I was in the US Air Force during Desert Storm / Desert Shield. I remember being assembled for a meeting headed by the squadron commander that was a pep-talk designed to convince us that the war was “not about oil.” Apparently the concern was that those of us on mobility who ended up going  to Iraq (I was on mobility but my number was never called) might suffer low morale if we thought our nation was driven by prurient petrol-guzzling interests.

I can’t tell you what most of the men in the room thought about this – mostly we just shrugged and went back to work. However, I can tell you that if I, personally, had believed what the Captain was saying I would have been outraged. If it wasn’t for the oil, what, precisely, was in it for America? Warm fuzzy feelings? Get real. Of course we weren’t going there to loot oil, but to suggest our incursion into Iraq by way of Kuwait wasn’t about oil was simply a lie.

There are always small countries being trampled upon. Everyone knows, mighty as the US is, we CAN’T be the world’s policeman (even those without the good sense to realize we SHOULDN’T be). Were we expected to believe that the Kuwaitis were just better and more deserving people than those in African, Asian, or Latin American countries that were being beaten down by a stronger neighbor? My morale dropped that day because my intelligence had been insulted - not because I was above fighting for oil. 

The preceding vignette came to mind because as we are wriggling our way out of two other wars that “weren’t about the oil”, we are faced with the possibility of a war with Iran that some officer is now telling some enlisted kid won’t be about oil - despite the precipitating event being conflict over oil sanctions. That officer will say it’s about another form of energy entirely; the energy provided by and atom, an energy that can boil water to turn steam turbines or destroy cities in a flash, and Iran insists on cultivating technologies that would allow it to do either.

Make no mistake, the wars we are leaving and the war that sits a like a storm cloud on the horizon are all about oil. It’s not that all of the woes of the Middle East are due to oil, but the only reason they touch America substantially is oil. If we are to believe the Islamic extremists who have attacked us, they have done so because America interfered in their world and supported dictators that brutally repressed them. Maybe this rationale is a pure fabrication, however, the fact that the US has historically supported dictators in this region because it was in the interest of maintaining the stability conducive to the unimpeded flow of petrol does lend credence to their claims. This includes not only activities in oil-producing countries (e.g. Saudi Arabia), but also countries critical to unimpeded transport (e.g. Egypt), and countries that border oil-producing states and from which revolution might spread (e.g. Jordan).

Before I get to the point of this post, let me say that even if all oil could be replaced with other energy sources tomorrow it wouldn’t make everything hunky-dory with respect to US-MidEast relations. There could even be a period of time during which relations would be more violent than ever. There would be a number of countries, used to holding sway disproportionate to their populations, military power, and all factors except resource endowments, which would become instantaneously marginalized. However, the elimination of oil as a driving motive for US intervention in the region will at least undercut a rationale for attacks against America that has purchase in the region.

I’ve heard a notion, popular in some circles, that America doesn’t need to ween itself from oil to eliminate export dependency, but rather it needs to develop indigenous resources more fully. While developing more indigenous resources may reduce the scale of dependence, being resource dependent is like being pregnant – you either are or you aren’t. The size of the deficit between what the US produces and what it consumes is too great to be made up entirely by more domestic pumping, and reducing the degree of dependence won’t eliminate the problem. The US consumes twice as much as it produces domestically.

So, what does our hypothetical non-petrocentric world look like? First of all, electric-powered transport is the norm. The US, and many other nations, shifted away from any petrol-burning electric power generation they had after the oil shocks of the 1970′s (with the exception of backup generation for the rare instances in which the main power goes off-line or for temporary uses - that is here to stay given supply lines for petrol are so well-developed versus other fuels, but, at any rate, backup generation is a nominal issue with respect to dependency). Passenger and commercial ground transport is one area in which petroleum almost completely dominates and a substantial proportion of our overall energy consumption occurs. A non-petrocentric world is one in which electric cars and trucks dominate, which will require better battery and electric drive system technologies. Most corner gas stations will be gone, and charging stations will be widely dispersed.

Second, (not chronologically, but in terms of the logic of our story) there will have to be an increase our electricity generating capacity commensurate with meeting the aforementioned electric transport demand (and, obviously, this increased capacity will have to be met without resorting to fuel oil-fired turbines or the like.) Base-load, as well as peak-load power, will need to be increased. This means more coal and / or nuclear power, which are cheap and optimal base-load power sources, will need to be an important part of the strategy. However, the former risks running afoul of environmental regulation and the later could not successfully be jump-started in the US before Fukushima Dai-Ichi – and it’s only gotten harder since.

Right now there is a lot of talk about natural gas being cheap because of a mild winter. This speaks to the issue with natural gas, its cost-effectiveness depends heavily upon the price of gas (as opposed to, say, nuclear), and, of course, as more plants are built demand rises and – all else equal – fuel prices will increase. Solutions based on natural gas (natural gas vehicles or power generation) will be subject to volatility and rising prices. 

In the movie Real Steel, which is loosely (read, extremely loosely) based on the short story Steel by Richard Matheson, the presence of wind turbines is frequently used to show the viewer that he or she is seeing events in the future. This movie is not unique, wind and solar are widely anticipated saviours. Solar and wind, if their prices can be brought down and storage efficiencies improved, can be part of the solution, but they can’t be the solution in the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, the non-petrocentric world is hard to see because it is either a long way off or will be induced by a sudden shock that is beyond our capacity to fathom.

If one wonders why Germany is so irritated by the mass of debt-ridden European countries it must bail out, consider the brilliant pragmatism and efficiency reflected in the idea to install prostitute meters. Like any tax activity, the meters presumably exert at least a marginal (perhaps negligible) reduction in solicitation (there may not be fewer prostitutes, but they will stand around less). At the same time, it raises revenue.

Let’s contrast this with the US approach that is designed to make prostitution (like drug sales) highly profitable, violent, and promoting of the institution of slavery by driving out those who would voluntarily choose this type of work (and creating an “in for a penny,  in for a pound” situation of criminality.) Alright, I’ll be honest, the US system is not ”designed” to achieve said goals, but it does succeed  in them spectacularly.

I watched Obama’s State of the Union Address and the Republican commentary that followed. I tried not to be distracted by the superficial things like: a.) Who wrote the spilt milk joke that, as near as I could tell, only Obama found amusing? b.) Why did Mitch Daniels give his whole rebuttal by way of sideways glance? c.) Whether it is just the camera that makes Obama’s ears and Daniels’ forehead look huge.

The address was long and covered a lot of ground, but I became preoccupied with one apparent contradiction. On the one hand, Obama was advocating trying to spur investment - at least for firms operating in the US. This is a notion with potentially broad and popular support. For a long time I’ve come to think that, while Americans in theory occupy a large range on the political continuum, in practice they tend to be populist and think that government should serve the average joe (or josephine) - and that they are that average joe. Part of this is that even ardent proponents of free markets, which presumably includes free trade, are willing to support a little nationalistic tilting of the playing field in favor of domestic industries as long as they aren’t in an export dominant field (i.e. the losers who will be subject to retaliatory strikes.) [Among my disappointments during my (big-"L") Libertarian days was that so many paid lip service to the virtues of free trade and competition, but wanted to replace taxes with tariffs or other schemes to transfer the cost of governance off-shore. It became clear that many Libertarians were not as much in favor of economic liberty and the virtue of competition as they just didn't want to pay a dime in taxes (even for items such as defense that they typically agreed were essential, even if at a reduced level). Such individuals would be more properly defined as "cheap skate nationalists" than libertarians in my opinion.]

Another heavily reiterated concept in Obama’s speech was a desire for the rich to pay their “fair share.” This sentiment also has potential traction among the masses. It doesn’t take much convincing to persuade much of America that it is a travesty that Warren Buffet pays a lower percentage of tax on his income than does his secretary. As I’ve mentioned in posts on entirely different subjects, inequity aversion is one of the most strongly evolutionarily hardwired concepts to reside in the human psyche.

Here is where the discussion gets interesting. That extra tax that the Obama administration would levy to make sure the tax system isn’t regressive (i.e. the higher the income the lower the proportion of taxes paid) will largely fall on the return on investment. Generally, if the government wants less of something, one way they can achieve that goal is to tax it. If you want less pollution, put a tax on gasoline. If you want fewer smokers, put a tax on cigarettes. If you want people to invest less inside America, tax their investment returns at a higher rate so as to make it more expensive to earn a given return on investment.

The reason the rich pay a smaller percentage in tax is because a smaller percentage of their income is in salaries and wages and a larger proportion is return on investment (capital gains), which is taxed at a lower rate to encourage investment. Is this taxation scheme fair? I don’t know; I’ll leave that to the reader. What I’m saying is that it’s going to be hard to create tax breaks for investing in America while increasing the taxation on capital gains sufficiently to make sure the tax structure is progressive – or even flat.

The BBC is reporting that research on a genetically modified version of bird flu has ceased due to concerns about the potential for terrorist use of the published recipe. This is just the latest permutation of a story that has terrified people for years. If some rogue were to create a bug that was as deadly as Ebola and as easily transmitted as the flu, one would have the makings of a devastating germ that might result in millions or tens of millions dead. Fortunately, such a cocktail is exceedingly rare in the natural world.

Bill Clinton, when he was President, is said to have been heavily influenced by a novel called The Cobra Event by Richard Preston. The book was all the more scary because Preston wasn’t a random novelist churning out fiction on topics he knew little about beyond Wikipedia research. Instead, Preston was best known as a science writer (who wrote the widely read works of non-fiction The Hot Zone [Ebola and Marburg] and Demon in the Freezer [Small Pox] before and after the aforementioned novel, respectively.) As I recall, having read the book over a decade ago, in The Cobra Event an expert creates a weaponized germ with the lethality of a brain pox and the tranmissibility of the flu, and then puts it on a piece of playground equipment.

It is interesting to see how these dilemmas about whether to publish play out. The reader may remember the famous case of an article about the potential for botulinum toxin to be put in the milk supply (Wein & Liu, PNAS). In that case, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) did opt to publish the paper, and at no small cost to the National Academies - which was threatened with loss of Department of Agriculture research jobs, a threat which held for a time.

 

If you’re a policy wonk (and if you’ve driven deep enough to find my obscure little policy blog, you must be a mega-wonk – the wonkiest of wonks), you’re probably aware of national strategy documents on: weapons of mass destruction, cyber security, pandemic influenza, critical infrastructure protection, etc. Any scare that’s come down the pike is likely to result in someone in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) or on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC) putting out a document. However, for all the diversity of topics seen in national strategy documents, the most recent one to be announced may come as a surprise.

PR Newswire has reported that President Obama announced a national strategy on tourism today that is designed to boost travel to the US. Given the slow grind toward economic recovery and the political campaign season underway, a National Strategy on Travel and Tourism is not nearly so unexpected.  Obama just took a political hit for killing the Keystone pipeline – and aborting the jobs that would have been involved in making it. The question becomes where might a President have a chance to produce some jobs and appease a population that largely thinks he hasn’t done enough to decrease unemployment. Travel and tourism is one area in which the US seems to greatly underperform its potential.

Why does the US travel and tourism industry underperform? It mostly has to do with the fact that it can be a huge pain in the butt to get into the country. It’s certainly not that there is nothing to see. Our vast country offers every ecosystem imaginable from arctic tundra to expansive deserts and from lush tropical rainforests to mammoth mountains. It has spectacular glitzy cities and quaint quiet Amish countryside.

A couple of years ago my wife and I were considering going to India when our plans to travel to another Asian country fell through (because the riots and violent protests didn’t drop the airfare enough for us to risk it), but we found that the process to get a visa was excruciating - so we immediately moved on to our next choice. I can only imagine how often the same thing happens with respect to the US. It was hard for me to be angry with the Indian bureaucrats; they were just reciprocating US policy.

The idea behind the strategy seems to be to get more of those potentially lucrative BRIC  tourists. BRIC stands for Brazil, Russia, India, and China but could be applied more generally to any large population country that is beginning to build a middle class wealthy enough to travel abroad.

I don’t know if this strategy will work, but I’m in favor of efforts to boost this underperforming sector of the economy. If nothing else, increasing BRIC tourists might just offset the tourists we are losing from Europe where weakening currencies respective to the US dollar have made it more expensive to travel to the US for many. We might even do ourselves some strategic good in the process by having visitors see the US in its most positive light.

Astronomers have announced today that planets are far from the rarity they were once believed to be. The Wall Street Journal reported that on average each star in the galaxy probably has more than one  planet, and this would translate into 100 billion planets in the Milky Way alone. While the vast majority of planets would not be capable of supporting life (wrong mass, composition, lacking an energy storing atmosphere, etc), with those kinds of numbers it seems life on other planets would virtually be inevitable. It is possible that humans are the most technologically capable form of life in the universe (or the only technologically capable form of life), but then again…

The story made me think of Stephen Hawking’s controversial statement about the likelihood that any life that we might contact and subsequently interact with would be colonizers not interested in our well-being. Such a species would have to be far more technologically advanced then us in that they would need to be able to take advantage of energy on a scale of an entire solar system. (We can only use a fraction of the energy available to our planet and are great leaps away from being able to understand how to travel across the vastness of space with the necessary rapidity.)

 

Will our radio signals be our doom?

PS: Yes, I’m aware that my title implies that I can’t think of a single planet with intelligent life – including our own. It’s not accidental wording.

It would be easy to find 2011 a depressing year. Economically, it was a year of stagnation in the US, and was even worse in Europe. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan had devastating and widespread effects.  However, US Federal dysfunctions notwithstanding, governance was one area in which 2011 shone brightly. This was most notable with respect to the “Arab Spring”, but more generally it was a good year for brutal despots to die (e.g. Gaddafi and Kim Jong Il).

However, lest one get too cozy with the idea that there is an inexorable one-way flow toward democratization and liberalization and that we are seeing the last throes of authoritarianism, may I point out a country that is bucking the trend. Being a small country, it is easy for the disturbing events being witnessed in Hungary to go unnoticed by the rest of the world.

It should be noted that Hungary, along with Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia, were among the golden children of Central and Eastern European (CEE) governance reform coming out of the Soviet era. Students of history may remember that Hungary’s liberalization played a major part in the fall of the Berlin Wall (Hungary was letting people come and go across the border with Austria, so the Wall became irrelevant in staunching the flow of people out across the Iron Curtain.)

However, the holiday season passage of a new constitution, called the Basic Law, which consolidates power, is the most recent slip in a retrograde from liberty. The Basic Law, which, among other things, weakened the judiciary follows on the heels of laws reducing the autonomy of the central bank, one that reduces the number of “legitimate” religions recognized by the state, and one that curtails the free operation of the media. (Lest one think that the religion law was mostly aimed at Rastafarians and practitioners of “Festivus”,  Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and even some sects of Christianity did not make the cut.)

It should be noted that events in Hungary have not gone altogether unnoticed. Both EU and US diplomats have been talking to Viktor Orban’s government about their fears. The EU did drive some changes in the Central Bank Law including making selection of Central Bankers a parliamentary rather than a Prime Ministerial decision. Also, the Constitutional Court found some parts of the media and church laws unconstitutional – as well as finding some rules  designed to weaken the judiciary to be illegal.

So why be concerned about the way of a country geographically the size of the state of Maine with a population about the same as Michigan? The concern is a spread of countries modeled on the present-day Russian model - i.e. with sham democracies and sham civil liberties – that may erupt into something horrible as they slide further down their slippery slope.

What can one expect from a year that has already been the title of countless books suggesting a late December apocalypse? That’s a bummer of a way to enter a new year, unless you really believe – in which case it’s time to party like it’s 1999, I mean 2012. The 2012 mythos does tell us something interesting and relevant. It tells us that people are so eager to believe that humans can predict the future, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they will do so even if the prediction is horrific news. Of course, to be fair, the Mayans didn’t really make a prediction about the end of the world, they just ended their calendar. Conclusions about the end of the world came from present-day authors with a keen understanding of a certain peculiarity of the human psyche and a desire to sell books .

So, as a naysayer about prognostication, why am I writing a post of my 2012 predictions? Because it’s fun and caters to my desire to cast myself in god’s image. I can’t really fake omnipotence, but I can fake omniscience – right up until events prove me wrong.  Of course, I do believe we can make better predictions about events a year from now than we can about 2050, and vastly better than we can about life will be like in 1,200 years. (If I were smart I’d make predictions about the latter: not so distant that the damn dirty apes will have deciphered the language of our ancient texts, but long enough that humans will all be illiterate.)

2012 will be a year of major events. It will be an important election year not only in the US but globally as well. The summer Olympics will be held in London. Furthermore, there is a great deal of unfinished business including deciding the plight of the Euro, the Arab Spring continued, and the winding down of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s a presidential election year in the US, and there are leadership elections in a number of other important countries. There will be some elections, like the one in the US, that have completely unknowable outcomes and which could have a substantial influence on the direction the nation takes on some issues. There will also be elections, like the ones in China and Russia, that offer little surprise and are unlikely to result in any change of course.  In between, there will be a few elections, such as the one in Venezuela, that may prove intriguing. Of course, a possible presidential election in Egypt may be among the most eagerly anticipated of the year.

The US elections promise some interesting twists and turns before November. I’m fascinated to see that Ron Paul has made it into the position of leading anti-Romney. Don’t get me wrong, Ron Paul’s views are probably the closest to my own among the Republican candidates, and so I make my previous statement not with malice but rather out of an objective consideration of nominatability.

I once heard former Senator Sam Nunn, when asked about his own aspirations of running for President, say that he could see a path by which he could get elected if nominated, but, that didn’t matter, because the centrist (on a few issues downright conservative) politician couldn’t see a path by which his party would ever nominate him.  It has been fascinating to watch the GOP’s internal struggle with candidates that might be nominated but would be completely unelectable (i.e. Perry and Bachmann) versus those that have a good chance in an election but face an uphill struggle for the nomination. Of course, I don’t expect Paul’s current popularity will go anywhere; who knows, there might be another leading anti-Romney before Romney is nominated.

In an Obama v Romney election, I suspect Romney has a better than even shot given the discontent with incumbents. If the GOP nominee turns out to be someone else, it becomes hard to set odds. If it’s someone like Perry, I think the Republicans will have succeeded in “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory”, which, interestingly, is usually a Democrat move. While it’d be nice to think the US is ready for a libertarian President, i.e. Paul, I have my doubts.

The one thing that I do have confidence in is that being an incumbent won’t be the coveted status it usually is. This will be particularly true if the political jackassery of 2011 continues into the new year. If we keep having economic crises every few weeks because of political gridlock, we may see a vast booting of those in power.

I also believe the US’s long march of decline will continue as a result of our inability to “get big stuff done.” The “big stuff” in question is infrastructural advancements, big science, and long-term technology development. Most notably, I suspect the next big kick to the economy is going to require breakthroughs in energy. The government’s inability to do its part is not the sum of the problem. Perhaps a bigger problem is the fact that the government’s dysfunction has an adverse impact on the private sector portion of the solution as well by creating uncertainty that makes bold entrepreneurial risk-taking all the less appealing.  

As for the rest of the world, there will be some surprises to be certain. It will be interesting to see what happens in Venezuela, Russia, and North Korea. In Venezuela, Chavez, battling cancer and a tough opposition, will have his work cut out for him.  In Russia, there will be a likely swapping of positions between Putin and Medvedev (the former resuming the presidency and the later becoming PM) that seems unlikely to be derailed. While no surprises are anticipated, there are uncertain foundations under foot. For one thing, the domestic contentedness that makes this a non-issue is predicated on continuation of a sound economy, which, to a disturbing degree, is predicated on strong energy prices. While Russia’s elections are not really an important factor in what will happen with regards its leadership, there is another country in which no elections will occur but in which the world will watch for a transition of power. That is, of course, North Korea, whose new leader, Kim Jong Un, will have to consolidate power over a very feeble country.

I don’t have high hopes for a vast resurgence of the economy because of the continued debt crises in Europe and the role political jockeying may continue to play in the US’s own economic stagnation as companies and consumers ride the roller-coaster of economic uncertainty. Of course, one of the key lessons one learns in economics (besides that one can’t have everything) is that no event or situation is ever bad (or good) for everyone. In other words, even if the economy is not zero-sum, in any happening in which there are losers there will tend to be winners. Who will be the winners? They will probably continue to be the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and other countries that have big low-cost labor forces and both the mass and the competence to get things done.

In the domain of war and peace there could be some dreadful surprises, but I’m hopeful there won’t be. The US, for one, does not have the will to enter a war it has the potential to avoid. This would seem to be good news. However, there are a number of potential countervailing factors. On the one hand, there is a consistent failure to recognize that activities that are not equated with war (e.g. providing air support) often do turn into war. On the other hand, one can anticipate a number of unstable situations globally that might contribute to bellicosity. There are a pack of new fledgling democracies in the Middle East, and no one can anticipate how the power vacuums will be filled. In North Korea, Kim Jong Un may start engaging in bold actions to cement his power, and these could result in miscalculations. Iran has been threatening to cork up the Strait of Hormuz, an act that virtually ensures war - regardless of who is  US President. Then there are the non-state actors. Al-Qaeda may be eager to show that, while clearly down, it is not out.

There will be a horrific natural disaster that ends up resulting in at least hundreds dead. The trend toward urbanization is not declining and the popularity of building cities on water makes this a safe bet.

Of course there are bound to be completely unanticipated events. That’s the nature of prediction. One can make fairly accurate prognostications if one projects that the past will continue along the trends of the present. The problem is that the big game-changing surprises are what we care about, and we can’t predict them. For example, I don’t anticipate game-changing technological advancements because the countries most capable of being the point of origin for them are not in a condition to advance them. However, one never knows…

Everybody is scrambling for scraps of information that may give some insight into who exactly Kim Jong Un is and what his leadership will mean for the future of North Korea and, by extension, East Asia in general. Not much is known about him except that he seems to be more quiet like his father rather than being a potent speaker like his grandfather, and he loves basketball (plans are no doubt being formulated to see if Michael Jordan will trade him a signed game ball for the DPRK plutonium stocks.) Of course, in the immediate future it probably doesn’t much matter. To the extent that Kim Jong Un may have aspirations that would take the DPRK on a different course, he can’t act upon them without consolidating power first. There is now an OK Corral moment in which no one is inclined to make any erratic movements on a whim.

However, even if he manages to get an iron-grasp on the reigns of power, can he be a significant reformer? It must be remembered that a reformer in a brutal dictatorship makes everyone with power nervous. What happens as power transitions to the people? One can have a situation like that of Libya where the dictator ends up a bullet-riddled corpse, or, alternatively, they may end up on trial for their lives like Mubarak and Hussein. All those people around the dictator expect to suffer the same fate. If our man of mystery did entertain thoughts of reform, he would certainly be looking at the Arab spring and attempting to draw lessons from it.

So if he’s not likely to be a reformer, what’s the prognosis. Of course, the concern is that he will feel the need to assert his boldness by acting out as his father did. Given Kim Jong Un, like Kim Jong Il, doesn’t seem to possess the kind of commanding personality of Kim Il Sung, this seems a likely possibility. I was recently reading about Hitler’s activities well before the oft-cited Chamberlain appeasement of 1938. Hitler’s succesful use of audacity in reconstituting a military and then moving on the demilitarized Rhineland in 1935 and 1936 respectively did a lot to bolster his leadership credentials because it was a completely make-or-break move for him. While Kim’s situation is not perfectly analogous, if Kim Jong Un doesn’t act boldly he will appear weak, in which case he may be eaten alive.  

On the nuclear front, I don’t expect change anytime soon. North Korea is likely to be more weary of its security than usual, and is not likely to give up its perceived ace-in-the-hole.

How does a World War II happen? This question has fascinated me for a long time. I’m not asking how a war came to take place. It’s not hard to imagine a demoralized Germany trying to rise against the Versailles Treaty limitations and that war might resume in Europe as a result of the “unfinished business” of the previous war. Furthermore, it’s not difficult to picture Japan, as a rising power with low indigenous resource endowments, practicing imperial expansion in the same way many European countries had earlier done. What I am talking about is the millions of people blindly following a mad-man like Hitler into events far more despicable than war.

Only someone with an audacity born of complete irrationally exuberance could have achieved Hitler’s results. There seems to be a near consensus that had Germany been beaten back when it reoccupied demilitarized territory adjacent France it would have been devastating to Hitler and his ambitions.  But the question is why people followed him en masse. Yes, he had charisma, but he was all kind of crazy as well.

My interest in this question has a lot to do with concerns about whether this is a tragically repeatable phenomenon. I think most people think that this could never happen again, at least not in the developed world, but, perhaps, the conditions have just not recurred. I bring this all up because I think that prolonged demoralizing economic conditions were a crucial factor in what took place in Germany. As William Shirer points out, before Hitler 6 million bread-winners were out of work. This is not to praise Hitler. When his programs resulted in near full employment it was in no small part due to a treaty-violating military build up and reconstitution of the military industrial complex.

Not only did these prolonged economic doldrums make people eager to get back to work, it made them eager to regain self-esteem. This left people desirous of rebuilding the national glory so as to get a vicarious boost from residing in a nation of higher status. It also made it easy to sell boogie-man theories of outgroups who were responsible for people’s dire situations.

As we look at the possibility of a prolonged economic stagnation in Europe and the US, I’m not confident we are beyond historical reruns at some scale. The far-right Jobbik has made headway in Hungary in recent years, and they are not unique in this regard.