1. Gunther S. Stent, The Coming of the Golden Age: a view of the end of progress. Starting on p.84 (!), this short 1969 tract becomes a remarkable disquisition on stagnation, through the lens of “Faustian Man,” the decline of romanticism, Ortega y Gasset, Kierkegaard, and the hippie beats of San Francisco. At some point the social sciences won’t make that much more progress, and Stent portrays the Maori as the non-complacent branch of the Polynesians.
2. Susan Southard, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War. What is a city like after a nuclear bomb hits? Beautifully written, both historical and anecdotal, and the ignoble record of the American government in this episode, with respect to cover-ups and poor treatment of survivors, extends well into the recovery period.
3. Jonathan Abrams, Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution. A study of youth vs. experience, you can think of this as an excellent management book in addition to its basketball virtues.
4. Javier Cercas, La verdad de Agamenón, selected essays about literature, Borges, Tijuana, Spanish political culture as expressed through history, and the life of an author. About half of them are excellent, none of them bad. Could Cercas be the least-known (in America) great author in the world today?
5. Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What To Do Abut It. The top one percent is not the relevant group.
6. Fernando Vallejo, Our Lady of the Assassins. This short and violent novel is about Colombia during the period of its troubles. Full of life and vigor, makes the case for complacency.
Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, Cents and Sensibility: What Economists Can Learn from the Humanities, covers a topic I am greatly interested in; here is a partial review by David Henderson. Related issues are considered by Mihir A. Desai, The Wisdom of Finance, with Charles Sanders Peirce and Wallace Stevens being two points of focus.
I am happy to have just written a blurb for Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Become Richer, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality, self-recommending.
I’m guessing you would never write a blurb for a book entitled ‘The Captured Economy: How the Rich Become Powerful, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality’ even if that pretty accurately summarizes America in the last generation.
even if that pretty accurately summarizes America in the last generation.
No, it restates with perfect fidelity what liberal opinion journalism has had running on continuous loop for 35 years – when Richard Reeves was in junior high school.
While we’re at it, why is the Brookings Institution hiring philosophers?
Because the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.
No, the point is to prevent it from getting worse immediately. It will get worse anyhow, but “immediately” is especially bad.
America is gerting wose according its leading minds, but not Brazil.
*getting worse
#5 I think this kind of separation can be particularly seen in commercials and ads. I frequent a lot of political/high-brow websites and tv shows, and increasingly the ads seem to be targeting somebody I don’t recognize.
Who the hell can actually afford a Tesla? Who needs to know about websites for employers to gather resumes efficiently and effectively? Who can consistently drop 1 or 2 grand on the latest Apple MacBookAirProPad? The answer is, our new upper-middle class overlords, who are breaking away from the rest of the pack, and advertisers are chasing that pool of money, targeting ads to the group that’s got it.
Charles Murray’s bubble quiz is worthwhile. The zip codes to which low scores correlate are the targets of those ads.
The Murray bubble quiz is a great example of how discussion about bubbles are absurd.
Do you know the web ads you get are based on your search engine queries and browsing history?
Who the hell can actually afford a Tesla?
The 50,000 people who bought one last year. It’s a big country and has a critical mass who can sustain the purveyors of luxury goods, even if they’re not contextually very numerous. I’d worry less about some BigLaw attorney’s fancy-shmancy computer than I would about the influence BigLaw can bring to bear over the rest of society.
> I’d worry less about some BigLaw attorney’s fancy-shmancy computer than I would about the influence BigLaw can bring to bear over the rest of society.
Their fancy-shmancy computer *is* evidence of the influence they have over the rest of society; if business chases where the consumer dollars are, and the consumer dollars are increasingly only among the upper-middle class, that means that what we as a society produce will be focused more and more on the upper-middle class; we’ll hire programmers and engineers to make Roomba robots that do a half-ass job of cleaning your floors and cost $400 rather than working on a newer more inexpensive mass good for the working poor, because they haven’t got the money and so the margins there aren’t great. We’ll shift what we spend our time incrementally improving to revolve around upper-middle class lifestyle.
I suspect you’re trying to make some sort of argument about government mandated laws, but what I’m talking about is a sort of supply-side social reshaping.
Their fancy-shmancy computer *is* evidence of the influence they have over the rest of society;
No, it isn’t Nick. That aside, no one had a computer in their home 40 years ago and few people today have a little robot to clean their carpets. They do all right.
Are you of the opinion now that markets *don’t* matter and *aren’t* influential on society?
5. I read a few excerpts from the book. Although Reeves has some correct ideas, for example, on the great unfairness of internships, he fails on the subject of education in general, assuming that the solution is to give more education to the bottom 80 percent, seemingly oblivious to the fact that that’s exactly what we’ve been doing and it has only worsened the problem.
> that’s exactly what we’ve been doing and it has only worsened the problem.
Do you mean education is a kind of paradox of thrift situation? Where it’s only useful if only a subset of society does it, because then it serves as a distinguishing signal, whereas if EVERYBODY has a college degree, you just end up with a lot of debt for something everybody else already has?
Again, most baccalaureate degrees are acquired in vocational subjects (61%). To some extent, higher education has captured training programs which were once run by employers.
And higher education does largely a very poor job of it
Putting the responsibility on the prospective employee to acquire the training necessary to do his job isn’t much different than requiring him to purchase the equipment needed as well. This is a terrific situation for the employer, who, bearing none of the cost the training, loses nothing by a reduction in force.
And higher education does largely a very poor job of it
I’m not aware of any evidence that the body of technical knowledge possessed by nurses or IT techs is declining or that higher education imparts it inefficiently above and beyond having nursing students compile distribution credits. . Nursing has its problems, but it’s a reasonable inference they derive from attempting to treat what is a vocation as if it were a profession. Higher education does a wretched job of training teachers, but that’s not a function of lectures, papers, and examinations as a way to train them. That’s the institutional culture of teachers’ colleges.
Nurses? IT Techs? What are you even talking about?! I don’t care about that when I mean technical skills I’m talking about whether say a University EE program does a good enough job teaching realtime operating Systems so the graduates are prepared for a jobs related to embedded systems development or if physics graduates are actually good at using MatLab. I don’t care if they “typical” graduate is really just some kind of low-level technian or nurse. Clearly the entire point of any comment section such as this is to come on and ride your own personal hobby-horse – I don’t know why you come and bother with statistics, we aren’t hear to have some kind of scientific discussion.
You think I’m really interested in how well nurses are taught? Why would you think that? It’s so funny that you think that.
Nurses? IT Techs? What are you even talking about?! I don’t care about that when I mean technical skills I’m talking about whether say a University EE program d
I don’t about what you don’t care about. Business, nursing, teacher training, &c are what people are studying. About 5% of the youth obtain engineering degrees.
And, at the same time, those same employers complain that they can’t find potential employees with the skills they need at a salary that they can afford.
As I gaze at the clouds and the stars and the letters in print I see some patterns that please me. These patterns I report, with the sincere hope of their future magnification, and the expectation that others will record them as well. Are these patterns the thing, or my relative susceptability of recording these patterns, or are they one and the same?
Susan Southard, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War.
This is typical Tyler. Susan Southard, writing about the effects of the atomic bomb, has a degree in creative writing. I’m sure her book is beautiful and moving as Tyler says, but in the intro she mentions fetuses getting radiation who will turn 70 in 2015. Tyler has demonstrated he knows almost nothing about science so that sentence is likely “moving” to him despite physicists arguing for decades that the amount of radiation received was trivial.
This is why it sometimes sucks to have a physics degree. It is often impossible to explain the basics to economists.
To add, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were absolute horror shows, and I think clearly immoral. I also think the fire bombing of Tokyo where thousands were burned alive or suffocated from a lack of oxygen was immoral.
I guess I was critical since so tired of writers with no science background exaggerating an already horrible event.
Anyone interested in this topic should look up “Feynman atomic bomb Hiroshima” on youtube.
Maybe the radiation was not so trivial.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-bombings-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-still-inform-health-today-180956185/
Even if (a big if) the physical effects of radiation on foetuses was trivial, the mere belief in these effects has had hugely detrimental consequences for the lives of survivors. People born soon after the nukes hit have tried to hide their birth records, lest they become unable to find employment or romantic partners because of the stigma of radiation sickness.
Are we reading the same article? Because that looks like a criticism of the no-threshold assumption to me. That is, an argument that radiation is not as bad as we assume.
A group of cows that were exposed to radiation were brought back to the US from Japan by the Occupation. They have now had many generations of breeding. It is clear that there is no genetic damage.
Also finding some 840 cancer deaths from two bombings that killed about 150,000 people each suggests that radiation really is not that bad for you.
Well, here we agree, SMFS.
That was a strange article.
It states a rethinking and opposition to LNT (linear no-threshold) is recent but that is only true with UNSCEAR, which became opposed in 2013. It has been established by health physics groups in the US, UK and France since 1993. Surveys show around 85% of radiation health physicists have rejected LNT with the remaining 15% either for keeping it or are undecided. The only reason it hasn’t been discarded is because of regulation politics.
The journalist writes: “That fact, coupled with low doses, may explain why the health effects of radiation at Fukushima have been minimal thus far: A favorable wind direction and sheer fear of radiation kept most people from receiving higher doses.”
First, the health effects from radiation have not just been “minimal thus far” but zero apart from two workers who ignored high radiation level and received radiation burns that they quickly recovered from. Around 30 workers received more than the cancer threshold of 100 mSv/year giving each a 1 percentage point increase of getting a cancer due to Fukushima, so *maybe* one person will be affected, yet that would not show up until around 2040, the year Cowen thinks his Great Stagnation will be over. Almost nobody will die of cancer in 2040 so the death toll drops to zero.
The favorable wind direction had no effect on safety. The maximum radiation that those in Tokyo could have received is equivalent to what those in Denver receive year round.
Nanking was pretty horrible too. And Shanghai. And Bataan. And the Burmese railway.
The Japanese government and people chose the horror show. It is moral idiocy to insist that every action to stop them, in a mortal contest, be finely judged and each blow weighed to a nicety with the full benefit of hindsight.
A fair degree of latitude should be granted to all strikes against an aggressor. Period.
The people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were mostly civilians. I know that this is not really a discussion that anyone really wants to get into, but surely it is possible to acknowledge that the dropping of the atomic bomb was a horrific act that should never ever ever be repeated, but that it was nonetheless necessary to avoid a ground invasion that could have cost more lives.
A ground invasion was necessary only in the sense of administering maximum retribution. MacArthur could have informed the Japanese from the bridge of the Missouri with a giant loudspeaker that they had been defeated and would, for the foreseeable future, be isolated on their islands. The idea that an invasion was required to impose defeat on the Japanese military caste, with the ancillary destruction of its civilian population and US soldiers, is irrational.
Chuck Martel, could you elaborate on your alternative scenario? So you would essentially have MacArthur blockade Japan? To what end? To essentially starve them into submission? How is that ultimately different than what actually happened? Is it worse to die in a nuclear inferno or starve to death?
How would restricting the Japanese to their own islands, inhabited by them, generally in a very isolated manner for centuries, be starving them into submission? It makes more sense to kill thousands of civilians and destroy jillions of dollars in property to satisfy some primeval revenge motive? Since the Japanese navy had steamed away to battle without enough fuel to return, no blockade would have been necessary. The ultimate reason for the atomic bombs and occupation of Japan was to hold the Soviets at bay and, in fact, that strategy was successful in only a limited sense as the Soviets captured and retained the Kuril Islands.
Japan was not able to feed itself in 1945. Access to foreign food supplies [and oil] was one of the reasons the war was started in the first place.
“Food [in 1945] had become so scarce that most Japanese were subsisting on a sub-starvation diet.”
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html [an anti-bomb paper]
Ah, so nuking the Japs and terminating their part in the war was actually an act of mercy, an opportunity for them to get a square meal. I just wasn’t thinking.
By chuck’s logic, the allies should have stopped at the Rhine and left the Nazi’s to rule Germany in perpetuity.
CM,
If we played it your way, depending on how close the blockade is (can they fish? can they ship goods between islands?), Japan starves. And starves quickly. Population will reduce to a level that the local economy can support at a barely industrial level. Given the food imports as a proportion of total agricultural production, and allowing for some belt-tightening, 20%-50% total mortality might be expected. So between 10m and 30m people might die over the next few years. Way to go, humanitarian.
‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it’, a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.
I don’t regard killing 100k people by nuclear weapons as notably more “horrible” or morally different from killing them by conventional weapons or even, at that matter, drowning, gassing, or the slow starvation of blockade. Death is death and differences in “pleasantness” are slight compared to not-death.
Nearly all the moral difference in killing lies in the context and intent, not the method of death. I think obsessing over the method rather than wider moral context is a sign we’re getting mislead by our emotions.
CM,
Do you have an responsive argument to make? Do you want to dispute my ethics, logic or my facts?
Or do you just want to signal your moral superiority with cute aphorisms that go nowhere?
It’s truly noteworthy that so many Americans can justify the heinous behavior of their government, no matter how uncivilized. From the very beginning, the New England Puritans brought with them the same values that motivated Cromwell and the New Model Army in subjugating the Irish. The native Americans were the first to suffer the Biblically justified wrath of the Puritans but later English patriots and southerners fell to the warped capitalist/Protestant morality. In the case of the Japanese, dropping nuclear weapons on teen-age girls walking to school is economically the correct methodology because in long range terms it was supposedly cheaper. In any event, those kimono-clad hussies worshiped their pathetic emperor and deserved death for that undemocratic belief, just as the uncooperative Sioux and Comanche and the slave-holding Georgians did. Even today, a country that has the technological ability to send objects to the furthest reaches of the solar system still insists on using the 15th century technology of the rapid expansion of chemicals to drive a metal pellet through the body of someone that won’t do as instructed. Americans like to kill people.
CM.
I’m not American. ….STRIKE ONE! I don’t live in the USA. STRIKE TWO!
But your anti-US rant was really entertaining. Keep it up.
Hindsight? The atomic bombs were used with the intent to cause the maximum civilian deaths. Can you please explain to me what moral code allows soldiers to burn hundreds of thousands of women and children to death on purpose? How was it not clear at the time that what they were doing was burning hundreds of thousands of women and children to death?
Now, of course the bombs were new. Of course they were going to be used. But a “fair degree of latitude” is one thing and the deliberate premeditated murder of civilians is another.
And to quibble, the Japanese people did not choose anything. They were not asked. Nor is aggression all that clear cut in 1941.
I usually respect your posts, SMFS, but this is nonsense.
Firstly, the bombs were NOT targeted to cause maximum civilian deaths. Nothing in the historical record supports such a ridiculous assertion. The record is clear that cities were chosen for their industrial and military potential; right down to the designated aimpoints. Civilian deaths were an obvious corollary, but not the primary intent.
Had the intent been merely to kill the greatest number of Japanese, the first target would have been Tokyo. The record DOES show quite deliberate forbearance here; the US consciously reserved this target for the third bomb to give the Japanese a chance to surrender first.
“Can you please explain to me what moral code allows soldiers to burn hundreds of thousands of women and children to death on purpose”
OK, technical quibble; your focus on ‘burning’ is quite interesting. But I have to tell you that nuclear weapons mostly kill by blast effect. A mix of primary, secondary and tertiary blast injuries dominate. Burning is very, much a weaker lethal vector. Then radiation (secondary then primary, in that order) is weaker still. Perhaps your interpretation is coloured by Tokyo firestorms. Or any one of the rather sentimental and unrealistic depictions of the event in film.
Anyway, onto the ethical/legal nub. I won’t bore you with all the relevant bit of Law of Armed Conflict and the Geneva Conventions; the chances are you’re not military lawyer. But basically you’re allowed to kill and maim civilians in proportion to the military objectives achieved by the damage. Don’t inflict _unnecessary_ suffering, etc. And winning a multi megadeath scale war is a pretty big objective to set against 150k deaths. You’ve heard this before.
Set amongst the options and knowledge of the time…in conditions of uncertainty and risk an action doesn’t have to be _perfect_ to be _morally defensible_ and exempt from censure. The demand for moral perfection in a mortal contest under conditions of risk and uncertainty is moral idiocy. That’s my argument in a nutshell.
“And to quibble, the Japanese people did not choose anything. They were not asked. Nor is aggression all that clear cut in 1941.”
Quibbling is fine. For the complete removal of doubt between us, I regard aggression as initiating the hitting-bombing-stabbing-shooting of people and taking their stuff. Refusing to trade with someone or calling them names doesn’t constitute aggression. Your mileage may differ, but I suspect the difference is our ethics not interpretation.
Finally and respectfully, it is hard to judge population “responsibility” for the composition and choices of national leadership. It seems to me that everyday Russians in the Cold War were “innocent” of government choice; were we wrong to point nukes at them? Perhaps Germans might plead that 66% never voted for Hitler. Both might have more justice than Japan. There the military government was not (just) a movement of elites, but reflected a genuine national mood and enjoyed a lot of mass support, especially whilst they were winning. Choice? Maybe not so formal, but I can’t accept the Japanese population as wholly innocent bystanders to their ultimate fate.
The bombs were dropped to case the maximum civilian death. That is why they were set to go off at 1900 feet. So that the blast radius would be as big as possible. That is, as many civilians as possible would be killed.
The designated aim point for Hiroshima was the Aoi bridge. A civilian target. Not a military one. Hiroshima was chosen partly because it had not been bombed before. It had not been bombed before, with conventional bombs, because it had so little worth bombing. It did not have a significant military target. Nagasaki did admittedly. The bombing documents talk about a psychological effect. At this point in the war the US talked about precision bombing. They even tried it in Germany. But in Japan it was just indiscriminate terror bombing.
“But basically you’re allowed to kill and maim civilians in proportion to the military objectives achieved by the damage. Don’t inflict _unnecessary_ suffering, etc. And winning a multi megadeath scale war is a pretty big objective to set against 150k deaths. You’ve heard this before.”
You are not allowed to take a child and torture it to death because you think it might win the war. That would excuse 9-11. You are allowed to kill and maim civilians as an indirect consequence of a lawful military purpose in proportion to the objectives. But there was no lawful purpose to bombing civilians. Yes, they were going to try strategic bombing because it was new and it might have worked. In fact the atomic bombs did work. But there is no denying what the purpose and intent was.
I am not demanding moral perfection. I am simply pointing out what Roosevelt knew perfectly well when other people did it. He condemned German and Japanese bombings of civilians before December 1941 as immoral and illegal. Which they were. He seems to have had a change of heart.
Japan did not have free elections because the government feared they would not win them. The Japanese public was publicly loyal but that does not mean they supported the war.
“I am not demanding moral perfection. I am simply pointing out what Roosevelt knew perfectly well when other people did it. He condemned German and Japanese bombings of civilians before December 1941 as immoral and illegal. Which they were. He seems to have had a change of heart.”
I doubt it troubled too much the people going through the Hell of Japanese occupation or American young men risking their lives for Civilization on the Pacific Front. Maybe people who engage in genocide, enslavement, plundering, rape, unethical experiences with prisoners and world conquest must expect some bad things happening to them occasionally.
“what moral code allows soldiers to burn hundreds of thousands of women and children to death on purpose”
The kind that wins wars.
War is hell and its seldom moral. Thinking we can tidy war up is delusional.
SMFS: I am not demanding moral perfection. I am simply pointing out what Roosevelt knew perfectly well when other people did it. He condemned German and Japanese bombings of civilians before December 1941 as immoral and illegal. Which they were. He seems to have had a change of heart.
Not familiar with the casualty projections for the invasion of Japan, I take it. The Japanese, due to their culture and domestic political dynamics, were going to fight to the last man, woman, and child for every square millimeter of Honshu. Only the credible threat of total annihilation was going to break them and get them to surrender.
But a “fair degree of latitude” is one thing and the deliberate premeditated murder of civilians is another.
You surprise me. I thought you were a faithful, rock-ribbed reactionary Social Darwinist. This sort of naivete about the nature of war–especially of war on the scale of WWII–is usually the province of hippie peaceniks, self-righteous progressives severely lacking historical perspective, and Oliver Stone conspiracy theory types.
And to quibble, the Japanese people did not choose anything. They were not asked.
It wouldn’t have mattered if they had been asked. They would’ve just deferred to the emperor and the dominant caste. They weren’t a society of free-thinking, salt-of-the-earth commoners cruelly conscripted into a war they didn’t want. Their worldview just didn’t work that way.
Nor is aggression all that clear cut in 1941.
Ah, the old “FDR goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor” chestnut. You’re checking all the boxes today, man.
If war is hell and winning it of the greatest importance, why should there be any rules or conventions at all, being only applied to the losers, anyway? In fact, wouldn’t it be more prudent to use some serious shock and awe before any attack by the opposition? Dropping a few well-placed A-bombs in the western Soviet Union in 1946 would have made for a different, safer world in the years to follow.
SMFS,
“The bombs were dropped to case the maximum civilian death. That is why they were set to go off at 1900 feet. So that the blast radius would be as big as possible. That is, as many civilians as possible would be killed.”
Optimum blast radius to industrial and military targets too. So this is a post-hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy based on a spurious correlation. I have a modus tolens for you in exchange: If max civ deaths then Tokyo first. Not Tokyo first. Therefore not max civ deaths. Care to answer?
“The designated aim point for Hiroshima was the Aoi bridge. A civilian target. Not a military one. Hiroshima was chosen partly because it had not been bombed before. It had not been bombed before, with conventional bombs, because it had so little worth bombing. It did not have a significant military target. ”
I suggest you should focus on ethical assumptions and structure of argument and not on such mere factual points. They are easy to defeat you on. I hate to quote Wikipedia, save under constraints of time.
“The Target Committee nominated five targets: Kokura, the site of one of Japan’s largest munitions plants; Hiroshima, an embarkation port and industrial center that was the site of a major military headquarters; Yokohama, an urban center for aircraft manufacture, machine tools, docks, electrical equipment and oil refineries; Niigata, a port with industrial facilities including steel and aluminum plants and an oil refinery; and Kyoto, a major industrial center. …’
“You are not allowed to take a child and torture it to death because you think it might win the war. That would excuse 9-11. You are allowed to kill and maim civilians as an indirect consequence of a lawful military purpose in proportion to the objectives. But there was no lawful purpose to bombing civilians. Yes, they were going to try strategic bombing because it was new and it might have worked. In fact the atomic bombs did work. But there is no denying what the purpose and intent was.”
I find it hard to follow your argument here. There seems to a lot of non sequitors. You seem to accept the ethical principle of proportionality, but then meander off and deny it again. It seems to me you must hence either deny that H&N were military and industrial targets, or that they were military and industrial targets but that the civilian casualties were disproportionate to both immediate and long term results. Which is it?
“Japan did not have free elections because the government feared they would not win them. The Japanese public was publicly loyal but that does not mean they supported the war.”
It seems to me that public loyalty and obedience to such a government is all that is needed garner a degree of moral complicity in such matters. The Germans understand this. Even the ones who didn’t vote for Hitler and weren’t directly involved in atrocities felt, rightly, guilty. If your government turns to great evil, the responsibility is on YOU to get out, or oppose it in some manner. Not sit there protesting “well, it’s not my personal fault” as the bombs come down. Your mileage may vary.
Re: The bombs were dropped to case the maximum civilian death. That is why they were set to go off at 1900 feet.
Actually that minimized civilian casualties in one very important way: neither bomb was close enough to the ground to create heavy radioactive fallout downwind. (The radiation sickness reported was due almost entirely to the “prompt radiation” of the explosion itself).
Bob from Ohio June 6, 2017 at 10:39 am
The kind that wins wars. War is hell and its seldom moral. Thinking we can tidy war up is delusional.
So your position is that basically the only thing that Bin Laden did wrong was not win? Had 9-11 driven America out of Saudi or whatever he wanted, then it would have been fine with you? The problem with precedents is that they are precedents. What becomes acceptable is acceptable for other people too.
We can tidy up war. We do so. The Nazis fought almost to the last man in Berlin even when the war was clearly lost. Because they could see what Soviet rule meant. In the meantime they fought on the beaches in France, then withdrew rapidly to the German border and then fought briefly there before surrendering en masse. Millions of Allied soldiers are alive because the Germans knew that the West would treat them relatively well. The Soviet Army lost roughly as many soldiers in Berlin alone as the Americans did from D-Day to the end of the war in Europe.
Burning women and children to death is rarely a good idea. For practical as well as moral reasons.
47 FUBAR007 June 6, 2017 at 10:44 am
Not familiar with the casualty projections for the invasion of Japan, I take it. The Japanese, due to their culture and domestic political dynamics, were going to fight to the last man, woman, and child for every square millimeter of Honshu. Only the credible threat of total annihilation was going to break them and get them to surrender.
I am. Come on. The Japanese are not that irrational. They surrendered whenever they got a chance. Just like everyone else. We don’t know what would have happened. It may have meant more deaths. It may not. It doesn’t matter as the bomb was there and it was going to be used. But both of us need to keep that indeterminacy in mind.
They would’ve just deferred to the emperor and the dominant caste. They weren’t a society of free-thinking, salt-of-the-earth commoners cruelly conscripted into a war they didn’t want. Their worldview just didn’t work that way.
Have you actually met any Japanese people? No they would not have. They were not a Western society, true, but neither were they a society of idiotic robots. Admittedly given the police state it would have been very brave of anyone who have opposed the Emperor. But there is not a lot of evidence the Japanese wanted to send their children into the Army.
48 chuck martel June 6, 2017 at 11:53 am
Dropping a few well-placed A-bombs in the western Soviet Union in 1946 would have made for a different, safer world in the years to follow.
Yeah, it would have. Actually.
Alistair June 6, 2017 at 12:15 pm
Optimum blast radius to industrial and military targets too. So this is a post-hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy based on a spurious correlation. I have a modus tolens for you in exchange: If max civ deaths then Tokyo first. Not Tokyo first. Therefore not max civ deaths. Care to answer?
Tokyo had already been bombed so badly that it would have been hard to assess the damage. That is why they wanted a city that had not been extensively bombed. It was a test. Sure, they dropped it from higher up so they could cover a larger area – optimal is not the right word to use as there was nothing optimal about it. They wanted a large target and they got one. They designed it to kill as many people as possible. They are not destroying a factory or a naval base. The bigger the area, the more civilians die – and the relatively minor the military targets are. You bomb a tank factory and you bomb a tank factory. You bomb a tank factory and the 3.5 kilometers radius around it and all you are doing is killing the people who grow the vegetables the workers in the tank factory eat.
I suggest you should focus on ethical assumptions and structure of argument and not on such mere factual points. They are easy to defeat you on. I hate to quote Wikipedia, save under constraints of time.
And yet it is factually true. The target was not a military one. It was the center of the city. “Hiroshima, an embarkation port and industrial center that was the site of a major military headquarters”? That is to say, it had a railway station and a port. Notice they do not list a single military target. It is the same as the justification of Dresden – it had a railway station. That is clearly not a particularly military justification. What city in America would not qualify as a legitimate target by this criteria?
I find it hard to follow your argument here. There seems to a lot of non sequitors.
It isn’t hard. You are not allowed to target civilians. You must target a military objective. You may hurt civilians as an incidental by-product of that targeting. As long as it is proportional. So given Hiroshima had an office for a military command, you could argue that was a legitimate target – not that they were aiming for it. But then you would have to argue that to kill so many people to destroy an office was proportionate.
It seems to me that public loyalty and obedience to such a government is all that is needed garner a degree of moral complicity in such matters.
Does it? I think the Christian tradition is that the government is to be obeyed in all but extreme cases. I don’t like to think I am complicit in abortions even though I pay taxes that fund them. Are you saying the moral option is to kill abortion doctors? Were all Americans guilty of every lynching?
The Germans understand this. Even the ones who didn’t vote for Hitler and weren’t directly involved in atrocities felt, rightly, guilty.
The German Protestant tradition likes to feel guilt. No one else does for their crimes.
If your government turns to great evil, the responsibility is on YOU to get out, or oppose it in some manner. Not sit there protesting “well, it’s not my personal fault” as the bombs come down. Your mileage may vary.
I agree. But you would have to know what your government was doing in the first place.
“Does it? I think the Christian tradition is that the government is to be obeyed in all but extreme cases. I don’t like to think I am complicit in abortions even though I pay taxes that fund them. Are you saying the moral option is to kill abortion doctors? Were all Americans guilty of every lynching?”
I would say the Christian tradition would ban wars of aggression, but for some reason lots of so-called Christians love them anyway. So you are saying the government must be obeyed by Chrtistians on the abortions issue, but England and the tea thing was a little too much to bear? Maybe the war of conquesr, enslavemente and genocide things can be comsidered “extreme cases”? But I admit that “I support the Nazis because Jesus said so” sounds like a great bumper sticker for a Panzer.
SMFS: Come on. The Japanese are not that irrational.
Yes, they were. Giri. Death before dishonor. A rigidly hierarchical and extremely nationalistic, supremacist culture bent on conquest and subjugation.
We don’t know what would have happened.
We can make, just as the U.S. leadership did then, a pretty educated guess based on the behavior of the Japanese up to that point.
But let’s cut to the heart of the matter: put yourself in Truman’s shoes without the benefit of hindsight. Weigh the lives of the civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki against the lives of all of the Americans–and Japanese, for that matter–who would’ve died during an invasion. Remember whose side you were on and to whom your responsibilities were.
Have you actually met any Japanese people?
Yes, but the attitudes of contemporary Japanese aren’t relevant. Their society has changed considerably since 1945.
Admittedly given the police state it would have been very brave of anyone who have opposed the Emperor.
Exactly.
and I think clearly immoral.
A pose characteristic of people who will never make a decision with consequences for people outside their own family.
The book is moving precisely for the reason you are criticizing TC. People, and particularly the people who survived the bomb at Nagasaki, do not live their lives listening to physicists explaining the basics. They experience life as Tyler read the book: through anecdotes and history.
Perhaps the amount of radiation received WAS trivial, from a physics point of view. The shame and stigma those people had to endure for the rest of their lives was not trivial, including the curious way they are held up as perpetrators and victims today, faceless props in both cases, including by this comments section.
So do I understand you correctly that basically you are saying the anti-nuclear activists have made everyone much more miserable than they should have been through their, dare I say it?, fake news and other assorted lies?
Well, basically, yes. I suspect you know the Chernobyl epidemiology data suggests that the scaremongering probably did a lot more harm via social stress than the actual radiation did.
Three Mile Island is well documented too. We need to stop Fake News and Fearmongering!
When I wrote that I thought her book was likely moving, I wasn’t being sarcastic. I read ‘Hiroshima’ twenty years ago and was definitely moved. But when I read the misinformed introduction about fetuses’ radiation I wondered what else she might have written that was wrong or greatly hyped. The bombing of Nagasaki was bad enough with the need to embellish. Maybe that intro was the only place where Southard did that.
Re: despite physicists arguing for decades that the amount of radiation received was trivial.
Huh? Then please account for the fact that acute radiation sickness (which only happens above ~100 rem of exposure) was definitely experienced by many survivors in both cities. These were mainly people somewhat close to the actual hypocenter, but shielded from the worst of the blast wave and heat flux and so they survived that.
Indeed. Todd needs to explain. The atomic bombs created several hospitals’ worth of victims of acute radiation sickness. I don’t see how that can be called trivial.
http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp22.shtml
and an epidemiological study of the survivors, including dose-response curves
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907953/
I meant trivial with respect to overall deaths, which if my memory is correct was 0.3% of the total. People at risk for acute radiation sickness were also close to the blast and died before radiation would have killed many of them within a few weeks.
Deaths are only one type of casualty; injuries are another. That epidemiological study that I cited covers 200,000 people. 40% of them were still alive in 2011, so one could argue that they suffered radiation effects that were “trivial”. (I suspect that many of them would disagree with that adjective however.)
The other 60% suffered varying degrees of injury or shortened life due to the radiation, depending on their exposure.
Todd explains this one well; such radiation casualties are a small proportion of total casualties.
Nuclear weapons kill by mostly by blast effect. Then burn. Then radiation (mostly fall-out rather than initial blast). It’s down to basic physics; if you’re close enough to receive severe burns / radiation poisoning then you are well within the lethal blast radius.
Incidentally, that NCBI paper has 2 obvious stat errors in it’s regression treatments that I found in the first 2 minutes of looking. Shows how well peer review works!
Indeed. Todd needs to explain. The atomic bombs created several hospitals’ worth of victims of acute radiation sickness. I don’t see how that can be called trivial.
http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp22.shtml
and an epidemiological study of the survivors, including dose-response curves
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907953/
The Strip by Stefan Al is quite good.
@1
Tyler this reminded me that you once spent some time reading Kierkegarrd’s corpus. From a quick search, it would appear 10 years have past. Looking backwards: underated or overrated and why?
I like Cercas (very much, btw), but apart from his childish atheism, Vallejo is a much greater writer/essayist/intellectual. He has written some of the best biographies in the Spanish language about some really odd and forgotten figures (“poète maudit” Porfírio Barba Jacob, 19th wonder linguist Rufino José Cuervo), the only “ars poetica” about prose (!) in any langue (Logoi) and some really, really good novels. I don’t know how the text works in English, but “La Virgen de los Sicários” – the book you mentioned – is a masterpiece in Spanish.
The upper middle class knowledge workers are being taken advantage of and crushed by market forces just like the classes below them.
It”s the managerial class who are the problem, not the upper middle class
Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median cash salary of ‘chief executives’ is $181,000 per year. Physicians devoted to internal medicine are paid a median salary of $196,000 a year; lawyers receive $118,000 a year; economists in non-academic settings $101,000 a year; pharmacists $122,000 a year; software developers $100,000 per year &c.
Dilbert’s boss is a demoralizing irritant to everyone. However, the market forces appear to be treating knowledge-workers passably well.
Doctors and lawyers have accreditation protection and limits on immigration. Engineers and industriy scientists do not.
The PHBs do their best to offshore work and to continually dump experienced knowledge workers in favor of cheaper aspirational and preferably immigrant replacement s (aka the “talent shortage”).
Engineers and scientists who do not backrub their way into the managerial class find that their careers fall into steep decline long before they approach retirement age.
Moreover it is not the knowledge workers who are lobbying elected officials for open borders and other policies that favor wall street and big tech.
“There is no such thing as being rich; there is only being poor on a much larger scale.”
Nagasaki and Hiroshima were subject to atomic, not nuclear, bombs.
You’ve got your physics wrong. They were subjected to fission bombs not fusion bombs.
“At some point the social sciences won’t make that much more progress”: oh what a tease.
“the ignoble record of the American government in this episode, with respect to cover-ups and poor treatment of survivors”: would you care to elaborate, Mr Cowen?
It’s the academicians’ shtick. You’d be surprised if you didn’t see it. They have no affect on any other person bar the colleagues and students they annoy. Bar a scatter of molecular biologistsl, engineers, and archaeologists, they’ve never had to organize a blessed thing that had a two-digit population of participants or supervise more than two people at a time. They just write books bitching about how people with much more responsibility than they’ll ever have do things.
‘Effect’ Art
Not ‘affect’.
2. Rodney Brooks is looking better, after yesterday’s news.
https://rodneybrooks.com/is-war-now-post-kinetic/
The crazy thing about cyber is that you can be living in the fallout, and not even know it.
After the last election I read a caution about “internal exile.” The author said that while oppressive regimes often exile dissidents, people can do it to themselves. In response to a bad political situation they can find a hobby, cut down on the news, avoid things that are distressing. That essay said “don’t do that,” because a democracy needs engaged and informed citizens.
We are at a very strange moment, with Trump lashing out at London’s Mayor again this morning, and turning on Qatar, as revelations of actual hacking of the actual election by actual Russian Intelligence fight for attention. I don’t know where all that will lead, but I don’t think internal exile (“urgent” recommendation of 10,000 year old agricultural news) is the answer.
This is quite possibly something people will ask you about 20, 50 years from now. What did you think then? What did you do?
The burden isn’t that high. I’m not asking you to stay in the Hanoi Hilton for 6 years, having your bones broken and re-broken. I’m not even telling you what conclusion to draw. I’m just asking you to read the news.
5. Amazon: “Reeves defines the upper middle class as those whose incomes are in the top 20 percent of American society.” This is ambiguous. Does he include everyone in the top 20% as upper middle class? Most of the growth in income inequality has been between the middle class and the top earners, so how does Reeves group those at the lower end of the top quintile with those at the upper end. It makes little sense. In any case, the income at the lower end of the top 20% is in the $100,000 per year range, certainly enough to enjoy many privileges, including the ability to send their children to good schools. But looking at the great recession, I would say that those at the lower end of the top 20% are also very vulnerable, most of their savings tied up in a house and not much else in the way of investments that can take them through a long period of economic hardship. If I’m at the lower end of the top 20%, I might be a hoarder too. Of course, they won’t get much sympathy from those in the quintiles below, who have far greater struggles to deal with.
“In any case, the income at the lower end of the top 20% is in the $100,000 per year range, certainly enough to enjoy many privileges, including the ability to send their children to good schools”
Are you sure. Are we talking household income here? A household income of $100K with a wife and 2 kids is hardly “upper middle class” in any of the larger cities (eg : New York City). It translates to roughly $5-6K per month post tax. Half of that is going to go for rent. A quarter of what remains on non discretionary expenses excluding schools. I don’t think you’d save anything at all if you have to spend on “good schools”
#3 is a great read. Always thought this was a great (if not overused) parallel to evaluating founders (e.g., first-time vs. repeat, etc)
#5 Raising an UMC kid requires extraordinary resources, daily training from birth, good schools, examples of good living and good choices. The result, whether artists, teachers or people who do things in the world are the most important resource in our country.
If parents and children of less educated families are willing to adopt the values of the UMC and put in the time and effort, I’m not aware of any insuperable barriers to entering the UMC. But that’s a big ‘if.’
It’s pretty obvious that a large barrier to mobility is that the middle class supports the unfortunate in all kinds of ways. It used to be that if you did not get and education and move up, your life would be pretty miserable in every way. It didn’t require much imagination to realize that it was worth daily and serious sacrifice to help the kids avoid that future. Today, not so much. And the level of sophistication required today is much more that it used to be. And people keep telling the ignorant that it is someone else’s fault that their functioning is so limited.