn't enough (Speer's defenses shot my grandfather's bomber down such that he spent the war in a camp). I think it'd be very hard to prove that argument, although Speer might have been the one who could have.
There’s certainly stupidity where romanticizing the idea of paying people not to work is concerned, but the partisans, bi or no, are just useful idiots for that kind of elite “wisdom”, as they were for the intentional destruction of the technical skills of the country.
Oh yeah, I forgot, “technical” means something different, and more narrow on a blog like this. Manipulating a keyboard, data work, “collating” and managing, in highly technical fashion.
Well, good luck with that. I accidentally fell into a subreddit - thanks to the skills of the technically-gifted with information - for professors despite having nothing to do with professing, and readit for a few days before blocking, or muting (I forget the “technical” term). R/professors. I imagine half the posts on there could be fake. I mean, it’s Reddit (which is doing very well, according to the WSJ, a bright spot in the American, ah, technical economy).
Fake only has valence in relation to the real, of course, and the thrust of most posts is: 1) the kids are “spoiled” (that’s not the interesting part) or stupid; and 2) “I spent the first day teaching them how to do a google search, or use email”.
Hopefully someone is making due plans for an economy based on making toast for one another, walking apartment-bound dogs, and painting toenails.
"the intentional destruction of the technical skills of the country."
I don't want to guess regarding those in the lower half (regardless of how one defines lower and upper) but if we put a random sample from today's upper half against a similar group from before "destruction of technical skills," I take today.
"sanctions ought to be one of the easiest policies to adopt. But we now discover that Germany continues to supply large amounts of industrial goods to Russia, albeit funneled through central Asia"
Ever since Biden & Blinken's ridiculous sanctions on Russian energy in February, 2022 the US continues to pay Russia $1 Billion per annum for enriched uranium
Globalization hurts thousands of well-paid American workers, who vote. And don’t like losing 10 or 20 or 50% of their income because much higher paid execs decide to invest in overseas production. The fact that it helps tens or hundreds of thousands of people, non-US voters, shows that the Free Market theory is correct. It works. But those who lost income don’t like it—it has been a huge govt failure not to have more activist programs to help workers whose US jobs have disappeared.
2 cheers is not enough if the missing cheer is US voters. Economists have been lousy at proposing policies to help those hurt, while so many consumers get lower prices and companies often get higher profits.
How many Free Market supporters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
None! The free market will take care of it.
Zzzzzt. Bad answer, voters prefer active attempts at solutions, or at least harm mitigations. Such harm reduction reduces free markets, in theory & practice, but increases support of free markets so they stay more free, longer.
To maintain support for creative destruction, those workers whose jobs are destroyed need more than zero help. What is the least costly support to minimize anti-free trade sentiments?
The traditional "active attempt at solution" has been to urge people who lose jobs to go back to school, and to provide grants and loans, and direct subsidies to state schools. I suspect it is still the preferred policy of the Democratic Party. Alas, it is not working real well.
The most productive policy for promoting manufacturing and raising real wages ("good jobs") in the US would be to reduce the deficit to Σ(expenditures with NPV>0) with a combination of financing social insurance with a VAT and raising other revenue with a progressive consumption tax. Increasing high skilled immigration (Elon Musk notwithstanding :)) will also help.
Gurri's speculations about Obama's supposed views on violence as destiny or not are not particularly relevant to the support the US has given Ukraine in repelling the Russian invasions. It is, of course, unfortunate that Putin did not pay closer attention to Obama's "lecture" that aggression in Ukraine was not in Russia's interest. If not stymied by Trumpists in Congress I suspect that Harris will continue to demonstrate the validity of Obama's "lecture."
I wasn't able to finish reading Gurri's piece because I didn't want to subscribe to the Free Press, but I don't understand his argument that Obama carried out foreign policy via words. As Gurri notes, Obama based his candidacy on opposition to the Iraq war, but as I recall he also argued that Afghanistan was the 'right war,' and after he was elected he escalated our military involvement there, which eventually ended with Biden's disastrous withdrawal. And we still have a military presence in Iraq to some extent, don't we? Frankly, given the insurgency in Iraq, it never made sense to me that Afghanistan would turn out any better. Then there was the Syrian debacle (we still have a military presence there, don't we?), and the bombing campaign against Libya, which is still a mess as I understand it. As for Russia, Obama presided over the coup against the elected government of Ukraine (Yanukovich), and although he didn't respond with military aid when Putin annexed Crimea following the coup, it is not clear Russia would have invaded Ukraine in 2022, absent the coup that happened in Obama's second term. My view of Obama is that, underneath all that empty rhetoric, he went along with 'the establishment' in terms of his use of 'hard power,' and that he did so not out of principle, but cynically for the sole purpose of maintaining political power for himself and the Democratic Party. I agree with Gurri on one point, however -- Putin probably found Obama's lecturing to him annoying and condescending, and the lecturing was probably akin to waving a red flag in front of a bull.
I don't remember if I have seen you in particular voice opinions on this matter, so I apologize in advance if I incorrectly impute them based on vibes, but objections to that Ukrainian "coup" are rather rich coming from very much pro-Trump and "far-right" Americans who hate elected Democratic state and federal authorities with the passion of a thousand suns, argue about Trump's 2020 loss being due to electoral machinations which should have been stopped, perhaps by action of Congress such as refusing to certify the election, and that 1/6 people basically did nothing wrong except perhaps for not going far enough. Why should I be surprised that people's ideas on whether it's fine to stand up against a corrupt government which endangers one's country depend on political alignments.
You want to talk about left vs. right hypocrisy, you got it. The EU observers who monitored the election of Yanukovich judged it to be a legitimate election. Yet Mike McFaul of the Hoover Institute (the site of what we homies used to call 'Hoover's last erection') had the nerve to say in a talk (see youtube) that Yanukovich was 'narrowly elected' while the 2014 Maidan coup was a 'popular uprising.' Get it? The CIA-armed coup against the legitimately elected President of Ukraine was real democracy when a leftist partisan like McFaul says it is, but when a bunch of unarmed Trump supporters trampled through the halls of Congress January 6th after being let in by guards and one of them, a woman, was shot in cold blood by a black cop, that was an anti-democratic insurrection. The essential elements of a free and fair election are well understood: a free press (a condition violated by the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, among other things), same-day in-person voting, voter ID, paper ballots. When you relax those restrictions and allow practices like prolonged early voting, mass mail-in ballots, no ID required, electronic voting machines, and 'ballot harvesting,' you get a system that by design is impossible to audit and is ripe for election fraud and rigging, with the inevitable result that a large percentage of the population no longer trusts the outcome and 'democracy' is thereby undermined. The only recent presidential election in which I have any confidence was the 2016 election, and that is because the outcome was not only unexpected, but it was opposed on a bipartisan basis by the establishment. And btw, I didn't vote for either candidate in that one.
My point was the manipulation of language to imply that the election outcome was not democratic. And the 'narrowness' of the difference reflects the ethnic divide between Ukrainian citizens who identify as ethnic Ukrainians versus those who identify as Russian (not to mention the Hungarians and the Poles, among others), which is probably among the main reasons Ukraine has been politically unstable since the collapse of the USSR.
Right, that was one of Trump's many stupid decisions, especially given the role of a Ukrainian Jew (Vindman) in getting him impeached a second time, but at least his State Department didn't employ Vicky Nuland (she worked for Cheney before being part of Obama's Administration, and returned under Biden), and unlike Biden, he didn't overtly threaten Russia with making Ukraine a NATO member. And even though Obama sent only tents and blankets, I'm pretty sure NATO started building up and training Ukraine's military under Obama's watch, following the Minsk Accords of 2014 and 2015.
Russia isn't militarily threatened by NATO, or it wouldn't have taken away most military assets from north-western borders after Finland's accession. NATO countries sold Russia the machine tools and technologies with which it built up its army, ffs! Russian tanks used French optics, Russia's sole modern tank training ground was built by Rheinmetall - with construction continuing after Putin annexed Crimea, by the way. Russia earned trillions selling hydrocarbons to NATO countries who were more than happy to buy them, sometimes to their own detriment (like Germany decommissioning its nuclear power plants partly because Russian natural gas was "greener" and cheaper). Russia hates not being able to bully and subject neighbors which used to be part of its empire, and that's what NATO membership would do.
Whether or not Russia is militarily threatened by NATO is moot. The Russian government under Yeltsin and Putin, in common with the predecessor Soviet government, has exhibited a consistent pattern of responding militarily to perceived threats internally (eg. Chechnya) and in bordering states (its 'buffer zone'). The policy of dangling NATO membership for Ukraine over Russia's head was designed to provoke a military response, in the apparent but mistaken belief that another round of even more severe financial and trade sanctions plus some military aid to Ukraine would bring Putin and the Russian economy to its knees. How did that work out? Your insinuation that the Russian military has long depended on Western technology is irrelevant. Even if it is completely accurate, one way or another the technology is still getting through the sanctions net, and the Russians are still pumping out more artillery shells, missiles, tanks and other military equipment than all of NATO combined. I've flown on Soviet-made aircraft many times and lived to tell the tale, and frankly, given a choice between a Russian-made jet and one manufactured by Boeing, I'd choose the former any day. Having lived in Russia, I don't need someone else to tell me that the Russians can be bullies. I've experienced it firsthand. But going into a land-based proxy war of attrition against Russia without sufficient stockpiles of ammunition and the capacity to replenish them is just plain stupid. And if NATO membership would protect Ukraine from Russian bullying, why doesn't the US and its NATO allies just go ahead and make Ukraine a member? Think about it.
NATO membership has protected the Baltics and former Warsaw Pact members from Russian bullying very well, which is why they spent the 90s lobbying and begging to be admitted.
I'm curious why anyone would think the areas hit by the China Shock would be the one's receiving new economic relevance....these are the locations that "caused" the China shock in the first place, i.e., unionized high paid line workers fomenting discord, strikes, etc. Of course the "new" jobs aren't going back to those places.
"He speculates that foreign policy under a Harris Presidency would continue to be carried out via words."
I've been mis-paraphrased countless times, including yesterday and at least one other time in the same thread in comments on an AK post from a couple days ago. Obama may have said this but I never heard it so I'm skeptical.
It would be a little odd if he had said it because while his line in the Syrian sand turned out to be all words, the larger body of his foreign policy definitely wasn't.
“…we are data-drenched, to the point of drowning…” Yes, isn’t it wonderful?! Snuggling up with books, taking photos of books, reading books, writing in books, posting about books, buying books, discussing books and carrying around books wherever I go. Only problem is, I don’t have enough time to read books. Which reminds me….I should leave here and get back to my books.
From Iran hawks like Gurri, I would like to hear how they plan to achieve their goals without a war involving five figure US casualties. Or much worse if the Iranians decide to put in the two weeks to finish building a nuclear weapon and then use it.
If I thought maximum pressure stood any chance of success I would take it seriously as an alternative to the Obama approach. But realistically, if your goal is regime change there that means an invasion, which is just not a serious option.
The US could suffer millions of casualties and keep going. That's not really the problem. The difficulty is doing it without facing a lot of rabble rousing from rival domestic elites.
A militaristic society is quite different from a pacifistic, mercantile, quasi-Quaker society. In militaristic societies all the songs and poems are about war and beautiful death. Our society's songs are mostly about fornication. Our movies concern how godlike superheroes can relieve ordinary people from the burdens of duty. This poses a real problem for hawks who shriek like bad-cosplay-Spartans to get people who just want to vape marijuana and work fake jobs to go die in Persia for glory. So Obama's strategy is without a doubt better fitted to the American people as they are.
Under current conditions, I agree invasion seems unlikely. Will it be as unlikely under future conditions? Maybe not. Depends on the conditions, right?
I'm not just saying it's unlikely, I'm saying it's a really bad option. Worse than just letting Iran have free rein, although I don't favor doing that by any means.
In most or all conceivable situations I would agree with that too. But what about the inconceivable? What if Iran were able to launch a ground attack on Israel? What if they already have nukes and tried to launch one on Israel?
Ok, maybe we still don't invade but is there any doubt we would try to ENTIRELY destroy anything in the country that looked the least bit military?
They would have to go through Iraq, Syria, and/or Jordan to get through on the ground, and it's not likely they'd be able to get the equipment needed that far intact. On a longer timeline, as in a generation or so, maybe that would be feasible for them, but now almost certainly not. A nuclear exchange would be challenging to predict, but there are certainly people who have written up plans to account for it.
This makes sense but it isn't really what today's Iran hawks are complaining about. They seem to think that in the current situation, if we just engage in enough low intensity tit for tat conflict with Iran and its proxies, magical geopolitical forces will make everything turn out better.
Right, but I think it would require magical geopolitical forces to make it turn out better than Obama-style diplomatic deal-making would be. So the view that it is the least bad option requires the sort of magical thinking I'm talking about.
Napoleon marched into Russia using army boots supplied by British traders that had smuggled them past the Continental Blockade.
His own Marshals made a killing smuggling through the blockade. And all sorts of special interests in French society were able to get special legal exemptions for this or that "critical" thing to be imported.
There was a period very early on in the Continental system where a had bad harvest been combined with more pressure maybe the British could have been broken, but France's own legal exceptions got them through it. All of his attempts to bully and invade allies into joining it were spectacularly counter productive and never would have worked anyway had they gone well. If he put his own brother on the throne of Russia it would have gone no better than his brother on the thrown of Holland.
Sanctions are hard.
Stopping profitable trade is hard. Sanctions are just one instance. Many opponents of sanctions do, however, express some incoherence or cognitive dissonance in their rhetoric. Sanctions are somehow both futile and impossible to enforce so have zero impact, and at the same time, horrendously cruel causing the suffering of hundreds of thousands which their states are helpless to prevent. They are somehow both too harsh and not harsh enough.
US sanctions are also the reason hard left Latin American regimes do so poorly, economically. Chavez's policies weren't ruinous at all; it was trade sanctions that caused all the trouble!
I think they are harmful to the ordinary people of the countries affected. The governments have the money to get the things they need, even if it means pinching their people to get it. The people, not the war machine, gets hurt.
Maybe on some very very long timeline you might starve a country out like Britain did to Germany in WWI, but that's one of those "everyone loses" total war scenarios.
Beyond mere diversion of resources from people to regime, there is the additional problem of these regimes strategically arranging things to hurt certain of their disfavored sub-populations to as great an extent as possible while plausibly blaming them on the sanctions, while perversely leveraging the suffering of people they don't even care about to pressure sanctions-imposing countries to relent. In general my impression is that the idea that sanctions are an available foreign policy lever that is low cost and effective is one that just seems too tempting and leads to far more involvement and intervention in foreign matters than can be justified.
re: "romanticizing manufacturing jobs"
Average hourly total compensation for production workers: $35.12
Average hourly total compensation for service workers: $25.22
Average hourly total compensation for office and sales: $34.00
- https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ecec.t02.htm
I don't have a link but I recall reading that manufacturing jobs also tend to generate more supporting jobs as well.
There is an excellent discussion of spillover benefits from foreign direct manufacturing investment in this recent "Billion Dollar Factories" report - https://ipc.mit.edu/research/manufacturing/ - but I get the impression that establishment economists are indifferent to considerations of long term economic stability for working class people.
"They start out with an anecdote about how US bombers destroyed most of Germany’s ball bearing production in 1943. This was supposed to cripple their war machine. Unfortunately, it had almost no effect."
No, that's not what happened with the Schweinfurt bombing efforts. Indeed, the analysis from the late 50's that "ball bearings didn't matter anyway" was a kind of revisionist sour grapes rationalization to cover up a fiasco. Even at the time they tried to cover for it by exaggerating German air losses by 300%, and the 'unimportance' is belied by the intelligence collected of the Germans thinking that, yeah, actually, the plants were important, especially since the industry was concentrated in just a few huge factories in one region "the bottleneck", and furthermore inferrable by their reallocation of robust amounts of scarce military resources to protect them, and a snap campaign to disperse production elsewhere in Germany as fast as possible specifically to reduce the vulnerability to expected subsequent bombings, an effort which proved prescient and successful. The first attempt in August 43 took out about a third of production but at very high cost in lost air power as by then the Germans were getting better and better at air defense, despite not having RADAR. That did indeed threaten to hit the German war machine hard - and had the mission been twice as efficient it could have indeed crushed the German war machine early, but the chance was missed, and the Germans had the opportunity to recover. The Germans had enough spare reserve stock and undamaged capacity to keep going while they rebuilt production, and, as you can probably guess, continue to substantially augment the air defense for it. Yes, they were able to replace lost capacity and buy some bearings from abroad from neutral countries, but this was hardly an equivalent substitute, as much more delayed, risky, and costly. The US had to wait two months to try again, this time thinking the addition of a lot more fighter escorts would help, but instead it was a total disaster, "Black Thursday", with a quarter of aircraft destroyed, another 40% damaged, 650 highly-trained bomber pilots and crewmen (a quarter) lost. The 305th BG was entirely annihilated. The gain was to shut down all bearing production in the region until 44, but by then there were new plants elsewhere and the loss was so great the US -lost- air superiority over Germany as a consequence for four months until "Big Week" in late February helped set the stage for D-Day.
The other problem, if I recall what I read correctly, is that factories proved far more resilient to high explosive bombing than Allied planners anticipated with most damage actually caused by the resulting fires. Firebombing as in Japan would have been more effective, probably at the cost of causing Dresden levels of civilian casualties (the Brits, again IIRC, were a lot more bloodthirsty about this and expected their nighttime raids to take out the civilian workforce)
My father participated in the strategic bombing campaign against Germany. His war records show that all of his sorties took place in March and April of 1945, shortly before Germany surrendered. Even at that late stage in the war, however, he said that he saw bombers on both sides of his B-24 get shot down.
Before jet engines it was hard to get aircraft carrying lots of fuel and heavy bombs to fly high and fast enough and with enough maneuverability to reduce vulnerability to both agile interceptors and air defense artillery. The B-29s (like the Enola Gay) were better but fewer in number and mostly sent to the Pacific because they had nearly double the max range of a B-24, just enough for a round trip to bomb Tokyo from the Mariana Islands but not enough from the closest base in Chengdu, China. At the end of 1943 it was decided to capture the Marianas in order to put the XXI BC and nearly all the B-29s there to keep pummeling and incinerating mainland Japan around the clock until the end of the war, and drop countless sea mines on their naval lanes and ports to shut down their maritime fighting and logistical capability in the aptly named "Operation Starvation." The Battle of the Philippine Sea was thus the D-Day of the Pacific, and just as important though much less famous, and began with the invasion of Saipan only 9 days after the first landings at Normandy. By luck, American intelligence got a hold of the penultimate Z version of the A-Go plan, which followed (recently decreased) Admiral Koga's vision for one decisive naval engagement that would crush the American Pacific Fleet. But the US Navy had the plan, used the invasion of Saipan to draw in the Japanese and provoke them into launching A-Go, leading to the biggest battles between carrier groups in history, and a crushingly asymmetric Japanese defeat even worse than Midway, destroying 90% of remaining Japanese carrier air group strength in -just two days- sinking almost all their carriers, destroying most of their aircraft, and killing almost all their trained, experienced pilots. Just three weeks earlier McArthur had launched the invasion of strategically critical Biak from Australia as the foothold on the southern Phillipine Sea needed for the recapture of the Philippines. But he did it with too few naval assets and the Japanese sent two of their most powerful battleship groups to crush him, which they would have, had they not been withdrawn at the critical moment to participate in A-Go, which, interestingly, they both survived.
Thanks very much for the historical/technical details. One of my father's older brothers was a pilot in the Pacific theater. I don't know what he flew, but his plane disappeared somewhere over the Pacific. We have a letter from the Department of the Army, basically saying they don't know what the hell happened. My father remained vehemently against war all his life, and unlike the stereotypical member of the 'Greatest Generation,' he was not proud of his service. Perhaps you may disagree, but I have no patience for all this 2nd-guessing about nuking Japan, like Tucker Carlson's complaining because supposedly Japanese Christians were concentrated in Nagasaki (he only seems to care about war victims when they are Christians). They can GFT, for all I care. My father survived, and I got to live.
I recall that the revisionist case is that destroying the ball bearing production didn't work, but hampering oil transmission and refinery capacity did. On the other hand, German industrial production set records all the way until end of 1944-45.
It's a biased source (since he was trying to suck up to his captors) but Speer claimed 6 more weeks of bombing on the ball bearing plants would have shortened the war by a year.
Well, they tried really hard and it wasn't enough (Speer's defenses shot my grandfather's bomber down such that he spent the war in a camp). I think it'd be very hard to prove that argument, although Speer might have been the one who could have.
There’s certainly stupidity where romanticizing the idea of paying people not to work is concerned, but the partisans, bi or no, are just useful idiots for that kind of elite “wisdom”, as they were for the intentional destruction of the technical skills of the country.
Oh yeah, I forgot, “technical” means something different, and more narrow on a blog like this. Manipulating a keyboard, data work, “collating” and managing, in highly technical fashion.
Well, good luck with that. I accidentally fell into a subreddit - thanks to the skills of the technically-gifted with information - for professors despite having nothing to do with professing, and readit for a few days before blocking, or muting (I forget the “technical” term). R/professors. I imagine half the posts on there could be fake. I mean, it’s Reddit (which is doing very well, according to the WSJ, a bright spot in the American, ah, technical economy).
Fake only has valence in relation to the real, of course, and the thrust of most posts is: 1) the kids are “spoiled” (that’s not the interesting part) or stupid; and 2) “I spent the first day teaching them how to do a google search, or use email”.
Hopefully someone is making due plans for an economy based on making toast for one another, walking apartment-bound dogs, and painting toenails.
"the intentional destruction of the technical skills of the country."
I don't want to guess regarding those in the lower half (regardless of how one defines lower and upper) but if we put a random sample from today's upper half against a similar group from before "destruction of technical skills," I take today.
The juxtaposition of these articles is like a step into an economic subconscious.
1. Yay for the information economy.
2. History hasn't ended.
3. Pooh-pooh manufacturing goods.
4. Turns out manufacturing goods have a rather outsized strategic importance in a world still subject to history.
"sanctions ought to be one of the easiest policies to adopt. But we now discover that Germany continues to supply large amounts of industrial goods to Russia, albeit funneled through central Asia"
Ever since Biden & Blinken's ridiculous sanctions on Russian energy in February, 2022 the US continues to pay Russia $1 Billion per annum for enriched uranium
The hypocrisy is deafening.
Globalization hurts thousands of well-paid American workers, who vote. And don’t like losing 10 or 20 or 50% of their income because much higher paid execs decide to invest in overseas production. The fact that it helps tens or hundreds of thousands of people, non-US voters, shows that the Free Market theory is correct. It works. But those who lost income don’t like it—it has been a huge govt failure not to have more activist programs to help workers whose US jobs have disappeared.
2 cheers is not enough if the missing cheer is US voters. Economists have been lousy at proposing policies to help those hurt, while so many consumers get lower prices and companies often get higher profits.
How many Free Market supporters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
None! The free market will take care of it.
Zzzzzt. Bad answer, voters prefer active attempts at solutions, or at least harm mitigations. Such harm reduction reduces free markets, in theory & practice, but increases support of free markets so they stay more free, longer.
To maintain support for creative destruction, those workers whose jobs are destroyed need more than zero help. What is the least costly support to minimize anti-free trade sentiments?
IDK, but I would like to know.
The traditional "active attempt at solution" has been to urge people who lose jobs to go back to school, and to provide grants and loans, and direct subsidies to state schools. I suspect it is still the preferred policy of the Democratic Party. Alas, it is not working real well.
The most productive policy for promoting manufacturing and raising real wages ("good jobs") in the US would be to reduce the deficit to Σ(expenditures with NPV>0) with a combination of financing social insurance with a VAT and raising other revenue with a progressive consumption tax. Increasing high skilled immigration (Elon Musk notwithstanding :)) will also help.
Gurri's speculations about Obama's supposed views on violence as destiny or not are not particularly relevant to the support the US has given Ukraine in repelling the Russian invasions. It is, of course, unfortunate that Putin did not pay closer attention to Obama's "lecture" that aggression in Ukraine was not in Russia's interest. If not stymied by Trumpists in Congress I suspect that Harris will continue to demonstrate the validity of Obama's "lecture."
I wasn't able to finish reading Gurri's piece because I didn't want to subscribe to the Free Press, but I don't understand his argument that Obama carried out foreign policy via words. As Gurri notes, Obama based his candidacy on opposition to the Iraq war, but as I recall he also argued that Afghanistan was the 'right war,' and after he was elected he escalated our military involvement there, which eventually ended with Biden's disastrous withdrawal. And we still have a military presence in Iraq to some extent, don't we? Frankly, given the insurgency in Iraq, it never made sense to me that Afghanistan would turn out any better. Then there was the Syrian debacle (we still have a military presence there, don't we?), and the bombing campaign against Libya, which is still a mess as I understand it. As for Russia, Obama presided over the coup against the elected government of Ukraine (Yanukovich), and although he didn't respond with military aid when Putin annexed Crimea following the coup, it is not clear Russia would have invaded Ukraine in 2022, absent the coup that happened in Obama's second term. My view of Obama is that, underneath all that empty rhetoric, he went along with 'the establishment' in terms of his use of 'hard power,' and that he did so not out of principle, but cynically for the sole purpose of maintaining political power for himself and the Democratic Party. I agree with Gurri on one point, however -- Putin probably found Obama's lecturing to him annoying and condescending, and the lecturing was probably akin to waving a red flag in front of a bull.
I don't remember if I have seen you in particular voice opinions on this matter, so I apologize in advance if I incorrectly impute them based on vibes, but objections to that Ukrainian "coup" are rather rich coming from very much pro-Trump and "far-right" Americans who hate elected Democratic state and federal authorities with the passion of a thousand suns, argue about Trump's 2020 loss being due to electoral machinations which should have been stopped, perhaps by action of Congress such as refusing to certify the election, and that 1/6 people basically did nothing wrong except perhaps for not going far enough. Why should I be surprised that people's ideas on whether it's fine to stand up against a corrupt government which endangers one's country depend on political alignments.
You want to talk about left vs. right hypocrisy, you got it. The EU observers who monitored the election of Yanukovich judged it to be a legitimate election. Yet Mike McFaul of the Hoover Institute (the site of what we homies used to call 'Hoover's last erection') had the nerve to say in a talk (see youtube) that Yanukovich was 'narrowly elected' while the 2014 Maidan coup was a 'popular uprising.' Get it? The CIA-armed coup against the legitimately elected President of Ukraine was real democracy when a leftist partisan like McFaul says it is, but when a bunch of unarmed Trump supporters trampled through the halls of Congress January 6th after being let in by guards and one of them, a woman, was shot in cold blood by a black cop, that was an anti-democratic insurrection. The essential elements of a free and fair election are well understood: a free press (a condition violated by the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, among other things), same-day in-person voting, voter ID, paper ballots. When you relax those restrictions and allow practices like prolonged early voting, mass mail-in ballots, no ID required, electronic voting machines, and 'ballot harvesting,' you get a system that by design is impossible to audit and is ripe for election fraud and rigging, with the inevitable result that a large percentage of the population no longer trusts the outcome and 'democracy' is thereby undermined. The only recent presidential election in which I have any confidence was the 2016 election, and that is because the outcome was not only unexpected, but it was opposed on a bipartisan basis by the establishment. And btw, I didn't vote for either candidate in that one.
> had the nerve to say in a talk that Yanukovich was 'narrowly elected'
2010 election vote counts were 12,481,266 for Yanukovich, 11,593,357 for Timoshenko, or a 3.5% difference. What do you call this? A landslide?
> CIA-armed
> armed
Okay, I suppose there's nothing left to talk about. Have a nice day.
My point was the manipulation of language to imply that the election outcome was not democratic. And the 'narrowness' of the difference reflects the ethnic divide between Ukrainian citizens who identify as ethnic Ukrainians versus those who identify as Russian (not to mention the Hungarians and the Poles, among others), which is probably among the main reasons Ukraine has been politically unstable since the collapse of the USSR.
As for your second point, for a revisionist view of Maidan, see this page from a Canadian professor of Ukrainian origin: https://uottawa.academia.edu/IvanKatchanovski
Well, FWIW, Trump sent Javelins to Ukraine as opposed to Obama sending tents and blankets.
Right, that was one of Trump's many stupid decisions, especially given the role of a Ukrainian Jew (Vindman) in getting him impeached a second time, but at least his State Department didn't employ Vicky Nuland (she worked for Cheney before being part of Obama's Administration, and returned under Biden), and unlike Biden, he didn't overtly threaten Russia with making Ukraine a NATO member. And even though Obama sent only tents and blankets, I'm pretty sure NATO started building up and training Ukraine's military under Obama's watch, following the Minsk Accords of 2014 and 2015.
Russia isn't militarily threatened by NATO, or it wouldn't have taken away most military assets from north-western borders after Finland's accession. NATO countries sold Russia the machine tools and technologies with which it built up its army, ffs! Russian tanks used French optics, Russia's sole modern tank training ground was built by Rheinmetall - with construction continuing after Putin annexed Crimea, by the way. Russia earned trillions selling hydrocarbons to NATO countries who were more than happy to buy them, sometimes to their own detriment (like Germany decommissioning its nuclear power plants partly because Russian natural gas was "greener" and cheaper). Russia hates not being able to bully and subject neighbors which used to be part of its empire, and that's what NATO membership would do.
Whether or not Russia is militarily threatened by NATO is moot. The Russian government under Yeltsin and Putin, in common with the predecessor Soviet government, has exhibited a consistent pattern of responding militarily to perceived threats internally (eg. Chechnya) and in bordering states (its 'buffer zone'). The policy of dangling NATO membership for Ukraine over Russia's head was designed to provoke a military response, in the apparent but mistaken belief that another round of even more severe financial and trade sanctions plus some military aid to Ukraine would bring Putin and the Russian economy to its knees. How did that work out? Your insinuation that the Russian military has long depended on Western technology is irrelevant. Even if it is completely accurate, one way or another the technology is still getting through the sanctions net, and the Russians are still pumping out more artillery shells, missiles, tanks and other military equipment than all of NATO combined. I've flown on Soviet-made aircraft many times and lived to tell the tale, and frankly, given a choice between a Russian-made jet and one manufactured by Boeing, I'd choose the former any day. Having lived in Russia, I don't need someone else to tell me that the Russians can be bullies. I've experienced it firsthand. But going into a land-based proxy war of attrition against Russia without sufficient stockpiles of ammunition and the capacity to replenish them is just plain stupid. And if NATO membership would protect Ukraine from Russian bullying, why doesn't the US and its NATO allies just go ahead and make Ukraine a member? Think about it.
NATO membership has protected the Baltics and former Warsaw Pact members from Russian bullying very well, which is why they spent the 90s lobbying and begging to be admitted.
I'm curious why anyone would think the areas hit by the China Shock would be the one's receiving new economic relevance....these are the locations that "caused" the China shock in the first place, i.e., unionized high paid line workers fomenting discord, strikes, etc. Of course the "new" jobs aren't going back to those places.
"He speculates that foreign policy under a Harris Presidency would continue to be carried out via words."
I've been mis-paraphrased countless times, including yesterday and at least one other time in the same thread in comments on an AK post from a couple days ago. Obama may have said this but I never heard it so I'm skeptical.
It would be a little odd if he had said it because while his line in the Syrian sand turned out to be all words, the larger body of his foreign policy definitely wasn't.
As I recall, Churchill also said that, "jaw-jaw is better than war-war."
“…we are data-drenched, to the point of drowning…” Yes, isn’t it wonderful?! Snuggling up with books, taking photos of books, reading books, writing in books, posting about books, buying books, discussing books and carrying around books wherever I go. Only problem is, I don’t have enough time to read books. Which reminds me….I should leave here and get back to my books.
From Iran hawks like Gurri, I would like to hear how they plan to achieve their goals without a war involving five figure US casualties. Or much worse if the Iranians decide to put in the two weeks to finish building a nuclear weapon and then use it.
If I thought maximum pressure stood any chance of success I would take it seriously as an alternative to the Obama approach. But realistically, if your goal is regime change there that means an invasion, which is just not a serious option.
The US could suffer millions of casualties and keep going. That's not really the problem. The difficulty is doing it without facing a lot of rabble rousing from rival domestic elites.
A militaristic society is quite different from a pacifistic, mercantile, quasi-Quaker society. In militaristic societies all the songs and poems are about war and beautiful death. Our society's songs are mostly about fornication. Our movies concern how godlike superheroes can relieve ordinary people from the burdens of duty. This poses a real problem for hawks who shriek like bad-cosplay-Spartans to get people who just want to vape marijuana and work fake jobs to go die in Persia for glory. So Obama's strategy is without a doubt better fitted to the American people as they are.
I think there's a lot wrong with what you wrote. But also a lot right, and that second paragraph, wow, well-said.
Under current conditions, I agree invasion seems unlikely. Will it be as unlikely under future conditions? Maybe not. Depends on the conditions, right?
I'm not just saying it's unlikely, I'm saying it's a really bad option. Worse than just letting Iran have free rein, although I don't favor doing that by any means.
In most or all conceivable situations I would agree with that too. But what about the inconceivable? What if Iran were able to launch a ground attack on Israel? What if they already have nukes and tried to launch one on Israel?
Ok, maybe we still don't invade but is there any doubt we would try to ENTIRELY destroy anything in the country that looked the least bit military?
They would have to go through Iraq, Syria, and/or Jordan to get through on the ground, and it's not likely they'd be able to get the equipment needed that far intact. On a longer timeline, as in a generation or so, maybe that would be feasible for them, but now almost certainly not. A nuclear exchange would be challenging to predict, but there are certainly people who have written up plans to account for it.
Sure. While you add detail, what you say was intended in my first two words here:
"What if Iran were able to launch a ground attack on Israel?"
This makes sense but it isn't really what today's Iran hawks are complaining about. They seem to think that in the current situation, if we just engage in enough low intensity tit for tat conflict with Iran and its proxies, magical geopolitical forces will make everything turn out better.
"They seem to think that in the current situation,"
I very much doubt that. I'd bet the house their thinking is more along the lines of it being the least bad option.
Right, but I think it would require magical geopolitical forces to make it turn out better than Obama-style diplomatic deal-making would be. So the view that it is the least bad option requires the sort of magical thinking I'm talking about.