Life takes us in many strange directions and wonderful discoveries. It never turns out the way we thought it would.
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The Economist Magazine Cover For 09/14/2024
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September 14th 2024
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How we chose this week’s image
The Economist
Edward Carr
Deputy editor
The conventions have convened, the debaters have debated and suddenly America’s election night does not seem so very far away. As the campaigns switch into overdrive, three things are clear—the race is getting uglier, the result is on a knife-edge and, unfortunately, America’s way of running elections is destined to create conflict. Our cover this week is about how all of these factors will collide after the vote on November 5th.
Elections are meant to generate the consent of the people, even when their candidate loses. By this most basic standard, the presidential election of 2024 is unlikely to succeed.
We sought to capture the prospect of enduring dissent in America with a light aircraft flying a protest banner over the portico of the White House. But the execution is too cheerful. It is also implausible. Aptly for a country that is not at peace with itself, long before the plane got anywhere near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue it would have been shot out of the sky.
Here the hats focus on partisanship. That helps explain today’s fight, certainly, but the peculiar vulnerabilities of America’s voting system also play a role. American elections demand patience and trust, yet the country comes joint last in the G7 on confidence in the judiciary and dead last on belief that its elections are honest. The two-month gap between voting and election certification in Congress is the most drawn-out anywhere. Complexity invites legal challenges, which incubate conspiracy theories. And America is the only proper presidential democracy in which the candidate who wins the most votes does not necessarily win power. That risks feeding a sense of grievance among the losers.
This goes to the other extreme. Not only is a ballot box a bit dull, but this one ignores the politics. If Mr Trump wins in a close race, Democrats could bring legal challenges in states where Ms Harris only just lost. Some of these might end up at the Supreme Court, where three justices appointed by Mr Trump would have to adjudicate their merits. Democrats have come to view the justices as Republican politicians in robes.
Although there would be rancour and anger, Ms Harris would probably concede, taking the wind out of any Democratic challenge. Not so Mr Trump. If he were to lose, the complexity of America’s voting system would collide with the MAGA conspiracy machine. Already, the Republican National Committee has filed more than 100 election lawsuits to create a paper trail in preparation to fight the result.
This gothic horror is more like it. Our guess is that a new “stop the steal” movement would fail to overturn the result—because MAGA Republicans in Congress would not muster the votes to do so and because the Supreme Court would, in fact, uphold the law. Yet the challenge could still succeed politically. One possible consequence is violence. Local police, the Secret Service and the FBI will have to prepare for protesters descending on statehouses, and for the risk of assassination attempts against lawmakers.
Lightning over the White House is dramatic, but spray-painting the Resolute desk is more precise. About 20% of American adults say that they are open to the possibility of using violence for a political end. In a large, well-armed country you do not need many of them to mean it for that threat to be scary. The Capitol will be so well policed in January 2025 that there will be no repeat of the riots on January 6th. But graffiti in the Oval is a clever echo of that grim day.
For the final cover, we have ditched “Not my president”, which dates back to Mr Trump’s election in 2016, rather than the contested result in 2020. “Cheater”, which you see scrawled on the cars of adulterers, is more visceral. An intruder has left a can of paint on the floor. And we dithered over the chair—black, red, Chesterfield? Regrettably, our title, “A foregone confusion” is hard to work out if you don’t already know what we are writing about. But it was too good to waste, so we moved it onto the briefing that accompanies our editorial. For the cover, we opted for something more plain, “How ugly will it get?”
In January 2025, we expect America’s duly elected president to take office. Neither side will be able to force their candidate on the nation. But that is a minimal definition of democratic success. Each time people feel that an election lacks legitimacy, the day draws closer when one side or the other breaks the system rather than accepts the result.
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Saturday, September 14, 2024
Friday, September 13, 2024
Thursday, September 12, 2024
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
9-11 Is A Somber Day In My Life
Today is a day of thought and reflection for me. My first 9-11 event was in 1973 when I found myself in Santiago, Chile when the military coup erupted. I could not believe what was happening. I was staying at a Sheraton Hotel and dared not leave. All of a sudden, I saw US Army officers all over the place. I Was told to go to my room and not to leave. I was confined to my room for 10 days. I was allowed to leave after signing an agreement saying that if I talked about anything that I saw, I would face ten years in a US prison under the Espionage Act. Two US citizens were killed by the Chilean Army.
My second 9-11 event came in 1998. I arrived in Houston and could not stay there. I had $200 to my name. I bought a bus ticket to San Jose, California. I wanted to find my ex-wife and make contact with a news reporter named Gary Webb. I had a lot of information on CIA involvement in drug dealing. Gary was investigating this matter. My belongings were in several cardboard boxes. I rode the bus for two days to get to San Jose. It was as sunny and glorious afternoon when I arrived. I was full of optimism and hope. I found a room in a $30 a night hotel. It was clean and nice.
My third 9-11 event happened on a sunny Friday afternoon in the Willow Glen section of San Jose. I was eating dinner at the Crowne Plaza Mexican restaurant. A man named Paul Lir Alexander who I thought a was a friend told me to go there and that he would call me. He never called. 6 US Marshals came in. I was arrested for civil contempt of court for failure to bey a judge's order and report to a federal official. I was handcuffed. I was hauled to the Santa Clara County jail. I was given paperwork telling me that I was facing 18 months in prison.
My fourth 9-11 event happened on Tuesday in the year 2001. I was working at Telewave, Inc. A television was brought out and turned on. I watched in horror as I saw jet airliners crashing into the two huge twin towers in New York City Washington, DC was under attack. Was World War III starting. I called my wife Elena and my son Pedro to make sure that they were all right. I could not believe what was happening in my country.
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Sunday, September 8, 2024
Dissident Former Japanese Soldiers Trained The North Vietnamese To Defeat The French and THe US
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According to a US report written on the 20th April 1946, it was estimated that 49,000 Japanese deserters were in the ranks of the Viet Minh in northern Vietnam at this time.
At the official Japanese surrender ceremony in Saigon on 30 September, Field Marshal Terauchi Hisaichi agreed that Japanese troops would be responsible for law and order in southern Indochina until Allied troops arrived. Nonetheless, as many as 10,000 rank-and-file soldiers quickly chose a different strategy, namely desertion. Many shared their military expertise with the Viet Minh and Pathet Lao, thus making a direct connection between the way WW II ended and the general history of subsequent Indochinese revolutionary movements.
A range of ‘psychological’ reasons for desertion were established by French intelligence. First, a majority headed for the bush because they were ignorant of the fate that awaited them, just as their Viet Minh sponsors kept them in the dark as to the possibility of repatriation. Second, certain officers and grades went over to the Viet Minh side for political reasons, including sympathy for the pro-independence cause. Third, certain nationalist elements joined the Viet Minh ranks in the belief that they could achieve their Greater East Asia dreams. Fourth, some joined Cao Daoist ranks owing to supposed similarities with Shinto. Fifth, some were disoriented by the Imperial rescript under which the Emperor repudiated the myth of his divinity. Sixth, war criminals were conscious of their fate should they fall into the hands of the French authorities. Seventh, others more or less cognizant of conditions back home in Japan, preferred to wait out their time in Vietnam. Added to that, some were seduced by Viet Minh propaganda calling for Japanese military specialists to help wage the anti-white war. Geography, namely the location of Burma or China, offered an escape route for others.
While numerically insignificant alongside the mass Viet Minh membership (with an initial 1,000 deserters in southern Vietnam and several thousand more scattered throughout Indochina), their contribution was clear. Their role as military instructors, especially regarding guerrilla combat, was acknowledged, as was the creation of Tokkohan (special assault sections), and ‘suicide volunteers.’ Japanese officers were especially active in Nguyen Binh district of Cao Bang province, commanding the Viet Minh 7th zone. As Christopher Goscha (2002) has highlighted, individual Japanese sympathizers to the anti-French cause offered technical assistance to the Viet Minh, with some building light weapons and munitions factories and others lending their expertise as radio operators. In general, all the Japanese serving with the Viet Minh adopted a Vietnamese name with the title Tan Viet Nam (New Vietnamese).
As of 20 April 1946, an estimated 49,000 Japanese deserters-dissidents remained in Tonkin (northern Vietnam). Three thousand of these crossed over to Hainan Island (China) clandestinely while the rest scattered throughout northern Vietnam. The lion's share of these (30,500) moved to the port of Haiphong and the rest spread to a number of obscure locations, including Thai Nguyen (300); Phuc Yen (Vinh Phuc, 200)), Hoa Binh (3,000), Dong Thieu (Thanh Hoa, 3,000) and Hanoi (500). An additional 3,000 remained in Annam (central Vietnam), and an equal number are known to have relocated to Laos, some into leadership positions. One example is Col. Yamane Yoshito (contacted by the author in Vientiane in 1980-81), who rose to a high rank within the Pathet Lao movement before defecting to the Royal Lao Army in 1950
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Nuclear Reactors Are Coming Back In The U.S.
(Illustration by Carl Godfrey)
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Get Ready for the New Nuclear Age. It Could Help Solve America’s Electricity Problems.
Artificial intelligence and electric vehicles are devouring enormous amounts of electricity. Constellation Energy and Vistra could benefit.
By
Avi Salzman
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Sept 06, 2024, 12:01 am EDT
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Just south of Harrisburg, Pa., on a narrow island in the Susquehanna River, something extraordinary is taking place. The Three Mile Island nuclear plant, scene of a historic radioactive meltdown in 1979, is quietly getting prepped for a second chance. Within three or four years, the plant’s one undamaged reactor may start up again, heralding a new era in American energy.
Just south of Harrisburg, Pa., on a narrow island in the Susquehanna River, something extraordinary is taking place. The Three Mile Island nuclear plant, scene of a historic radioactive meltdown in 1979, is quietly getting prepped for a second chance. Within three or four years, the plant’s one undamaged reactor may start up again, heralding a new era in American energy.
“It would be incredibly symbolic,” says Joe Dominguez, CEO of Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, which owns the Three Mile Island reactor. The 1979 accident taught the industry “hard lessons” about how to make nuclear power safer. Now, Dominguez says, it can “also be the birthplace for this renewed interest in nuclear power.”
The stars are aligning for a nuclear power revival in the U.S. The government is funneling billions of dollars into the industry, tech luminaries like Bill Gates and OpenAI’s Sam Altman are backing new companies, and public support for nuclear power is firmly on the rise.
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One sign of the industry’s rebound is Constellation’s stock price. The nation’s largest owner of nuclear power plants was begging state regulators for bailouts just a few years ago; now it’s thriving, and its stock is up 70% in the past year. There’s reason to believe that shares of Constellation and peers like Texas-based power producer Vistra will keep rising as government support increases and utilities boost payments to nuclear plant owners. Other publicly traded nuclear players, such as Canadian mining and nuclear-tech company Cameco, could also benefit as demand for uranium rises.
The rebound has come just as the nuclear age looked to be in its twilight. America’s 94 nuclear reactors generate 18.6% of U.S. electricity, enough to power 72 million homes. They’re the largest single source of carbon-free energy in the country. But nuclear’s share of total electricity generation has been ebbing for years, after peaking above 20% in the 1990s. A dozen U.S. reactors shut down from 2012 to 2021.
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The tide is turning. Six reactors slated to close from 2021 to 2025 have been saved through state and federal action. And three reactors that were closed and decommissioned may be restarted, which has never happened before. Gates’ nuclear company, TerraPower, is preparing the site of a retired coal plant in Wyoming for a new reactor with more than $2 billion in government financing, and two Altman-backed companies are testing nuclear technologies. The Biden administration has announced a goal to triple the nation’s nuclear capacity by 2050.
The biggest reason for nuclear power’s resurgence is that U.S. electricity demand is growing after more than a decade of flat power consumption. In some areas, demand is exploding. Electric vehicles, data centers powering artificial intelligence, and new factories fueling a “Made in the U.S.A.” industrial boom all need enormous amounts of electricity. Utilities are scrambling to secure reliable power, and they’re willing to pay up for it. The electric grid operator covering the mid-Atlantic and Midwest agreed in July to boost capacity payments to power plant owners ninefold, a multibillion-dollar windfall.
In past centuries, that new power might have come from coal. But America’s climate goals favor sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide, and that points to nuclear, solar, and wind. Among those, nuclear stands out as a clean source that can run whether the sun shines or the wind blows.
“We need hundreds of Hoover Dams’ worth of firm power if we’re going to make this energy transition, and we’re not in dam-building mode anymore,” says Katy Huff, a University of Illinois professor who was the highest-ranking nuclear power official at the Department of Energy until she left in May.
Huff’s time in government was remarkably fruitful for nuclear energy policy, with plant closures stemmed and older facilities upgraded to improve performance.
Still, there’s a large caveat to this story of a nuclear renaissance. Even as the Biden administration and state governments have saved plants from closing, and urged owners of defunct sites to start them up again, the country’s larger targets look daunting. Tripling nuclear capacity would necessitate building about 200 large-scale reactors. Yet not a single new one is under construction today. Even if a project were to be announced before the end of the year, it would probably take a decade to plan and build.
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The most important players in the industry—utilities with the heft and expertise to build reactors—aren’t ready to commit to big projects, despite increasingly generous federal and state subsidies. The DOE acknowledged in one report that the industry is “stuck in a stalemate” that may not break without more taxpayer backing or innovative funding models.
The U.S., which has more reactors than any other nation, is on the verge of falling behind. Around the world, 64 reactors are being constructed. China is building about 30 of them and has lately been approving new reactors at a rate of 10 or more a year. France, Russia, and South Korea have ambitious government-supported plans of their own.
Taking a Cue From Eisenhower
For most of the history of nuclear power, the U.S. led the development and deployment of the technology. The commercial nuclear reactor industry grew from the Department of Defense’s World War II era atomic weapons program, and its basic components haven’t changed dramatically. Inside nuclear reactors, uranium-filled tubes power a process called fission, where neutrons collide with uranium atoms, releasing energy and spurring more reactions. U.S. reactors use water to help control temperatures. And heat produced by reactors turns water into steam, which spins turbines and generates electricity.
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President Dwight Eisenhower dedicated the first nuclear plant in Shippingport, Pa., in 1958 with a speech celebrating America’s ability to “put the atom to work for the good of mankind, not his destruction.” By the 1960s, the U.S. was building dozens of plants capable of keeping lights on at millions of homes.
The rollout wasn’t always smooth. Nuclear energy has long been controversial because it’s inextricably connected to nuclear weapons in the public imagination. Safety processes have improved but have not fully quashed fears of radioactive leaks. Some of those fears were realized in 1979 when one Three Mile Island reactor partially melted down. The incident forced evacuations and raised health concerns, though the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the accident’s “small radioactive releases had no detectable health effects on plant workers or the public.” The Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents in 1986 and 2011, respectively, were more devastating, and slowed the rollout of new plants.
There have been other problems, too. The government hasn’t figured out where to store nuclear waste generated by the plants. Americans don’t want it in their neighborhoods or trucked through them, and much of it sits encased in concrete near to the reactors. Concerns about radiation and radioactive waste were among the reasons the rollout of new reactors slowed in the late 1970s. The total number of reactors peaked at 112 in 1990 and has declined since.
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In recent years, economic pressure has been the biggest factor forcing nuclear plants to close. Natural gas grew into the largest source of electricity-generation in the country. Cheap gas and growing renewable power drove down wholesale electricity prices, making it difficult for nuclear plants to compete at auctions where utilities buy electricity. The Three Mile Island reactor not involved in the meltdown closed in 2019 for financial reasons. At the time, it was losing over $100 million a year, Dominguez says.
The biggest shift since then has been the change in government support for nuclear power. The Inflation Reduction Act included nuclear tax credits that rival support for wind and solar. Those credits essentially create a floor for power prices paid to nuclear plants, which is well above operating costs. The DOE has also directly funded reactors that were on the brink of extinction. Diablo Canyon, California’s last nuclear plant and the source of 9% of the state’s electricity, was slated to close its two reactors this year and next, but $1.1 billion worth of federal funding will help keep it open for several more years.
Government leaders may be following public opinion. Pew Research Center found that 57% of Americans supported adding more nuclear plants in 2023, up from 43% in 2020. Support is higher among Republicans, but Democrats are increasingly warming to the industry.
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“You’re seeing a generational shift—from people who grew up when nuclear energy was conflated with nuclear weapons programs, to younger people who don’t have that kind of history,” says John Wagner, director of the Idaho National Laboratory, a government-run facility that was the birthplace of nuclear-powered electricity 75 years ago. It’s now hosting experiments for new nuclear-power technologies.
The new generation has its own existential fear—climate change—and it increasingly sees nuclear power as a solution. While solar and wind power production is growing, it’s intermittent, and most lithium batteries operate for just four hours at a time—not enough to get Americans through the night.
Politicians around the world are embracing nuclear power. At the COP28 climate conference in Dubai last December, more than 20 countries, including the U.S., agreed to try to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. The signatories included Japan, which had suspended all of its nuclear plants after Fukushima.
Sizing Up the Winners
“It has been a fascinating time, probably the best supply/demand fundamentals I’ve seen in 40 years in this business,” says Cameco CEO Tim Gitzel. Cameco is now reopening uranium mines it shut after the Fukushima disaster. The company’s stock has risen with uranium prices. Analysts see earnings roughly doubling next year. That scorching growth rate isn’t fully reflected in shares, which trade at 29 times their estimates.
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The other big winners in the nuclear revival are owners of existing reactors; they’re poised to benefit from rising power prices. Constellation and Vistra are in particularly good shape because they operate as independent power producers whose profits aren’t regulated like traditional utilities. Their reactors are becoming more profitable, and their stocks trade at multiples below the market average.
They also may have the potential to increase their nuclear capacity without going into debt to build new reactors. Constellation’s Dominguez thinks his company can add 1.5 to two gigawatts worth of capacity—about as much as the Hoover Dam—by modernizing existing plants and restarting mothballed ones.
The first test case of whether an old reactor can be restarted is unfolding in Michigan. Holtec International, a company that normally makes money from decommissioning nuclear plants, is now planning to reopen a shuttered reactor at a site known as Palisades, on the banks of Lake Michigan.
Patrick O’Brien, Holtec’s director of government affairs and communications, says the company had not expected to reopen the reactor when it took over the site from utility Entergy
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in 2022. But Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office insisted they consider it, and the state was willing to put up part of the money to make it happen. Michigan has committed to decarbonizing its electricity grid by 2040. Officials there realized that leaving out Palisades, which can serve 800,000 customers, would be a major setback. Achieving the state’s climate goals “would be really hard without bringing this facility back on-line,” says Kara Cook, the state’s chief climate and energy strategist.
(Illustration by Carl Godfrey)
The state has pledged $300 million to support Palisades, and the federal government has conditionally approved a $1.5 billion loan guarantee. Depending on the speed of permitting, Palisades could come back on-line by October 2025. The company is also applying to build two small reactors, potentially generating enough power for about 500,000 additional people.
Not everyone is cheering. The Sierra Club argues that reopening Palisades means that more dangerous nuclear waste will be stored along the Lake Michigan shore. The environmental organization also says the state is wasting money that could be spent on better options, including a speedier rollout of solar and wind.
Three Mile Island could be the next decommissioned site to reopen. A recent engineering assessment yielded good news. “The equipment was in just as good a shape as when we prematurely shut it down in 2019,” Dominguez says.
If the company moves ahead, the restart could take 36 to 48 months, he adds. NextEra
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CEO John Ketchum told investors recently that his company is “looking at” reopening a decommissioned Iowa reactor.
Upgrading and restarting existing plants might add 5% or so to nuclear capacity over the coming decade. To meet the government’s goal of tripling capacity, America would have to embark on an effort several times as big as the Manhattan Project and sustain it for decades. It would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and require training as many as 375,000 workers.
Recent history doesn’t bode well for that. In the past 28 years, the U.S. has built just three nuclear reactors. Two of them—located near Augusta, Ga.—started operating in 2023 and 2024, respectively. At their opening, DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm declared hopefully, “Two down, 198 to go!”
Lessons From Georgia
The next 198 won’t come easily. The Georgia reactors, known as Vogtle 3 and 4, offer a cautionary tale. Originally expected to open in 2016 and 2017, they faced extensive delays and cost overruns that were estimated to be as high as $20 billion. Westinghouse, which designed the reactors, filed for bankruptcy protection midway through the project. Sometimes, reactor parts that had been shipped to the site wouldn’t fit together correctly, says Joe Klecha, who oversaw part of the construction process for owner Southern Co.
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Klecha says the basic problem is that building the first version of a new industrial facility is always difficult, and tends to be plagued by delays and cost overruns. Cost savings start to kick in after enough nuclear reactors have been built that the construction teams have ironed out the problems. He now works for a start-up called The Nuclear Company that’s looking to seed development of several large standardized reactors.
Much of the cost overruns in Georgia will have to be paid by ratepayers, who already have been facing rising electricity prices. That leaves Georgia regulators with a dilemma. New data centers and factories are causing electricity demand to spike beyond their previous projections, but they’re wary of approving new plants without protections for customers. “We have the experience to build more [large nuclear] units, and we need the capacity,” wrote Tim Echols, vice-chair of the Georgia Public Service Commission, in an email to Barron’s. “But we cannot do it like we did before—we need assurances.”
The question now is who will provide that assurance. In countries with the most aggressive nuclear programs, such as China, the government has bankrolled programs that pay for teams of workers to travel from site to site, building identical reactors quickly and efficiently. They can now build reactors in seven years or less at a fraction of the cost as in the U.S.
The U.S. has done things differently, offering grants and loan guarantees to private companies. The DOE’s Loan Programs Office is reviewing $65 billion worth of loan applications for various kinds of nuclear power projects.
The funding already has sparked a flurry of innovation and competition. Some companies are working on new designs for reactors that use novel methods to produce and store nuclear power, and can be built rapidly in modular segments. The new companies include TerraPower, founded by Gates in 2008, and Oklo, a public company chaired by OpenAI’s Altman. The companies say they can operate more efficiently and safely than most existing players, but they are years away from producing reactors. Neither has received approval for their designs from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The U.S. may have erred by lending money to several competing companies rather than directly funding a massive buildout of cookie-cutter reactors, some argue.
“I think their heart was in the right place,” says Seth Grae, chairman of the American Nuclear Society’s International Council and CEO of nuclear tech company Lightbridge. “But in terms of cold reality, the other countries made a better decision. The U.S. can catch up and can do well, but we’re kind of in a rush, because we needed the energy yesterday.”
The DOE didn’t respond to Grae’s criticisms. Huff says the department recognizes that direct funding is a “much more reliable strategy” to build nuclear quickly, but the approach is limited by congressional appropriations.
Nonetheless, Huff and other officials see a way forward for nuclear that may involve some unusual players. Big tech companies have gotten particularly interested in nuclear power for data centers and other applications. Nuclear reactors can support huge power needs, including the most demanding AI applications, without adding to carbon emissions. All of the big tech firms have goals to emit less carbon but are finding that challenging as they invest in power-hungry AI. To control their emissions, the tech giants have found they can no longer be passive electricity consumers.
Microsoft has been hiring nuclear experts, and seems willing to experiment. The company agreed to buy nuclear energy as soon as 2028 from an Altman-backed start-up called Helion that’s working on nuclear fusion—a technology most experts think is many years from commercialization. And earlier this year, Amazon.com
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agreed to a deal with power producer Talen Energy
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to connect its data centers directly to an existing Pennsylvania nuclear plant, bypassing the grid. That agreement won’t add to the country’s nuclear fleet—in fact, critics argue that it will reduce power available to other customers—but it shows that nuclear is on the radar.
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A nuclear energy resurgence in America is in progress, but won’t come easy, Barron’s Senior Writer Avi Salzman explains.
Other agreements could lead to new reactors being built. Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and steel maker Nucor are partnering with North Carolina–based utility Duke Energy to explore new financing mechanisms “designed specifically to lower the long-term costs” of nuclear power and other clean sources. That could include committing to “tariffs” that would provide some of the money for the new plants. Duke hasn’t yet announced new plants, but the utility may need nuclear to cover its escalating power needs. Duke added more customers than ever last year, and its expectations for new electricity demand by 2030 are eight times as high as they were just two years ago. “New nuclear undoubtedly will play a role in Duke Energy’s clean energy future,” says Kelvin Henderson, Duke’s chief nuclear officer, in a statement to Barron’s.
The tech companies declined interviews about their strategies. Some nuclear experts are skeptical they’ll foot enough of the bill to jump-start nuclear construction without more government help. Nonetheless, economic and environmental imperatives have come together to put nuclear energy back in the spotlight. The next couple of years will determine whether the technology is once again ready to shine.
Write to Avi Salzman at avi.salzman@barrons.com
Saturday, September 7, 2024
The Economist Magazine Cover For 09/07/2024
The Economist
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September 7th 2024
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Insert a clear and simple description of the image
Zanny Minton Beddoes
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We have two covers this week. In most of our editions we warn how the Communist Party’s instinct to restrict data threatens China’s economy. In America we focus on our own research showing that ever-heavier SUVs and pickups are killing people.
The gloom about China’s economy reflects real problems, from half-built tower blocks to bad debts. But it also reflects growing mistrust of the information the Chinese government is willing to release. On August 19th stock exchanges stopped publishing daily numbers on dwindling foreign-investment inflows. Balance-of-payments statistics have become so murky that even America’s Treasury is baffled. Figures for youth unemployment, which is a huge problem, have been “improved and optimised” and—who would have guessed?—they have come out lower.
Here are two versions of this distortion. In one the party is suppressing technical data that it finds awkward or embarrassing. In the other, it is dressing up the numbers. Last year many of China’s biggest retailers reported disappointing sales. Yet the National Bureau of Statistics declared that nominal household consumption rose by a robust 9.5%.
Neither version quite gets the story right—partly because neither captures its magnitude. The information void feeds on itself: the more fragile the economy is, the more knowledge is suppressed and the more nerves fray. By backtracking on a decades-long policy of partially liberalising the flow of information, China will find it harder to achieve its ambition of restructuring the economy around new industries. Like the Soviet Union—and indeed communist China before its reforms—it risks instead becoming an example of how autocratic rule is not just illiberal but also inefficient.
We liked the panda working its way through a pile of embarrassing statistics. But it is too cuddly. Amid a widening culture of fear and a determination to put national security before the economy, the Communist Party has proved unable or unwilling to limit the scope of its interference in information flows. It also misses half the story. For decades, China’s leaders have run a system known as neican, or internal reference, in which journalists and officials compile private reports. However, it is a good bet that this source of information may be failing, too. No one wants to sign a memo that says one of Mr Xi’s signature policies is failing. If the public square is locked and barred, where can contrarians make themselves heard?
These flags are more like it. We imagined a headline about darkening: as the facts are obscured, so are China’s prospects. To Chinese eyes, however, when a newspaper uses black, it is marking an important death. It would be as if The Economist were wishing a catastrophe on China. Patches of light wash away the offence, but turn a powerful image into a so-so one.
We settled on a version of this photograph of the forbidden city—as in the tales of Alice, we have the real world and its imaginary twin which works by its own peculiar logic. This cover needs work. The red filter makes the image hard to read. The top half will collide with our logo and the flashes that we use to highlight articles. And we realised that we should make the two images different, to reflect different versions of reality.
Amid the horrors of the mid-20th century, liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek grasped that free-flowing information improves decision-making, reduces the odds of grave mistakes and makes it easier for societies to evolve. But when information is suppressed, it turns into a source of power and corruption. Over time, the distortions and inefficiencies mount. China is turning its back on this lesson and the consequences could be grave.
Our cover in America is about how heavy SUVs and pickups kill people—not their drivers, but everyone else on the road. Heavy vehicles protect their occupants, but for each life the heaviest 1% of SUVs or trucks saves in America, more than a dozen are lost in smaller vehicles. Using data for 7.5m crashes in 14 American states in 2013-23, The Economist has found that for every 10,000 crashes the heaviest pickups and SUVs kill 37 people in the other car, compared with 5.7 for cars of a median weight and just 2.6 for the lightest. The number of pedestrians killed by cars has almost doubled since 2010. Battery-power will add to the problem. The Ford F-150 Lightning weighs around 40% more than its petrol-engine cousin.
We wanted our cover to put the monster into monster truck. One idea was to shrink the people. Another was to have a truck parked on the page with the title in the collision zone.
Heavy cars pose a giant collective-action problem. In America it is hard enough to persuade gun owners to embrace sensible gun laws, because of a mistaken belief that guns protect their owners. Convincing big-car drivers to trade down would be even harder, because they and their passengers really are safer.
But only up to a point. We estimate that if the heaviest 10% of vehicles in America’s fleet shrank by roughly 1,000lb, road fatalities in multi-car crashes would fall by 12%, or 2,300 a year, without impairing the safety of the heavier cars.
What to do? A large part of the answer is to make accidents rarer and less deadly. Stop signs are an abundant feature of America’s road network. Replacing them with roundabouts would save thousands of lives a year. Because the energy—and hence destructive power—of a moving vehicle rises with the square of its velocity, finding ways to limit speed has an outsize effect. A good start would be simply to enforce existing laws on speed limits. Instead, plenty of American states ban speed cameras.
For our cover we jettisoned the stop sign and focused instead on the front end of a massive truck—carefully designed not to represent the product of any of the large carmakers. Inevitably, we vacillated over whether to use the word truck or car. Alliteration and Englishness won the day.
Cover image
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View large image (“China’s looking-glass economy”)
•
View large image (“America’s killer cars”)
Backing stories
→ The real problem with China’s economy (Leader)
→ The Chinese authorities are concealing the state of the economy (Briefing)
→ What to do about America’s killer cars (Leader)
→ Americans love affair with big cars is killing them (United States)
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Friday, September 6, 2024
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Monday, September 2, 2024
The Probability Of Trump Winning The Presidential Election
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Geoff Arnold
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I am a career musician (guitar, bass, piano, percussion) and music teacher.Updated Sat
What is the probability of Donald Trump winning the next presidential election?
I’m going to answer this question differently than probably anyone else.
Right now, the elderly are passing away at approximately 14,000 per 100,000 elderly every year. So with ten million elderly as an example, you have 1.4 million dying every year. Over the past eight years, since 2016, that means over 11 million elderly folks have died.
Now, factor in that some living elderly have stopped voting for various reasons we won’t get into right now. So that’s 11 million fewer elderly voters in the last eight years. Elderly people tend to be more conservative in their voting habits. It isn’t hard and fast, but as a person of 70 years, I vote far more conservatively than I did when I was in my 20s.
Now, let’s look at another factor…
Young people are graduating high school at a rate of approximately 3.5 million a year. The majority of them are eligible to vote either right a way or within one year (I graduated when I was 17, so had to wait one year, back in 1972 until 1973). Most young people tend to vote more liberally than conservatively. No, again, it isn’t hard and fast, but it is generally true.
Over the past 8 years, that means over 25 million young became voters.
The young voters coming into the political arena far outstrip the elderly remaining, and as more elderly people pass away, more young people will be replacing them at approximately 2.5 to one, as has been the general trend for many years, dating back more than eight years.
Okay, still with me? Good. Now, bear in mind, I am speaking in generalities, not specifics. The stats I have cited are not hard numbers, but generally true.
Therefore, seeing as how young people tend to vote more liberally into their forties before beginning to dial back a bit as they get closer to retirement, we see the trend toward more progressive candidates is becoming more and more the norm. Conservative candidates are losing more races than they are winning, generally speaking.
Rural America tends to be more conservative, and as many point out, that is NOT where the majority of people live in this nation. So, while rural America votes in conservatives, their influence is still beginning to wane as the young in rural America are indeed becoming more liberal/progressive in their views. It has been happening for nearly 40 years. Again, this is a generality, but still essentially true.
I live in a small town. The young here are more liberal than their parents in many ways, including politically and socially.
Now, having set the core reasoning in place, here is my answer to the original question: What is the probability of Donald Trump winning the next presidential election?
Given the statistics, flawed as my assessment may be, the general trend of the American voter is becoming more progressive, not conservative.
Therefore, the probability of Donald Trump winning the presidential election in 2024 is approximately 40%
He most likely will take the “flyover states” more than not because they are still predominately conservative OUTSIDE the major cities in those states. But this is no longer a guarantee because of the shift in weight of the vote of the young becoming more dominant.
Trump will not take the major metropolitan metroplexes, and so will fail to take Washington, Oregon and California, New York, Massachusetts, Delaware, New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania…
Well, you see right there, he loses because he fails to take key states or flip Blue states.
But, and I say this guardedly, you never know. There are still three months until the election. The economy is a big deal with people. Education issues are a big deal with people. The wars are a big deal with people.
And unless Kamala implodes, which is entirely possible if not wholly likely, then Trump does win in the key states.
The American people are angry. Just how angry about everything will determine the outcome.
But I do not hold out much hope for Trump at this point.
((I am stunned that over 525K people have seen this post in just 17 days! Thanks to all of you.))
(( I am now seriously overwhelmed that 850K people have seen this post as of 8/31/24 - I’m wondering that it will reach 1 million before the election!))
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Sunday, September 1, 2024
What American Civil War II Would Look Like
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Mayoi
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Self-EmployedJul 21
What would a civil war look like in America?
The social fabric's already stretched thinner than a cheap cosplay. You got factions everywhere: lefties, righties, libertarians, conspiracy nuts, preppers, tech bros, and every flavor of keyboard warrior in between.
First, urban vs. rural. Cities would be ground zero, riots and looting like BLM protests but on steroids. Police? LOL, they’d be overwhelmed in a hot minute. National Guard? Maybe, but they'd be playing whack-a-mole across a hundred cities. Suburbs would become fortresses; think gated communities with AR-15s instead of white picket fences.
Tech-wise, it’s cyber warfare too. Internet outages, hacked utilities, fake news on every feed – total info chaos. Imagine trying to coordinate when your internet's down, and you can't trust the news 'cause everything's a psyop.
Supply chains? Broken like your last relationship. Food, meds, ammo – all scarce. Black markets would thrive. Skills like gardening and basic medicine would be gold. Prepper wet dream.
Economically, it’d be a collapse. Stock market crash, hyperinflation, unemployment – great depression 2.0. Bitcoin might become the new currency if the internet survives the cyber onslaught.
Now, alliances. Neighbor against neighbor but also regional powers. California might try to secede, Texas too. Midwest becomes the breadbasket fortress, the South, a guerilla stronghold. Foreign powers might get involved, either to back a faction or just take advantage of the chaos.
Military? Split. Some units loyal to the federal government, others to local factions. Armed militias everywhere, from well-trained vets to LARPing neckbeards. Total clusterfuck.
Humanitarian crisis? Bet on it. Refugee flows within the country, maybe out. Border states get flooded. Basic services collapse – healthcare, sanitation, education – all gone.
And yeah, it'd be bloody. Guerrilla tactics, bombings, urban combat – more Syria than Civil War 1.0. Civilian casualties high, infrastructure wrecked.
Modern civil war in America would be an unholy mess. Best case scenario? A quick resolution with minimal bloodshed. Worst case? Years of chaos and a fractured nation. At least we’d get some dank memes out of it, right?
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