A December EP for the Substack reboot. You can find old issues here.
Happy reading :) 🎄🎁
🌎 The Warm War
How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis (NYT, ProPublica) by Abrahm Lustgarten (Dec 2020)
Why it matters: You hear climate change is one of the most significant challenges facing the world. Less often you hear about the winners. Insofar as climate change is going to shape this century, understanding who stands to win, and what that means, will be important.
And who stands to win is the global north, primarily Russia and Canada. As global warming leads to human migration, food & water insecurity, both countries stand to benefit from a massive increase in inhabitable and arable land and agricultural productivity.
…by 2080, Russia’s permafrost in the Asian part of the country will be reduced by more than half, at least in the active layer within six feet of the surface. One-third of its land mass would begin to switch from “absolute extreme” in its inhospitality to “fairly favorable” for civilization — and quite hospitable… The steady melting of the Arctic sea ice will open a new shipping lane that would cut transit times from Southeast Asia to Europe by up to 40 percent and also shorten travel time to the United States, positioning Russia to profit by controlling this route between China and the West.
👨👩👦 Family Ties
The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake (Atlantic) by David Brooks (Mar 2020)
…while social conservatives have a philosophy of family life they can’t operationalize, because it no longer is relevant, progressives have no philosophy of family life at all, because they don’t want to seem judgmental.
I thought this piece was especially interesting now, when so many people have spent an unexpected and prolonged amount of time with family. It’s a survey of the disintegration of the nuclear family over the last half half century, its causes, consequences, and possible successors. Essay mainly covers:
the unique social and economic conditions that led were responsible for its heyday, and now, decline.
the emergence of new and I suppose what you might call paleo-traditional living arrangements and ideas of kinship.
Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950–65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.
“Family inequality” by race…
Finally, because groups that have endured greater levels of discrimination tend to have more fragile families, African Americans have suffered disproportionately in the era of the detached nuclear family. Nearly half of black families are led by an unmarried single woman, compared with less than one-sixth of white families. (The high rate of black incarceration guarantees a shortage of available men to be husbands or caretakers of children.)
…and by class
“Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There’s a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up… Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families. They preach that everybody else should build stable families too. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide—and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.”
There second part of that that really reminded me of a Douthat piece from 2014 that was and continues to be a big influence on my thinking.
Brooks notes a small comeback in multigenerational living arrangements but it seems to be driven more by economic instability than any organic desire. The new models of community living that he touches on in the final part are interesting.
A related article worth reading is Katherine Boo’s 2003 piece in The New Yorker: “The Marriage Cure”. As the title suggests, she puts forward a skeptical view of government policy intended to increase family formation as a panacea or root solution for many social ills. I think Brooks would agree that social conservatives trying to prescribe the 1950s style nuclear family are doomed to fail and that we need to come up with new ways of living and rediscover even older ones.
🇨🇳 A Portrait of Xi Jinping as a Young Man
How the U.S. Misread China’s Xi: Hoping for a Globalist, It Got an Autocrat (WSJ) by Jeremy Page (Dec 2020)
A brief, informative biographical piece that sheds light on why Xi didn’t become the globalist many hoped for when he first came to power.
On Xi’s own father’s purge from leadership and his experience during the Cultural Revolution:
In 1968, Mao tried to restore order by sending millions of young people into the countryside to be “educated.” That is how Mr. Xi, at age 15, wound up in Liangjiahe, a cluster of about three dozen homes, mostly traditional cave dwellings, 220 miles northeast of his father’s birthplace.
Conditions were brutal. Flea-ridden and often hungry, he spent much of the next seven years building wells, digging fields and herding sheep. There was no school.
And lessons learned:
[Xi] rarely speaks of those years, but in interviews before taking power, he said they hardened his view of politics. He recalled denouncing his father, being jailed three times and having Red Guards threaten him with execution.
“People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see these things as mysterious and novel,” he said in 2000. “But what I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bullpens”—a reference to Red Guard detention houses—”and how people can blow hot and cold. I understand politics on a deeper level.”
One conclusion Xi Jinping reached, these people say, was that politics is a winner-take-all contest. Another was that he should conceal his own views until he had real power.
The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning (Palladium) by N.S. Lyons (Oct 2021)
A short profile of Wang Huning, the top party ideological and political theorist under Xi, sheds further light on ideology under Xi. Also covers trends in Chinese culture and society that I think go against the mainstream stereotypes in America of China as this inevitable hegemon with an invincible economy and unified collective society.
Wang, while also coming from a favored family, seems to have had a very different childhood than Xi’s:
Wang Huning studied French at an elite foreign-language training school near his hometown of Shanghai, spending his days reading banned foreign literary classics secured for him by his teachers. Born in 1955 to a revolutionary family from Shandong, he was a sickly, bookish youth; this, along with his family’s connections, seems to have secured him a pass from hard labor.
Wang later studied in the US where he had what seems like a less-than-great time:
Also in 1988, Wang—having risen with unprecedented speed to become Fudan’s youngest full professor at age 30—won a coveted scholarship (facilitated by the American Political Science Association) to spend six months in the United States as a visiting scholar. Profoundly curious about America, Wang took full advantage, wandering about the country like a sort of latter-day Chinese Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities.
Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.
But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.
“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”
This story of a visiting scholar having an adverse exposure to America reminded me of a part of Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower that describes Sayyid Qutb coming to America and having such a strong reaction against the culture that it radicalized him and contributed to his jihadism thought.
So that was Wang in America then. But in China now:
…many of the same problems Wang observed in America have nonetheless emerged to ravage China over the last decade as the country progressively embraced a more neoliberal capitalist economic model.
Feeling alone and unable to get ahead in a ruthlessly consumerist society, Chinese youth increasingly describe existing in a state of nihilistic despair encapsulated by the online slang term neijuan (“involution”), which describes a “turning inward” by individuals and society due to a prevalent sense of being stuck in a draining rat race where everyone inevitably loses. This despair has manifested itself in a movement known as tangping, or “lying flat,” in which people attempt to escape that rat race by doing the absolute bare minimum amount of work required to live, becoming modern ascetics.
According to a leaked account by one of his old friends, Xi has found himself, like Wang, “repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveaux riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution.” Wang has now seemingly convinced Xi that they have no choice but to take drastic action to head off existential threats to social order being generated by Western-style economic and cultural liberal-capitalism—threats nearly identical to those that scourge the U.S.
There’s a sort of easy symmetry to the idea that with such rapid and massive development, you’d just as quickly get the cultural and social decadence we associate with America today, if not our political sclerosis. And it cuts against the strain of Sino-fatalism or Sino-defeatism you hear in some circles in America. These aren’t Western problems that are essential flaws of Western cultural character. Which should give us some hope, or at least inspiration.
🍖 Tidbits
The next quant revolution: shaking up the corporate bond market (FT) by Robin Wigglesworth and Laurence Fletcher (Dec 2021)
The global corporate bond market stands at over $40tn, but is virtually untouched by the computer-powered “quantitative” investment revolution that has reshaped the stock market in recent decades… if the quants do succeed, the impact on the corporate debt market could be monumental. Industry executives say the rise of electronic trading and systematic credit strategies are now starting to reinforce each other in a positive feedback loop. The final outcome could be a radically different corporate debt market — faster, more transparent and cheaper to trade, but potentially more fragile and tempestuous.
President Biden’s Economic Agenda Wasn’t Designed for Shortages and Inflation (WSJ) by Greg Ip (Nov 2021)
Mr. Biden has a different problem: His agenda isn’t well suited to fixing it. This stems from his team’s early conviction that Mr. Obama’s stimulus in 2009 wasn’t big enough, and the resulting sluggish recovery contributed to Democrats’ shellacking in the 2010 midterms. Thus, they pushed to enact the biggest stimulus possible once Mr. Biden was sworn in.
But Mr. Obama’s economy suffered from a lack of demand; Mr. Biden’s suffers from a lack of supply. Businesses were closed because of the pandemic, supply chains are stretched because of changes in consumption patterns, and millions of workers have dropped out because of Covid-19, child-care issues or stimulus money. So Mr. Biden’s stimulus, by pouring more demand into a supply-constrained economy, fed inflation. How much is hard to say, but Republicans and even some Democrats such as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin have eagerly made the connection.