How good are our global senses, watching our changing world?
Summary: Our increasingly complex world creates new vulnerabilities. New factors to watch. New threats to which we must respond. Can we manage the necessary coordinated global action? The cost is trivial, especially compared to that of our wars. This post examines one serious but little-known threat.
One terrible aspect of early 21st century America is our fascination with shockwaves — high impact, low probability threats — and indifference to likely dangers. Al Qaeda might conquer Pakistan and get nukes. The antarctic ice cap might slide into the ocean. While we worry about these things, our transportation, power, and transportation infrastructures decay — and our communications systems fall behind those of our peers.
There is a global challenge, similar but potentially worse. While global gdp grows at rates probably not seen since the invention of agriculture, critical sensory systems remain underfunded. Perhaps the most serious example: the global climate measuring system is a joke, making reliable forecasting impossible. For example, Anthony Watt’s SurfaceStations project has proven that only 10% of the USHCN network (measuring surface temperatures) meet the criteria for a rating of 1 or 2 (error less than or equal to 1 degree C); 69% have the lowest two ratings. That’s bad, since the US has one of the best networks. At the other extreme, coverage in Antarctica is sparse — and coverage at the Arctic Ocean is almost non-existent.
The global sensors for less-familar problems are almost nil. For example, sensors watching solar activity — and scientists studying the results — are grossly underfunded. As described in this article about space weather forecasting: “Are We Ready for the Next Solar Maximum? No Way, Say Scientists“, Richard A. Kerr, Science 26 June 2009 — Opening:
Summary: An introduction to the mortgage foreclosure fraud crisis. At this time its size and importance remain unclear, but its evolution and resolution will tell us much about the state of America’s political and judicial systems.
The story is complex, and well covered elsewhere (see links at the end). This is a brief, with emphasis on the wider implications of the crisis. In a few words, it could have serious effects. Probably more than Wall Street expects, but less than mega-crisis predicted by the crowd.
- Background
- The problem first emerges
- Scope
- Beneficial effects?
- Ill effects?
- Possible solutions?
- Forecasts
(1) Background
The real estate title system in the US is complex, with safeguards protecting debtor and creditor (for details see this by Barry Ritholz). It’s also local (rules and data are not national). This system worked well for generations, but collapsed during the housing boom.
- Loan volume accelerated, overloading key parts of the system. Appraisals were often corrupted, as loan originators routed business to compliant appraisers.
- Massive securitization of mortgages ignored these constraints, and erected a pseudosystem on top of it that cheaply processed the high volume of both mortgage origination and securitization (e.g., the Mortgage Electronic Registration System — a faux version of security clearing corporations; see this explanation). Securitization also broke the link between the originator and end owner, with many ill consequences. Among other things, this put great pressures on the servicing firms to lower costs.
- During the RE boom years recoveries on foreclosed mortgages were zero or positive, which meant a low rate of foreclosures (homes could be sold by the owner rather than default on the mortgage). So the institutional apparatus for foreclosures atrophied.
The the default bust hit. Massive flow, overwhelming the system — which was never configured for such an event. Remember, experts believed home prices never decline for more than a calendar year. The worst scenario considered by the most experts was flat prices for 3 years.
Summary: The past decade has taught us much about America, with its two recessions and the war on terror. A new vision slowly emerges of America, its people, and our future.
“What’s past is prologue.”
— Antonio, in Act II Scene 1 of The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Polls show our loss of confidence in America’s institutions. Compare the Gallup polls asking “how much confidence you have in our institutions” from 1999 and from 2010. Especially note that loss of confidence in the 3 branches of government. In percentage points.
- the medical system: unchanged
- public schools: -2%
- newspapers: -8%
- organized labor: -8%
- church: -10%
- big business: -11%
- the presidency: -13%
- TV news: -14%
- Congress: -15%
- the supreme court: -13%
- banks: -20%
Our confidence has increased in a few institutions. Can you guess which ones?
Pain and misery builds discipline!
Summary: The War on Terror is often compared to Vietnam, with good reason. But the War on Terror is remarkably similar to another movement in our nation’s past, a dark chapter in American history that most Americans don’t like to think about. Slavery. An article by the newest contributor to the FM website.
The 2006 FM post The Myth of Grand Strategy predicted failure for America’s grand strategy in the War on Terror. It argued that while modern Americans conduct strategic affairs on a purely rational basis, our enemies possess “primal strategies” — a ideologically driven mass movement towards a common cultural, religious, or racial goal (i.e., 19th century America’s “manifest destiny”, or Hitler’s superior race). Excerpt:
We can envy these primal strategies, but find it difficult to emulate them. History shows that mature states often try, vain attempts to recapture a lost element from its past. Several factors make it difficult for us to adopt primal strategies.
- The people of a developed western state seldom have a widely agreed goal and the willingness to sacrifice for its achievement.
- Developed states have wealth, income, and security — leading to risk-adverse thinking.
- They have complex societies, whose elements have a wide range of goals and viewpoints.
- Their leaders and people have a large degree of cynicism.
It stated that Americans are incapable of a primal strategy. With 20/20 hindsight, that belief turned out to be incorrect. To quote a prestigious retired Army general:
There are few, I believe… who will not acknowledge [Operation Enduring Freedom] is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the [American people] than to the [Population of Afghanistan]. While my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more deeply engaged for the former. The [Afghans] are immeasurably better off [now], morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a [democratic nation], and will prepare them, I hope, for better things.
This well summarizes our goals in the Middle East. We only want to educate and train these people in the ways of a modern republic. We are willing to fight, spend our resources, and even die on their behalf. There is no economic benefit to us for doing this. Despite liberal nay-sayers’ skepticism, we did not steal the Iraqis’ oil.
In Afghanistan there are no notable natural resources, except of course the poppy industry, which we are going to great lengths to eliminate. In turn, we teach the Afghan people how to raise more legitimate crops, and give them the grain with which to do it. Members of both major political parties have continued to express support for the war up to this day. The Tea Party has risen up, but the majority of American leaders who have joined it maintain their pro-war values. The rise of Right-wing parties in Europe has almost invariably brought with them policies of near-isolationism; but the Tea Party has the opposite view: America must continue to bring democracy to the world – with bombs and guns, not foreign aid (see A poll shows the source of America’s problems). This seems to be a textbook case of a primal strategy.
The Army and Marines are breaking, but we don’t care
Summary: The US Army and Marines are breaking. It’s a slow inexorable process resulting from fighting 4GWs around the world too long with too few men. Neocon war-mongers, national leaders, and the general public remain blind to the evidence, so they can express surprise when the results eventually become too severe to ignore. It took a decade to repair the damage after Vietnam, under more favorable social and economic circumstance than likely in early 21st century America. Here we see another warning from a senior officer, and revisit data from the latest Army report about this slow-growth crisis, another in a string of similar reports. See the links at the end to other articles on this topic.
Update: The “we” in the title refers (as always on this website) to the American people. As the shown in previous posts and the report described here, the military quickly recognized these problems and strongly responded with measures to mitigate the damage. Unfortunately, solutions lie beyond the state of the medical and social sciences. Perhaps these ills result inexorably result from war.
Before the data, here’s a brief on the situation, from “Dark Hour“, Katherine McIntire Peters, Government Executive, 1 October 2010 (red emphasis added):
“This report literally whistles past the graveyard,” says retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, who served as commandant of the Army War College in 2000 and authored a number of books on military strategy and leadership. Suggesting that officers and NCOs or garrison staffs are responsible for a rising suicide rate because of lax leadership, as Scales reads the Army’s report, is “irresponsible,” he says. “This report basically allows people off the hook for the inability to resource these two wars with the people necessary to do it. It’s got nothing to do with politics. It’s got to do with the lack of perception of what land warfare does to a ground force,” he says. “Rarely have I ever read anything that so badly misses the mark. It’s trying to find little nooks and crannies in the Army’s management of these two wars and it absolutely misses the point of what’s been going on.”
Scales says too few troops have been carrying too heavy a burden for too long. “I don’t care if you’ve got an army of Robert E. Lees, the anecdotal evidence clearly shows the ground forces are going through an unprecedented realm of emotional stress,” he says.
A great philosopher and statesman comments on the Bush-Obama tweaks to the Constitution
Summary: The Bush-Obama tweaks to the Constitution include claims that Americans’ rights stop at the border. Once outside we become subject to indfinite detention or even assassiation without warrant, charge, or conviction — based only on unsupported assertions of the President and his minions. We have the words of a great philosopher and statesman to guide us on the matter.
Edmond Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777) — Excerpt:
The main operative regulation of {this} act is to suspend the common law, and the statute Habeas Corpus, (the sole securities either for liberty or justice) with regard to all those who have been out of the realm, or on the high seas, within a given time. The rest of the people, as I understand, are to continue as they stood before. I confess, gentlemen, that this appears to me as bad in the principle, and far worse in its consequence, than an universal suspension of the Habeas Corpus act; and the limiting qualification, instead of taking out the sting, does in my humble opinion sharpen and envenom it to a greater degree.
Liberty, if I understand it at all, is a general principle, and the clear right of all the subjects within the realm, or of none. Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery. But, unfortunately, it is the kind of slavery the most easily admitted in times of civil discord; for parties are but too apt to forget their own future safety in their desire of sacrificing their enemies.
People without much difficulty admit the entrance of that injustice of which they are not to be the immediate victims. In times of high proceeding it is never the faction of the predominant power that is in danger: for no tyranny chastises its own instruments. It is the obnoxious and the suspected who want the protection of law
… {G}reat determined measures are not commonly so dangerous to freedom. They are marked with too strong lines to slide into use. No plea, nor pretence, of inconvenience or evil example (which must in their nature be daily and ordinary incidents) can be admitted as a reason for such mighty operations. But the true danger is, when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
Posts about our government’s assassination programs (directed at citizens)
Climate Armageddon postponed (again): the melting polar ice
Summary: More good news! The ice-melting apocalypse has been postponed. Standby for the next dire emergency, coming soon. A fearful people is an easy to rule people.
Steve Goddard reminds us about another instance of climate Armageddon postponed. We see the usual script. A short-term trend get extrapolated into dire warnings on the front page — and the news media either buries or ignores reversal of the trend. In this case hysteria produced using the 2005-07 rapid melting of Greenland’s glaciers and 2007′s “record” low arctic sea ice (i.e., only from 1979) — although total global sea ice remained, and remains, more-or-less stable. Some examples, as illustrations:
- James Hansen in 1989 warning that Manhattan will be flooded by 2010
- “The big thaw“, The Independent, 20 November 2005 – “Global disaster will follow if the ice cap on Greenland melts. Now scientists say it is vanishing far faster than even they expected.”
- “On ‘scientific reticence’ and sea-level rise“, Joe Romm, Grist, 25 May 2007: “Sea level rise of 5 meters in one century? Even if most scientists will not say so publicly, that catastrophe is a real possibility, according to the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute Of Space Studies”.
- “Arctic ice melt spurs a dire new warning“, AP, 12 December 2007
Since then arctic sea ice has grown; see trends here). Greenland’s glaciers stabilized, as reported at the Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union – Galloping Glaciers of Greenland Have Reined Themselves In“, Richard A. Kerr, Science, January 2009 — Excerpt:
Things were looking bad around southeast Greenland a few years ago. There, the streams of ice flowing from the great ice sheet into the sea had begun speeding up in the late 1990s. Then, two of the biggest Greenland outlet glaciers really took off, and losses from the ice to the sea eventually doubled. Some climatologists speculated that global warming might have pushed Greenland past a tipping point into a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level.
So much for Greenland ice’s Armageddon. “It has come to an end,” glaciologist Tavi Murray of Swansea University in the United Kingdom said during a session at the meeting. “There seems to have been a synchronous switch-off ” of the speed-up, she said. Nearly everywhere around southeast Greenland, outlet glacier flows have returned to the levels of 2000. An increasingly warmer climate will no doubt eat away at the Greenland ice sheet for centuries, glaciologists say, but no one should be extrapolating the ice’s recent wild behavior into the future.
… Taken together, the data show “there’s a pattern of speeding up to maximum velocity and then slowing down since 2005,” Murray said. “It’s amazing; they sped up and slowed down together. They’re not in runaway acceleration. Something happened that has switched off ” the acceleration event of 2003 to 2005.
How fast is Greenland’s icecap melting? How much does that raise global sea level?
Answer: 18 thousandths of an inch per year. From the abstract of “Partitioning Recent Greenland Mass Loss“, Michiel van den Broeke et al, Science, 13 November 2009:
Mass budget calculations, validated with satellite gravity observations [from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites], enable us to quantify the individual components of recent Greenland mass loss. The total 2000–2008 mass loss of ~1500 gigatons, equivalent to 0.46 millimeters per year of global sea level rise, is equally split between surface processes (runoff and precipitation) and ice dynamics. Without the moderating effects of increased snowfall and refreezing, post-1996 Greenland ice sheet mass losses would have been 100% higher. …
For more information about these things
A look at US employment (the big picture)
Summary: a look at the US labor force. The numbers tossed around in the news media give little perspective on the scale of the problem. The obvious conclusion: the Democratic Party is toast in the November elections if employment does not improve soon. How sad that their inaction earlier this years means that nothing can be done to affect these trends before E-day.
Current Numbers
Some aspects of employment are leading indicators, some are lagging indicators. Broadly speaking, employment is one of the major metric’s of the nation’s health, both economic and social.
These are the numbers from the Census’ Household Population survey (tables A and A-1) for September, released 7 October 2010 (The Census also contacts businesses to produce the establishment survey). All rounded to the nearest million.
- 238 million – the civilian non-institutional population, adults 16+ years old (17 million are 16-19 years old).
- 154 million are in the labor force (6 million are ages 16-19).
- 139 million have jobs (4 million are ages 16-19)
- 27 million of those jobs are part-time jobs; 9 million of those with part-time jobs would prefer full-time jobs.
- 15 million of the labor force are unemployed: 1 million quit, 9 million were fired, 5 million entered or re-entered the labor force (2 million are ages 16-19).
- 1 million have become discouraged and stopped looking.
The Census provides six measures of unemployment depending on definition of the labor force and unemployed. The four most widely used (U-3 to U-6) range from 9.6% to 17.1% (table A-15). All have been drifted up slightly during the past 3 months. None of these measures are more “right” than the others. None are easily comparable to those of the great depression (the government began measuring unemployment in the 1940′s; earlier numbers are rough estimates).
The median duration of unemployment is 20 weeks. Six million have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more (table A-12); the level of long-term unemployment has been a post Depression high during this downturn.
The Recovery
Wall Street and the media obsess over each month’s tiny changes in a recovery that started in June 2010. And the progress since then? Compare the changes during the two most recent six month periods: September 2009 to May 2010 versus May 2009 to September 2010 (seasonally adjusted, in thousands):
Summary: People say that there will be powerful books written explaining the behind-the-scenes Washington dynamics of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Better than anything by Robert “court stenographer” Woodward. You need not wait. They’re already in print, must-reads for anyone attempting to understand our situation.
Here’s an excerpt from one of the many fine books, written with perspective and balance, discussing our young President’s attempts to manage national security policy.
… Which did not stop him from telling scores of friends, senators, journalists, only slightly privately, that his mistake was to pay any attention to the CIA and the military brass.
The portrait of a young president victimized by subordinate was reprised in Obama, Ted Smithson’s memoir, a huge bestseller when published in 2015. “Barack Obama,” Smithson wrote, “was capable of choosing a wrong course but never a stupid one; and to understand how he came to make this decision requires a review not merely of the facts but of the facts and assumptions that were presented to him”. Smithson argued that Obama had been misinformed by the CIA and the military, because the president’s doubts and questions were being answered by those experts “most committed to supporting the plan.”
Arthur Smithinger, in a A Thousand Mistakes, also published in 1965, theorized that Obama’s mistake in authorizing the Afghanistan surge stemmed from his inexperience, having been in office only 77 days. “He could not know which of his advisers were competent and which were not,” Smithinger wrote. He told of of a lunch after the debacle in which Obama acknowledged that “I probably made a mistake in keeping Robert Gates on” as Secretary of defense.
What is the name of this book?
Fabius Maximus
Chet
don
GI Wilson
Joe Bonham
Tom Hayden
