President Trump has proposed a $54 billion increase in defense spending, which he said would be “one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history.” … Mr. Trump wants to increase the number of active-duty military personnel in the Army and Marine Corps by about 70,000 — a rise of about 11 percent…. The United States has around 2,200 fighter jets, including about 1,400 operated by the Air Force. Mr. Trump wants to add at least 100 more fighter aircraft to the Air Force. The United States Navy has 275 surface ships and submarines. Mr. Trump wants to increase that number to 350, including two new aircraft carriers. … After Mr. Trump tweeted his pledge to expand America’s nuclear capability, he told the talk-show host Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”
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Gordon Adams, a former senior White House national security budget officer, said, “Unless you decide you’re going to war — and going to war soon — nobody keeps a large military.”
– K.K. REBECCA LAI, TROY GRIGGS, MAX FISHER and AUDREY CARLSEN, Is America’s Military Big Enough?, NYT, AR. 22, 2017 (excerpts not all in original order)

Here’s how Trump’s chief strategist sees our future:

We’re going to war in the South China Sea in 5 to 10 years, aren’t we? There’s no doubt about it.
– Steve Bannon, Chief Strategist in the Trump administration, Interview of Lee Edwards (at 5:22), Breitbart News Daily, March 10, 2016

In September 2013, about a year before Nicholas Carr published The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, his chastening meditation on the human future, a pair of Oxford researchers issued a report predicting that nearly half of all jobs in the United States could be lost to machines within the next twenty years.
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The term for what happens when human workers are replaced by machines was coined by John Maynard Keynes in 1930 in the essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” He called it “technological unemployment.”
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Machine efficiency was becoming so great that President Roosevelt, in 1935, told the nation that the economy might never be able to reabsorb all the workers who were being displaced.
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As Paul Krugman wrote a couple of years ago in The New York Times:
 
Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but they will also reduce the demand for people—including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.

In the United States, real wages have been stagnant for the past four decades, while corporate profits have soared.

“Today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which provide nonpartisan policy and program analysis to lawmakers, employ 20 percent fewer staffers than they did in 1979. The same pattern of diminished in-house expertise is true throughout government. As the University of Pennsylvania political scientist John DiIulio has noted, the number of federal bureaucrats declined about 10 percent between 1984 and 2012. At the same time, business lobbying, political polarization, and wealth inequality all started their steady and unmitigated increases.
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The more complexity policymakers have to deal with, the greater the strain on their ability to intelligently think before they act. With each year, the strain gets greater, because the social, political, and legal complexity all continue to grow.
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There is also more legal complexity. The U.S. code of federal regulations grew from 71,224 pages in 1975 to 102,295 pages in 1980 to 174,545 pages by 2012. Some of this is the result of societal complexity—new technologies and new projects require new regulations.
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All three types of complexity are only going to keep growing. (What intervention could possibly stop them?) If we continue on our current path of not giving the government adequate policy capacity, the gap between what our policymakers need to know to effectively govern and what they actually know will only increase.
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The buildup of in-house congressional expertise from 1946 to 1979… did provide Congress with the capacity to think and act for itself—to override corporate pressure and pass legislation cleaning up the air and water; to prosecute, in bipartisan fashion, the crimes of the Nixon White House; and to investigate and roll back intelligence agency abuses with the now-legendary Church and Pike Committees.

When Congress had capacity, it had the time and resources to get together and think through legislation and oversee the rest of the government. Now it doesn’t. As the figure on the left shows, the time lawmakers spent in committee meetings deliberating together rose at a steady clip from the early 1960s until the late 1970s, then plummeted. The decline was partially a consequence of the time demands on members of the rise in campaign fund-raising, but the decline in staff played a critical role. So, instead of debating issues in committee meetings, members and their staff get briefed separately by lobbyists—the very people that members were now spending so much more time raising money from.
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The federal government across all its branches has experienced a deterioration in its ability to acquire, process, and analyze information. But the problem is especially urgent in Congress, which is at the center of America’s current governing crisis.”

According to Dr. Anthony Rostain, co-chairman of a task force on student emotional health at the University of Pennsylvania,“We’re expecting more of students: There’s a sense of having to compete in a global economy, and they think they have to be on top of their game all the time. It’s no wonder they feel overwhelmed.”

For more details, see More College Freshmen Report Having Felt Depressed by Alan Schwarz (NYT, Feb. 5, 2015).

Today added sugar is everywhere, used in approximately 75 percent of packaged foods purchased in the United States. The average American consumes anywhere from a quarter to a half pound of sugar a day. If you consider that the added sugar in a single can of soda might be more than most people would have consumed in an entire year, just a few hundred years ago, you get a sense of how dramatically our environment has changed. The sweet craving that once offered a survival advantage now works against us.
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In animal studies, animals experience sugar like a drug and can become sugar-addicted. One study has shown that if given the choice, rats will choose sugar over cocaine in lab settings because the reward is greater; the “high” is more pleasurable.
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Sugar is added to foods by an industry whose goal is to engineer products to be as irresistible and addictive as possible.

– James DiNicolantonio and Sean Lucan, Sugar Season. It’s Everywhere, and Addictive., New York Times, 12/23/2014

Reporting on the lack of any serious opposition to separatist leader Aleksandr Zakharchenko in the current eastern Ukrainian election, Andrew Kramer provided the following commentary from a Russian newspaper editor:

Aleksandr A. Prokhanov, the editor in chief of the Russian nationalist newspaper Zavtra, who has advised separatist field commanders including Mr. Zakharchenko on ideological questions, said in an interview over the weekend that the Donetsk People’s Republic would not be bound by rigid Western ideas of democracy.

“There are elections when you choose between A and B, and then there are the more difficult ones when you choose between A and A,” he said. “You are a liberal, so you do not understand this. In the Russian consciousness, you can choose between A and A and A, and choosing between an infinite number of A’s is true freedom.”

– Andrew Kramer, Rebel-Backed Elections to Cement Status Quo in Ukraine, New York Times, 11/3/2014

Insanity in Mexico

Those who have not paid attention to the story of the disappearance of 43 students from the Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos teachers’ college in southern Mexico will find a good overview in today’s New York Times article by Paulina Villegas and Randal Archibold. Given the breakdown of order reported in this part of Mexico, one wonders if America’s neighbor could collapse into chaos like Syria or Libya. Here’s an excerpt:

The small teachers’ college in southern Mexico has been at the center of a national crisis since 43 of its students disappeared in September after a violent confrontation with the local police force, which has been infiltrated by a drug gang.

…Israel, one of the students missing since Sept. 26… was part of a large group of students who went to the industrial city of Iguala, about two hours away and 120 miles south of Mexico City, to collect money for school activities and to steal two buses to help transport them to demonstrations on Oct. 2 commemorating a 1968 student massacre in Mexico City.

The appropriation of the buses [was] routine and temporary, students here say….

They have routinely blocked highways and these days have regularly taken over tollbooths on superhighways in southern Mexico, asking for donations while federal police officers sit nearby, apparently unwilling to risk a confrontation.

… In the search for the students, the authorities have uncovered several mass graves containing a total of 38 bodies, though initial tests indicate that none are the missing students.

… The authorities now believe that the mayor of Iguala had close ties to the drug gang and ordered the police to round up the students before they interrupted a speech his wife, a social services official in town, was giving.

– Paulina Villegas and Randal Archibold, Keeping the Revolutionary Fires Alive, New York Times, 11/3/2014

Along with an excellent discussion of why the Great Recession occurred and persisted, Paul Krugman’s recent Why Weren’t Alarm Bells Ringing? (a review of Martin Wolf’s The Shifts and Shocks: What We’ve Learned–and Have Still to Learn–from the Financial Crisis) provides an impressive picture of the extent to which the views of contemporary economists have been disconnected from reality. Here’s an excerpt:

Almost nobody predicted the immense economic crisis that overtook the United States and Europe in 2008. … On the eve of crisis in 2007 the officials, analysts, and pundits who shape economic policy were deeply, wrongly complacent. They didn’t see 2008 coming; but what is more important is the fact that they even didn’t believe in the possibility of such a catastrophe.

…while the depression that overtook the Western world in 2008 clearly came after the collapse of a vast financial bubble, that doesn’t mean that the bubble caused the depression. Late in The Shifts and the Shocks Wolf mentions the reemergence of the “secular stagnation” hypothesis…. If the secular stagnationists are right, advanced economies now suffer from persistently inadequate demand, so that depression is their normal state, except when spending is supported by bubbles. If that’s true, bubbles aren’t the root of the problem; they’re actually a good thing while they last, because they prop up demand. Unfortunately, they’re not sustainable—so what we need urgently are policies to support demand on a continuing basis, which is an issue very different from questions of financial regulation. …

Yes, rising levels of private debt, increased reliance on shadow banking, growing international imbalances, and so on helped set the stage for disaster. But intellectual shifts—the way economists and policymakers unlearned the hard-won lessons of the Great Depression, the return to pre-Keynesian fallacies and prejudices—arguably played an equally large part in the tragedy of the past six years. …

The Shifts and the Shocks is an excellent survey of how we arrived at the mess we’re in, and Wolf’s substantive proposals… are all worthy and laudable. But the gods themselves contend in vain against stupidity. What are the odds that financial reformers can do better?

“the Secret Service has revealed itself to be as bungling and dysfunctional as many other once-revered Washington institutions.”

and Frank Bruni wrote that

Time and again, Washington validates the naysayers who like to dismiss it as the capital of bureaucratic incompetence.

Michael Ignatieff’s recent New York Review of Books article Are the Authoritarians Winning? provides an interesting overview of the problems of America and other modern democracies. Here’s an excerpt:

In the 1930s travelers returned from Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany praising the hearty sense of common purpose they saw there, compared to which their own democracies seemed weak, inefficient, and pusillanimous.

Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period of envy and despondency. …

… America sets a dismaying example to its allies and friends. For two centuries, its constitutional machinery was widely admired. Now, in the hands of polarizing politicians in Washington and in the two parties, it generates paralysis. …

It’s difficult to defend liberal democracy with much enthusiasm abroad if it works so poorly at home. …

[Harvard economist Joseph] Stiglitz argues that the fiscal crisis of the liberal state is to be attributed squarely to three interrelated phenomena: rising income inequality, money power in politics, and systemic tax avoidance by the superrich and globalized corporations.

As inequality rises, Stiglitz argues, it suppresses effective demand. Unequal societies hoard wealth at the upper end instead of spreading consumption and investment through a broad middle class. When inequality holds back demand, corporations sit on large cash hoards, unwilling to invest or consume. As the rich become ever more ingenious in avoiding taxes, the cost of carrying the liberal state falls on a middle class forced to shoulder the burden alone. It is hyperinequality that is choking off demand and starving the liberal state.