Favorites March 13th 2022
Usually manage to keep weekends light, but we do have to make certain concessions to the war.
This is commentary on the question of whether the us 'Won' in GWB's invasion of Iraq. I tend to agree that it was a victory, which clearly illustrates how futile modern wars of agression clearly are.
Despite world population growing substantially, this war is fought with far fewer people. Another highlight of the thread.
It's a longer thread, but the policy upshot is that we need to take antitrust seriously for hospitals.
The currency in which a government will pay it's debt is generally stipulated, switching it is essentially a default. He's got a whole article about it if you want to read.
I really like this idea, it mostly avoids the danger of motivating people to use even more gas with a gas tax rebate.
China has been ready to produce the BioNTech vaccine since middle of last year, but they've decided to develop their own, which still isn't ready. It turns out that autocratic governments make some pretty dumb mistakes.
I don't know how we got into a spiral of "base mobilization is the only way to win", I'd think this research would have been possible a long time ago.
Francis Fukuyama famously coined the "End of History", based on the triumph of liberal democracy at the end of the cold war. Today he's seen as being wrong, here he's putting his neck out and predicting that things will finally turn around. I hope he's right...
• New Michael Kofman thread on the Russian Military
• Thread about an article by a Chinese foreign policy expert on why continued alliance with Putin is folly. It'll probably be ignored by the Chinese government.
• Good article/thread on how East Asia overtook South Asia in terms of Female labor force participation.
