The next-order network perturbation

INTERVIEW: "David Hightower on the Explosion in Commodities Markets," by Maria Bartiromo, BusinessWeek, 26 May 2008, p. 021.

Rising Asia gets you rising energy costs, which contribute to the rise in food costs, which soon enough (as in, next year) will help drive high meat (beef and pork) costs.

Why? Price of feed to the animals goes up, so farmers reduce their herds.

The more you hoard the power, the less you control

ARTICLE: "Trouble in the pipeline: Despite booming demand and record prices, Russia's oil industry faces problems," The Economist, 10 May 2008, p. 71.

This is all too predictable, despite the West's frantic fears that the oil producers have us somehow over a barrel. The truth is, the producers get addicted to the oil money much worse than we get addicted to the oil. There is no supply threat out there, just an adaptation threat on our side—namely, do we respond reasonably fast to the permanently heightened prices.

Just wait long enough for the reality of climate change's impact on global agricultural production patterns to emerge, because more of the planet will begin to recognize that it's North America who holds most of the cards there, and food is a lot more precious than oil.

Anyway, no reason to get all freaked about Putin anymore that Chavez. We've seen this show too many times before, like with Mexico: the more you nationalize and try to "control" your precious resource, denying it outside capital and expertise, the less you actually command in terms of production.

Remember when Sears and Roebuck sold you a house-in-a-box?

ARTICLE: "Arriving in London: Hotels Made in China," by Fred A. Bernstein, New York Times, 11 May 2008, p. BU19.

Of course you don't, because that was about a century ago.

You should recognize the Wick home, though, or the prefab houses that are built in factories and then trucked to permanent foundations. When I grew up in Wisconsin, there was (and I believe still is) a huge Wick factory on the west side of Madison. I knew more than a few people who lived in these houses, because I grew up in a part of America that featured modest households.

So now we have China cranking entire hotels like Wick homes, shipping prefab rooms to London for assembly. They're basically an adaptation of the container structures used on ships, so easy to ship and easy to stack once you get them to the construction site.

Anyone who's spent time on U.S. military bases inside the Gap is familiar with this construction technique. Just see my pictures from Djibouti and Kabul.

Hotel-in-boxes!

Self-segregated America—at least along political lines

ARTICLE: "Vote Like Thy Neighbor: Why the American electorate is more politically polarized than ever," by William A. Galston and Pietro S. Nivola, New York Times Magazine, 11 May 2008, p. 12.

This, to me, sounds suspicious as causal analysis, but I'm not sure how to counter the argument, even as I suspect it's an oddity of the Boomers.

But here it is: "In 1976, only 27 percent of voters lived in landslide counties where one candidate prevailed by 20 points or more. By 2004, 48 percent of voters lived in such counties."

The Boomer age is a weird one, politically, marked, as expert Ron Brownstein argues in his book, The Second Civil War, by a deeply and closely divided electorate, meaning big differences between the parties, but they attract similar levels of popular support. So the Dems and Republicans are less willing and less able to compromise, yielding the Boomers' pathetic record as legislators.

So if you accept the Brownstein argument, and I do, then this one by Galston and Nivola indicates that the Boomer age has resulted in a sort of political segregation: we naturally move to counties where we feel politically comfortable.

I'm not willing to describe this phenomenon as a permanent hardening of the social arteries of our democracy. People move a lot in this day and age, so the whole thing may be gone in a couple of decades as the Boomers move into their old age.

Or maybe not.

The dollar: not down for the count but the future seems obvious

WEEK IN REVIEW: "The Dollar: Shrinkable But (So Far) Unsinkable," by Peter S. Goodman, New York Times, 11 May 2008, p. W1.

Between 2001 and 2007, the dollar's share of the world's total foreign exchange reserves drops from 73% to 64%, but it's mostly due to a drop in value that was long in the making.

Still, it signals a long-term development in my mind. I think I wrote in PNM about the inevitable reality of a triad of global reserve currencies: the dollar, the euro, and some yuan/yen basket.

As that day approaches, the U.S. economy and consumer will learn more discipline, but the corrections and the balancing will come faster, and not merely as the result of a once-every-decade "Plaza"-like accord.

This will be a good thing for us and the world. We outgrew the mysticism of gold in the early 1970s and we—meaning the world—need to outgrow too much faith in the dollar. We simply don't dominate the global economy like that anymore, like we did in the early 1970s when the "global" economy was just the West.

So ultimately we're made to adjust by the very same international liberal trade order that we created, set in motion, defended and nurtured since 1945.

This is a "problem" of our success and not our failure. Our order extends over the near-entirety of the planet, dwarfing what the European colonial orders achieved.

And this is an "empire" (if you must) that actually enriches its subjects!

How else to explain the coming huge growth in the global middle class?

The imaginary world yields real-world profit for Gen Y

ARTICLE: "My Virtual Summer Job: With summer jobs in short supply, more young people are pursuing money-making opportunities in Web fantasy worlds," by Alexandra Alter, Wall Street Journal, 16 May 2008, p. W1.

ARTICLE: "Second Life has a special guest: AI," by Michael Hill, USA Today, 19 May 2008, p. 6B.

The two pieces interest me simply as milestones in the migration of human activity into virtual worlds.

I fully expect to witness the opportunity, in my old age, to migrate myself into such virtual environments as an alternative to advanced infirmity. You see elders in nursing homes using Wii. This is just the beginning.

The Matrix is coming, and it will be a voluntary migration, led primarily by elders.

Another example of "New Core = New Rules"

The People's Republic Leads the Way in Alternative-Energy Hardware, By Spencer Reiss, Wired, June 2008

New Core pillars like China, because of their rapid rise, face the worst pollution, so it's logical they step to forefront on anti-pollution techologies.

(Thanks: Terence Hill)

Tom around the web

(Note: I'm only about half-way caught up. Been working hard on endnotes. So don't be alarmed if your link's not here yet.)

Links to What will America do when Iran gets nuclear weapons?
+ Quality Leadership Weblog
+ Information Dissemination
+ Global Students Connect
+ North Korea Blog
+ SWJ Blog

+ Politics of Scrabble linked Hillary Clinton, the least potential downside.
+ The Daily Cloud linked Tom's recent radio appearance, the website, and a recent column.
+ SWJ Blog linked The current bibliography (books only) of "Great Powers".
+ Exurban League linked Those who hope for McCain, China-as-enemy.
+ 21st Century Waves links Tom in their short blogroll.

+ TheLiaisonReport.com linked the Brief on YouTube.
+ random axis linked the TED talk.
+ Curtis Schweitzer embedded the TED video on YouTube (don't think I knew it had migrated over there).
+ BjarkeP linked the TED video.

+ The Kalamazoo Post linked Bush pre-approves Israeli strikes on Iran.
+ bienvenido recommends PNM to other missionaries.
+TurcoPundit also linked The current bibliography (books only) of "Great Powers".
+ Auspundits (no more 'pundit' names, people! ;-) linked Next-war-itis.
+ Information Dissemination linked Will quake prompt China maturation?
+ Jay Reding linked Bush's Africa policy underrated?
+ Quality Leadership Weblog also linked A bit too convenient for McCain on Iraq and Bush pre-approves Israeli strikes on Iran.
+ Defense and the National Interest has Tom on their blogroll.
+ Penguin Monkey linked Terrorists worldwide stump for Obama! October "surprise" predicted!
+ Arnold Kling is reading the 'infamous' (his word) PNM on his Kindle.
+ Side Effects May Vary picked up Kling's post.
+ SWJ Blog linked AFRICOM: forward and back.
+ So did zenpundit.
+ Political Hustler linked PNM.

+ The John Birch Society (warning: extreme American libertarianism) linked Nuclear Iran could provide chance for Mideast stability. Then, Editorial Assistant Ann Shibler attempts to deconstruct Tom, but she's a few years behind. Check this quote:

Before waiting for such a day to arrive, maybe the "Non-Integrated Gap" here in the U.S. should invite the likes of Professor Barnett to go earn a living in the private sector, rather than sitting around worrying about "the future of the world," courtesy of our own tax dollars.

A fair number of other sites picked up Ms Shibler's post, but I don't think I'll link them.

This week's column

The wrong defense

The late 1980s was a turning point in global security: worldwide defense spending peaked, along with the number of men under arms and arms sales. During these last great years of the Cold War, the Pentagon spent an average of $4 billion annually on missile defense.

That level of spending continued throughout the 1990s, only to double in the Bush-Cheney administration. As leading missile expert Joseph Cirincione notes in the current issue of Foreign Policy, President Bush's current budget request would elevate missile defense spending to roughly $12 billion, "or nearly three times what the United States spent on antimissile systems during any year of the Cold War."

Read on at Scripps Howard.
Read on at KnoxNews.

Once again, I liked the headline I submitted better. It was: Missile threat: not worth the bet.

Update: KnoxNews ran my headline. It was Scripps Howard who changed it ;-)