war

The challenges of a global basic income

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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.”

To truly honor veterans, end war

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JDN 2457339 EST 20:00 (Nov 11, 2015)

Today is Veterans’ Day, on which we are asked to celebrate the service of military veterans, particularly those who have died as a result of war. We tend to focus on those who die in combat, but actually these have always been relatively uncommon; throughout history, most soldiers have died later of their wounds or of infections. More recently as a result of advances in body armor and medicine, actually relatively few soldiers die even of war wounds or infections—instead, they are permanently maimed and psychologically damaged, and the most common way that war kills soldiers now is by making them commit suicide.

Even adjusting for the fact that soldiers are mostly young men (the group of people most likely to commit suicide), military veterans still have about 50 excess suicides per million people per year, for a total of about 300 suicides per million per year. Using the total number, that’s over 8000 veteran suicides per year, or 22 per day. Using only the excess compared to men of the same ages, it’s still an additional 1300 suicides per year.

While the 14-years-and-counting Afghanistan War has killed 2,271 American soldiers and the 11-year Iraq War has killed 4,491 American soldiers directly (or as a result of wounds), during that same time period from 2001 to 2015 there have been about 18,000 excess suicides as a result of the military—excess in the sense that they would not have occurred if those men had been civilians. Altogether that means there would be nearly 25,000 additional American soldiers alive today were it not for these two wars.

War does not only kill soldiers while they are on the battlefield—indeed, most of the veterans it kills die here at home.

There is a reason Woodrow Wilson chose November 11 as the date for Veterans’ Day: It was on this day in 1918 that World War 1, up to that point the war that had caused the most deaths in human history, was officially ended. Sadly, it did not remain the deadliest war, but was surpassed by World War 2 a generation later. Fortunately, no other war has ever exceeded World War 2—at least, not yet.

We tend to celebrate holidays like this with a lot of ritual and pageantry (or even in the most inane and American way possible, with free restaurant meals and discounts on various consumer products), and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Nor is there anything wrong with taking a moment to salute the flag or say “Thank you for your service.” But that is not how I believe veterans should be honored. If I were a veteran, that is not how I would want to be honored.

We are getting much closer to how I think they should be honored when the White House announces reforms at Veterans’ Affairs hospitals and guaranteed in-state tuition at public universities for families of veterans—things that really do in a concrete and measurable way improve the lives of veterans and may even save some of them from that cruel fate of suicide.

But ultimately there is only one way that I believe we can truly honor veterans and the spirit of the holiday as Wilson intended it, and that is to end war once and for all.

Is this an ambitious goal? Absolutely. But is it an impossible dream? I do not believe so.

In just the last half century, we have already made most of the progress that needed to be made. In this brilliant video animation, you can see two things: First, the mind-numbingly horrific scale of World War 2, the worst war in human history; but second, the incredible progress we have made since then toward world peace. It was as if the world needed that one time to be so unbearably horrible in order to finally realize just what war is and why we need a better way of solving conflicts.

This is part of a very long-term trend in declining violence, for a variety of reasons that are still not thoroughly understood. In simplest terms, human beings just seem to be getting better at not killing each other.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that this is just a statistical illusion, because technologies like nuclear weapons create the possibility of violence on a previously unimaginable scale, and it simply hasn’t happened yet. For nuclear weapons in particular, I think he may be right—the consequences of nuclear war are simply so catastrophic that even a small risk of it is worth paying almost any price to avoid.

Fortunately, nuclear weapons are not necessary to prevent war: South Africa has no designs on attacking Japan anytime soon, but neither has nuclear weapons. Germany and Poland lack nuclear arsenals and were the first countries to fight in World War 2, but now that both are part of the European Union, war between them today seems almost unthinkable. When American commentators fret about China today it is always about wage competition and Treasury bonds, not aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles. Conversely, North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear weapons has by no means stabilized the region against future conflicts, and the fact that India and Pakistan have nuclear missiles pointed at one another has hardly prevented them from killing each other over Kashmir. We do not need nuclear weapons as a constant threat of annihilation in order to learn to live together; political and economic ties achieve that goal far more reliably.

And I think Taleb is wrong about the trend in general. He argues that the only reason violence is declining is that concentration of power has made violence rarer but more catastrophic when it occurs. Yet we know that many forms of violence which used to occur no longer do, not because of the overwhelming force of a Leviathan to prevent them, but because people simply choose not to do them anymore. There are no more gladiator fights, no more cat-burnings, no more public lynchings—not because of the expansion in government power, but because our society seems to have grown out of that phase.

Indeed, what horrifies us about ISIS and Boko Haram would have been considered quite normal, even civilized, in the Middle Ages. (If you’ve ever heard someone say we should “bring back chivalry”, you should explain to them that the system of knight chivalry in the 12th century had basically the same moral code as ISIS today—one of the commandments Gautier’s La Chevalerie attributes as part of the chivalric code is literally “Thou shalt make war against the infidel without cessation and without mercy.”) It is not so much that they are uniquely evil by historical standards, as that we grew out of that sort of barbaric violence awhile ago but they don’t seem to have gotten the memo.

In fact, one thing people don’t seem to understand about Steven Pinker’s argument about this “Long Peace” is that it still works if you include the world wars. The reason World War 2 killed so many people was not that it was uniquely brutal, nor even simply because its weapons were more technologically advanced. It also had to do with the scale of integration—we called it a single war even though it involved dozens of countries because those countries were all united into one of two sides, whereas in centuries past that many countries could be constantly fighting each other in various combinations but it would never be called the same war. But the primary reason World War 2 killed the largest raw number of people was simply because the world population was so much larger. Controlling for world population, World War 2 was not even among the top 5 worst wars—it barely makes the top 10. The worst war in history by proportion of the population killed was almost certainly the An Lushan Rebellion in 8th century China, which many of you may not even have heard of until today.

Though it may not seem so as ISIS kidnaps Christians and drone strikes continue, shrouded in secrecy, we really are on track to end war. Not today, not tomorrow, maybe not in any of our lifetimes—but someday, we may finally be able to celebrate Veterans’ Day as it was truly intended: To honor our soldiers by making it no longer necessary for them to die.

What really scares me

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JDN 2457327

Today is Halloween, so in the spirit of the holiday I thought I’d talk about things that are scary. Not things like zombies and witches and vampires; those things aren’t real (though people do still believe in them in many parts of the world). And maybe that’s part of the point; maybe Halloween is meant to “scare” us like a roller coaster, where we feel some of the epinephrine rush of fear but deep down we know we are safe.

But today I’m going to talk about things that are actually scary, things that are not safe deep down. I could talk about the Republican debate earlier this week, but maybe I shouldn’t get too scary.

In fiction there is whatever sort of ending the author wants to make, usually a happy one. Even tragic endings are written to be meaningful and satisfying. But in real life any sort of ending is possible. I could be driving down the street tomorrow and a semi truck could blindside me and kill me on impact. There’s no satisfying tragedy there, no comeuppance for my hubris or tragic flaw in my character leading to my doom—but this sort of thing kills over 30,000 Americans each year.

But are car accidents really scary? The way they kill just about anyone at random is scary. But there is a clear limit to how much damage they can do. No society has ever been wiped off the face of the Earth because of traffic accidents. There is no way for traffic accidents to risk the survival of the human race itself.

This brings me to the first thing that is really scary: Climate change. Human societies have been wiped off the face of the Earth due to local ecological collapses. The classic example is Easter Island, which did have an ecological collapse, but also suffered greatly from European invaders. Recent evidence suggests that the Vikings fell apart because glaciation broke their trade networks. Jared Diamond argues that a large number of ancient societies have fallen due to ecological collapse.

Yet for the first time we are now facing rapid global climate change, and it is our own doing. (As the vast majority of climate scientists agree.) We are already seeing its effects in flooding, wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes. Positive feedbacks are created, such as heat waves leading to more air conditioning, which draws more electricity that releases more carbon. Even as management of fishing improves, fisheries are still being depleted—because their waters are becoming too warm for the native fish.

Just yesterday the United Nations released a report showing that current promises of reduced carbon emissions will not be sufficient—even if they are followed through, which such promises often aren’t. The goal was to keep warming under 2 C; but it looks like we are looking at more like 2.7 C. That 0.7-degree difference may not seem like much, but in fact it means thousands or even millions of additional deaths. Most of the economic damage will be done to countries near the equator—which is also where the most impoverished people tend to live. The Global Humanitarian Forum estimates that global warming is already killing 300,000 people each year and causing over $100 billion in economic damage.

Meanwhile, there is a campaign of disinformation about climate change, funneled through secretive “dark money” processes (Why are these even allowed!?), including Exxon corporation, which has known for 30 years that they were contributing to climate change but actively suppressed that knowledge in order to avoid regulation. Koch Industries has also funded a great deal of climate change denialism. West Virginia recently tried to alter their science textbooks to remove references to climate change because they considered the scientific facts to be “too political”. Supposedly serious “think tanks” with conservative ideologies twist data in order to support their claims. Rather than be caught lying or denying science, most of the Republican presidential candidates are avoiding talking about the subject altogether.
There is good news, however: More Americans than ever recognize that climate change is real. 7% changed their minds in just the last few months. Even a lot of Republican politicians are finally coming around.

What else is scary? Nuclear war, a Black Swan. This is the most probable way humanity could destroy ourselves; the probability of nuclear war in the next 50 years has been estimated as high as 10%. Every day that goes by with nuclear weapons at the ready is like pulling the trigger in a game of Russian Roulette. We don’t really know how to estimate the probability with any precision; but even 0.1% per year would be a 10% chance over the next century.

There’s good news on this front as well: Slowly but surely, the world is disarming its nuclear weapons. From a peak of 60,000 nuclear weapons in 1986, we are now down to about 10,000. But we shouldn’t get too comfortable, as the estimated number necessary to trigger a global nuclear winter with catastrophic consequences is only about 100. India or Pakistan alone probably has enough to do that. The US or Russia has enough to do it 40 times over. We will need to continue our current disarmament trend for another 30 years before no single nation has enough weapons to trigger a nuclear winter.

Then there’s one more class of scary Black Swans: Mass extinction events. In particular, I’m talking about the Yellowstone Supervolcano, which could erupt at any moment, and the possibility of a large asteroid impact which could destroy cities or even wipe out all life on the surface of the Earth. We are 99.989% sure that TV135 will not do this; but in that 0.02% chance, it would hit with the force of 2500 megatons—50 times larger than any nuclear weapon ever built. Smaller (“smaller”) sub-megaton impacts are actually remarkably common; we average about two per year. If one ever hit a major city, it would be comparable to the Hiroshima nuclear bombing. The Yellowstone supervolcano would not be as catastrophic as a planet-scouring impact, but it would be comparable to a nuclear war and nuclear winter.

With asteroids, there are actually clear things we could do to improve our chances. Above all, we could invest in space exploration and astronomy. With better telescopes and more tracking stations we could see them coming; with better long-range rockets we might be able to deflect them before they get here. A number of different deflection proposals are being studied right now. This is actually the best reason I can think of to keep at least some nuclear weapons on standby; a large nuclear blast positioned at the right place could be effective at destroying an asteroid or deflecting it enough to miss us.

With Yellowstone, there really isn’t much we can do; all we can do at this point is continue to research the supervolcano and try to find ways to reduce the probability of its eruption. It is currently estimated at a just over 1 in 1 million chance of erupting any given year, but that’s a very rough estimate. Fracking near Yellowstone is currently banned, and I think it should stay that way until we have a very clear idea of what would happen. (It’s actually possible it could reduce the probability of eruption, in which case we should start fracking like crazy.)

Forget the zombie apocalypse. I’m scared of the supervolcano apocalypse.