Asian Tigers

Banaue rice terraces Philippines
Low yield, but very pretty.

Astral Codex Ten has posted a book review of How Asia Works. I think they have some good points, especially land reform. The post goes on at some length, but this introduction covers it pretty well:

What was the best thing that ever happened? From a very zoomed-out, by-the-numbers perspective, it has to be China's sudden lurch from Third World basketcase to dynamic modern economy. A billion people went from starving peasants to the middle class. In the 1960s, sixty million people died of famine in the Chinese countryside; by the 2010s, that same countryside was criss-crossed with the world's most advanced high-speed rail network, and dotted with high-tech factories.

And the best thing that ever happened kept happening, again and again. First it was Japan during the Meiji Restoration. Then it was Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s. Then China in the 90s. Now Vietnam and others seem poised to follow.

(fun trivia question: ignoring sudden oil windfalls, what country has had the highest percent GDP growth over the past 30 years? Answer, as far as I can tell: the People's Democratic Republic of Laos.)

There was nothing predetermined about this. These countries started with nothing. In 1950, South Korea and Taiwan were poorer than Honduras or the Congo. But they managed to break into the ranks of the First World even while dozens of similar countries stayed poor. Why?

Joe Studwell claims this isn't mysterious at all. You don't have to bring in culture, genetics, or anything complicated like that. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc, just practiced good economic policy. Any country that tries the same economic policy will get equally rich, as China and Vietnam are discovering. Unfortunately, most countries practice bad economic policy, partly because the IMF / World Bank / rich country economic advisors got things really wrong. They recommended free markets and open borders, which are good for rich countries, but bad for developing ones. Developing countries need to start with planned economies, then phase in free market policies gradually and in the right order. Since rich country economists kept leading everyone astray, the only countries that developed properly were weird nationalist dictatorships and communist states that ignored the Western establishment out of spite. But now the economic establishment is starting to admit its mistakes, giving other countries a chance to catch up.

How Asia Works is Studwell's guide to good economic policy. He gives a three-part plan for national development. First, land reform. Second, industrial subsidies plus export discipline. Third, financial policy in service of the first two goals.

This & That

Men's communication is like semaphores in the navy - direct and to the point. Women's communication is like interpretive dance. No wonder communication between the two sexes is so difficult.

We might need some land reform in US, too. Are there any small farmers in the US who are making a living? And what's a small farmer anyway? If good crop land costs $10,000 an acre, a 40 acre plot would cost $400K, as much as a small house in a big city. On a vaguely related note, McDonalds stopped buying pork from confinement operations. Those were pretty inhumane. Most large operations that raise food animals are pretty disgusting. 

Since our homeless population continues to grow, maybe what we need is a new peasant class. That should be a step up for the homeless because even peasants have someplace to live. Maybe take some largish tracts of farm land and carve it up into homesteads. Maybe do this around small, rural farming communities that are slowing fading away.

In season 7 of Bosch, which we just finished watching, Lieutenant Billets, a not particularly attractive woman, is revealed to be a lesbian. A couple of patrolmen take to harassing her, she fights back and the twerps are punished. The key point I wanted to make was that the people harassing her were twerps. These are a couple of grown men acting like kids. Maybe that's typical, but it was certainly juvenile. And maybe that's the problem, people are trying to make a federal case out of people being bad babies. Punishing babies with the law is just going to be a waste of time. Babies are taught by people saying 'no' in a firm voice and maybe spanking if they do something egregious or dangerous, and that's usually enough. As they grow up they should become more aware of the rules and become amenable to following them. Unfortunately, some people never seem to grow up. Perhaps baby crimes should be punished with baby punishments, like spanking, or a right cross to the chin.

Property & Property Rights

Working in the Rice Paddy - AP

How Authoritarians Turn Rural Areas Into Their Strongholds by Michael Albertus

Michael explains how land reform can improve a country's economic situation or saddle it with a yoke of tyranny. His explanation makes a lot of sense.

I recently added The Atlantic to my news feed. I've read some good articles in there in the past, but I was surprised by the amount of dreck that was showing up. I was on the verge of deleting them until this story showed up.

P.S. The photo comes from the article, but they provided no caption, so I asked Google's image search to identify it. Google usually does a pretty good job, but this time all it came up with was 'steppe' and a bunch of pictures of horses on grassland. Got to admit that those sneaky farmers do a pretty good job of imitating horses.

Grocery Robots

How many robots does it take to run a grocery store?
Tom Scott
On one hand, this is great. Tell the world (or Alexa) you want a box cheeze doodles, and presto, a few minutes later a box shows up at your door without anyone actually having to do anything, except the delivery driver, and that's just until they get the automated drone delivery system going.

On the other hand, all those people who were employed picking and packing groceries are out of a job. But all the people who are designing and building robots have got all the work they can handle. That would be okay if it took as many people to design and build the robots as the number of grocery pickers they were replacing, but probably not. I suspect it's more like one to ten.

Yes, all these fancy machines and automated processes are eliminating the drudgery from many people's lives, but we aren't giving them anything else to do. If you want to be a part of society, you need to have a stake in society, which means owning something of real value, and that means real estate. It doesn't have to be much, an eight foot square shop might be enough. But being on the dole, playing video games and protesting aren't going to get you there. Makes me think we might be due for some land reform. 

Via IAman

i give it two out of five ches.

by Marko Kloos

Reason.com has a nice little bit of snark on Rolling Stone Magazine’s insipid “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For” article. For those of you who don’t want to drive up the click counter at Rolling Stone: one Jesse A. Myerson basically repackages the main pillars of the Communist Manifesto to appeal to modern-day ultra-progressive hipster sensibilities and advocates guaranteed public-sector jobs, a basic living stipend, and, oh yeah, abolishing private property. It reads like something a bunch of 19-year-old sociology students cooked up at Starbucks in an hour and a half over MacBooks and $5 lattes.

Look, I grew up in a divided country. Half of us had to live under the tyrannical yoke of capitalism, with private property and landlords and greedy bankers and stuff. The other half got to live in a place where every single item on Jesse A. Myerson’s economic reform wish list was in place. Guaranteed employment and basic living stipend from the state? Check. Communal ownership of everything (“take back the land”)?Check. Social security for all? Check. Public banking system? Check. On top of that, free education, free child care, free healthcare, and the strictest gun control imaginable.

Guess which half of the country had to put up barbed wire and minefields after a few years to keep its population from fleeing to the other half? Guess which half of the country ran its economy and environment into the ground?

Holy balls, that article is so chock-full of starry-eyed, self-righteous coffeehouse Trotzkyism, it practically vibrates with revolutionary fervor. Did you know that landlords, for example, don’t really do anything for their rent money? That they just “claim ownership” of some property and then sit there and collect cash from the working class? It’s true. This is amazing news to this landlord and his wife, who have been diligently paying off two mortgages all these years, and hired a property management company to maintain the place and make sure our tenants’ needs are met. Why, just last month we oppressed our poor working-class tenants by buying a new range and dishwasher to replace the old appliances that were starting to go all wonky on them. But yeah, other than paying the mortgage on the place every month, paying the management company, and making sure anything that breaks is fixed promptly, we do pretty much nothing but collect rent checks and sit on our asses.

Anyway, that’s what you get when you run articles on economics written by professional Occupy Reality folks who have never had to make a payroll. Bet you that article is getting lots of clicks and views, though, which was probably the entire point. It sure as shit has nothing to do with progressivism or upsetting the current order, because Rolling Stone is about as hip and counter-culture as Citibank these days.

Stolen entire from the munchkin wrangler.
Via view from the porch

Clinton's Blacklist

Envigado F.C.

Looking for pictures to go with my last post, I stumble over this article about how a Colombian football club (soccer to US'uns) has managed to get themselves on Clinton's backlist because they are suspected of laundering drug money for the evil drug cartels.
   The Clinton List? That would be Bill Clinton, who set up this list back when he was President. It is apparently still hanging around despite a couple of Federal courts declaring it unconstitutional. (At least I think it's Bill, or Will, not Hill. I couldn't find the origin, The best I could find was a list of revisions going back to 1994, which, along with rumor and innuendo, kind of points to Willy.) Is the ACLU working on this? If not, why not?

US Embassy in Lima, Peru

Short refresher on South America:

• Brazil is the big country with Rio de Janeiro and the big fuss about the World Cup.
• Venezuela elected chubby Chavez, a populist who made friends with Cuba and pissed off everyone who had any money. He's dead but his policies live on.
• Peru, a poor mountainous country famous for being the home of Peruvian Marching Powder. The US Embassy is the biggest building in the capital, funded almost entirely by the DEA.
• Argentina and Chile are back to back across the Andes mountains. They are the southernmost countries, have temperate climates as opposed to tropical, and might almost be considered first world countries. They both also have a history of mass-murder carried out by right wing death squads. That seems to have gone away, but it's still a feature on most of the rest of the continent.
• Columbia is trying hard to be a first world country, mostly by emulating the USA by fighting the commies (FARC) and the druggies, which may be the same thing. They pursue this course because we give them a lot of money to do so.
• Bolivia, which is also famous for Peruvian Marching Powder, probably because both here and Peru are mostly high elevation mountains, and coca leaves are what people use to in order to function at 15,000 feet without oxygen.
• Uraguay and Paraguay are smaller countries on the border between Argentina and Brazil. Uraguay is on the Atlantic Ocean, Paraguay is land-locked.
• Ecuador is a small country on the Pacific Ocean.
• The Guinea states, three small countries on the northeast coast. France has a space launch port there.

So once again the War On Drugs is distorting world affairs like nothing since the U.S.S.R. collapsed, or the Saudi Oil Embargo, which got me to wondering why, if the War On Drugs is so manifestly evil, do we continue to pursue it? Which brings me to money, movies and conspiracy theories.

    There are people in the USA who are making billions of dollars off of the illicit drug trade. I'm not talking about the gang bangers shooting each other on downtown street corners, or flashy blacks with their gold chains and their pimped out Escalades. I'm talking about the guy in the big house. He wears a gray suit, drives a Mercedes, might have an office somewhere, but he doesn't conduct any real business in it. He is totally invisible. Might even have friends on Capital Hill. I mean what better way to influence legislation?

    This-guy / these-people really like having all that money coming in and if anyone even thinks about changing the law I'll bet they get a visit, a very discreet visit from a nobody who manages to convey the message that they should drop any attempt to change the law or . . .  Whatever-it-is is left unsaid, but you can bet that the message is crystal clear, something along the lines of "nice kids you got there, shame if sumthin' were to happen to 'em". Now they might get all self-righteous and call the cops. That might protect his family, for the moment, but all it really means is that a little more political arm twisting will need to be done to see that no reform bill ever makes it to the floor.

Update November 2016 added caption to top picture so that we have a reference to the name of the club. Wikipedia has an article about the Envigado F.C. (Football Club), but it does not mention being blacklisted.

Chucky's Seven Levels of Hell

Dante's 7 Circles of Hell

I don't think our criminal justice system is working very well. By all accounts our prisons are pretty horrible places, expensive to build, expensive to maintain and overrun by gangs. I would also say they were ineffective in accomplishing their intended purpose if I knew what the intended purpose was. Are we trying to reform people? Punish them? Enslave and exploit them? Remove them from civilized society? Or are we just trying to keep the prison-industrial system going and keep all the contractors and prison guards employed?

I'm thinking farms and ranches would be better for maybe half of the people in prison. I think a lot of people would be happy just to have something to do. Of course there are those who are just going to rebel against anyone telling them what to do. Well, if they do, they can go down to the next level.

Homelessness seems to be a big problem. Maybe a big campground would help. This would be level one. Any vagrants, people caught loitering or jaywalking, having too many parking tickets, we'd put them on a bus and send them to the campground. They are free to go where they want, but if they show up in the city again doing the same bullshit, we put them on the bus and send them back to the campground. Probably have to be 50 or even miles outside of the city to where the land is cheap enough you can afford to establish a campground.

Let the campground govern itself. Anybody they decide is misbehaving goes to the next level - a campground encircled with a fence. Every month or so the people in this second level decide whether anyone of their number can be trusted enough to be elevated to the first level. Anyone they decide is misbehaving according to their rules to cast down into a lower level. That level only meets quarterly to decide on who gets parole. Each successive layer has a higher fence and a longer time between meetings of the parole board.

This is Sparta Scene (full) HD
THE VTER

The bottom level is a circular area surrounding a bottomless pit. You get on the wrong side of the people on the seventh level and into the pit you go.