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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6609 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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What are the "world issues" of our age?

I am a high school social studies teacher (lame) and our curriculum is very old. As such, it is adamant that kids learn about the AIDS crisis, SARS, the Millennium poverty reduction goals, UN peacekeeping, third-world debt and the IMF, etc. It's all very Naomi Klein, Michael Moore-type stuff, and feels like teaching in 1992 with books written during the Cold War.

Most of those issues are still around, but they are obviously no longer as relevant to the globally-minded. Other than stuff like SARS, which has an obvious analog in COVID, what issues SHOULD we talking about. In 2007 you could pretty easily list the things that were considered "world issues" by the bien-pensant class. Has wokeism bulldozed all that? Are there constituencies out there who are still worried about this type of stuff? If so, what are they worrying about?

She also cynically accused Mace of trying to exploit the issue to get her name in the papers. Mace responded by calling AOC dumb and her suggestion disgusting, but she didn't offer any alternative enforcement mechanism.

I think this is one of the dumbest possible critiques of this policy. The simple answer is, "whatever happened when a man went into a ladies room in 2000." Which, quite simply, is if they did their business in a quick and non threatening manner, nothing happened. Maybe some women would look at him askance or ask him if he is lost. Only when said man started ogling women and girls, whipping out his junk, etc would security be contacted. And such is a perfectly reasonable enforcement mechanism. On top of that the bright line rule, is very convenient as an escalation or extra charge for the police/prosecution and as evidence of criminal intent.

Assuming you're not allowed to go completely off the rails from the curriculum, each of the topics you mention can be a natural hook into more current issues.

  1. AIDS/SARS of course leads to covid and other public health concerns, which in turn leads to global trade, supply chains, the recent inflation, etc.
  2. Millennium development goals are done now, so the discussion of which succeeded and which failed can lead to the development of China and the massive fall in poverty there, but also the pivot to the SDGs and the greater proportion of diplomatic effort being spent on climate issues. (I see the debate about climate below, but I don't think it can be denied that lots of people consider it the "world issue" and ignoring it just lets your students be fed less rational stories about it by other people.)
  3. UN peacekeeping leads to current peacekeeping efforts in Israel/Palestine, but also why no one really talks about "UN peacekeeping" anymore, and how the idea of peacekeeping has changed from the Balkans through the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine how the balance of global power shifted with the fall of the USSR, the rise of China and the expansion of NATO.
  4. Third-world debt and the IMF leads to the PIIGS and the Great Recession, which leads to first world sovereign debt, the recent inflation and global trade and telecommunications. Your students probably don't appreciate how new and remarkable it is that you, a private citizen, can sit in your bed with your phone and just buy something from someone in China. Or how expensive it used to be to call other countries. Which in turn leads to how much those capabilities depend on international infrastructure that turns out to be pretty vulnerable to sabotage, or satellites, which is a good time to bring up the changes in the space industry and how that might shape the world going forward.

Tikkun Olam.

Climate change.

I didn't used to believe in this, and I'm still, say, maybe ambivalent? But I do think there's a real chance that we start seeing some serious shit in this regard in the near future, trends that happen slowly and then all at once.

There's no real chance we start seeing some serious shit - we are already seeing serious shit. 2024 is the hottest year on record, beating out... 2023 for the top spot. Corals all over the world are bleaching and dying and we're already seeing temperature zones marching away from the equator and towards the poles.

I highly recommend the following article, because I think it is the most reasonable take on the issue that I've seen. https://www.ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/

There would have to be some sort of discontinuous break for climate change to have a serious effect on human civilization.

People keep on predicting that climate change will cause more famines and storm deaths. But, over time, human deaths from famine and storms have been going down, not up. Human capacity to deal with the climate increases far faster than the climate changes. Unless the world deindustrializes, there will never be another Bhola cyclone which killed 300,000 people in 1970.

Climate change predictions often call for a 1 or 2% decrease in total global GDP due to climate change in the next 50 or 100 years. Frankly, this is small potatoes. And furthermore, it's quite easy and cheap to mitigate the worst effects of climate change if we cared to do so. (We don't).

That's not to say climate change isn't bad. It is. It will have many negative consequences for the natural environment and may cause some species to go extinct. This is bad and we should strive to prevent it.

But humans will be fine.

Yeah, climate change isn't a "threat of human extinction" type of problem (unless we're missing something big and Venusy, which is far-fetched), but I could see 1 or 2% decrease in total global GDP being a serious underestimate. The theme I keep seeing in climate change predictions is devaluation of land. A large number of major coastal cities having to simultaneously move inland would be pretty bad, even if it was a relatively gradual process.

A large number of major coastal cities having to simultaneously move inland would be pretty bad, even if it was a relatively gradual process.

It's going to be very gradual on a human time scale. How gradual? Think 1 meter of sea level rise in the next 100 years, assuming no mitigation.

The cities won't move, but lower lying areas will see marginally less development over time, so the population center of the cities will gradually shift inland. In extremely valuable areas like lower Manhattan, there won't be any retreat, just more money spent on land reclamation. Amsterdam and New Orleans are already below sea level.

AI. Can relate to how students should be taught to write given AI, and what work will be available when AI gets even better and we get cheap robots.

  • Current existential threats: AI, pandemics, nuclear proliferation (and Lybia, Ukraine, NK, Iran show the incentives for/against a country pursuing nuclear weapons)
  • The rise of global trade: semiconductor markets, shipping lanes (compare to Roman Roads), global financial markets / how and why the USD is the global currency
  • Global telecom and instantaneous communication
  • Geopolitical balance of power, the fall of Russia as a power and the rise of China (as economic powers). Since ~2017, chinese GDP has been higher (PPP) than US GDP.
  • Chinese demographics (and the big question of economics in a shrinking population), China and Taiwan/Hong Kong (back to its origin in opium wars)
  • Chinese dependency on the West: China imports fuel and food, exports manufactured goods.
  • US military build-up in the Pacific vs. South China sea as a barrier to US containment
  • Hybrid warfare
  • Not current issue, but a fun thing for me to think about: "how to raise a country into an economic miracle" (Korea) vs. "how to destroy a country" (Venezuela, Gosplan). The relevant point I would emphasize is that you need some unit of value (money) which signals the amount of resources which go into a product, and which signals how many resources people are willing to give up for that product. This distributed computation cannot be efficiently centralized!
  • Within the US, the financialization of corporations and rising power of private equity/monopolies: downfall of Boeing (funneling money into stock buybacks), PE firms buying real estate and setting up local dental monopolies, market power being abused to add junk fees and raise prices (Ticketmaster), etc.

Geopolitical balance of power, the fall of Russia as a power and the rise of China (as economic powers). Since ~2017, chinese GDP has been higher (PPP) than US GDP.

Perhaps more important than Russia falling and China rising is Russia and China getting friendlier with one another. The Sino-Soviet split was a major factor in the Soviet loss of the Cold War; now, Russia and China are becoming a single anti-American bloc again.

I think for me a big issue is the polarization of the United States. It’s probably not completely unprecedented, but it’s crazy to my self raised in the 1980s and 1990s that we live in a world where half of the country views the other half as subversive if not dangerous. I don’t think if you’d go back to 1985 and said that in 2025, people would consider the president elect a danger to democracy— especially given that such a sentiment is not a fringe thing, a major political party, hell the current president, have said so. I don’t think, other than the American Civil War, you had something quite so polarized.

The energy transition, with a discussion of peak oil. Low TFR and population aging. Mass migration, populism, social media.

Peak oil

The experts were just so wrong about peak oil, weren't they?

Not only did the world not reach peak oil in the late 2000s as predicted, but US production grew so much it is now 30% above its prior 1970 peak.

I'll venture that we really will reach peak oil in the next decade, but not because of lack of supply (we are discovering oil faster than we are burning it), but because of lack of demand.

We never ran out after all.

AI, mass immigration and cultural fragmentation, the power of political Islam, low birth rates, the risk of biologically engineered pandemics, the effect of social media on population psychology. Not stuff most high schools are going to want you to spend all your time discussing in class.

The emerging second Cold War?

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