Kevin Drum

Last week, Cyprus begged Russia for help with its banking failure. They got nothing. Dan Drezner is intrigued:

This is not the first time a weak Western ally has sought out either China or Russia as a way of avoiding onerous financial strictures. Iceland begged Russia for financial assistance during the depths of the 2008 financial crisis. At one point, the Icelandic President allegedly offered Russia the use of Keflavík Air Base. This possibility caused some mild consternation in Foggy Bottom. In the end, the Russians said they didn't need the base and proffered only a fraction of what Iceland wanted, leaving Reykjavik little choice but to cut a deal with the IMF.

One can tell a similar story with Pakistan and China. During the fall of 2008 Islamabad was facing a balance of payments crisis and sought out China as a benefactor. In the end, China was unwilling to offer Pakistan enough money to substitute for IMF support, forcing the Pakistani government to take out an IMF loan.

Why are Russia and China apparently so uninterested in building an empire? Dan offers three possibilities, and I'd pick Door #3:

Outside their own neighborhood, neither Russia nor China is really revisionist. As great powers, Moscow and Beijing will do what they gotta do in their near abroads. Globally, however, they have neither the ambition nor the interest in altering the current system of "good enough" global governance. After all, the current rules of the global game have benefited both of them pretty well over the past decade or so.

In the postwar era, this has pretty much been true all along. The Soviet Union picked up a few nonlocal client states during the Cold War, but mostly did so only because of its competition with America. Historically, it's always been more interested in controlling a buffer zone around its own territory than in truly becoming a global influence. Ditto for China.

Now, it's also true that neither country has ever really had the capacity to project power abroad in any great amount. In China's case, that could change. Still, they've got plenty of internal problems, plenty of regional problems, and the ability to see that a worldwide string of client states hasn't really helped the United States much. Dan is right: the current rules have worked out pretty well for them. Why fix something that isn't broken?

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

Ezra Klein writes about a small implant that monitors your bloodstream and automatically alerts paramedics when you're about to have a heart attack:

This particular device might prove, for one reason or another, to be bunk. Many seemingly magical inventions do. But it's not alone....And every major health device company knows there's billions and billions to be made here.

Consider how dramatically these devices will change medicine. Right now, the medical industry is fundamentally reactive. Something goes wrong, and we go to them to fix it. This will make medicine fundamentally proactive. They will see something going wrong, and they will intervene to stop it. It's like "Minority Report" for health care.

This is why I don't put much stock in projections of health-care spending that run 30 or 50 or 75 years into the future. Will biometric devices in constant communication with the cloud make medicine more or less expensive? Will driverless cars prolong life in a way that saves money or costs it? Will the advances in preventive technology make medicine so effective that we're glad to devote 40 percent of gross domestic product to it? Who knows?

I agree, and something similar to this needles me periodically whenever my mind drifts into dorm room bull session mode.¹ You see, I believe that we're only a few decades away from true artificial intelligence. I might be wrong about this, but put that aside for the moment. The point is that I believe it. And needless to say, that will literally change everything. If AI is ubiquitous by 2040 or so, nearly every long-term problem we face right now—medical inflation, declining employment, Social Security financing, returns to education, global warming, etc. etc.—either goes away or is radically transformed in ways we can't even imagine.

So if I believe in medium-term AI, why do I spend any of my time worrying about this long-term stuff? The only things really worth worrying about are (a) how to adapt the economy equitably to an AI world, and (b) issues that are important but might not be affected much by AI—global thermonuclear war, for example. Everything else is just noise.

And yet—I do believe in AI, but I still worry about long-term economic issues like healthcare costs and banking stability as well. Maybe this is just an insurance policy: I believe we should keep working on the other stuff just in case the whole AI thing doesn't pan out. Or it could be pure empathy for the near term: we should keep working on the other stuff because it affects people over the next few years, and that's important even if ultimately it won't change anything.

Both of those are part of the answer, but they don't feel like all of it. There's more to it. In reality, I suspect a lot of it is just pure habit. I worry about the stuff I worry about because that's what I've always worried about. Besides, there's really nothing much I can do one way or another about artificial intelligence, so I might as well occupy myself with other things. Anyone got a problem with that?

¹This is a hint not to take this post too seriously.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

Dave Weigel points out this morning an interesting change in public opinion. A year ago, 65 percent of the public approved of drone strikes against American citizens overseas. Today, it's 41 percent.

Some of this might be due to a difference in question wording, but that can't account for all of it. It's too big a shift. The obvious conclusion is that public support has dwindled thanks to Rand Paul's filibuster and related questions over John Brennan's nomination to head the CIA.

If that's the case, then you'd expect support to have dropped much more dramatically among Republicans than Democrats. Unfortunately, no internals are available for last year's poll, so we can't tell. Maybe I should ask the Washington Post's polling director if they can make those numbers available. I'd be curious to see how this has really played out.

UPDATE: I misread the Post poll from a year ago. The net result is that 65 percent of the public approved of drone strikes on American citizens, not 79 percent. I've corrected the text. I'll post another update if I get hold of poll internals showing how opinion has shifted among Democrats and Republicans.

UPDATE 2: Peyton Craighill of the Post has kindly sent along the internals of last year's poll. Here's how the net approval for drone strikes against American citizens has changed:

                2012    Today    Net Change
Democrats       58%      41%        -17
Republicans     76%      50%        -26
Independents    65%      35%        -30

There's less of a difference here than I would have guessed. Republican support did indeed drop more than Democratic support, but not by a huge amount. And Independent support dropped by more than either.

At a guess, I'd say this suggests that maybe half the drop is based on a genuine reduction in support over the past year for drone strikes on U.S. citizens, while the other half is a semi-partisan reaction to Rand Paul. But that's just a wild guess.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

Chana Joffe-Walt has a longish, data and anecdote-driven piece on Planet Money about the steady rise of disability payments over the past couple of decades. To a large extent, she says, the federal disability program has become a de facto parking place for lots of people who lose their jobs and simply have no chance of getting another one. Here she is talking to a doctor in a rural county in Alabama:

"We talk about the pain and what it’s like," he says. "I always ask them, 'What grade did you finish?'"

What grade did you finish, of course, is not really a medical question. But Dr. Timberlake believes he needs this information in disability cases because people who have only a high school education aren't going to be able to get a sit-down job.

Dr. Timberlake is making a judgment call that if you have a particular back problem and a college degree, you're not disabled. Without the degree, you are.

And here she is talking to a guy who lost his job in a mill closure:

After I got interested in disability, I followed up with some of the guys to see what happened to them after the mill closed....Scott [Birdsall] tried school for a while, but hated it. So he took the advice of the rogue staffer who told him to suck all the benefits he could out of the system. He had a heart attack after the mill closed and figured, "Since I've had a bypass, maybe I can get on disability, and then I won't have worry to about this stuff anymore." It worked; Scott is now on disability.

Scott's dad had a heart attack and went back to work in the mill. If there'd been a mill for Scott to go back to work in, he says, he'd have done that too. But there wasn't a mill, so he went on disability. It wasn't just Scott. I talked to a bunch of mill guys who took this path — one who shattered the bones in his ankle and leg, one with diabetes, another with a heart attack. When the mill shut down, they all went on disability.

...."That's a kind of ugly secret of the American labor market," David Autor, an economist at MIT, told me. "Part of the reason our unemployment rates have been low, until recently, is that a lot of people who would have trouble finding jobs are on a different program."

....People who leave the workforce and go on disability qualify for Medicare, the government health care program that also covers the elderly. They also get disability payments from the government of about $13,000 a year. This isn't great. But if your alternative is a minimum wage job that will pay you at most $15,000 a year, and probably does not include health insurance, disability may be a better option.

I have a pretty bearish take on all this. Basically, I suspect it's inevitable. There are a growing number of workers who are all but unemployable, and we can either throw them on the streets or else we can provide them with a small government benefit. Most of us, even the ones who talk the toughest, aren't willing to toss people out on the streets, so by hook or by crook, disability has become our way of providing the unemployable with a small pension. It's obviously a million miles from perfect, but it's better than nothing. And no one has a serious incentive to fix it, because fixing it would mean facing up directly to the problem. That's something that we're pretty universally afraid to do.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet