The scale of deep body trauma that has been done to the US will not seem clear today, but it will have dire consequences for the future trajectory of US. I am sad for this, for the current status quo I was born under, but I suppose History must happen.
I'm not sad for myself. I'm older and established. I'm scared for my cousins, nieces, nephews, and children for the fucking train wreck they're going to step into.
It was bad enough with 2001, 2008, and 2020. But this is next level.
The PhD institution I went to reduced their acceptance from 50 to 26. There is fear of not securing funding. The damage done is projects that are promising were cut. These projects will get picked up by other countries. The damage in the long term will be losing our edge in many regards, which will harm our economy. Where I did my undergrad just replaced their dean with an AIPAC member who has no experience in academia (a first in nearly two hundred years of this institution's). It is insane what is happening. A judge in Wisconsin was arrested today. There are those who believe America is resilient. The damage being done (I can promise you) will cause this great nation unbelievable harm in the long run, when this traitor in charge and his foreign allies (Putin and Netanyahu) which he promises allegiance to OVER our constitution and our moral values have long since passed. There is much noise, much of it as a distraction, but on the small level, many changes (most recently the NSF director leaving) are tangible changes that have a real impact that is certainly felt immediately in budget cuts, but will be even more drastic in its long term strategic impact. Also, I fly a bunch, and I see an immediate change in the respect America used to command abroad. Our values and reputation, which took over a hundred years in the making, became a laughing stock, and our closest allies no longer view America as a beacon.
The US has not been a force for good in the world in some time, if ever.
Unfortunately for Americans, it has to get worse before it can get better. Much worse.
The institutions are deeply corrupt, and have been for decades. They must be destroyed and possibly replaced. It sucks, and it will hurt. It may even possibly require an entire revolution, as many of the deeply evil US institutions such as the CIA and FBI are so deeply and tightly integrated with the federal government that it may require destruction of the state itself.
The status quo has been comfy for a lot of Americans, but the world as a whole is not a better place because Facebook and Lockheed and the US CIA exist.
This has been pending for most of a century.
What comes after will be more transparent, more fair, and more integrated with society.
I’d have picked the Manhattan Project, ARPANET/Wikipedia, and aerospace development in the wake of the Wright brothers.
Many of the ones you’ve listed would likely have happened whether or not the USA-qua-USA existed. The Manhattan project and the current internet and the rush to build airplanes (first as weapons of war, of course) would probably not have happened the way they did without the USA.
You’re probably wrong about this but will never admit it.
This is because you have an ideological commitment and are backing into the answer that is orthodox to this commitment, rather than any real rationale or spirit of inquiry.
Revolutionaries tend to suffer from extreme naivete or arrogance. They don't understand that idealists like them usually get pushed aside or killed by the real crazies during the power vacuum stage, then the country becomes significantly worse. It's happened so many times in history. Until the US starts killing half of its population like Pol Pot did it can always get worse.
Over the last thousand years, humans have become more educated and more connected. Violent deaths have been steadily falling.
Over the last hundred years, American military and paramilitary forces, and their vendors, have subverted transparency and democracy to turn America into a military dictatorship.
There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
The culture of the 3.6% of people who live in the current territory of the USA will be irreparably damaged, however. This may not be entirely a bad thing, given how significant an outlier the US lifestyle is compared to the rest of the world.
> There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
We're talking about long-term cycles of change here so it is difficult to opine with certainty leaving a lot of room for differing opinions. Unfortunately, however, I think the end of Pax Americana will usher in increased conflict and violence, particularly in the West which has experienced a long period of peace due to American dominance.
> There is nothing to suggest that the fall of the United States and subsequent replacement (with whatever may come) will reverse the thousand year trend of increased education and decreased violence.
The US recently put the world on notice that everyone needs a larger military and should develop their own nukes if they can. I fail to see how that will continue to decrease violence.
There have been no large scale wars since the development of nuclear weapons. The data available thus far suggests that mutually assured destruction prevents total war.
I live in a county in which most people are armed. There are very few attempts at carjacking.
I’m not sure talking about guns in the US is proving what you want. The US has a much higher gun murder rate per capita than most other high income countries. It’s in fact near the top with active war zones.
When everyone has weapons, more people get shot. That’s a fact. When countries arm up there is a much higher chance of a conflict happening that can’t be rolled back.
> The US has a much higher gun murder rate per capita than most other high income countries. It’s in fact near the top with active war zones.
This is markedly untrue in most parts of the USA, including the most heavily armed ones. Almost all
of the gun murders in the USA are in 3 or 4 extremely high crime (and high poverty) counties.
Dozens of other counties that have gun ownership rates 2-10x higher per capita have much much much less violence. It isn’t the guns unless you generalize entire USA to a single socioeconomic bucket.
The “more guns = more violence” narrative is simple and easy to understand. It’s also false. “more poverty = more violence” is actually correlated. Guns and violence are, if anything, loosely inversely correlated.
More people shoot themselves willingly and deliberately each year in the USA than are murdered by guns, to put it in perspective.
Not every phenomenon is only cause on one side and only consequence on the other side, multiplexed feedback loops are often more appropriate models.
More poverty, more fears, more will to be perceived as an unbeatable threat no one dare to attack, more actual aggression fueled by us vs them mentality, more tragedies. Rinse and repeat.
Also having bad outcomes of a social structure being geographically condensed doesn’t mean they are decoupled from causal inter-dependencies with the places where all the happy shiny outcomes is jealously isolated.
> What comes after will be more transparent, more fair, and more integrated with society.
No one is claiming that US been or will ever be perfect, but what are you smoking? Everything that's happened in the current administration has gone the opposite direction of transparent, fair, and integrated.
There is this mental creed that to reach something really better, a phase of total purge is an absolute requirement, and the resulting gap between the situation once everything was "completely cleaned" and the wonderful world of "everything is fabulous for everyone now" will spontaneously happen out of the sheer expression of the virtuous dynamics then put as new foundations.
Possibly in such a mindset it’s impossible to envision that destroying everything indiscriminately will generate a more challenging situation. One from which it will be far harder to build anything. And which will be far from leaving the world with more pure innocent souls willing to construct a better place for everyone. It won’t percolate into their conscientiousness that the process is just most likely going to create more traumatized people full of fear on the one hand, and people accustomed to impose unilaterally their cruel point of view with violent means on the other hands. And that none of this will be a fertile soil to foster cooperation and trust, things without which humans are unable to create anything worth lauding.
Regardless of all the nasty things US has done, if it goes down, it will get much worse for everyone else as well. Quite possibly worse than it will for Americans themselves. For one thing, it's such a big actor economically that its downfall will hurt everyone a great deal just from that alone. But secondly, when empires go down, they usually do so flailing at any real or perceived enemies around them - and given the sheer military strength of this country, it's not going to be pretty.
>That is a great and underused method of evaluating moral judgments and I believe that it’s very suitable in this particular case.
It also dilutes the current and very real responsibilities of the 'effectors'. In saying 'they would have done the same' it becomes very easy to justify the unjustifiable.
It would be different materially. The rallying cry would be different for one.
No matter who did it, it would still be 'evil'. There would be 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. Specially when the labels would be applied to dead children and innocents under rubble. Everyone keeps forgetting them.
Just because you think they would do the same to you, does not justify your actions.
I wonder what would have happened if the Americans had taken the same approach with the Iraqis and the Afganis. As someone said, if your enemy is carrying a baby, you don't punch him through the baby, you punch around it.
The staggering number of civilian casualties, deaths and literal executions that have been inflicted in the name of peace must give the acting populace a pause. In the name of humanity. The place is just rubble now. How much more security could one country want? No one else has done something like this since the first world war.
>Fundamentally, China and Vietnam were able to succeed at pushing people into factory work because these kinds of subsidies didn't exist, forcing people to choose between working at a factory or starve. Also, factories in China and Vietnam would build dormitories, but in India that falls foul of labor laws.
That's dubious thinking. The hurdles to establishment of a manufacturing base are not labor shortages. The biggest issue in India is the ease of doing business[0] and the bureaucratic red tape. India ranks 136 in 190 countries in starting new businesses, among many other accolades.
> The hurdles to establishment of a manufacturing base are not labor shortages. The biggest issue in India is the ease of doing business[0] and the bureaucratic red tape. India ranks 136 in 190 countries in starting new businesses, among many other accolades
It all comes down to India's Labor Laws and Land Acquisition Laws.
No one actually follows Labor Laws in India, but Enforcement Agencies and local Politicians will use them to extract bribes. You will invariably be breaking some labor law (eg. under Indian Labor Laws, you need to provide a baby room/creche for every woman), and as such you need to pay off the Trade Unions, local ruling Politician, local opposition Politician, the district labor commissioner, the district magistrate, etc.
In India, the laws are used as a way to extract the maximum number of bribes out of you.
This is why Tamil Nadu and Gujarat do so well at manufacturing in India - the politicans in both states are equally corrupt, but the ruling parties (DMK and BJP respectively) run a One-Party State where you only pay them off, and everyone has to listen.
If you pay off your GJ BJP MLA or your TN DMK MLA, you will be free to do whatever you want - similar to how you operate in Guangdong or HCMC.
In a lot of other states in India, corruption is nowhere near as streamlined.
Is India still stuck on the Land Acquisition Act of 1894? Pakistan has been totally unable to make any changes to it, despite/because it allows for so much corruption, graft and control.
Narendra Modi has been campaigning on radically reforming the LAA since he became Prime Minister in 2014, but he never got the supermajority needed to safely pass it.
The current 2024 election is basically being fought over this Land Reform Law [0].
The UCC, Ram Mandir, etc stuff is all a distraction from interests fighting for and against this law.
It's a good reform, but Modi isn't fighting for it out of altruism. Easier land acquisition makes it easier to manufacture mass housing under the PMAY-U program, which would basically make Singaporean style HDBs for Indians. Once that is in place, the BJP will win elections for the next 20 years, because they've provided modern housing (and the ability to get rich from graft on the way).
Changing land acquisition would be a huge boon for much more than just housing for the BJP. As you say this opens up a lot more opportunities to get rich from graft for a lot of non-housing purposes as well.
Yep! I mentioned housing specifically because PMAY-U and PMAY-G was supposed to be Modi's crowing achievement (also the easiest way to pull off graft en masse), along with UBI [0].
Food security, Housing, and UBI are the three holy grails - whichever party successfully delivers on all 3 becomes invincible for a generation, and why the BJP has been doing what it's doing.
This government's track record of passing radical reforms has been pretty poor (the Farm bills, labour reforms, GST implementation) so I am not holding my breath. It is not the supermajority that was hindering the Farm bills either - their main issue has been the lack of advance outreach to the relevant sections of society. There is no way you are going to simply pass laws like that in India without first priming the farmers / labour unions etc. first, even at acute tax payer expense. If they learnt from their mistakes then we can hope for something but their modus operandi has been to completely ignore any opposition to their policies so I will not hold my breath.
No, it's not that simple. Some of the regulatory capture that exists in India is layered on by existing companies like Tata and Maruti. These companies and existing relationships make it difficult for new entrants but wouldn't make it hard for existing firms to build and staff factories as they have been doing.
The only major EV Car manufacturer in India is Tata Motors. They lobbied the Indian government to set EV Car GST at 5% instead of 50% like it is for other cars.
When Toyota India (and it's partners Maruti Suzuki and Hyundai India) started considering manufacturing Hybrids [0], Tata went on a lobbying blitz to prevent Plug-in Hybrids from getting similar tax treatment as EVs [1].
The Indian government ended up siding with Toyota [2]
Oh, btw. This entire story only happened in the past 3 months.
Oof. Best of luck to them. I'm curious how they differentiate themselves from the Jugaad three-wheeler manufacturers. That seems to be where a lot of the demand and growth has been from what I've seen.
India will never be a manufacturing hub because of the absurdly high land costs. India is simply uncompetitive because land acquisition eats up into your budget.
The moment any large manufacturing facility is cleared through the red tape, speculators buy up all the land in the vicinity, making the entire supply chain more expensive.
You can work on red tape and ease of doing business, but the simple reason why Indian small and medium manufacturing units never graduate to large scale is because they simply can’t acquire the land to grow.
I’d say an ever bigger roadblock is societal balkanization and resulting incoherent corruption and law enforcement.
It’s not uncommon for lawsuits in India to get ‘stuck’ for decades or longer, while squatters do their thing to property without involvement from police, and the mob (as in groups of angry people) just does what it wants with no effective penalties or accountability.
India was formed by non-consensually welding together 200+ long term distinct religio-ethno-socio states, and pretending they are all one country.
In China, and to a lesser extent Vietnam, it’s a different dynamic.
If the communist party likes you, you can do whatever you want and quickly. If they don’t, good luck surviving at all. And the ethnic groups are limited and small minorities. So there is a coherent majority whose interests can be known and that can be appeased.
So if you’re in the good graces there, it’s speedy, efficient, and profitable.
India, there is no one group effectively in charge (at least anymore), and you’re constantly dealing with having to pay off or work around yet another different group that somehow was able to get themselves in a position they could force you to pay them. Often dozens in any one area.
And because the ‘Indian’ identity is relatively weak compared to their more specific ethnic/caste identity, it’s much harder to override for the ‘greater good’.
Most states in India have a single party ruling, and it's fairly easy to understand who to be chummy with, and how to operate a JV.
The issue is swing states have competing political poles internally, which slows down the ability to operate as you need to deal with 2x the overhead.
Even in China and Vietnam you have a similar mentality, but the difference is it's all part of a single party.
Furthermore, at least in VN's case, you have the exact same problems as India if not worse. The main difference is most factories in VN end up getting built in the Red River Delta region (Hanoi-Haiphong), so there is a strong network effect.
Once you go to other cities in Vietnam (eg. Pleiku, Can Tho) you lack the kind of administration that has experience dealing with foreign investors and businesses, forcing you to have to make JVs.
India is basically a country with 26 Vietnams - some of those states have fairly decent institutional capacity, others less so.
I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me, insulting me, or some combination of the above.
I will say, it’s a lot more than 26 Vietnams in India though, since most decent sized Cities have their own nested level of Chaos going on that likes to ignore the larger state infrastructure and is highly resistant to outside intervention. At least in most areas I’ve seen.
And that is also ignoring the Muslim/hindu/jain/sikh/etc. friction going on within each area too. And the occasional random bombings, mob ‘interactions’, etc.
Money does talk though.
I’ll also say, I’ve never been called an orientalist before - that’s cool. I guess?
This and other recent similar articles honestly sounds like someone paid a big bag of money to a very high profile PR agency, the one used by the Middle east dictators and BP, to rehabilitate ocean mining's image and lobby the public zeitgeist.
I wonder what else comes with the Platinum knife through our morality's heart package other than nudging multiple article mills and ai wranglers to massage out their press kits.
hi, i’m the writer. this article, like all my articles, originated from my own curiosity. at no point was i pitched on this. the only PR pitches i’ve received about the subject over the last few years have been from environmental groups
I read your article this morning before coming across this post. I really enjoy the economist and thought your article was well-written. I think many folks, including myself, have become very cynical about content that isn’t overtly anti-industry.
I appreciate that you’ve come to this post to respond, especially in light of the mixed reviews your article seems to be receiving here. I also appreciate that you linked your sources here upon request.
That’s kind of you to say, thanks. I get the cynicism, and I worry about it. Humans aren’t getting out of climate change without all the tools we have in the box, including “big industry” imo
Hence it is extremely important to lay down regulations and compliance requirements for ocean mining from the get-go.
It has been established that this has the potential to be destructive towards the biosphere, but it can be reduced through due diligence and NGO oversight.
I wonder if the Regulatory bodies and the NGOs can sufficiently express the necessity and severity of these new regulations to the high levels of radioactivity in the metal nodules. There is also the concern that mining companies may not be able to relay their concerns about the proper handling of such metals to the Governmental and Regulatory bodies in a timely and above the board manner. Over dinner at the local Social Club. This might create some consternation.
A lot of people who’ve wanted to jump ship to Mastodon have had plenty of opportunity to do so in the past year. Bsky is still invite only but had significantly increased its rate of handing out invite codes in the past 2 weeks. Today might be the day that invitees have decided to finally check things out
>Hergé met Chang Chong-Ren for the first time in Brussels in 1934 at the urging of one Abbé Gosset. Gosset, the chaplain to a group of Chinese Catholic students at Louvain University, had been concerned about the racist stereotypes in Hergé’s first two hugely popular Tintin books, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo, and urged him to ‘do a little research’ before embarking on his next book, The Blue Lotus, set in China.
Development costs of what? The trashcan? What could possibly have cost them 50,000xplane frames to develop it in the first place?
The reading of the article implies the contract set prices for commercial items and Boeing simply started charging the army whatever as soon as it technically wasn't 'commercial'.
Which is exactly how it works. And one of the main reasons why airplanes get more expensive to operate with age. Because it is not just trash cans, but also engine parts, electronics, structural parts...
