Progress On Hunger

Progress is a thing. A smaller share of people go hungry now than they did in the past, and that share is falling rapidly in South America in particular. 

The share of people who are hungry has been decreasing faster in South America than anywhere else in the world. It is down by one-third since 2020, according to a report published on July 21st by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Just 3.5% of people in the region consume insufficient calories, the lowest level recorded. Eliminating hunger by 2030 is one of the UN’s “sustainable development” goals. “If there is a region in the world that can potentially achieve that, it’s South America,” says Máximo Torero, the FAO’s chief economist.

Lula, as the president is commonly known, made food security a priority when he returned to office in 2023. By 2025 Brazil had made it off the UN’s Hunger Map, which tracks countries where more than 2.5% of the population suffers from chronic hunger. Chile and oil-rich Guyana were also removed. Argentina is almost there at under 3%. Colombia and Paraguay are approaching at 4%, while Peru and crisis-battered Venezuela are making inroads near 5%. Even Ecuador and Bolivia have improved a tad, to 11% and 20% respectively. Only Suriname is moving in the wrong direction.

From The Economist. 

How We Got Here, And Where We Might Go Next

Proximately, the U.S. is in a bad way because Trump and MAGA secured a federal trifecta and also control the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the governmental apparatus of many states, because our laws do too little to discourage the concentration of economic power.

Political theory seeks to explain what factors in the complex political economy we live in led to this situation.

This post surveys some of the possible answers.

An institutionalist approach

An institutionalist approach is a social engineering outlook on why political systems work or do not work. It takes as an axiom the belief that the right rules and systems and organizations more or less directly produce good political economy outcomes, so reforming existing institutions is the path to a better political economy. 

This is closely aligned with a notion that the rule of law is the key to a good society, something that is an article of faith in "Western culture" (with its roots in Western Europe) and is widely rejected in "Eastern culture" (with its roots in China).

Fundamentally Broken Institutions

The U.S. Constitution, other key laws, and important institutions of political and civic society (like political parties and the media) are broken. There are deep design flaws with the status quo that can't right itself without decisive, and indeed, perhaps revolutionary change in our institutions.

Common reform proposals in this approach are campaign finance reform, gun control, abolition of the electoral college, expansion of the franchise, proportional representation electoral systems or ranked choice voting, better procedural rules within legislative institutions, improved methods of selecting judges and other key public officials, tweaked checks and balances (like a unicameral legislature, a conversion from a Presidential to a parliamentary system, laws prohibiting corrupt practices enforced by effective enforcement agencies, and so on.

Imperfect, But Fundamentally Sound Institutions

The U.S. Constitution, related key laws, and important institutions of political and civic society (like political parties and the media) are flawed but are not fundamentally broken. These institutions are robust enough to eventually right the ship of our political economy, even though they aren't as fool proof and rapid as we'd like.

Really bad Presidents produce electoral backlash and encourage more competent people who otherwise would pursue careers other than politics to resist bad political leaders, which puts us back on track. But this feedback mechanism can't react much sooner than every couple of years, can't prevent serious abuses and failings, and often takes decades. Lessons learned in the last crisis are forgotten until we pay the price for forgetting those lessons again. In worst case scenarios, it can take long insurgencies or wars or full on Great Depressions to trigger support for the necessary reforms.

Bad high court judges need to be threatened with court packing to overcome their biases. Legal scholars seeing legal doctrines producing bad results propose new legal theories. New political parties need to replace old ones much like the GOP replaced the Whigs. People come to realize that voting for openly corrupt liars and criminals is maybe not such a good idea.

Culture

The main counterpart to an institutionalist approach to the success of a political economy (which has strong parallels in the economic development literature), observation that laws and institutions that are identical in all material respects can produce wildly different results, when people who are culturally different utilize these institutions.

This approach concludes that the character, morals, norms, and values of the people who use the institutions profoundly influence the quality of the political economy outcomes that a society produces, while the particulars of the institutional arrangements put in place to facilitate management of the political economy aren't particularly important within a fairly finite set of combinations of big choices in institutions.

Differences between the success of parliamentary systems and Presidential systems, in this view, have more to do with the political culture of the people utilizing those systems than with the inherent, universal virtues of different reasonable sets of institutions and rules. 

There may be some sets of institutions and rules that usually led to bad outcomes, but people with a good political culture can make any remotely reasonable set of institutions produce good outcomes, while people with a political culture ill-suited to their demands of their current circumstances will find a way to break any set of institutions and rules, no matter how expertly crafted.

The optimal political culture is also not universal. In times of economic hardship and scarce resources which give rise to weak states, cultures of honor, clan based societies, cousin marriage, and systems that reward might over right may be more functional. In times of economic abundance that facilitate the rise of strong states, more atomized social structure, meritocracy, forgiveness, out marriage, and systems that reward truth over power may be more functional.

For example, one way to explain the rise of Christianity in the Greco-Roman classical era is that Christianity was a tool of cultural change that helped a society that was becoming more abundant, more urban, and more mercantile transition managed by a strong state, and away from a Greco-Roman pagan culture more suited to rural living, herding, and tradition based allocations of resources, in small and weak states. The expansion of the Islamic empire likewise involved a massive cultural change from a decadent and disorganized society without strong state management in the post-Roman era to a society with more firm and decisive, yet decentralized leadership that functioned well in the absence of Western Roman Empire type institutions.

This cultural-first approach to political theory is closely aligned with a notion that rule by good and moral leaders is the key to a good society, something that is an article of faith in "Eastern culture" (with its roots in Chinese Confucianism) and is widely rejected in "Western culture" (with its roots in Western Europe), where the "rule of man" is synonymous with authoritarianism, corruption, and arbitrary treatment of people.

Malleable culture

One version of a cultural approach to political economy sees a society's political culture as harder to change in many respects than institutional rules, but feasible with measures like widespread public education, religious conversion or deconversion, and grass roots activism through "movement politics" over decades. And, while this takes longer to accomplish than institutional rule changes, it is almost more robust and enduring.

A malleable culture theory concludes that while the relative political leanings of groups and geographic regions with different cultures are persistent over time periods measured in centuries, that societal progress is attainable over time. Yesterday's segregationists become today's advocates of a color blind society without affirmative action. Yesterday's corporal punishment advocates become today's advocates of large fines and long sentences of incarceration. 

In absolute terms, society gradually abandons specific practices and norms that are conservative or backward at the time, while the descendants of people who held those specific practices and norms come to adopt views that were liberal in the times of their ancestors and are conservative now. But the descendants of the liberal leaning ancestors in turn, become even more progressive.

Even proponents of malleable culture approaches to political economy acknowledge that the process can be two steps forward and one step back. But ultimately, technology and the accumulation of knowledge and fundamental, universal human impulses that are masked by different immediate material conditions point humanity in the same general direction in the long terms (although there are shorter and longer routes to progress), so we progress more often than we regress.

Static culture

In contrast, a view that culture at an ethnic group or geographic area scale is predominantly static, even if isolated and exceptional individuals can change their cultures, see mass movements and programs to change a society's culture intentionally as largely futile.

It isn't that this view believes that the culture of a particular geographic area can't change. But, it sees the main mechanism for a change in the culture of a particular geographic area to be replacement of people of one ethnicity or mix of ethnicities with people of another ethnicity or group of ethnicities.

In this view, some of the main mechanisms of cultural change are colonization by people of a different ethnicity, genocide (through forcible abandonment of culture, actually murder, restrictions on fertility, or economic marginalization), immigration, and differential rates of births and deaths between ethnicities, with these mechanisms being particularly strong among men, while women more easily assimilate into new cultures in which they find themselves. This is also a more zero sum worldview. Flavored with ideas about ethnic or religious or cultural superiority, this can morph into righteous missionary zeal, ethnic nationalism and/or religious nationalism.

Along the same lines, languages associated with dominant cultures tend to increase their market share of language speakers in a society, while languages associated with economically marginal ethnicities tend to decrease their market share of language speakers in a society, in both cases at a pace measured primarily in generations, rather than within the lives of individual speakers of a language.

This outlook was heavily disfavored in the 1960s and 1970s in the Western world (under the motto that pots are not people), but has enjoyed a resurgence as research into ancient DNA, historical linguistics, and physical archaeology have been synthesized in a manner that has reviewed that over time frames of centuries and millennia, that these mechanism of demic change have been far more common than culture change through intercultural contact and elite dominance. Admittedly, there have been notable exceptions to this general trend (e.g. the linguistic transition of the country now known as Hungary, or the Brahui people, or the expansion of the Islamic empire, or the rise of Christianity). But cultural transition without demic change has been the exception rather than the norm.

This outlook on political economy, for example, perceives Zionism and the formation of new West Bank settlements in Israel, or ethnically and religiously motivated raids by Sahel Muslims from traditionally herding societies in Africa on Christian/animist communities to their immediate South, from a very different worldview framework than a worldview in which institutional approaches or malleable cultural views are the norm.

More generally, a political theory bent rooted in the worldview that culture is predominantly static, particularly when fused with the concepts of economic and environmentally driven cultural change discussed below, tends to see political tactics that "civilized society" condemns most intensely, as largely inevitable and natural, even if it is not morally desirable at an individual level.

Political worldviews and theories that emphasis the static nature of culture at the group and regional level are more sanguine about the inevitability of progress than those which see culture as malleable. These worldviews tend to see cultural progress as exceptions to the general rule that require specific and rarely recurring conditions, rather than as a universal law or inevitability.

Environmentally determined culture

A premise which is widely accepted in anthropology, but less widely accepted in political theory, is that people's material conditions determine which cultures are optimal for those conditions.

While no culture is inherently better than any other in a vacuum, in any given set of circumstances, some cultures are more functional than others.

Plough based agriculture tends to favor patriarchy and patrilocal clan systems. Hoe based agriculture and hunter-gatherer societies can tend to favor matriarchal social structures, with households often led by brother-sister couples rather than households led by monogamous co-parent households. 

Affluent, urban societies, without low rates of childhood morality that rely on skilled labor that takes many years of investment in human capital tend to favor small family households; poor, rural societies, with high rates of childhood mortality that rely on unskilled labor tend to favor large family households. 

Weak states tend to favor cultures of honor, and clan based social organization. Strong states tend to favor a focus on individual autonomy, meritocracy, rule based justice, and weaker extended family ties. 

Perceptions of economic scarcity and uncertainty favor conservatism and societies where religion and/or superstition are important. Perceptions of economic abundance and security favor secular, liberal societies that rely on science rather than superstition.

Perceptions of economic decline or stagnation of an ethnicity or geographic group or social class, and societies where the economy is heavily reliant upon economic rents like land ownership or fossil fuel resources, can further fascism, far-right movements, ethnic and religious nationalist movements, and support for authoritarianism. Shared prosperity in a society where the economy depends heavily on a diffuse class of merchants, professionals, and skilled labor rather than natural resources, in contrast, tend to further democracy, an absence of corruption, respect for individual rights, and tolerance for diversity.

Cultures ill-suited to their conditions decline, due to both conversion to better suited cultures and economic and demographic decline. Cultures well-suited to their conditions thrive. Conversely, religious institutions that support threatened cultures tend to thrive, while religious institutions associated with establishment, secure, dominant cultures tend to wither despite the fact that the communities that they serve tend to have more economic resources.

The notion that culture is economically or environmentally determined is relatively agnostic about whether culture is malleable or static, with their very different mechanisms and tactics that give rise to cultural change.

Synthesis

Of course, none of these political theories is 100% true. 

Even a strong culture oriented political theorists who takes a hard look at all the data will acknowledge that institutions and rules can matter, and can shape culture. You can see this particularly clearly when looking at the divergent paths taken by North Korea and South Korea, by Taiwan and mainland China, by East Germany and West Germany prior to unification and persisting in regional culture differences in the thirty-seven years that have elapsed since unification, even though the highly distinct institutions in these places that once shared a common culture including a political culture arose only about eighty years ago or less, in these cases.

On the other hand, scholarly works like Albion's Seed, and studies of persistent regional cultural differences in Germany (that predate the formation of a unified Germany state about 150 years ago), also establish that once regional or ethnic cultures are established, they are remarkably resilient in the face of institutional change and political unification, and can persist for centuries.

If you were to guess how politicians in the late 1700s and early 1800s in newly formed U.S. states leaned politically relative to each other on major groups of political issues like being pro-war or anti-war, or on economic or social issues, based upon the current political leanings of those states, you would overwhelming be correct 250 years plus or minus a few decades later.

The Catholic-Protestant divisions of Europe have been mostly static for the entire early modern period that started with the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s that were decided based upon the decisions of late stage feudal lords to choose one side or the other of this divide in European Christianity. And, those religious divisions, as famously noted by Max Weber in the 19th century, are associated with a whole suite of larger cultural divides epitomized by what he called the "Protestant work ethic."

Persistent culture divisions whose effects predominate in places where different cultures function within the same formal political institutions, like divisions in economic prosperity and political economy between regions dominated by different ethnic groups in Nigeria, whose characteristic cultures and cultural identities pre-date the relatively recent conversion of southern Nigeria to Christianity across a wide variety of diverse ethnicities starting in the 19th century or so, are still very real (even though many formal statistics on African immigrants to the U.S. aren't so fine grained and don't make these distinctions in their record keeping mask these differences).

In India, genetic testing has confirmed the anthropologically well-documented phenomena of caste endogamy and inequalities, pin pointing the time frame, centuries ago, when endogamous caste divisions at the jati level started to harden upon which historical accounts from those time periods were inconclusive and scarce, and eighty years of Indian independence with egalitarian institutions and ideals have only modestly dented the resilient cultural juggernaut of caste divides. Genetic studies also establish the time frame of the much older origins of varna level caste/ethnic divisions within India and help establish more clearly the magnitude, timing, and nature of introgression of people from one varna into another one.

Particularly in my own personal world and my own country, I am well aware that I instinctually lean towards institutional explanations and solutions, and that I also tend to favor malleable culture worldviews over static culture worldviews, to a greater degree than that evidence available to me supports.

How We Got Here

Each of these political theories naturally lends itself to a different narrative about how we go here, and the deeper driving factors behind the proximate causes of our woes.

Environmental determinism points to technological changes and human driven climate changes as the source of structural economic changes and changes to the U.S. social structure and social class system that has shunted the benefits of economic growth to an educated upper middle class serving a thin veneer of old money and new money billionaires and big businesses, and while reducing the less educated whom the modern economy has little use for, from a broad unifying middle class that has a stake in our society to a working class and underclass. The upper middle class has small stable prosperous families, while the working class is seeing their families fall apart despite having as many or more children, and their prospects for social mobility or comfort without generational wealth and social capital fading. The upper middle class has become far more secular, while comparatively the working class has remained more religious despite its long term trend away from religion as well.

The neo-fascist MAGA movement is, in this analysis, a natural consequence of two generations of economic stagnation for the non-college educated working class.

Static cultural worldviews emphasize the fact that there is a straight line from antebellum Southern whites to the KKK and Jim Crow and segregation supporters and American Nazis prior to WWII to opponents of the civil rights movement to MAGA.

Malleable cultural worldviews emphasize the fact that far right political viewholders skew heavily towards older white men while younger generations are much more liberal on a wide variety of issues. They note that the divorce between the MAGA worldview and reality is the product of intentional propaganda by billionaire class funded conservative media outlets like Fox News, conservative think tanks, talk radio, and fundamentalist Christians and Christian clergy who are wary of reality based inquiry because it undermines their religious doctrines, and can be reversed with carefully crafted interventions to deprogram MAGA adherents.

Institutionalists who see the system as fundamentally broken see the proximate causes of our woes as more directly caused by particular flaws in our Microsoft of political systems which was state of the art in the late 1700s, but had rules that didn't benefit from the next couple of centuries of experience with democratic political institutions which addressed the inherent flaws in our own system which the Founders, not being omniscient, and with their own narrow franchise and biases could not have foreseen. The trouble is, that if indeed, our Institutions are fundamentally and deeply broken, there is no clear path to fixing them.

Institutionalists who see the system as flaws but fundamentally sound, in contrast, acknowledge that the flaws in our system have prevented our political system from preventing or more swiftly ending the MAGA scourge. But they are more optimistic and stoic. In an analog to the idea that suppressing all wildfires can make a forest more vulnerable to more devastating big wildfires, or to the hygienic hypothesis that an environment that is too sterile and devoid of threats can lead to autoimmune diseases and allergies because the immune system didn't have a chance to do its job non-pathologically, they argue that as unpleasant as it is at the time, healthy political economies need periodic threats to its values so that the people served by them remain vigilant in developing a combination of institutions and political cultures that can defeat even strong threats to their health.

People never exposed to fraud become too trusting and become easy marks (something that is a big problem in the overall high trust society of Mormon Utah). Politicians who grow too used to playing nice with their political opponents forget the tactics that their predecessors used to win when their political opponents didn't play fair. 

A near miss constitutional crisis of our political economy with fascism and authoritarianism, with an scary dose of corruption and lies, may be what it takes to build broad enough support to fix the most important institutional flaws in the status quo, much like the U.S. did in the New Deal, and again in the 1960s and 1970s.

Institutionalists who see the "bones" of U.S. political institutions as fundamentally sound will note that the U.S. system has been good enough to last 250 years including multiple comparably bad or worse political crises, like those leading up to, during, and following the U.S. Civil War. And, they see the gridlock and shifting political coalitions that have predominated in the time frame from the 1980s to the present, as a feature rather than a bug, by preventing thin majorities from making big and bold political changes in the absence of widespread, bipartisan, cross-ethnic, cross-regional support. Our federal system funnels paths to innovations to the states and refrains from making big changes until with the passage of time, some approaches are widely understood to be desirable, and other approaches are seen as failures. And, like the seventy year plus era of doctrinaire communism in Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia, on one side, and mixed capitalism in the "West" and some Western leaning East Asian nations, this deadlock can seem completely intractable and static, until sudden it collapses, with Eastern European communism collapsing in just a few years, and Asian communism more resiliently adopting market-style reforms to the point where it has become communism in name only with billionaire capitalists holding all positions of power in these one party states.

We saw something similar leading up to the abolition of slavery in the United States. This issue divided the new republic for eight-five years from its inception right up until 1861, only for slavery to be formally abolished four years later all at once, in turn followed after a brief reconstruction interlude, with another eight-five years of so of Jim Crow, only for that institution to in turn collapse over the course of about a decade when it had seemed in 1950 that Jim Crown might persist eternally. Sixty years after the Civil Rights movement had achieved most of its major objectives, MAGA is trying its best to undo the reforms of the civil rights era in a last dying eruption of a movement that know that democracy will mean its death as socially and economically regressive Baby Boomers, some of whom were born in the era of segregated water fountains, bathrooms, and schools, die and reduce their share of the electorate only to be replaced by liberal Generations Z and Alpha in the electorate for whom racial diversity is second nature and is their generation's reality.

Trump has been a racist all of his life, just like his Nazi father. Joe Biden came around later in his political career, but got started in Congress on a platform of opposition to school desegregation in Delaware. Many of the leaders in Congress, and especially in the U.S. Senate, are from that same generation and still wear ideological and worldview boots of clay developed in their politically formative years.

Eventually, however, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, dementia, COVID, geriatric falls, and the like will do the job of replacing them with the next generation of politicians, that Baby Boomers have prevented from happening in the ordinary course as it should have a couple of decades ago.

The midterms in 2026 could end the GOP's trifecta control of the federal government and reducing the bleeding that our national institutions and esteem on the global stage have been suffering. Ideally, its defeat could be crippling enough to lead to the GOP's replacement with some new center-right opposition party that starts over after MAGA has burned all of the GOP's bridges and poisoned the well with several younger generations. Democrats could take the Presidency in 2028 with majorities not seen in recent memory and a commitment to play hardball after the horrors of Trump 2.0, and make enough major reforms to put the U.S.A. on track again with wide consensus backing, even though it may take decades to undo the damage done by Trump already that is not irreparable. And, if that happens, the Institutionalists who believe that flawed as it is, that the U.S. political system is not broken beyond all repair, will be vindicated. The fact that the U.S. has weathered past crises makes this a far from unlikely scenario, and the optimist in my wants to hope that they are right. Polling leading up to the midterms that are barely more than five months away, suggest that they might be right. 

While MAGA stayed loyal during Trump 1.0, his more radical Trump 2.0 term has finally seen Trump's steadfast support start to erode and has seen some prominent GOP/MAGA leaders, like Marjorie Taylor Green, break ranks with him.

What Happens If We Don't Escape And End Up In A Deeper Circle of Hell?

I want to believe that they are right, because the alternatives are very dark indeed. If Democrats can't do this over the next three years or so, because its institutions are too badly broken to return the nation to a positive path, all of the paths before us are nightmares.

One need look no further than North Korea, Cuba, Albania until the fall of communism, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, East Germany, the Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the slave states of the U.S. prior to the U.S. Civil War, to observe that the fact that a regime is authoritarian, undemocratic, and performs dismally economically in its non-natural resource sector, and faces significant sustained pressure from  the international community to reform, does not mean that these regimes are fragile or vulnerable to prompt collapse. Eventually, many of these regimes did collapse. But it took an entire lifetime or so to do fall, and more often than not it took an international military intervention (or at least a costly cold war interspersed with periodic hot proxy wars) to make it happen.

The U.S. is to big and militarily powerful for a turn for the worse to be cured with a foreign military invasion of the U.S. to liberate us any time soon. 

If one of the darker scenarios has developed in the U.S. by 2028 or 2030, it is entirely possible that the U.S. will degenerate into a full fledged malevolent dictatorship and remain in that state until sometime in the early twenty-second century. 

This dark era for the U.S. could possibly punctuated by an ugly and deadly military insurgency, and waves of assassinations, asymmetric warfare, sabotage, and non-violent resistance that persists as long as Afghanistan has been in a state of near continual war since the 1970s, that may only end or at least subside when it is put down with brutal ruthless efficiency that scars our nation with horrors we have yet to imagine like the annihilation of every soul in a whole liberal leaning rebellious metropolitan area like Minneapolis, rather than a mere attempted ICE and National Guard driven show of force. The Handmaid's Tale was meant to be a warning and not a prophecy, but there is no certainty that it won't turn out to be one.

There are happier paths that one could imagine, like a bloodless coup that is followed by a new covenant that replaces our existing political and economic institutions, if the existing ones don't solve the problem in the next three year or so, that reboot our nation in some manner or another, or a wave of blue state successions, that leaves unsubsidized red state America in a state of total economic collapse, and followed by reform or reunification.

One could also imagine something like the experience of the Romans, who first transformed from a genuine Republic, to a more flawed Republic, to a truly non-democratic empire, stuttering from crisis to crisis, with bandaid temporary political fixes that don't last, punctuated with emperors like Nero and Caligula, who are still remembered about two thousand years later for their perfidy and insanity. Trump could end up being a model for future corrupt, authoritarian, delusional demagogues who are equally bad, but even less restrained by the democratic actions of the electorate or the courts or federalism or military independence, than Trump 2.0 which is actually exploring every avenue to end these constraints upon it.

Some of these nightmares seem almost unthinkable now, after the imperfect and slow mechanisms and institutions for slowing down Trump and MAGA's destruction of the federal government and everything good in the United States of America finally started to kick in. But the United States doesn't get three strikes. If the midterms to provide a decisive and effective check on Trump 2.0 in what has so far been a Congress that has ceded its responsibilities, we'll be lucky to get a federal election at all in 2028, and if there is one then, it will probably be less free and less fair (despite the fact that Republicans are pulling out all stops to undermine the regularity of the 2026 elections and to persecute Trump's enemies with no regard to the law or any notion of anything greater than Trump's momentary whims).

If Americans, collectively, fail to decisively interrupt its current course in either 2026 or 2028, we're pretty much done. Democracy and democratic values and the rule of law and civil liberties will be no more, and there will be no way back within the confined of legal political action or even civil disobedience. The U.S. is too big, and too culturally divided to secure the final turnabout that ousted a far right authoritarian regime in Hungary earlier this year.

Those who can will become political refugees, much like the scientists who fled Germany when the Nazis came to power, and fled the Soviet Union as it grew ever more oppressive. Those who can't will suffer, or sell their souls for petty subordinate power at the whim of some unsteady dictator (probably not Trump for long, given his ill-health and age, but possibly some successor who is equally evil but more competent).

Better Isn't Impossible, Other Countries Do It

 

Empirical Tests Of Economic Theories

Experience tells us which economic theories are right and which are not, often with unexpected results.

* In theory, a higher minimum wage should greatly increase unemployment. In reality, the effect is almost immeasurable at U.S. levels.

* The evidence from Brexit and from Trump 2.0 and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs demonstrate that globalism is very important for a healthy economy and that departing from free trade does great harm, as does discouraging immigration.

* While a shallow microeconomic analysis would suggest that immigration hurts the job market for native born Americans, experience shows that immigration has the opposite effect, improve the job market and prosperity.

* The evidence from Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War era illustrates that securities laws to reduce the likelihood of things like Ponzi schemes are actually very important even when other protections of property laws and contract laws are in place.

* Economic development studies tend to show that economic development is quite localized and culture driven, rather than being primarily driven by national laws, although national laws do matter quite a bit as shown by comparing the economies of communities on either side of a national boundary where the laws are quite different.

* Notably, lots of the litmus tests for economic development: municipal water quality, roads in good repair, regular trash collection, effective legal enforcement of debts, unambiguous real estate ownership, good quality K-12 education, and the availability of trauma center hospitals, are mostly provided at the local government level, rather than at the regional or national level.

* During the Financial Crisis, two different methods of managing the risk of high loan to value residential loans were compared which have very different regulatory regimes. 

One approach was to make a conventional mortgage at 80% loan to value, and then to have a second mortgage for the next 10-15% of loan to value that was subordinate to the conventional mortgage. This is subject to securities regulation of mortgage backed securities, with risks assessment mostly delegated to thinly regulated and thinly capitalized bond rating agencies (which are basically just credit reporting agencies for the bond market).

The other approach was to issue a single mortgage for the entire loan and to secure mortgage insurance, paid for by the borrower to protect the lender, which covered the lenders' losses if the value of a foreclosed home resulted in a deficiency judgment. This was subject to state insurance regulation.

In the financial crisis, insurance regulation was decisively proven to be superior, with no mortgage insurance firms going out of business, while essentially all of the subprime lenders, mortgage backed securities firms that packaged second mortgages for investors, and investment banks that organized this activity either ceased business entirely, underwent bankruptcy reorganization, or were saved only by bailouts with purchases of the failed firms by healthy large financial companies.

Musings On September 11

 * I was supposed to be in a trial out of town today for one of my clients. She's been hospitalized since Sunday (it is not life threatening at this time, although it sucks to be in the hospital, of course). So, the trial had to be continued to a future date to be determined. As a result, I have some found time today.

* I was in court 24 years ago, on September 11, 2001, when the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon took place, and Flight 93 crashed after passengers rose up and disrupted the efforts of the men who hijacked the plane. 2,996 people were directly killed in the attacks including 19 terrorists were killed in the attacks, predominantly passengers on the four hijacked flights, people in the World Trade Center, and World Trade Center first responders. 

I still lived in the same house and was married to the same wife. Back then, I was a junior associate attorney with a two year old and an infant. Now, my children have finished college, have apartments of their own, have good jobs, and have significant others with good jobs. My daughter is engaged to be married in less than a year. I'm a few days away from starting a new job as a senior city attorney for the City and County of Denver, after almost twenty years of self-employment as an attorney in the interim.

* In the U.S., the 9-11 attacks, after briefly completely shutting down commercial air travel in the U.S., resulted in the formation of the Transportation Security Administration, the reorganization of the federal government bureaucracy to create a Department of Homeland Security, the establishment of much more strict security checks and protocols for commercial air travel, the creation of memorials and compensation schemes for the victims of the attacks (several thousand people were killed), the rebuilding of the Pentagon, and the erection of a new skyscraper where the World Trade Center once stood. Islamic terrorism in the U.S. after 9-11 proved to be extremely rare and small in scale. Some of the measures imposed in the wake of that attack, like a requirement to remove one's shoes in a security line that was triggered by a single failed shoe bombing attack on December 22, 2001, are finally being rolled back now. The 9-11 attacks also spurred the passage of the controversial PATRIOT Act which strengthened the authority of U.S. intelligence agencies, the substance of which largely remains on the books with several modifications adopted since then.

* A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Ashcroft v. Iqbal, dismissing a lawsuit alleging the arbitrary detention without probable cause and mistreatment of American Muslims in the wake of the 9-11 by the federal government adopted a new standard for bringing federal lawsuits, that replaced "notice pleading" that allowed lawsuits to be brought upon information and belief to be substantiated in the discovery process with "plausibility pleading" that requires allegations of facts that were actually known to state a plausible claim for relief to bring a federal lawsuit, and many but not all U.S. states subsequently also adopted this standard. The case was dismissed because the plaintiffs didn't have actual knowledge of the insider discussions of top U.S. officials in adopting the policy. The case and a related one called Twombly, which involved an anti-trust lawsuit in which the plaintiffs did not have the "smoking gun" of actual knowledge of the deal reached by allegedly conspiring insiders who had allegedly reached an anti-competitive agreement with each other, made it much harder to bring lawsuits that involve misconduct that only actual insiders have actual knowledge of without court ordered discovery.

* The 9-11 attack was planned and orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization operating in Afghanistan, an organization that the Taliban, which controlled almost all of Afghanistan at the time. al-Qaeda was backed financially and intellectually mostly by factions of the Saudi Arabian royal family and allied wealthy elites were were not part of the ruling faction. The terrorist was Saudi Arabian and Egyptian and Lebanese nationals.

In response to the attacks, Congress promptly and almost unanimously passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against this non-state actor. Starting on October 7, 2001, a small U.S. force using a combination of CIA operatives, U.S. Special Forces, and U.S. air power promptly crushed the Taliban (by December 7 of 2001), which had been on the verged of conquering the entire control over the opposition of a coalition of warlords, called the Northern Alliance, that was resisting them. 

A multinational coalition led by the U.S. then occupied Afghanistan in the resulting power vacuum, shepherded a constitutional assembly based upon local traditions which adopted a Western style government (but with Islamic law as the supreme law of the land) under which a democratically elected civilian government of Afghanistan was formed, with the multinational force supporting the newly formed Afghan government (whose take on Islamic law was far less extreme than that of the Taliban) in counterinsurgency actions against the Taliban. 

The Afghan government fell in 2021, just days after U.S. forces withdrew on August 30, 2021, under an executive agreement that previous U.S. President Trump had negotiated with the Taliban without Afghan government involvement. The Taliban government swiftly seized control of the entire country and has imposes a very strict Islamic law regime in the four years that have followed. 

The AUMF, however, continues to be in force to fight a larger "War on Terrorism" against Islamist terrorist groups and insurgencies related to al-Qaeda, especially the "Islamic State" group that briefly operated an ultra-extreme Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. U.S. military action under the AUMF, predominantly in the Middle East and Africa, has continued into 2025.

About 5.5 million members of the U.S. military served in the post-9-11 era and a large share of the soldiers in the Army and Marine Corps, as well as many members of the U.S. Air Force, and a modest number of U.S. Navy sailors, serve in Afghanistan and/or Iraq (where the Iraq War was conducted from March 10, 2003 to December 15, 2011 with some U.S. forces remaining on a residual basis afterwards). There was a steady, but small stream of casualties from that conflict: 2,420 U.S. soldiers were killed and 20,093 were wounded but not killed in the Afghan War over almost twenty years, usually from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and ambushes from Taliban-linked insurgents. The peak strength of the multi-national force in Afghanistan, in October of 2019, was 17,178 soldiers (about two-thirds of whom were U.S. troops, with British and Canadian troops making up a little more than half of the rest), which was about 5% of the peak number of U.S. troops deployed in Iraq. The U.S. spent $2.3 trillion on the war in Afghanistan (about 90% for the conduct of the war and 10% for related care of Afghan war veterans). At least 243,000 people died as a direct result of this war (mostly Afghani civilians, contractors, and Afghan combatants on both sides). These figures do not include deaths caused by disease, loss of access to food, water, infrastructure, and/or other indirect consequences of the war. 

* Afghanistan has been immersed in civil wars and insurgencies, with only brief interruptions, since 1979 (just six years after the 18th century monarchy that unified the country was removed in a 1973 coup, with the Western style republic's government removed in a 1978 coup). As a result, on essentially ever element of human development is it the worse in the world outside Sub-Saharan Africa, with only Yemen and the Palestinian territories within Israel (especially post-October 7, 2023 Gaza) coming anywhere close.

The Idea To Action Pipeline

My education and life training was typical of a lot of people who grew up in upper middle class families and lots of upwardly mobile people who used education and skill training and socialization in the course of securing those things. There are maybe a hundred million people in the United States, a country of about 340 million people, who have been raised or trained to have the kind of mindset that I have.

As younger children, a key focus from my parents (and the parents and teachers of most people like me) was on making good choices, and that's also something that was an important part of what my wife and I, and most of our peers viewed as good parenting.

As I got older, and advanced in my education and socialization all of the way into college, I was raised and taught (formally and informally) to identify problems, to analyze them in evidence and experience informed ways, to be familiar with lots of proven problem solving strategies, to devise appropriate solutions to problem that would work, and to know how to evaluate what is likely to work and test proposed solutions to see if they work as expected (and to revised the solutions if they don't).

Even in law school, the curriculum, while it taught us to nuts and bolts of what the law says, was very oriented towards identifying legal rules and official policies that were good, or were flawed, partially so we could use this knowledge in our adult lives and careers to push for better policies, and partially so that when we encountered flawed rules that we couldn't change we could understand what we were up against, why the rules were a problem, and with this information could devise the best strategies for dealing with them.

We learned to be on the lookout for good ideas that other people had, from other countries and places within our own country, from history, from different cultures, from people with a good track record for innovation, from sources that specialize in identifying good ideas. In the areas of science, and technology and medicine, back before the Internet, we subscribed to Popular Science and Science News. In the area of style and food and architecture when we moved to the West, there was Sunset magazine. These days, for example, I regularly check in on the Boing Boing websites, and read the latest academic scholarship from free sources like the arXiv and bioRxiv and SSRN preprint websites, NBER, the Legal Theory blog, and the various law professors blogs.

It is a way of thinking and conceptual tool kit shared with modest variation, by a large swath of people trained to make up our classes of mangers, professional, and makers. It's an approach used by scientists, engineers, inventors, transactional lawyers, mediators, business executives, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and innovators.

One of the textbooks used in my first college level political science classes, at Miami University of Ohio, was called "Power and Choice". And, the training, upbringing, and inclinations that I developed and that a huge swath of people developed, was focused on the choice side of this formula.

One of the reasons that I blog, and a major theme of my life, and the lives of lots and lots of people, although I probably have the luxury and means to do so more than most people, is to float constructive ideas for how we as a society can make better choices and find better solutions. Sometimes they are proposed government policies or laws. Sometimes they are better way to fund or finance something. Sometimes they are new technologies to could be used in a new way. 

Sometimes they are concrete approaches to concrete problems like better ways to landscape our home in a city in what is almost a high desert, or a better kind of appliance, or coming up with a better way to keep track of what pills I've taken or need to take, or a better way to keep track of what we need to buy at the store and what we already have in a way that we can actually find it, or how to manage household plants, or a more efficient way to pay bills.

Many of these ideas are solutions to problems that somebody else has. How to make better military procurement choices. What tools we could make available for first responders and disaster responses. How to tax publicly held companies and multinational business in a better way. How to deliver better health care results for our society as a whole, while doing so in a more affordable way. How to cut red tape in big bureaucracies.

Collectively, most of us have much less familiarity, less training, and less comfort and familiarity with the power side of the "power and choice" formula, even many of those of us who are truly exceptional and extraordinary at the choice part.

A lot of us are attracted to politics because we care about and have a good skill set for making policy, but are adrift when it comes to securing the power necessary to putting those policies in place. A lot of the scientists who see most clearly what paths to new scientific discoveries would be most fruitful and which are most likely to be dead ends are stymied at how to generate momentum and funding for those ideas in the scientific community. Lots of us are aware of businesses that would be good to invest in, or would be good to short, but don't have the financial wealth or the influence with people who have access to money to do anything about this knowledge. Lots of us are aware of innovative technological solutions that could bring about a lot of constructive change, but don't know where to begin to go about getting those solutions adopted more widely.

People like me, and there are perhaps a hundred million of us in the United States, have lots of good ideas, but feel hopeless or frustrated when it comes to turning these ideas into action.

And, it isn't just that we are stupid or missing the obvious. The idea to action pipeline is hard for most people to locate, is clogged up, and is full of seemingly unnecessary twists and turns that make it less effective. Acquiring the power to make even a seemingly obvious on brainer innovation that is itself minor seems to take absolutely epic amounts of time, money, connections, and effort that seems grossly disproportionate to the swift moment it takes to recognize that an idea is good and should be put into action.

It is no secret that I am no fan of Elon Musk, who is the richest man in the world. And, Mr. Musk is not a particular genius when it comes to coming up with ideas of his own. The technological innovations behind Telsa, SpaceX, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the Hyper loop, and his other projects were all the work of someone else. His ability to identify good ideas is slightly above average, but it isn't particular exceptional. Frederick W. Smith, who founded FedEx, is cut from the same cloth. He had identified one particular, not really profoundly innovative idea that could be implemented with technology that wasn't cutting edge but was still pretty new at the time he came up with it.

But, I have to grudgingly acknowledge that what Musk and Smith both excelled at (and may even continue to excel at) is securing the resources and momentum necessary to turn moderately good, although fairly obvious ideas that no one had implemented (as is so often the case) into action that allowed the ideas that were mostly children of other people to actually come into wide use.

In the case of Musk, being an heir to an emerald mine fortune helped a lot. Smith also grew up as the son of a wealthy, moderately successful business owner, attended the top local private schools, and went to Yale in some of the last years when doing so was more about money and connections than academic merit.

But turning ideas into action can be a lot more challenging for the rest of us, partially because we don't have nearly as much training in how to do this as we do in how to come up with good ideas (i.e. because we are much better at making good choices than exercising power), and in part, because the idea to action pipeline at the moment is mediocre and has deteriorated over time is a society that is starting to stagnate (something that Economist Tyler Cohen wrote a book about).

This is true even for people like me who have a solid nuts and bolts understanding of things like how capital is raised for businesses in the modern U.S. economy, how the political process works, and the inner workings of academia, while spending decades working side by side by quite successful political figures and business people and academics (albeit not necessarily the peak "A-list" individuals in their respective fields).

Yes, it is possible to innovate and turn good ideas into action, even if, in my humble opinion it is too hard to do so. And, it is true that innovation shouldn't be too easy or free of gatekeepers. There are also a lot of really bad ideas out there that, when implemented, do immense harm. The more easily ideas get turned into action, the more important it is that the ideas that receive the thumbs up are good ones.

For examples in the 20th century of bad ideas being adopted too quickly and causing immense harm, ask the people of the early Soviet Union, Maoist China, revolutionary Cambodia, or North Korea. Ask the members of cults like the one organized by Jim Jones. 

Ask the people who thought it was a great idea to cover beautiful hardwood floors with cheap vinyl who convinced tens of millions of American homeowners to do so. Further back, ask the people who thought that putting the ill-drafted Second Amendment into the United States constitution was a good idea.

More recently, look at the policy initiative of RFK, Jr., or the actions taken by Elon Musk's DOGE, or the "Liberation Day" tariffs in the second Trump Administration.

On the other hand, lots of opposition to new ideas is mindlessly stubborn, ignorant, corrupt, or mendacious.

Sitting in my living room under the ceiling fan on a hot, dry summer day in August, after returning to work at home after a morning in my office doing a lot of work that actually generates money, I don't have a solution for how to improve the idea to action pipeline. But, surely, even identifying this as a crucial and pervasive problem in our society is progress in and of itself and can lay a foundation for future progress.

The Proposed Mega Sports Complex For Douglas County

Artist's rendering from Douglas County via the Denver Post

The Project

The controversial Zebulon Regional Sports Complex in Douglas County is set to break ground this fall. It is a $1.3 billion project planned for a site near Chatfield Reservoir in a brownfield development with "an old dynamite-making plant that operated for decades at the proposed Zebulon site" although it purportedly has been fully remediated. The state signed off on that conclusion in 2022.

The plans for the Zebulon Regional Sports Complex are huge.

On the drawing board are four baseball fields, three ice rinks and a pair of soccer fields. Eight to 10 basketball courts — which can be converted into 20 volleyball courts or 30 pickleball courts — are also in the mix. Add in a 400,000-square-foot, domed indoor sports facility that will house more fields for year-round play. . . .

And that’s just the first phase, which could break ground as soon as this fall on a 50-acre parcel just southeast of the master-planned Sterling Ranch community. Later phases could bring as many as eight additional sports fields, along with restaurants, shops and a hotel[.]

Does It Pencil?

I've worked with clients to help vet a similar proposals on a smaller scale, so I have so familiarity with the economics of these deals. For the life of me, I can't see how this could pencil as a "for profit" private sector venture at this scale in this location.

Sure, there is unmet demand in the area, which has had and continues to have large subdivisions rolled out over the last few decades (like 12,000 homes in Sterling Ranch which will house 35,000 people when completed that is only 20% built out), without sufficient government investment or HOA in community amenities. So, a much smaller private non-profit or public sector recreation center run by Sterling Ranch's metro district might work.

But, the demand just isn't there for something of this scale, and a similar but smaller complex in Centennial isn't thriving.

[A] citizen survey conducted last year by Douglas County ... revealed [that] a “mega-sports complex” was identified by 33% of respondents as the “least appealing option” of a list of potential amenities. The survey also showed that just 22% of respondents were dissatisfied with the number of youth sports facilities in the county.

Another smaller recreation center is already on the drawing board for Highland's Ranch which would be between the South Suburban Recreation Center twenty minutes to the east and the Zebulon complex.

The county investment is about $800K in engineering planning for infrastructure (realistically, a drop in the bucket) and a portion of the about $22 million a year in revenues for the the next 15 years from the county's 0.17% sales tax for its Parks, Trails, Historic Resources and Open Space Fund established in 1994.

But even this investment is controversial, in part, because the county leadership whose home rule county proposal epically crashed and burned in June, and which has a history of infighting and political posturing, isn't popular and doesn't have much public trust.

Moreover, as a "for profit" it probably isn't eligible for municipal bond financing with private activity bonds. This project would probably have, at best, a BBB credit rating implying roughly a 6.1% corporate bond interest rate, while a comparable municipal bond would have roughly a 3.6% interest rate, which is a $32.5 million a year difference for an investment of this size. Municipal bond eligibility, that it could receive as a non-profit, would be worth more than all of the sales tax revenue that could be diverted to the project.

There are a few other sports complexes with a similar (but slightly smaller than the proposed full build out) scale in the metro area, the South Suburban complex further east in Douglas County, one in Arvada, and one in Jefferson County (IIRC). But those are strictly government owned and funded, and the most similar South Suburban Parks and Recreation District facility further east, in Centennial, doesn't seem to be thriving.

Bottom Line Analysis

Philosophically, the fact that it is a brownfield development is a good thing, the fact that it provides amenities in a rapidly growing community with unmet needs is a good thing, and the fact that the risk that it will be an unprofitable money pit will fall mostly on wealthy, private sector, for profit, investors with only modest public subsidies is a good thing. It is also estimated to create 1,800 temporary jobs to build it, which is a good thing in what is mostly a bedroom community, where construction work for its huge sprawling suburban subdivisions is winding down due to factors like a limited supply of water for new taps.

But the fact that the proposal appears to be vastly bigger than the realistic demand for recreational facilities, the fact that the public is subsidizing a for profit company (even if it isn't a professional sports team), and the fact that it doesn't have much public support when the public will be providing significant sales tax funding support to the project, aren't good things.

An independent non-profit project, or metro district, or South Suburban Parks and Recreation District (with annexation of additional territory, if needed) sponsored project, that is less ambitious, with more phases to allow experience to determine if demand justifies something larger, would make more sense, in my opinion.

TFR And Coupling Rates

The total fertility rate (TFR) is a point in time estimate of the number of children that the average woman has over a lifetime, compiled from a population weighted average of the number of children born to women of each age.

The "coupling rate" is the percentage of adults who are married to, or cohabit out of marriage with, a partner.

Note that these are trend line figures and not absolute numbers with 2010 set at 100.

The strong implication of this data is that in the last thirty years, in developing and developed countries, declining rates of child bearing are mostly a product of declining rates of couples living together (whether or not they are married), rather than being mostly due to couples having children at a much lower rate due to wider use of contraception (which probably is the biggest factor in undeveloped countries).

Education Reduces Poverty

Education reduces poverty through economic development in economies that use this resource to make its economy more skilled. Specifically, it helps the poor in developing countries and not just a wealthy elite.

This article quantifies the role played by education in the reduction of global poverty. I propose tools for identifying the contribution of schooling to economic growth by income group, integrating imperfect substitution between skill groups into macroeconomic growth decomposition. I bring this “distributional growth accounting” framework to the data by exploiting a new microdatabase representative of nearly all of the world’s population, new estimates of the private returns to schooling, and historical income distribution statistics. 

Education can account for about 45% of global economic growth and 60% of pretax income growth among the world’s poorest 20% from 1980 to 2019. A significant fraction of these gains was made possible by skill-biased technical change amplifying the returns to education. Because they ignore the distributional effects of schooling, standard growth accounting methods substantially underestimate economic benefits of education for the global poor.

Amory Gethin, "Distributional Growth Accounting: Education and the Reduction of Global Poverty, 1980-2019" The Quarterly Journal of Economics, qjaf033 (July 22, 2025).

Why Does Japan Have Less Economic Inequality?

A short video on Facebook explained why Japan has less economic inequality than the U.S. and many other countries. It notes three main points that were particularly decisive in the 1960s.

1. High and highly progressive incomes taxes that persisted later than comparable high taxes in the U.S. in the post-war period.

2. High estate taxes that persisted later than comparable high taxes in the U.S. in the post-war period.

3. Massive land reform in 1946 coupled with inflation that undermined creditors.

Under Japan's 1946 land reform, landlords who owned more than the permitted amount had to sell the excess land to the government at a fixed price. The government then sold it at the same price, giving first preference to any tenant who had been farming the land. 

Japan’s land reform succeeded for two reasons. 

The first reason is that the Occupation had the power to impose and enforce a law that hurt the interests of a very powerful class of people, wealthy landlords, in order to bring about social and economic change. 

The second reason is more complex. At the time the land reform law was passed in October, 1946, it provided reasonable compensation to the landlords who had to sell their land to the government. But from 1946-48 Japan experienced rampant inflation, which reduced the value of the yen. As a result, while most of the buyers were able to pay off their loans within two or three years after they purchased the land, the money landlords received for their land was worth much less.

These aren't the only factors, of course. 

* The wealthy took a huge hit from the destruction of World War II.

* Urbanization gradually divorced income from land ownership.

* Japan's manufacturing based economy lasted longer than in the U.S. where deindustrialization became by the mid-1970s. 

* A mostly ethnically homogeneous society increased empathy that crossed social class lines and reduced resistance to reforms like universal health care that deep racial and cultural divides in the U.S. undermined. So did the bonding that arose from shared experiences of World War II, defeat in that war, and U.S. occupation.

* Loose land use regulation prevented the best from being the enemy of the good in the process of making affordable living possible, so that very few people were in a state of privation as extreme as now found in the U.S.

Observations Related To The Latest Conflict With Iran

In a nutshell, the most recent military conflict involving Iran, Israel, and the U.S. can be summed up as follows:

* Iran is getting close to developing nuclear weapons.

* Iran wants to remove Israel from the face of the Earth and that is why it is developing nuclear weapons.

* Iran has not very long ago launched missile and drone attacks on Israel.

* The Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank in Israel, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, are all Iranian proxy forces. Iran was deeply involved in facilitating the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

* Iran has had periodic military engagements with U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf.

* Israel carried out a major airstrike on Iran, mostly using F-35I stealth fighters with conformal fuel tanks to boost their range allowing them strike and return without aerial refueling, targeting Iran's nuclear program and key individuals in that program. Many of these targets were successfully struck and/or killed. But, one of Iran's most important nuclear facilities is in a very deep bunker in Iran.

* The U.S. used seven B-2 stealth bombers and with two "bunker buster" bombs each, to strike this very deep bunker with Iranian nuclear facilities (although probably only setting it back a few months), and used one of these and other carrier based aircraft to attack two other Iranian bases.

* It isn't clear that the U.S. has non-nuclear strike capabilities sufficient to truly destroy Iran's most secure nuclear program resources in its deepest bunker sufficiently to set its nuclear program back all that far.

* Before attacking Iran, the U.S. threatened it and evacuated personnel and ships from a U.S. naval base in Bahrain, and moved more carrier groups into the region.

* Iran counterattacked Israel and a U.S. military base in Qatar. Interceptor missiles apparently stopped all of the strikes on Qatar, and 80%-90% of the strikes on Israel, although this was not entirely successful and there was Israeli casualties. These defenses may not be sustainable, since Israel is running very low on key missile defense interceptor missiles that are part of its "Iron Dome" anti-missile and anti-drone defenses. But Iran's supply of effect long range missiles and armed drones and strike aircraft that can reach Israel is also not unlimited, and it has no quick source from which it can resupply itself (and Russia does not appear to want to get involved in this fight).

* Iran has been a major supplier of armed drones to Russia for it use in the Ukraine War.

* Iran has regularly interfered with shipping in the Persian Gulf and has a fairly impressive naval made up mostly of submarines and small missile boats, although it is building a drone carrier and has shipping container ballistic missiles as well.

* Many decades of sanctions have caused Iran to develop its own military industrial complex.

* Iran's government is officially under the supervision of a Shi'ite Islamic theocratic supreme leader since the Islamic revolution in 1979. But it has a democratic secular elected government, screened to remove candidates contrary to the regime or contrary to Shi'ite Islam, that has gradually been growing more powerful and more moderate. In part, this is because its economy is at least as dependent upon a diversified mercantile class as it is upon oil and gas exploitation (which is about 20% of its GDP) and agriculture.

* Iran is religiously diverse despite being a theocracy. It is home to many minority religions, that are tolerated, and its people are less religious in their daily lives and more secular leaning, than most countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and many other places in the Islamic world (like Pakistan and Afghanistan). Devout Shi'ite Muslims make up only a plurality of the population (about a third of the population) at most.

* Iran, not having the luxury of abundant oil wealth shared by a small population of citizens with real work done by temporary foreign laborers, like the Arab oil monarchies, has a substantial grass roots movement that wants fewer restrictions on women, more modernity, an identity that embraces its historical Persian roots rather than an exclusively Shi'ite Islamic national identity, more political freedom, and more freedom of speech. This said, there is wide grass roots opposition to and hate of Israel and the United States in Iran. In general, Shi'ite Muslims have been less backwards than Sunni Muslims in the Middle East. Iranians, and in particular, Iranian women, are also better educated than many Middle Eastern countries.

* But for its attacks and proxy attacks on Israel, its direct and indirect attacks on Persian Gulf and Red Sea commerce, its nuclear program, its military support for Russia, the sensible thing to do would be to allow Iran to percolate with its own internal conflicts and political developments without foreign interference. This would probably have led to considerable moderation and maybe even disestablishmentarianism, either politically or through a counterrevolution, sometime in the next five to twenty years. But, its violent foreign policy has made intervention more urgent.

* Israel was basically already at war with Iran and was entirely reasonable in taking action to prevent Iran from obtaining military capabilities that would be used to obliterate it.

* On the merits, U.S. military support for Israel in its strikes on Iran's nuclear capabilities was not unreasonable.

* The U.S. has, without really intending to do so, defanged Iran's main potential military opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan, through invasions of those countries, freeing up Iran's military resources to take on Israel and to interfere with Persian Gulf trade and to become an arms supplier to Russia.

* Neither the Israeli strikes nor the U.S. strikes appear to have done all that much to degrade Iran's air defenses, its air forces, its drone forces, its long range missile capabilities, its Persian Gulf navy, its anti-ship missiles, or the military industrial complex it uses to supply itself, Russia, the Houthis, Hamas, and Hezbollah. But, if the U.S. and Israel are going to be attacking Iran anyway, those seem like sensible additional targets.

* A sustained ground invasion of Iran makes no military sense. There is no likely scenario in which the U.S. sends hundreds of thousand of U.S. group troops to Iran, possibly as part of a multi-national coalition like those in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or needs to new military draft. This a a conflict involving strikes with aircraft, missiles, and drones, and defenses against counterattacks by similar means and at sea, and in terror attacks (most likely not primarily on U.S. soil, and more like the U.S.S. Cole attack by al Qaeda on October 12, 2000 in Yemen, and Shi'ite militia attacks on U.S. forces in Syria and Jordan in the waning days of the Syrian civil war).

* It isn't at all obvious that regime change can be achieved in Iran without a ground invasion, or that killing key political and theocratic leaders in Iran would result in much of a change in Iranian policies. Indeed, attacks by Israel and the U.S. on Iran probably strengthen the regime against these common enemies in the short run. Iran has plenty of adequate potential successors to its current leaders who wouldn't seem much different in their policies towards Israel, the U.S., and maritime commerce.

* A claimed U.S. brokered cease fire hasn't really held at all, for even t twenty-four hours.

* The Israeli-U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear program wouldn't have been necessary if Trump hadn't ended an Obama negotiated deal with Iran related to its nuclear program in 2018.

* Both Israel's leadership and the U.S. leadership have reasons to divert attention from domestic affairs to this conflict. It does have a genuine solid military motive, but the timing may very well be politically motivated.

* It isn't clear that President Trump had the legal authority to strike Iran in support of Israel without Congressional authorization which was not sought or obtained. This strike is not within the scope of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), or any of the authorizations made in connection with the Iraq War.

* The MAGA right is divided on the desirability of this strike and it isn't clear that Trump could have promptly secured backing from Congress to make the strike if he'd asked it to do so.

* While a military strike directly on Iran from the U.S. no doubt does increase the likelihood of retaliation on the U.S. from Iran, the notion that we should be suspicious of Iranian-Americans, many of whom are medical professionals working in rural America, is very doubtful. There are probably not lots of Iranian "sleeper cells" in the U.S. who want to commit terrorist acts in the U.S.

* Political protests against Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is long standing on the American left, and has legitimate justification, particularly given an Israeli military response in Gaza to the October 7 attacks that, while understandable, particularly because Hamas continues to hold Israeli hostages and refused to surrender, has been overkill. Notably, however, the October 7 attacks had widespread support in Gaza long after the blowback it suffered from them became clear. The U.S. opposition to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is predominantly not anti-Semitic, and isn't even predominantly anti-Zionist. It is mostly a very general pro-human rights driven movement.

* The Israeli response to October 7 in Gaza has been so completely destroyed that the enclave that it can support only perhaps a third or a half as many people as it had before the attacks (see also here). While there have been tens of thousands of Gazan deaths so far there, the clock is ticking and there will soon be either many hundreds of thousands to millions of Gazan deaths from starvation, lack of water, and illness, or a mass exile of people who are currently in Gaza, which no Islamic countries are volunteering to sponsor.