Afghanistan

What does nonviolence mean?

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 15 JDN 2460842

As I write this, the LA protests and the crackdown upon them have continued since Friday and it is now Wednesday. In a radical and authoritarian move by Trump, Marines have been deployed (with shockingly incompetent logistics unbefitting the usually highly-efficient US military); but so far they have done very little. Reuters has been posting live updates on new developments.

The LAPD has deployed a variety of less-lethal weapons to disperse the protests, including rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper balls; but so far they have not used lethal force. Protesters have been arrested, some for specific crimes—and others simply for violating curfew.

More recently, the protests have spread to other cities, including New York, Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, San Fransisco, and Philadelphia. By the time this post goes live, there will probably be even more cities involved, and there may also be more escalation.

But for now, at least, the protests have been largely nonviolent.

And I thought it would be worthwhile to make it very clear what I mean by that, and why it is important.

I keep seeing a lot of leftist people on social media accepting the narrative that these protests are violent, but actively encouraging that; and some of them have taken to arrogantly accuse anyone who supports nonviolent protests over violent ones of either being naive idiots or acting in bad faith. (The most baffling part of this is that they seem to be saying that Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi were naive idiots or were acting in bad faith? Is that what they meant to say?)

First of all, let me be absolutely clear that nonviolence does not mean comfortable or polite or convenient.

Anyone objecting to blocking traffic, strikes, or civil disobedience because they cause disorder and inconvenience genuinely does not understand the purpose of protest (or is a naive idiot or acting in bad faith). Effective protests are disruptive and controversial. They cause disorder.

Nonviolence does not mean always obeying the law.

Sometimes the law is itself unjust, and must be actively disobeyed. Most of the Holocaust was legal, after all.

Other times, it is necessary to break some laws (such as property laws, curfews, and laws against vandalism) in the service of higher goals.

I wouldn’t say that a law against vandalism is inherently unjust; but I would say that spray-painting walls and vehicles in the service of protecting human rights is absolutely justified, and even sometimes it’s necessary to break some windows or set some fires.

Nonviolence does not mean that nobody tries to call it violence.

Most governments are well aware that most of their citizens are much more willing to support a nonviolent movement than a violent moment—more on this later—and thus will do whatever they can to characterize nonviolent movements as violence. They have two chief strategies for doing so:

  1. Characterize nonviolent but illegal acts, such as vandalism and destruction of property, as violence
  2. Actively try to instigate violence by treating nonviolent protesters as if they were violent, and then characterizing their attempts at self-defense as violence

As a great example of the latter, a man in Phoenix was arrested for assault because he kicked a tear gas canister back at police. But kicking back a canister that was shot at you is the most paradigmatic example of self-defense I could possibly imagine. If the system weren’t so heavily biased in fair of the police, a judge would order his release immediately.

Nonviolence does not mean that no one at the protests gets violent.

Any large group of people will contain outliers. Gather a protest of thousands of people, and surely some fraction of them will be violent radicals, or just psychopaths looking for an excuse to hurt someone. A nonviolent protest is one in which most people are nonviolent, and in which anyone who does get violent is shunned by the organizers of the movement.

Nonviolence doesn’t mean that violence will never be used against you.

On the contrary, the more authoritarian the regime—and thus the more justified your protest—the more likely it is that violent force will be used to suppress your nonviolent protests.

In some places it will be limited to less-lethal means (as it has so far in the current protests); but in others, even in ostensibly-democratic countries, it can result in lethal force being deployed against innocent people (as it did at Kent State in 1970).

When this happens, are you supposed to just stand there and get shot?

Honestly? Yes. I know that requires tremendous courage and self-sacrifice, but yes.

I’m not going to fault anyone for running or hiding or even trying to fight back (I’d be more of the “run” persuasion myself), but the most heroic action you could possibly take in that situation is in fact to stand there and get shot. Becoming a martyr is a terrible sacrifice, and one I’m not sure it’s one I myself could ever make; but it really, really works. (Seriously, whole religions have been based on this!)

And when you get shot, for the love of all that is good in the world, make sure someone gets it on video.

The best thing you can do for your movement is to show the oppressors for what they truly are. If they are willing to shoot unarmed innocent people, and the world finds out about that, the world will turn against them. The more peaceful and nonviolent you can appear at the moment they shoot you, the more compelling that video will be when it is all over the news tomorrow.

A shockingly large number of social movements have pivoted sharply in public opinion after a widely-publicized martyrdom incident. If you show up peacefully to speak your minds and they shoot you, that is nonviolent protest working. That is your protest being effective.

I never said that nonviolent protest was easy or safe.

What is the core of nonviolence?

It’s really very simple. So simple, honestly, that I don’t understand why it’s hard to get across to people:

Nonviolence means you don’t initiate bodily harm against other human beings.

It does not necessarily preclude self-defense, so long as that self-defense is reasonable and proportionate; and it certainly does not in any way preclude breaking laws, damaging property, or disrupting civil order.


Nonviolence means you never throw the first punch.

Nonviolence is not simply a moral position, but a strategic one.

Some of the people you would be harming absolutely deserve it. I don’t believe in ACAB, but I do believe in SCAB, and nearly 30% of police officers are domestic abusers, who absolutely would deserve a good punch to the face. And this is all the more true of ICE officers, who aren’t just regular bastards; they are bastards whose core job is now enforcing the human rights violations of President Donald Trump. Kidnapping people with their unmarked uniforms and unmarked vehicles, ICE is basically the Gestapo.

But it’s still strategically very unwise for us to deploy violence. Why? Two reasons:

  1. Using violence is a sure-fire way to turn most Americans against our cause.
  2. We would probably lose.

Nonviolent protest is nearly twice as effective as violent insurrection. (If you take nothing else from this post, please take that.)

And the reason that nonviolent protest is so effective is that it changes minds.

Violence doesn’t do that; in fact, it tends to make people rally against you. Once you start killing people, even people who were on your side may start to oppose you—let alone anyone who was previously on the fence.

A successful violent revolution results in you having to build a government and enforce your own new laws against a population that largely still disagrees with you—and if you’re a revolution made of ACAB people, that sounds spectacularly difficult!

A successful nonviolent protest movement results in a country that agrees with you—and it’s extremely hard for even a very authoritarian regime to hang onto power when most of the people oppose it.

By contrast, the success rate of violent insurrections is not very high. Why?

Because they have all the guns, you idiot.

States try to maintain a monopoly on violence in their territory. They are usually pretty effective at doing so. Thus attacking a state when you are not a state puts you at a tremendous disadvantage.

Seriously; we are talking about the United States of America right now, the most powerful military hegemon the world has ever seen.

Maybe the people advocating violence don’t really understand this, but the US has not lost a major battle since 1945. Oh, yes, they’ve “lost wars”, but what that really means is that public opinion has swayed too far against the war for them to maintain morale (Vietnam) or their goals for state-building were so over-ambitious that they were basically impossible for anyone to achieve (Iraq and Afghanistan). If you tally up the actual number of soldiers killed, US troops always kill more than they lose, and typically by a very wide margin.


And even with the battles the US lost in WW1 and WW2, they still very much won the actual wars. So genuinely defeating the United States in open military conflict is not something that has happened since… I’m pretty sure the War of 1812.

Basically, advocating for a violent response to Trump is saying that you intend to do something that literally no one in the world—including major world military powers—has been able to accomplish in 200 years. The last time someone got close, the US nuked them.

If the protests in LA were genuinely the insurrectionists that Trump has been trying to characterize them as, those Marines would not only have been deployed, they would have started shooting. And I don’t know if you realize this, but US Marines are really good at shooting. It’s kind of their thing. Instead of skirmishes with rubber bullets and tear gas, we would have an absolute bloodbath. It would probably end up looking like the Tet Offensive, a battle where “unprepared” US forces “lost” because they lost 6,000 soldiers and “only” killed 45,000 in return. (The US military is so hegemonic that a kill ratio of more than 7 to 1 is considered a “loss” in the media and public opinion.)

Granted, winning a civil war is different from winning a conventional war; even if a civil war broke out, it’s unlikely that nukes would be used on American soil, for instance. But you’re still talking about a battle so uphill it’s more like trying to besiege Edinburgh Castle.

Our best hope in such a scenario, in fact, would probably be to get blue-state governments to assert control over US military forces in their own jurisdiction—which means that antagonizing Gavin Newsom, as I’ve been seeing quite a few leftists doing lately, seems like a really bad idea.

I’m not saying that winning a civil war would be completely impossible. Since we might be able to get blue-state governors to take control of forces in their own states and we would probably get support from Canada, France, and the United Kingdom, it wouldn’t be completely hopeless. But it would be extremely costly, millions of people would die, and victory would by no means be assured despite the overwhelming righteousness of our cause.

How about, for now at least, we stick to the methods that historically have proven twice as effective?

The War on Terror has been a total failure.

PNRJ current events, ethics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , ,

Sep 11 JDN 2459834

Since today happens to be September 11, I thought I’d spend this week’s post reflecting on the last 21 years (!) of the War on Terror.

At this point, I can safely say that the War on Terror has been a complete, total, utter failure. It has cost over $8 trillion and nearly a million lives, and not only didn’t reduce terrorism, it actually appears to have substantially increased it.

Take a look at this graph from Our World in Data:

Up until the the 1980s, terrorism worldwide was a slow smoldering, killing rarely more than a few hundred people each year. Obviously it’s terrible if you or one of your loved ones happen to be among those few hundred, but in terms of its overall chance of killing you or your children, terrorism used to be less dangerous than kiddie pools.

Then terrorism began to rise, until it was killing several thousand people a year. I was surprised to learn that most of these were not in the Middle East, but in fact spread all over the world, with the highest concentrations actually being in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Notably, almost none of these deaths were in First World countries, and as a result most First World governments largely ignored them. Terrorism was something that happened “over there”, to other people.

Then of course came 2001, and 9/11/2001, in which nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in a single day. And suddenly the First World took notice, and decided to respond with overwhelming force.

We have been at war basically ever since. All this war has accomplished… approximately nothing.

The deadliest year of terrorism in the 21st century was not 2001; it was 2014, after the US had invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq, and in fact withdrawn from Iraq (but not yet Afghanistan). This was largely the result of the rise of Daesh (which is what you should call them by the way), which seems to be the most fanatical and violent Islamist terrorist organization the world has seen in decades if not centuries.

Even First World terrorism is no better today than it was in the 1990s—though also no worse. It’s back to a slow smolder, and once again First World societies can feel that terrorism is something that happens to someone else. But terrorism in the Middle East is the worst it has been in decades.

Would Daesh not have appeared if the US had never invaded Afghanistan and Iraq? It’s difficult to say. Maybe their rise was inevitable. Or maybe having a strong, relatively secular government in the region under Saddam Hussein would have prevented them from becoming so powerful. We can at least say this: Since the US withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban retook control, the Taliban and Daesh have been fighting each other quite heavily. Presumably that would have been happening all along if the US had not intervened to suppress the Taliban.

Don’t get me wrong: The Taliban were, and are, a terrible regime, and Saddam Hussein was a terrible dictator. But Daesh is clearly worse than either, and sometimes in geopolitics you have to accept the lesser evil.

If we’d actually had a way to take over Afghanistan and Iraq and rebuild them as secular liberal democracies as the US government intended, that would have been a good thing, and might even have been worth all that blood and treasure. But that project utterly failed, and we should have expected it to fail, as never in history has anyone successfully imposed liberal democracy by outside force like that.

When democracy spreads, it usually does so slowly, through the cultural influence of trade and media. Sometimes it springs up in violent revolution—as we hoped it would in the Arab Spring but were sadly disappointed. But there are really no clear examples of a democratic country invading an undemocratic country and rapidly turning it democratic.

British colonialism was spread by the sword (and especially the machine gun), and did sometimes ultimately lead to democratic outcomes, as in the US, Australia, and Canada, and more recently in India, South Africa, and Botswana. But that process was never fast, never smooth, and rarely without bloodshed—and only succeeded when the local population was willing to fight for it. Britain didn’t simply take over countries and convert them to liberal democracies in a generation. No one has ever done that, and trying to was always wishful thinking.

I don’t know, maybe in the very long run, we’ll look back on all this as the first, bloody step toward something better for the Middle East. Maybe the generation of women who got a taste of freedom and education in Afghanistan under US occupation will decide to rise up and refuse to relinquish those rights under the new Taliban. Daesh will surely die sooner or later; fanaticism can rarely sustain organizations in the long term.

But it’s been 20 years now, and things look no better than they did at the start. Maybe it’s time to cut our losses?

Unending nightmares

PNRJ current events, ethics, market failure, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 19 JDN 2459477

We are living in a time of unending nightmares.

As I write this, we have just passed the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Yet only in the past month were US troops finally withdrawn from Afghanistan—and that withdrawal was immediately followed by a total collapse of the Afghan government and a reinstatement of the Taliban. The United States had been at war for nearly 20 years, spending trillions of dollars and causing thousands of deaths—and seems to have accomplished precisely nothing.

Some left-wing circles have been saying that the Taliban offered surrender all the way back in 2001; this is not accurate. Alternet even refers to it as an “unconditional surrender” which is utter nonsense. No one in their right mind—not even the most die-hard imperialist—would ever refuse an unconditional surrender, and the US most certainly did nothing of the sort.)

The Taliban did offer a peace deal in 2001, which would have involved giving the US control of Kandahar and turning Osama bin Laden over to a neutral country (not to the US or any US ally). It would also have granted amnesty to a number of high-level Taliban leaders, which was a major sticking point for the US. In hindsight, should they have taken the deal? Obviously. But I don’t think that was nearly so clear at the time—nor would it have been particularly palatable to most of the American public to leave Osama bin Laden under house arrest in some neutral country (which they never specified by the way; somewhere without US extradition, presumably?) and grant amnesty to the top leaders of the Taliban.

Thus, even after the 20-year nightmare of the war that refused to end, we are still back to the nightmare we were in before—Afghanistan ruled by fanatics who will oppress millions.

Yet somehow this isn’t even the worst unending nightmare, for after a year and a half we are still in the throes of a global pandemic which has now caused over 4.6 million deaths. We are still wearing masks wherever we go—at least, those of us who are complying with the rules. We have gotten vaccinated already, but likely will need booster shots—at least, those of us who believe in vaccines.

The most disturbing part of it all is how many people still aren’t willing to follow the most basic demands of public health agencies.

In case you thought this was just an American phenomenon: Just a few days ago I looked out the window of my apartment to see a protest in front of the Scottish Parliament complaining about vaccine and mask mandates, with signs declaring it all a hoax. (Yes, my current temporary apartment overlooks the Scottish Parliament.)

Some of those signs displayed a perplexing innumeracy. One sign claimed that the vaccines must be stopped because they had killed 1,400 people in the UK. This is not actually true; while there have been 1,400 people in the UK who died after receiving a vaccine, 48 million people in the UK have gotten the vaccine, and many of them were old and/or sick, so, purely by statistics, we’d expect some of them to die shortly afterward. Less than 100 of these deaths are in any way attributable to the vaccine. But suppose for a moment that we took the figure at face value, and assumed, quite implausibly, that everyone who died shortly after getting the vaccine was in fact killed by the vaccine. This 1,400 figure needs to be compared against the 156,000 UK deaths attributable to COVID itself. Since 7 million people in the UK have tested positive for the virus, this is a fatality rate of over 2%. Even if we suppose that literally everyone in the UK who hasn’t been vaccinated in fact had the virus, that would still only be 20 million (the UK population of 68 million – the 48 million vaccinated) people, so the death rate for COVID itself would still be at least 0.8%—a staggeringly high fatality rate for a pandemic airborne virus. Meanwhile, even on this ridiculous overestimate of the deaths caused by the vaccine, the fatality rate for vaccination would be at most 0.003%. Thus, even by the anti-vaxers’ own claims, the vaccine is nearly 300 times safer than catching the virus. If we use the official estimates of a 1.9% COVID fatality rate and 100 deaths caused by the vaccines, the vaccines are in fact over 9000 times safer.

Yet it does seem to be worse in the United States, as while 22% of Americans described themselves as opposed to vaccination in general, only about 2% of Britons said the same.

But this did not translate to such a large difference in actual vaccination: While 70% of people in the UK have received the vaccine, 64% of people in the US have. Both of these figures are tantalizingly close to, yet clearly below, the at least 84% necessary to achieve herd immunity. (Actually some early estimates thought 60-70% might be enough—but epidemiologists no longer believe this, and some think that even 90% wouldn’t be enough.)

Indeed, the predominant tone I get from trying to keep up on the current news in epidemiology is fatalism: It’s too late, we’ve already failed to contain the virus, we won’t reach herd immunity, we won’t ever eradicate it. At this point they now all seem to think that COVID is going to become the new influenza, always with us, a major cause of death that somehow recedes into the background and seems normal to us—but COVID, unlike influenza, may stick around all year long. The one glimmer of hope is that influenza itself was severely hampered by the anti-pandemic procedures, and influenza cases and deaths are indeed down in both the US and UK (though not zero, nor as drastically reduced as many have reported).

The contrast between terrorism and pandemics is a sobering one, as pandemics kill far more people, yet somehow don’t provoke anywhere near as committed a response.

9/11 was a massive outlier in terrorism, at 3,000 deaths on a single day; otherwise the average annual death rate by terrorism is about 20,000 worldwide, mostly committed by Islamist groups. Yet the threat is not actually to Americans in particular; annual deaths due to terrorism in the US are less than 100—and most of these by right-wing domestic terrorists, not international Islamists.

Meanwhile, in an ordinary year, influenza would kill 50,000 Americans and somewhere between 300,000 and 700,000 people worldwide. COVID in the past year and a half has killed over 650,000 Americans and 4.6 million people worldwide—annualize that and it would be 400,000 per year in the US and 3 million per year worldwide.

Yet in response to terrorism we as a country were prepared to spend $2.3 trillion dollars, lose nearly 4,000 US and allied troops, and kill nearly 50,000 civilians—not even counting the over 60,000 enemy soldiers killed. It’s not even clear that this accomplished anything as far as reducing terrorism—by some estimates it actually made it worse.

Were we prepared to respond so aggressively to pandemics? Certainly not to influenza; we somehow treat all those deaths are normal or inevitable. In response to COVID we did spend a great deal of money, even more than the wars in fact—a total of nearly $6 trillion. This was a very pleasant surprise to me (it’s the first time in my lifetime I’ve witnessed a serious, not watered-down Keynesian fiscal stimulus in the United States). And we imposed lockdowns—but these were all-too quickly removed, despite the pleading of public health officials. It seems to be that our governments tried to impose an aggressive response, but then too many of the citizens pushed back against it, unwilling to give up their “freedom” (read: convenience) in the name of public safety.

For the wars, all most of us had to do was pay some taxes and sit back and watch; but for the pandemic we were actually expected to stay home, wear masks, and get shots? Forget it.

Politics was clearly a very big factor here: In the US, the COVID death rate map and the 2020 election map look almost equivalent: By and large, people who voted for Biden have been wearing masks and getting vaccinated, while people who voted for Trump have not.

But pandemic response is precisely the sort of thing you can’t do halfway. If one area is containing a virus and another isn’t, the virus will still remain uncontained. (As some have remarked, it’s rather like having a “peeing section” of a swimming pool. Much worse, actually, as urine contains relatively few bacteria—but not zero—and is quickly diluted by the huge quantities of water in a swimming pool.)

Indeed, that seems to be what has happened, and why we can’t seem to return to normal life despite months of isolation. Since enough people are refusing to make any effort to contain the virus, the virus remains uncontained, and the only way to protect ourselves from it is to continue keeping restrictions in place indefinitely.

Had we simply kept the original lockdowns in place awhile longer and then made sure everyone got the vaccine—preferably by paying them for doing it, rather than punishing them for not—we might have been able to actually contain the virus and then bring things back to normal.

But as it is, this is what I think is going to happen: At some point, we’re just going to give up. We’ll see that the virus isn’t getting any more contained than it ever was, and we’ll be so tired of living in isolation that we’ll finally just give up on doing it anymore and take our chances. Some of us will continue to get our annual vaccines, but some won’t. Some of us will continue to wear masks, but most won’t. The virus will become a part of our lives, just as influenza did, and we’ll convince ourselves that millions of deaths is no big deal.

And then the nightmare will truly never end.

The extreme efficiency of environmental regulation—and the extreme inefficiency of war

PNRJ current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 8 JDN 2458217

Insofar as there has been any coherent policy strategy for the Trump administration, it has largely involved three things:

  1. Increase investment in military, incarceration, and immigration enforcement
  2. Redistribute wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich
  3. Remove regulations that affect business, particularly environmental regulations

The human cost of such a policy strategy is difficult to overstate. Literally millions of people will die around the world if such policies continue. This is almost the exact opposite of what our government should be doing.

This is because military is one of the most wasteful and destructive forms of government investment, while environmental regulation is one of the most efficient and beneficial. The magnitude of these differences is staggering.

First of all, it is not clear that the majority of US military spending provides any marginal benefit. It could quite literally be zero. The US spends more on military than the next ten countries combined.

I think it’s quite reasonable to say that the additional defense benefit becomes negligible once you exceed the sum of spending from all plausible enemies. China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia together add up to about $350 billion per year. Current US spending is $610 billion per year. (And this calculation, by the way, requires them all to band together, while simultaneously all our NATO allies completely abandon us.) That means we could probably cut $260 billion per year without losing anything.

What about the remaining $350 billion? I could be extremely generous here, and assume that nuclear weapons, alliances, economic ties, and diplomacy all have absolutely no effect, so that without our military spending we would be invaded and immediately lose, and that if we did lose a war with China or Russia it would be utterly catastrophic and result in the deaths of 10% of the US population. Since in this hypothetical scenario we are only preventing the war by the barest margin, each year of spending only adds 1 year to the lives of the war’s potential victims. That means we are paying some $350 billion per year to add 1 year to the lives of 32 million people. That is a cost of about $11,000 per QALY. If it really is saving us from being invaded, that doesn’t sound all that unreasonable. And indeed, I don’t favor eliminating all military spending.

Of course, the marginal benefit of additional spending is still negligible—and UN peacekeeping is about twice as cost-effective as US military action, even if we had to foot the entire bill ourselves.

Alternatively, I could consider only the actual, documented results of our recent military action, which has resulted in over 280,000 deaths in Iraq and 110,000 in Afghanistan, all for little or no apparent gain. Life expectancy in these countries is about 70 in Iraq and 60 in Afghanistan. Quality of life there is pretty awful, but people are also greatly harmed by war without actually dying in it, so I think a fair conversion factor is about 60 QALY per death. That’s a loss of 23.4 MQALY. The cost of the Iraq War was about $1.1 trillion, while the cost of the Afghanistan War was about a further $1.1 trillion. This means that we paid $94,000 per lost QALY. If this is right, we paid enormous amounts to destroy lives and accomplished nothing at all.

Somewhere in between, we could assume that cutting the military budget greatly would result in the US being harmed in a manner similar to World War 2, which killed about 500,000 Americans. Paying $350 billion per year to gain 500,000 QALY per year is a price of $700,000 per QALY. I think this is about right; we are getting some benefit, but we are spending an enormous amount to get it.

Now let’s compare that to the cost-effectiveness of environmental regulation.

Since 1990, the total cost of implementing the regulations in the Clean Air Act was about $65 billion. That’s over 28 years, so less than $2.5 billion per year. Compare that to the $610 billion per year we spend on the military.

Yet the Clean Air Act saves over 160,000 lives every single year. And these aren’t lives extended one more year as they were in the hypothetical scenario where we are just barely preventing a catastrophic war; most of these people are old, but go on to live another 20 years or more. That means we are gaining 3.2 MQALY for a price of $2.5 billion. This is a price of only $800 per QALY.

From 1970 to 1990, the Clean Air Act cost more to implement: about $520 billion (so, you know, less than one year of military spending). But its estimated benefit was to save over 180,000 lives per year, and its estimated economic benefit was $22 trillion.

Look at those figures again, please. Even under very pessimistic assumptions where we would be on the verge of war if not for our enormous spending, we’re spending at least $11,000 and probably more like $700,000 on the military for each QALY gained. But environmental regulation only costs us about $800 per QALY. That’s a factor of at least 14 and more likely 1000. Environmental regulation is probably about one thousand times as cost-effective as military spending.

And I haven’t even included the fact that there is a direct substitution here: Climate change is predicted to trigger thousands if not millions of deaths due to military conflict. Even if national security were literally the only thing we cared about, it would probably still be more cost-effective to invest in carbon emission reduction rather than building yet another aircraft carrier. And if, like me, you think that a child who dies from asthma is just as important as one who gets bombed by China, then the cost-benefit analysis is absolutely overwhelming; every $60,000 spent on war instead of environmental protection is a statistical murder.

This is not even particularly controversial among economists. There is disagreement about specific environmental regulations, but the general benefits of fighting climate change and keeping air and water clean are universally acknowledged. There is disagreement about exactly how much military spending is necessary, but you’d be hard-pressed to find an economist who doesn’t think we could cut our military substantially with little or no risk to security.

The challenges of a global basic income

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457404

In the previous post I gave you the good news. Now for the bad news.

So we are hoping to implement a basic income of $3,000 per person per year worldwide, eliminating poverty once and for all.

There is no global government to implement this system. There is no global income tax to be collected or refunded. The United Nations and the World Bank, for all the good work that they do, are nowhere near powerful enough (or well-funded enough) to accomplish this feat.

Worse, the people we need to help the most, not coincidentally, live in the countries that are worst-managed. They are surrounded not only by squalor, but also by corruption, war, ethnic tension. Most of the people are underfed, uneducated, and dying from diseases such as malaria and schistomoniasis that we could treat in a day for pocket change. Their infrastructure is either crumbling or nonexistent. Their water is unsafe to drink. And worst of all, many of their governments don’t care. Tyrants like Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong-un, King Salman (of our lovely ally Saudi Arabia), and Isayas Afewerki care nothing for the interests of the people they rule, and are interested only in maximizing their own wealth and power. If we arranged to provide grants to these countries in an amount sufficient to provide the basic income, there’s no reason to think they’d actually provide it; they’d simply deposit the check in their own personal bank accounts, and use it to buy ever more extravagant mansions or build ever greater monuments to themselves. They really do seem to follow a utility function based entirely upon their own consumption; witness your neoclassical rational agent and despair.

There are ways for international institutions and non-governmental organizations to intervene to help people in these countries, and indeed many have done so to considerable effect. As bad as things are, they are much better than they used to be, and they promise to be even better tomorrow. But there is only so much they can do without the force of law at their backs, without the power to tax incomes and print currency.

We will therefore need a new kind of institutional framework, if not a true world government then something very much like it. Establishing this new government will not be easy, and worst of all I see no way to do it other than military force. Tyrants will not give up their power willingly; it will need to be taken from them. We will need to capture and imprison tyrants like Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong Un in the same way that we once did to mob bosses like John Dillinger and Al Capone, for ultimately a tyrant is nothing but a mob boss with an army.Unless we can find some way to target them precisely and smoothly replace their regimes with democracies, this will mean nothing less than war, and it could kill thousands, even millions of people—but millions of people are already dying, and will continue to die as long as we leave these men in power. Sanctions might help (though sanctions kill people too), and perhaps a few can be persuaded to step down, but the rest must be overthrown, by some combination of local revolutions and international military coalitions. The best model I’ve seen for how this might be pulled off is Libya, where Qaddafi was at last removed by an international military force supporting a local revolution—but even Libya is not exactly sunshine and rainbows right now. One of the first things we need to do is seriously plan a strategy for removing repressive dictators with a minimum of collateral damage.

To many, I suspect this sounds like imperialism, colonialism redux. Didn’t so many imperialistic powers say that they were doing it to help the local population? Yes, they did; and one of the facts that we must face up to is that it was occasionally true. Or if helping the local population was not their primary motivation, it was nonetheless a consequence. Countries colonized by the British Empire in particular are now the most prosperous, free nations in the world: The United States, Canada, Australia. South Africa and India might seem like exceptions (GDP PPP per capita of $12,400 and $5,500 respectively) but they really aren’t, compared to what they were before—or even compared to what is next to them today: Angola has a per capita GDP PPP of $7,546 while Bangladesh has only $2,991. Zimbabwe is arguably an exception (per capita GDP PPP of $1,773), but their total economic collapse occurred after the British left. To include Zimbabwe in this basic income program would literally triple the income of most of their population. But to do that, we must first get through Robert Mugabe.

Furthermore, I believe that we can avoid many of the mistakes of the past. We don’t have to do exactly the same thing that countries used to do when they invaded each other and toppled governments. Of course we should not enslave, subjugate, or murder the local population—one would hope that would go without saying, but history shows it doesn’t. We also shouldn’t annex the territory and claim it as our own, nor should we set up puppet governments that are only democratic as long as it serves our interests. (And make no mistake, we have done this, all too recently.) The goal must really be to help the people of countries like Zimbabwe and Eritrea establish their own liberal democracy, including the right to make policies we don’t like—or even policies we think are terrible ideas. If we can do so without war, of course we should. But right now what is usually called “pacifism” leaves millions of people to starve while we do nothing.

The argument that we have previously supported (or even continue to support, ahem, Saudi Arabia) many of these tyrants is sort of beside the point. Yes, that is clearly true; and yes, that is clearly terrible. But do you think that if we simply leave the situation alone they’ll go away? We should never have propped up Saddam Hussein or supported the mujihadeen who became the Taliban; and yes, I do think we could have known that at the time. But once they are there, what do you propose to do now? Wait for them to die? Hope they collapse on their own? Give our #thoughtsandprayers to revolutionaries? When asked what you think we should do, “We shouldn’t have done X” is not a valid response.

Imagine there is a mob boss who had kidnapped several families and is holding them in a warehouse. Suppose that at some point the police supported the mob boss in some way; in a deal to undermine a worse rival mafia family, they looked the other way on some things he did, or even gave him money that he used to strengthen his mob. (With actual police, the former is questionable, but actually done all the time; the latter would be definitely illegal. In the international analogy, both are ubiquitous.) Even suppose that the families who were kidnapped were previously from a part of town that the police would regularly shake down for petty crimes and incessant stop-and-frisks. The police definitely have a lot to answer for in all this; their crimes should not be forgotten. But how does it follow in any way that the police should not intervene to rescue the families from the warehouse? Suppose we even know that the warehouse is heavily guarded, and the resulting firefight may kill some of the hostages we are hoping to save. This gives us reason to negotiate, or to find the swiftest, most precise means to deploy the SWAT teams; but does it give us reason to do nothing?

Once again I think Al Capone is the proper analogy; when the FBI captured Al Capone, they didn’t bomb Chicago to the ground, nor did they attempt to enslave the population of Illinois. They thought of themselves as targeting one man and his lieutenants and re-establishing order and civil government to a free people; that is what we must do in Eritrea and Zimbabwe. (In response to all this, no doubt someone will say: “You just want the US to be the world’s police.” Well, no, I want an international coalition; but yes, given our military and economic hegemony, the US will take a very important role. Above all, yes, I want the world to have police. Why don’t you?)

For everything we did wrong in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think we actually did this part right: Afghanistan’s GDP PPP per capita has risen over 70% since 2002, and Iraq’s is now 17% higher than its pre-war peak. It’s a bit early to say whether we have really established stable liberal democracies there, and the Iraq War surely contributed to the rise of Daesh; but when the previous condition was the Taliban and Saddam Hussein it’s hard not to feel that things are at least somewhat improving. In a generation or two maybe we really will say “Iraq” in the same breath as “Korea” as one of the success stories of prosperous democracies set up after US wars. Or maybe it will all fall apart; it’s hard to say at this point.

So, we must find a way to topple the tyrants. Once that is done, we will need to funnel huge amounts of resources—at least one if not two orders of magnitude larger than our current level of foreign aid into building infrastructure, educating people, and establishing sound institutions. Our current “record high” foreign aid is less than 0.3% of world’s GDP. We have a model for this as well: It’s what we did in West Germany and Japan after WW2, as well as what we did in South Korea after the Korean War. It is not a coincidence that Germany soon regained its status as a world power while Japan and Korea were the first of the “Asian Tigers”, East Asian nations that rose up to join us at a First World standard of living.

Will all of this be expensive? Absolutely. By assuming $3,000 per person per year I am already figuring in an expenditure of $21 trillion per year, indefinitely. This would be the most expensive project upon which humanity has ever embarked. But it could also be the most important—an end to poverty, everywhere, forever. And we have that money, we’re simply using it for other things. At purchasing power parity the world spends over $100 trillion per year. Using 20% of the world’s income to eliminate poverty forever doesn’t seem like such a bad deal to me. (It’s not like it would disappear; it would be immediately spent back into the economy anyway. We might even see growth as a result.)

When dealing with events on this scale, it’s easy to get huge numbers that sound absurd. But even if we assumed that only the US, Europe, and China supported this program, it would only take 37% of our combined income—roughly what we currently spend on housing.

Whenever people complain, “We spend billions of dollars a year on aid, and we haven’t solved world hunger!” the proper answer is, “That’s right; we should be spending trillions.”