The optimistic interpretation is that the threat to democracy has faded. Talk of Trump running again in 2028 has diminished, and the SAVE Act, which would disenfranchise millions, stalled in Congress, and won’t apply to the current election. A further reason for optimism is that Trump is now so unpopular that he would lose even a rigged election, as long as there was some attempt to preserve a pretence of electoral competition.

These points may be correct, but they are contingent and circumstantial. The bigger lesson of 2024 is that a plurality of American voters are willing to vote against democracy, and a majority are willing to vote against or abstain. That’s a depressing conclusion for believers in democracy, and one that runs against a lot of previous evidence.

Although there have been many previous periods when government crises have produced a demand for a “man on horseback”, most voters have almost always rejected such candidates. Democracies have been overthrown by coups or (in Germany’s case) by governments which lacked majority support, but rarely in free elections.

So far, we have seen no such rejection. Trump is massively unpopular but mainly for reasons that apply to many previous presidents: he promised lower prices and instead delivered higher inflation and he promised to keep the US out of Middle Eastern wars, but started them instead.

By contrast, his attempted overthrow of the constitution in 2021 is barely mentioned. His immigration policies, with masked secret police, concentration camps and deportation of people who have lived in America since infancy, is disapproved of by a slender majority, but remains by far his most popular policy position.

In these circumstances, it’s unsurprising that Democrats have chosen to focus primarily on “affordability”. Relative to the “cost of living”, this framing at least has the merit of implying that wages might be part of the problem. But it does not provide a basis for a repudiation of the Trump regime [1]. Rather, the implied model is one of normal politics, where the Republicans will return to power when and if the economy performs badly under the Democrats.

The one bright spot has been the last-minute shift to focus on Republican corruption. While concerns about the future of democracy are abstract, corruption is comprehensible and hard to conceal. Viktor Orban’s crushing defeat owed a fair bit to aerial photographs of his country estate, complete with two swimming pools (trivial compared to Trump, but Hungary is a much poorer country).

The difficulty is the (historically well-founded) belief that “both sides do it”. American politics has long been characterised by practices that would be regarded as dubious or unthinkable in many other countries - ambassadorships for some wealthy donors and pardons for others, pork-barrelling on an industrial scale and much more. And, although the US is not alone in this, there has been widespread toleration of sexual harassment and worse. Trump has extended these precedents and gone much further, with leading Republicans following suit. But for someone not paying attention, it’s easy to imagine that this is balanced out by the feckless Hunter Biden, or by fraudulent welfare claims.

Nevertheless, recent surveys suggest that corruption is emerging as a major concern for voters, and that more people perceive the Republicans as the party of corruption. Assuming that the Democrats win control of at least the House of Representatives, and that Trump does not succeed in overturning the result, a central focus of the remainder of Trump’s term should be investigations aimed at establishing universal awareness of Republican financial and moral corruption. The broader view of an “Epstein class”, with complete immunity from any consequences, is part of this.

To be successful, the perception must match reality. That means Democrats must not tolerate any such corruption on their own side, regardless of the political costs of action. This seems to be happening. Although he was given the benefit of the doubt for too long, Graham Platner (widely seen as an ideal candidate) was dumped once credible accusations of sexual harassment emerged.

The elephant in the room here is Bill Clinton, not only for his numerous instances of sexual assault and harassment, but for his corrupt pardon of financier Marc Rich. Democrats as diverse as Kirsten Gillibrand and Bernie Sanders have condemned his actions, but he is still generally regarded as a “party elder”, regularly invited to campaign for Democratic candidates. That needs to stop.

The next step is to extend the critique beyond Trump and his immediate circle to Republicans in general, to the billionaire class that backs them and to the Supreme Court, most obviously Thomas and Alito. There’s ample evidence here, but it will take time to establish it.

Harder, but crucial, is to establish the link between Republican corruption and subversion of democracy through gerrymandering, voter suppression, billionaire financing and, of course, the insurrection. Only when the majority of Americans, including former Trump voters, conclude that voting for Republicans was not just a mistake but a moral failure and abdication of democratic responsibility, will it be possible to undertake a serious reconstruction of US democracy.

fn1. Unless affordability is linked to corruption. We can’t have nice things because Trump and the other billionaires have stolen the money.

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There’s a lot of talk about a proposed meeting between Putin, Trump and Xi in which they will, it is suggested, partition the world into spheres of influence. The obvious analogy is with the 1945 Yalta meeting where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin negotiated exactly such a partition (though Asia was largely omitted)

It’s a safe bet that the meeting, if it happens won’t be in Yalta. The charm of this Crimean beach resort has been drastically reduced by regular Ukrainian missile attacks and the cessation of normal economic activity. And that fact tells us everything we need to know about the idea of a new partition.

The core assumption of the new Yalta is that an agreement between the great powers of the world will be sufficient to dictate a mutually acceptable outcome for the war in Ukraine. In the optimistic visions of some in Washington and Beijing, the same will be true of Iran and Taiwan.

But we have four years of experience in Ukraine and a year or more in Iran (beginning with the first US-Israel bombing attack) to show that the great powers have no capacity to impose their vision on their smaller target.

Russia has been bled dry to give Putin control over a narrow strip of Ukraine and some desolated cities and towns, whose inhabitants have mostly fled. The US has seen its position in the Middle East destroyed, and has even been forced to abandon its airbase in the UK. China has quietly abandoned the deadline of 2027 for a capacity to conquer Taiwan (the “Davidson Window”). The impossibility of defending surface ships against drones and missiles mean that this capacity won’t be regained in the absence of some as yet unforeseen technological change.

If the meeting goes ahead, it will either produce an agreement which is promptly ignored or end in a bombastic, but content-free, declaration of its own importance.

Despite its pointlessness, a meeting of this kind would be a big win for Putin and a significant win for Xi. Putin would be able to maintain the pretence that his weak and impoverished state is a great power, as it was in 1945. Xi will be able, at a minimum, to weaken the presumed alliance between the US and Taiwan.

The big loser will be Trump and, more specifically, MAGA. The summit will show, once and for all, that the US is no longer in a position to dictate the course of global events. That’s mostly a good thing, but adjusting to it will be a slow process, particularly for countries like Australia where this assumption remains almost unquestioned.

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The core of the story is that France has a massive public debt, public spending that exceeds revenue and, as a result, faces rising interest rates on government bonds. Efforts to cut spending have proved ineffectual and provoked further resistance.

There is a passing mention of the fact that interest rates are also rising in Germany, Japan and the United States, and a graph showing French bonds rising faster than in Germany. But no one reading the article would have any idea that the US suffers more severe problems than either France or Germany. Here’s the graph they should have published

Source: https://www.thetrading.tools/global-bond-yields

More importantly, France and the US face similar problems for similar reasons. Both Macron and Trump have given massive tax cuts to the wealthy then tried, ineffectually, to recoup the lost revenue by cutting public expenditure or by shifting the tax burden to lower income earners. The current French protests began with students protesting against poor conditions in schools. Before that, the “gilets jaunes” protests were ignited by higher taxes on fuel, , seen as massively unfair at a time when the rich were getting big tax cuts.

The similarity in the outcomes is striking. While fiscal problems are present everywhere, France and the US are outliers relative to the eurozone as a whole.

Source: IMF Fiscal Monitor, April 2026, Tables A2 and A7., data for 2025

The primary budget deficit is important because, in a situation where the interest rate of government debt is equal to the (nominal) rate of GDP growth, this is the gap that needs to be closed to stop debt/GDP ratios rising further, with a flow-on to interest rates (the driver for the “doom loop”).

In the end, the only way to fix this problem is to raise more tax revenue, and the only people who can pay more are the rich. The need for socialist support for the budget has forced Macron to take some baby steps in this direction, but the US is going the other way with Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. If they manage to defeat Trump, the Democrats will inherit the problem. They will need more than talk about “affordability” to fix it. The obvious, but super-difficult solution is an effective wealth tax.

Coming back to the starting point, the NY Times is the best of a bad lot when it comes to US mainstream media coverage of domestic issues. But its coverage of events outside the US is useful only to keep track of the delusional thinking that still dominates the centrist political class.

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Singularity review

I’ve finally received my copy of Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity, which was posted to me by its American publisher six weeks ago …

The title refers to the claim that the process of technological change, notably in relation to computing, biotechnology and nanotechnology is accelerating to the point where it will produce a fundamental, and almost instantaneous, change in what it means to be human, arising from the combination of artificial intelligence and the use of biotechnology to re-engineer our bodies and minds.

The term Singularity, used to describe this event, apparently arose in discussions between the mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann. The idea of the Singularity was popularised in the 1980s and 1990s by mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and later by Kurzweil, a prominent technologist and innovator.

Kurzweil’s argument has two main components. The first is the claim that continuing progress in microelectronics and computer software will, over the next few decades, realise the ultimate ambitions of the artificial intelligence (AI) program, producing computers that first equal, and then dramatically outstrip, the reasoning capacities of the human mind.

The key to all this Moore’s Law. This is the observation, first made by Intel CEO Gordon Moore in the mid-1960s, that computer processing power, roughly measured by the number of transistors on an integrated circuit, doubles every eighteen months to two years. Over the intervening forty years, the number of transistors on a typical integrated circuit has gone from less than a thousand to hundreds of millions.

No exponential trend can continue indefinitely, and the end of the expansion described in Moore’s Law has been predicted on many occasions, often with reference to seemingly unavoidable constraints dictated by the laws of physics. The constraint most commonly cited at present relates to the size of components. On present trends, transistors will be smaller than atoms within 15 years or so; this does not appear to be feasible, and current industry plans only extend to two or three more generations of progress, enough for perhaps a 100-fold increase in computing power.

Not surprisingly, Kurzweil dismisses such talk, arguing that just as transistors displaced vacuum tubes and integrated circuits displaced discrete transistors, new computing paradigms based on quantum effects will allow continued progress along the lines of Moores Law right through this century, and well past the point at which computers are powerful enough to permit functional emulation of human brains.

The second part of Kurzwei’s argument is based on three overlapping revolutions in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics. These revolutions are presented as being in full swing today but iin any case it is assumed that AI will smooth out any rough spots. Between them, Kurzweil argues, developments in these three fields will transform medicine, science, finance and the economy. Although all sorts of miracles are promised, the most dramatic is human immortality, achieved first through dramatic extensions in lifespans delivered by nanorobots in our bloodstreams and, more completely, by the ability to upload ourselves into infinitely-lived computers.

Not surprisingly, Kurzweil has attracted a passionate support from a small group of people and derision from a much larger group, particularly within the blogosphere which might have been expected to sympathise more with techno-utopianism. The wittiest critique was probably that of Daniel Davies at the Crooked Timber blog (disclosure: I’m also a blogger there) who modified Arthur C Clarke’s observation about technology and magic to produce the crushing ‘Any sufficiently advanced punditry is indistinguishable from bollocks’. Riffing off a link from Tyler Cowen on the expected value of extreme forecasts, and a trope popularised by Belle Waring, Davies outbid Kurzweil by predicting not only that all the Singularity predictions would come true, but that everyone would have a pony (“ Not just any old pony by the way, but a super technonanopony!”).

Before beginning my own critical appraisal of the Singularity idea, I’ll observe that the fact that I’ve been waiting so long for the book is significant in itself. If my great-grandfather had wanted to read a book newly-published in the US, he would have had to wait six weeks or so for the steamship to deliver the book. A century later, nothing has changed, unless I’m willing to shell out the price of the book again in air freight. On the other hand, whereas international communication for great-grandad consisted of the telegraph, anyone with an Internet connection can now download shelves full of books from all around the world in a matter of minutes and at a cost measured in cents rather than dollars.

This is part of a more general paradox, only partially recognised by the prophets of the Singularity. Those of us whose lives are centred on computers and the Internet have experienced recent decades as periods of unprecedently rapid technological advance. Yet outside this narrow sector the pace of technological change has slowed to a crawl, in some cases failing even to keep pace with growth in population. The average American spends more time in the car, just to cover the basic tasks of shopping and getting to work, than was needed a generation ago, and in many cases, travels more slowly.

The advocates of the Singularity tend either to ignore these facts or to brush them aside. If there has been limited progress in transport, this doesn’t matter, since advances in nanotech, biotechn and infotech will make existing technological limits irrelevant. Taking transport as an example, if we can upload our brains into computers and transmit them at the speed of light, it doesn’t matter that cars are still slow. Similarly, transport of goods will be irrelevant since we can assemble whatever we want, wherever we want it, from raw atoms.

Much of this is unconvincing. Kurzweil lost me on biotech, for example, when he revealed that he had invented his own cure for middle age, involving the daily consumption of a vast range of pills and supplements, supposedly keeping his biological age at 40 for the last 15 years (the photo on the dustjacket is that of a man in his early 50s). In any case, nothing coming out of biotech in the last few decades has been remotely comparable to penicillin and the Pill for medical and social impact (a case could be made that ELISA screening of blood samples, was crucial in limiting the death toll from AIDS, but old-fashioned public health probably had a bigger impact.

As for nanotech, so far there has been a lot of hype but little real progress. This is masked by the fact that, now that the size of features in integrated circuits is measured in tens of nanometers, the term “nanotech” can be applied to what is, in essence, standard electronics, though pushed to extremes that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago.

Purists would confine the term “nanotechnology” to the kind of atomic-level engineering promoted by visionaries like Eric Drexler and earnestly discussed by journals like Wired. Two decades after Drexler wrote his influential PhD thesis, any products of such nanotechnology are about as visible to the naked eye as their subatomic components.

Moore’s Law and demand elasticity

Only Kurzweil’s appeal to Moore’s Law seems worth taking seriously. There’s no sign that the rate of progress in computer technology is slowing down noticeably. A doubling time of two years for chip speed, memory capacity and so on implies a thousand-fold increase over twenty years. There are two very different things this could mean. One is that computers in twenty years time will do mostly the same things as at present, but very fast and at almost zero cost. The other is that digital technologies will displace analog for a steadily growing proportion of productive activity, in both the economy and the household sector, as has already happened with communications, photography, music and so on. Once that transition is made these sectors share the rapid growth of the computer sector.

In the first case, the contribution of computer technology to economic growth gradually declines to zero, as computing services become an effectively free good, and the rest of the economy continues as usual. Since productivity growth outside the sectors affected by computers has been slowing down for decades, the likely outcome is something close to a stationary equilibrium for the economy as a whole.

But in the second case, the rate of growth for a steadily expanding proportion of the economy accelerates to the pace dictated by Moore’s Law. Again, communications provides an illustration – after decades of steady productivity growth at 4 or 5 per cent a year, the rate of technical progress jumped to 70 per cent a year around 1990, at least for those types of communication that can be digitized (the move from 2400-baud modems to megabit broadband in the space of 15 years illustrates this). A generalized Moore’s law might not exactly produce Kurzweil’s singularity, but a few years of growth at 70 per cent a year would make most current economic calculations irrelevant.

One way of expressing this dichotomy is in terms of the aggregate elasticity of demand for computation. If it’s greater than one, the share of computing in the economy, expressed in value terms, rises steadily as computing gets cheaper. If it’s less than one, the share falls. It’s only if the elasticity is very close to one that we continue on the path of the last couple of decades, with continuing growth at a rate of around 3 per cent.

This kind of result, where only a single value of a key parameter is consistent with stable growth, is sometimes called a knife-edge. Reasoning like this can be tricky – maybe there are good reasons why the elasticity of demand for computation should be very close to one. One reason this might be so is if most problems eventually reach a point, similar to that of weather forecasting, where linear improvements in performance require exponential growth in computation (such problems are said to be polynomial in complexity).

If the solution to a problem involves components that are polynomial (or worse) in complexity, initial progress may be rapid as non-polynomial components of the problem are solved, but progress with the polynomial component will at best be linear, even if the cost of computation falls exponentially.

So far it seems as if the elasticity of demand for computation is a bit greater than one, but not a lot. The share of IT in total investment has risen significantly, but the share of the economy driven primarily by IT remains small. In addition, non-economic activity like blogging has expanded rapidly, but also remains small. The whole thing could easily bog down in an economy-wide version of ‘Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away’.

In summary, I’m unconvinced that the Singularity is near. But unlike the majority of critics of Kurzweil’s argument, I’m not prepared to rule out the possibility that information technology will spread through large sectors of the economy, producing unprecedently rapid economic growth. Even a small probability of such an outcome would make a big difference to the expected returns to investments, and would be worth planning for. So it’s certainly worthwhile reading Kurzweil’s book and taking the time to consider his argument.

At this stage, though, the Singularity is still best considered as science fiction. If you really want to get a feel for the ideas that drive discussion of the Singularity, read Ian McDonald’s River of Gods or, better still, Charles Stross’ Accelerando.

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Singularity review

I’ve finally received my copy of Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity, which was posted to me by its American publisher six weeks ago …

The title refers to the claim that the process of technological change, notably in relation to computing, biotechnology and nanotechnology is accelerating to the point where it will produce a fundamental, and almost instantaneous, change in what it means to be human, arising from the combination of artificial intelligence and the use of biotechnology to re-engineer our bodies and minds.

The term Singularity, used to describe this event, apparently arose in discussions between the mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann. The idea of the Singularity was popularised in the 1980s and 1990s by mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and later by Kurzweil, a prominent technologist and innovator.

Kurzweil’s argument has two main components. The first is the claim that continuing progress in microelectronics and computer software will, over the next few decades, realise the ultimate ambitions of the artificial intelligence (AI) program, producing computers that first equal, and then dramatically outstrip, the reasoning capacities of the human mind.

The key to all this Moore’s Law. This is the observation, first made by Intel CEO Gordon Moore in the mid-1960s, that computer processing power, roughly measured by the number of transistors on an integrated circuit, doubles every eighteen months to two years. Over the intervening forty years, the number of transistors on a typical integrated circuit has gone from less than a thousand to hundreds of millions.

No exponential trend can continue indefinitely, and the end of the expansion described in Moore’s Law has been predicted on many occasions, often with reference to seemingly unavoidable constraints dictated by the laws of physics. The constraint most commonly cited at present relates to the size of components. On present trends, transistors will be smaller than atoms within 15 years or so; this does not appear to be feasible, and current industry plans only extend to two or three more generations of progress, enough for perhaps a 100-fold increase in computing power.

Not surprisingly, Kurzweil dismisses such talk, arguing that just as transistors displaced vacuum tubes and integrated circuits displaced discrete transistors, new computing paradigms based on quantum effects will allow continued progress along the lines of Moores Law right through this century, and well past the point at which computers are powerful enough to permit functional emulation of human brains.

The second part of Kurzwei’s argument is based on three overlapping revolutions in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics. These revolutions are presented as being in full swing today but iin any case it is assumed that AI will smooth out any rough spots. Between them, Kurzweil argues, developments in these three fields will transform medicine, science, finance and the economy. Although all sorts of miracles are promised, the most dramatic is human immortality, achieved first through dramatic extensions in lifespans delivered by nanorobots in our bloodstreams and, more completely, by the ability to upload ourselves into infinitely-lived computers.

Not surprisingly, Kurzweil has attracted a passionate support from a small group of people and derision from a much larger group, particularly within the blogosphere which might have been expected to sympathise more with techno-utopianism. The wittiest critique was probably that of Daniel Davies at the Crooked Timber blog (disclosure: I’m also a blogger there) who modified Arthur C Clarke’s observation about technology and magic to produce the crushing ‘Any sufficiently advanced punditry is indistinguishable from bollocks’. Riffing off a link from Tyler Cowen on the expected value of extreme forecasts, and a trope popularised by Belle Waring, Davies outbid Kurzweil by predicting not only that all the Singularity predictions would come true, but that everyone would have a pony (“ Not just any old pony by the way, but a super technonanopony!”).

Before beginning my own critical appraisal of the Singularity idea, I’ll observe that the fact that I’ve been waiting so long for the book is significant in itself. If my great-grandfather had wanted to read a book newly-published in the US, he would have had to wait six weeks or so for the steamship to deliver the book. A century later, nothing has changed, unless I’m willing to shell out the price of the book again in air freight. On the other hand, whereas international communication for great-grandad consisted of the telegraph, anyone with an Internet connection can now download shelves full of books from all around the world in a matter of minutes and at a cost measured in cents rather than dollars.

This is part of a more general paradox, only partially recognised by the prophets of the Singularity. Those of us whose lives are centred on computers and the Internet have experienced recent decades as periods of unprecedently rapid technological advance. Yet outside this narrow sector the pace of technological change has slowed to a crawl, in some cases failing even to keep pace with growth in population. The average American spends more time in the car, just to cover the basic tasks of shopping and getting to work, than was needed a generation ago, and in many cases, travels more slowly.

The advocates of the Singularity tend either to ignore these facts or to brush them aside. If there has been limited progress in transport, this doesn’t matter, since advances in nanotech, biotechn and infotech will make existing technological limits irrelevant. Taking transport as an example, if we can upload our brains into computers and transmit them at the speed of light, it doesn’t matter that cars are still slow. Similarly, transport of goods will be irrelevant since we can assemble whatever we want, wherever we want it, from raw atoms.

Much of this is unconvincing. Kurzweil lost me on biotech, for example, when he revealed that he had invented his own cure for middle age, involving the daily consumption of a vast range of pills and supplements, supposedly keeping his biological age at 40 for the last 15 years (the photo on the dustjacket is that of a man in his early 50s). In any case, nothing coming out of biotech in the last few decades has been remotely comparable to penicillin and the Pill for medical and social impact (a case could be made that ELISA screening of blood samples, was crucial in limiting the death toll from AIDS, but old-fashioned public health probably had a bigger impact.

As for nanotech, so far there has been a lot of hype but little real progress. This is masked by the fact that, now that the size of features in integrated circuits is measured in tens of nanometers, the term “nanotech” can be applied to what is, in essence, standard electronics, though pushed to extremes that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago.

Purists would confine the term “nanotechnology” to the kind of atomic-level engineering promoted by visionaries like Eric Drexler and earnestly discussed by journals like Wired. Two decades after Drexler wrote his influential PhD thesis, any products of such nanotechnology are about as visible to the naked eye as their subatomic components.

Moore’s Law and demand elasticity

Only Kurzweil’s appeal to Moore’s Law seems worth taking seriously. There’s no sign that the rate of progress in computer technology is slowing down noticeably. A doubling time of two years for chip speed, memory capacity and so on implies a thousand-fold increase over twenty years. There are two very different things this could mean. One is that computers in twenty years time will do mostly the same things as at present, but very fast and at almost zero cost. The other is that digital technologies will displace analog for a steadily growing proportion of productive activity, in both the economy and the household sector, as has already happened with communications, photography, music and so on. Once that transition is made these sectors share the rapid growth of the computer sector.

In the first case, the contribution of computer technology to economic growth gradually declines to zero, as computing services become an effectively free good, and the rest of the economy continues as usual. Since productivity growth outside the sectors affected by computers has been slowing down for decades, the likely outcome is something close to a stationary equilibrium for the economy as a whole.

But in the second case, the rate of growth for a steadily expanding proportion of the economy accelerates to the pace dictated by Moore’s Law. Again, communications provides an illustration – after decades of steady productivity growth at 4 or 5 per cent a year, the rate of technical progress jumped to 70 per cent a year around 1990, at least for those types of communication that can be digitized (the move from 2400-baud modems to megabit broadband in the space of 15 years illustrates this). A generalized Moore’s law might not exactly produce Kurzweil’s singularity, but a few years of growth at 70 per cent a year would make most current economic calculations irrelevant.

One way of expressing this dichotomy is in terms of the aggregate elasticity of demand for computation. If it’s greater than one, the share of computing in the economy, expressed in value terms, rises steadily as computing gets cheaper. If it’s less than one, the share falls. It’s only if the elasticity is very close to one that we continue on the path of the last couple of decades, with continuing growth at a rate of around 3 per cent.

This kind of result, where only a single value of a key parameter is consistent with stable growth, is sometimes called a knife-edge. Reasoning like this can be tricky – maybe there are good reasons why the elasticity of demand for computation should be very close to one. One reason this might be so is if most problems eventually reach a point, similar to that of weather forecasting, where linear improvements in performance require exponential growth in computation (such problems are said to be polynomial in complexity).

If the solution to a problem involves components that are polynomial (or worse) in complexity, initial progress may be rapid as non-polynomial components of the problem are solved, but progress with the polynomial component will at best be linear, even if the cost of computation falls exponentially.

So far it seems as if the elasticity of demand for computation is a bit greater than one, but not a lot. The share of IT in total investment has risen significantly, but the share of the economy driven primarily by IT remains small. In addition, non-economic activity like blogging has expanded rapidly, but also remains small. The whole thing could easily bog down in an economy-wide version of ‘Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away’.

In summary, I’m unconvinced that the Singularity is near. But unlike the majority of critics of Kurzweil’s argument, I’m not prepared to rule out the possibility that information technology will spread through large sectors of the economy, producing unprecedently rapid economic growth. Even a small probability of such an outcome would make a big difference to the expected returns to investments, and would be worth planning for. So it’s certainly worthwhile reading Kurzweil’s book and taking the time to consider his argument.

At this stage, though, the Singularity is still best considered as science fiction. If you really want to get a feel for the ideas that drive discussion of the Singularity, read Ian McDonald’s River of Gods or, better still, Charles Stross’ Accelerando.

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I wasn’t surprised by this. Farley is the epitome of the navalist view that serious expertise on the technology of naval warfare is a crucial requirement for commentary, whereas being right is irrelevant.

Given this respect for credentialed expertise, however, I was a bit surprised, to see Farley endorse a piece by Bret Devereaux making the claim that that “the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the global economy” You might think that the relevant expertise here included at least some knowledge of both transport economics and the global economy. Devereaux, who is an “ancient and military historian” has neither.. Still, I’m not going to pull academic rank here. Let’s see what Devereaux has to say and how well it stacks up as a piece of economic analysis.

I take the architectural metaphor to mean that the global economy depends critically on the supposed role of the US Navy in protecting maritime trade. This is stronger version of a claim commonly made by navalists, to the the effect that US naval expenditure is a form of global foreign aid, offsetting the notorious stinginess of the US in ordinary aid (now massively exacerbated by Trump and Musk).

A notable example of this latter claim is this piece by Brookings Institute researcher Michael O’Hanlon, notable as a prominent Iraq war hawk who hasn’t paid any price for being worng.. Like Devereaux also lacks any economic qualifications and shows no evidence of having learned anything on the subject. O’Hanlon claims that US naval activity is crucial to the maintenance of free movement through vital waterways including Strait of Hormuz and the South China Sea (the latter claim is treated with appropriate derision here)

Now let’s turn to Devereaux. He begins well enough with the observations that trade is an important part of the global economy. He presents, but doesn’t really explain the concept of comparative advantage. Next he explains that, while shipping is slow, it is much cheaper than air or land transport. For that reason, most seaborne trade is focused on staples like food, rather than luxury goods. These familiar facts are presented rather breathlessly with lots of bold and italic font, as is the observation that “ships can be really, really big”

Deveraux asserts that all of this trade depends on the fact that piracy has been almost non-existent since 1945. That’s an important claim which obviously needs assessment in the light of that post-1945 experience.

What we get, however, is a lengthy history of piracy from the Greek Dark Age to the Barbary Wars, in which Devereaux’s expertise in ancient history is displayed. Unfortunately, there is no modern history. The story stops 200 years ago, omitting the much more relevant experience of piracy in the waters off Somalia

To recap briefly, Somalia fishers, whose traditional fisheries were being devastated by industrial-scale extraction undertaken by fleets from rich countries, began attacking merchant ships and holding them, and their crews for ransom. This turned out to be a profitable enterprise which expanded rapidly. The US and other rich countries responded by sending destroyers and other high-powered naval vessels. However, these vessels weren’t well suited to dealing with fisher/pirates in speedboats and piracy continued.

The eventual answer to the problem, amusingly enough, was a combination of lawyers, guns and money. Legal processes were developed to ensure that pirates, once apprehended, could be prosecuted. Shippers reluctantly hired armed guards and installed safe rooms to slow hijackers down to the point that help could be called in. And financial aid to Somalia helped reduce the desperation that drove piracy in the first place (piracy has ticked up again since the Trump administration cut that aid).

But even at its peak, the economic cost of piracy was minimal, no more than around $10 billon a year on a generous estimate. That’s less than the running cost of a single carrier strike group. And the low level of piracy wasn’t due to the “tiger-repelling rock” effect of the US Navy. Even with 11 carrier groups, the USN isn’t big enough to patrol every coastline from which pirates might operate.

Deveraux next presents the standard navalist calin about “choke points”, that is, “narrow sea passages where alternative routes are either much longer or simply unavailable”. As with the discussion of piracy, Devereaux sticks mainly to the distant past, looking at tolls charged by Denmark in the 19th century.

Devereaux claims that “every country on a choke-point tried to maximize extraction off of it, the result would be a major drop in global trade, which, as discussed above, would lead to a sharp decline in living standards in rich and poor countries alike. ”

At this point, an economist would immediately ask “how sharp would the decline be, and how much should we pay to prevent it”. The big question about “choke points” is how much it costs to go the long way around them, rather than fighting a way through. Such cost-benefit calculations never occur to navalists.

As with pirates, we have plenty of evidence. The Suez canal is among the most important of choke points and it’s been closed repeatedly, notably during the eponymous 1956 crisis and from 1967 to 1973. It’s been largely closed for the last three years thanks to the conflict in Yemen.

The economic effect has been trivial. Shipping has been diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding 6-8 days to a typical voyage, and around $100/container to the shipping cost. For a container-load of, say, 25 fridges that’s $4 apiece.

We can also make estimates for a hypothetical closure of the Panama Canal. Comparing this route to US intermodal rail, you get a bigger increase in cost (about $1000/container) but that’s offset by faster delivery, and more flexible routes (and, for US domestic trade, the Jones Act wipes out most of the cost advantage, effectively replicating the impact of a blockade).

https://carraglobe.com/suez-vs-cape-of-good-hope-transit-times/

And this calculation implicitly assumes that naval power can keep these choke points open. That hasn’t been the case in the Suez canal, which is still under Houthi/Ansaralla control. Some oil has been flowing out of the Strait of Hormuz. But that doesn’t mean the strait has been re-opened. The flow appears to depend primarily on traditional blockade running techniques, sailing by night without identification, ship-to-ship transfers and quiet payoffs to the blockaders (in this case, Iran).

Fortunately, while an increase in the price of oil is as Devereaux says, no fun, its impact on the global economy is marginal. The crisis is politically problematic, but it amounts to adding a few tenths of a percentage point to inflation rates and an even smaller effect on economic growth.

It is true that sufficiently power navies can still impose blockades ,as the US is doing now. But that does not help the global economy. And since no blockade in history has ever compelled the surrender of an adversary without the assistance of land forces, it’s a weak reed for navalists to lean on.

Since most conflicts end in compromise, I’ll offer one to Farley and Deverauz. If they’ll stop making silly claims about international trade and the global economy. I’ll stop talking about aircraft carriers.

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The recent panic about a breach of Medicare computer security by an “AI agent” contrasts sharply with other recent cases such as the Telstra and Optus outages that left many Australians unable to reach Triple Zero. In those cases, no one blamed the computers involved. The mistakes were clearly sheeted home to the corporations that operated them.

This wasn’t always the case. When the term “artificial intelligence” was coined some 70 years ago, the first mainframe computers (absurdly primitive by modern standards) were viewed with the same awe and concern as the AI agents of the present day. There were even “algorithms” (though the term wasn’t used in that way at the time) that were supposed to pick ideal dating matches.

Failures were inevitable, and blame-shifting became routine. “The computer made a mistake” was the 1960s equivalent of “your email must have gone to junk”. Gradually, however, we realised that the problem was not with the computer but with incorrect information fed into it or badly written programs invoked as a result.

We need to make a similar adjustment when we discuss AI “agents”. If someone enters a prompt like “find Australian medicine statistics” into a program like ChatGPT or Claude, and the result is a breach of Medicare’s site, the responsibility does not lie with a piece of code. Either the human who entered the prompt or the corporation producing the code made a mistake, and they should be held liable for the resulting damages. If it’s impossible to work out who is at fault, liability should be joint and several – that is, both are liable for the full amount of the same loss, and the cost can be allocated between them.

Fixing the problems of agentic software won’t be easy. The frequency with which early computer programs malfunctioned made “debugging” (a term predating its use in computing) an essential part of information technology. Bugs might be found in the operating system, the program itself or the information fed into it. In one case, the problem was a literal bug: a moth that got caught in the relays. But with enough determination the source of the problem could usually be found and fixed.

Traditional debugging is much more difficult with agentic programs. It may be possible, after the fact, to work out what the program has done. But it’s impossible to inspect the hundreds of billions of parameters in a large agentic model and work out why the agent did it.

In this context, the idea of constraining the program with “guardrails” or “harnesses” is naive in the extreme. The whole point of telling a computer program to perform a task is to get around obstacles to that task. And with no understanding of the internal workings, external constraints will be treated as obstacles.

In most cases, the only solution will be to abandon many of the capacities that are supposed to make agents useful, such as the ability to log in to sites using passwords or to make payments on the user’s behalf.

This will be a huge wrench for corporations that have grown up with the Silicon Valley ethics of “move fast and break things” and “ask for forgiveness, not permission”. They are far more comfortable talking about “hallucinations” and “rogue agents” than about their own responsibility for programs that produce massive errors and real-world damage.

But once AI corporations are made to bear the financial consequences of their reckless negligence, a different kind of calculus will come into play. Instead of thinking, “what cool thing can we make this program do”, the first question will be, “what could go wrong if we let it run”.

Forcing corporations to bear liability for damage caused by their actions will, in all probability, drastically slow the “hyperscaling” rush to produce more and increasingly powerful agentic software. That’s a good thing for the environment as well as the economy.

And none of this will preclude the many benign uses of “AI” software, including massively improved internet search, document summarisation and translation, and software coding. These uses come with the adjustment problems that always arise with new technology, eliminating some jobs while creating others, and so on. But there is no reason to fear that they will accidentally cause a nuclear holocaust or even drain our bank accounts.

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What got me started on this was talk about “demand destruction” in oil markets, often claimed to be a term used by economists. This piece of idiocy conflates reductions of consumption in direct response to price changes (movements along the demand curve), reductions for other reasons like the arrival of electric cars (shifts in the demand curve) and permanent shifts away from oil as a response to events like the US-Iran war.

Next up is “algorithms”. Until recently an algorithm was a defined procedure, guaranteed to yield a correct answer to an appropriate class of problems given the right starting conditions and sufficient time. The classic example is Euclid’s algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Now the term is used to mean the undefined and incomprehensible way in which a variety of decisions (from the content of social media feeds to the selection of bombing targets) are derived from the inputs fed into complex models.¹ The term carries over the connotations of precision from the original definition, often for people who would deride any inference described as coming from a “model”. This battle is pretty much lost, but I’m not giving up quite yet.

On the other side of this coin are spurious attempts at sophistication, rather like children putting on lipstick. One is “methodology” (the philosophical study of scientific method) used as a fancy synonym for “method” . Even worse, contorted attempts to use “data” as a plural (presumably of “datum”²) rather than as a mass noun like water. To see how wrong this is, compare “a large amount of data” with the clunky “a large number of data”. In the rare case when we need a singular/plural distinction, correct is “data point(s)”, with the associated collective term “data set”.

Finally, my favorite peeve is “begs the question”. Its original form, meaning “assuming the conclusion” is an absurdly literal translation of the Latin “petitio principii”. The most common modern use, meaning “raises the question”, just marks the user as ignorant. Best avoided altogether.

As I said at the start, there is no way of setting the language in stone. But some innovations make for more clarity or expressiveness, while others collapse useful distinctions (like methodology for method) or are inherently dishonest (like algorithm for model)

¹ There must be an algorithm somewhere inside the model, maximising an objective function of some kind. But since we don’t know what the function is, that’s not very helpful.

² “Datum” is a technical term used by surveyors with the ordinary plural “datums”.

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In my previous newsletter, I criticised the piece. for overstating the success of the European far right. But the really appalling thing about the article is the sanewashing of the Trump administration and the US voting public.

The article contains a passing mention of rhetorical claims made by Vance, Rubio and Trump along lines similar to those of the European far right. But no one reading it would realise that the Trump administration has implemented policies more extreme than those of even the AfD, the furthest right of the European parties discussed, and has done so with the near-unanimous support of US Republicans,

The stated AfD policy on remigration proposes. (translation and summary from ChatGPT, checked with Google Translate)

• Deport people subject to enforceable departure orders.

• Withdraw refugee protection when the original grounds are considered to have ended, specifically identifying Syria.

• Negotiate with countries of origin to facilitate returns

• Prioritise deportation of foreign nationals classified as security threats, extremists or serious criminals

• Make deportation easier for foreigners convicted of violent, drug-related or sexual offences

• Expand financial incentives for voluntary return.

The programme envisages changing existing laws while remaining within constitutional requirements. it states “We firmly reject unconstitutional demands—such as the arbitrary, collective deportation of foreigners regardless of their individual right of residence, or even the deportation of German citizens with a migration background.”

The AFD policy certainly appeals to anti-immigrant sentiment. But the Trump administration has gone far beyond this, detaining and deporting people who have committed no crime, and have sought to pursue residency through legal processes. And it has repeatedly trashed constitutional protections of all kinds, with heavily armed secret police snatching people off the streets and disappearing them into concentration camps.

Source: New York Times, balanced reportingnormalising these outrages.

This is not just a MAGA policy. Every single Republican member of Congress, with the exception of Lisa Murkowski, voted to support this regime of terror [1] And what’s true of politicians is true of Unlike European far-right parties, which rarely get more than 20 per cent support, Trump and the Republicans got nearly 50 per cent of the votes in the 2024 election. And while they are likely to lose ground in the next election, that’s not because of repugnance against these crimes. Immigration is the issue on which Trump’s support is highest, at around 40 per cent. That includes 80 per cent of Republicans. A

These aren’t (only) the left-behind denizens of midwestern diners. 40 per cent of white Americans with four-year degrees share this approval (given the gender gap, white college-educated men would be close to 50)

In summary, the NY Times would get much more insight into the roots of rightwing extremism if its reporters took the Long Island Rail Road to Suffolk county [2[ went to an upscale bar or restaurant and chatted to the patrons there. But it’s far more comforting to read about foreigners nostalgic for Mussolini and Hitler than to consider the likelihood that your next-door neighbour shares their views.

fn1. (As usual, Susan Collins got a hall pass to support a failed amendment, before falling into line on the final vote).

fn2 (2nd richest in New York with median household income $130k and a 54 per cent vite Trump)

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The NYTimes doesn’t mention that

• The rightwing coalition of which Wilders was part collapsed when he withdrew support and lost the subsequent election. Wilders party split and is competing with two other far-right parties, also in opposition.

• The rightwing Swedish coalition which had promised the Sweden Democrats a role was defeated at the recent election, with the SD vote declining

• Farage’s Reform party has also split and Farage himself is now massively unpopular

There have been more consequential losses than this. The most successful far-right government in Europe, that of Viktor Orban’s Fidesz in Hungary, was crushed in elections earlier this year. and the party is now splitting. Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS), lost office in 2023 and has now also split [1{/

Other successes have turned sour for the far-right. Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, a successor to various neo-fascist parties, won elections in 2022, and has held together since then. But the government hasn’t delivered much of the far-right agenda, beyond stunts like a recently announced ban on burquas in schools. The Finns Party’s participation in a right government (in Finland, obviously) has seen a big loss of popularity.

Europe isn’t out of the woods yet. A victory for the National Rally in the French election next year would pose some significant problems. But compared to the defeats listed above, the fact that the German AfD migh form the government of a small German state is not a big problem.

It’s important to observe at this point that the rise of far-right parties does not imply an increase in the proportion of voters with far-right views. In almost any country, at least 20 per cent of the voters and maybe more hold far-right views of one kind or another, which will emerge if given the chance. As I observed back in 2016, the neoliberal consensus meant that “mainstream” rightwing parties could no longer rely on the votes of (white Christian) tribalists/Trumpists and made symbolic gestures in their direction, but largely ignored them, particularly if their interests came into conflict with those of big business. After the 2008 financial crisis, this was no longer possible

Finally, it’s true that far-right parties have succeeded in pushing European countries to adopt more restrictive immigration policies. But anti-immigrant bigotry has always been a winning issue for the political right. The UK Conservative party, normally classed as centre-right has advocated and implemented policies far more restrictive than those of any European far-right party, only to be outflanked by the further right Reform and Restore.

And that brings us to the elephant in the NYT room. But I’m going to leave that for Part 2.

fn1. Admittedly a PiS candidate scraped in to win the most recent presidential election, but he has limited power).

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With this in mind, I take very strong positions in the hope of making people think. In the case of the National Anti-Corruption position, the title of the submission tells it all. NACC is an unfixable waste of time and money. My summary is below and you can read the whole thing on the inquiry website

Summary:

The NACC has spent large amounts of public money and exercised extraordinary coercive powers for little or no benefit. The National Anti-Corruption Commission Act 2022, as interpreted by the Commission, provides little or no capacity to act against behaviour by politicians and senior public servants that might reasonably be regarded as corrupt. Experience so far suggests that lower-level corruption, such as bribery, is not entrenched in a way that justifies the operating costs and powers of a body like the NACC. Predecessor bodies, such as the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, were equally effective.

The NACC should either be abolished or completely restructured, with all statutory officers and senior managers replaced. An effective organisation needs a commitment to fighting corruption that is entirely absent from the current NACC. Unfortunately, such a commitment requires an across-the-board political consensus on the need for substantial change in the behaviour of politicians and political parties. No such consensus exists at present.

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As of today, the story has disappeared from most front pages. Admittedly, it’s the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but the NYT found space for stories about the Reflecting Pool fiasco and Trump’s presidential library. I found one story in USA Today suggesting that the policy might be inflationary, but that’s about it.

Source: moneyinstructor.com

The reaction from US financial markets has been similarly subdued. Interest rates on government bonds have continued the gradual increase of recent months. There has been nothing like the reaction that put Liz Truss out of office in the UK after a term that lasted less than the shelf life of a lettuce. Meanwhile, stockmarkets barely reacted.

Lots of commentary has focused on the fact that Trump has previously proposed handouts that didn’t happen, for example from the savings to be made by DOGE, which never materialised. But this is typical of Trump - he has a range of obsessions to which he returns from time to time, before his attention span expires. Some are relatively trivial like steam-catapults for aircraft carriers, others more consequential like his suggested conquests of Canada and Greenland, or retribution against his political enemeis. But he never abandons them for good,

And, in the case of cash handouts he’s had one big success - the Covid stimulus checks that were sent out with his name on them and almost certainly helped him come within an inch of victory in 2020 - as well as some smaller ones.

In any serious country, a massively expensive policy of this kind would have been analysed in detail by now, with estimates of the immediately effect on inflation and interest rates and the flow on to the economy as a whole. Combined with the budgetary costs and price effects of the Iran War, it seems likely to add at least a couple of percentage points to US inflation, giving the Fed a choice between abandoning its inflation targeting regime or raising interest rates enough to risk a recession.

But the US is not a serious country [1}. Over the past decade, at least 40 per cent of US voters (including sustained majorities of white men, the dominant identity group) have shown themselves willing to vote for a corrupt and deranged clown, while another third of the population hasn’t even bothered to vote. Faced with these facts, mainstream media and establishment Democrats have continued to pretend that everything is normal [2], sanewashing Trump and hoping that another round of elections will solve the problem.

As Adam Smith observed to a correspondent, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. The US is still the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen. But it is running down its capital at a startling rate, and there is no real sign of things turning around in time

fn1. Phillips O’Brien has been making this point with respect to foreign policy.

fn 2. Each new Trump outrage is met with feeble protests to the effect that “this is not who we are”, gradually replaced by tacit acceptance that this is who tens of millions of Americans are.

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At the time of the misconceived ban on access for under-16s, I argued that a better alternative would be to fix social media for everybody, including by addressing the problems created when platforms decide what to show while denying any responsibility for what they publish.

The measures announced recently go at least part of the way. As long as there is an easy way to opt out, it’s likely that a lot of people will choose it, rather than having their feeds flooded with the nonsense served up at present. At least that’s my introspective intuition, having selected the “only people I follow” option for Substack, Bluesky and Mastodon.

Opt-in, as supported by the Greens would be better. It’s likely enough that the platforms will find ways to make opting out difficult. But once they resist this small step, the case for going further will be that much stronger.

Politically, this seems like a winner for the government.The rightwing parties are likely to oppose the measures, or split over them, while of course the platforms will fight, and may get backing from Trump. But they have worn out their social license by now, I think.

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As with lots of claims made by this government, it’s defensible if construed literally enough, but conceals more than reveals. Back in 2022, when a routine CPI adjustment to welfare benefits coincided with high inflation, PM Albanese announced it as “the biggest increase to the pension in 30 years”

Then there was Albanese’s observation that Labor had only won office from opposition three times between WWII and 2022, meant to demonstrate the extreme difficulty of this task. The logic of two-party government implies that the LNP achieved the same feat four times (assuming you count 1975). Or, to put it differently again, the average post-war government has lasted about 10 years (by 2022, the LNP had been in for nine).

Coming back to gambling, most of the changes, like the extension of provision for self-exclusion were tweaks on existing policies. The big change was a restriction to three ads an hour, between 6am and 8:30 pm. That’s welcome, but the problem it addresses only arose, at least in its current form, around 2019.

Online gambling didn’t really happen until the disastrous High Court decision[1} in the Betfair case, which struck down most legal restrictions. The result was an explosion of advertising during sporting events, even included in commentary. The worst excesses were curbed in 2013 and further limits were imposed in 2018. The gambling industry response was to shift advertising from sporting events to general viewing.

It was shortly after this that the Peta Murphy MP began her campaign to ban gambling ads. It had widespread support but was faced with the ferocious opposition of the gambling and media lobbies. After long delays, the government finally produced legislation which limited ads to three per hour. Although ads are typically 15-30 seconds, there’s nothing to stop the industry putting its money into 60 second ads, which would use up around 20 per cent of the 15-18 minutes typically allocated to non-program content on commercial channels. That’s essentially uncchanged from the present.

Then there are a bunch of restrictions on ads appealing to minors, logos and the like. Although the details very from drug to drug, these are broadly similar to the restrictions that currently apply to alcohol and applied to tobacco before all forms of advertising were banned.

Finally, there has been almost nothing on pokies or casinos. These have historically been the biggest source of social damage from problem gambling. Racing broadcasts have been carved out explicitly and racetrack betting is essentially untouched.

So, to state the government’s claim more accurately. “Although much weaker than the community demanded, this is the strongest set of restrictions on online sports gambling and advertising since 2018”

Now for some speculation on why the legislation has been so weak. Lobbying always makes a difference but the public and cross-party support for strong restrictions was such that a determined government could have faced down business opposition. In my view, a large part of the story is an Albanese “captain’s call”.

In 2022, retired NBA player Shaquille O’Neal visited Australia as a paid advocate (and celebrity promoter) for PointsBet. Albanese took the opportunity to appear with him supporting the Voice, in one of the stranger publicity exercises of a misconceived campaign. Albanese saw O’Neal (aged 50, with a career that peaked around 2000) as someone who “might appeal to young people”. Apart from skin colour, O’Neal had no obvious link to the issues surrounding the Voice. The historic experience of African-Americans, while equally brutal, is entirely different from that of First Nations around the world, a distinction apparently lost on Albo.

This wasn’t much noticed at the time, but it presaged a series of similarly revealing Albo choices; Piers Morgan, Kyle Sandilands, the LGBT census question, the Grace Tame “difficult” comment and of course Bush Deep. It fits with Albo’s use of terms like “punters” to describe ordinary voters and “pub test” to describe their common sense reactions The central assumption is that middle-aged blokes, like himself, without any intellectual pretensions, are the representative voters whose concerns should be addressed.

And with this world view, Albo has been solicitous not only of Big Media, but of any possibility that punters in general might be inconvenienced

And this is all related to Labor’s failure to respond effectively to the challenge of One Nation. The demographic group Albo exemplifies and valorises is exactly the kind of lifelong Labor voter who might be tempted to line up with Pauline (as with the examples listed above). He can’t present a coherent alternative because he doesn’t really believe in one.

fn1. I’ve often said I’d prefer it if High Court decisions were decided by coin flip, getting it right 50 per cent of the time. Historically and recently, HC well below this.

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Early in February 2026, Trump deployed a carrier strike group (CSG) to the region, with a second arriving shortly afterwards. This show of force was described (with a striking lack of historical awareness) as an “armada”. The lead ship of that group, the USS Abraham Lincoln, is now limping home after what is generally admitted to have been a disastrous tour of duty.

As many people have pointed out to me over the years , I’m not a naval expert. But I can count. So, when the armada arrived, I checked the numbers and concluded that the threat was a hollow one.

The escorts are critical. They provide missile defence using AEGIS and Sea Sparrow systems, and once their interceptor stocks fall to low levels they must withdraw to be replaced or rearmed.

This creates an arithmetic problem. A Hobart-class destroyer has 48 blocks each capable of carrying one AEGIS controlled SM-2 or SM-6 interceptors. Alternatively, each block can carry four Sea Sparrows, but these are less capable.

Standard USN doctrine calls for the use of two defensive missiles against each incoming missile. On the assumption of 100 usable missiles per escort, that’s 50 defensive actions per escort or 200-250 in total. No one knows how many missiles Iran has available, but typical estimates suggest at least 3000, of which 1000 or more could be used in anti-ship capacity. Even assuming successful air attacks on launch sites, use of aircraft against missiles etc, hundreds of missiles will pose a threat, and at least some of them will cause enough damage to force escorts to withdraw.

A carrier-based bombing campaign couldn’t be sustained for even ten days without exhausting the carrier group’s defences, and requiring the USN “declare victory and go home”

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who could count. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (a hawkish and generally navalist think tank) looked at the numbers and concluded that the available force could do some damage but not enough to produce regime change. And, pretty clearly, the US military drew the same conclusion, except for the bit about going home.

Like the CSIS, I didn’t expect a massive air campaign beginning with the killing of the top Iranian leadership. But once the full-scale war began, the vast majority of the attacks were made by land-based aircraft. The carrier-based air arm fired most of their Tomahawks from a safe distance, with only modest effects. Iran responded by attacking land bases with a level of success that could have produced a catastrophe if it had been focused on the navy.

The role of the USN was reduced to its long-stated mission of keeping vital sea lanes open. When that failed, it shifted to the secondary task of imposed a blockade on Iran. Unsurprisingly, this has not produced a surrender - no naval blockade in recorded history has forced an adversary to surrender without the deployment of land forces.

Meanwhile, it is reported that the costs of the futile campaign have wrecked the Navy’s budget. A navy official, quoted in the Guardian says

.The money for payroll was robbed to pay for overseas contingencies and is being backfilled by money that hasn’t been spent. They are backfilling payroll so we get enough money in our paycheck.

More succinctly, a former official said

They’re fucked. They shot all their weapons; they trashed all their ships; they ran out of their money

The 2020s haven’t been a great decade for navies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine began with the destruction or capture of almost the entire Ukrainian navy. Then, despite having no navy of their own, the Ukrainians wiped out much of the mighty Black Sea Fleet, with the remnants sheltering in a Russian port as far away from Ukraine as they can get.

The Iranian war began similarly. The destruction of the Iranian Navy was rapid and complete. The most notable feature was the perfidious sinking of a ship returning from a training exercise in India, with the survivors of the initial attack being left to drown, even though their rescue would have posed no risk.

The US Navy suffered nothing more than the failures described above, but that was bad enough. Following the earlier failure to dislodge the Houthis, who now control access to the Red Sea, it is clear that naval forces cannot reliably keep trade lanes open, or defeat even a low-level land-based opponent.

But having been through many rounds of this debate, I am confident that nothing will persuade navalists that their beloved flat-tops and frigates are little more than floating targets. Pirates, grey zones, reconnaissance, diplomatic visits, disaster relief and tiger-repelling rocks will all be wheeled out. Still, for any government in serious fiscal trouble (and aren’t they all) reducing the navy* to a coast guard would save a heap of money that would otherwise be wasted.

Anticipating this, I won’t reply to any comments restating points of this kind. If you have something actually new to say, go ahead.

* I haven’t talked about submarines here. The doomsday machines waiting to unleash nuclear armageddon from the deep ocean floor are too much for me to think about. The ordinary kind, designed to sink ships from concealment, now seem like an expensive way of doing the job of a low-cost missile or drone, and even their invisibility is a depreciating asset.

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The last push over the line was a gimmick promotion in which I invited anyone who donated $100 to nominate a topic on which I should write a post.

Reader Daniela Brins-Norris took me up on the offer, and asked for a piece about the economic significance of Taylor Swift. I wrote about how Swift became the cultural and economic phenomenon she is now, and if someone would donate another $100, offered a post answering the question: what does her status as a self-made billionaire tell us about income distribution and public policy? Readers Paul Norton and Mike Funnell came up with the money - thanks guys

The claim “Every billionaire is a policy failure” is pretty widely accepted these days, formulated most clearly by Ingrid Robeyns case for limitarianism (a hard cap on the maximum wealth anyone can have). Looking at the Forbes list of the richest people in the world (one woman in the top 20) it’s hard to disagree. Most are thoroughly objectionable, and even those who aren’t personally appalling mostly made their money from monopoly (for example, Warren Buffett) or inheritance (members of the Walton family).

But what about the good billionaires, a category for which Taylor Swift (ranked about 2000 in the list) seems like the ideal example (before her, there was JK Rowling, but look how that turned out). Swift seems to tick all the boxes. Apparently a nice person (if you ignore the promotional feuds with other celebrities), generous with her money, treats her employees well, politically progressive without being obnoxious about it.

And she’s made her money honestly, selling records and concert tickets to people who want to buy them. Revealed preference arguments need to be treated with care (Tom Slee’s No One Makes You Shop at Walmart is the classic here) but Swifties have plenty of alternatives on offer. At the margin, a dollar spent on Swift is a dollar less for other entertainers, but that’s not a consideration we usually regard as relevant in our current system.

So, if there’s a problem with Swift’s wealth it’s not a problem with her, but with the system that makes such massive wealth possible. For Swift that comes about in several ways.

First, the money she makes from selling records and merchandise depends on the system of “intellectual property” (in this case, mostly copyrights and trademarks. Unlike many entertainers, she’s been highly successful in capturing this for herself rather than letting record companies grab it.

Second, her returns from ticket sales to her concerts depend on the availability of stadiums. These aresometimes explicitly subsidised by the public and always dependent on land use regulation.

Finally, the returns she gets when she invests her wealth are higher than those available to ordinary households. This is at the core of the r>g point made by Piketty a while back.

These compounding effects would be greatly reduced by a more progressive income tax system (a top marginal rate of 70 per cent) and by wealth taxes, capturing the excess returns to high wealth. In combination, these would make it very difficult, though not impossible, to become a billionaire by entertaining people. Other measures would be needed to deal with the massive accumulations of corporate wealth represented by the multibillionaires.

Given her dependence on the society that made her wealth possible, Swift can have no legitimate moral objection to a tax system that shares it out more evenly. But is there an economic cost here. The standard story is one about incentives and effort. But it’s hard to believe that Swift would write fewer songs, or perform less concerts if the return were in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions or billions. And, as I already observed, most of the ultra-rich have made their money in actively harmful ways. Even where there is an actually useful product involved, the super-profits have come mostly from monopoly or speculation.

In summary, in a society which produces billionaires, there’s no reason to object to Taylor Swift becoming one. But we could have all the music we need or want in a society without billionaires. Indeed, with policies like a participation income or livable income guarantee, we could see a lot more people making music, some of which might turn out better than what the industry currently gives us.

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I’ve been thinking about two questions. First, how did Swift become the cultural and economic phenomenon she is now? Second, what does her status as a self-made billionaire say about income distribution and public policy? I’ll write about the first today. If anyone would like to donate another $100, I’ll do the second.

For the first question, I’ll offer some amateur cultural analysis along with a bit of economics. As background, although Swift has had a long and successful career (beginning in 2006 at age 16) there was, until recently, nothing to predict the phenomenon we see now. As of 2015, she could have been seen as first among equals in a group of white female pop singer-songwriters that included Adele, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande and Meghan Trainor. That’s not a genre I follow closely (the female singer-songwriter I really admire is the marvellous Judy Small who is about as dissimilar as possible), but the song from that group I liked best was All About That Bass by Trainor, which seemed to prefigure huge success, rather than her subsequent sequence of modest hits.

Swift’s transformation began in 2021 when she re-recorded her back catalogue, outmanoeuvring the record companies who owned the masters of the originals. This turbocharged her career, setting the stage for the 2023 Eras tour, which turned her from a pop megastar (big, but not exceptional) into a cultural and economic phenomenon, whose tours were sought after by prime ministers and presidents. By this point the relevant comparisons weren’t with her contemporaries but with cultural figures like Elvis, Dylan, The Beatles and Michael Jackson.

As the re-recording episode shows, Swift is an exceptionally good businesswoman. Her success here contrasts sharply with that of the stereotypical 1960s rocker, forced out on the road again because their accountant has looted the bank account.

There’s still a puzzle remaining to be resolved. Taylor Swift has a lovely voice and is a talented songwriter, but, unlike the people I’ve named, she’s not a radical innovator. That’s not true of Swift alone. From the beginnings of rock-and-roll in the 1950s, through heavy metal and psychedelia to rap in the 1970s, radical innovation was the norm. Since the 1980s, new styles have mostly been hybrids and recombinations (acid house , dubstep and so on) or attempts at returning to rock purity (grunge and, before that, punk).

Drawing a long bow, I’d link to this to the decline of the teenager as a central category in music and culture generally. Before the 1950s, the word “teenager” was almost unknown. Young people turned from children at 13 into legal adults at 21, with the “awkward age” of adolescence in between. The advent of mass secondary schooling, followed by the impact of the Baby Boomers produced a large group whose tastes, for the first time, dominated popular music. And since the teen years are short, the demand for something new was ever present.

There’s not much of this left today. Teenagers are once again the subject of adult and parental concern rather than the central actors in cultural drama. The audience for popular music is no longer segmented by age in the way it used to be. This in turn makes it possible for someone like Taylor Swift to build up both an audience and a repertoire over decades rather than years.

That audience maps on to her own career remarkably well. The core group of Swifties is dominated by women aged between 16 (her age when she began her career) and 36 (her age today). Her songs chronicle her own journey through those years, and resonate with her fans. That broad spread makes it possible for her to pack stadiums around the world, even at the eye-watering ticket prices that prevail today,

As I mentioned at the beginning, this success has made Swift a billionaire. As someone who holds the view that “every billionaire is a policy failure”, that raises some questions for me. If you want my answer now, donate here. Otherwise you will have to wait.

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Source: sevenswords.uk

Following this up, I learned that the periodization I was taught in school had been totally abandoned over the second half of the 20th century. In that story, the Bronze Age was succeeded by the technologically superior Iron Age Progress continued until Roman decadence led to barbarian invasion and the Dark Ages, now more neutrally described as the Early Middle Ages.

Instead, the end of the Bronze Age was followed by a centuries-long Dark Age, wth regression much more complete than after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Greek civilisation, centred on the Mycenaean palace culture, collapsed almost completely, to the extent that writing was completely lost. Homer’s account of the Bronze Age was written centuries after the event, and with nothing but oral tradition to go on.

Obvious candidates for the cause were the mysterious Sea Peoples, whom the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III claimed to have defeated around 1187 BCE. This claim was discovered in the 19th century, hadn’t been much discussed outside Egyptology (a point made by Emily Wilson in her highly critical review). In the film, Odysseus admits to his wife that “we are the Sea People” and foreshadows the Bronze Age collapse

More recent scholarship sees the city burners, whoever they were, as secondary causes of a collapse induced by, and reinforcing, the breakdown of the complex economic structures required by the need for copper and tin to produce bronze. Bronze weapons and armour, were the central requirement of the aristocratic warrior class represented by the Acheans at Troy. Climate change, always a suspect in civilisational collapse, also appears as a possible cause. The eventual emergence of iron as a cheap (though initially inferior) replacement ended the era of the heroic warrio. Iron weaponry produced something analogous to the modern mass army, in which the entire male citizen class was expected to serve (Socrates, for example, was an Athenian hoplite, noted for bravery).

All of this is directly opposite to the pop culture of the American manosphere. Rome wasn’t brought down by the decadence of Nero and Caligula but by the shift of power to what is now Istanbul centuries later. The Hegsethian heroes described by Homer either destroyed their own society (a reading perfectly consistent with the endings of the Iliad and Odyssey) or were brought down by their failure to manage the economy and the environment. Add in an absurd misreading of Thuycidides Melian dialog, and you have the MAGA theory of history

John Quiggin is a professor at the University of Queensland’s School of Economics

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