Tag: ross douthat

South Korea’s Demographics

The “picture” you see here is based off the picture in Ross Douthat’s column. I asked Dall-E to create this one, of course.

Without clicking on the link, can you guess what his column is about?

For some time now, South Korea has been a striking case study in the depopulation problem that hangs over the developed world. Almost all rich countries have seen their birthrates settle below replacement level, but usually that means somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.5 children per woman. For instance, in 2021 the United States stood at 1.7, France at 1.8, Italy at 1.3 and Canada at 1.4.

But South Korea is distinctive in that it slipped into below-replacement territory in the 1980s but lately has been falling even more — dropping below one child per woman in 2018 to 0.8 after the pandemic and now, in provisional data for the second and third quarters of 2023, to just 0.7 births per woman.

It’s worth unpacking what that means. A country that sustained a birthrate at that level would have, for every 200 people in one generation, 70 people in the next one, a depopulation exceeding what the Black Death delivered to Europe in the 14th century. Run the experiment through a second generational turnover, and your original 200-person population falls below 25. Run it again, and you’re nearing the kind of population crash caused by the fictional superflu in Stephen King’s “The Stand.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/opinion/south-korea-birth-dearth.html

Get used to worrying about not enough people, because that’s what the study of demographics will (has already?) come to mean in the 21st century. It’s not just South Korea, of course – Germany, Italy and Japan are also staring at the same problem, and that list is very far from being complete.

And what problem is that?

Not Enough People.

And as an Indian, sure you can ask how this can possibly be a problem. Here’s how:

There will be a choice between accepting steep economic decline as the age pyramid rapidly inverts and trying to welcome immigrants on a scale far beyond the numbers that are already destabilizing Western Europe. There will be inevitable abandonment of the elderly, vast ghost towns and ruined high rises and emigration by young people who see no future as custodians of a retirement community. And at some point there will quite possibly be an invasion from North Korea (current fertility rate: 1.8), if its southern neighbor struggles to keep a capable army in the field.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/opinion/south-korea-birth-dearth.html

I’m actually slightly uncomfortable with the assertions in this paragraph (note the repeated use of the phrase “there will be”). Not because I disagree with them, but because we simply do not know how this will pan out. Maybe the immigration story will play out better than expected, and maybe (as Ross Douthat himself says elsewhere in the column, the tide will turn in pleasant and unexpected ways). Maybe, if you want to be all weirdly sci-fi about it, the South Korean government will produce babies in artificial wombs.

Too weird, and can’t possibly happen, you say? I present to you the last fourteen years or so.

But what really gave me pause was thinking about how Ross Douthat ends his column. What, he asks, are the underlying sociological causes of and responses to this rapid fall in birthrates?

  1. Traditional social mores in South Korea, including very low out of wedlock births
  2. A feminist revolt against conservative social expectations
  3. A consequential male anti-feminist reaction
  4. Sharp polarization between the sexes
  5. A sharp reshaping of the country’s politics, and a sharp decline in marriage rates

If you are a student of economics, but only faintly interested in demographics and sociology, you’re doing it wrong, I promise you.

We live in interesting times!

Ross Douthat and Noah Smith on Asia (kinda)

The reason I say kinda is because Ross Douthat’s column is titled “Why We Should Fear More Than Middle Eastern War“. Noah Smith’s post, on the other hand, is titled “Asia Is Much More Important to US Interests Than The Middle East“.

But both are really talking about the same thing, if for slightly different reasons: the real fight for the USA is going to be with China, and therefore Asia is what President Biden (and whoever comes next) needs to focus on.

Here’s Ross Douthat:

“It makes sense to talk about China, Iran and Russia as a loose alliance trying to undermine American power, but it is not a trio of equals. Only China is an arguable peer of the United States, only China’s technological and industrial might can hope to match our own, and only China has the capacity to project power globally as well as regionally.”

And here’s Noah:

“The EU and the UK together have more than enough people, industrial capacity, and technology to defend against Russian aggression indefinitely with minimal American assistance, should they choose to do so. The only reason the U.S. remains key to Ukraine’s war effort is that Europe has been reluctant to step fully into that role. Over time, that will hopefully change. But in Asia, China is so strong that U.S. power is indispensable.

In sum, Asia wants and needs the U.S. to protect it. It needs U.S. military power and economic engagement, not to crush China, but to preserve the status quo that has worked so well. Developed Asian countries want to keep being rich and free, and developing Asian countries want to keep getting rich on their own, and to do this they need the U.S. to deter Xi Jinping from trying to upend the modern world’s greatest success story.”

Wish it away as much as you like, there is likely to be a showdown of sorts between America on the one side, and Russia, China and Iran on the other. Who else will be with America, and to what extent (and for what reasons) will only become clearer with time, and ditto for the other side. But it is coming – like I said, like it or not.

By the way, Noah Smith has advice for the United States about how to go about getting the answers to the questions I raised in the previous paragraph:

In Asia, meanwhile, the U.S. should be beefing up both our defensive power and our engagement with other countries. We need to accelerate the supply of defensive weapons to Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, India, and the Philippines, and to keep building and strengthening and expanding multilateral organizations like the Quad. We need to re-engage economically by re-joining the modified TPP, and by creating a dense network of other economic agreements in Asia. And in general, we just need to pay a lot of attention to the region, making sure our allies and quasi-allies and potential allies know we’re there for the long haul, and won’t suddenly withdraw to go plunge into some foolish conflict in the Middle East.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/asia-is-much-more-important-to-us

In effect, both Ross and Noah are asking Biden a question I am fond of asking here (and they’re answering it for him too): what are you optimizing for?

And both of them are saying that America should be optimizing for going up against, and not being defeated by, China.

(The way I chose to frame that last sentence is striking to me, by the way, and I realized it as I was typing it out: not being defeated by China. Not, you understand, defeating China. Quite telling, no?)

Why does this matter for the USA?

China hawks tend to argue that losing a war over Taiwan would be much worse than our post-9/11 debacles, worse than letting Vladimir Putin hold the Donbas and Crimea permanently. You cannot definitively prove this, but I think they’re right: The establishment of Chinese military pre-eminence in East Asia would be a unique geopolitical shock, with dire effects on the viability of America’s alliance systems, on the likelihood of regional wars and arms races and on our ability to maintain the global trading system that undergirds our prosperity at home.

And it’s at home where I fear the effects of such a defeat the most. America has experience losing wars of empire — in Vietnam and Afghanistan, for example, where we were extending ourselves without putting our full might into the fray. But we have no experience being defeated in straightforward combat, not guerrilla war, by a great-power rival and ideological competitor.

Whatever anxieties you have about our current political divisions, whether you fear left-wing disillusionment with America or right-wing disillusionment with democracy or both, such a defeat seems more likely than anything to accelerate us toward a real internal crisis. Which is why, even with other foreign crises burning hot, a debacle in East Asia remains the scenario that the United States should be working most intensely to avert.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/21/opinion/china-taiwan-war.html

And what about India? What is our position, and what should be our position?

The really big wild card here is India, which has a huge population and a reasonably hefty economy. The USSR was India’s protector during the Cold War, and much of India’s military equipment still comes from Russia (though this is starting to shift). So India can’t be expected to enter into any conflict against Russia. But China is a very different matter. China is India’s main military threat, and the two countries have come to blows recently over a disputed border. They are also rivals for influence in the Indo-Pacific region. This is why India has joined the Quad, forging a loose quasi-alliance with the U.S., Japan and Australia whose purpose is obviously to hedge against China.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-war-economy-sizing-up-the-new

We live in interesting times. On that score, there is no doubt.

One person worth following on Twitter on this topic is Elbridge Colby. This is his pinned tweet, if you’re asking why he is worth following on this issue:

Bottomline: buckle up. Life is about to get very interesting indeed.

Top Gun Maverick and Straussian Takes

I am in the habit of asking my students to ask me five random questions at the end of each class. They don’t get a choice in the matter: they have to ask me five random questions, and the only rule is that the questions cannot be about whatever I spoke about in class on that day. That apart, anything is fine.

One question that usually comes up in the course of a semester is about my favorite movie, and in response, I usually end up walking the students through my model for judging a movie to be truly awesome.

To be truly awesome, I tell ’em, a movie must do three things:

  1. It must inform. I must know more about a part of the world at some point of time than I did before.
  2. It must provoke thought. I should be able to think differently about a topic than I did before I saw the movie.
  3. It must entertain. I shouldn’t feel bored/restless while watching the movie.

Each of these, to some extent are subjective, and the last two points especially so. But that’s fine. I wouldn’t want to decide for everybody what their model for judging a movie should be, I’m merely explaining my own, and even if you were to adopt this model (or a variant of it), we might still end up judging the same movie differently. In fact, that would be better! Room for more disagreements and discussions, and what else is there in life, no?

So, Top Gun: Maverick. So-so, good or great? (spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you might want to skip the rest of the post)

I watched the movie sometime last week and thoroughly enjoyed watching it. It didn’t really inform me of anything (and given that my knowledge of military hardware is non-existent, I wouldn’t have been able to pick up on much in the first place), and it didn’t really provoke much thought either. Some, but not a lot.

Did it entertain? Gawd yes, it did. Good popcorn fare, or to use a very Indian phrase, phull paisa vasool.

And that, I thought, was that. Until Marginal Revolution linked to a Ross Douthat tweet, that linked, in turn, to a The Bulwark review of the movie. And that provoked some thought. Again, spoilers ahead, so if you’re still reading, this is the last chance to, well, jettison.

It’s almost like Mav, rather than miraculously surviving an ejection at 7,000 or so miles per hour, perished in that test flight and before he could head on up to fighter-pilot heaven he had to work through his own personal purgatory. All I’m saying is that when Hangman saves Mav’s bacon in the final dogfight while uttering the line “This is your savior speaking” in the tone of voice that can only be labeled “pilot”—memorably described by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff as a lineal descendant of “the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager”—I don’t think the invocation of the almighty is entirely metaphorical.
And this is what, really, gives Top Gun: Maverick its power. Despite being almost aggressively generic in terms of plotting it is also deeply personal, a window into the regrets of one of pop cinema’s legendarily beloved characters. Maverick is at peace now. He has been to the danger zone and back. He can rest.

https://www.thebulwark.com/top-gun-maverick-review/

Huh. I’ll happily admit to not having thought about it quite that way.

Which brings me to the second part of the title of today’s blogpost: Straussian interpretations.

Like many fans of Marginal Revolution, I’ve been reading the phrase for many years, and wondered what it meant. Here is a link to an essay that does (if you ask me) a good job of explaining exactly what Straussian reading is, and here is an extract twice removed:

Imagine you have received a letter in the mail from your beloved, from whom you have been separated for many long months. (An old-fashioned tale, where there are still beloveds—and letters.) You fear that her feelings toward you may have suffered some alteration. As you hold her letter in your unsteady hands, you are instantly in the place that makes one a good reader. You are responsive to her every word. You are exquisitely alive to every shade and nuance of what she has said—and not said.
“Dearest John.” You know that she always uses “dearest” in letters to you, so the word here means nothing in particular; but her “with love” ending is the weakest of the three variations that she typically uses. The letter is quite cheerful, describing in detail all the things she has been doing. One of them reminds her of something the two of you once did together. “That was a lot of fun,” she exclaims. “Fun”—a resolutely friendly word, not a romantic one. You find yourself weighing every word in a relative scale: it represents not only itself but the negation of every other word that might have been used in its place. Somewhere buried in the middle of the letter, thrown in with an offhandedness that seems too studied, she briefly answers the question you asked her: yes, as it turns out, she has run into Bill Smith—your main rival for her affection. Then it’s back to chatty and cheerful descriptions until the end.
It is clear to you what the letter means. She is letting you down easy, preparing an eventual break. The message is partly in what she has said—the Bill Smith remark, and that lukewarm ending—but primarily in what she has not said. The letter is full of her activities, but not a word of her feelings. There is no moment of intimacy. It is engaging and cheerful but cold. And her cheerfulness is the coldest thing: how could she be so happy if she were missing you? Which points to the most crucial fact: she has said not one word about missing you. That silence fairly screams in your ear.

https://lacker.io/books/2017/03/26/straussian-reading.html

It’s not just what is written on the page (or shown in a movie, or sung in a song, or even painted on to a canvas), but is about so much more than that. While reading a book, or listening to a song, or watching a movie or viewing a painting, you might want to ask yourself some questions:

  • What are some of the non-obvious messages that the creator wants to you recieve, if only you’re paying attention?
  • What is it about the time and place in which this creation was created that might have prevented the creator from being more open about whatever they wanted to covney?
  • Might your appreciation of the work of art become better if you are able to peel away one layer at a time?

This is by no means a complete list, and once you realize that Straussian readings are possible, you can go back and consume much of what you have already read/seen/listened again (and again). Interpretations become so much richer, nuanced and uncertain (but in a good way).

That’s what a Straussian reading is, and once you’ve seen Top Gun: Maverick again, you might want to think about whether this Straussian interpretation is correct.

Me? I’m very much tempted to agree with it.

What does the future look like, and how should you think about the answer to that question?

I came across this tweet a while ago, and found it quite funny:

I have asked this question myself while interviewing candidates, and the reason I ask it is not because I want to get a definitive answer from the student. Prediction is a mostly pointless activity. It is because I want to understand what factors the interviewee includes in her analysis.

And the reason I begin with this in today’s post is because two really and truly excellent pieces worth reading were gifted to us earlier this week.

First, Noah Smith interviewed Patrick Collison.

N.S.: So, what are the three things that excite you most about the 2020s?

It’s hard to restrict to three! But here are the first that jump to mind:

First, the explosive expansion in access to opportunity facilitated by the internet. Sounds prosaic but I think still underestimated. Several billion people recently immigrated to the world’s most vibrant city and the system hasn’t yet equilibrated. When you think about how YouTube is accelerating the dissemination of tacit knowledge, or the number of creative outsiders who can now deploy their talents productively, or the number of brilliant 18 year-olds who can now start companies from their bedrooms, or all the instances of improbable scenius that are springing up… in the landscape of the global commons, the internet is nitrogen fertilizer, and we still have a long way to go — economically, culturally, scientifically, technologically, socially, and everything in between. I challenge anyone to watch this video and not feel optimistic.

Second, progress in biology. I think the 2020s are when we’ll finally start to understand what’s going on with RNA and neurons. Basically, the prevailing idea has been that connections between neurons are how cognition works. (And that’s what neural networks and deep learning are modeled after.) But it looks increasingly likely that stuff that happens inside the neurons — and inside the connections — is an important part of the story. One suggestion is that RNA is actually part of how neurons think and not just an incidental intermediate thing between the genome and proteins. Elsewhere, we’re starting to spend more time investigating how the microbiome and the immune system interact with things like cancer and neurodegenerative conditions, and I’m optimistic about how that might yield significantly improved treatments. With Alzheimer’s, say, we were stuck for a long time on variants of plaque hypotheses (“this bad stuff accumulates and we have to stop it accumulating”)… it’s now getting hard to ignore the fact that the immune system clearly plays a major — and maybe dominant — role. Elsewhere, we’re plausibly on the cusp of effective dengue, AIDS, and malaria vaccines. That’s pretty huge.

Last, energy technology. Batteries (88% cost decline in a decade) and renewables are well-told stories and the second-order effects will be important. (As we banish the internal combustion engine, for example, we’ll reap a significant dividend as a result of the reduction in air pollution.) Electric aircraft will probably happen, at least for shorter distances. Solar electricity is asymptoting to near-free, which in turn unlocks other interesting possibilities. (Could we synthesize hydrocarbons via solar powered atmospheric CO2 concentration — that is, make oil out of air — and thereby render remaining fossil fuel use-cases carbon neutral?) There are a lot of good ideas for making nuclear energy safer and cheaper. France today gets three quarters of its electricity from nuclear power… getting other countries to follow suit would be transformatively helpful in averting climate change.

There’s lots more! New semiconductor technology. Improved ML and everything that that enables. Starlink — cheap and fast internet everywhere! Earth-to-earth travel via space plus flying cars. The idea of urbanism that doesn’t suck seems to be gaining traction. There’s a lot of good stuff on the horizon.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/interview-patrick-collison-co-founder

I know I say this every other day, but please – pretty please with a cherry on top – do read the whole thing. And subscribe to Noah Smith’s Substack, and follow him on Twitter, and follow Patrick Collison on Twitter, and read the page titled Advice on his website.((I’ve linked to it before, and I’ll gladly link to it again, it’s that good))

There are many, many, many things to appreciate about Patrick Collison, but the thing that has stayed with me the longest is a tweet of his, that helped me understand how to approach Twitter (and therefore life):

Wonderful advice, and I’ve taken it to heart.

But you need the “No, but” approach in life too. Not so much to disagree with other people, but to constantly ask yourself how you might be wrong, and to think about what needs changing for the better.

And a wonderful essay that speaks about precisely this came out this week as well:

The Decadent Society came out in hardcover about three weeks before Italy’s hospitals were overwhelmed by the coronavirus and lockdowns began to descend across the Western world. So it was probably not the ideal time to bring out a book arguing that our era is defined by drift, stalemate, boredom and repetition, that Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” is still with us thirty years after he declared its advent, that our society is more likely to glide slowly toward dystopia than to leap forward toward a renaissance or plunge into catastrophe. Surely here was something new, here was history come again, here was the shock, the crisis, the un-simulated Reality, the hinge from one age into the next. Surely the pandemic meant the end of decadence, whatever else it meant.

In the Zoom interviews with which I finished up my book tour, I usually half-conceded the point. Yes, this was a real crisis, death taking off its masque amid the partygoers, stalemate giving way to disaster, Reality Itself suddenly pushing fantasy and simulation aside. But at the same time, nothing about a temporary crisis necessarily alters long-term patterns. Plagues can open new chapters in history, but it all depends on how people respond to them, what kind of responses are possible, and which pre-existing trends they accelerate or blunt. Would our decadent institutions, when tested, crumble, taking us deeper into crisis, closer to collapse? Would the shock of pandemic spark a new era of technological innovation, or midwife a new age of political reform? Or would stagnation reassert itself, or even deepen, in the aftermath?

https://douthat.substack.com/p/the-pandemic-and-the-decadent-society

I haven’t yet read Ross Douthat’s book, but he refers to the four horsemen of the decadent society in his essay: stagnation, sterility, sclerosis, and repetition.((It is fascinating to me how in the excerpt above, he refers to this quartet as drift, stalemate, boredom and repetition. The first three words have changed, and if you ask me, for the better. The fourth is, well, repeated. I would love to ask Ross Douthat if that was deliberate – and if so, well played, sir!))

And this essay is a larger examination of the same question: where do you see the world in the future, but now viewed not through the prism of sunny optimism that imminent technological advances can bring you, but also through the prisms of institutional, cultural and demographic pessimism.

This point, in particular, stood out for me:

Lyman Stone recently calculated that there would be 5.8 million more babies if the U.S. had just maintained its pre-Great Recession birthrates; the pandemic is likely to subtract at least several hundred thousand more, with similar trends in Europe.

Yes, it’s possible to hope that the optimistic economic scenario described above will speed a fertility rebound. It’s possible to look at developments in U.S. family policy and see our political system slowly, slowly coming round to taking those issues seriously. Maybe there’s a big turnaround waiting to happen here: Maybe in a Biden boom there will be a battery-powered minivan in every driveway, piloted by a remote-working parent, and simply stuffed with kids.

But to the extent that the fertility collapse is connected with the struggle to transition to adulthood, the struggle to form stable romantic partnerships, it’s also easy to see how the coronavirus’s negative effects could linger — how a lost period for courtship and marriages, a retreat from physical reality and real-world intimacy in crucial years for both, could reverberate through the next decade and beyond.

https://douthat.substack.com/p/the-pandemic-and-the-decadent-society

I sincerely hope he is wrong about this, and I genuinely think that he is, but is it a point worth thinking about and a factor worth including in your analysis of the future?

Absolutely.

Reading both essays will absolutely not help you get the answer to the question of what the future will look like. Nothing will, because the future will remain resolutely unknowable. But both essays will help you get started on which factors you might want to use in your analysis of the question. And will be very informative about why the people who helped make both essays happen think the way they do.

And therefore I’d recommend that you read them. Multiple times over, preferably.