Friday, May 31, 2024

Calypso Receiving Telemachus and Mentor by William Hamilton (1791)

 

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We're Bound for the Rio Grande, 1929 by Arthur Briscoe

We're Bound for the Rio Grande, 1929 by Arthur Briscoe























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Thursday, May 30, 2024

Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night by Dora Wheeler (1886)

 

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Icarus, 1907 by Galileo Chini

Icarus, 1907 by Galileo Chini 


























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Wednesday, May 29, 2024

The Blinding of Polyphemus

 

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Bridgeport by Jon deMartin (b. 1955)

Bridgeport by Jon deMartin (b. 1955)




















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Loss of signal strength or loss of trust?

From The Decline & Fall of the US News Rankings by Brian L. Frye and CJ Ryan.  From the Abstract.

Have the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings become irrelevant? The ostensible purpose of the US News law school rankings is to give prospective law students convenient and reliable information about the relative quality of law schools and help them decide which law school to attend. Law schools care about the US News rankings because prospective law students care about the US News rankings. A ranking increase means more prestige and better credentialed students, while a ranking decrease means less prestige and students with worse credentials. Accordingly, law schools are jealous of their US News ranking.

Do prospective law students actually care about the US News rankings anymore? We compared changes in law school US News rankings to changes in prospective law student preferences the following year. Those variables should be strongly positively correlated. If a school’s US News ranking increases, prospective law students should prefer it more the following year, and if it decreases, they should prefer it less. But in fact, they were at best very weakly positively correlated, and often they are weakly negatively correlated. In other words, prospective law students appear to be largely indifferent to changes in a school’s US News ranking. This suggests that prospective law students are getting information about which law school to attend from someplace other than US News. And it also suggests that law schools can safely stop paying attention to the US News rankings, because their customers don’t care.

I don't think their conclusion follows from their evidence.  Sometimes, participation is required as a ticket to the table.  You might not need to have the best US News ranking, but perhaps you do need to have one.  Its a ticket to the table even if it is no guaranty of a win.

What would be especially interesting is if the researchers had extended their work back into the 1970s.  All they have actually done is demonstrate that there is little correlation between ranking and applications since 2014.  

What we really want to know is whether the rankings ever served as a useful signal of quality and desirability.  If they never served as a useful signal, then the fact that they did not in the past decade is not especially meaningful.  But, in their heyday in the 1970s or 1980s, if the rankings did serve as a useful signal, then the decline into irrelevancy now is an interesting fact.

It goes to the larger issue of declining trust in institutions and increased skepticism in signaling from sources whose financial well-being is tied to that signaling.  

The researchers assume that the rankings have become a weaker signal because everyone now has more and better access to information than in the past.

Prospective law students have a lot more of it, so they aren’t as reliant on the US News rankings, which gradually became less salient to them.

Maybe.  That would make sense if the ratings used to be strongly correlated with student applications.  But if there never was a signal in the first place, then increased information is irrelevant.  Further, the information access explanation might be irrelevant if the core issue is a loss of trust in the signal.

I am inclined to believe that perhaps there did used to be a stronger signal than there is now but I would like to know that there was in fact a strong correlation rather than merely assuming that there was one.  Further, if there is a real loss in signal strength, this research does not shed light on whether the loss is due to better access to other better signals or whether it is due to loss of confidence in the quality of the US News signal.

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Tuesday, May 28, 2024

Odysseus and Polyphemus" by Arnold Böcklin (1896)

 

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Der Kommandant, 1918 by Claus Bergen

Der Kommandant, 1918 by Claus Bergen



















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Monday, May 27, 2024

Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, 1829 by Joseph Mallord William Turner

 

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They also serve who only stand and wait.

On Memorial Day, I usually post on some ancestor and their adventures in the American Revolution or other war.  This year, for whatever reason, Milton's words stick in my mind about those others whom we ought to also remember and celebrate, "They also serve who only stand and wait."  

Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent
by John Milton 

When I consider how my light is spent,
   Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
   And that one Talent which is death to hide
   Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
   My true account, lest he returning chide;
   “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
   I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
   Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
   Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
   And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
   They also serve who only stand and wait.”

The mother's, the wives, the sweethearts, left to keep things going while the men were away in battle.  And left to pick up the pieces on those occasions when they fell and did not return.  Sacrifices somewhat less obvious but just as great.

And the men as well who left their families and farms behind to go off to fight but did not do so.  For every ancestor's story I come across at Bunker Hill or Monmouth or Germantown or Guilford Courthouse or Kings Mountain or Long Island or Lexington, there are men who simply marched and camped and marched and camped.  And died of pneumonia or cholera or any of a number of other camp diseases.

I recall reading one ancestor's account.  He was in Virginia which was several times under threat from British invasion.  From 1775-1779 he mustered I recollect some five times, each for a three month militia duty.  And on every occasion he marched.  Marched to one location to guard some prisoners.  Marched to another to forestall a British threat which did not transpire.  Marched to meet a threat from British and Indians on the western border.  Marched to yet another location to take part in a battle which ended before they arrived.  And so it went.  Ready and willing and putting life at home at risk and under personal jeopardy.  But no actual battles.  

And no less necessary as those who actually fought.  Jefferson Davis (Governor of Virginia) was constantly juggling his manpower commitments to the Continental Army while also trying to ensure the safety of his own state.  Men who ended up fighting in Germantown (two Virginia Hocombes killed and one wounded) were able to do so because some Virginia militia had answered the call and headed off a different British threat.  

I think the DAR calls non-fighting support of the Revolution something like Patriotic Service, often involving providing supplies and shelter near battlefields, and indeed those were important.  But there were all those others we should also remember this memorial day.  

They also serve who only stand and wait [and march].

And not just those of distant battles and times.  Our military depends on those willing to stand and fight on our behalf.  But they in turn depend on their parents and wives and husbands and siblings to keep things held together.  I am confident we do not appreciate near enough how much they sacrifice on our behalf, especially the junior enlisted.  They all deserve our thanks and recognition.

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Returning the Pilot, 1900 by Don Demers

Returning the Pilot,  1900 by Don Demers



















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I am not familiar with the measurement system being used but a very intriguing map of European languages.






















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Sunday, May 26, 2024

Odysseus Overcome by Demodocus' Song, by Francesco Hayez (1813–15)

 

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Night Shadows, 1921 by Edward Hopper

Night Shadows, 1921 by Edward Hopper






















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Saturday, May 25, 2024

Law of 20 years and the average cost of capital.

From The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times by Christopher Lasch.  Originally published in 1984.  

Apocalyptic Survivalism and Ordinary Apatby The debate about space travel and other survivalist fantasies is a debate among people alarmed by the deterioration of social and physical conditions on this planet. It naturally holds no interest for those eternal optimists who see no cause for alarm, who close their ears to disturbing reports, or who cling to the hope that humanity will somehow muddle through. Nor does it hold any interest for the much larger class of people who regard the future as so deeply troubling that it hardly bears looking into at all and who prefer to concern themselves, accordingly, with more immediate and manageable issues. The ignorant masses, as Kurt Saxon calls them, remain indifferent to long-range planning for survival. They have never taken much interest either in a governmental program of civil defense or in privately constructed survival shelters, survival condominiums, survival collectives, or groups like Posse Comitatus or Survival, Inc. Neither have they taken a passionate interest in environmentalism. They support environmental legislation, but only as long as it does not threaten their jobs. Their “apathy” is the despair of environmentalists and survivalists alike. They care about survival only in the most immediate sense    . Compared with the apocalyptic fantasies circulated by those who care about long-range survival, however, their “apathy” has a good deal to commend it.

  The contrast between these two attitudes, the apocalyptic activism of a self-chosen survivalist elite and the ordinary citizen’s indifference to ideologies, emerges very clearly from a recent film, Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André. Two friends renew their acquaintance in a New York restaurant and defend the choices that have led them down divergent paths. André has traveled all over the world in search of spiritual enlightenment. Wally has stayed in New York, grubbing for work as a writer and actor and sharing a humdrum domestic existence with his girlfriend. He defends everyday comforts and conveniences against André’s contempt for mindless materialism and mass culture. When he volunteers the information that he sleeps under an electric blanket, he provokes André’s scorn. Turning on an electric blanket, according to André, is “like taking a tranquilizer or … being lobotomized by watching television.” Wally replies that “our lives are tough enough as it is.” “I’m just trying to survive,” he says, “… to earn a living.”

  While Wally contents himself with small pleasures and small attainable goals, André pursues spiritual transcendence, higher states of consciousness. He experiments with Eastern religions, mind-altering spiritual exercises, and communal retreats. He wants to wake up the world, or at least to save the best of our civilization when the rest of it collapses. Returning to New York after a long absence, he sees it as the “new model for the concentration camp”—a prison populated by “lobotomized people” and “robots.” He and his wife “feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties.” They “have actually had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out”—“escape before it’s too late.” “The world now may very well be a self-perpetuating unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money.” Under these conditions, the only hope is that small groups of the elect will gather in “islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to function, in order to maintain the species through a Dark Age.”

  The encounter between André and Wally juxtaposes two kinds of survivalism, both predicated on the unspoken, unexamined premise that the crisis of twentieth-century society has no collective or political solution. It juxtaposes the banality of everyday existence with the banality of stylish social criticism, which denounces a society of sleepwalkers and tries “to wake up a sleeping audience” with alarming reports of impending catastrophe. “We’re living in the middle of a plague.” Cancer—caused, André adds, by “what we’re doing to the environment”—has reached “plague dimensions. … But is anybody calling it a plague? I mean, in the time of the Black Plague, when the plague hit, people got the hell out.” One kind of survivalism takes refuge in the immediate; the other, in apocalyptic visions of things to come. Both have renounced hope. But whereas André longs to desert the sinking ship, Wally stays in the city he grew up in, a city saturated with memories. “There wasn’t a street—there wasn’t a building—that wasn’t connected to some memory in my mind. There, I was buying a suit with my father. There, I was having an ice cream soda after school.” André’s disdain for ordinary life, on the other hand, springs from a terrifying sense of its impermanence. “A baby holds your hands, then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?” The contrasting circumstances of these friends’ lives suggest that although a sense of place and a respect for ordinary facts may prevent the imagination from taking wing, they also prevent it from consuming itself in flights of apocalyptic fantasy. André himself detects in the new “monasteries,” where survivors will gather to preserve what remains of civilization, a “sort of self-satisfied elitist paranoia that grows up, a feeling of ‘them’ and ‘us’ that is very unsettling” and leads to a “kind of self-contained, self-ratifying certainty.” In such moods, he is “repelled by the whole story” of his own quest for mystical transcendence.

  The doomsday mentality makes ordinary everyday survivalism like Wally’s look like a model of common sense and democratic decency. Whatever its limitations, everyday survivalism retains a sense of place, a loyalty to familiar surroundings and their associations. It retains something of what Hannah Arendt called a love of the world—the world, that is, of human associations and human works, which give solidity and continuity to our lives. But although it cherishes personal memories, this attitude has little use for history or politics, both of which appear to people like Wally to serve merely as a theater for the play of competing ideologies. The everyday survivalist has deliberately lowered his sights from history to the immediacies of face-to-face relationships. He takes one day at a time. He pays a heavy price for this radical restriction of perspective, which precludes moral judgment and intelligent political activity almost as effectively as the apocalyptic attitude he rightly rejects. It allows him to remain human—no small accomplishment in these times. But it prevents him from exercising any influence over the course of public events. Even his personal life is sadly attenuated. He may reject the fantasy of escape to a mountain retreat or a desert island or another planet, but he still conducts his own life as if he were living in a state of siege. He may refuse to listen to talk of the end of the world, but he unwittingly adopts many of the defensive impulses associated with it. Long-term commitments and emotional attachments carry certain risks under the best of circumstances; in an unstable, unpredictable world they carry risks that people find it increasingly difficult to accept. As long as ordinary men and women have no confidence in the possibility of cooperative political action—no hope of reducing the dangers that surround them—they will find it hard to get along, in short, without adopting some of the tactics of hard-line survivalism in a milder form. The invasion of everyday life by the rhetoric and imagery of terminal disaster leads people to make personal choices that are often indistinguishable in their emotional content from the choices made by those who proudly refer to themselves as survivalists and congratulate themselves on their superior insight into the future course of history.

Returning home from university, brimming with the doom laden bromides of The Population Bomb, and The Club of Rome, I recounted to my father as proof of approaching catastrophe, the fact that we would run out of oil in twenty years.

My engineering father, at that point thirty years into a career in the oil industry gently deflated my penny ante academic knowledge with the observation along the lines of:

All my career we have always been only twenty years away from running out of oil.  When I first noticed that it always remained twenty years in the future, I just assumed we were lucky to keep finding new oil just in time.  Later I realized it was just a matter of finance and economics.

For a given interest rate, it doesn't make sense to hold more than a certain amount of inventory.  In the oil industry, the long term cost of capital means that it doesn't make sense to find more than twenty years inventory of oil.  Change the cost of capital and you change the amount of it makes sense to find.  

It was an important lesson on several fronts.  1) Make sure you compare received academic knowledge to real world knowledge.  2) You can point out so someone that they are naively foolish without making fun of them.  3)  Complex systems are fiendishly complex.  

Every time someone points out some longstanding "threat" or problem or obstacle, I always come back to that point my dad was making.  If it hasn't been resolved, it might not make financial sense to resolve it.  Conversely, another aspect is that all coercive solutions are almost certain to fail because they are failing to take into account some unaccounted for cost.  

Mother Nature and Reality are hard taskmasters obeying many hidden laws.  Such as the Law of 20 years and the average cost of capital.

In the decades since that conversation, various forms of apocalyptic survivalism have come and gone.  After The Population Bomb, there was Fear of Nuclear Winter.  Then there was fear of capitalism and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Income Inequality.  Then climate catastrophism and Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).  Then religious violence and the Global War on Terror.  Then race violence and Black Lives Matter (BLM).  And on and on.

Apocalyptic survivalism keeps morphing and taking new names but it always comes down to authoritarian utopianism with decision by the Elect, the Philosopher Kings, the Vanguard.

André dreams his apocalyptic dreams without ever taking into account the law of 20 years and the average cost of capital.  His vision is to grandiose to take into account the mundane.  Wally lives with the mundane.  The mortgage has to be paid.  The bed made.  The job completed.  The promises kept.  

André hopes to make things better (and himself better) but dreaming big and gambling on the unknown.  He is dreaming beyond the epistemic 20 year limit and thinking that his passion and ideological commitment will make the imagined future real.  André is intellectually exotic but a dangerous idiot.

Wally is the real the engine of the improved future.  He works to make things better given the epistemic limits and constraints of his life and of reality.  He pushes on the epistemic limits in small increments but slowly expands the frontier of the possible, more safely bringing the future into the present.

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Between Scylla and Charybdis by Henry Fuseli (1794-1796)

 

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Evening in London, 1920 by Frederick-Cayley Robinson

Evening in London, 1920 by Frederick-Cayley Robinson



























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Friday, May 24, 2024

The Siren Vase attributed to the Siren Painter, (480-470 BC)

 

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Battleship Yamato 1945, 2016 by Vincent Alexander Booth

Battleship Yamato 1945, 2016 by Vincent Alexander Booth






















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Thursday, May 23, 2024

Teiresias foretells the Future to Odysseus by Henry Fuseli (1780-1785)

 

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Old Sycamore Trees, Cairo, 1925 by Georges Sabbagh

Old Sycamore Trees, Cairo, 1925 by Georges Sabbagh 

















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Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses by John William Waterhouse

 

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Golden Rails by Jon deMartin (b. 1955)

Golden Rails by Jon deMartin (b. 1955)
















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Tuesday, May 21, 2024

Heated debate is the natural by-product of a consent based system

From Modern Meditations: Tyler Cowen by Mario Gabriele.  The subheading is The renowned economist shares his thoughts on AI teddy bears, nuclear risk, and darkly plausible futures.  I like this point.  

I think we’re overestimating the risks to American democracy. The intellectual class is way too pessimistic. They’re not used to it being rough and tumble, but it’s been that way for most of the country’s history. It’s correct to think that’s unpleasant. But by being polarized and shouting at each other, we actually resolve things and eventually move forward. Not always the right way. I don’t always like the decisions it makes. But I think American democracy is going to be fine. 

Polarization has its benefits. In most cases, you say what you think, and sooner or later, someone wins. Abortion is very polarized, for example. I’m not saying which side you should think is correct, but states are re-examining it. Kansas recently voted to allow abortion, and Arizona is in the midst of a debate. Over time, it will be settled—one way or another. Slugging things out is underrated. 

Meanwhile, being reasonable with your constituents is overrated. Look at Germany, which has non-ideological, non-polarized politics. They’ve gotten every decision wrong. Their whole strategy of buying cheap energy from Russia to sell to China was a huge blunder. They bet most of their economy on it, and neither of those two things will work out. They also have no military whatsoever. It’s not like, “Ok, they don’t spend enough.” They literally had troops that didn’t have rifles to train with and were forced to use broomsticks. 

Germany is truly screwed and won’t face up to it. But when you listen to their politicians speak – and I do understand German – they always sound intelligent and reasonable. They could use a dose of polarization, but they’re afraid because of their history, which I get. But the more you look at their politics, the more you end up liking ours, I would say. 

I was in a conversation just the other evening with some very intelligent individuals who were primarily out of academia and there was such a strong undercurrent of anxiety for the American future even though there own life outcomes were magnificent testaments to the American system.  I agree "The intellectual class is way too pessimistic."

And usually, the things about which they are most anxious are the very things which make the American system so strong - freedom of speech, individualism, communitarianism, immense diversity (religion, thought, familial culture, etc.), and resistance to delegated and centralized decision-making.  Sure, we are outstanding at inefficient governance but it is usually because we are are generally so focused on consent of the governed.  We get into trouble the more governmentally efficient we become where decisions are made by cloistered experts rather than the people themselves.  

And I agree that Germany, so often held up by statist central planners as an example of success over the past four decades, is rather the reverse.  The appearance of success was based on four strategic bets made by the consensus of the governing elite:

1)  The durability of the German saver

2)  The dominance of manufactured exports as the vector of growth

3)  The excess dependence on the Chinese market, and 

4)  The supply of cheap energy from Russia.

All four strategies have weakened or failed.  

Heated debate is the natural by-product of a consent based system.  What many public intellectuals take as a mark of failure is actually evidence of a healthy system.  A quiet system of governance with little debate or public contention is the one you have to watch out for.  

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Reducing regulations increases supply? Who's have thought it?

From Childcare Regulation and the Fertility Gap by Anna Claire Flowers, et al.  From the Abstract:

Children require care. The market for childcare has received much attention in recent years as many countries consider subsidizing or supplying childcare as a response to dropping birth rates. However, the relationship between childcare markets and the fertility gap -- the difference between desired and achieved fertility -- is yet to be explored. We build upon previous work by investigating the regulation of childcare and fertility gaps across the U.S. states. Our results consistently show fewer childcare regulations are associated with smaller fertility gaps. This suggests that women are better able to achieve their fertility goals in policy environments that allow for more flexibility in childcare options and lower costs.

There seems to be a pattern.

You want more children, reduce childcare regulation.

You want more education, reduce education regulation.

You want more accessible healthcare, reduce healthcare regulation.

You want more business activity, reduce business start-up regulations.

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Queen of Suburbia, 2013 by John Brosio (American, b.1967)

Queen of Suburbia, 2013 by John Brosio (American, b.1967) 



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Monday, May 20, 2024

Their own facts refute their argument and they don't even realize it.

Its not much more than policy propaganda.  From How Gun Violence Spread Across One American City by Shaila Dewan and Robert Gebeloff.  The subheading is Columbus, Ohio, had only about 100 homicides a year. Then came a pandemic surge. With more guns and looser laws, can the city find its way back to the old normal?

It is an established pattern that in 2020 there were two events which plausibly increased crime, especially in particular American cities - 1) the lockdowns associated with the government response to Covid-19 and 2) the calls for defunding the police following the George Floyd riots in May 2020.  Just as with the Ferguson riots, there is the same pattern - riots lead in some cities to a retrenchment and/or reduction in policing followed within the year by a rise in the murder rate.  After two or three years, there is public objection, policing is gradually restored and crime begins to fall again.  

The plausible case for lockdowns increasing crime remains plausible but unproven.  The case that defunding police and more general efforts to reduce policing did indeed lead to a rise in crime is much more well established. 

Woke policy people, such as "reporters" at the New York Times, believe that gun availability drives crime.  This despite the fact that there is virtually no correlation between gun ownership and rising crime.  Gun ownership has been rising year on year for forty years, more in some years than in others, but always rising.

On the other hand, crime has fallen steeply from circa 1995 until 2014 and the Ferguson riots when violent crime shot up again temporarily.  But then by 2016, crime started falling once more.  Until 2020 and the George Floyd riots.  Crime shot up, primarily in a couple of dozen large cities which toyed with defunding the police, showed a proclivity for show trials against police officers or who otherwise sought to reduce policing as well as reducing incarceration.  

In the same country in all our thousands of jurisdictions,  it is demonstrably true that a gradual rise in gun ownership is not correlated with the rise in crime.  It is policing and incarceration which correlate with rises and falls in crime, not changes in gun ownership.

This is well publicized, reasonably documented and widely publicized in different publications, but you would not know it from Dewan and Gebeloff's "reporting."  Control F with Riots, George Flow, and Defund the Police as causes of rising crime and you get nothing back.  

D&G focus first on Ohio's increasing gun rights.  They never offer a quantification for what that means for gun ownership prevalence in Columbus or in Ohio, seemingly a critical element to their argument.

The balance of their reporting is police blotter sketches of tragedies from social breakdown, dysfunctional families and reduced policing.  They have half a dozen or so stories about teens and younger killing one another.  For all that Ohio has reduced barriers to gun ownership, it has not made it legal for young teens to buy and own guns.  Indeed, you have to be at least eighteen to purchase a firearm, and twenty-one to purchase a handgun (the weapon responsible for the overwhelming majority of murders.)  

No evidence is offered that rising gun ownership has caused rising crime and no evidence is offered that increased gun controls would reduce violent crime.  Rather, the inadvertent opposite.  For all their complaints of rising gun ownership, they acknowledge:

There is optimism that 2024 is going to be better in Columbus, which has seen homicide numbers fall dramatically so far this year, with 36 as of last week, compared with 70 in the same period the year before. 

Dewan and Gebeloff report that violent crime is falling while gun ownership is rising.  So much for their argument.  

They are not making an argument based on evidence, logic and reason.  They are not reporting facts to provide the whole story.  They are pushing ideological policies without an evidentiary basis.  They are policy propagandists.

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The Eruption of the Soufriere Mountains in the Island of St. Vincent, 30th April 1812, 1815 by Joseph Mallord William Turner

The Eruption of the Soufriere Mountains in the Island of St. Vincent, 30th April 1812, 1815 by Joseph Mallord William Turner





















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Sunday, May 19, 2024

Importance and relevance follows from having created value.

A wistful plaint from African Countries Are Failing to Make a Dent in Washington’s Diplomatic Scene by Nahal Toosi .  The subheading is It’s partly a question of resources, but it’s also about political will and hustle.

African diplomats say they’d like to be more prominent in the U.S. capital, but that, above all, they lack the resources.

Many of their embassies have just a handful of diplomats. Those diplomats often are underpaid; some take side jobs in Washington such as Uber or delivery drivers, or even at gas stations, according to a current and a former State Department official familiar with the issue.

The argument is that African embassies in Washington, DC are ineffective at their job and multiple reasons are advanced for this ineffectiveness.

They don't have the resources to perform their jobs.

They don't have enough people to do their jobs.

Many embassies do not have people who know how to do their job.

Ambassadors and their staffs are not involved in diplomatic activities.

Many embassies do not have public affairs officers.

The countries of Africa do not share common diplomatic goals.

Some of the countries are in the diplomatic doghouse (recent coups, human rights abuses, civil repression, etc. )

Some ambassadors like to keep a low profile.

Many embassies limit themselves by an excessive observation of protocol.

African diplomats are not good at networking.

Africa does not have strong trade or military ties to the US which makes it harder for diplomats to function.

Often, the African country does not intend to use its embassy personnel in the first place.

Some African countries prefer to contract with lobbyists to accomplish embassy functions.

African countries lack relevance to American commercial and global interests.  

African countries aren't being invited to important meetings.

Sometimes the American State department engages directly with the foreign country rather than going through the embassy.

It is a long indictment.  And it is boringly predictable.  

This is exactly what you get from teams within corporations and enterprises from poor performing levels of management.  

We don't have enough resources.

We don't have enough people.

We don't have the right people.

We don't get enough leadership support.

We don't have enough time.

There is too much uncertainty.

Virtually every poor performing team or executive or executive group advances some combination or variation as the explanation for why they have not achieved what they needed to achieve.

Which is not to say that all these things, and more barriers, might all be true to an extent.  But if everything were easy and available, they would not be needed as leaders.  They are just underperforming managers.  Leaders figure out the work-arounds, the trade-offs, the alternative approaches.  And they get things done.  

Are there African or other small country embassies which punch well above their class?  Sure.  It can be done and it is done.

Interestingly, the author of the article fails to directly allude to two separate long-standing issues.  

Disintermediation - All ambassadors and embassies everywhere have suffered this problem for the past forty years.  When you have instantaneous secure communication (text, voice, and video) as we have had for that period of time, the need for embassies is much more superfluous than used to be the case when messaging was a process of days and weeks.  This is an issue affecting everyone, not just African embassies.

Parking lot sclerosis - Again, all embassies everywhere have suffered from their nation using the staffing of the embassy as a place to park political opponents (to get them out of the domestic limelight), stuff with nepotistic or political favor appointees, or slip in spies (spies against the host nation or, not infrequently, spies against emigre groups in the host nation.)  Once all those slots are filled, there is often little room left for professional foreign service diplomats.

African nations might suffer these to a greater degree than other nations but all suffer from those conditions.  US ambassadors overseas are routinely circumvented and left out of the loop, just are African ambassadors in Washington, DC.

Toosi's solution is not wrong, but kind of irrelevant.

That could mean some entrepreneurial African diplomats need to start cold-calling a few Washington socialites about getting on their invite lists, persuading think-tankers to share their Rolodexes or building a tradition of hosting gatherings at their embassies.

If there’s anything in shortage in Washington, it’s attention, a former Asian diplomat said.

“You have to get out and get that attention,” he said. “It takes hustle.”

Hustle takes care of almost all problems.  The devil is always in the details.  If African embassies and ambassadors want to be relevant, they need to provide value to their own country and to their host nation.  If they are not doing that (whatever that might entail), then of course they are not going to get the attention they crave.  Kind of a middle-school status seeking game and insight.

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European rulers watched aghast as the former English colony assumed colossal new proportions

A book review in the New York Times.  From That Time Europe Tried to Bring Monarchy Back to Mexico by Natasha Wheatley.  The subheading is In “Habsburgs on the Rio Grande,” Raymond Jonas’s story of French-backed nation building in Mexico foreshadows the proxy battles of the Cold War. 

The seeds of freedom and republicanism and Age of Enlightenment ideals have never quite taken root in Mexico, a land of fantastic potential.  Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande covers part of that story.  

When Mexico first cast off Spanish rule, the country established its own independent monarchy — the First Mexican Empire — and then, in 1824, a republic. Two decades of turbulent constitutional change and civil strife followed. In 1845, the United States annexed Texas from Mexico. It then launched a war of aggression that would strip Mexico of half of its territory. U.S. ambitions appeared unlimited, its appetite for territory insatiable, and many Mexicans feared their young republic would succumb entirely.

They were not alone in their alarm. Across the Atlantic, as Mexico ceded California to end its war with the United States, European autocrats were busy stamping out liberal revolutions, many of which had drawn up constitutions inspired by the American one.

But it wasn’t just the existence of a stubbornly persistent democracy that made the United States a threat: European rulers watched aghast as the former English colony assumed colossal new proportions, stretching from coast to coast and dwarfing their own states in size. “In the space of two generations,” Jonas writes, “the American republic had transformed itself from a postcolonial backwater — distant and easily ignored — into an insolent continental powerhouse and an existential threat to Europe and European hegemony.”

They needed a strategy of containment. When the Civil War erupted, absorbing American energy and attention, European rulers, led by the French autocrat Napoleon III, seized the opportunity to check the rising hegemon. They joined forces with conservatives and traditionalists chafing at republican rule in Mexico to launch a wildly ambitious plan to restore monarchy and defend Mexico against the “Yankee imperialism” of the “Robber Republic” to the north.

On the pretext of collecting debt and protecting “persons and property,” British, Spanish and French forces formed a coalition of the willing and invaded Mexico in 1861. Cracks emerged quickly in this motley alliance. Facing military defeats, yellow fever and skeptical opinion at home, Britain and Spain soon fell away, leaving Napoleon III to wage his increasingly bloody “war of liberation” alone.

Looks like a great read and I suspect provides a rich context for the relevance of the Zimmerman Telegram in World War I, and foreshadowing some of the dynamics of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.  

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