Catherine Dior

🇫🇷 Miss Dior
Late afternoon 6 July 1944, Catherine Dior, Resistance member and sister of fashion designer Christian, is arrested by the Gestapo when she goes to meet a member of her network at Place du Trocadero in Paris... 1/7 pic.twitter.com/QX7bgQ82mE

— Vanguard WWII (@Vanguard_WW2) July 6, 2023

History

Map shows the extent of Earth’s ice cap during the last glacial maximum 20,000 years ago. pic.twitter.com/TilF6EB9Fn

— Xavi Ruiz (@xruiztru) May 12, 2023

 

An Insight

Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole. - Thomas Sowell

— Cerebral Wisdom (@CerebralWisdom) May 11, 2023

 

I see wonderful things

Straddling the mid-Atlantic rift in Iceland, stepping from the North American plate to the Eurasian one! The two plates are rifting apart at about 2.5 cm/year.. pic.twitter.com/0mBAWwSJkp

— Chris Stringer (@ChrisStringer65) May 11, 2023

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Click to enlarge.

So aimless activists protest and riot and embrace causes that they hope will bring needed shape to their moral lives.

From The Fury in France—and Across the West by Abe Greenwald.  The subheading is We’ve stuffed ourselves with the good things we’ve created, yet still yearn for meaning. The recent riots are a sign of our despair.

Massive protests have been rising in the West for years. In the United Kingdom, Spain, Canada, the United States, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Israel—you name it—activist armies have been taking to the streets in greater numbers and frequency. And the nominal causes are all over the place: anti-coal protests, cost-of-living protests, farmer protests, trucker protests, anti-immigration protests, anti-capitalist protests, and, of course, Covid-lockdown and police-brutality protests. 

It’s tempting to point to the seismic events of 2020—the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd—as the catalyst for this increased instability. But the rise goes back further. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), “Mass protests increased annually by an average of 11.5 percent from 2009 to 2019 across all regions of the world.” The upheavals of 2020 only exacerbated a growing trend. In the U.S., recall that Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Women’s March all managed to seize our attention before we ever heard the word Covid.

As the CSIS report notes, we are in an “age of global mass protests.” But what sets this wave of tumult apart from, say, the rash of protests in autocratic countries at the end of the Cold War, is that Western democracies have been swept up in the action. 

So what’s going on? Why are Western populations now so primed to explode? If you’re exercised over a given political or social cause, you’ll see that cause as the explanation. But are all these causes coincidentally coming to a head at the same time? Are Western countries staring at once into the multiple abysses of racism, state-sanctioned brutality, and economic adversity?

I’d argue just the opposite. The West has made such extraordinary—indeed, historically unique—progress in reducing suffering on a large scale that we’re now left grasping for new ideals and new aspirations to fulfill. This is not to say that everything is perfect. But the current penchant for protests and riots is profoundly out of proportion with the relatively small-scale challenges we still face. 

Our accomplishments on human rights, freedoms, and the alleviation of hardship are so gargantuan that statistical comparisons with previous ages are made absurd. In the twentieth century, industrial-scale racism emanating from Western Europe killed millions of Jews and brought the world to war. In the U.S., Jim Crow segregation was the law of the land in the South while de facto segregation reigned elsewhere. In the twenty-first century, we seize on statistically rare police shootings as evidence of an ongoing genocide. You want to know what French barbarity looks like? The guillotine was still in use in the late 1970s. In the previous century, countries in Western Europe saw genuine famines. Today, Western Europe (and America) is fighting an obesity crisis, with the United Kingdom leading the pack. 

The widespread poverty known to previous ages now seems science-fictional compared to life in today’s West. Between 1960 and 2023, the French GDP per capita went from $1,334 to $43,659, with other Western European nations showing similar growth trends in income and consumption. In the U.S. over the same time period, per capita GDP rose from $3,007 to $70,249. It’s not noted nearly enough that the life of an average citizen of a modern Western country makes the existence of an old-world aristocrat look pauperized by comparison. And the reduction in global poverty driven by Western trade, industry, aid, and debt forgiveness over the past decades has been even more astounding. Between 1990 to 2017 alone, the global poverty rate fell from 36 percent to 9 percent.

We’ve stuffed ourselves to the gills with the good things that we’ve created. But we are still human beings—the one species on the planet that yearns for meaning. And we don’t know where to turn next. In a different age, many would turn to their faith. But in the West, religion has been on a steep decline that crosses the rising rate of mass protests in an X pattern. So aimless activists protest and riot and embrace causes that they hope will bring needed shape to their moral lives.

Because of our systemic productivity, more people have more choices and can take more risks.  Prosperity allows them to indulge in the narcissism of small differences.  We have harvested all the low hanging fruit and people everywhere are marvelously better off than their parents or grandparents.  

Whether it is bringing meaning to their own lives, or achieving status gains by moral signaling during protests, out prosperity allows people to indulge in behaviors which are counter-productive.

Data Talks

Lovely map by @landgeist shows us the share of households across Europe that have at least one dog. The biggest dog divide I can see runs between Austria and Czechia. pic.twitter.com/IcIrKopUgr

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) May 11, 2023

 

Changes only at the margin

From A Tumultuous SCOTUS Term by Declan Garvey, et al.  The subheading is Plus: Biden administration hit with court order limiting communications with Big Tech platforms.

Some elected officials sure are frustrated with the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence these days. “Useless judges,” one claimed, may view the Constitution as a “thing of wax” to “twist and shape” as they see fit.

Oh wait, that was Thomas Jefferson.

The court has always been the object of scorn from those upset by its rulings, but 221 years since Jefferson’s presidency began, SCOTUS faces intensified attacks on its status as a nonpartisan constitutional arbiter. With the dust settling after another term’s ending, the justices are headed out of town for summer vacation and we’re reflecting on their rulings. The court handed down 58 decisions this year, many of which blurred traditional ideological lines. The justices’ rulings in the highest-profile cases also tended to line up with public opinion—but that hasn’t stopped progressives’ calls for changes to the court.

A knowledge of history and numeracy are both key skills we would wish to see in journalists and which we usually do not.  

The Supreme Court, one of the key three branches of government has always been suspect by someone.  It lacks the power to coerce as the Executive can deploy.  It lacks the power of the purse, Congress's weapon.  It can merely make an argument and expect that decision to be respected.  As it should be.

But anyone on the losing end of that argument tactically usually only see advantage to resisting the court's decision.  They are usually not interested in respecting all the trade-offs and constraints inherent in our written constitutional republic with all its checks and balances.  People want to win and if someone or an institution stands in the way, then out comes human nature, red in tooth and claw.

For thirty-three years, the Supreme Court delivered a series of ground-breaking decisions noted as much for their policy nature as they were grounded at all in jurisprudence.  Roe v. Wade was probably the archetype of a policy decision dressed on jurisprudential cloth but it was one of many.  

Policy decisions which eventually began to be notable for their divergence away from Classical Liberal philosophy grounded in rule of law, equality before the law, property rights, due process, natural rights, etc.  Since 1986, with Rehnquist, at first slowly, and now at an accelerating pace, the court rulings have veered back to Classical Liberal principles.  Thank Goodness.

However, what that has meant is that a mainstay of the Progressive/Socialist wing of the Democratic Party, the Supreme Court, which used to reliably effect policy changes without having to get agreement from Congress, no longer functions in that capacity.  And given that the solid majority of Americans do not support Progressive/Socialist policies, this clearly represents an existential crisis for Progressive/Socialists, the Woke, the mainstream media, Academia, and the deep state.

But it is worth remembering, as Garvey et al remind us, that the Supreme Court is always controversial to the power not actually representing the values and interests of the public.  

While the mainstream media has been working overtime over the past couple of weeks to represent the Supreme Court as an out-of-control arm of the right wing of the Republican party, the numerical reality is more mundane.  This session looks like most sessions with variances at the margin mostly notable only to close court watchers.

I have not yet seen a final accounting of all the decisions it seems like this year may be on track to look like last year when:

Fully 46% of cases were decided unanimously or with eight of the Justices in agreement with one another, including all or 66% of the three liberal justices.  

54% of all decisions included at least one liberal justice in concurrence.  

Only 16% of cases involved a 5-4 decision and among those, the liberal justices were joined by two conservatives in order to achieve a 70% win rate.  

I don't get the sense that the Supreme Court justices have gotten more radical.  Rather, what we are seeing is the gradual reversal of the most notorious instances of policy making decisions during the Warren/Burger era.  Bringing us back to a more Classical Liberal view of the Constitution.

Which is marvellous.

 

The Maid, 1862 by Wilhelm Amber (German, 1822-1899)

The Maid, 1862 by Wilhelm Amber (German, 1822-1899)

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China decoupling

I frequently disagree with Noah Smith but at least he deals in data unlike many of journalistic kin.  And occasionally he arrives at the same conclusion I do and when that happens, he certainly expresses it better.  

From At least five interesting things for the middle of your week (#5) by Noah Smith.  The subheading is The world loves America, Twitter's self-destruction, the "richcession" continues, more decoupling, permitting reform in California, and backtracking on patent reform. 

On decoupling.

As regular readers of this blog know, I view some degree of economic decoupling between China and the developed democracies to simply be inevitable. A lot of people think that decoupling is being driven entirely or mostly by U.S. policy choices, but this was never really true, even in the Trump era. The truth is that Chinese policy choices are a major driver of decoupling.

For example, China is now lashing out at other countries with export controls. It recently announced curbs on the export of the minerals germanium and gallium, which are important for making chips. China is responsible for most of the world supply of both minerals, and while they’re not that hard to replace, doing so will require building up processing capacity in other countries — a capital-intensive, low-margin business that most nations had been happy to outsource to China. This move will probably do more to speed the rapid reshoring of critical supply chain bottlenecks than any Biden administration incentives.

The controls on gallium and germanium are in reaction to the U.S.’ own chip export controls. But in a less well-publicized move, China is also restricting graphite exports to Sweden. Graphite is important for building batteries. China dominates the global battery industry, but Sweden’s Northvolt is one of the best battery makers outside China. So China is restricting the sale of battery minerals to Sweden in order to strangle a potential competitor and retain its dominance in batteries.

What this shows is that unlike the U.S., Xi’s China uses export controls not just to maintain or gain a military edge, but to gain a purely commercial edge for domestic companies. No one had tried to kill the Chinese battery industry, but China is trying to kill the Swedish battery industry nonetheless. This isn’t geostrategic competition; this is pure mercantilism.

In other words, companies around the world now have to realize that whenever they compete with Chinese industry, even if there’s no military angle at all, they can expect China to leverage the power of the state against them. That understanding will speed decoupling, as companies everywhere look to protect themselves from this kind of mercantilist supply chain attack.

In any case, this is far from the only thing China is doing to speed decoupling along. It has onshored the manufacturing of intermediate goods (chips, displays, industrial machinery, auto parts, and so on) to such a degree that South Korea, which boomed in the 2000s and 2010s from selling these goods to China, now exports more to America. The less that companies from advanced economies like South Korea can sell to China, the less reason they have to stay invested in China.

Anyway, what all this means is that Chinese policy is driving a flood of investment out of China. 

China has unenviable challenges - Demographic problems (population aging and a still large rural base, twenty years of capital mal-investment, a more aggressive foreign policy, a more mercantilist trade policy and finally, the mismatch between the expectations created in a somewhat free market (in some sectors) versus the autocratic controls which are being reasserted.  The only good thing about these challenges is that the greater part of them are a consequence of policy choices, not exogenous conditions.