I am invisible

 That is all.

Will Tether Bring All The Cryptocurrencies Way Down?

 I do not know, but there is a fairly serious argument now out there that this could happen.  It is made by Gennaro at hackermoon.com/tether-and-the-great-crypto-ice-age-115h329k , picked up on by Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution without comment. Among those Gennaro cites at least partly supporting his argument are Nassim N. Taleb.

So the argument is that bitcoin and most other major cryptocurrencies are now fundamentally based on stablecoins tied to the US dollar, with claims those stablecoins can be easily traded into dollars.  According to Gennaro, and I do not know if he is right, the various non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies now use stablecoins to trade between each other at low costs, with these stable coins providing liquidity, but at the cost of a dangerous potential instability.  If there is a rush on them, they have no ultimate backer, and a crash by them could drag all of the cryptocurrencies into an ultimate total crash into an effectively zero absorption barrier, with Taleb apparently providing some support for this possible scenario.

As it is, Tether is now the leading stablecoin, indeed the #3 cryptocurrency overall, behind Bitcoin and Ethereum.  According to Gennaro, the central fact of crypto trading is that the most important ratio is that between bitcoin and tether, not bitcoin and the dollar, although the latter is the ultimate measure of value, the de facto "gold" of the cryptocurrency markets, even as bitcoin itself has been claimed to the "new gold," and gold has definitely become quite boring.

Again, according to Gennaro, a major problem with Tether is that while on the one hand it has essentially centralized Bitcoin trading into itself, if not all crypto trading.  But unlike the dollar, which has the Fed to back it up, Tether has nothing. It is owned by a semi-murky Hong Kong based entity, Bitfinext, which has already been in legal trouble in the state of New York for misrepresenting and hiding certain transactions and assets.  Gennaro argues this shows that it has no backing, and that a run on it will make it unable to access actual US dollars, the world's actual key currency, which could lead to an implosion dragging down the entire cryptocurrency market, given the nonexistence of any entity capable of coming to its rescue.

For those who want to find this particular tale somewhere between laughable and unlikely, while Bitcoin, Ethereum, and several other leading cryptocurrencies have suffered major declines recently, driven by such things as the Chinese government imposing serious restrictions on their mining and use, the one cryptocurrency that has gained in the last week has been, oh yes, Tether.  But then pride goeth before a fall,. While I am going to stay out of forecasting anything in these markets, given how many important market manipulators are playing in them, regarding whom I have no idea what they will do, it does seem that the possible volatility and more deeply threatening threats in them has increased.

Barkley Rosser

TimeWork Web Reloaded

Publication of my article, "The Ambivalence of Disposable Time: The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties at Two Hundred," felt very much like the culmination of a 26-year long research project that began when I answered a call for proposals from the B.C. Ministry of Employment and Investment. My proposal included a research hub website, which was pretty innovative for 1995. It turns out that no research contract was awarded because a provincial government spending freeze terminated the selection process. But the proposed website materialized as the TimeWork Web and endured until 2004 when it was integrated into the Work Less Party website as a resource for the Work Less Institute of Technology.

I had the old html files from 1995 and 2004 on hand so I decided to revive the TimeWork Web with pages featuring the publications that have resulted from the project, a couple of upcoming conference presentations and, of course, the historical archives from 1995, 2004 and a middle one I call "1999" reconstructed from files retrieved from the Internet Archives Wayback Machine.

There is also a pop-up economics page that embeds animated videos produced by Reuben Walker of three of my pop-up books along with a brief summary of the contributions of the theorists the books celebrate: Charles Wentworth Dilke, Sydney J. Chapman and Arthur O. Dahlberg.

The Iranian Presidential Election

 The outcome is as expected, a solid victory with 18 out of 28 million votes or so for the hardline winner, Ebrahim Raisi, who is currently head of the Supreme Court.  He was previously Attorney General, ran four years ago for president, and has a long history of being a public prosecutor going back into his 20s (he is now 60). In 1988 he played a role in the killing of about 5,000 prisoners, which led him to be sanctioned from traveling in the US. He has regularly ordered executions, gaining a reputation as a "hanging judge," although I think they mostly use the electric chair there.  While has run against corruption, there are reports that he is involved in some, and this will probably be used against selected political opponents. He was clearly the favorite of the supreme leader, Vilayet-al-faqih (numerous transliterations of that title), often translated as "Supreme Jurisprudent," Ali Khamenei, age 82, who is Commander-in-Chief of the military as well as the top person of the police and judiciary, over Raisi in the court system.  Many see this a Raisi being positioned to succeed Khamenei in that position.

Turnout was unusually low at less than 50 percent, with many voters boycotting the election.  It is clear that Khamenei and the hardliners did not want any "surprise" moderate winners as has happened in the past, arguably 8 years ago with outgoing President Hassan Rouhani.  In 2013 Iran was suffering severe economic sanctions that President Obama organized, with Russia and China largely joining in, which had the goal of bringing Iran to the nuclear negotiating table.  Rouhani ran on doing that and went after he got elected.  This led to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement where Iran shut down some reactors and reduced its uranium enrichment to less than 3.75 percent.  Most of the economic sanctions were lifted, although the US retained some that had been on previously due to human rights issues, and the Iranian economy turned around and had positive growth again.  This led to Rouhani being reelected four years ago, even though then President Trump was talking about leaving the agreement, which all agreed Iran was keeping to.  But he had not done so at that point.  He did withdraw the following year, imposing even stronger sanctions and demanding European and other firms follow suit as well, although no other signatory to agreement supported Trump's decision.  But the sanctions hit, and the Iranian economy turned around and has been in a steep fall since with solid double digit unemployment and inflation rates.  Oil exports are now about one tenth of what they were before. 

Trump's SecState, Pompeo, whose arrival in office coincided with the move to leave the JCPOA, made 12 diplomatic demands on Iran and declared that either Iran would agree to some of these and return to the negotiating table or the regime would fall.  None of that happened, although the Iranian economy has suffered greatly with much suffering for the Iranian people.  Unsurprisingly this outcome completely discredited Rouhani and his allies, with their hardline enemies, some of whom had said the US cannot be trusted to make an agreement with, looking good and riding high.  Thank you, President Trump for this total failure on your part, possibly the worst foreign policy move of the whole administration.

Even though the moderates were seriously discredited, Khamenei was not taking any chances.  For candidates to run for office in Iranian elections they must be approved as being "sufficiently Islamic" by the Council of Guardians, a 12-person body half of them appointed by Khamenei and the other half by the judiciary, with now-President-Elect Raisi having selected three of them.  The body ruled out the two most serious moderate candidates in the mold of Rouhani, one of them his vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, and the other, and apparently more substantial candidate, Ali Larijani, a former Speaker of the Majlis (parliament) who was the lead negotiator of the JCPOA nuclear deal.  

This left as the most substantial moderate candidate, much more conservative than either of those two, the head of the central bank, Abdolnasr Hammeti, who urged people not to boycott. But in the end he came in third, with the second place winner, Mohsen Rezaei, a former Revolutionary Guard commander and hardliner, getting about three million votes. Some of have noted that Raisi versus Hammeti was sort of like having Chief Justic John Roberts run against Fed Chair Jerome Powell in the US.

While this will almost certainly lead to some crackdowns on mild liberalizations in the treatment of women in Iran, it is unclear what many of Raisi's policies will be.  Given his solid frontrunner status he was reportedly quite vague about his plans during debates that happened (there were 7 allowed candidates in all).  He seems to have a pretty free hand, within limits.  

One area that may not turn out too badly has to do with the ongoing renegotiation of the JCPOA agreement, which Biden ran on reentering.  Those negotiations have reportedly made some progress, but had become stalled, with many essentially seeing the Iranian side as waiting for this election to do anything serious.  The big complication is that both sides ended up violating the agreement, so there is a timing issue of who undoes which violation before the other in order to get the agreement back in place.  Iran actually continued to obey the agreement for a year after the US withdrew, hoping the Europeans might either not go along with obeying the US sanctions or even convincing Trump to rejoin it.  But after this did not happen, they began to violate it in several ways, including now enriching uranium up to a 60 percent level (90 percent is weapons grade level).  

In any case, supposedly Raisi supports the negotiations, and in any case any return to the agreement will require the support of Khamenei, who presumably will be more supportive of something Raisi might come to. What is clearly not going to happen is that any of the additions to the agreement some in the US (and some other well-known outsiders) have been demanding be made, most notably to add restrictions on the Iranian ballistic missile programs. That is not going to happen, and now Putin has agreed to help then with a satellite program that will support that.  The best that can be hoped for is some sort of return to the old agreement, so stupidly trashed by Trump, but even that is not a slam dunk at all.

Addendum a few hours later: I have just read Juan Cole's analysis of the election. Mostly agrees with mine.  He makes a couple of extra important points. One is that there is a six weeks transition while Rouhani is still president.  He thinks Khamenei wants Rouhani to make the deal with the US on renewing the JCPOA during this period so that if things do not work out, Rouhani can be made the scapegoat, although he definitely wants a deal and the sanctions lifted.

The other point is that one reason he wants Raisi in, aside from perhaps grooming him as likely successor, is that he wants to resist opening the economy and society to outside influences.  Marina and I have long described Iran as the premier example of a New Traditional economy, one trying to combine a traditional cultural system (Shia Islam) with a modern economy. But this involves a serious tension between being open to new technologies and all that and preserving that cultural dominance the ulama have there in Iran.

He also commented on local foreign policy implications, but these seem fairly few.  Raisi visited Iraq in February and supported the pro-Iran parties there.  Would like US totally out, but this is not new.  Seems to have worked on improving relations with neighboring Iraq, who is clearly very important economically for Iran.  He supports Assad in Syria, and has said little about Yemen, although the Houthis welcomed his election.

Barkley Rosser

Bottom Line On The Biden-Putin Summit

 According to Robyn Dixon of the Washington Post on 6/18/21 regarding the outcome of the Buden-Putin summit in Geneva, I shall simply quote directly from what looks to be the bottom line from Putin himself:

Despite a packed European tour schedule, Biden "looked fresh" and was "fully aware of the materials" during the two hours of talks, Putin said:

'Biden is a professional. One should be very observant when working with him in order not to miss anything. He misses nothing. I can assure you," he added.

 Barkley Rosser

Why Are Infrastructure Cost So High In The US?

Sorry, but anybody wanting some simple answer on this one, especially an ideologically neat one, sorry, there is not one, Indeed, on this important issue, there is a large problem on this, but not remotely a clear answer regarding why there is this large and important problem.

For numbers on this problem I draw on a Washington Post column yesterday by Catherine Rampell. Here are some of the crucial data. In the early 1930s, just to pick one major infrastructure project, the Oakland-Bay bridge was approved and built within four months.  Yeah, the Great Depression.  But now compared to Europe, where supposedly they have higher labor costs and more regulations, well: a tunnel in Seattle cost three times as much as one in Paris and seven times as one in Madrid. This is not an oddball, this is how it is.  Infrastructure investments in the US now cost multiple times what is does abroad, and these are nations with labor and environmental concerns being taken seriously .

So, what is going on here? The very bright and knowledgeable Rampell confesses that not only does she not know, but she cannot find anybody who can explain it. In a way this looks like the high costs of medical care in the US.  This is  a much more politicized matter, but when one digs seriously into the research there seems to be no single reason, a whole series of matters, not easily resolved.

The issue of infrastructure lacks some of the matters healthcare has, such as how the US is the only nation in the world not having universal healthcare, which many of us think itself would lead to lower healthcare costs for various reasons. But what is responsible for the now high costs of infrastrucuture investment in the US, some of the obvious culprits there for healthcare are not there.

Of course there are many things involved here, which Rampell lays out, but again there is not remotely a "smoking gun," But her list contains the following: "poor planning, complicated procurement processes,  our multilayered federalist system, NIMBY-ism, and risks of litigation." Why all this is worse than so many other high income nations  I do not know. 

She also adds some other matters, such as a tendency of our political system to fund wasteful projects, although this is something that has always gone on, and that I find hard to believe also do not go on in other democratically run nations. Local economic interests have a way of getting their way in democratic political systems, and also do so in non-democratic ones, although even in those places, local economic interests get their way to the degree they get in with the Supreme Leader.

Barkley Rosser 

The Zhou Enlai Paradox

A bit over a half century ago when Henry Kissinger was organizing Richard Nixon's visit to China, he was largely interacting on this matter with Zhou Enlai (Chou-Enlai in Wade-Giles transliteration). He reported that during their negotiations he asked Zhou what he thought of the French Revolution.  Zhou replied that "It is too soon to tell." This has since been taken as deep insight by Zhou on a deep historical issue, which indeed is still debated, at least in parts of the West. More recent scholarship has decided that probably rather than being Mr. Deep Historical Genius, Zhou was simply commenting on recent current events, most notably the student-worker uprisings in France in 1968, two-three years prior to their discussions. 

According to the Chaguan column in The Economist, 6/5/21, there is now a film out about the life of Zhou Enlai being shown to children from kindergarten on up, with this produced in anticipation of the centennial of the Chinese Communist Party's official recognition of its founding on July 1. That Zhou rather than many other possible figures is being put forward to children at this time as a role model is most curious and interesting.

I think what is involved here is the regime's effort to resolve its ongoing conflict between traditional Chinese Confucianism and the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist heritage of the ruling CCP. Zhou came from a scholar-bureaucrat family, which fell into pieces, with Zhou depicted as the deep student of traditional Confucianism that he was as well as finding works in his grandfather's library about peasants rising against "feudal aristocracy," with him moving to become a "great proletarian revolutionary." 

So this film about his life provides an effort to overcome this conflict between ancient Confucian Chinese tradition, with its respect for established hierarchies such as the CCP is now, with support for the ideologically revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maoist tradition that underpins the Chinese Communist Party on this time of its centennial.

A final note is that the Economist article observes that one reason why Zhou managed to survive through the worst machinations and reversals and upheavals of the Maoist era was precisely due to his deeply serious Confucian education from his youth, this allowing him to "a reverance for Coufucian teachings about self-restraint and the need for officials to swallow small insults in the national interest."

Oh, and as regards the reception by various age groups of this new film about the life of Zhou Enlai, the very young like a moment where he shows his bare bottom, a bit older like seeing him picking and selling wild vegetables as a boy to try to get his family out of debt, and older viewers liking the conclusion, which shows him "to swelling chords, young Zhou waxes indignant on learning that Russia and Japan have taken territory from the ailing Chinese empire, then declares that he studies hard so that China may rise. That phrase of Zhou's is taught in schools to this day and triggers murmers of recognition."

Barkley Rosser

The Cornwall Paradox

 The County of Cornwall has been in the news as the site of the G7 summit, just ended. In today's Washington Post an article "In Cornwall, a jarring contrast of power and poverty," by Karla Adam and Loveday Morris, a paradox of this visit is highlighted and brought out, indeed, that Cornwall is one of the poorest places in Great Britain, indeed in Northern Europe more generally, but that it is drawing much attention and some money, if not necessarily what it most needs.  

A deep part of this paradox is that Cornwall was probably the part of Britain that got more per capita aid from the EU than any other, certainly as much as any other, due to its poverty, but also was one of the most strongly supportive of Brexit, with much of this driven by a dislike of EU fishing regulations, but now with Brexit in place the Cornish fishers discovering that the gains they imagined getting from leaving the EU and its regulations are simply not there, including unsurprisingly because they are now blocked substantially from selling the fish they do catch to the EU.

A part of this particular moment is that UK PM Boris Johnson was the main leader of the Brexit effort and is also apparently half Cornish, from his father's side.  So he is personally aware of the gains and losses and attitudes there, and his desire to help Cornwall was why he chose to have the G7 summit there this year when UK was the host.  It apparently is bringing in money and attention, although probably not all that much to the third of the young population that is officially poor.  The booming industry seems to be tourism, but people coming in buying second hones are driving up housing prices for the locals, whose other industries have been in decline, the last tin mine closing in 1998 after many centuries of operating.

I have a rather odd perspective on this, one I think I shared here several years ago, but now it is updated with this odd occurrence and new information.  When the Brexit vote happened on June 23, 2016 I was in Antwerp with JMU students, with my wife Marina running our summer program there.  The day after that vote we took the students to Brussels to visit EU HQ.  The person who spoke to us was none other than a British man from Cornwall, who spent some time pointing out the peculiar situation of Cornwall, indeed the only part of the UK eligible for the largest amount of regional poverty payments.  Probably not well known in Cornwall was that nearly all local public infrastructure projects were being funded by the EU, something Boris Johnson is aware of and has made some moves to offset the loss of, but not enough to fully make up for it.

Indeed, this man noted the strong pro-Brexit vote there and was obviously frustrated by it.  He also commented at some length on the matter of the fisheries, which he identified as the big issue driving this sentiment.  He essentially forecast what seems to have come to pass, that the Cornish fishers would gain little if anything from Brexit, despite their strong belief they would.  The bottom line does seem to be that more in Cornwall have lost from Brexit than have gained, despite their strong support for it.

I close this by noting a bit about Cornwall and the Cornish people for those who do not know.  It is the the southwestern most part of the island of Britain, due south of Wales. While a part of England, in fact the people are largely Celtic, and their language, which died as a first-use language as far back as the late 18th century, is most closely related to Welsh and Breton. Apparently there is a movement to revive the language, and it is now being taught as a second language there, with a few families now attempting to raise children to speak it as a first language.  So maybe it is coming back.

Barkley Rosser

Global Polls

OK, so I think the nations surveyed are biased, but I have now seen two polls with roughly similar polls.  

So Pew, with a larger base and solid credibility has that among foreign nations polls in their nations data set showed an improvement in favorability rating for the POTUS have gone from 17% to 75% give or take a few percents. OTOH, the attitude towards the US among whichever nations Pew polled had the attitude towards the US only rising from 34% to 62%.  Most commentary has this as foreigners now fear that either Trump himself or some clone of his might well become POTUs in the not too far distant future.

In the meantime, I wish the best to the current POTUS on his current trip abroad.

Barkley Rosser

Treasury Secretary Yellen Achieves A Victory

 This is her getting the G-7 finance ministers to agree to a minimum 15% corporate tax. It is easy to sneer at this. Some of the nations involved may not pass it. There are many problems with details, such as whether the tax would be on gross or net income.  There are a lot of nations not in on this agreement, including especially large China.

But currently many large corporations are paying zero anywhere, with this reflecting their ability to shift earnings around from nation to nation.  Frankly, although I have long been a fan of Janet Yellen's I really did nor expect this plan to go anywhere.  There would simply be too much international opposition. But she has pulled off at least the quite significant agreement, supported by President Biden. So I would like to recognize this achievement and applaud it, even if in the end they are unable to push it all the way to through to full implementation.

Barkley Rosser

#TangPing ("lying flat")

China's new 'tang ping' trend aims to highlight pressures of work culture

(from BBC)

Young people in China exhausted by a culture of hard work with seemingly little reward are highlighting the need for a lifestyle change by "lying flat".

The new trend, known as "tang ping", is described as an antidote to society's pressures to find jobs and perform well while working long shifts.

China has a shrinking labour market and young people often work more hours.

The term "tang ping" is believed to have originated in a post on a popular Chinese social media site.

"Lying flat is my wise movement," a user wrote in a since-deleted post on the discussion forum Tieba, adding: "Only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things."

The comments were later discussed on Sina Weibo, another popular Chinese microblogging site, and the term soon became a buzzword.

The idea behind "tang ping" - not overworking, being content with more attainable achievements and allowing time to unwind - has been praised by many and inspired numerous memes. It has been described as a spiritual movement. 

The War On Anthony Fauci

 This title may seem a bit over the top, but for those not paying attention to the Trump media bubble they may not realize how completely out of control and over the top this has become.  It is topped off by Trump himself going after Dr. Anthony Fauci big time in his speech to the NC GOP earlier this evening for having urged people to wear masks and for supposedly covering up the supposed lab source of the coronavirus in Wuhan. But this follows what has become an almost all the time attack on Fox, Newsmax, and OAN on nearly all their shows, with people now claiming that Dr. Fauci (along with Obama) actively encouraged and aided the development of Covid-19 in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). He is personally guilty for every person dead in the US as well as every job lost due to the pandemic, and a string of prominent GOP politicians are now calling for his firing, if not more.  No fault or blame should lie on Trump at all. This tirade reached an especially bad peak on Friday evening when Donald Trump, Jr. sent out an Instagram post in which he looked forward to being able to say "Dr. Fauci did not kill himself" with apparent pleasure. This has truly gone way over the top.

The basis for all this is that indeed NIH did provide some funding that Fauci had some signing off on connection with, did not initiate it or lead it or inspire it, that did support some research on virus research at the WIV, one of the world's leading sites for such research, with some US scientists involved in this research with some at the lab, especially Dr. Shi Zhengli.  But this financial assistance was relatively minor and apparently limited to supporting the gathering of some past data.  Even if the virus was created out of "gain of function" or other research there, this assistance would have played a trivial role in that. And while it is now being taken for granted that for sure the virus was so created in that lab, the most that can be said is that as of now that cannot be ruled out and that US intel agencies are looking at that as well as other possible sources of where the virus originated and how it got into the human population as a pandemic.  

Of course the main alternative, pushed for some time last year by a number of scientists as clearly the likely explanation, as been one involving a zoonotic transmission from bats to some intermediate animal, with pangolins the leading suspect, with such intermediate animal then transmitting it to humans in a wet market, possibly the Huanwan one in Wuhan that certainly was a very early superspreader site for Covid-19. But it is not clear pangolins were actually for sale there, and research on this alternative has apparently not gotten anywhere, with this still sitting as a strong possibility with many viewing it as still the most likely source (or some variation on it).  It has also come out that the person who organized a prominent article in Lancet early last year arguing this was almost certainly it and definitely not any lab, Dr. Peter Daszak, has been involved in research with people at WIV, and thus subject to conflict of interest problems.  As it is, some who supported that view last year are now saying that a lab origin is possible and should be further investigated.

Curiously, what looks to me to be a highly likely source, possibly the most likely, has received only minimal attention, although it has gotten some renewed publicity with a front page story on June 4 in the Washington Post by Eva Dou and Lily Kuo.  While Dr. Shi of the highly secure WIV has loudly and publicly declared the virus did not come from her lab, no such loud denials have come from another researcher, Tian Junhua, associate chief lab technician at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (WCDC), a lab located only 500 meters from the Huanwan market and operating at a much lower level of security than the WIV.  Dr. Tian is the "bat hunter" who has explored many sites including caves in search of animals with viruses, and apparently brought back as many as 155 bat viruses to the WCDC from a cave where several people became seriously ill, with Dr. Tian himself having been spattered with bat blood and urine there while not wearing protective gear  Dr. Tian has made no public statements and is currently refusing to do so.  That one of these viruses might have infected somebody at his lab and gotten out to the market or elsewhere is certainly a possibility, with this case sort of lying between the Fauci-did-it-artificially-through-WIV story favored by the racist Trump gang and the it-came-purely-out-of-nature-through-an-intermediate-animal story favored by those turned off by the Trump gang push.

Of course there are a lot of loose ends and rumors, such as one that there may have been three people who go seriously ill possibly from it, in November 2019 at the WIV.  Without doubt the Chinese government should facilitate and encourage all parties to help track down who were the earliest cases to try to determine the origins of this.  However, this does not seem to be happening, with if anything just the opposite the case, with reports that some Chinese posting reports on all this being suppressed.

I note that in the SARS pandemic of 2002-03 we saw both sources.  The initial outbreak of that pandemic looks to have been the zoonotic route from the wild through civet cats. But then a second round, smaller than the first, was due to two leaks out of a Beijing lab.  

Pretty much anything is possible here, and unfortunately I fear we may never be able to get to the bottom of this. But the current wave of attacks on Anthony Fauci rolling through the right wing mediasphere has become completely outrageous, with this recent Instagram post by Donald Trump, Jr. really going beyond despicable.

Barkley Rosser

My Latest Book

Heck, I might as well brag here when I have the opportunity, and I do.  

So, just a couple of days ago my latest book came out from Springer Nature.  It is called Foundations and Applications of Complexity Economics.  I am not going to go on about it or its contents other than to note that I have published on this general topic before on numerous occasions, with my last book out on it a decade ago in 2011, also from Springer.  

Anyway, it feels good to actually get those hard copies in your hands of something you worked on for a long time, and I am not one of those people who just knocks off books in a couple of weeks or months while riding on airplanes or whatever.  They have all taken years of work, even revisions for new additions, and this one took a few as well. But now it is over. Whew!

Barkley Rosser 

Do Languages Get Simpler When They Get More Complicated?

 Oh, a minor diversion from the usual political economy stuff that goes up here.  

This is triggered by an article in last week's The Economist on the nearly dead San language, Nluu.  It has only two living fully fluent speakers alive, both in their 80s.  The San languages are among the world's most ancient, although arguably reflecting a simpler world than the one we live in, although certainly with many complications we know nothing of.  But the point that caught my attention was that it has 45 distinct click sounds, along with 114 basic sound units. It is one of only three languages in the world (all of them San) that have something called the double lip-full kiss click, whatever that is. I only know that if one sees an exclamation point that means some sort of click. So probably the most numerous living San group are the !Kung, yeah, some sort of click on the front end of that name.

I have known about this matter of clicks in southern African languages for some time, but had no idea there were so many different ones.  Not only the San languages, but also the Khoechan (or Khoi khoi) languages have lots of them.  Some clicks can also be found in the much more widespread Xhosa languages, one of which was the mother tongue of Nelson Mandela, who almost certainly had some Khoi or San ancestry.  But beyond these languages, I am not aware of any others that have any clicks.  They have disappeared in later languages, and I am unaware of any other language having anywhere near the number of basic sound units that apparently this nearly extinct Nluu language has.

I have not heard anybody theorize about simplifying sounds over time in languages, but I know there is an academic argument about grammar becoming more simplified, especially when two languages are combined as with creole or pidgin languages, something written about by John McWhorter in hi The Creole Debate. Pidgin languages, artificially created to allow communication between groups and drawing on each other's languages, tend to be especially simplistic in gramatical terms.

It occurs to me that this might apply to English, which is itself a sort of creole out of Germanic Old English and Latinic Norman French, with some other elements.  In a way it may be the world's most complicated language in some forms, notably in probably having more words than just about any other language, drawing on so many inputs from so many parts of the world and fields.  But in grammatical terms it is rather simple, with only a few cases and having eliminated gender from most words.  In contrast, Lithuanian, thought to be the closest to the original proto-Indo-European has seven cases, more than any other, although Russian is not too far off.  However, despite this relative grammatical simplicity, English is hard to learn, not only because it has so many words but because it violates its own supposed rules so often, in contrast with Spanish, for example, reputedly one of the easiest languages to learn.

So, there is no big profound point here, but just that I find this curious: that it seems that as languages evolve and interact with each other and encounter more and more influences, they seem to drop elements they previously had, whether these are sound units or grammatical forms and cases.

Barkley Rosser

The Trumpification of Xi Jinping

 The Peoples' Republic of China (PRC) has achieved great outcomes over the last several decades, especially after the late Deng Xiaoping took effective control of the nation from Maoist holdovers.  He set a model of indirect and collective leadership in contrast with Mao Zedong who ruled nearly absolutely for nearly three decades, while building and enforcing a cult of personality dedicated to himself. Of the top three positions in the nation, he held only one: Chair of the Military Commission, making him Commander-in-Chief. But he was never General Secretary of the Party (with his exact position there unclear), and his highest position in the actual government never above Vice Prime Minister, which he did not remain in all that long.

The system went through various changes in the 1980s, with Deng clearly running things, although after 1983 the Head of State position, President, got a 5-year term.  Starting in 1993 the system established with the accession of Jiang Zamen in 1993, a new pattern appeared that the Supreme Leader (a title Deng was granted by the CCP in 1979) would hold the top three position for 10 years, two presidential terms: President, Party General Secretary, and Char of the Military Commission. This did not work perfectly as when the transition in 2003 to Hu Jintao came, Jiang delayed handing over the Chair of the Military for about half a year, while Hu got the other two on time.  Their rivalry would come to dominate the hidden power struggle in Zhongnanghai with its remnant "Sitting Committee" of retired Long March and later leaders carrying on their ancient power struggles.

In any case, the period from Deng's becoming Supreme Leader, although bearing few specifically official positions of power, led to a profoundly seriously successful period of Chinese economic growth and social and cultural achievement and advancement.  It would lead by around 2014 China becoming the world's largest economy in real PPP terms, with it now more than 30% ahead of the US on that measure, even as the US continues for a few more years to be tops in nominal GDP. In the last year China has announced achieving ending deep poverty. So, much has been achieved, and way more than I have mentioned here. It is now in many ways the world's leading economy and society.

Which brings us to how the current Supreme Leader appears to be blowing this very seriously, and I seriously think that a non-trivial influence on what I think is a serious mistake that has been made was inspired or at least aided by former President Trump during his time in office.  I see two items here. One is the replacing of the normal 10 year turnover of power with a lifetime appointment of the Supreme Leader, and the other is assuming a "We are Number One" approach to world affairs, with it looking like these two reinforce each other, and with both certainly inspired by and to some degree supported by by former President Trump while he was in office.

So in 2013 Xi Jinping, a "princeling" son of a former high official, took power as Jiang did 20 years earlier, getting all three of the top positions at the same time from his predecessor.  At first things continued as they had up to about the time Xi was to be reconfirmed at the 5-year rotation time.  But then, after having interacted with US President Trump, including getting to eat chocolate at Mar-a-Lago while Trump showed off sensitive videos for diners at his club, things changed. Xi made it clear that he would not step down in 2023 when his second term ended, but would remain in power indefinitely, to the end of his life, if he could pull that off. 

As it was, Donald Trump's reaction to this announcement was to comment on how "maybe we should try this in the US."  People thought he was joking, but subsequent events show he was not at all, and is very envious of not only Xi but Putin and Erdogan and other authoritarian leaders who have assumed absolute lifetime power in their nations. Indeed, he continues to actively push an end to democracy in the US and essentially him being allowed to indeed assume the US presidency for the rest of his life.  Not clear who is actually influencing whom here.

But there is another important feature of what Xi has done that leads to the conclusion that he has Trumpified himself. Prior to this declaration of lifetime rule, he seemed to follow a path described by an adviser to his predecessor as "peaceful rise," which involved avoiding angering other nations to the point they would oppose policies or actions of China as its economy and power became more and more important in the world. And from 1979 until very recently this approach was highly successful on so many fronts. Indeed, in the first years of Trump's presidency, when his "America First" policies led to a complete collapse of favorable attitudes towards the US around the world, China stood briefly as a beacon of world leadership, supporting international rules and customs and world order.  It still claims to do so, but unfortunately Xi seems to have decided to imitate Trump with a "China First" policy since he assumed lifetime leadership, with this badly carried out policy leading to an enormous backlash.

There are several issues involved here.  Many involve increased suppression of human rights within China, including in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.  But an especially crucial one seems to be its management of its role in the origin of the Covid-19 virus and the subsequent pandemic.  A free and democratic nation would be open to and assist investigations of the origin of a disease that looks to have emerged initially within its boundaries. But China has never accepted this, suggesting it came from US troops at an athletic event in Wuhan in October, 2019, or maybe on some frozen food from wherever, a theory that the WHO under Chinese influence still takes seriously, although nobody else outside of China does so.  It is clear it first appeared in Wuhan in central China, but exactly how and when remains unknown and will probably remain so, since rather than being open and helpful, the Chinese government (reflecting the views of the CCP) has destroyed all evidence relating to the origin of the disease and suppressed Chinese initially reporting on it.

For awhile China got away with this because Trump politicized the issue by making exaggerated claims that China consciously created the virus and then lied about it, with all this embedded in a lot of racist anti-AAPI verbiage that he took to the campaign trail, with a major uptick of attacks on Asian Americans following this. 

But changes of mind of various scientists who previously said that the "lab leak" hypothesis was highly unlikely have changed their minds, and now we see not only President Biden but much of the world demanding a more thorough and transparent investigation regarding where this virus came from. However, despite some possible new openings, such as possibly finding the originally infected people (an effort likely to be blocked by China), I think too much crucial data has been destroyed by the Chinese government for us to ever really figure this out.

Well, so more recently we have seen a change to a much more aggressive and hostile approach to the rest of the world by the Chinese leadership.  When the Australian government demanded an deeper probe on the origins of the virus, instead of agreeing like an open and democratic government might do, the PRC responded by a massive attack on Australian trade with China. More recently when the EU, while not declaring that Chinese policy towards the Uighurs is "genocide," they nevertheless raised some complaints about what is going on with those people there, the Chinese response was a strong attack that led to the EU ending negotiations on a trade and investment deal with China, which had looked to be good to go a few months ago. And, of course, there have been militarily aggressive moves against India, as well as in the South China Sea.

All this has led to the Xi becoming Trumpified. Prior to Trump becoming POTUS, the US had an fairly high approval rating around most of the world, although not in the Muslim Middle East. But when Trump came in it did not take too long for his "America First" policies, along with his personally insulting most leaders of US allied nations (Israel, KSA, UAE, and a few others excepted), for the approval rating of the US to collapse, in some nations dramatically so, with the upshot being that the US went from basically being one of the most respected and approved of nations in the world, to being  barely above a pariah.

So, big surprise, when Xi Jinping decided to imitate his former chocolate cake buddy with a similarly indefensible "China First" policy, the approval rating of his nation has fallen.  A column in the May 28 Washington Post by Fareed Zakaria provides some data on this collapse.  I shall bring this now long post to an end by simply listing the numbers he reported in this column, which compare a change from 2017 to 2020 in negative feelings towards China in these nations:

US, 47% to 73%

Canada, 40% to 73%

UK, 37% to 74%

Australia, 32% to 81%

South Korea, 61% to 75%

Sweden, 49% to 85%.

Barkley Rosser