zenpundit.com

I have but two recommended readings this week but they are both very good. I say “week” because I am going to be mostly offline for the next seven to ten days and will only have time to sporadically check in, so posting will be extremely light. My email response will also be, I say with all candor, very poor except for the most urgent business.

Scholar’s Stage – Notes on the Dynamics of Human Civilization: The Growth Revolution, Part I

My primary historic interest lies with the civilizations of the classical age. The world of Asoka, Shi Huangdi, and Scipio Africanus is a fascinating one, and the modern world would be a better place if our current caste of world leaders studied the lessons of these ancient days. However, the more I study these periods the more I realize that the world we live in is a fundamentally different place than that of our axial forbearers. This fact is little appreciated and (most likely) little understood by most commentators. There are clear limitations to the lessons we can learn from times past. If we do not understand the dynamics by which these societies operated and the ways in which these dynamics differ from those of the modern world, comparisons between the two will do more harm than good. 

On the broadest terms, the history of humanity can be divided into three periods. The first begins with the evolution of modern humans c. 50,000 years ago and ends with the advent of sedentary society (c. 11,500 years ago – Gobelki Tepe being the marker of this first transition). This was a world without civilization. Complex societies (used interchangeably with “civilization” in this post) have only existed for a fifth of humanity’s existence. While but a small part of human history in toto, it is these last 11,500 years that are the object of our study.

Human civilization has gone through two stages. The first of these stages is the longest, beginning with the emergence of complex societies in the Near East c. 11,500 years ago and ending only at the beginning of the 19th century. I submit that every society of this period- from the first chiefdoms to the great empires of Rome and China – operated under the same basic structural constraints. The rules and limitations were the same; the differences were a matter of emphasis and scale. This changes at the turn of the 19th century. Humanity’s third great period begins here (it has not yet ended). The rules by which the modern world operates are incredibly different from those of the old order. The transformation wrought by modernization was no less revolutionary than that wrought by the advent of complex society 11,000 years previous.

This revolution is widely recognized, but also grossly mischaracterized. The standard label for this transition is the “Industrial Revolution.” This title is misleading. The industrialization of the world economy was the result, not the cause of modernization. The nature of this radical transformation is captured better by a different title: The Growth RevolutionThe info graphics tell the story better than I do….

A tour de force post by T. Greer ( Hat tip to Joseph Fouche)

The Glittering Eye:

Dave Schuler is one of my oldest (and smartest) blogfriends and we have here from him a series on the struggling economy and contours of American society

The Breakdown
The Breakdown: The Young Aren’t Getting Enough Education
The Breakdown: Education Is More Necessary Than Ever
The Breakdown: Baby Boomers Have Higher Incomes

The Breakdown: Age and Employment

….Since the start of the current recession (or previous recession if you’re in the financial industry), we’ve read an almost constant stream of analyses, critiques, prognostications, and laments on the state of the economy. The preponderance of these took a sort of econophysics point of view, a view from 30,000 feet in which forces applied had deterministic outcomes. Local, regional, cultural, or demographic differences tend to be ignored.

I don’t think this view of behavioral or social phenomena is realistic and over the last few years I’ve repeatedly emphasized the local variants in the economic downturn and how that tends to obscure what’s actually going on nationally. Today I’m going to try to come up with an explanation of the changes in the economy that focuses on our changing demographics, particularly the differences among age cohorts. We’ll see how far I get.

A good place to start is with the graphic above. That’s what’s called the “age pyramid” for 2010. There are bars for each five year age cohort. The number of men for each cohort is shown on the left and the number of women on the right. It’s a straightforward visual snapshot that captures the country’s age and gender demographics in an eye-catching manner….

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

We may as well get this out of the way as it is the overriding story for good reasons as well as bad. After that, a few other interesting things……

First, here is the doc dump site itself Wikileaks

The best round-up post in this section of the blogosphere is by SWJ Blog –The Afghanistan War Logs Update

Now for some bloggers whose Wikileaks posts or op-eds caught my eye:

Josh Foust – The Assange Leaks: What’s new about the WikiLeaks data?

Andrew Exum – Getting Lost in the Fog of War

Karaka Pend – Document Dumping

Thomas P.M. Barnett –Wikileaks: the transparency standard we inevitably face in the Long War

Pundita – Afghan War version of Pentagon Papers released, WikiLeak Afghan War Papers: Pity the White House spin machine, Afghans say, ‘I told you so’ after WikiLeak papers point to Pak military’s support for Taliban, U.S. support for Pakistan’s military aiding conditions for Castro-style revolution in Pakistan, Afghan government questions U.S. silence over Pakistani regime’s support for Taliban, Are you calling Amrullah Saleh a liar, Mr Semple?

At this juncture, allow me to pause and say “Miss Pundita, en fuego!!”

Newshoggers.com – Wikileaks and ‘material support’, Pakistan’s ISI: No “Smoking Gun”?,  Some thoughts on the “War Logs“, “Wikileaks War Logs? Nothing new, move along.” Sure…To November!

BLACKFIVE – Strategy Room video

Sic Semper Tyrannis –The Afghan Papers

Wings Over Iraq –“Our Valuable Ally” (Updated) , Wikileaks: The Big Deal

Great Satan’s Girlfriend – Legerdemain

For laughs, from SWJ Blog –Taliban Responds to WikiLeaks

Technically, it isn’t the Taliban, but rather the Haqqani Network asshats, but they all have huge beards, opium bundles, AK-47’s and nominally retired ISI colonels as advisers….same difference.

SOME NON-WIKILEAKS ITEMS OF INTEREST…….

S. Anthony Iannarino – Selling and the Human Terrain System

This is a neat example of horizontal thinking, where Anthony uses HTS as a foil for applying business strategies. I particularly liked his questions at the conclusion of the post:

Selling is About the Human Terrain

Conceptually, our business as sales professionals is insurgency and counterinsurgency (albeit with very different stakes). We are either focused on taking clients from our competitors by winning hearts and minds, or we are protecting our existing dream clients from the insurgents who would take them from us by keeping their hearts and minds. It is a simplification, but dissatisfaction opens the door to insurgencies; preventing dissatisfaction is our counterinsurgency effort.

Our focus as salespeople is too much about solutions, and not enough about the Human Terrain….

….Questions

1. When you are in the boardroom presenting, do you know whose hearts and minds have been won? Have you spent your time understanding and working within your dream client’s human terrain to know that you have the votes to win the deal, and then to implement and execute your solution? Review your notes from your last three or four needs analysis sales calls.
2. What notes do you have about the company’s culture? What are the defining characteristics of their culture that will help enable you to win their hearts, their minds, and their votes? What about their culture will rub against your ideas and your solutions later, after you are chosen? What considerations do you have to make now in order to address these cultural issues?
3. What notes do you have about their linguistics, the language that they use to talk about their business? Are you certain that you fully understand what the words your dream clients use mean to them? Are there differences in the way they refer to concepts that differ from the language that you use? What language do they use that differs from their industry standard? Do your language choices mean something else to your dream client? [….]

Chicago Boyz (Bruno Behrend) – Swapping a VAT for failing income tax is good policy

Bruno has a great wedge issue here – a wedge against elite GOP officeholders for reformists as much if not moreso than GOP vs. Democrats:

The solution is to make the case for a massive overhaul of the tax system, and transition the system from one that relies on income (corporate and individual and Soc. Sec.) taxation to one that relies on taxing consumption (VAT, National Sales Tax, or FairTax). This is a wonderful opportunity for a party of ideas (Republicans, before they succumbed to corrupt Hastertism) and a vibrant think tank community (before they began to resemble an echo chamber of conservo-libertarian apparatchiks promoting stale doctrine) to lay the ground work for a 3rd and 4th “American Century.”

There are even more new ideas (and political and economic benefits) to go along with this new (and superior) tax policy.

Why aren’t we talking about increasingly popular ideas like constitutional spending caps? Why aren’t we lauding the replacement of the the bureaucratic entitlement state with a yearly stipend for every American (see Fair Tax rebate or Charles Murray)?

Instead of fighting against a welfare state that most Americans still support (Soc. Sec., “health care reform,” and public education), why aren’t we framing our ideas as the “individualization” of government assistance through retirement accounts, health savings accounts, and scholarships and education savings accounts?

The question is whether enterprising politicians will run on these better policies, and whether they can get enough airplay to persuade the voters that they are workable (they are). My greatest fear for our nation is that we are already too far gone down the the road of ruin. We seem to be like that obese person who is just old enough and just heavy enough to avoid the hard work of getting back in shape or forgoing that “satisfying” meal.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Charles Hill on Grand Strategy. Hat tip to Ian.

Hill is dead right on higher education BTW….

Top Billing Juxtaposition on Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, For and Against:

FOR: Lord Robert Skidelsky – The 2006 Hayek Lecture: The Road to Serfdom Revisited

The second thing that one needs to know about the background of The Road to Serfdom was that it arose from Hayek’s involvement in the debate on central planning in the 1930s. Socialists had argued that a central-planning authority could replicate the economic benefits of the market, minus its costs, by causing state-run firms, required to equate marginal costs and prices, to respond appropriately to simulated market signals. Hayek claimed that this was completely utopian. Central planning was doomed to failure because the knowledge needed to make it work could never be centralized. Further, it ignored the role of market competition in discovering new wants and processes. It would thus freeze economic life at a low level.

In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek extended his critique of central planning to politics. He defined central planning as the central direction of all economic activity toward particular ends. The nature of the ownership system was not crucial, since central planning removed the essential rights of owners or managers. Democratic central planning, he declared, was an illusion, because there was never sufficient voluntary consent for the goals of the central plan and because partial planning would lead to problems that required ever more extensive planning. So planning involved a “progressive suppression of that economic freedom without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.” Fascism and communism were totalitarian culminations of what had started as democratic socialism. Western democracies were fighting fascism without realizing that they were on the slippery slope themselves. Against the planners, Hayek upheld the fundamental principle that in the ordering of our affairs, we should make as much use as possible of the “spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion.”

AGAINST: Fabius Maximus –Looking at one of the most popular books in the conservative canon: The Road to Serfdom

Summary

The post-WWII era provided two great sociological experiments. 

• The phenomenal economic success of the Asian Tigers – esp vs. the more statist nations of Latin America – proved the superiority of government-regulated but essentially free-market systems.
• The success of the Scandinavian nations – along with the US and UK – have disproven the fears of Hayek and others.  Mixed-system economies, with their high degree of government intervention in the economic sphere, do not tend to slide down the slope to totalitarianism.  At least over the few generation-long horizons which Hayek and others discussed.

Hayek’s work provides a salutary warning, but the passage of 66 years have disproven his specific forecasts.  Western governments have grown in breadth and reach since 1944, esp in Scandinavia.  Yet none have succumbed to totalitarianism, or even moved visibly in that direction (Hayek gave himself an out by saying this was “not inevitable”).

In fact America has moved in the reverse direction.  When Hayek wrote a large segment of America’s people lived under goverment-sponsored oppression.  Beatings of Black veterans in Mississippi and South Carolina (e.g. Isaac Woodard) sparked President Truman’s historic executive orders taking the first step to rolling back the South’s successful counter-revolution after Reconstruction.  This continued at a high but decreasing level though the 1960?s (e.g., the 1965 murder of  Viola Liuzzo).

How many conservatives reading his book see these contradictions with history?  My guess:  very few.   It’s such a useful theory, even if false (creationism serves a similar role)! 

I note that Paul Krugman also wrote something on von Hayek and Keynes recently, but it was a brief and largely stupid ahistorical comment to score contemporary partisan points, so I won’t link to it ( and I say this while being in agreement with Krugman that there’s a potential deflationary danger present). Some ironies, von Hayek despite being lionized by conservatives, did not consider himself to be one and Keynes, von Hayek’s alleged statist bete noire was favorably inclined to The Road to Serfdom. The back and forth between the two great economists was a lot more nuanced and complex in their exchanges than is generally presented in the media.

Schmedlap –Politics and the Military Profession

Here is the deal. Military service and political office do not go together.

What do I mean by that? I am not just referring to the rare instance in which someone does both simultaneously. I am referring to four situations, in descending order of egregiousness:

Serving in the military while also serving in elected office.Serving in elected office soon after serving in the militaryServing in the military soon after serving in elected office.

Voting while in the military

Why do I see a problem with any or all of these? I will hit on the basic philosophical issue first and then hit on each situation individually.

A really good, thought-provoking, post. I don’t agree with all of it as Schmedlap has purposefully staked out an extreme position on the interrelationship of democracy, citizenship and military service but he raises good arguments that challenge contemporary assumptions ( or even assumptions held by a historical military figure of such unimpeachable personal rectitude as George C. Marshall).

AFJ:  Col. Joseph Collins – The way ahead in Afghanistan

….First, there will no doubt be some key players who favor continuing with the U.S. plan that is still unfolding. Given the protracted nature of such conflicts, and barring unforeseen surprises, the battlefield situation in December is not likely to be radically different than it is now. Conservatives will prefer to keep up the full-blown counterinsurgency operation for a few more years and move slowly on the transition to Afghan responsibility for security.

….A second option would be to reduce over a year (July 2011-July 2012) most of the 30,000 soldiers and Marines in the surge combat forces and make security assistance and capacity building – not the provision of combat forces – ISAF’s top priority. Remaining ISAF combat units could further integrate with fielded Afghanistan National Army units. Maximum emphasis would be placed on quality training for soldiers and policemen. To build Afghan military capacity, ISAF commanders would also emphasize the development of Afghan combat enablers, such as logistics, transportation and aviation. In this option, the focal point of allied strategy would be on the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan and not on allied combat forces.

….A third option – compatible with the options noted above, either sequentially or concurrently – is for the Afghan government, with coalition and U.N. support, to move out smartly on reintegration of individuals and reconciliation with parts of or even the entire Afghan Taliban. To do this, Karzai first will have to win over the nearly 60 percent of the Afghan population that is not Pashtun. These groups – Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazarras and others – were treated poorly by the Taliban and today often live in areas outside Taliban influence. They will want peace, but not at a price that threatens their regions or allows the “new” Taliban much latitude.

SEED – Suicidal Tendencies

Are higher IQ people more prone to suicide?

Coming Anarchy: Curzon  –The Changing Role of the US Secretary of State

And what role do….women play here?

Thomas P.M. Barnett – Mattis becomes Central Command boss

More on Mattis.

In Harmonium – Ethics, honour and the dangers of over-ritualization, part 1 and Ethics, honour and the dangers of over-ritualization, part 2

Newscientist.com – Google should answer some searching questions

Is Google shaping your search results to benefit Google?

RECOMMWNDED VIEWING:

Benoit Mandelbrot on the complexity of “roughness”

Top Billing! Steven Pressfield –  General Hal Moore

Steve interviews General Hal Moore who fought the Battle of Ia Drang and wrote the bestselling, We Were Soldiers Once….And Young:

SP: Of all the people I’ve had the honor to meet, you are without a doubt the one who knows the most about thinking creatively under fire-literally. Many of the readers of this series are artists and entrepreneurs, who are fighting their own wars every day. Bullets and bombs might not be flying, but the enemy (usually interior) can be pretty real just the same. That’s one reason why I wanted to talk to you, Gen. Moore-to see if we can cross-pollinate a little, from real war to the “war of art.”

One of the axioms you’re famous for is this:

“There is always one more thing you can do to increase your odds of success.”

What would you share with civilians (and active-duty service members) about increasing success? In your years of service, what was it that you did to increase the odds?

HM: I learned early on there’s always one more thing an officer can do to increase the chances of accomplishing his mission and getting his men back alive. In fact, it’s incumbent upon any commander leading men into harm’s way to beat his brains out, ahead of time, to figure out that one thing-and every other element he can come up with, too. I instinctively think ahead. I run scenarios before things happen. I plan ahead for things I know are coming-and, more important, for what I don’t know is coming. Surprises. When you’ve rehearsed for multiple contingencies, even if it’s only in your imagination, you can deal with crises when they happen (and they always do) with a higher degree of calm, which in turn keeps everyone around you in a problem-solving mode and not a panic mode. I’m a great believer in reading. A military commander should know as much of the history of warfare as he can, so sudden reversals don’t catch him by surprise. There’s nothing new under the sun. Everything that happens to you and me under fire has happened already to Hannibal, Napoleon, Alexander, you name it.

Committee of Public Safety –  Worth Reading: Special Operations and Strategy: From World War II to the War on Terrorism

….What politicians really want is a giant red button they can push and, voila, victory is had, quick, easy, cheap, and bloodless. The best way to win a bigger slice of the power that the politicians are dishing out is to take your tactical solution and present it as a strategic (and therefore political) solution: the Easy Button. Macgregor’s particular Easy Button is Armor and, unlike many aspiring Easy Button advocates, Macgregor was actually allowed to push his Easy Button. His operational concept was the kernel around which the plan for the second invasion of Iraq in 2003 congealed. Unfortunately, his preferred solution was similar to Bernard Finel’s “repetitive raiding“: speed into Iraq, destroy Iraq’s government, set up a new Iraq government, and withdraw to avoid irritating the natives.

Macgregor was outraged when his preferred strategy was ignored in favor of whatever strategy it was that guided the American occupation of Iraq from 2003-2007. In his eyes, like Finel’s, an occupation would lead to a quagmire. Even worse, it would open a window of opportunity for Macgregor’s Light Infantry opponents, especially that irritating David Petraeus. Macgregor left the Army in disgust and Light Infantry was able to defeat Armor in a long war of attrition between 2003 and 2007.

Joseph Fouche is giving the War Nerd a run for his money as the Satirist-in-Residence of the .mil/strategy blogosphere.

Howard Bloom at Kurzweilai.net – Is the iPad the New Guillotine?

….Most people mean well when they go to work. Most want to do good. So how did the bureaucratic system become vicious? The cruelty of bureaucracy comes from the isolation of bureaucrats among their peers, the isolation of bureaucrats from the people they serve. Those who never have to face their customers and their constituents can treat their clients with savage indifference. On the other hand, those who know the people they serve as human beings are far more likely to respond with care, creativity, and empathy. And thanks to Google, private databases remotely available via laptop, and IM, text messages, and cell phone calls, bureaucrats no longer need to be isolated in cubbyholes attached to endless corridors filled with other bureaucrats. They can go out among the fellow humans to whom their services have been marketed and promised

The anti-bureaucratic jihad of Howard Bloom. 

Insurgent Consciousness – Mexican Bandhs

….Greg and Jan may be correct that government  forces are winning tactically.  Nonetheless, tactical military superiority will not necessarily produce strategic success.  

Consider the Zetas’ attempt to free their boss described above.  If we look narrowly at this operation, it looks like a Zeta failure; the Mexican Army convoy carrying El Tory managed to escape the Zetas’ blockade.  Nonetheless, if we conceive of the blockade as a bandh, and not merely as an effort to free the boss, the Zetas’ chances for continued success in this city increase.  The Zetas have used such blockades for this purpose before.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

3-D Map of the Universe

Edward Luttwak on “The Grand strategy of the Byzantine Empire”

That’s it!

Ignite, which is essentially trying to be TED jr. on crack, has a 5 minute presentation by Heather Knight on efforts to satisfy man’s ancient desire to anthropomorphize his environment by building “charismatic robots”

Hat tip to John Hagel.