Everybody’s heard the rhetoric on U.S. China relations. They’ve heard politicians lambast China for a variety of human rights abuses and aggressively expanding their territory in the South China Sea. They’ve also heard legislators in the Democratic Party framing competition with China as a main reason to pass legislation such as the CHIPS Act (which incentivizes domestic semiconductor manufacturing). While it’s true that China poses a threat to the Post-WWII rules-based international world order, we should not be viewing this relationship with China as a looming catastrophe. In the authoritarianism-versus-democracy scenario that President Biden has laid out, there actually is a lot of hope for our relationship with China if you look at it through the lens of political economy. Before anybody can understand why there’s a positive path forward with U.S. and China relations, they need some background. Dr. Yuen Yuen Ang of Johns Hopkins has studied corruption in many countries and ana...
The most dangerous thing about climate change is that it has the potential to destabilize numerous systems in our world. If left unchecked, it could completely upend weather systems and patterns, food production, oceans, economies, disease patterns, wildlife migration patterns, global trade, governments, and mental health. When poorer countries are slammed by climate disasters it can easily turn their precarious existence from poor to desperate, causing widespread hopelessness, anger and desperation. This becomes fertile ground for climate terrorism. Climate terrorism is when a few people in a country deeply affected by climate change commit an act of violence in retaliation for climicide. Climicide occurs when a small group of wealthy oil executives in rich countries continue pumping out fossil fuels despite knowing the devastating effects. Climicide is such a disturbing phenomenon because fossil fuel companies like Shell, Exxon, BP and Chevron have known all along exactly what t...
My age places me in the first couple years of Generation Z. Many of the people I know who are also in my generation are either in despair about the state of the world or are very angry and resentful. That leads them to take positions that are extreme in ideology and substance. While their anger and despair is understandable, it prevents them from grasping the history or context, so they can’t formulate a complete and logical plan of action. The context, according to most political economists, is that we are in the 2nd American Gilded Age, which began in 1980. Patterns in our Gilded Age mirror the first that started after the Civil War and ended around 1901. Then and now, there is tremendous inequality, poverty, political corruption, environmental degradation, political polarization, gridlock, and narrow elections, over-the-top materialism, systemic financial risk and robber barons with large amounts of political control (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc). As Mark...
Comments
Post a Comment