IanGould

  Some people seem to think I'm a defender or supporter of the CPC and PRC. I'm not but 30 year of studying them have demonstrated one thing: they're depressingly durable. Countless predictions of China's imminent economic collapse have proven incorrect. But currently the Chinese economy is starting to look more and more like the Japanese economy at the start of their "lost decade" of the 1990's. Back in 1979 when the Dengist reforms started, China had a massive deficit in almost every form of physical infrastructure. Much of China's economic growth since then can be attributed to building infrastructure -ports; airports; railway lines; power plants - that increased economic efficiency. But that deficit has been largely made up and the economic returns on further investments in physical infrastructure have fallen sharply. This is why, for example, the expansion of the high speed real network has effectively been halted. Xi and the Presidium know all ...

John Mearsheimer's lecture "Why is Ukraine the west's fault" has been getting a whole lot of attention lately mainly because of its title and because it appeals to the narcissistic and solipsistic worldview of many westerners. - it's from 2015 so it's 7 years out of date. Simply put, if you actually listen to the lecture as opposed to simply waving a link to it around in lieu of an actual argument, events since then have proven him catastrophically wrong. - Mearsheimer starts out by giving a backgrounder in which he feels the need to explain that France is next to Germany and Ukraine is next to Russia. That pretty much sets the level for the rest of the lecture. (He also completely omits Great Britain from his discussion of European geopolitics.) Oh good now he's describing the massacre of peaceful protesters in 2014 as "an overreaction" and "messy" "What they're doing is not trying to conquer Ukraine. That's not going...

 The McDonald's Theory of Conflict Avoidance argued that no two countries with McDonald's restaurants had ever gone to war. The serious underlying point was that advanced capitalist economies tend to avoid direct armed conflict because it's bad for business. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has dealt that theory a potentially fatal blow. The question is whether Russia counts as an "advanced capitalist economy" and if so, for long will it continue to qualify as such. More broadly, the share of the global economy attributable to primary industries like mining and agriculture has been declining for decades as has that of manufacturing, services are where it's at. That's why China is pushing to become a service-based economy. That implies that natural resources have become relatively less valuable and that it's generally cheaper to buy them than to go to war to obtain them. That's true even if you're a private company and can get a government to do ...

  "Russia has one million soldiers. How can they be running out of troops in Ukraine." Well, first, that figure includes their navy and air force both of which have around 150,000 troops and their Special Rocket Forces, the branch that runs their nuclear deterrent, that has around 50,000. Next of the 650,000 in their army, 200,000 or so are conscripts who, according to Russian law can't be deployed outside Russia's borders. Even if they choose to ignore that law, you can't send troops who haven't even completed basic training into high intensity front line combat because if you do they'll die. So let's assume 50,000 of those conscripts are available for service in Ukraine. That leaves 500,000 troops. Now in a typical military there's what's known as the spear tip/spear shaft split. The spear tip are the units that directly conduct offensive operations - the tanks units, the artillery and the infantry - the spear shaft are all the other units t...