This is not a building…

… it’s a facade with an exo-skeleton.

Seen in Piccadilly yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Chevy Chase couldn’t ad-lib a fart after a baked-bean dinner.”

• Johnny Carson

Now why does this remind me of a certain scene in Blazing Saddles?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Norah Jones | Come Away With Me

Link

Long Read of the Day

The liberal complacency of Martin Amis

Terry Eagleton takes a more disenchanted view of the recently-departed enfant terrible, whose “exquisite style”, he thinks, “hid a squalid sense of morality”.

Part of Amis knew this frenetically consumerist culture from the inside, while an alter ego submitted it to savagely entertaining satire in the name of a moral norm which is present only by its absence. His fiction thus refutes the old cliché that satire requires a stable standard by which to judge. If anything goes, however, nothing has value — not even shock-value, which is why calling a book Dead Babies smacked of clamouring for attention in an offence-proof world. The great modernist writers had the good fortune to confront a readership that was still eminently shockable. Indeed, the title Dead Babies would have been unthinkable in the Sixties, only a decade before the book appeared. In a postmodern world where the monstrous and psychopathic are routine, Amis didn’t have the modernists’ advantage. This was a civilisation in which nothing could be said, which was both the object of his satire and a source of his endless verbal fertility…

Note the reference to “a moral norm that is present only by its absence”. A typical Eagleton gibe, I guess. Entertaining nonetheless. What I liked about the piece was the contrast it provides to the prevailing reverential tone of the obsequies.

Books, etc.

Freedom to Read

From a post by Richard Ovenden on the LRB blog:

On 10 May 1933, a bonfire was held on Unter den Linden in Berlin. Watched by a cheering crowd of almost forty thousand, a group of students marched up to the fire carrying a bust of Magnus Hirschfeld, the Jewish founder of the Institute of Sexual Sciences. Chanting the ‘Feuersprüche’, a series of fire incantations, they threw the bust on top of thousands of volumes from the institute’s library, which had joined books by Jewish and other ‘un-German’ writers (gays and communists prominent among them) that had been seized from bookshops and libraries. Rows of young men in Nazi uniforms stood around the fire saluting. Goebbels gave a speech:

No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! … The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you … You do well to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed.

Ninety years later, the excuses of ‘decency’ and ‘morality’ are being used by those who seek to control the books that people can access in public libraries across many US states.

PEN America has tracked more than four thousand instances of books being challenged or removed from American libraries since July 2021, with more than 1400 between July and December 2022 alone…

As the American republic continues its long slide into authoritarianism, the echoes of 20th-century fascism are increasingly striking. Wonder when the book-burning will start.

My commonplace booklet

 A baby hears Pavarotti sing “Nessun Dorma” for the first time

Entrancing video.

Errata

Oscar Wilde’s quote about Wagner’s music in yesterday’s edition was incorrect. It should have read ”I like Wagner’s music more than any other music….” Many thanks to the eagle-eyed reader who pointed this out.

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Where have all the cyclists gone?

Seen in a nature reserve yesterday.

Quote of the Day

”Military glory is the attractive rainbow that arises in showers of blood.”

• Abraham Lincoln.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Beach Boys | A Day In The Life Of A Tree

Link

Long Read of the Day

Setting time on fire and the temptation of The Button

Ethan Mollick has discovered that, when composing a document in Google Docs, he’s now offered a ‘button’ labelled “Help me write” which, when clicked, invites you to prompt Bard (Google’s LLM) to write the article/essay/email on which you were embarking.

As far as I can see, this facility is currently only available to selected users of Google Docs in the US, but it’ll soon be everywhere. I do much of my writing in Drafts (which runs only on Apple kit) and it already offers a similar button which summons ChatGPT to one’s aid (if that is the correct term for the services of a stochastic parrot).

Mollick has written an interesting post on the longer-term implications universal acceptance of the apparent shortcuts offered by ‘AI’.

So why do I think this is a big deal? Because, when faced with the tyranny of the blank page, people are going to push The Button. It is so much easier to start with something than nothing. Students are going to use it start essays. Managers are going to use it to start emails, or reports, or documents. Teachers will use it when providing feedback. Scientists will use to write grants. And, just as we are seeing with Adobe incorporating AI into Photoshop, when AI gets integrated into a familiar tool, adoption become simple. Everyone is going to use The Button.

Now, there are a million implications to outsourcing our first drafts to AI. We know people anchor on the first idea they see, influencing their future work, so even drafts that are completely rewritten will be AI-tinged. People may not be as thoughtful about what they write, or the lack of effort may mean they don’t think through problems as deeply. We may not learn how to write as well. We may be flooded with low-quality content. All of these implications are significant, but I want to focus on one thing that, as an academic at a business school, really stands out to me: the coming crisis of meaning…

It’s an interesting disquisition on the way the time one puts into composing a document can provides an implicit signal about its worth, which may be useful to its recipient. One example he uses is a task that many academics, especially senior ones, have to do — write letters of recommendation for students or junior colleagues. I have to do this quite a lot, and I put a fair amount of time into it. Recipients (academics often have to write the same kinds of letter) will easily be able to spot how much work has gone into a reference, and assign a value to it accordingly. But what if I started to use a tool like GPT-4 which can rattle off plausible-looking references in a minute or two?

Mollick’s essay has prompted an interesting response from one of his readers, Pascal Montjovent:

As an early adopter, I’ve been immersed in AI and digital technologies, employing tools like GPT and Midjourney in my day-to-day activities for months now. Far from being a luddite, I embrace these developments with open arms, recognizing their potential to shape the future.

But in my field, ever since film cameras were supplanted by digital cameras, and subsequently by smartphones, everyone seems to think that creating a movie is simple.

Clients and agencies have started to cut down on delivery times and budgets. Faith in the expertise of professionals has plummeted.

As a result, projects are less prepared, the duration of shoots is diminished, as is that of post-production: “You don’t need so much time to deliver this edit or mix to me.”

What fades away with this shift towards digital and AI, is the time for reflection, the capacity to take a step back and contemplate what we are doing. The ability to reexamine one’s work after a break or to review an edit after a good night’s sleep is dwindling.

Soon, everyone will be familiar with the concept of “simply pressing The Button”.

Everyone will know that a letter of recommendation can be written in twelve minutes and that minutes of a meeting can be automatically transcribed during the work session.

Yet, the time saved won’t be repurposed for more enriching activities. It will merely serve as a means to accept more work, for the same pay of course, and without the luxury of reflection time.

We’ve drawn closer to the condition of a hamster in its wheel. We are running faster. But for what purpose, and in which direction? This is the question that looms large and, to my mind, requires our immediate attention and action.

A lawyer got ChatGPT to do his research, but he isn’t AI’s biggest fool

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

This story begins on 27 August 2019, when Roberto Mata was a passenger on an Avianca flight 670 from El Salvador to New York and a metal food and drink trolley allegedly injured his knee. As is the American way, Mata duly sued Avianca and the airline responded by asking that the case be dismissed because “the statute of limitations had expired”. Mata’s lawyers argued on 25 April that the lawsuit should be continued and appending a list of over half a dozen previous court cases that apparently set precedents supporting their argument.

Avianca’s lawyers and Judge P Kevin Castel then dutifully embarked on an examination of these “precedents”, only to find that none of the decisions or the legal quotations cited and summarised in the brief existed.

Why? Because ChatGPT had made them up. Whereupon, as the New York Times report puts it, “the lawyer who created the brief, Steven A Schwartz of the firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, threw himself on the mercy of the court… saying in an affidavit that he had used the artificial intelligence program to do his legal research – ‘a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable’.”

This Schwartz, by the way, was no rookie straight out of law school…

Do read the whole thing

Why Trump will be the GOP candidate next year

Janan Ganesh wrote a very perceptive column in the Financial Times (behind the paywall) about Ron DeSantis’s chances of defeating Trump for the Republican nomination. The Florida governor is under the impression that evidence of his ability to get things done in his home state gives him an advantage in the contest with Trump.

In this, Ganesh argues, he is deluded. This contest is not about any kind of competence, but about something else entirely.

“Consider for a moment,” he writes,

what Donald Trump gives to his average follower. Membership in a vast nationwide communion of like-minded people. A paternal figure in a confusing world. The frisson of transgression: middle-aged whites don’t often in life get to play the rebel.

Next to all this, what is the marginal benefit of seeing him win an actual election? What, after that, is the marginal benefit of watching his policies come into force? No doubt, Trump fans would rather have these bonus items than not. But he has done them a profound emotional and almost spiritual service before it ever gets to that.

It is not clear that Ron DeSantis understands this about populism.

Poor DeSantis is logical and thinks that modern politics is about getting things done. Ganesh feels sorry for him.

The extent to which it is about belonging — about replacing the group identity that people once got from a church or a trade union — is lost on his rationalist ken. In this one sense, he thinks like a liberal.

And therefore, in the crazed world of American rightwing politics, he’s doomed.

I suppose I should be pleased about this. When DeSantis first appeared on the horizon I was alarmed: the last thing American democracy needed was a competent autocrat. I needn’t have worried. The choice the American people will have to make next year will be between an elderly but competent Democrat, and an incompetent but buoyant autocrat.

My commonplace booklet

If you live in the UK and drink tap-water (and, let’s face it, who doesn’t?) it’d be worth watching this brief video from openDemocracy. Among other things, it illustrates what happens when a major country turns over its water supply to a bunch of private-equity charlatans.

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Fontenay on an August evening

The Abbey of Fontenay in northern Burgundy. One of the loveliest and most peaceful places I know.

Quote of the Day

”I can always hire mathematicians, but they can’t hire me.” * Thomas Edison

I was thinking about this a few weeks ago when I gave a talk about AI to a hedge fund which employs a hundred mathematicians and 500 software engineers.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Ombra mai fu | Xerxes HWV 40 | Andreas Scholl, countertenor.

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Open the pod bay doors

You may have seen the recent spate of stories about how ‘AI’ (aka machine-learning) has ‘discovered’ a new antibiotic.

I found this LRB blog post by Liam Shaw really illuminating. Hope you might too.

It has been reported that abaucin was ‘discovered using AI’. This needs a bit of unpacking. Finding any new drug means searching through ‘chemical space’ – the many possible configurations of atoms that can make up molecules. It’s difficult to get a grip on how vast this universe of possibility is. Most drugs consist of molecules with fewer than thirty atoms and a molecular mass of less than 500 daltons (a hydrogen atom has a mass of one dalton, give or take). It’s hard to estimate, but even if you restrict yourself to a handful of elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur) there are at least 1060 possible molecules that fit these criteria. This is a big number, more than a thousand times the number of hydrogen atoms in the Sun. Exploring this chemical universe in its entirety is impossible. The hope is that using predictive algorithms from machine learning can help guide you to the right galaxy…

Good example of how to explain something that’s rather complex.

An auto CEO came very close to saying the right thing about heavy EV batteries

A story from The Verge.

The race to cram heavier and heavier batteries into bigger and bigger electric vehicles hit a speed bump today when a major automaker CEO finally threw up his hands and asked why.

“I have no idea what’s going on in this industry right now,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said during his company’s capital markets event Monday. He referenced electric vehicles coming out with 450–500 miles of range, including “a three-row crossover” announced today that was likely the new electric Cadillac Escalade.

Higher ranges will necessitate bigger batteries, he noted, adding, “These batteries are huge.”

“These batteries are huge.”

Farley is right. US automakers are relying on supersized batteries to power their equally supersized EVs — namely, all the electric trucks that will soon flood the US market…

That’s why taxing EVs on kerbside weight might be the right thing to do.

Books, etc.

Jeff Jarvis’s new book arrived the other day (I’m reviewing it for The Literary Review). It’s basically a book-length exploration of an idea first articulated by the Danish scholar Thomas Pettitt in 2010 — the notion that the period from, roughly, the 15th century to the 20th, an age defined by textuality — was really an interruption (a parenthesis) in the broader arc of human communication. And that we are now, via the architecture of the web, gradually returning to a state in which pre-Gutenberg orality — conversation, gossip, ephemera — defines our media culture.

There’s a nice video clip of Pettitt explaining his idea here.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Jeff does with it.

My commonplace booklet

Submarine cable map of the world

Link

Cyberspace was once defined (by William Gibson, I think) as “the space behind the screen”. Nowadays, I suppose that people think of it as residing in the ‘Cloud’ (another misleading euphemism for thousands of huge metal sheds called ‘data-centres’ or even ‘server farms’. But there are good grounds for thinking that Cyberspace also exists underwater, in the global network of submarine cables.

Note also how the cables mirror the pathways of 19th century colonial power.

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Flora and Fauna of East Anglia

A real basket-case, seen yesterday in a nice farm just outside Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself”

• Raymond Chandler

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton | Walkin’ Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Why So Many Conservatives Feel Like Losers

You may have noticed that some kind of wacky US-funded conference about ‘real’ conservatism took place in London recently. Fortunately for the rest of us, Helen Lewis was there. And her dispatch is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.

Sample:

The first day of the conference was dominated by one subject: babies. In the opening session, Miriam Cates, a Conservative member of Parliament, identified low birth rates as the biggest problem facing the West, attributing the phenomenon both to concrete policy challenges and a liberal individualism that she deemed “completely powerless to resist a cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls.”

Over the next two days, speakers offered a lot of this sort of thing—what George W. Bush might have described as “some weird shit.” Cates’s fellow Tory Danny Kruger devoted part of his speech to condemning a “new religion” of “Marxism and narcissism and paganism.” The historian David Starkey claimed that critical race theorists “do not care about Black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture.” I began to keep score of how many speakers asserted that Britain had been through a cultural revolution, the evidence for which was that students are quite left-wing and annoying. Over and over, this was attributed to “indoctrination.”

Or this:

Undeterred by outside criticism, Hazony played the hits, attacking “woke neo-Marxism” and ending with an exhortation that we should all have more children and become more religious. He was in happy company because the next speaker was Jacob Rees-Mogg (six children, the last of whom is named Sixtus). Rees-Mogg, a devout Catholic, started playing a caricature of an English toff in early life and has not stopped yet. His speech took in Saint Thomas Aquinas, Charlemagne, the Treaty of Westphalia, habeas corpus, Edward the Confessor, and occasional snatches of Latin. “Are DeSantis speeches like this?” texted a friend on the other side of the hall. “Slightly less about Aquinas and the French monarchy,” I replied. “Slightly more about Disney.”

Magical stuff. Do read it.

Ian Hacking RIP

The great Canadian philosopher of science has passed away at the age of 87.

There are two nice early obituaries in the NYT and the Globe and Mail

The last thing by him that I read was his terrific Introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of my favourite books. (I wrote a short essay about it when the anniversary edition appeared in 2012.)

Brad DeLong’s question

From his blog:

Text-producing Generative ChatBots are, in a sense, somewhat tuned (by actual human feedback) Internet simulators: they show you what the Internet would be likely to say in response to the prompt that you have fed it, based on its assessment of what pages on the Internet are “close” to your prompt. (Much of the magic is in the definition and metric of “close” that the neural network constructs for itself—a metric that is largely inaccessible and largely incomprehensible to humans. But I digress.) That makes text-producing Generative ChatBots a reasonable way of taking the temperature of the conventional wisdom of humanity, or rather of that part of humanity that is compelled by mercenary, addiction, or egocentric reasons to write on the Internet.

But what are picture-producing Generative ImageBots doing. Are they too Internet simulators? Are they a way of taking the temperature of… not the conventional wisdom… rather the id of humanity, or at least of that portion of humanity compelled by mercenary, addiction, or egocentric reasons to put pictures on the internet and write captions for them?

He goes on to try some prompts on Stable Diffusion (one of the Generative AIs that do images). The results are not very interesting (IMHO) but his question is nevertheless an insightful one.

Also, I like his formulation that LLMs “show you what the Internet would be likely to say in response to the prompt that you have fed it”.

My commonplace booklet

 Our delivery Yacht had a serious interaction with a large pod of Orcas

Absolutely riveting nine-minute video of a scary encounter in the Straits of Gibraltar.

If I had a yacht, I’d like this guy to be its captain.

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Lilies: helicopter view

A gift from a dinner guest the other day.

Quote of the Day

“The Internet is less a ‘marketplace of ideas (as conservatives and libertarians would have it) and more a ‘marketplace of passions’.”

• Will Davies, writing on fandom in the London Review of Books.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Pinetop Perkins | Pinetop’s Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution

Interesting profile in Wired.

“I was pretty freaking excited in the ’90s about the possibilities for a new kind of peer-to-peer economy. What we would build that would be like a TOR network of economics, the great Napsterization of economics in a digital environment,” he tells his students. But more recently, he continues, he’s turned his attention to something else that this new digital economy has created: “It made a bunch of billionaires and a whole lot of really poor, unhappy people.”

This kind of rhetoric is part of a recent, decisive shift in direction for Rushkoff. For the past 30 years, across more than a dozen nonfiction books, innumerable articles, and various media projects about the state of society in the internet age, Rushkoff had always walked a tightrope between optimism and skepticism. He was one of the original enthusiasts of technology’s prosocial potential, charting a path through the digital landscape for those who shared his renegade, anti-government spirit. As Silicon Valley shed its cyberpunk soul and devolved into an incubator of corporate greed, he continued to advocate for his values from within. Until now. Last fall, with the publication of his latest book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Rushkoff all but officially renounced his membership in the guild of spokespeople for the digital revolution. So what happened?

Like me, he’s a recovering Utopian.

Worth reading.

AI will be everywhere, but its rise will be mundane not apocalyptic

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

In March, OpenAI decided that it needn’t just be a service provider – it could also be a platform on which other companies could build businesses. So it published a set of application programming interfaces (API) that would allow developers to add a version of ChatGPT to their services (for a fee, of course) without having to sink shedloads of money into building and training their own language models. This was the step that more or less guaranteed that ChatGPT would, in due course, be everywhere.

A good analogy is what happened with Google Maps…

Read on.

How to regulate crypto: treat it like the gambling that it is

From Molly White (Whom God Preserve):

The UK Parliament’s Treasury Committee has released a report suggesting that the cryptocurrency industry should be regulated like gambling, rather than as a financial service:

1. Regardless of the regulatory regime, their price volatility and absence of intrinsic value means that unbacked cryptoassets will inevitably pose significant risks to consumers. Furthermore, consumer speculation in unbacked cryptoassets more closely resembles gambling than it does a financial service. We are concerned that regulating retail trading and investment activity in unbacked cryptoassets as a financial service will create a ‘halo’ effect that leads consumers to believe that this activity is safer than it is, or protected when it is not.

2. We strongly recommend that the Government regulates retail trading and investment activity in unbacked cryptoassets as gambling rather than as a financial service, consistent with its stated principle of ‘same risk, same regulatory outcome’.

That’s more like it.

The tech industry isn’t interested in history…

… because it thinks there’s nothing to be learned from it.

Revealing passage From The Verge’s report of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s gig at UCL the other day.

However, he said, he was hopeful about the future. Extremely hopeful. Altman says he believes even current AI tools will reduce inequality in the world and that there will be “way more jobs on the other side of this technological revolution.”

“This technology will lift all of the world up.”

“My basic model of the world is that the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy are the two limited inputs, sort of the two limiting reagents of the world. And if you can make those dramatically cheaper, dramatically more accessible, that does more to help poor people than rich people, frankly,” he said. “This technology will lift all of the world up.”

Altman clearly needs to read Power and Progress which chronicles a thousand years of technological development during which the most of the rewards went to the rich and powerful who owned the technology. Except for a few exceptional periods, the rising tide mostly floated yachts.

My commonplace booklet

 If you must go to court, get a proper lawyer.

A cautionary tale from the New York Times.

A man named Roberto Mata sued the airline Avianca, saying he was injured when a metal serving cart struck his knee during a flight to Kennedy International Airport in New York.

When Avianca asked a Manhattan federal judge to toss out the case, Mr. Mata’s lawyers vehemently objected, submitting a 10-page brief that cited more than half a dozen relevant court decisions. There was Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and, of course, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, with its learned discussion of federal law and “the tolling effect of the automatic stay on a statute of limitations.”

There was just one hitch: No one — not the airline’s lawyers, not even the judge himself — could find the decisions or the quotations cited and summarized in the brief.

That was because ChatGPT had invented everything…

It’s a hoot. Or, more pedantically perhaps, an hoot.

Errata

Re Kissinger at 100…

Holger Huber writes:

The quote from Mother Jones is confusing. It appears to say that Operation Breakfast (more precisely Operation Menu) caused between 150000 to 500000 casualties. Wikipedia states the following:

There are no confirmed estimates of Cambodians killed, wounded, or rendered homeless by Operation Menu. The Department of Defense estimated that the six areas bombed in Operation Menu (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snack, Dessert, and Supper) had a non-combatant population of 4,247. DOD planners stated that the effect of attacks could tend to increase casualties, as could the probable lack of protective shelters around Cambodian homes”.

MJ might have been mixing up Operation Menu with Operation Freedom Deal, about which Wikipedia has to say the following: The number of deaths caused by U.S. bombing has been disputed and is difficult to disentangle from the broader Cambodian Civil War. Estimates as wide-ranging as 30,000 to 600,000 have been cited. Sihanouk used a figure of 600,000 civil war deaths, while Elizabeth Becker reported over one million civil war deaths, military and civilian included, although other researchers could not corroborate such high estimates. Marek Sliwinski notes that many estimates of the dead are open to question and may have been used for propaganda, suggesting that the true number lies between 240,000 and 310,000.

Judith Banister and E. Paige Johnson described 275,000 war deaths as “the highest mortality that we can justify”. Patrick Heuveline states that “Subsequent reevaluations of the demographic data situated the death toll for the [civil war] in the order of 300,000 or less”. Of these civil war deaths, Sliwinski estimates that approximately 17.1% can be attributed to U.S. bombing, noting that this is far behind the leading causes of death, as the U.S. bombing was concentrated in under-populated border areas. Ben Kiernan attributes 50,000 to 150,000 deaths to the U.S. bombing. According to Larry Clinton Thompson, 150,000 seems to be the best estimate.

Whether that changes anything in one’s judgement of Henry Kissinger is a different matter, but I have been alway intrigued that Kissinger seems to be made often solely responsible for the US actions abroad, as if he was acting behind Nixon’s back.

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Business lunch?

Quote of the Day

“Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect . . .”

• Jonathan Swift

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn, Seán Keane, Paddy Glackin, Arty McGlynn & Paul Brady | Gradam Ceoil TG4 2007

Link

I still remember vividly the first time I heard Liam play — in a crowded room in an hotel on the coast of Galway Bay one Summer evening. I was mesmerised then, and am still whenever I come on a recording of him and his peers in action. There’s something about his calm, still impassivity and his absolute mastery of his instrument.

Long Read of the Day

An interview with Dan Wang

For years, one of the great treats in following the geopolitical aspects of technology was Dan Wang’s Annual Letter from China. But now he has left China and returned to the US, taking up a position at the Yale Law school. So Noah Smith (who had advised him years ago to make the move to China) booked a long interview with him, of which this is an edited transcript.

It’s fascinating. Here’s a sample:

Smith: What’s different about semiconductors and advanced aviation? Why has China not been as successful in catching up in those sectors?

Noah: I think there has been a consistent pattern of Chinese successes and failures. Any technology that demands the complex integration of different scientific areas is challenging for Chinese firms. Semiconductors bring together electrical engineering, chemistry, computer science, and more; aviation is the integration of aerodynamics, materials science, mechanical engineering, etc. China’s scientific capabilities have steadily risen, but I would say it’s still fairly weak. No surprise, perhaps, that Chinese firms weren’t able to produce mRNA vaccines, since its scientific establishment is unused to puttering around the fringes of new fields.

On the other hand, for any technology where the science is mature, and the complexity lies more with the manufacturing process, China tends to be strong. Take renewable technologies like solar photovoltaics or EV batteries. The science of turning light into electricity and power storage are pretty well understood. But Chinese firms have been able to outbuild their foreign competition (with plenty help from government support) in creating high-performing products. Putting together a battery, for example, involves around ten steps—from cell filling to final sealing—that demand perfect handoff at each stage. Chinese firms are really good at this, which they learned from the highly-demanding electronics supply chain.

And here the US tends to be weak. American manufacturers aren’t good at making products of high intricacy at high volume. And it sometimes trips over simple products too. It’s puzzling to me that American factories weren’t able to quickly retool to turn out masks and other personal protective equipment in the early days of 2020. There’s something quite strange about the US where it is able to make super-advanced products like AI, jet engines, semiconductor production equipment, but can’t build basic infrastructure or simple products…

Do read it. I think he should now start doing a Letter from America every year, aimed at Chinese audiences.

Books, etc.

Diane Coyle has been reading Ian Dunt’s book. Her brisk review of it is characteristically concise — as is the headling over it: “Competent government? Read and weep”.

It’s an excellent book, forensic in its analysis of the operations of the UK’s central government – and that is exactly why it’s so deeply depressing and angry-making. The chapters cover both the political processes – selection of MPs, role of special advisers, the imbalance of power between the Executive and Parliament, lobby journalism – and the official aspects – an amateur-by-design civil service that’s becoming ever-less capable, increasing tensions between ministers and officials, the dire impact of the Treasury. The book is even handed, pointing out that many of the trends that make for ineffective government today started in the 1990s or before, and were accelerated significantly by New Labour, before being turbo-charged by the succession of Conservative governments that have followed.

The key takeaways, she writes are:

• It would actually be a bad idea to reform the House of Lords as it’s the only part that semi-functions

• None of the actors in UK national politics have any incentive to change anything – for instance, proportional representation would be excellent but neither Tories nor Labour want it

• I already thought more devolution to sub-national levels is desirable, and now think it’s the only hope of introducing any competence into UK government (although many people in Whitehall and Westminster have the cheek to talk about a lack of capacity at local level).

And, she adds,

If you really want to get angry about the pervasive incompetence of the government, just read the chapter on Afghanistan. Shameful.

Welcome to ‘global Britain’.

I might just have to buy the book, even though I suspect that Dominic Cummings loves it.

My commonplace booklet

War criminal turns 100 this week

From Mother Jones:

In early 1969, shortly after Nixon moved into the White House and inherited the Vietnam War, he, Kissinger, and others cooked up a plan to secretly bomb Cambodia, in pursuit of enemy camps. With the perversely-named “Operation Breakfast” launched, White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman wrote in his diary, Kissinger and Nixon were “really excited.” The action, though, was of dubious legality; the United States was not at war with Cambodia and Congress had not authorized the carpet-bombing, which Nixon tried to keep a secret. The US military dropped 540,000 tons of bombs. They didn’t just hit enemy outposts. The estimates of Cambodian civilians killed range between 150,000 and 500,000.

I often think of Tom Lehrer’s crack that “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize”.

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