Good stuff over at Brad DeLong's Blog

 Mainly, the commentator, Graydon with the following:

Graydon said...

Logistics.

Focus on the logistics.

Russia is a petrostate, and Putin's personal security and odds of dying of his age rather than artistically depend on his control of fossil carbon revenues and ability to apply those as patronage. (Russian GDP was falling, as a long term trend, ante plaga. Not the best thing for the supreme sole autocrat.)

That sucks, because the more people look, the better the case for decarbonisation gets.

Big data sets allow statistical certainty that air pollution is in fact about twice as bad for you as previously thought; lots of "what's the mechanism?" to go, but there isn't much question about the effects. China has a BAD air pollution problem; they've also got quantified decision making about a lot of things, and given air pollution doing that much harm, decarbonizing purely for the health benefits, to stop paying the cost in sick and dead people, is worth it. That's why solar panels got cheaper quicker than expected; that's why an American administration run by someone numerate and non-evil (Warren!) would have a really good case for setting such a policy, Oil Empire or no Oil Empire.

So the petro-aligned power structures -- American, Russian, and Saudi -- have, as their core job, keeping people from noticing that AND keeping people from noticing that, hey, we're walking right up to the line on agriculture here, all these philosophical differences about how to organise society implode into nothingness if there's no reliable food supply. This is a terrible position; it's the position of weakness. But it's the position they've got. Their personal everything depends on not carbonising. (You figure that when the kids conclude that, yeah, everything is irrecoverably ruined that the oil executives are going to survive? Nah. It's going to be artistic.)

If you're in a terrible position you do stupid things.

The mammonite position is that you want all the money. You don't understand what money is -- you think it's the material love of God -- and see no reason not to steal it; the idea that money is the emergent property of an economy sufficiently complex to support a sovereign and thus a consequence of political legitimacy is entirely lost on mammonites, and theft is quick.

But! Putin is the head of the faction that got very, very rich by stealing the public infrastructure of the USSR. The total take gets estimated up to Trillion-with-T USD, and that several hundred billion of that stuck to Putin personally; that he is, in fact, significantly richer than Bezos. Observing this happen was an illuminating moment for mammonites; you don't have to steal from the proles, you can do meta-colonialism and steal the public infrastructure, and the richer the city or country, the better.

So what's happening in the UK is a mammonite takeover; the idea is to steal the entire public infrastructure and get very very rich. Putin supports that because his tier 1 goal is get all the nukes pointed at Russia to go away. (Tier 0 remains "do not die artistically".) Owning enough shares in Tories means he can get rid of the (unpopular!) sole remaining leg of the UK deterrent via exchange of favours. He can already be sure Trump won't launch; what he wants is a sufficient US collapse to mirror the post-Soviet state where the Russian nuclear deterrent was nominal, not actual. Then it's just the Force de dissuasion and the PLA he has to worry about.

In the US, the GOP is already in the habit of stealing public infrastructure (taxes; health care is one example, but fundamentally it's using the power to tax as a direct means of personal enrichment) and of viewing the federal government -- which tells them things they hate, like you can't murder people for not conforming and you have to view women as human -- as illegitimate. And they're certainly mammonite.

And old, and rich, and authoritarian; change is bad. Change decreases your relative social power, which is intolerable, and change will be in the direction of increased cosmopolitanism, which is more intolerable. White supremacy is the ghastly great god of the sunk cost fallacy, and they're not going to admit they're wrong now.

So now we get back to the stupid thing; the general peace and the general prosperity sit on the notion of the legitimacy of government and authority. Elections are how you create legitimacy. What's going on in the US is "no non-white-supremacist answer can be legitimate, and if elections don't give us white supremacy we stop having elections". What's going on in the UK is nakedly "money creates legitimacy", and incipient/not fully realised parliamentary dictatorship. What's going in in Russia is to push both of those things, because the resulting collapse in legitimacy isn't going to happen in Russia. They've had that, they haven't recovered from it, and from Putin's point of view the damage is completely desirable in the Anglosphere. (Don't ever fool yourself into believing mammonites are smart. Their core position -- that money is a thing inherent in the world -- is some serious nonsense.)

So what you've got is a willingness to trade political legitimacy -- the reason people grumble and go along with the rules -- for white supremacy on the part of a mammonite faction who are too stupid to recognise that what they're doing is deicide. Kill the legitimacy, kill the money. And who have demonstrated for generations that the only things they value are the mammonism and the white supremacy; the United States, the notions of democracy and human rights and a civilisation of laws are things they wipe their ass with. What they want is an aristocratic slave state with a very high Ginni coefficient even among the slave-holding class.

AND, because prosperity hasn't been shared since Reagan, the existing legitimacy of the public institutions does not suffice to withstand this; too many people prefer being rich to the public peace, because they think wealth better guarantees their rights. (They are not, on an observational basis, wrong; that's the problem.)

So, well, duh, there's already an awful lot of blood in the streets; being called out on that is why the cops are rioting. If you look at the excess mortality stats from homelessness and starvation, well, that might be informative in the "blood" column, too. And now we've got a complete public failure with respect to the plague. (Collapse of the old legitimacy serves Trump's faction; he's the figurehead of several men so weak they desire a king, and to get one, they need to have some other mechanism of legitimacy working than the ostensibly democratic one. Step Zero is to destroy the legitimacy of what presently exists.)

So, yes, of course there will be blood. You're looking at choice between blood and acceding to the furnace.

 

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