Sunday Cutdown XV (3/10/2024)
Clearing my inbox of stories I want to document
1) Scary Katie misleads, broad framing relieves
NPR: Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans, studies find
You all certainly know now of Sen. Katie Britt’s weird counter-SOTU delivery, already parodied on SNL.
That was just too easy to make fun of. When I listened to it myself, the first thing I thought was, like so many others, that’s SNL cold open!
Frankly, I loved her vibrato-heavy delivery. Britt was selling fear — pure and simple, so why not indulge in the theatrics?
Putting aside the point of her anti-immigration vignette being something like two decades old (going back to George W. and thus hardly attributable to Biden’s presidency), the far more accurate broad-framing here is that immigrants, on average, commit fewer crimes than US citizens. Here’s the citations from NPR:
Research indicates that immigrants commit less crimes than U.S.-born people.
Much of the available data focuses on incarceration rates because that's where immigration status is recorded.
Some of the most extensive research comes from Stanford University. Economist Ran Abramitzky found that since the 1960s, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born people.
There is also state level research, that shows similar results: researchers at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, looked into Texas in 2019. They found that undocumented immigrants were 37.1% less likely to be convicted of a crime.
Beyond incarceration rates, research also shows that there is no correlation between undocumented people and a rise in crime. Recent investigations by The New York Times and The Marshall Project found that between 2007 and 2016, there was no link between undocumented immigrants and a rise in violent or property crime in those communities.
The truth has always been that we attract — on average — the most ambitious and not the most devious. The ambitious want to escape a bad or limiting situation, while the devious and criminal are happy to remain and exploit that environment.
2) WTO is need of some US love
WAPO: Everyone would be poorer without the WTO. Biden needs to rescue it.
The World Trade Organization, with its rule and arbitration mechanisms, is a crucial pillar of globalization. America spent decades building up this international organization. From America’s New Map:
America recast world trade by creating, propagating, and defending a global body of rules. Compared to the rapid establishment of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) at a single 1944 international conference (Bretton Woods), the 1947 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) was merely a provisional arrangement (not a treaty) that did not result in a permanent international organization. It took half a century and numer- ous negotiating rounds to grow that initial 23-nation agreement into today’s 164-member World Trade Organization (WTO). Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland—unlike the Washington, DC–based World Bank and IMF—the WTO oversees and administers rules spanning 98 percent of global trade, in addition to serving as a forum for trade negotiations and dispute resolution.
As opposed to the World Bank and IMF, the WTO cannot create and impose global rules on its own. New rules can only be negotiated by consensus among its ranks. That is typically easier to achieve on a regional level. Such Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) are often viewed as WTO competitors at best and WTO failures at worst, but, in truth, they are WTO fellow travelers reflecting the reality that global rules accumulate “upward” from nations and regions. Moreover, these preferential agreements often reference WTO rules, simply copying that language into their texts. After first appearing in the 1950s, there are now 355 RTAs in force worldwide. More importantly, most of these agreements are now being concluded among developing economies.
Understand: the world spent decades on these huge global negotiation “rounds” that often stalled and were declared dead, and yet the WTO eventually came into being and has since expanded.
Nonetheless, we are presently at one of those seeming stall-out points again, in large part because #1 global economic pillar America is dissing the org. From WAPO:
Members couldn’t even make progress on small yet crucial items, such as ending subsidies to fisheries that are endangering the globe’s stock of fish. Of course, no progress was made toward repairing the organization’s critical trade-dispute mechanism, which remains largely inoperative after Washington — frustrated at what it called the WTO’s “judicial activism” — blocked appointments to the appellate body that stood as its final arbiter.
Sound familiar? Going nuts over the judicial role, politicizing it like crazy? Where have I seen that before with Boomers and Xer political leadership?
Point is America doesn’t like to lose any cases in the WTO, because, when we do, we pull the usual trick of declaring ourselves outside the law that we spent decades putting into place — apparently just for others.
WAPO is rightly worried about the lack of progress at this latest WTO mega-gathering:
If the meeting produced one clear takeaway, it is that unless Washington recovers its commitment to a rules-based trading system, the organization it painstakingly helped build over half a century to police international commerce will prove irrelevant to the new global challenges coming into focus, from the mass deployment of artificial intelligence to climate change.
So, besides the usual fears about the global trade order fracturing as the big players pursue self-serving protectionism, it’s also about the North sabotaging the South’s necessary adaptation to climate change:
This will not only make the green transition slower and more expensive; it will also cut out developing countries, raising the question of how they will afford their own climate transition. “Rich countries can play the subsidy game,” said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director general of the WTO. “Poorer countries cannot afford it.”
As I often note: America has needed, post-2008, to embrace more of a market-playing role that looks out for us first of all, but it makes little sense to completely abandon our old market-making role across the system. We have inordinate power to destroy the system we spent decades building, and, if we do that, our market-playing role will be substantially damaged/limited.
Thus, some balance is required between those two roles. Hard, I know for the US, which lurches one way or the other all the time, but balance must be restored, otherwise the North is going to face an incredibly unstable South over time.
3) The Leviathan destroys, the SysAdmin Force restores
WAPO: How the U.S. military will use a floating pier to deliver Gaza aid
We are the only military in the world that lays down the hammer and then seeks to reassemble the resulting pieces.
Yes, we backstop and bodyguard Israel while it levels Gaza (meaning we’re partially responsible by extension and thus triggering serious rage within our ranks over the ethics of it all), and yes, we are hitting Iran’s proxies around the region.
But we’re also the country that steps up on the aid, making a floating pier happen to circumvent Israel’s grip on Gaza and deliver the relief. You don’t really see competing superpowers doing that. Oh, they’ll stomp and protest but they won’t deliver — not on that scale and effort.
We also took the lead on protecting shipping in the Red Sea, even though it is, by and large, NOT our trade.
This is why a real superpower has both capacities, and that leaves the US as the sole military superpower in the world today.
4) The East Asian re-balancing proceeds
WAPO: Philippines strikes security deals as tensions rise with China at sea
The US believes it must “pivot” to Asia (something we’ve been doing for well over a decade now, so enough with the pivot!), but the truth is, the region itself is mounting its own balancing act vis-a-vis China, so we need to eschew the notion that it is a mano-a-mano struggle here because it ain’t:
The Philippines has been striking new defense agreements with other countries at a rapid clip, seeking to build what officials here call a “network of alliances” that could deter Chinese aggression in disputed waters.
The Philippines has signed or entered discussions over new security agreements with at least 18 countries since a Chinese coast guard vessel flashed a military-grade laser at a Philippine coast guard ship in the South China Sea last year, according to the Philippine Defense Department.
While the deepening Philippine alliance with the United States — which includes granting the U.S. military expanded access to Philippine military bases — has drawn much attention, Manila’s security campaign goes beyond Washington.
That last line is the most crucial.
We spent decades helping a number of powers throughout Asia “rise peacefully.” Those nations are now largely in charge of regional balancing against China, and that is a good thing that should temper our strategic fears.
5) Hot! Hot! Hot!
CNN: The planet just shattered heat records for the ninth month in a row
Scientists may still be struggling to come up with a definite start-date for the Anthropocene, but climate change marches on.
I don’t care where you stick your thumbtack. Just notice the upward slope when you attach your red thread to the most recent data. Then put your beautiful mind to better use than debating when this whole thing started.
6) Get used to this Middle Earth throughline
REUTERS: Millions of Sudanese go hungry as war disrupts food supply
Another good point where experts will argue endlessly about what came first, the chicken or the egg.
Here the ingredients for our clusterf$%k are the usual suspects:
Abundance of strife
Lack of water
Lack of food
Tougher time growing food.
We can pretend that by addressing one or two we’ll break the cycle, but that cycle is only growing stronger thanks to climate change, which, in its systematic depression of water, food, and agriculture, forces groups to fight ever more desperately over that shrinking “pie.”
For now, you have the usual resulting dynamics of migration: from the rural to the city, from Sudan to the next country over (Egypt), and eventually to the Promised Land of free movement known as Europe.
We can track these growing migrations and say “War is the culprit.” But war is just one of many downstream realities. The ultimate upstream reality is that wide swaths of the world (Middle Earth, as I call it) — meaning, the lower latitudes, are going to look more and more like the Sahara in terms of the resulting conflict and migration dynamics.
7) The Maldives as another glimpse of our climate-shaped geopolitical future
ABC NEWS: Facing dire sea level rise threat, Maldives turns to climate change solutions to survive
NYT: The Maldives Is a Tiny Paradise. Why Are China and India Fighting Over It?
The Maldives are a true bucket-list destination: over a thousand coral islands in the Indian Ocean.
But it’s also the “lowest lying nation in the world,” meaning four-fifths of the Maldives will be gone or uninhabitable by 2050. Habitability will be destroyed mostly by the loss of fresh groundwater now being intruded and ruined by rising sea levels.
Recall my America’s New Map warning: about two Australias’ worth of land will cease supporting human life across Middle Earth, meaning those people have to go somewhere, logically to the New North where the same rough amount of land will open up to settlement and agriculture.
Right now China and India are sparring and competing over the Maldives, seeing in them the path of protecting sea lines of communication. So lots of building projects being offered and pursued.
The Maldives’ location makes it a strategic priority for both of Asia’s superpowers. China needs a military presence on the Arabian Sea to safeguard its access to oil from the Persian Gulf. And India, which has been clashing with China along their Himalayan border, wants to make sure that the Maldives, its island neighbor, doesn’t become too cozy with Beijing.
What has this to do with adapting to climate change? For now, not all that much, and that is worrisome for the Maldives. They are being buffeted by a superpower competition that isn’t necessarily bolstering their climate resilience.
Over time, India is the more logical of the two for integrating the Maldives into bigger unions that allow controlled migration. How so? Well, besides the proximity, there’s the historical reality that, when stuff hits the fan, it’s the Indians who always show up:
China has the deeper pockets, with development banks that dwarf India’s. But, Mr. Ghafoor noted, if China “has mostly carrots,” India “has both carrots and the stick.” That is because the Maldives depends on its near neighbor in times of intense need.
Mr. Ghafoor rattled off a list of crises in which Indian help proved indispensable, from fighting back a coup launched from Sri Lanka in 1988 to rescue work after the tsunami of 2004 to a delivery of 1,200 tons of freshwater by airplane and tanker during a shortage in 2014 — a time when the Maldives was led by a China-leaning president.
Hard to see India letting China dominate on its doorstep, so this competition will only heat up.
8) Move ’em where they ain’t
VISUAL CAPITALIST: Mapped: North America Population Patterns by Density
The map is pretty clear on the disparity:
In North America, we have people concentrated where climate change will hit hardest and where water supplies are being rapidly depleted TODAY.
Meanwhile, the areas opening up to agriculture are to the North, where the population density is incredibly low.
Thirty degrees north is basically America’s southern border, lopping off crowded and sweltering Florida.
I see a clear logic in this map, when it comes to climate migrants and their resettlement. The only question is how long does it take to unfold because political forces refuse to accept this inevitability?
9) India achieving liftoff
BROOKINGS: India eliminates extreme poverty
The source:
India has just released its official consumption expenditure data for 2022-23, providing the first official survey-based poverty estimates for India in over ten years.
The findings:
Growth: Real per capita consumption growth of 2.9% per annum (pa) since 2011-12; rural growth at 3.1% pa was significantly higher than urban growth of 2.6%.
Inequality: An unprecedented decline in both urban and rural inequality.
The result:
Poverty: High growth and large decline in inequality have combined to eliminate poverty in India for the PPP$ 1.9 poverty line.
The liftoff apparent:
The data show a strikingly lower number of poor people in India, at both thresholds, than those estimated by the World Bank.
This is India cashing it its demographic dividend, thus attracting higher investment flows from abroad and more local investment staying home: it’s not just the increase in labor, it’s the shifting of large numbers of Indians from subsistence/poverty to consumption.
May not be your middle class, but India is jacked!
As the article notes: “Time for a higher poverty line.”
10) When scientists freak, I freak
NYT: Scientists Are Freaking Out About Ocean Temperatures
The off-the-charts temperatures in oceans are being treated by more and more scientists as “an omen of the future.”
Given the overall warming trend, higher temperatures in the oceans aren’t a complete surprise. Oceans absorb most of the additional heat that greenhouse gasses trap near the surface of the Earth, and have been steadily warming for years. The current El Niño weather cycle is also leading to additional heat in the Pacific Ocean and allowing more energy to be released into the atmosphere.
Yet the past year has come as a shock even to those who follow the data closely.
It’s like your patient has a low fever and that makes sense, given the infection being fought, but then, the temp shoots up to 105 and you’re wondering what the hell is going on.
And that’s when the professionals freak out.
That gets your attention, does it not?
11) Another small-but-bad sign of Xi’s rule in China
YAHOO NEWS: China in a surprise announcement says it is eliminating annual news conference by premier
The gist:
China's government said Monday it is eliminating an annual news conference by the premier that was one of the rare times a top Chinese leader took questions from journalists.
Lou Qinjian, the spokesperson for the National People's Congress, said on the eve of the opening of the legislature's annual session that Premier Li Qiang would not hold a news conference at its conclusion, as it has every year since 1993.
The move appears to be in line with a diminishing of the premier’s power, and that of the government bureaucracy generally, as the Communist Party and leader Xi Jinping centralize control of the nation’s affairs, said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore.
“Because the structure now is the party leads, the premier is more like an implementer of the party’s orders, so no longer so important,” he said. “That’s the main message.”
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! The great and powerful Xi has spoken!
12) Climate change’s ultimate losers — no surprise
NYT: Global Warming Is Particularly Bad for Women-Led Families, Study Says
The gist:
Extreme heat is making some of the world’s poorest women poorer.
That is the stark conclusion of a report, released Tuesday, by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, based on weather and income data in 24 low- and middle-income countries.
The report adds to a body of work that shows how global warming, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, can magnify and worsen existing social disparities.
This is what begins the migration flow:
In some places, extreme weather, like heat and drought, can force women and girls to travel longer distances for water, food and cooking fuel. Elsewhere, diminishing incomes can prompt families to pull girls out of school before boys. Where men migrate to cities for work, women are left to tend the land.
Eventually, the women-led families are overwhelmed by the requirements to hold onto the family farm and they too head into the cities, where they are no less vulnerable.
Then we’re into the predictable escalation: abandon the farm, abandon the city, try the next-country-over, make the Long March to the immediate North.
This is why we’re seeing a rise in women with kids migrating northward around the world.
And it’s only going to increase with time.