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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26459 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?

Plummeting fertility rates.

I think this is probably the one. I'd put space travel in there. Suspect that pollution (microplastics!?) might come around to being a Big Deal Again, at least in The Discourse. Same with Climate Change. But not sure if either of them will be as important as fertility rates, or even space travel.

China. The world issue is China. In 1600 China was 29% of world GDP. By 1913 it was 8%. A small island nation on the fringes of Europe was capable of crossing the entire globe and imposing it's will upon the Heavenly Kingdom. Austria-Hungary, that corpse of an empire, would send troops to fight the Boxers. Germany had concession near Beijing.

Today the Chinese fraction of world GDP is back to ~20% and rising. It has aircraft carriers. It's the number one trading partner of almost every nation on earth. It's over 50% of world steel production. Over 50% of concrete production. Every single supply chain in the world interacts with China. In 1990 Shenzhen has 800k people. Today it has over 17 million. An entire NYC greater metro area has been birthed between that book in 1992 and today. And every country in the world has to adjust. The entire globe has gone from treating China as a non-issue to having to reconcile the return of China to global affairs. A world stage unseen for literally hundreds of years. What does the Chinese leadership want? How integrated should each nation be with it? How can any global treaty be efficacious if China is not on board?

Do you want to affect climate change? China is over 50% of global coal consumption. Chinese domestic coal consumption is a World Issue.

Do you want to affect global poverty? Chinese development alone has done the majority of lifting the global poor out of poverty, by sheer population scale. Any growing market today has to consider China as a factor, whereas previously the only game in town was the West.

Global security? World Peace? China. Now that Russia has torn itself asunder in Ukraine China is the last source of Great Power conflict.

For the longest time 'global issues' were just a proxy for 'concerns of the global community'. which in turn just meant this map. Now every country, on all issues, has to deal with sheer scale of the factor that China is back.

I...kinda feel like by the same logic that China is The World Issue one could argue that The United States is The World Issue.

I definitely think it's good for people to know about China and whatever they happen to be up to, and I agree that whatever it does impacts the world. But that's also true of the United States, the EU at a minimum, and I'd think Russia and India as well.

PS –Russia conventional [ground] forces now are stronger than they were before the conflict (as per statements from US DoD officials.) It's plausible that they will end up being more important to the Course of the Next Century than China.

I would completely agree that the World Issue is also the United States. I consider the important difference to be that of familiarity. Countries have been navigating a world with the US as a Great Power for 100 years, and as a Superpower for 30-60 depending on your definition. China is relatively new, and every country, ngo, and ethnicity has to navigate that space of what it means for them now that China's back.

In the 50's China was still 80%+ farming. In the 70's it was still 77% farming. Today it affects every single industrial chain in the world and the Pentagon is tearing it's hair out trying to figure out how to build anything without it relying on Chinese firms at some point. The Great Divergence was an assumed global condition.

Behold this comparative composition of world GDP by country over time.

The world has known a what it means on a daily basis to deal with European & American global dominance. But that Chinese trendline? That collapse 200 years ago and sharp rise to today? That's something new. Because it's one thing when a country is massive but it's pre-industrial. Zheng He sought tribute, not Naval bases in Djibouti. This is a genuine arrival of a new industrial power on a world scale. And every country from Colombia to Kenya has to account for it.

I'd love to read those US DoD comments if you can drag up the link. Not challenging it as wrong. Just enjoy reading this kinda stuff.

Yeah – I think all of these are good points. I guess "China" and, I dunno, "global warming" strike me as different sorts of issues, although as you point out they are all intertwined.

I'd love to read those US DoD comments if you can drag up the link. Not challenging it as wrong. Just enjoy reading this kinda stuff.

Oh sure, same here. Not that I mind being challenged :)

Here's an example from September from Voice of America: US Air Force general: Russia military larger, better than before Ukraine invasion

Here's another example in the Hill from March, that I think is a bit more in-depth: US general says Russian army has grown by 15 percent since pre-Ukraine war

Main takeaways:

  • Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the head of U.S. European Command, said Thursday that Russia’s army has grown by 15 percent since before the invasion of Ukraine, raising the alarm that Russian forces are reconstituting “far faster” than initial estimates suggested.
  • In written statements, Cavoli said Russia has also lost about 10 percent of its air force and more than 2,000 tanks on the battlefield. Moscow has also been beaten back in the Black Sea by Ukraine, but he said the Russian naval activity is at a “worldwide peak.”
  • Cavoli said in his written testimony that Russia is expected to produce more ammunition than all 32 NATO allies combined per year and is on track to “command the largest military on the continent and a defense industrial complex capable of generating substantial amounts of ammunition and materiel in support of large scale combat operations.”

(Note that the written testimony is doubtless floating around on a .senate.gov website somewhere, I just haven't bothered to track it down.)

My thoughts, fwiw:

Historically, militaries that are not defeated during a conflict often (maybe even typically) are stronger after the conflict than before. It seems to me that Russia will be much the same, with the largest army in Europe and the most experienced army in the world (with relevant experience defeating frontline NATO technology) after the war in Ukraine is over. I think it's true that a lot of their Soviet inheritance will be spent, but I'm not sure (as per e.g. the statement above) they couldn't stock back up more aggressively than the West – which, likewise, has spent much of its Cold War inheritance.

I also don't think the injuries inflicted on Russia are "minor" – Russia has lost a lot of modern armor, and huge portions of their rotary and fixed-wing aviation. For instance, Russia is estimated to have lost about a quarter (40ish out of 150ish) of its Su-34 strike aircraft. Based on past orders, it probably will take at least two years to reconstitute their forces, assuming no more are lost. But on the flip side, the war spurred innovation, such as the production of much-needed glide bombs, that make the remaining Su-34 fleet much more lethal.

From the American perspective, I continue to believe that the true threat to American hegemony is more likely to be China. But I think Russia continues to be a live player, and its actions in Ukraine, rather than dooming it to irrelevance, seem on balance poised to make it more important and relevant in the future.

I think China is a self-limiting issue. Its population is aging and shrinking. Its diplomacy is nonexistent: you can name multiple countries in the G20 that consider American problems their own. Does China have any friends? Russia and Pakistan are allies of convenience at most.

Does China have any friends?

North Korea kinda sorta?

Now that Russia has torn itself asunder in Ukraine China is the last source of Great Power conflict.

We are literally in a proxy war with Russia right now and regardless of whatever happens with their conventional forces, they still have thousands of H-bombs.

Though I agree fully with your main point, China does overlap into everything else - tech, energy, trade, politics...

Now that Russia has torn itself asunder

100,000 dead or so the Russians have isn't the end of the place. Arguably the 300-500K dead isn't perhaps even the end for Ukraine, as they're largely older people and they'll be able to preserve their independent western/central Ukraine without a doubt.

Those are all still excellent subjects - just not in the ways the authors envisaged. Talking about the failures and successes of AID efforts in Africa; of COVID policies, of the persistent backfiring of foreign aid, the corruption of the UN, BRICs strategizing and world supply chains, etc.

what issues SHOULD we talking about

  • Environmental issues
  • Wealth inequality
  • How AI will impact your students' lives
  • The Mindfulness Revolution
  • The rise of secular wisdom traditions like Authentic Relating
  • The Psychedelic Renaissance, including communities that use psychedelics in a spiritual/religious setting.

The common theme is that these are developing issues that involve a lot of uncertainty about the near future. They are salient to young people today and learning to navigate these issues will be helpful to their futures.

Wealth inequality is a made-up issue. To the extent that we care about economic inequality, our primary concern should be consumption inequality, because consumption is ultimately what really matters. The whole point of accumulating wealth is to allow you or your heirs, or the beneficiaries of your charitable contributions, to consume more in the future. Consumption is what you've taken from the economy, and wealth is the difference between what you've contributed and what you've taken.

For various reasons that should be fairly obvious if you think about it, consumption inequality < income inequality < wealth inequality. That is, in any given year, consumption is most equal and wealth is least equal. Lifetime consumption is even more equal than consumption in a given year, because at least some of the inequality in consumption is just due to life cycle effects. This is also true of income, and even more so of wealth.

Egalitarian ideologues started out talking about income inequality, because it's easiest to measure. At some point they should have realized that it makes more sense to talk about consumption inequality, but instead they went in the opposite direction and started talking about wealth inequality.

Why? Because, as I mentioned above, consumption is more equal than income, and wealth is less equal. This makes it much easier to sensationalize. The top 1% might do 5% of all consumption in the US, but they earn 20% of all pre-tax income, and own something like a third of all wealth. US billionaires may have more combined net worth than the bottom 50% of the population (If you say this, a lot of people will incorrectly assume that it means that billionaires own the majority of wealth, which is why Oxfam releases a statement to this effect every year), but they probably consume less than than the bottom 1%. There are fewer than a thousand US billionaires and 3.3 million bottom one-percenters; to consume more than the bottom 1%, billionaires would have to consume 3,300 times more per capita. If the bottom 1% each consume $20k per year, that's about $70 million per capita for billionaires. Likely some of the richer billionaires hit that at least some years, but $70 million is quite a lot to spend in one year if you only have a net worth of $1-2 billion.

So if you're trying to promote hatred of the rich and build a consensus for more redistribution, obviously you want to talk about wealth, and not consumption, so that's what we get.

Why? Because, as I mentioned above, consumption is more equal than income, and wealth is less equal. This makes it much easier to sensationalize.

A few years back, there was a "splashy" "study", which surveyed people, showing them three pie charts. One was a depiction of the wealth distribution, by quintile, in the US. Opposed to it was a completely equal distribution, 20% for each quintile. Conveniently, in the middle, they put "Sweden", and they asked folks which wealth distribution they'd prefer. People were at least smart enough to realize that a totally equal distribution makes no bloody sense, as an indebted fresh medical school grad is not going to have the same amount of wealth as a nearing-retirement saver-of-forty-years. Nevertheless, it allowed them to blast in the media that however much percent of the population surveyed would prefer a wealth distribution more like Sweden, heavily implying that the US should adopt some unspecified set of policies that people associate with Sweden.

...but of course, this sensationalism was entirely built on a complete lie. "Sweden" was not Sweden, at least not its wealth distribution. They called it "Sweden", with quotation marks attached in the original survey, because they simply lied and substituted Sweden's income distribution and compared that to the US's wealth distribution. If you looked at Sweden's actual wealth distribution, it would be extremely visually similar to the US, so they needed to lie and make people think that there was the magical possibility that is totally magically achievable that is visually clearly different if we only let them implement whatever haphazard collection of policies they want.

The average person's intuitions about what a "reasonable" wealth distribution should look like are totally unmoored from reality. Imagine a country full of people who all earn the same income, save the same percentage of it, earn the same return on their investments, retire at the same age, spend down their retirement savings at the same rate, and die at the same age. Literally just people living the exact same life with staggered birth years. Show the average subject in that "Sweden" study a pie chart of that wealth distribution, and he'll say it's way too unequal.

I could go on for pages and pages about how stupid wealth inequality discourse is and how little sense the way people think about it makes.

Dan Ariely, the lead author of that study, was recently at the center of a huge fraud scandal for some unrelated research. The data he used were definitely manipulated, but I guess he managed to convince the investigators that someone else did it and he didn't know. I have no basis on which to doubt that finding, but I haven't seen the evidence.

Just out of curiosity, I wanted to calculate the wealth Gini coefficient that comes from your life-cycle only model, and got numbers around 0.35. Interesting.

our primary concern should be consumption inequality, because consumption is ultimately what really matters

Even if the first premise is true (big caveat), we'll have to look at how an increase in consumption scales when isolated from wealth. Because we'll run into fun non-linearities pretty much immediately.

  • For a very slight increase in your "consumption of housing", you can get a massive increase of your living standard - because for close to the price of rent for a shitty apartment, you can afford the interest on a mortgage. Sometimes, this could even mean a decrease in consumption allowing you the quality of live jump of renter --> home owner.

  • For another increase ("only" double digit percentage) in "consumption of housing", you can decrease your commuting time by >100 hours per year.

  • Especially at the lower end, food quality also scales non-linearly.

And of course, when comparing two subjects with equal consumption, the presence of wealth makes a huge difference in the feeling of security in life.

billionaires would have to consume 3,300 times more per capita

In all three metrics (consumption, income, wealth), statements like that make little sense. In the end, only quality of life matters. But that's notoriously hard to measure.

Due to diminishing marginal utility, quality of life is even more equal than consumption. The difference in utility between a $100,000/month home and a $1,000/month home is not 100 times as great as the difference between a $1,000/month home and living on the street. A meal at a three-star restaurant may cost a hundred times as much as a cheap, nutritionally adequate meal, but the difference between them is less important than the difference between the cheap meal and starving.

Anyway, the monetary value of goods and services are important, because, unlike income, wealth, and subjective quality of life, consumption is rivalrous—it reduces the availability of goods and services for others to consume. The monetary value of the goods and services you consume is a measure of how large a share of total output you consume.

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.

Think you responded to the wrong top-level.

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.

  • -12

Speak plainly, and refrain from low effort Dark Hints.

Climate change.

Climate Change policies are a series of scams.

Politically, the European version uses climate fearmongering to push through renewables and energy austerity because the end result was purported to be energy autarky and an end to being easily blackmailable through hydrocarbon blockades.

The American version is the same, except the motivation is more along the lines of keeping people poor because poor people are less likely to build stuff.

The climate modellers of course have their institutes and their salaries and budgets.

It's a harmful policy being pushed under false pretences and is of course wholly ineffective because people will be merrily burning coal elsewhere by the gigaton. Since 2007, world coal use has increased by a gigaton despite all the efforts.

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/

I recommend reading 'Apocalypse Never'. The coverage of climate-related injuries to ecosystems in the media is inadequate. Journalists are not neutral at all, nor are they competent.

we're already seeing temperature zones marching away

And? That article itself notes planet used to be much warmer and there were no real issues with that. The fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects are obviously just that- fantasies.

Did you even read the article?

The points you're raising have already been brought up and dealt with. I'm not familiar with Apocalypse Never, but from reading the back of the book and how it talks about climate activism not being effective that's actually a point raised in the article itself:

Protest marches and virtue signaling do nothing to keep the resulting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Nor do the wind farms, rooftop solar panels, and other pork barrel projects that have been marketed so heavily using climate change as a sales pitch Nor, for that matter, do any of the other gimmicks that have been so heavily promoted and praised by corporate media. If you doubt this, dear reader, take a good look at the chart of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and see if you can find any sign that any of these things have slowed the steady increase in carbon dioxide one iota. If the point of the last three decades of climate change activism was to slow the rate at which greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere, the results are in and the activists have failed. Nor is there any reason to think that doing more of the same will yield anything else; what’s that saying about doing the same thing and expecting different results?

Furthermore...

And? That article itself notes planet used to be much warmer and there were no real issues with that.

Compare that to:

Second, an equable climate may sound great in the abstract, but getting there’s not going to be so fun. To begin with, melting the polar ice caps will raise sea levels three hundred feet. While it will take centuries for this process to complete, even the first steps along that route will play merry hob with the global economy, flooding most of the world’s large cities and a vast amount of other real estate, erasing entire nations from the map, forcing mass migrations, crippling ports and other trade facilities, and the list goes on. Meanwhile the weather isn’t simply going to pop right into an equable condition; to judge from what’s currently happening, the climate belts will keep on lurching unsteadily toward the poles a little at a time, causing droughts, floods, famines, and other entertainments. A thousand years from now things may be great, but that’ll be small consolation to you, or to the generations who have to deal with the rest of the change.

If you want to have an actual discussion about the merits of the article and Greer's position I'm here for it 100%, but you have to actually argue against what he's written rather than just some imaginary gestalt of all the articles on the climate you've read in the past. Telling someone that "fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects are obviously just that" doesn't even reach the level of being wrong when the person you are talking to has explicitly criticised apocalyptic fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects in the essay you're trying to attack.

I skimmed it.

world’s large cities and a vast amount of other real estate, erasing entire nations from the map, forcing mass migrations, crippling ports and other trade facilities

And is that a big deal? 'Erasing entire nations from the map and mass migrations' is just history. Unlike the US which has 300 years of not much happening, we've got like 2 millenia of actual history in Europe. It's pretty much mostly forgotten by everyone normal. People are capable of dealing with history. Worst case they die out and are thoroughly forgotten. Not a problem for anyone involved in said history.

Reason I skimmed it is because I find him to be a noise generator.

He's just another primitivist engaged in wishful thinking about how this stinking complex industry he doesn't understand is all going to end, wholly ignoring that heavy industry is the source of state power and as such, indispensable. Short of some devastating bioweapon killing enough people to prevent sufficient populations to survive until the last book rotted, nothing can end industry. Even a devastating nuclear war would only result in a decline to late 19th century level in the unaffected parts of the world, followed by rapid rebuilding.

Greer's problem is that he is just way, way too pompous and takes himself too seriously. Whatever he says that's novel is wrong. Recently he has ticked off a particularly angry British man and .. yeah.

but from reading the back of the book

Well you should read it. It goes over, in sometimes tedious detail, about how the present-day environmental movement evolved. It's a pretty infuriating book and it makes very clear environmentalism is actually not about the environment.

I skimmed it.

You didn't read it and your critiques have no value because you do not understand the position you're attempting to argue against. You're not engaging with the material being presented, and you don't even seem to understand the underlying reasoning. Even beyond that your position is an incomprehensible joke - "Worst case they die out and are thoroughly forgotten. Not a problem for anyone involved in said history." Did you even read your own post? Dying is actually something most people consider to be a problem!

Well you should read it. It goes over, in sometimes tedious detail, about how the present-day environmental movement evolved. It's a pretty infuriating book and it makes very clear environmentalism is actually not about the environment.

Sure, I'm willing to read it - though I probably won't be finished by the time this thread is dead, which is why I gave my reply after reading about the book and not after I'd finished reading it. But John Michael Greer has been making this exact point for decades now! He has written multiple articles explaining why the environmentalist movement has failed, how it failed and what people can do to move on in a world shaped by that failure. He explicitly and overtly attacks a lot of the scams like Goldman Sachs' carbon pricing scheme and even in the essay you refused to read he explicitly points out that the entire environmentalist movement has done absolutely nothing to change the trajectory of carbon emissions.

If you're going to complain about someone being a noise generator, take a look at yourself - you spouted a whole bunch of nonsense because you couldn't even be bothered reading a single essay while expecting me to go read an entire novel.

John Michael Greer is like Zeihan. Someone who says wrong things with great conviction and never apologizes or express remorse at having said that.

If you don't believe me, go back and read his Peak Oil stuff. He has been wrong for decades.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2008-08-31/review-long-descent-john-michael-greer/

I was half convinced that Peak Oil would have required actually investing in coal to liquid and increase oil prices and could cause a slowdown.

Would have been a problem, as it's dirty and investment heavy, requiring coal mining and vast chemical plants of the kind Americans and their provincial subjects aren't really good at building anymore.

Luckily, fracking came into use and Americans turned from net importers into exporters.

This was JMG back in '08

Drawing on the theory of catabolic collapse touched on earlier, Greer next outlines in detail how our predicament is likely to play out during the decades and centuries ahead. Greer’s theory of catabolic collapse—well-known within peak oil circles—shows how civilizations headed for collapse tend to decline in a gradual, downward stairstep of repeated crises and recoveries. They don’t undergo the sudden, catastrophic free fall envisioned by diehard peak oil doomers. This theory makes for truly fascinating reading, and is included in its entirety as an appendix.

How will our own society’s catabolic collapse proceed? Greer sees us on the verge of a couple of decades of economic contraction, chronic energy shortages, declining public health, political turmoil and vanishing knowledge and cultural heritage. This crisis period, he predicts, will be followed by a respite of perhaps 25 years or so, during which industrial civilization’s newfound relief from the lavish energy demands of universal motoring and electrification, climate-controlled buildings, modern medicine and other present-day amenities will buy it a little breathing room. But this respite will, in turn, be followed by another round of crises that will rid our civilization of further layers of social complexity, and so on.

Eventually, the developed world will assume an agrarian lifestyle built around local communities and sustainable resources. But this change will happen so slowly that no one alive today will be around to witness the end result. Thus, Greer maintains, our energies should be focused not on surviving the end of industrial civilization, but on making it through the imminent crisis period that will be but one brief interval within that larger context.

It's hard to overstate how absurd this is.

which industrial civilization’s newfound relief from the lavish energy demands of universal motoring and electrification

Without electricity, everything gets a 100x less convenient and harder. Even if somehow oil production collapsed and we returned back to street cars and trains and expensive EVs, electricity could never go away. Without it you're back in 1850s.

Nobody can afford to stop making electricity.

I'm going to raise the flag again by saying we can massively prevent the impact we, as a species, have on the climate if we nuke every single industrializing nation and ensure nobody ever goes past subsistence farming. During COVID, China saw relatively clear, pollution-free skies.

I mean that's a non starter, especially when the climate feel-gooders realize how it looks when you notice all the people that would have to accept an energy-poor non-industrialised serf future are various shades of brown, but, you know. The planet's at stake.

Perhaps so, but at those times there probably weren't cities of millions of people lying more or less at sea level.

There are entire countries built below sea level now.

If the sea level were to raise by 50 m over a few centuries, people could deal with that.

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.

The Migration Period starting 300 AD ultimately resulted in the fall of Rome and a massive decrease of technology on the European continent. A billion people moving away from the equator (after the first wet bulb events), and later several billion people moving away from coastal areas (after they're sick and tired of rebuilding after getting flooded every year) easily have the capacity to "seriously effect human civilization".

It doesn't have to. Unprecedented development of infrastructure for those people and an unthinkable change of culture (both of the migrants and the native people they join) could mitigate this. So could unprecedented violence at the borders.

I'm a pessimist. The west doesn't have the capacity for either of those options.

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.

Think 1 meter of sea level rise in the next 100 years, assuming no mitigation.

Sea level has been rising (possibly slower than that) for several thousand years. We know this because there are underwater archaeology sites like Doggerland and Heracleion (that one may be more a matter of localized geology) where people at one time lived on dry land.

Admittedly the rates of rise may be changing, but assuming a null hypothesis of completely static sea levels seems wrong too.

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.

Both yes and no. There is still popular anti-Chinese sentiment in Russia, and as American missiles strike targets in Russia, you find American rap playing on Russian radio stations, not a single Chinese song can be found

I mean, does China have pop music that's popular anywhere in the world outside of China? I can go on youtube and find videos of rap, rock, country, and pop music concerts aping American artists in most major countries, speaking a variety of languages; American artists are extremely popular in Europe, Latin America, Africa, etc. I'm unaware of any Chinese equivalents.

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 70’s saw left wing bombing campaigns on U.S. soil.

I don’t think, other than the American Civil War, you had something quite so polarized.

The 60's and 70's were absolutely that polarized, as were the '50s for some conservative groups. Things were always both wilder and more normal than you think in the past.

The problem is that the woke-vs-Trump split is absolutely impossible to discuss dispassionatly in a classroom. My own position ('a pox on both your houses!') (which is obviously very dispassionate, neutral and objectively correct) would likely earn me fire from both of the big factions.

It has been said that Politics is the Mind-Killer.

The thing about elephants in the room is that sometimes, acknowledging them will cause them to rip your head off (metaphorical elephants, at least, I think actual elephants are mostly peaceful), so it is much safer to tiptoe around them and confine your lecture to elephants which are safely in another continent.

Of course, you want your students to engage in political discussions about stuff which actually affects them, not the politics of of the French revolution, but you also want them to have civilized disagreements and arguments, not to start killing each other.

Pick a topic which students have feelings about, but which is not partisan-politics-coded. i.e. daylight saving times -- it is safe, if slightly boring. Every student has to deal with them (or their absence), but few will pick that as their hill to die on. Local issues.

I honestly don’t think at least at present, that politics is polarized because it’s so important. Political in the past was important because the people who generally discussed them were important people, and thus it mattered to them. In most systems, other than signaling loyalty to the regime, there’s nothing much at stake here. And even if it did, from an evolutionary standpoint, democracy is extremely young— 250 some years since the American and French Revolutions. 250 years from an evolutionary perspective is nothing. Furthermore, even in democratic systems, the average Prole has almost no actual power. The legitimacy of the system requires his consent, but he himself has almost no power over any of the decisions that actually affect his life.

So from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, there’s no reason to care about politics. Even from a practical perspective, there’s no rational reason to care about politics. The opinion of the proles has never mattered on those kinds of politics. And weirdly enough, as you bring up local politics, it’s long been my personal observation that the more power a person has on a political system, the less interested people actually become in learning or talking about it. You can get millions of engagements talking about trans issues that you can’t affect. Nobody but the die hard political junkies know who sits on the school board or the county board or even the state legislature. The people in those seats can still be affected by local citizens. Nobody really cares, and those politics are boring.

In my view, the reason for politics being so divisive is just how little power most people have over the direction of the country. It’s basically a topic that lets you feel powerful, important, and smugly right. At the same time anyone rational knows that if you’re talking about national politics, their opinion doesn’t actually matter. I want to dump the entire science budget into building an albucurre warp drive. It’s not happening because nobody actually cares what I think. The only reason that I matter is that I’m supposed to buy into the idea that because we all voted and that guy won, that “We The People” have spoken and “We” have decided that giving Ukraine the go ahead to fire long range missiles into Russia is a good idea. “We” decided no such thing. Biden did. And this is the way politics works in democratic societies— you must follow the news and vote correctly even though you actually don’t have any power other than giving the system legitimacy. Thus political issues become nothing but identical signaling and pretended power in a place where you don’t have to worry about being right, just making a lot of mouth-noises.

I would honestly contend that you could easily turn down the temperature of politics by giving people actual skin in the game. If voting had consequences beyond the draperies in the Oval Office or which mug you’d see on TV for 4 years, people wouldn’t use it as an identity for social networking purposes. They’d actually care who wins because they want specific things to happen.

I agree with one of your main points--people don't engage in the local politics where they have the most impact--but I disagree that political discussions are powerless. Let's take the trans issues in particular:

You can get millions of engagements talking about trans issues that you can’t affect.

In my experience, whenever trans issues come up in person (so not with strangers online), the discussion serves a very important social function: my social circle is coordinating understanding of how to appropriately act/react if someone we know says they're trans. If my social circle cannot come to a single view on the matter, at least we get to identify who feels strongly about the issue and in which direction, and then act accordingly.

And, in my experience, the way such conversation don't start out with "So and so is trans, how should we react?". They start out as "I heard [some news item about a trans-person]...", followed by a qualified personal reaction. Talking about people who we don't know provides an important emotional distance, even if it's a topic someone is passionate about (one way of another), to feel out where other people stand.

Take my Liberal suburbanite friend Judy, who has a twelve-year-old daughter. Judy starts the conversation with "I heard about that High-school teenager in [another state] who assaulted a girl in the girl's bathroom." Then we do a verbal dance around trans rights / sexual assault. Once Judy is satisfied that I know that she's in principle for trans rights, and she heard me make appropriately qualified noises about protecting girls from predators, only then she brings up how there is this trans kid in her daughter's class and her daughter now doesn't go to the bathroom between bells but instead keeps asking for a hall pass during the class after lunch, and the math teacher brought this up and an issue during the parent-teacher conference last Wednesday.

I think actual elephants are mostly peaceful

No they are not. Elephants are very dangerous animals.

Way I remember from the last time I did research, elephants are in the top 20 (or is it top 10?) killers of humans, but a lot of those are accidental. Some elephants (especially adolescent males) deliberately target humans, especially in retaliation for humans killing elephants ... but I remember one story where some young elephants drank from some barrels of fermenting alcohol on the outskirts of a village, got super drunk, and destroyed the village in their drunken rampage.

So, uh, mostly peaceful but simultaneously way more dangerous than the majority of animals humans are likely to interact with in general.

Fiery but mostly peaceful elephants

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.

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

Kind of. The increasing and more volatile price of oil motivated the development of fracking technologies, which have a higher upfront cost but about the same marginal cost as previous wells, allow previously unexploitable fields to be made exploitable, and allow wells to be turned on and off with macroeconomic realities. So increasing prices signalled need, and the technology was developed to fill that need.

Which is probably a good estimate for the trend that will occur in other domains of resource exploitation, as long as we allow price signalling to work.

As a side note, it looks like gasoline prices are almost monotonically decreasing when adjusted for inflation. I suspect this is because the price of energy is basically what sets the value of the dollar. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/

There's an author I like (David Mitchell) whose novels are all loosely connected and part of the same universe.

His first big hit and arguably his opus, Cloud Atlas, had a section set in a post-apocalyptic earth. Within the book, the end of industrial civilisation comes about due to peak oil. In 2004 when the book was written this wasn't an unreasonable thing for someone like Mitchell to believe.

Unfortunately, since all his books are within the same universe, he then revisited how the end of civilisation came about in his 2014 book The Bone Clocks.

This leads to the situation where the characters watch civilisation die around them in the 2050s because they are running out of diesel.

The big thing that the environmentalists got wrong is that it's basically impossible to run out of a resource. Nothing that we extract gets annihilated.

The resource simply gets more and more expensive, in the worst case, or you find new ways to extract it more efficiently, in the best case (as what happened to oil). And in the worst case, the higher prices lead to development of substitutes and more efficient usages - as always, high prices are the cure to high prices.

To be fair to peak-oilers their argument was always that peak is different from running out and the danger is what oil getting more and more expensive would cause to the global economy and society.

This seems like saying the same thing in more words (not always a bad idea!).

Assume that technological progress will not gift us Pareto-optimal replacements for anything that we need more of. In that case, the different between ‘running out’ of something and ‘no longer being able to do many tasks that require it because it’s too expensive and there’s no good replacement’ is essentially semantic.

Assume that technological progress will not gift us Pareto-optimal replacements for anything that we need more of.

That's kind of assuming the conclusion. The fact is that high prices incentivize finding substitutes for lower value applications of expensive commodities.

It is assuming the conclusion, that’s what I mean. The peak oil argument is that we were given a limited gift of irreplaceable resources and we’re splurging it all on junk. The tech optimist argument is that we can basically use as much stuff as we want (indeed more is better) and if there are supply problems we’ll find a way.

Obviously, in the former view, you will eventually run out of everything that is not self-replacing. In the latter, you can never run out of anything. But the existence of appropriate substitutes is a factor beyond our control.

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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