Making It Hardest For The Most Resilient Among Us

HUMANITY HAS TRANSFORMED THE NATURE OF LIVING OVER THE PAST CENTURY, ROUGHLY DOUBLING LIFE EXPECTANCY AT BIRTH AND THUS SHIFTING THE MEAN AGE RADICALLY UPWARD. This changes the structure of all societies, albeit at uneven paces. Globally, the worker-to-elder-dependent ratio was 12:1 in 1950, dropping only to 9:1 in the year 2000. But with globalization's profound expansion over the last 25 years, we're looking at a ratio of just 4:1 in 2050 (per the UN). That's an amazing burden shift that will be accommodated by people working later in life, technology and productivity advances, and — most crucially — the proper harnessing of youth as future labor. The big problem? Most of those youth are located in the emerging South, where a 10:1 ratio will still exist in 2050, whereas the advanced West will be looking at an untenable 2:1 ratio.

This is why I have advocated, throughout my career, for the West's open borders and active recruitment of immigrants from younger parts of the world. It is the only realistic solution — necessary even as it's insufficient (people will have to work longer and productivity will need to advance). Right now, Westerners seems to be dazzled by the imagery of robots running all and there being no work to be done, but this is a queer illusion that encourages inward-looking perspectives on the future, the classic example being Japan. The zero-sum mindset is also unrealistically greedy — as in, we have ours, so tough on you.

And yes, this generational divide, so well encapsulated in a North-South divide, dovetails quite negatively with the unequal social and environmental burdens generated by climate change, which likewise pits the "old" poles against" young" Middle Earth.

Simply put, we are eating our seed corn.

On this disturbing global trend comes a great editorial in the Economist. Some highlights, with commentary:

Roughly a quarter of the world’s people—some 1.8 billion—have turned 15 but not yet reached 30. In many ways, they are the luckiest group of young adults ever to have existed. They are richer than any previous generation, and live in a world without smallpox or Mao Zedong. They are the best-educated generation ever . . . they are also more intelligent than their elders. If they are female or gay, they enjoy greater freedom in more countries than their predecessors would have thought possible. And they can look forward to improvements in technology that will, say, enable many of them to live well past 100.

Another theme of my work over the years: when America stood up and took on the responsibility of running the world after WWII, it didn't simply replicate the global orders imposed sequentially by Europe's colonial powers over the centuries. Instead, it fundamentally reshaped it to enable global economic integration on an unprecedented scale — and based on our own model of states uniting. This is the primary reason why global standards of living have skyrocketed over the past half century.

But this creates class and generational consciousness on a global scale:

Just as, for the first time in history, the world’s youngsters form a common culture, so they also share the same youthful grievances. Around the world, young people gripe that it is too hard to find a job and a place to live, and that the path to adulthood has grown longer and more complicated.

The primary culprit? "Policies favouring the old over the young."

Last hired, first fired is the most obvious one:

In most regions they are at least twice as likely as their elders to be unemployed. The early years of any career are the worst time to be idle, because these are when the work habits of a lifetime become ingrained. Those unemployed in their 20s typically still feel the “scarring” effects of lower income, as well as unhappiness, in their 50s.

This is very bad news for a planet experiencing rapid demographic aging, the scariest and most self-destructive expression being the tendency of the old to want to "keep out" the foreign or "scary" young. This is a great deal of the emotion behind America's current passion for such slogans as "make our country great again!" It is simply nostalgia for the way things were.

But it denies us sufficient access to the most important resource on the planet — namely, youthful ambition and drive and creativity:

Young people are often footloose. With the whole world to explore and nothing to tie them down, they move around more often than their elders. This makes them more productive, especially if they migrate from a poor country to a rich one. By one estimate, global GDP would double if people could move about freely. That is politically impossible—indeed, the mood in rich countries is turning against immigration. But it is striking that so many governments discourage not only cross-border migration but also the domestic sort … A UN study found that 80% of countries had policies to reduce rural-urban migration, although much of human progress has come from people putting down their hoes and finding better jobs in the big smoke.

The aging of the North is making it brittle, self-centered, and selfish in spirit, and this is being increasingly reflected in government policies, in large part because, on average, 3 out of 5 elders regularly vote while only 1 out of 5 youth do.

The old have always subsidised their juniors. Within families, they still do. But many governments favour the old: an ever greater share of public spending goes on pensions and health care for them. This is partly the natural result of societies ageing, but it is also because the elderly ensure that policies work in their favour. By one calculation, the net flow of resources (public plus private) is now from young to old in at least five countries, including Germany and Hungary. This is unprecedented and unjust—the old are much richer.

This is where the newspaper nails the long-term danger:

That is a cruel waste of talent . . . Rich, ageing societies will find that, unless the youth of today can get a foot on the career ladder, tomorrow’s pensioners will struggle. What is more, oppressing youngsters is dangerous. Countries with lots of jobless, disaffected young men tend to be more violent and unstable . . .

The great challenge of the North's rapid demographic aging is resisting the general political crabbiness that comes with growing old, which eventually turns us all into cranky, get-the-hell-off-my-lawn types.

I don't know about you, but I don't dream of a future of gated communities populated mostly by the elderly who receive "personal care" from robots. That sounds more like the North turning itself into a giant nursing home.

Social resilience is a renewable resource, but it gets renewed generation by generation. We are not promoting that dynamic today in the West/North, and it will come back to haunt us.

The Internet of Things: Resistance Is Futile, But Resilience Is Fruitful

CONTINUING LAST FRIDAY'S THEME OF WHO'S-SPYING-ON-YOU, A DISTURBING ARTICLE FROM CBS NEWS HIGHLIGHTS HOW YOUR SMART PHONE CAN BE USED AGAINST YOU IN A VARIETY OF CRIMINAL/NEFARIOUS WAYS. What this reminds us is that, per the security expert cited in the story, we're all basically carrying around a mini personal computer in our pockets all day long, and that can be as disastrously hacked as any desk or laptop. Indeed, it can be far worse because of the camera, video, and recording capacities that we tend to view primarily as standard technologies kluged together in one unit, when they're all – to varying degrees –accessible to hackers via the software.

Some highlights from the piece:

Popular apps on your smartphone can be convenient and fun, but some also carry malicious software known as malware, which gives hackers easy access to your personal information.

A security firm found that between 75 and 80 percent of the top free apps on Android phones or iPhones were breached. The number jumps as high as 97 percent among the top paid apps on those devices.

Two caveats can be offered.

1. There is the argument that mobile devices are more secure than personal computers and servers, because they're less open (a countering argument being that PCs and servers are targeted far more because that's where the good stuff is – i.e., the data).
2. Many experts will also draw a distinction between Android phones and iPhones in terms of architecture and hence security.

With my limited technical knowledge, I'll buy both.  But here's the thing, with the blossoming Internet of Things, the number of devices grows fantastically, and the security features built into all those devices tends to be less comprehensive and robust, primarily because these devices are designed for consumers versus enterprises, meaning ease of use and access are paramount. Thus, as we rapidly build out the Internet of Things, we create sort of a wild-west frontier that surrounds all the critical infrastructure upon which these devices depend, allowing for a radical expansion of attack vectors by criminal and malicious actors.

That's certainly not an argument against pursuing the Internet of Things, but it does say that we need to build it out with more care and vision regarding the resilience of the critical infrastructure being increasingly exposed. In effect, our critical infrastructures are going to be subjected to an evolutionary leap of sorts, so we either adapt them in turn (keeping pace), or we suffer new and worse vulnerabilities.

Back to the story and quoted "cybersecurity expert Gary Miliefsky, whose company SnoopWall tracks malware."

Milifesky said when you download an app, you also give permission for it to access other parts of your phone, like an alarm clock app that can also track phone calls.

"You think an alarm clock needs all those permissions? Access to the Internet over wifi, your call information, calls you've made, call history, your device ID? This to me is not a safe alarm clock," Miliefsky said.

And there's the weather and flashlight apps that he says exploit legitimate banking apps to capture information, as he showed us in a demonstration of what could happen when someone takes a photo of a check to send to their bank.

"The flashlight app spies on the camera and noticed the check and grabbed a copy of it. Shipped it off to a server somewhere far away," Miliefsky said.

Last year the group FireEye discovered 11 malware apps being used on iPhones that gathered users' sensitive information and send it to a remote server, including text messages, Skype calls, contacts and photos Apple fought back by removing the apps and putting stricter security measures in place.

"They get at your GPS, your contacts list...to build a profile on you," Miliefsky said.

Some apps are simply collecting information for advertising purposes. In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission settled a lawsuit with a company over its popular Brightest Flashlight app, alleging it transmitted consumers' personal information to third parties without telling them.

But Miliefsky said he's found another flashlight app that can do much more troubling things.

"This one turns on your microphone in the background, listens in on you, and sends an encrypted tunnel to a server we discovered in Beijing," Miliefsky described.

That certainly gets your attention, yes?

Whether or not we buy into the darker, more geo-political aspects, it's clear that we're all being subjected to a game-changing degree of personal transparency, and that, in political terms, the question of who's watching the watchers is just starting to be explored.

Now, a lot of people will respond to these developments by attempting to reduce their exposure, just like a lot of enterprises have attempted over the years. But that approach typically comes with too big a price in terms of lost efficiency, convenience, and sheer opportunity. Building more firewalls as the Internet of Things comes into being is not the answer.

In short, while resistance is futile when it comes to the Internet of Things (and the Borg, of course), resilience becomes the new prime directive for individuals, families, enterprises, communities, governments, and nations.

How Climate Change Truly Tests Human Resilience Is By Pitting Middle Earth Against the Poles

YES, IT IS COMPLETELY UNFAIR THAT THE INDUSTRIAL NORTH, WHICH IS MOST RESPONSIBLE FOR GLOBAL WARMING, WILL RECEIVE MOST OF ITS BENEFITS, WHILE THE SOUTH, EAGER NOW TO ACHIEVE SIMILAR LEVELS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, WILL BE MOST HAMPERED BY CLIMATE CHANGE. And yes, this disparity will cause a great deal of political-military tension between that equatorially-centric band and the rest of humanity. We see an early version of this already in the migratory flows from central and north Africa, across the Mediterranean, into Europe. You may think it's all about civil strife in Libya and Syria, and there's plenty of that, but the consistent, long-term pressure of bodies heading north is more about climate-change-fueled desertification than anything else, reflecting the fact that it's growing harder to live in those regions.

A big part of why it's harder for humans to live in those central regions of the globe is that climate change is slowly draining them of resources, something we've noted for years in the poleward and upward (in elevation) movement of plants and animals, a dynamic that has recently been studied in a comprehensive manner (as described in a recent Newsweek posting):

As the planet warms, plants, trees, fish and other natural resources are on the move, shifting toward the poles, in the direction of higher elevations and deeper into the seas, states a paper published February 24 in the journal Nature Climate Change. This natural capital has economic value, especially in developing countries where it accounts for a large share of resources. The team of researchers led by Eli Fenichel, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, say that where the fish migrate, money will follow, but that it’s not as simple as this.

The findings suggest that it’s not enough for policymakers to look for biophysical changes, such as the increase of fish in one place and the decrease in another, to see how wealth is shifting in response to climate change, but that they should also take “inclusive wealth” into consideration. Inclusive wealth is an economic framework that accounts for the sum of traditional, human and natural capital, in an effort to measure a country’s ability to sustain human well-being. Wealth that is stable or which increases over time indicates overall sustainability. The framework can be applied to track the broader impacts of climate change on local and global sustainability: When natural capital shifts due to climate change—either toward the poles or toward the mountains—its value changes in response to new pricing that takes into account these social considerations in addition to the biophysical change alone.

The study, worth reading, employs scenarios to illustrate climate change's winners and losers, positing two fishing communities in the north (winner) and south (loser). The point was to examine the socio-economic changes in human behavior that arise from this pronounced resource shift:

“People are mostly focused on the physical reallocation of these assets, but I don’t think we’ve really started thinking enough about how climate change can reallocate wealth and influence the prices of those assets,” says Fenichel. The study uses fish as an example, but natural capital can include plants, trees, and other assets valuable to humans.

“We don’t know how this will unfold, but we do know there will be price effects. It’s just Economics 101—prices reflect quantity and scarcity and natural capital is hard for people to move,” Fenichel says. “It’s as inevitable as the movement of these fish species.”

“To be clear, the ‘gainers’ here are clearly better off,” he says. “They’re just not more better off than the losers are worse off. The losers are losing much more than the gainers are gaining. And when that happens, it’s not an efficient reallocation of wealth.”

The study's primary author then takes a stab at analogizing the resulting political-military tension:

It’s sort of like taking a piece of birthday cake from one child and giving it to another child who already has cake, according to Fenichel. One child undoubtedly stands to benefit more. “But the kid who got the second piece of cake is going to be a lot less happier than the kid who lost their only piece of cake will be upset.”

That analysis reminds me of the Western academics who examined China's gender imbalance and immediately went to positing Chinese military aggression so as to burn off the excess males. Not only was it bad political-military analysis (modern warfare is no longer ground-troop centric, as it was in the past, so just loading up the military with extra bodies accomplishes nothing), it simply ignored the realities of modern life, which says males seeking spouses don't simply sit put, accepting their fate, but rather tend to do whatever it takes to find mates. With modern travel networks, this includes the "unthinkable" of going abroad and marrying non-Chinese, like we've long seen in other Asian societies suffering over-concentrations of males in various geographic pockets or age cohorts.

And guess what, the same thing will happen (as we're already seeing in Europe) with climate change. The people of Middle Earth won't simply tough it out forever. Instead, they'll head north and south . . . to where there's growing amounts of arable land freed up by climate change.

The good news is, an older North (and developed South) should logically welcome this influx of fertile youth, because that's how we'll keep our own populations from aging too rapidly in coming decades. Yes, there will be politicians who call for "walls." There are plenty of them in North America and Europe now, and frankly, Russia's renewed interest in the Middle East is largely driven by that fear of an influx of radicalized Muslims. But, rest assured, they're coming. Nature will drive them and the rest of us will simply have to accommodate them in one of the greatest political experiments in human history.

Western Hemisphere's Shale Men as Oil Industry's New "World Swing Producers"?

FASCINATING BRIEFING IN A RECENT ECONOMIST (23 JAN 16) ADDS A NEW TWIST TO AN ARGUMENT I'VE BEEN RECENTLY ADVANCING ON HOW NORTH AMERICA'S EMERGING ENERGY INDEPENDENCE DRAMATICALLY REDEFINES ITS OWN SENSE OF ECONOMIC RESILIENCE AND – ULTIMATELY – AMERICA'S GLOBAL SECURITY PERSPECTIVE. Think of the future as mostly about energy and water, with the latter accounting for food production. Any country seeking to ensure its economic resilience going forward wants to be either rich in both, or rich in secure access to both. This is essentially where China is weakest now and in coming decades (hence the aggressive military behavior on display off its coast), because it must import both food and energy in ever increasingly amounts (and overwhelmingly via seaborne trade). This is also where America (and North America in general) is strongest now and in coming decades, relative to just about every great power out there – save perhaps Russia. But even there, America has little reason to unduly worry about the widely-perceived renewal of strategic rivalry with Moscow, which invariably becomes China's economic vassal on that basis:

China, please meet Russia, an energy-business-masquerading-as-a-government, which is incredibly vulnerable on the subject of lower energy prices but stands as the world's largest exporter of energy.

Russia, please meet China, which is the world's largest importer of energy and the stingiest, most aggressively demanding trade partner in the world.

Please go about you co-dependency with all the respect and friendship that you've each bestowed upon the other's culture and civilization over the years.

As I've pointed out, North America is already the world's de facto swing producer on grains, which gives us an enormous strategic advantage – and power – that we scarcely realize.

We are, in effect, the Saudi Arabia of grain. So, if, in our imagination, they have the world over an oil barrel, then we've got the world over a breadbasket.

Guess who cries "uncle" first?

And yes, we'll maintain that status in spite of climate change, because we're that clever and that resilient and that blessed by circumstances.

But here's where the Economist's analysis of the recent slide in oil prices is so intriguing: what if North America were to become the world's swing producer on energy – as well?

From the piece:

Now the fear for producers is of an excess of oil, rather than a shortage. The addition to global supply over the past five years of 4.2m barrels a day (b/d) from America’s shale producers, although only 5% of global production, has had an outsized impact on the market by raising the prospects of recovering vast amounts of resources formerly considered too hard to extract. On January 19th the International Energy Agency (IEA), a prominent energy forecaster, issued a stark warning: “The oil market could drown in oversupply.”

Amazing what the fracking revolution in North America has wrought, and don't – for a minute – discount how that sense of energy independence influenced President Obama's decision to see a Nixon-like detente with Iran, identified in the piece as "the most immediate cause of the bearishness."

[Iran] promises an immediate boost to production of 500,000 b/d, just when other members of OPEC such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq are pumping at record levels. Even if its target is over-optimistic, seething rivalry between the rulers in Tehran and Riyadh make it hard to imagine that the three producers could agree to the sort of production discipline that OPEC has used to attempt to rescue prices in the past.

But it gets even more disruptive – again, because of the fracking revolution in North America:

Even if OPEC tried to reassert its influence, the producers’ cartel would probably fail because the oil industry has changed in several ways. Shale-oil producers, using technology that is both cheaper and quicker to deploy than conventional oil rigs, have made the industry more entrepreneurial. Big depreciations against the dollar have helped beleaguered economies such as Russia, Brazil and Venezuela to maintain output, by increasing local-currency revenues relative to costs. And growing fears about action on climate change, coupled with the emergence of alternative-energy technologies, suggests to some producers that it is best to pump as hard as they can, while they can.

So we witness the Saudis – yet again – trying to shake out the market, not to mention its fierce regional rival, through an extended period of self-destructive over-production relative to market demand. It will definitely hinder Iran's re-entry into the world and its energy market, but in the US?

Yet there is also a reason for keeping the pumps working that is not as suicidal as it sounds. One of the remarkable features of last year’s oil market was the resilience of American shale producers in the face of falling prices. Since mid-2015 shale firms have cut more than 400,000 b/d from output in response to lower prices. Nevertheless, America still increased oil production more than any other country in the year as a whole, producing an additional 900,000 b/d, according to the IEA.

And here's where US technological resilience gets truly interesting:

During the year the number of drilling rigs used in America fell by over 60%. Normally that would be considered a strong indicator of lower output. Yet it is one thing to drill wells, another to conduct the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) that gets the shale oil flowing out. Rystad Energy, a Norwegian consultancy, noted late last year that the “frack-count”, ie, the number of wells fracked, was still rising, explaining the resilience of oil production.

The roughnecks used other innovations to keep the oil gushing, such as injecting more sand into their wells to improve flow, using better data-gathering techniques and employing a skeleton staff to keep costs down. The money is no longer flowing in. America’s once-rowdy oil towns, where three years ago strippers could make hundreds of dollars a night from itinerant oilmen, are now full of abandoned trailer parks and boarded-up businesses. But the oil is still flowing out. Even some of the oldest shale fields, such as the Bakken in North Dakota, were still producing at the same level in November as more than a year before.

No, we don't want to overestimate the economic boost to the US economy from all this. Our economic restructuring challenges are significant – as evidenced by voter anger in this year's presidential race. But others have it far worse:

Unsurprisingly some of the biggest splashes of red ink in the IMF’s latest forecast revisions were reserved for countries where oil exploration and production has played a significant role in the economy: Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Russia (and some of its oil-producing neighbours) and Nigeria. Weaker demand in this group owes much to strains on their public finances.

Russia has said it will cut public spending by a further 10% in response to the latest drop in crude prices (see article).

So where do we go from here? The article discusses "peak demand," something I've long argued would naturally precede the much-feared "peak oil" moment, primarily due to efficiency and environmental concerns.

Then the Economist lays out the crown-jewel argument – from my perspective – of the piece:

More likely, the oil price will eventually find a bottom and, if this cycle is like previous ones, shoot sharply higher because of the level of underinvestment in reserves and natural depletion of existing wells. Yet the consequences will be different. Antoine Halff of Columbia University’s Centre on Global Energy Policy told American senators on January 19th that the shale-oil industry, with its unique cost structure and short business cycle, may undermine longer-term investment in high-cost traditional oilfields. The shalemen, rather than the Saudis, could well become the world’s swing producers, adding to volatility, perhaps, but within a relatively narrow range.

Bingo!

Please keep that in mind when all the politicians and national security experts are trying to scare you to death during our ongoing transition from one president to the next: when it comes to food/water and energy, North America – and America in particular – is sitting pretty.

Why?

Because our national resilience on both continues to contradict the pessimists while amazing even the optimists like me!

Cultural Resilience in the Age of Globalization: Telling Your Own Stories, Your Own Way

THE NOTION THAT GLOBALIZATION RESULTS IN CULTURAL HOMOGENIZATION ONLY SEEMS TRUE DURING ITS INITIAL "INVASION," BUT, OVER TIME, REGIONAL AND NATIONAL PILLARS INVARIABLY RECLAIM THEIR HISTORIC CULTURAL INFLUENCE AND MARKET TURF. We in America tend to view this as a "reversal" of globalization's tide, when it is nothing of the sort. It's simply local populations accepting globalization's connectivity while repopulating its content, and, in doing so, rendering it more applicable, tolerable, and entertaining. I've made this point for many years in my writing: virtually everyone in the world welcomes globalization's connectivity, but many - if not most - have a problem with its content (particularly when it emanates from culturally free-wheeling America). A few nations deal with this content mismatch by censorship, bans, and the like. But the smarter cultures adopt the media/connectivity models and then fill them up with their own unique content - eventually exporting that content abroad.

That is most definitely the case with Nigeria, per a NYT story:

The stories told by Nigeria’s booming film industry, known as Nollywood, have emerged as a cultural phenomenon across Africa, the vanguard of the country’s growing influence across the continent in music, comedy, fashion and even religion.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, overtook its rival, South Africa, as the continent’s largest economy two years ago, thanks in part to the film industry’s explosive growth.

Notice how, when it's a regional pillar doing the "cultural imperialism," no one uses that term:

“The Nigerian movies are very, very popular in Tanzania, and, culturally, they’ve affected a lot of people,” said Songa wa Songa, a Tanzanian journalist. “A lot of people now speak with a Nigerian accent here very well thanks to Nollywood. Nigerians have succeeded through Nollywood to export who they are, their culture, their lifestyle, everything.”

But the key dynamic here, as noted above, is the repopulating of media networks previously dominated by outsiders with local content.

Nollywood generates about 2,500 movies a year, making it the second-biggest producer after Bollywood in India, and its films have displaced American, Indian and Chinese ones on the televisions that are ubiquitous in bars, hair salons, airport lounges and homes across Africa.

Nollywood succeeds by telling stories about the vast socio-economic transitions Africans are experiencing thanks to globalization's embrace:

Nollywood resonates across Africa with its stories of a precolonial past and of a present caught between village life and urban modernity. The movies explore the tensions between the individual and extended families, between the draw of urban life and the pull of the village, between Christianity and traditional beliefs. For countless people, in a place long shaped by outsiders, Nollywood is redefining the African experience.

In short, Nollywood's content represents a cultural coping-mechanism - a source of civilizational resilience amidst tumultuous change.

“I doubt that a white person, a European or American, can appreciate Nollywood movies the way an African can,” said Katsuva Ngoloma, a linguist at the University of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo who has written about Nollywood’s significance. “But Africans — the rich, the poor, everyone — will see themselves in those movies in one way or another.”

Best yet, Nollywood-as-Hollywood-cum-Bollywood knock-off is already replicating itself across the continent, resulting in even more localized and culturally rich content generation.

Nollywood has also created a model for movie production in other African nations, said Matthias Krings, a German expert on African popular culture at Johannes Gutenberg University.

In Kitwe, Zambia, local filmmakers were recently making their latest movie in true Nollywood style: a family melodrama shot over 10 days, in a private home, on a $7,000 budget. Burned onto DVD, the movie will be sold in Zambia and neighboring countries.

Acknowledging the influence of Nigerian cinema, the movie’s producer, Morgan Mbulo, 36, said, “We can tell our own stories now.”

And that's how globalization should work: global connectivity spreading capabilities and those expanding capabilities allowing for local developments that suit local tastes, cultural requirements, and the social issues of the day.

The Future of Human Resilience - or Indulgence?

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE TWO TYPES OF HUMANS: THOSE WHO SEEK TO "SAVE" THEMSELVES AND THEIR FUTURE (BY LIVING CAREFULLY) AND THOSE WHO SEEK TO "SPEND" THEIR LIVES (AND LITERALLY THEIR BODIES) AS AGGRESSIVELY AS POSSIBLE. On the former, think of vegan ascetics; on the latter, think of career military or NFL players. There is no right choice – just the choice. To quote the heavy-metal band Metallica, My lifestyle determines my death style. Except maybe now, thanks to emerging bio-technologies, it no longer will. At first glance, this is an unmitigated blessing: worn-out or diseased or damaged organs and bones replaced with organic replacements crafted from your own cells! But what happens to human behavior when people start to realize that today's extreme risks can be covered by emerging technological fixes? Are we suddenly braver? More foolhardy? More given to addictions? Less virtuous? In sum, does this form of new-school resilience (break it, replace it) somehow diminish the old-school variant (overcoming damage)?

Whatever the pathway, it seems clear that the nature of humanity's physical resilience will be transformed – profoundly augmented by biotechnologies that allow us to walk away from our mistakes, sufferings, bad luck, bad DNA, bad behavior, etc.

Two stunning examples, the first on 3-D printing:

A new method of 3-D printing can produce human-sized bone, muscle, and cartilage templates that survive when implanted into animals, researchers report.

"It has been challenging to produce human scale tissues with 3-D printing because larger tissues require additional nutrition," Dr. Anthony Atala from Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina told Reuters Health by email.

His team developed a process they call "the integrated tissue and organ printing system," or ITOP for short. ITOP produces a network of tiny channels that allows the printed tissue to be nourished after being implanted into a living animal.

The researchers produced three types of tissue - bone, cartilage, and muscle - and transplanted it into rats and mice.

Five months after implantation, the bone tissue looked similar to normal bone, complete with blood vessels and with no dead areas, the research team reported in Nature Biotechnology . . .

Results with 3-D printed skeletal muscle were equally impressive. Not only did the implants look like normal muscle when examined two weeks after implantation, but the implants also contracted like immature, developing muscle when stimulated . . .

"We are also using similar strategies to print solid organs," [Atala] added.

That's the human hardware, so to speak. Now on to the software . . .

Miniature brains [see image above] that show electrical activity akin to “a primitive type of thinking” could revolutionise how some drugs are tested and reduce the need for animals in research, according to scientists who have developed the structures.

Each ball of human brain cells - in all about the size of the head of a ballpoint pen - “represents more or less a two-month-old brain” of a foetus, Prof Thomas Hartung of Johns Hopkins University said, presenting the work at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference . The cultures also show “spontaneous electrophysiological activity” – their neurons zap off electrical signals to each other without prompting.

“It’s starting to produce a primitive type of ‘thinking,’” Hartung said, though he stressed that the operation is only mechanical. “Obviously there’s no input or output. It is meaningless electrical activity but the neurons are trying to communicate with each other.”

Scientists first developed miniature brains in test tubes in December 2013, but Hartung said that his team has managed to standardise the new “mini-brains” – meaning they can grow hundreds of uniform brain cultures in a single petri dish, rather than a few cultures each grown according to their distinct genetic codes . . .

Hartung said the neural activity, which can be measured with an EEG-like device, creates a “third dimension” for studying the effects of drugs: not only can researchers examine how drugs affect the health and function of brain cells, they can also see what drugs do to neural activity.

An obvious good in terms of drug testing and particularly in attacking brain-centric conditions and diseases like Alzheimer's. But note how quickly the doctor dismissed the notion of actual "thinking" being triggered. That inevitability, plus the comparison to a fetus, starts to feel a lot more God-like.

But, frankly, it's all God-like. In human history, there are two great brakes on behavior: one is the reality of the human body (you will pay for your bad or risky behavior!) and belief in the afterlife (and, if you don't, then God will make you pay for eternity). For now, we seem to be messing only with the first equation – the hard and fast one that only the most genetically fortunate can escape. But yes, we will eventually get around to the second one.

In both instances, though, we're leveling a playing field that's been magnificently tilted throughout human existence, and that is going to revolutionize our sense of risk – both individually and collectively. If you think that technology can save your skin (literally), you'll be more willing to push all manner of envelopes. At first, it will be – as usual – only the rich who can afford such a mindset. You see that today in cosmetic surgery, but these technologies will take that advantage to an entirely new level.

At some point, access to such technologies becomes a political issue – not unlike the shadowy question of who should be prioritized today for donor organs (the virtuous disease-sufferer or the person who destroyed their liver with alcohol). Eventually, expect that access to be defined a "human right" – upon threat of political revolution.

Again, whatever the pathway, these technologies will spread. They will be "democratized" like all before them. And they will dramatically alter human behavior – first individually and then in organizations. Legal and political systems will need to change in response.

And the notion of human resilience will never be the same again.

The Looming Social Burnout That is Demographic Aging

EVERY CULTURE THE WORLD OVER BRAGS ABOUT HOW THEY RESPECT THEIR ELDERS, AND IT'S ALL TRUE – UP UNTIL A CERTAIN LEVEL OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IS ACHIEVED. It's a matter of numbers and living circumstances. In a traditional rural agrarian situation, elders are – quite frankly – not all that common. That's an exhausting life, typically not well managed with medical care. Those who make it into old age are prized for their wealth of experience and their ability to serve as extra caregivers with children. But then economic development happens and all that is turned upside down.

The big differences include the improvement in living conditions, healthcare, and sanitation, plus dramatically altered cost incentives. Elders live a whole lot longer, costing in medical care. Children go from representing more labor on the farm to constituting new costs (education being the biggie). Housing is tighter and costlier. Family size drops dramatically, particularly as mothers are lured into more education and forced into second-paycheck careers.

In sum, elders, like kids, switch from being relatively low-cost additional assets to high-cost household liabilities. Families that a generation or two back always welcomed more births and always celebrated their elder's survival now start asking very different and difficult questions: Can we afford another child? What to do with grandma?

To me, what's most fascinating about these changes is how female-skewing they are. Throughout history, men were the far more "important," but think about today: Who lives longer? The wife – not the husband.  Who takes care of you when you age? The daughter – not the son. Who's most stressed by this "sandwich generation" phenomenon (caring for kids and elders at the same time)? The mothers – not the fathers (who too often disappear). In America, two-thirds of caregivers are women.

I mean, I realize that when traditional societies leap forward into modernity, the tendency is for parents to still prefer boys as offspring, creating gender imbalances. But I don't see these lasting as historical dynamics. Smart money (and parents) in a modern society should overwhelming bet on more females – not more males. Women simply build more resilience into society as it ages, so they're the true assets while the men are the true drains.

I don't make this argument casually. I've been studying the demographics of aging for years now, and, coincidentally, after my wife and I had three kids (one daughter, two sons), we adopted three girls. In effect, we bet on girls at a tipping point in human history when they're still relatively devalued in transitioning societies (our girls hail from Asia and Africa); we went "long" on girls when the world continues to "short" them.

No, I don't pretend this unequal burden is new, as the hunter-v-nester dichotomy is as old as humanity is. I'm just saying it's getting more concentrated or further skewed thanks to modernization and everything that comes with it: birth control, divorce, single-mother households, more educational and career opportunities for women, etc. We can pretend that the sandwich-generation dynamic affects men and women equally, but it doesn't – not even close.

So no surprise to find a new study published in JAMA that notes the following toll being exacted:

Many family caregivers in the U.S. provide unpaid medical aid and other services to loved ones at the expense of their own financial, physical and mental health, a study suggests.

Nationwide, an estimated 14.7 million family caregivers assist 7.7 million older adults who live in the community rather than in institutions like nursing homes. These family members often help with daily activities like eating, bathing and dressing. Many also provide medical support such as scheduling physician checkups, managing medications, cleaning wounds and giving injections.

“This issue is not a small or isolated issue but is widespread,” said Jennifer Wolff of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, who led the study.

Roughly 23 million Americans may not sound like a lot, but that's already 1-out-of-14 Americans, and, rest assured, that proportion will balloon in coming years and decades, so we're being offered a preview of coming social costs.

Almost half of the caregivers surveyed – 46 percent – helped an elderly person with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. Another 34 percent assisted a loved one with a severe disability, the authors reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Roughly half of family caregivers provide substantial help with medical needs and spend around 28 hours a week assisting loved ones, the researchers found.

Compared with people who didn’t offer medical support, caregivers who provided substantial assistance with health care were 79 percent more likely to experience emotional difficulty and more than twice as likely to experience physical problems themselves as well as financial difficulties.

They were also more than five times as likely to miss out on important activities in their own lives and more than three times as likely to suffer lost productivity at work.

There are many reasons why the rich live substantially longer lives than the poor in this country, but one of them is that they can pay someone else to handle such burdens. The rest? They simply get worn down.

Even so, the findings add to a growing body of evidence on the physical, emotional and financial predicaments family caregivers often encounter because they devote so much of their time to assisting elderly loved ones, Carol Levine, of the United Hospital Fund of New York, notes in an accompanying editorial.

In terms of relative national resilience in the face of demographic aging, the U.S. faces a much easier (less "steep") road than does Europe, Russia, China, and Japan. Frankly, it's one of the key reasons why I, as a security strategist, don't worry all that much about the "threat" from Russia or China down the road.

But clearly, as a species, we're looking at some profound social changes as we collectively age, and women are going to be at the center of this political and economic transformation. Simply put, with all this demographic aging foreordained at this point, we'll either learn, as societies, how to become a whole lot more resilient or we'll collectively grow a whole lot more brittle.

Here's a big hint as to how women begin to dominate these responses as well: in the U.S., females currently make up the majority of advanced-degree earners (post-bachelor's degrees). This has been true for quite some time, and the skew is substantial at 60% female to 40% male. On that basis, and the longer voting "lives" of women (who outlive men by quite a few years, on average), the feminization of political systems is sure to follow. As it does, expect all manner of dramatic changes to address this looming demographic reality.

On that political trajectory, take a look at some of the demographically "oldest" democracies in the world – namely, the Scandinavian or Nordic states of Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. There you will find an unusually high percentage of women already in positions of national political power.

Apogee of MSM Hyperbole on Global Conflict - Aleppo Battle as "Mini World War"

PERCEPTIONS MATTER WHEN IT COMES TO RESILIENCE – A RATHER NIETZSCHEAN CONCEPT IN AND OF ITSELF (DIFFICULT SITUATIONS FOSTERING SKILL-GROWTH).  One cannot be a Chicken Little and resilient, as problems must be examined with a clear eye toward their scale and surmount-ability. You can't be squealing "game over! game over!" into the camera lens and expect to foster anything but panic – the white flag of resilience.

The big challenge for the field of organizational resilience is its uncomfortably close association with national/international security thinking (from which I hail in training and the bulk of the career experiences). As a rule, national-security types want you to be afraid - very afraid!Why? The professional in me says that's just them doing their job in a "dangerous world." The cynic in me says that's their version of marketing, which is often the sad equivalent of fear-mongering – as in, the more afraid you are, the more important they become. I mean, ask yourself: when you watch TV and see experts opining on some crisis/conflict, do you ever hear them say that the situation is getting better? No, you don't. In this business, everything is always getting increasingly something (dangerous, worse, violent, unstable, uncertain, uncontrollable – pretty much un-anything).  

History, of course, says otherwise. In my lifetime, which began on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, we've seen wars growing less frequent, shorter, and less lethal. And not by a little bit, mind you, but by a lot. I could throw a ton of stats and sites at you, but the chart above demonstrates the history awfully well. Mind you, that's battle deaths per 100,000 people.  With numbers that just go up through 2013 (of course, they're increasing since then!), we see that the battle death rate, while rising from the early-2000s supreme low of less-than-one-person(!)-per-100,000 to the "disturbing" almost-one-person(!!)-per-100,000, is still lower than virtually all of history since WWII (only the "chaotic" year of 1996 – sarcasm mine – compares, and that was the most peaceful year since 1954, or before decolonialization began).

What else the chart tells us:

• The "unprecedented" disasters of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were . . . to be frank, minor compared to the 1990s, which we all collectively remember as being an awfully quiet decade outside of a handful of conflicts/disasters (Bosnia, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, central Africa).
• The 1990s themselves were far more quiet than the 1980s, which seemed bad only in comparison to the quiet shadow created by the Indochina wars of the 1960s and 1970s.
• Those 1960s/early 70s Southeast Asian wars were bad compared to the quiet 1950s (when we only feared total nuclear annihilation – sigh!).
• But Vietnam etc. was quite a come-down from the scary and destabilized post-WWII/Korean War segment.

What you don't see on the chart:  World War II stretching over roughly a decade and killing - on average - 15,000 people a day for well over 3,500 days.  That, my friends, was a world war.

So, imagine my surprise as an expert on conflict/international relations/global trends to see WAPO this morning declare the battle for a single city in Syria to constitute a "mini world war."

Why mini? Well, I'm guessing that a death rate of 150/day (my best estimate using a lot of other estimates) is a big part of it. That's actually quite high for a war nowadays, because most experts will label any conflict with an average of 3 deaths/per day (1,000+ for year) to be a "war."  But when your last true world war yielded a death rate 100-times higher, even "mini" seems like a wild exaggeration.

No, the reason why WAPO embraces this sort of reckless hyperbole is because Russia is now in the mix, sending Cold War-like chills down our collective spines. Naturally, this raises old fears of "escalation" – presumably to global nuclear war.

Except neither side is talking that, or acting that, or anything-ing that.

Instead, the great "evidence" cited in the piece (besides some self-serving observations by a security contractor working the conflict) is Russian Premier Dmitry Medvedev dropping hints in Europe this week about a new, Cold War-like dynamic between Russia and the West.

The great cause there? Obviously, Russia's land grab of the Crimea and the easter portion of Ukraine (the former formally, the latter informally).  That led to the West placing a lot of economic sanctions on a Russian economy already faltering and now nosediving in terms of its number-one export – energy, thanks to historically low global prices.

So, what does Russia seek with its military intervention in Syria? To prove it's a "dominant" Middle Eastern power, as the story's author opines? Well, a relevant power is a less screechy expression.

But try this alternative explanation on for size: Russia is hurting from the sanctions and needs to come in from the economic "cold" imposed on it by the West over Ukraine. But how to do it? Why not intervene in a place of high global interest, one which the U.S. is lowballing in terms of effort? All of a sudden, look how important Moscow is to the "peace process"! And if Moscow is seen as holding enough of the cards on the Assad regime, maybe asking for its help there will be matched by the West forgetting its transgressions in Ukraine.

Sound like a "mini world war" to you?  Or just the cantina scene from the original Star Wars movie?

Syria is a civil war. Civil wars today tend to get internationalized (all those characters in various uniforms in the cantina ...). We lament that development, but, let me remind you what we used to call states where conflicts raged and nobody from the outside showed up. Those we called "failed states" back in the 1990s. We still have a few now (same 1-2 dozen out of roughly 200 states in the world). But, if, by and large, few outsiders show up, those conflicts that have "failed" to attract any serious global attention are simply forgotten. So maybe we should call them "forgotten states."

Syria is not a forgotten state. A lot of regional and a few extra-regional powers are interested. Are they interested enough to stop the conflict? Not really. Are they interested enough to stop the conflict from going against their side? Just barely.

But should we look at that and invoke the imagery of a world war?

That is just shameful fear-mongering on the part of WAPO trying to sell your eyeballs to their advertisers.  The paper is simply repurposing Medvedev's propaganda as deep insight: he peddles "new Cold War" to amp up the West's sense of danger, hopefully (from Moscow's perspective) rendering the Obama Administration more amenable to compromise on Ukraine. WAPO knee-jerkedly transmutes that bit of diplomatic salesmanship into a "mini world war" on Aleppo. (You say Sarajevo, I say Aleppo, oh let's call this world war off!)

Scared? You're supposed to be. The Syrian Civil War is a genuine human tragedy, but re-packaging it as a "mini world war" is just inaccurate-bordering-on-journalistically-negligent.

Is this picking on WAPO? Absolutely, but only because I respect the paper so much and constantly cite it here in this blog. Frankly, its editorial staff should know better.

Again, the larger point here is maintaining perspective, because, when we lose it, we become brittle as individuals, decision-makers, leaders, and nations. Brittle, scared actors make bad choices; they do stupid things. They lash out because they imagine it to be the only option left, after issuing over-the-top threats . . . typically in response to hyperbolic media coverage (see debates in US presidential race for way too many examples).

So no, it's not all the fault of the media, although they start the process. They just give us what we want, which is fear. Nowadays we seem to collectively crave fear of complexity and chaos and uncertainty – the holy trinity of fear-mongers everywhere.

But do yourself a favor and don't buy any of it, because fear is the mind-killer - the little death, and the ultimate enemy of resilience.

Resilient Families --> Resilient Employees --> Resilient Companies (That Earn Better)

HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU HEARD THE OLD CORPORATE BIT ABOUT HOW "OUR PEOPLE ARE OUR GREATEST STRENGTH"?  What executives really mean when they trot that out is that their human capital is highly resilient – a concept that encompasses company loyalty in a big way. Compared to brand, products, services, physical plant, company rules and procedures, etc., your employees are the one asset that can most rapidly adjust to truly disruptive change. Everything else takes time to reconfigure, relaunch, re-something, but your people can alter their behaviors at great speed – if properly incentivized to value the firm's survival and success above their own instinctive need to stick to what they know/are comfortable doing/etc. Their ability to successfully engage and surmount risks and emergencies is whatever gets you(r enterprise) through the night – however defined.

Nothing beats all hands on deck during an emergency. Historically, that all-hands-on-deck mantra favored males over females, unmarried employees over married ones, anybody over the handicapped, and racial uniformity. "Outliers" to that bias were instinctively viewed as potential liabilities – just not the types you could trust in a pinch.

I'd like to say we all know better now, but we know that's not yet true. Diversity issues remain hot-buttons across the political, social, and economic landscapes. In many instances, enterprise leaders may well espouse adherence to the principles only to be unaware of how badly they perform on these issues simply because they're not well measured, much less publicized. This is why the Obama Administration recently mandated that companies submit data on their salary practices, the goal being to root out inequality by gender, race and ethnicity.  Nanny-state interference to some, but what if we could show you that a more diverse workforce makes for a more resilient company, which, in turn, improves the bottom line?

Studies have been done on this subject, and they've consistently supported the notion that gender equality is a solid indicator of a firm's long-term success.

From Fortune:

On Monday, the Peterson Institute for International Economics and professional services firm EY released a study that reveals a significant correlation between women in leadership and company profitability.

The report found that companies with at least 30% female leaders had net profit margins up to 6 percentage points higher than companies with no women in the top ranks. Interestingly, it did not find any notable difference in the performance of female and male CEOs, and was unable to determine whether having female board members helped or hurt companies in any way.

That's the headline, but when you dig deeper, you find wider causality:

“There are two reasons why gender diversity at the top could matter,” Marcus Noland, EVP and director of studies at the Peterson Institute, wrote in an email to Fortune. “The first is that there is evidence that the presence of women contributes to functional or skill diversity among the leadership group enabling top management to more effectively monitor staff performance. The other is discrimination: If some firms discriminate against talented, hardworking, effective women, then they will be outperformed by rivals that don’t discriminate.”

It's not having women per se that is the issue; it's being a genuine meritocracy that looks past gender, and – by extension – race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. If you limit your pool of applicants to the ones you find easiest to integrate and manage, you end up with a more brittle, less imaginative, and less resilient leadership and workforce. Life diversity is skill diversity, and skill diversity equals enterprise resilience – more types of hands on deck during crunch time.

But let's dig even deeper:

Another interesting finding: Paternity leave policies appear to be key to achieving gender parity in business. The ten countries with the greatest corporate gender balance—including countries in Scandinavia, Latvia, and Bulgaria—are not at the very top of the pack when it comes to government mandated maternity leave. However, there was a very strong correlation between countries with robust paternity leave policies and a strong gender balance in the workplace.

The report’s hypothesis is that offering paternity leave increases expectations that men will take on a share of child care responsibilities. “It stands to reason that policies that allow child care needs to be met but do not place the burden of care explicitly on women increase the chances that women can build the business acumen and professional contacts necessary to qualify for a corporate board,” reads the report.

That's a first-class bingo!

You set the standard that says, respect your families, care for loved ones, be strong at home, we'll cover you when needed and - guess what? Your people return the favor during those disasters, disruptions, crunch times, etc. And no, I'm not just talking standard nuclear families; I'm talking anyone with "family" of any sort.  Because the types of people who cast those interpersonal nets widely are deeply resilient by nature. They take on tough challenges, they stick by you when things go south, they don't flinch when the emergency siren goes off.

And when they do all those things - and you retain them, your enterprise makes more money.

When Wal-Mart Leaves Your Small Town, So Does a Great Deal of Your Community's Resilience

ONCE DEMONIZED AS DOWNTOWN-KILLING MACHINE, A NOW-OVEREXTENDED WAL-MART'S RETREAT FROM SMALL-TOWN AMERICA WILL EXTINGUISH THE MOST VULNERABLE COMMUNITIES.  Many small towns give up the ghost when they lose their local hospital, a sure sign that there's no longer enough local dollars to sustain a high-priced facility and its personnel.  But when big-box, rock-bottom-prices Wal-Mart gives up on your town, it's actually far worse, because now the people with the least disposable income - and often no car - are now locked out of their primary source of just-getting-by consumption.  Stand outside a Wal-Mart sometime and see who walks up (sans car), or bikes there, or is forced to take a bus or taxi to the store, only to come out an hour later with bags of virtually everything they'll consume over the coming weeks, and you'll be looking at the most vulnerable of the 99 percent in America. Because, when Wal-Mart pulls up stakes within their small universe, they've got nowhere else they can go for anything close to the same buying power (and no, the truly vulnerable don't shop much online).

From a powerful WAPO story on the subject:

To hear Mary Francis Matney tell it, Walmart didn’t kill the once-vibrant cluster of shops next to a railroad and a creek in the faded old coal town of Kimball, W. Va. — the disappearance of the mines had pretty well taken care of that already. But now that Walmart’s leaving, too, as one of 154 U.S. stores the company closed in January, the town might be snuffed out for good.

“It makes everyone so downhearted they don’t know what to do,” said Matney, 60, browsing the half-empty shelves of Kimball’s massive Supercenter, leaning on her cart, which contains a dustbuster and door crack insulation. Her husband once worked in the coal mines. Now the couple lives on what little they get from Medicare and Social Security, and with precious few other options she made the hour-and-a-half trip from her home back in the “hollers” once a month to stock up.

“It’s like we’re a forgotten bunch of people,” said Matney, her long gray hair loosely clipped into a bun. “It’s about all there was to look forward to. If we had to go any further, there ain’t no way.”

She patted the metal shelves full of half-off merchandise affectionately. "I hate seeing it die. I really do,” she said. “You could always find better stuff here.”

And two days later, the store was gone.

Wal-Mart just announced it was closing a slew of such "underperforming" stores across the United States, and - big surprise, "a Washington Post analysis of the stores on the closure list shows that they are in relatively lower-income, less dense census tracts." That's the truth of poverty in America: in terms of sheer numbers, it is far more an isolated rural phenomenon than one of the inner-city.

The repercussions of a Wal-Mart closing are many:

In Raymondville, Texas, the disappearance of tax income from Walmart could force city layoffs. In Oriental, North Carolina, the arrival of a Walmart Express had been the final straw for a local grocery store, leaving the community with few options for food — also the case in Fairfield, Ala. and Winnsboro, S.C.

Wal-Mart has never pulled back like this before, essentially killing its entire "Express" convenience store pilot program - the primary way it was going to serve the under-served throughout the country.

In many ways, this is one of those "other shoes" that finally dropped from the Global Financial Crisis and the years-long Great Recession it spawned. Wal-Mart is simply trimming back from an over-saturation strategy that decimated the competition and now leaves plenty of those 99%-communities high and dry.

The many negative ripples are still to be felt:

But Walmart’s disappearance will have more subtle ripple effects, like a drop in traffic to the small neighboring hotel and gas station, and the loss of a place to buy phone cards and hire tax preparation help. It was the main donor to the local food bank, and contributed $65,000 annually in taxes to the county, most of which goes to the school district.

And that's why the 99% continue to exhibit profound political anger in this unfolding presidential election. They feel their personal, family, and community resilience being sapped by economic forces beyond their control, and they desperately want Washington to give a damn about their plight.

Political Resilience Is Being Confident To Face Ugly Truths, Knowing Your System Will Survive The Encounter

AFTER AMERICA RODE A TIDAL WAVE OF ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AND EXPANSION FOLLOWING ITS CIVIL WAR (MOVING RAPIDLY FROM A SECTIONAL ECONOMY TO A TRULY CONTINENTAL ONE), A FRIGHTENING STRETCH OF BOOMS AND BUSTS IGNITED A LENGTHY PROGRESSIVE ERA (BREAKING FOR THE ROARIN' TWENTIES) WHEN POLITICAL ACTORS FROM BOTH PARTIES SOUGHT SYSTEMIC REFORMS - LEST THE COUNTRY SUCCUMB TO THE SORT OF RADICALISM LOOMING IN EUROPE (SEE FALLOUT OF WWI, CAUSES OF WWII). It was a frightening journey in many ways, with worried leaders concerned that the very nature of American democracy was at stake. But this is the usual price to be paid in return for a radical and lengthy expansion of economic activity, and it's one the world faces today after that quarter-century-plus boom that ended in 2008-09 and left the global economy with a bad hangover of toxic debt that is still largely to be processed.

Per a solid NYT story of late:

Beneath the surface of the global financial system lurks a multitrillion-dollar problem that could sap the strength of large economies for years to come.

The problem is the giant, stagnant pool of loans that companies and people around the world are struggling to pay back. Bad debts have been a drag on economic activity ever since the financial crisis of 2008, but in recent months, the threat posed by an overhang of bad loans appears to be rising. China is the biggest source of worry. Some analysts estimate that China’s troubled credit could exceed $5 trillion, a staggering number that is equivalent to half the size of the country’s annual economic output ...

But it’s not just China. Wherever governments and central banks unleashed aggressive stimulus policies in recent years, a toxic debt hangover has followed. In the United States, it took many months for mortgage defaults to fall after the most recent housing bust — and energy companies are struggling to pay off the cheap money that they borrowed to pile into the shale boom ...

In theory, it makes sense for banks to swiftly recognize the losses embedded in bad loans — and then make up for those losses by raising fresh capital. The cleaned-up banks are more likely to start lending again — and thus play their part in fueling the recovery.

But in reality, this approach can be difficult to carry out. Recognizing losses on bad loans can mean pushing corporate borrowers into bankruptcy and households into foreclosure. Such disruption can send a chill through the economy, require unpopular taxpayer bailouts and have painful social consequences. And in some cases, the banks might find it extremely difficult to raise fresh capital in the markets.

Sounds like recent American history, yes? It's 2016 but there's still palpable anger over the Wall Street bailouts and far too many Americans still struggle with unsustainable credit debt. But, by way of comparison, the U.S. dealt with the financial crisis with genuine speed.

Yes, op-ed columnists are still arguing about the bailouts and the stimulus spending (the latter being somewhat irrelevant to curing a financial crisis), with plenty still arguing for more spending (like Paul Krugman).  And we most certainly have endured a strange era of name-calling: remember when President Obama was a "socialist" in the eyes of his enemies?

But now we have a serious Democratic candidate for president in Bernie Sanders who embraces the Social-Democrat moniker, and he gets enough traction with that to force Secretary Clinton into making her own claims at the progressive label.  On the other side, Republican candidates are struggling with the terms but reaching for the same sense of popular desperation - the feeling that the middle class has been under assault for years now. It's just that too many candidates in the GOP are having trouble separating that valid concern from the sort of anti-immigrant sentiment that is historically attached to such fears.

Still, all this shouting and posturing and name-calling reflects something positive: compared to the rest of the world, America was more confident in processing its toxic debt overhang. Plenty of work to be done, but the job is engaged. What the NYT article laments is the lack of similar progress elsewhere, and, in my mind, that progress reflects a political lack of confidence in the systems afflicted - one that prevents them from moving more aggressively because they fear the very fabric of their governments' political legitimacy might tear.

China is the scariest example in this regard.  Per the chart above, we see just how integrated and important the Middle Kingdom has become with regard to the global economy's functioning. Scarier still is the damaging precedent set by neighboring Japan:

Japan, economists say, waited far too long after its credit boom of the 1980s to force its banks to recognize huge losses — and the economy suffered for years after as a result.

But Japan stalled out during the go-go nineties, so it could only do so much damage on a global scale. But, as the world went on a growth tear over the next decade and a half, the stakes today are so much larger - as is the poster-child for not facing the truth with enough alacrity - again, China.

Headline figures for bad loans in China most likely do not capture the size of the problem, analysts say. In her analysis, [one prominent local observer] estimates that at the end of 2016, as much as 22 percent of the Chinese financial system’s loans and assets will be “nonperforming,” a banking industry term used to describe when a borrower has fallen behind on payments or is stressed in ways that make full repayment unlikely. In dollar terms, that works out to $6.6 trillion of troubled loans and assets.

None of that was truly unexpected.  You spend your way out of a financial crisis and you're simply delaying your day of reckoning - an essentially political process of regrading the economic landscape like the two Roosevelts (Theodore and Franklin) once did for the U.S. under similarly tumultuous circumstances (may I suggest Ken Burns' 14-hour documentary "The Roosevelts" on Netflix).

It's just that no one can spot that sort of leadership in China right now. We've seen some experts compare Chinese president Xi Jinxing to T.R. in terms of foreign policy machismo (largely on display only in the South China Sea), and Xi has definitely earned his corruption-busting stripes for his lengthy recent domestic campaign. But processing China's frightening large pool of toxic debt?

The looming question for the global economy, however, is how China might deal with a vast pool of bad debts.

After a previous credit boom in the 1990s, the Chinese government provided financial support to help clean up the country’s banks. But the cost of similar interventions today could be dauntingly high given the size of the latest credit boom. And more immediately, rising bad debts could crimp lending to strong companies, undermining economic growth in the process.

“My sense is that the Chinese policy makers seem like a deer in the headlights,” Mr. Balding said. “They really don’t know what to do.”

And that, my friends, is the biggest uncertainty right now in the global system. ISIS, for all its ferocity and atrocities, does not compare.  Sanders/Clinton v Trump/Cruz/Rubio does not compare. The Brexit/Grexit/Whoxit? dynamic in the EU does not compare.

And this is where multiparty, pluralistic democracies rule - when they choose to. They can "throw the bums out."  Heck, they're required to in the U.S. after 8 years - maximum (our presidential administration). Being able to apply the "clean slate" is a huge act of political resiliency, one that China, with its single-party state, is presently unable to employ.

And that is worrisome for the entire global economy as it continues to process the toxic overhang from that great global economic expansion that we all now remember so fondly.

The Stunning Cancer Experiment That Is China, And How It Might Just Improve The World

IF NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION, THEN TRAGEDY IS THE MOTHER OF RESILIENCE. Right now China, home to 19% of the world's population, is enduring a national tragedy when it comes to environmental pollution delivering carcinogens to the citizenry, who, in turn, now suffer extraordinary cancer rates. That's the bad news. The good new is that China, like so many economic "risers" before it, is certain to surmount its local pollution issues as its per-capita income reaches that level - seen in previously industrialized nations like the UK and the US - when the public begins to prefer a cleaner environment more than that next additional bit of income.

Per the observed Kuznets Curve on environmental damage suffered by industrializing nations, we know that countries, when they traverse a certain per-capita income trajectory, begin to clean things up.  London's famous "fog" of the 19th century was really coal-burning-generated smog, and New York of a century ago was amazingly unhealthful due to local pollution.  But each metropolis, reflecting larger national trends, eventually cleaned themselves up. Better-off citizens simply began prioritizing that demand in political discourse, elections, candidates and the like. Didn't happen overnight, but like with everything witnessed in today's globalization era, we should expect it to happen at record speed with China.

(And yes, the environmental Kuznets Curve is subject to two key criticisms: 1) nations often clean-up by moving their dirtier industries to other nations (pollution haven effect); and 2) the notion applies well to local pollution, but not to global pollution of the sort represented by CO2 emissions. Of course, from my economic determinist perspective, these caveats only highlight the need to bring along - even faster - the less-developed parts of the global economy, so that they too reach proper national "incentivization" levels.)

But no matter how fast it happens, China's frightening cancer experiment is just beginning. Yes, we can cite the high smoking rates of the sort not seen in the U.S. since the 1940s-50s - a development that led to our own cancer-treatment boom in the 1960s-70s (when systematic work on virtually all of today's treatment protocols began).  But that's only responsible (it is estimated) for roughly one-quarter of China's current explosion of cancer cases. Another huge chunk is due to the population's unremitting exposure to carcinogens in their environment - the dark cost of the nation's rapid industrialization of the past several decades.

Now we get word of just how costly that trajectory, which lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, is turning out to be in the realm of cancer.

From the Medical Daily website (along with the scary photo above, credited as bl  michael davis-burchat, CC by 2.0):

A new report illuminates one aspect of this country’s current reality — the health of its citizens. Researchers estimate China endured 2.8 million cancer deaths during 2015 and 4.3 million new cancer cases, with lung cancer the most common of all.

“Cancer incidence and mortality have been increasing in China, making cancer the leading cause of death since 2010 and a major public health problem in the country,” wrote the researchers. Quality data from population-based registries has recently become available through the National Central Cancer Registry of China, giving researchers a better view of the country's health.

The key to the new understanding is meta-analysis of cancer registries around the country - in other words, Big Data to the rescue:

To penetrate the shadows and learn more about the current situation, a team of scientists from the American Cancer Society, University of Sydney, and National Cancer Center Beijing used mortality data compiled by 72 local cancer registries to estimate the numbers of cancer deaths in China in 2015.

Given the recent, rapid industrialization and the relative infancy of anti-smoking public campaigns in China, it's no surprise that the nation "outperforms" it global population share of 19% by accounting for 22% of new cancer diagnoses and a whopping 27% of global cancer deaths. But what really sticks out is the distribution of cases across organs:

Specifically, the four most common cancers diagnosed in China are lung, stomach, liver and esophageal cancer, representing 57 percent of all cancers diagnosed in the country. By comparison, these cancers account for only 18 percent of total incidence in the United States.

Have no doubt, Chinese are living longer and - in general - more healthy lives. As the study also notes, mortality rates have plummeted in the last decade alone - 21 percent for both males and females.  That's amazing.

But that also makes the spiking rise of invasive and fatal cancer cases all the prominent. People are living longer in China, but dying harder - and local pollution is the rising killer.

“Outdoor air pollution, considered to be among the worst in the world, indoor air pollution through heating and cooking using coal and other biomass fuels, and the contamination of soil and drinking water mean that the Chinese population is exposed to many environmental carcinogens,” wrote the authors.

Some efforts are being made to reduce the burden of environmental pollution in China, they say. Though the effects of these endeavors will not be felt immediately, the rates of cancer deaths could be reduced by increasing the effectiveness of care and treatment, particularly among the disadvantaged and those living in rural areas, the researchers conclude.

Having spent a lot of time in China over the past decade, I can attest to the scary nature of the air quality. Typically, I just start on antibiotics the minute my jet touches down, knowing that the expose will send my sinuses into acute infection - like clockwork. Frankly, it's why I turned down a full-time job offer last year from a Chinese enterprise: it wasn't just the personal health cost I feared, but what it would do to my kids once they made it over. It's when highly-skilled and globally mobile workers - both outside and inside China - start basing job decisions on local pollution that the political tipping point gets reached, simply because the profound economic costs begin to make themselves readily known.

China will process its peaking pollution by massing state resources and power to make it happen, and the government will do this - to a great extent - to avoid the public's political wrath.  The same will happen with China's burgeoning cancer treatment industry. Both efforts will leave China far more resilient on the far side of this development "hump," and the world will likely benefit greatly from the nation's great push on both subjects - just like it did before when Western economic giants went through similar growing pains.

A Civilization's Resilience Is Measured By Its Ability To Adapt Its Values To Economic Modernization

THERE IS A PREVALENT BELIEF THAT WESTERN SOCIETIES ARE MORE SOCIALLY BRITTLE WHEN IT COMES TO ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, WHILE EASTERN SOCIETIES ARE MORE RESILIENT. This is often expressed in terms of Asian societies featuring stronger social bonds and more community emphasis on the collective versus the individual, while Westerners are depicted as being more selfish, self-centered, and thus more likely to sever social bonds when stressed. A key depiction of these difference between Western and Asian values is found in the East's claim that they value families more, to include both a prioritization of their children's needs and a genuine veneration of their elders. Westerners, due to modernization, are often viewed in the East as having abandoned those values, only to suffer the painful social consequences.

My argument here is not to defend the West, but to point out that modernization and economic development tends to make individualists of us all. When I was young, I heard the Asian values argument with regard to rising Japan. But what we've seen with Japan is that the divorce rate - a great measure of family stress - rose with economic development.  Today roughly one-in-three Japanese marriages end in divorce, which represents a quadrupling since the 1950s and a doubling since the 1970s.  Today's divorce rate in Japan sits at a very European level - not as bad as America's but quite a bit different from its idealized past.

After Japan rose and then tapered off, we in the West heard the same arguments for China as it rose: the Chinese value their children more than Westerners, venerate their elders more than Westerners, and divorce less than Westerners.  Such Asian values would serve China well and mark its ascent as being different - and better - than the Western powers that rose before it.

Except we're seeing the same-old, same-old transformation of society in China that we've previously witnessed in Japan and, before that, in the West.

From a recent Economist article:

Divorce rates are rising quickly across China. This is a remarkable transformation in a society where for centuries marriage was universal and mostly permanent (though convention permitted men to take concubines). Under Communist rule, traditional values have retained a strong influence over family relationships: during much of the Mao era, divorce was very unusual. It became more common in the 1980s, but a marriage law adopted in 1994 still required a reference from an employer or community leader. Not until 2003 were restrictions removed.

Then came marketization and globalization:

In the past 35 years, the biggest internal migration experienced by any country in human history has been tearing families apart. Traditional values have been giving way to more liberal ones. Women are becoming better educated, and more aware of their marital rights (they now initiate over half of all divorce cases). Greater affluence has made it easier for many people to contemplate living alone—no longer is there such an incentive to stay married in order to pool resources.

Sound familiar?

As long as both sides agree on terms, China is now among the easiest and cheapest places in the world to get a divorce. In many Western countries, including Britain, couples must separate for a period before dissolving a marriage; China has no such constraints. In 2014, the latest year for which such data exist, about 3.6m couples split up—more than double the number a decade earlier (they received a red certificate, pictured, to prove it). The divorce rate—the number of cases per thousand people—also doubled in that period. It now stands at 2.7, well above the rate in most of Europe and approaching that of America, the most divorce-prone Western country (see chart). Chongqing’s rate, 4.4, is higher than America’s.

But the big change dynamic is simply heightened individual freedom of action, as in, go more places, meet more people, do more things, live different ways ...

Married people previously had limited opportunities to meet members of the opposite sex in social situations, according to research by Li Xiaomin of Henan University. Peng Xiaobo, a divorce lawyer in Chongqing, reckons 60-70% of his clients have had affairs.

Naturally, this development worries the government:

Many commentators in the official media talk of separation as a sign of moral failure; they fret that it signifies the decline of marriage, and of family as a social unit—a threat, as they see it, to social stability and even a cause of crime. The spread of “Western values” is often blamed.

Bingo!  "They did it to us!"

But marriage is not losing its lustre. In most countries, rising divorce rates coincide with more births out of wedlock and a fall in marriage rates. China bucks both these trends. Remarriage is common too. The Chinese have not fallen out of love with marriage—only with each other.

Give them time ...

And then factor in the stress of a rapidly aging population. China is "aging" three-times faster than US right now, its median age rising 3 years for every year America's rises through mid-century.

Yan Yunxiang of the University of California, Los Angeles, says “parent-driven divorce” is becoming more common. As a result of China’s one-child-per-couple policy (recently changed to a two-child one), many people have no siblings to share the burden of looking after parents and grandparents. Thus couples often find themselves living with, or being watched over by, several—often contending—elders. Mr Yan says the older ones’ interference fuels conjugal conflict. Sometimes parents urge their children to divorce their partners as a way to deal with rifts.

Naturally, that will be a very stressful development for Chinese society going forward.

Last, depressing similarity is that women suffer worse from divorce than men:

Women are more likely to be the ones who suffer financially when this happens. Rising divorce rates reflect the spread of more tolerant, permissive values towards women, but legislation tends to favour men in divorce settlements.

None of this is to pick on China, just to note that economic change drives social and political change, and when the former is fast enough and profound enough, the latter become quite brittle.

One positive upshot of all this socio-economic tumult: after "exporting" their "surplus" female babies for so many years (full disclosure - my fourth child is adopted from China), the international adoption flow out of China has slowed dramatically, meaning that Chinese society's age-old bias against adoption due to "strong" family values/biases against non-relatives is finally dissipating. Some of this is due to women putting off marriage and pregnancy to pursue more education and career opportunities and then finding it harder to conceive, and, most certainly, the lifting the of the one-child policy should radically decrease babies being put up for adoption. Plus, as the reality of single kids having to care for aging parents kicks in, those future parents have come to realize that, contrary to the age-old rural bias for males as farm workers, a modern, urbanized, and aging society and its members tend to value females more because those daughters are far more likely to care for them in their old age.

The irony here is that these changes are all so Marxian: economic and technological change begetting profound social and - eventually in China - political transformations. Marx was right on that transformational power; he just dramatically underestimated the capacity of empowered individuals - and their responsive governments - to adapt themselves to these changes in a constant, co-evolutionary fashion.

Marx simply dismissed that sort of social and political resilience.

The Extremes To Which Non-Resilient National Medical Systems Must Go When Facing a Potential Epidemic

LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES, EXPERIENCING OUTBREAKS OF A PREVIOUSLY MUNDANE VIRUS (ZIKA) THAT HAS APPARENTLY MUTATED TO THE POINT OF TRIGGERING DEVASTATING BIRTH DEFECTS, ARE TAKING THE UNPRECEDENTED STEP OF ASKING WOMEN TO DELAY PREGNANCIES - IN ONE CASE UNTIL 2018. Mosquito-borne, Zika seems to be expanding its reach with climate change and the heightened international travel dynamics associated with globalization. In other words, this growing medical challenge feels like a glimpse of the world's near-term collective future, one which places unusual and profound pressures on the resilience of national medical systems. (The map above comes from the CDC).

The gist from a great WAPO piece over the weekend:

The rapid spread of the Zika virus has prompted Latin American governments to urge women not to get pregnant for up to two years, an extraordinary precaution aimed at avoiding birth defects believed to be linked to the mosquito-borne illness.

What until recently was a seemingly routine public health problem for countries that are home to a certain type of mosquito has morphed into a potentially culture-shaping phenomenon in which the populations of several nations have been asked to delay procreation. The World Health Organization says at least 20 countries or territories in the region, including Barbados and Bolivia, Guadeloupe and Guatemala, Puerto Rico and Panama, have registered transmission of the virus.

Although the Zika virus has been documented since the 1940s, it began its assault on Latin America in the past several months. The hardest-hit country has been Brazil, where more than 1 million people have contracted the virus. In the past four months, authorities have received reports of nearly 4,000 cases in which Zika may have caused microcephaly in newborns. The condition results in an abnormally small head and is associated with incomplete brain development. Colombia, which shares an Amazonian border with Brazil, reacted to its own Zika outbreak, numbering more than 13,000 cases, by urging women not to get pregnant in the next several months. Other countries, including Jamaica and Honduras, also have urged women to delay having babies.

After more than 5,000 suspected Zika cases were reported last year and in the first weeks of 2016, El Salvador on Thursday took the most extreme stance so far: Deputy Health Minister Eduardo Espinoza urged women to refrain from getting pregnant before 2018.

Culture-shaping is the operative term here. We've long associated globalization with culture/society-shaping dynamics - particularly in the violent responses it can spawn in terms of insurgencies and terrorist movements designed to "safeguard" locals from its perceived pernicious effects (often surrounding the social standing of women who are disproportionally empowered by gender-neutral networks that invade traditional societies in globalization's wake). But climate change will clearly fall into the same category of impact: social behavior will be transformed. Here, we're talking overwhelmingly Catholic societies being asked to embrace birth control by states fearful of medical costs associated with an unfolding epidemic.

But as we've learned with "the pill," AIDS epidemic and abortion rights, it gets really hard to alter that most intimate of social behaviors.

Outside the National Maternity Hospital in San Salvador, Selina Velasquez Cortez, a 30-year-old employee of a sardine factory who has been trying to get pregnant for two years, said there is no way she will stop trying now.

Clearly the US is already taking note and following a similar path of prevention - for now:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday added eight to a list of 14 countries and territories it has urged pregnant U.S. women to avoid because of the risk associated with Zika outbreaks. So far there is no vaccine for the virus.

Having the right vaccine is the ultimate resilience reservoir, as we've learned across the 20th century, when the biggest killer (at 300 million) by far was chicken pox - not warfare. Humanity basically doubled its life-expectancy at birth from 1900 to 2000 (from low-30s to mid-60s globally), and early childhood vaccines were the primary engine of that amazing achievement. Prior to vaccines, that life expectancy at birth measure hadn't move much at all over the previous 10,000 years of human existence.

But now humanity enters into a new age (Anthropocene, as some in the scientific community call it) where our cumulative and growing impact on the planet doubles back upon us with sped-up evolutionary challenges that not only trigger one of Earth's biggest extinction spasms (loads of species disappearing in a massive die-off) but likewise force nations to rethink what it means to have truly resilient national medical systems.

 

Climate Change Tests Metropolitan Resilience With Wider Array Of Weather Dynamics

I RECENTLY MET A SAN DIEGAN - A TRANSPLANT FROM WISCONSIN (WHERE I LIVE) - AND SHE WAS FLABBERGASTED TO NOTE A RECENT TORNADO WARNING THERE, COURTESY OF EL NINO.  Having grown up with tornados in southwestern Wisconsin, I was curious to discover how often this happens in sunny southern California, and, according to the Tornado History Project, it's not all that often - roughly once every 6-7 years for the immediate San Diego metro area. Having endured 6-7 such warnings every summer as a kid, that strikes me as pretty rare, so, sure, when they happen in San Diego, it must seem awfully exotic - like an earthquake in Wisconsin.

Well, with humanity having so reshaped the planet's surface and atmosphere these past decades and centuries, what were once outliers in probability are becoming more routine.  Yes, fewer people die in disasters today than in decades past - something like 98% fewer people compared to 1900! But the costs and the dislocations are clearly rising with serious speed.  Per the US Global Change Research Program's recent National Climate Assessment Assessment, we can cite the following extreme-weather trends:

As the world has warmed, that warming has triggered many other changes to the Earth’s climate. Changes in extreme weather and climate events, such as heat waves and droughts, are the primary way that most people experience climate change. Human-induced climate change has already increased the number and strength of some of these extreme events. Over the last 50 years, much of the U.S. has seen increases in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, heavy downpours, and in some regions, severe floods and droughts ...

Heat waves are periods of abnormally hot weather lasting days to weeks. The number of heat waves has been increasing in recent years. This trend has continued in 2011 and 2012, with the number of intense heat waves being almost triple the long-term average. The recent heat waves and droughts in Texas (2011) and the Midwest (2012) set records for highest monthly average temperatures. Analyses show that human-induced climate change has generally increased the probability of heat waves., And prolonged (multi-month) extreme heat has been unprecedented since the start of reliable instrumental records in 1895 ...

Heavy downpours are increasing nationally, especially over the last three to five decades. The heaviest rainfall events have become heavier and more frequent, and the amount of rain falling on the heaviest rain days has also increased. Since 1991, the amount of rain falling in very heavy precipitation events has been significantly above average. This increase has been greatest in the Northeast, Midwest, and upper Great Plains – more than 30% above the 1901-1960 average. There has also been an increase in flooding events in the Midwest and Northeast, where the largest increases in heavy rain amounts have occurred.

One measure of heavy precipitation events is a two-day precipitation total that is exceeded on average only once in a 5-year period, also known as the once-in-five-year event. As this extreme precipitation index for 1901-2012 shows, the occurrence of such events has become much more common in recent decades ...

The mechanism driving these changes is well understood. Warmer air can contain more water vapor than cooler air. Global analyses show that the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere has in fact increased due to human-caused warming.,,,This extra moisture is available to storm systems, resulting in heavier rainfalls. Climate change also alters characteristics of the atmosphere that affect weather patterns and storms ...

Flooding may intensify in many U.S. regions, even in areas where total precipitation is projected to decline. A flood is defined as any high flow, overflow, or inundation by water that causes or threatens damage. Floods are caused or amplified by both weather- and human-related factors. Major weather factors include heavy or prolonged precipitation, snowmelt, thunderstorms, storm surges from hurricanes, and ice or debris jams. Human factors include structural failures of dams and levees, altered drainage, and land-cover alterations (such as pavement) ...

There has been a substantial increase in most measures of Atlantic hurricane activity since the early 1980s, the period during which high quality satellite data are available.,,These include measures of intensity, frequency, and duration as well as the number of strongest (Category 4 and 5) storms. The recent increases in activity are linked, in part, to higher sea surface temperatures in the region that Atlantic hurricanes form in and move through. Numerous factors have been shown to influence these local sea surface temperatures, including natural variability, human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases, and particulate pollution. Quantifying the relative contributions of natural and human-caused factors is an active focus of research ...

Winter storms have increased in frequency and intensity since the 1950s, and their tracks have shifted northward over the United States., Other trends in severe storms, including the intensity and frequency of tornadoes, hail, and damaging thunderstorm winds, are uncertain and are being studied intensively. There has been a sizable upward trend in the number of storms causing large financial and other losses. However, there are societal contributions to this trend, such as increases in population and wealth.

All this is to say that US metropolitan areas should expect to suffer weather "freak-outs" on a far more consistent basis in coming years and decades - over a far wider array of dynamics. Right now we're witnessing such a freak-out in the Washington DC area, and, I can tell you, having lived there for years myself, it is indeed a freak-out primarily because local, state and federal agencies there simply don't put in the time and effort to work these extreme winter storms (either in advance or during) and because so much of the population living there is un-experienced in navigating their way amidst such conditions.  And yet, it grows ever more obvious that major US metro areas will be forced to deal with such extreme-weather events on a far more regular basis, meaning those skills will need to be developed and honed - by everyone throughout the government, society, and economy.

Per the NOAA chart above, we will measure these events primarily in damages incurred (private insurance, publicly-funded reconstruction) and lost economic activity (business continuity), and yes, that is a huge improvement over the age-old statistic of lives lost. But we are talking about metropolitan governments needing to be "masters" of so many more "domains" over time that it's clear there will need to be a lot more transparency, planning, and preparation efforts jointly pursued by private and public-sector entities.

You know the old joke about a conservative being a former liberal who once got robbed? Well, a resilience-aware executive/political leader is oftentimes simply someone who's had to answer for a weak response to an extreme-weather event.

Transparency Begets Measurability Begets Improvement Begets Resilience

YOU CANNOT IMPROVE AN INDUSTRIAL ACTIVITY THAT YOU CANNOT MEASURE, BUT YOU CANNOT MEASURE THAT ACTIVITY IF THE INDUSTRY ISN'T BEING HONEST. The world's fisheries are under a great deal of stress right now, between pollution and rising ocean acidity triggered by higher CO2 absorption rates. Unsurprisingly, the more regulated Western nations, having themselves long overfished, now do a much better job of measuring and managing fish stock. But with the ballooning middle class emerging across the East and South, two global regions even more given to eating fish than the West, the pressure for bigger catches is immense among those very nations featuring weaker governments and regulatory oversight, begetting a classic "tragedy of the commons" that is now being addressed by an aggressive expansion of aquaculture (fishing "farms") across Asia, which, in turn, generates new and profound environmental stresses along that continent's littoral zones.

The key to managing fish stocks is reliable data, which is hard to come by, the crucial requirement being open and transparent cooperation among commercial fishing firms and the scientific community. Where is that going to best happen? Where the regulatory environment is strongest.

However, a recent study suggests that, on a global basis, fish catches are systematically under-reported:

Tens of millions more tons of fish have been taken from the seas than are recorded in official statistics, suggests a huge and controversial project aiming to estimate the ‘true catch’ of the world’s fishing industry.

The work is detailed in a paper in Nature Communications by fisheries researchers Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and it builds on a decade-long project that has drawn in hundreds of researchers from around the world.

According to Pauly and Zeller, global fisheries catches hit a peak of 130 million tons a year in 1996, and they have been declining strongly since then. This is substantially higher than the data collected by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which report that catches reached 86 million tons in 1996 and have fallen only slightly.

Actually, when you look at the above chart (note the typo on the vertical axis) that compares the two estimates (FAO v Sea Around Us), they appear to track with one another fairly tightly, with the new estimate just consistently higher throughout (roughly 50-60% larger).  But that's the point: if your most closely watched official estimate (FAO) is off by as much as one-third (underestimating the "damage"), then your calculations of fish-population resilience are likely to be significantly off.

Here's the real issue in data collection - a weak global authority relying on the honesty of member countries that are highly incentivized to low-ball their numbers to avoid criticism/penalties/etc.:

The FAO numbers have long been the only estimate of how many tons of fish are caught at a global level. But “the FAO doesn’t have a mandate to correct the data they get,” Pauly told journalists during a conference call.

This leaves the organization reliant mainly on the numbers submitted by member countries, he says, and “the countries have the bad habit to report only the data they see”. This means that many official statistics do not account for a huge amount of the world’s fisheries catch, such as that by small-scale and subsistence fisheries or fish thrown back as ‘discards’—species other than those being hunted.

To fill in the holes in official statistics, Pauly’s team embarked on an epic project to supplement the official baseline data from member nations. This included using results from peer-reviewed research, interviews with local specialists and consumption information from population surveys.

What I really about Pauly's team effort: it goes above and beyond the usual official reporting requirements and attempts to amass bigger data that yields more accurate truths.

A World In Which China’s Economic Resilience Seems As Important To The World As America’s

AP photo, used in WAPO citationIT MAY SEEM AN OBVIOUS - ALMOST TRITE - OBSERVATION AT THIS POINT IN HISTORY, BUT YOU WOULDN'T KNOW IT FROM THE WAY WASHINGTON, THE PENTAGON, AND OUR CURRENT SLATE OF PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES SPEAK ABOUT CHINA.  That fundamental disconnect is somewhat scary to, as well as dangerous for, the rest of the world. And no, I don't note that as some subtle plea for better and less contentious relations with China, because it will always take two to tango. I do, however, note it as a continuing negative trend when it comes to these two nations' co-management of global economic stability.

A couple of Reuters' pieces today remind us of just how important China has become to global markets and their expectations.  First, any new economic forecast figures from China are momentous enough to shift IMF calculations for future global economic growth:

The International Monetary Fund cut its global growth forecasts for the third time in less than a year on Tuesday, as new figures from Beijing showed that the Chinese economy grew at its slowest rate in a quarter of a century in 2015.

To back its forecasts, the IMF cited a sharp slowdown in China trade and weak commodity prices that are hammering Brazil and other emerging markets.

The Fund forecast that the world economy would grow at 3.4 percent in 2016 and 3.6 percent in 2017, both years down 0.2 percentage point from the previous estimates made last October. It said policymakers should consider ways to bolster short-term demand. [emphasis mine]

Unsurprisingly, the Reuters pieces notes that "concerns about Beijing's grip on economic policy have shot to the top of global investors' risk list for 2016 after falls in its stock markets and the yuan stoked worries that the economy may be rapidly deteriorating."  So, it's not just a matter of China's economic health but what Beijing intends to do about it.  Frankly, until very recently in history, the only countries that registers at that level of impact has been the United States, Japan, and the EU as a collective.  But come back with me to review the stimulus spending that unfolded in response to the global financial distress of 2008-09, and the numbers there previewed just how central China had become:

• US - 800 billion USD
• China - 600 billion USD
• EU - 220 billion USD
• Japan - 150 billion USD.

In other words, when push came to shove and big economies needed to pony up the money to shore up global economic demand, China outperformed the EU and Japan put together by making an effort bested only by the US.

This is why, per the second Reuters citation, just as many eyes are on Beijing as Washington right now:

Global equity markets on Tuesday snapped back from a rout at the start of the year after data showing weak economic growth in China prompted speculation Beijing would boost stimulus efforts, but a renewed drop in U.S. oil prices raised a cautionary flag.

China's rise from being a detached corner of the global economy - just four decades ago - to its status as second-most important pillar is akin to America's stunning, turn-of-the-20th-century rise to global prominence following our Civil War. And yes, the US of that era scared a lot of the world with its ambition, arrogance, and self-centeredness - just like China does today.

But we lucked out and picked up a mentor in the British, who, over time, had no choice but to encourage our rise as central to their own continued prosperity, security, and even national survival. The truth is, with all the world has on its plate right now with climate change, terrorism, technological leaps, and so on, the US is as likely to become as entirely co-dependent on China's national resilience in the 21st century as the British once became on US resilience in the 20th century.

Do I see any such recognition among our political and military leaders on this score?  No I do not.  And that worries me.

Do I see it across this country?  It depends on your age, as in, the older you are, the more you tend to fear China.  You also tend to fear China more if you are located in the interior and east of the US versus the Pacific-minded US West.

But I do see a different mindset among the Millennials, which, by all polling, appear to view China more as an ally in co-managing this world than an antagonist. And, based on my time in China, I spot enough of the same among China's youth to suggest that this co-dependent relationship will ultimate work out just fine.

What worries me most is getting from now to then.

The US spent decades after WWII working to spread and sustain an international liberal trade order that we now dub "globalization."  We were enormously successful in this endeavor, triggering the greatest reduction in global poverty and the greatest upsurge in global development that the world has ever seen.  But, in doing so, we created a host of economic "challengers" whom we must eventually come to accept as co-enablers of our own national resilience, as well as the resilience of the planet.

The hardest part for Americans seems to be this supposition that, if a foreign civilization joins this global trade order (as China has) and becomes highly capitalistic (as China has), it must rather rapidly become highly American as well (raucously pluralistic in politics).  However, to our continuing bafflement, almost half a century after Nixon went to China, the Chinese are still Chinese.

I know, right?  How dare they!

And that seems to upset a great deal of Americans to no end - but particularly older Americans, many of whom now seem to see, in China, a monster of our/globalization's making - a Frankenstein who cannot possibly be tamed (much less told what to do).

As suggested earlier, I expect generational change in both countries to solve this trust-divide that currently keeps the world's two greatest economies (and militaries) from realizing the full extent of their co-dependencies.  For now, it's important enough for players - and citizens - on both sides to realize just how much we collectively rely on one another's national capacities for resilience in face of common threats and challenges, AND to remember just how different this relationship is from the one we once endured with the Soviet Union - an empire that was bound to our national survival in terms of its nuclear weaponry but not to our economic resilience to any appreciable degree.

And that is what makes China entirely different.

A Squirrelly Argument Regarding Critical Infrastructure And Our Resilience In The Face Of Attacks

THE NATIONAL SECURITY COMMUNITY TENDS TO ATTRACT DOOMSDAY TYPES, WHILE THE UTILITIES SECTOR TENDS TO ATTRACT PRETERNATURALLY CALM ENGINEER TYPES - GO FIGURE! That's the just the nature of their respective businesses, so no big surprise that, when national security officials highlight the hacking threat to critical infrastructures (most frequently, electrical grids), plenty of practitioners in the utilities arena counter that "alarmism" with more prosaic examples of power outages - namely, those caused by rodents and birds. This is a classic argument between those who focus their professional attention on low-probability/high-impactevents (e.g., foreign military hackers attacking our critical infrastructure as a prelude to war-initiation) and those who must deal with high-probability/low-impact events - like a squirrel chewing through a wire and triggering a local blackout.

So, good on WAPO's The Switch column for running this story asking, "Are Squirrels a Bigger Threat to the Power Grid Than Hackers?" Yes, the use of the modifier "bigger" here is stunningly indiscrete (newspaper headlines tend to do that to pique your interest), but the author does provide a real-world threat "floor" to the notional threat "ceiling" routinely cited on WAPO's front page. On the latter score, I recall the near-constant drumbeat of fear-instigating stories (all presumably "leaked" by the Obama Administration), in the weeks leading up to the 2009 launching of US Cyber Command, about how seemingly everyone in the world was waging cyber-warfare against America, when, of course, we know full well that the U.S. Government itself is the preeminently offensive player in this arena - as it should be.

So, no, squirrels are not a "bigger threat." That's an idiotic notion (or - more politely - an imprecise notion). Significant cyber-warfare-capable nation-states and non-state actors are the bigger threat.  Squirrels are just the more common threat.

Another way to look at the difference: I am constantly subject to the common cold, but I still consider cancer to be the bigger threat to my health. Does that mean I ignore the cancer threat (lower probability but far higher impact) to focus more on the common cold? Hardly. Like everyone, I attempt to balance risk between the two.

I also most certainly do not discount the cancer threat merely because I find it stunningly hard to prevent my contracting the common cold on a regular basis, which is the implied argument here (Focus on real problems and don't believe the hype!). Wait long enough on today's national-security "hype" and eventually somebody nefarious will give that scenario a run for its money. And when they do?  The high-probability/low-impact skeptics will be nowhere to be found, while the public - and Congress - demands answers (and scapegoats) for this huge failure of national intelligence!

The Ultimate Enemy Of Resilience – And Democracy – Is Fear Of The Future

THE POOR WANT PROTECTION FROM THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES WHILE THE RICH WANT PROTECTION FROM THE POOR, BUT THE MIDDLE CLASS WANTS PROTECTION FROM THE FUTURE. They've achieved something both modest in scope but profound in political implications - a good life that they seek to protect. And when that middle class no longer feels sanguine about the future? Then their fears become the political system's driving dynamics.

As noted previously, this is where things now stand in America and throughout much of the West. Globalization has clearly created the world's first majority middle class, but that development has set off competitive dynamics (the West's middle class v. the East/South's "cheap labor" middle class) that have undeniably put a squeeze on this nation's resilience-defining socio-economic middle.

Remember back to when Europe and America, thanks to the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s, saw their middle classes balloon. Two reactions arose in tumultuous-but-still-monarchy-bound Europe: a radical impulse from the Left to prevent the rise of the bourgeoise (Marxism-Leninism) and a reactionary impulse from the Right to protect the shopkeepers from radicalized Labor (Fascism). In combination, these twin movements sparked unprecedented bloodshed across the great Europe-Asia landmass.

America, meanwhile, lucked out with the two Roosevelts, Teddy and Franklin, signaling this country's tremendous DNA-debt to the Dutch, who both spawned that famous political dynasty and impregnated us with that free-wheeling socio-economic mindset once known as New Amsterdam and now known as New York City - where the Roosevelts long reigned as political patriarchs. Our great good fortune was to see the American Middle come to rule itself, versus succumbing to either the Bolshevik Left or the Fascist Right. That political reality has defined America's national resilience ever since.

But clearly that stabilizing dynamics is under great duress right now. The Middle Class' fear of the future is what elected Barack Obama to the presidency, and thus it is no surprise that he spent much of his swan-song State of the Union address noting his enduring failure in eradicating that fear - despite guiding us rather ably through the Subprime Crisis and the Great Recession.

President Obama nailed his description of this deep angst when he noted:

We live in a time of extraordinary change -- change that's reshaping the way we live, the way we work, our planet, our place in the world. It's change that promises amazing medical breakthroughs, but also economic disruptions that strain working families.

It promises education for girls in the most remote villages, but also connects terrorists, plotting an ocean away. It's change that can broaden opportunity, or widen inequality. And whether we like it or not, the pace of this change will only accelerate.

Well said. But he should have used the modifier "revolutionary" versus "extraordinary."

Globalization is a revolutionary force in its aggressive connectivity. That promise of education for village girls is what drives a great deal of blowback anger among radical fundamentalist groups. Recall how the Taliban treats girls education in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan (attacking schools and shooting - in the head - the [subsequently] Nobel Peace Prize-winning teenage girl who champions female education), or what ISIS does to women (sex slaves) within its territory. Remember also the nickname local Nigerians gave to their northern radical Islamic insurgency - Boko Haram (Western education is forbidden), and how that group brazenly kidnapped a couple hundred young females (later forced into marriages with their soldiers and combat roles) to demonstrate their control and instill fear among the citizenry.

President Obama cites that "change" in a distant, abstract manner (as he cites so many things), when, in truth, these revolutionary dynamics are greatly of America's making ... and spreading (since World War II) ... and defending (since the Cold War's end). He distances America from that "change" because he does not see - as others do (including myself) - that historical lineage and the national responsibilities it creates.  In Obama's perspective, this is not so much a world of our creating but one of our enduring.

Over the long haul, President Obama will be more right than wrong. While I would argue that globalization is a world - first and foremost - of America's creating, our great success in doing so does eventually diminishes our standing as superpower-without-parallel (a status he reflexively asserts at the end of his address, so as not to appear un-American).

He shouldn't have to - of course. The only way America could remain the sole superpower would have been to deny the opportunities for others to rise, which would have been profoundly un-American. After WWII we championed the resurrections of Italy, Germany, and Japan, and after the Cold War we did our level best with Russia and hit the jackpot with China. We could have done otherwise, but we did not. And now we "suffer" a more competitive world that's also beget the first majority middle class in human history and seen those living in deep poverty reduced to less than 10% of world population - also unprecedented.  

Oh, and by the way, the world of today features fewer, shorter and less deadly wars than at any previous time in human history - the threat of catastrophic/everyday terrorism being stipulated. The world is also more democratic than ever before.

You add that all up and it is clear that the world advanced magnificently under America's alleged global "hegemony" - without a doubt surpassing all the previous efforts by European and Asian empires throughout history.

So what I'm saying here is that these are the best problems that America and the world have ever faced, even as they propel us collectively into new and uncertain situations where fear about the future will be difficult to tame.

And here is where President Obama's address also gets it supremely correct:

America has been through big changes before -- wars and depression, the influx of new immigrants, workers fighting for a fair deal, movements to expand civil rights.

Each time, there have been those who told us to fear the future, who claimed we could slam the brakes on change, who promised to restore past glory if we just got some group or idea that was threatening America under control. And each time, we overcame those fears.

We did not, in the words of Lincoln, adhere to the dogmas of the quiet past. Instead we thought anew and acted anew.

We made change work for us, always extending America's promise outward, to the next frontier, to more people. And because we did, because we saw opportunity where others saw peril, we emerged stronger and better than before.

What was true then can be true now. Our unique strengths as a nation -- our optimism and work ethic, our spirit of discovery, our diversity, our commitment to rule of law -- these things give us everything we need to ensure prosperity and security for generations to come.

In fact, it's in that spirit that we have made the progress these past seven years. That's how we recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations.

Brilliantly stated - except for that last claim. No one outside the Obama Administration would swallow the notion that America's "spirit" has been restored these past 7 years. We got a breather alright, and Obama deserves great credit there (then again, that's why we elected him twice - to give us a breather from Bush's exhausting presidency), but America has also taken a sort of strategic vacation from managing the world, a situation that's invited other great powers (Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia - to name the most prominent) to step in and try their own hands - a development that America instinctively mistrusts - with some good reason - no matter how much we implicitly beg the Rest to rid us of this infernal global policeman burden!

President Obama ended his speech with four questions, which, if answered, presumably end our nation's growing fears about the future:

First, how do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy?

Second, how do we make technology work for us, and not against us, especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change?

Third, how do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?

And finally, how can we make our politics reflect what's best in us, and not what's worst?

Not a bad list, but they can all be better summed up with: How do we make America the most resilient country in the world?  Less brittle, less reactive, and more flexible in our adaptations to this brave new world?

Yes, that is a looking-out-for-numero-uno approach at first glance, but can you name a better country to pioneer a redefinition of national resilience moving ahead? One more likely to share that learning curve with others?

Police Pioneering Minority Report-Like, Big Data-Driven, Predictive Technique On Individual Criminals

AS THE U.S. MILITARY EMBRACED COUNTER-INSURGENCY AND "SMALL WARS" AFTER 9/11, IT INVARIABLY PIVOTED FROM CLASSIC DEFENSE TO UNCONVENTIONAL SECURITY, AND - SINCE THEN - THAT SHIFT HAS TRICKLED DOWN TO POLICE DEPARTMENTS ACROSS THE NATION IN THE FORM OF REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGIES DEVELOPED AND FIELDED. If you're the type who errs on the side of 9/11 changed everything, then this is a good example of its wide impact: what began in the national-security community, driven by the ambition and urgency to connect the dots, now migrates into law enforcement. Drones fall into this category (they connect the dots operationally and tactically in a myriad of ways), and so do Big Data techniques designed to sniff out potentialities and likelihoods.

Per a great WAPO piece (almost 2k in length), this is a glimpse of the future of policing - namely, the cops have serious insight, in hand, as to your potential for violence, as they approach your door or vehicle:

While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report.

The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social- media postings. It calculated his threat level as the highest of three color-coded scores: a bright red warning.

The man had a firearm conviction and gang associations, so out of caution police called a negotiator. The suspect surrendered, and police said the intelligence helped them make the right call — it turned out he had a gun.

Hard to blame the police for wanting to know as much as possible before going in. I sure as heck would. And you have to hope such foreknowledge obviates those overkill responses when they they go in with the wrong worst-case assumptions. Then again, your "opponent" always gets a vote, and once criminals know full well that any approaching police will have their backstory in hand, that may well push them to go uptempo much more quickly. So, this knowledge will alter behavior on both sides. But, have no doubt, Big Data will transform policing like it's transforming everything else. Policing is essentially a service industry, and in service industries, it is highly advantageous to know as much as you can about your customers/clients so that you can tailor your efforts to the maximum degree.

“This is something that’s been building since September 11,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “First funding went to the military to develop this technology, and now it has come back to domestic law enforcement. It’s the perfect storm of cheaper and easier-to-use technologies and money from state and federal governments to purchase it.”

The piece goes on to profile the Real Time Crime Center currently being used by the Fresno (CA) Police Department:

On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city’s schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers’ bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems.

The cameras were only one tool at the ready. Officers could trawl a private database that has recorded more than 2 billion scans of vehicle licenses plates and locations nationwide. If gunshots were fired, a system called ShotSpotter could triangulate the location using microphones strung around the city. Another program, called Media Sonar, crawled social media looking for illicit activity. Police used it to monitor individuals, threats to schools and hashtags related to gangs . . .

But perhaps the most controversial and revealing technology is the threat-scoring software Beware. Fresno is one of the first departments in the nation to test the program.

But here's where it gets supremely tricky:

Exactly how Beware calculates threat scores is something that its maker, Intrado, considers a trade secret, so it is unclear how much weight is given to a misdemeanor, felony or threatening comment on Facebook. However, the program flags issues and provides a report to the user.

I can't wait for the lawsuits on that one. All you need is one over-reaction based on somebody's algorithm, resulting in deadly police shooting, and wham! You've got a big-time political controversy that won't be tamped down with a plea of "proprietary data."

I have to think that, it's one thing for private corporations to act that way on defense weapons/platforms/etc., but quite another thing for such products to hold significant sway in the world of law enforcement - where victims have all manner of legal recourse.

Something definitely to watch as it unfolds.