Simon Kuper in the FT on the enduring flaws in the UK's workings:
"The first flaw is running a country on rhetoric. Brexit was made about 30 years ago at the Oxford Union — Oxford university's version of a children's parliament, which organises witty debates, and where future Brexiters such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were presidents in the 1980s. … The referendum was won like a Union debate: with funny, almost substance-free hot air. Remember Johnson's policy on cake: he was pro-having it, and pro-eating it. In Britain, humour is used to cut off conversations before they can get emotional, boring or technical. "Oxford Tories built a cross-class alliance with the tabloids, a scaremongering force unique in western Europe. In 2002, their spectre was Saddam Hussein bombing Britain. In 2016, it was Turkey joining the EU. … "after the referendum, the Brexiters were tasked with managing Brexit. This was like asking the winners of a debating contest to engineer a spaceship. Results have been predictable. The Brexiters cannot wow Brussels with rhetoric, because the EU's negotiators prefer rules. "That is a cultural difference," notes Catherine de Vries, professor of politics at Essex University."
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In Vanity Fair:
"The C.F.O. of the [Energy] department at the end of the Obama administration was a mild-mannered civil-servant type named Joe Hezir. He had no particular political identity and was widely thought to have done a good job—and so he half-expected a call from the Trump people asking him to stay on, just to keep the money side of things running smoothly. The call never came. No one even let him know his services were no longer required. Not knowing what else to do, but without anyone to replace him, the C.F.O. of a $30 billion operation just up and left. This was a loss. A lunch or two with the chief financial officer might have alerted the new administration to some of the terrifying risks they were leaving essentially unmanaged. Roughly half of the D.O.E.’s annual budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal, for instance. Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists. In just the past eight years the D.O.E.’s National Nuclear Security Administration has collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people. The D.O.E. also supplies radiation-detection equipment to enable other countries to detect bomb material making its way across national borders. To maintain the nuclear arsenal, it conducts endless, wildly expensive experiments on tiny amounts of nuclear material to try to understand what is actually happening to plutonium when it fissions, which, amazingly, no one really does. To study the process, it is funding what promises to be the next generation of supercomputers, which will in turn lead God knows where." Much more at the link. Worrying. Zero-sum activities grow in importance as we approach satiation in basic goods and services7/28/2017 Adair Turner at INET:
"it's striking how much high-talent manpower is devoted to activities that cannot possibly increase human welfare, but entail competition for the available economic pie. Such activities have become ubiquitous: legal services, policing, and prisons; cybercrime and the army of experts defending organizations against it; financial regulators trying to stop mis-selling and the growing ranks of compliance officers employed in response; the huge resources devoted to US election campaigns; real-estate services that facilitate the exchange of already-existing assets; and much financial trading. Much design, branding, and advertising activity is also essentially zero-sum. … "Such zero-sum activities have always been significant. But they grow in importance as we approach satiation in many basic goods and services. … "The impact on measured GDP and productivity reflects national accounting conventions. … more and better-paid divorce lawyers increase GDP, because end consumers pay them. But more and better-paid commercial lawyers don't raise output, because companies' legal expenditures are an intermediate cost. ... "measured GDP and gains in human welfare eventually may become entirely divorced. Imagine in 2100 a world in which solar-powered robots, manufactured by robots and controlled by artificial intelligence systems, deliver most of the goods and services that support human welfare. All that activity would account for a trivial proportion of measured GDP, simply because it would be so cheap. Conversely, almost all measured GDP would reflect zero-sum and/or impossible-to-automate activities – housing rents, sports prizes, artistic performance fees, brand royalties, and administrative, legal, and political system costs. Measured productivity growth would be close to nil, but also irrelevant to improvement in human welfare." John Quiggin at Crooked Timber:
“the world is likely to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations around 450 parts per million by 2050, and reduce that to 350 ppm by 2100. … "Should this have been a surprise? It has been for me. As an economist, I'd have thought an outcome like this would have required a global commitment to an emissions trading scheme with a carbon price on a rising trajectory to $US100/tonne or so. In fact, we've seen nothing of the kind. There has been no real global co-ordination, and where carbon prices have been imposed, they have been low and limited in scope." “Instead, we've had a series of favorable technological surprises of which the most striking have been the plummeting cost of solar photovoltaics, and advances in battery technology allowing both low-cost electricity storage and affordable electric vehicles. … But maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. There were a lot of potential technological options out there, and we only needed a couple to work. … On the other hand, there's no obvious technical reason why we couldn't have developed most of these technologies decades ago. ... "A question I haven't yet been able to find a good answer on is: how much warming would a trajectory peaking at 450 ppm and declining to 350 ppm ultimately produce?" Scott Alexander writes:
"Look for the non-racist motives in actually racist things. … What about, I don’t know, rural Republicans in South Carolina who wave the Confederate flag all the time and think blacks and immigrants are ruining the country. ... this is pretty much the demographic that elected Nikki Haley (birth name, Nimrata Randhawa; daughter of two Punjabi immigrants) as governor, and that supports her so fervently that she remains one of the most popular elected officials in the country. Also the demographic that loved Ben Carson, making him the only candidate to briefly displace Trump for first place in the 2016 Republican primary polls. One plausible explanation is that the South Carolinians don’t like blacks and immigrants because they view them as having foreign values – specifically, Blue Tribe values (it may be relevant here that 90%+ of blacks usually vote Democrat). If someone like Nikki Haley or Ben Carson proves that they share Red beliefs, they become part of the tribe and will be fiercely defended. Maybe this is ... people using race as a proxy for something they care about, until they get direct information. ... "James Scott, as channeled by Lou Keep, ... says that the process of development, especially state-building and the switch from traditional to market economies, creates a pressure for “legible” language that renders entire classes of problems very difficult to talk about. This creates an asymmetry between an elite plugged into the global market structure whose concerns make perfect sense (“If we do this, GDP will go up 3% and we can build more roads!”) and the masses left behind whose concerns seem pointless and vague (“I feel like something important disappeared when we turned everything into a commodity”). Keep then proposes a very loose mapping onto cosmopolitan neoliberal Clintonites versus undereducated “I’m angry about losing my traditional culture” Trumpists. ... "cross-cultural communication is really hard, and so a lot of the concerns of people who aren’t like us will probably sound like nonsense. And most of them say that our demographic – well-educated people proud of our commitment to logic and reason – are at especially high risk of just dismissing everyone else as too dumb to matter. ... "Racism-as-murderism is ... a powerful tool of dehumanization. It’s not that other people have a different culture than you. It’s not that other people have different values than you. It’s not that other people have reasoned their way to different conclusions from you. And it’s not even that other people are honestly misinformed or ignorant, in a way that implies you might ever be honestly misinformed or ignorant about something. It’s that people who disagree with you are motivated by pure hatred, by an irrational mind-virus that causes them to reject every normal human value in favor of just wanting to hurt people who look different from them. ... "And I guess it sounds like I’m upset that we’re not very good at solving difficult cross-cultural communication problems which require deep and genuine effort to understand the other person’s subtly different value system. I’m not upset that we can’t solve those. Those are hard. I’m upset because we’re not even at the point where someone can say “I’m worried about terrorism,” without being forced to go through an interminable and ultimately-impossible process of proving to a random assortment of trolls and gatekeepers that they actually worry about terrorism and it’s not just all a ruse to cover up that they secretly hate everyone with brown skin. I’m saying that when an area of the country suffers an epidemic of suicides and overdoses, increasing mortality, increasing unemployment, social decay, and general hopelessness, and then they say they’re angry, we counter with “Are you really angry? Is ‘angry’ just a code word for ‘racist’?” … "People talk about “liberalism” as if it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully. "And when I see someone try to smash this machinery with a sledgehammer, it’s usually followed by an appeal to “but racists!” "You say we must protect freedom of speech. But would you protect the free speech of racists?" ... I don’t want civil war. I want this country to survive long enough to be killed by something awesome, like AI or some kind of genetically engineered superplague. Right now I think going out in a neat way, being killed by a product of our own genius and intellectual progress – rather than a product of our pettiness and mutual hatreds – is the best we can hope for. And I think this is attainable!" Hein de Haas at U of Amsterdam, writing for Der Spiegel on the myths of migration:
"The magnitude of migration is far too low to offset the effects of population aging. A United Nations study has shown that, to achieve such a result, levels of migration would have to reach levels that are both undesirable and unrealistic. In order to counter its aging population, this study found that Germany, for example, would require net immigration of 3.5 million people per year - 12 times higher than the annual average of 280,000 from the years 1991 to 2015. … Currently, about 0.4 percent of the total EU population is a refugee. That figure hovered around 0.5 percent between 1992 and 1995.” John Kay: "The market had changed from one in which the process was primarily one of mutualisation of risks to one in which risks were being transferred from people understood a lot about them to people who knew little. ... both investment and risk transfer are unavoidably heterogeneous, idiosyncratic transactions. In consequence, algorithmic scoring can never replace, although it may be able to assist, a qualitative and quantitative assessment of an experienced loan officer or shrewd investor ... the future of peer-to-peer lending is that the institutions which survive fraud, losses and increased regulatory scrutiny will increasingly resemble the organisations which we used to call banks." Colin Marshall at LARB, on Hermann Hesse's Demian in Korea: "Any story of “old Europe struggling with modernity” will resonate with a Korea doing plenty of modernity-grappling of its own. Demian in particular, Sellar writes, also taps inadvertently into the particular Korean storytelling sensibility: “They are much more enamored of sad endings, and they tend to be much more patient with stories that unfold in such a way that the protagonists never had a real hope of changing the outcome.” This has introduced certain difficulties into the marketing of Korean literature to Westerners, who “have little patience for stories that feature characters who can’t take some hand in their fate” and “tend to be less patient with melodramatically sad turns of plot,” but it means certain strains of anguish-oriented German fiction, best exemplified by Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (from the object of whose unrequited passion one of Korea’s biggest conglomerates took its name), have grown popular indeed here.” David Brooks discovers the French sociologist:
"Every minute or hour, in ways we’re not even conscious of, we as individuals and members of our class are competing for dominance and respect. We seek to topple those who have higher standing than us and we seek to wall off those who are down below. Or, we seek to take one form of capital, say linguistic ability, and convert it into another kind of capital, a good job. Most groups conceal their naked power grabs under a veil of intellectual or aesthetic purity. Bourdieu used the phrase “symbolic violence” to suggest how vicious this competition can get ... Bourdieu helps you understand what Donald Trump is all about. Trump is not much of a policy maven, but he’s a genius at the symbolic warfare Bourdieu described. He’s a genius at upending the social rules and hierarchies that the establishment classes (of both right and left) have used to maintain dominance. Bourdieu didn’t argue that cultural inequality creates economic inequality, but that it widens and it legitimizes it. That’s true, but as the information economy has become more enveloping, cultural capital and economic capital have become ever more intertwined. Individuals and classes that are good at winning the cultural competitions Bourdieu described tend to dominate the places where economic opportunity is richest; they tend to harmonize with affluent networks and do well financially. ... Bourdieu radicalizes, widens and deepens one’s view of inequality.” New Science paper on costs of climate change, via Tyler Cowen:
"The combined value of market and nonmarket damage across analyzed sectors—agriculture, crime, coastal storms, energy, human mortality, and labor—increases quadratically in global mean temperature, costing roughly 1.2% of gross domestic product per +1°C on average. Importantly, risk is distributed unequally across locations, generating a large transfer of value northward and westward [in the US] that increases economic inequality. By the late 21st century, the poorest third of counties are projected to experience damages between 2 and 20% of county income (90% chance) under business-as-usual emissions" Mike Konzcal, writing for Vox, has an excellent paragraph: "First, Democrats need to reevaluate their idea of themselves as disinterested stewards of the economy — as a party that accepts the current economic arrangements largely as a given. Second, they need to understand what their coalition looks like if they can’t peel off moderate Republicans, as they predicted they would throughout 2016. Third, they also need to decide if the economy requires structural changes, or merely some tinkering around the edges. And finally, they must decide whether social programs should target narrow populations or lean towards universalism." Bill McKibben, New Yorker, writes about off-grid solar providers in Sub-Saharan Africa: "There are as many people living without electricity today as when there were when Thomas Edison lit his first light bulb. ... The push for quick returns could lead some companies to try to "squeeze more out of poor households" .. "the gush of money may be too much, too fast for a sector that still has not fully solved core business model issues and may struggle under the high growth expectations and misaligned incentives of many venture capitalists." The Guardian, on Brexit: “It is odd, if we want a deep and special relationship with the EU, not to have proposed one. A year after the referendum, we have still put forward no plan, suggestion, outline or proposal for how one might in future organise cooperation.” The odds of a reversal on Brexit are slightly higher (though still low). Cardiff Garcia interviews Heidi Williams on health care innovation: E.g., on "the economic incentives for pharmaceutical companies to invest in late-stage cancer treatments versus preventive and early-stage treatments. A particular problem is the design of patents, whose protections in some industries begin at the time of discovery rather than at the time of the first commercial sale. But early-stage treatments for cancer can take a while to arrive at the market, in part because clinical trials required by the Food & Drug Administration naturally take longer than they would for late-stage cancers, especially given that the traditional qualification for success is lower mortality. Thus the period of exclusivity for early-stage treatments is shorter, potentially incentivising pharma companies to focus more on later-stage treatments." 99% Invisible on that day in the 60s Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. They'd held a referendum, 83% voted against switching, and the government did it anyway! Dan Hirschman on Peter Berger’s death: “Peter Berger was deeply involved with pro-tobacco social science. … What do we do with the fact that one of the most prominent figures associated with the term “social construction” also worked as a “merchant of doubt”?”
The Associated Press reports of secret prisons in Yemen: “Senior American defense officials acknowledged Wednesday that U.S. forces have been involved in interrogations of detainees in Yemen but denied any participation in or knowledge of human rights abuses.” Of course there aren't human rights abuses in secret Yemeni prisons... If the Pentagon trolled any harder, they'd pull a muscle. F. Gregory Gause III, at the Monkey Cage: “The real underlying conflict is not about Iran but about very different understandings of how political Islam should relate to the state among the Sunni powers of the Middle East.” Recommended. Masha Gessen, in Harpers:
"When we talk about the Reichstag fire, we talk about the consequences of a catastrophic event. But in our case, these consequences - a legal state of emergency, a sense of living under siege, popular mobilization, and an epidemic of conspiratorial thinking - are already in place. Indeed, they are preconditions of our current predicament. … To be worthy of the lofty name “resistance,” the opposition to Trump must aim to break the country’s post-9/11 trajectory. It must question the very premise of the war on terror, challenge the very fact of a perpetual state of emergency, and confront not only the Trump presidency but the legacy of the Bush and Obama Administrations." Patrick Dunleavy, Prof at the LSE:
"On her first weekend in office, May created a Cabinet in which 21 of the 24 members were new to the role they were playing … The end result of all this shaking up the personnel? May got the political balance she needed to convert to a ‘hard Brexit’ strategy of leaving the EU fast and curbing immigration, so as to attract UKIP voters back to the Tory ranks. But meanwhile almost all ministers spent a year learning their new roles, organizing reviews of policy, and getting almost nothing done. "The May team’s interfering did not stop at ministers though. In a little recognized but very consequential move for how Whitehall operates, a veritable putsch was organized to get rid of all the senior officials that May disliked (essentially anyone ‘speaking truth to power’). Instead, one by one, May’s team bullied the Cabinet Secretary, Jeremy Heywood, into replacing 5 out of 18 Permanent Secretaries across Whitehall, plus the vitally important head of the UK’s COREPER delegation in Brussels, so as to bring in officials more compliant to Downing Street’s complete hegemony. A further 8 Perm Secs were already new to their roles, not having held posts at the 2015 general election. ... "But the end result has been that two thirds of the Cabinet of ministers struggling with their new roles are also being advised by new-to-the-job Permanent Secretaries. And the senior civil service’s ability to offer frank advice has been cowed by the PM’s detailed insistence on everything going her way." [Why did she not go for a “national unity”, grand coalition after the Brexit vote?] The Guardian reports that "despite the constantly evolving technological landscape that means more communications can be gathered and examined quickly, making sense of the material itself remains a primary obstacle to security." ...
"less than a quarter of MI5’s 4,000 staff are believed to be involved in analysis, and a far smaller number are sited among the 2,500 staff of MI6 – as few as 100, according to Davies. Although it is true that most of the 8,000 employees in GCHQ can be categorised as analysts, they have to evaluate a vast daily data stream that runs to countless terabytes. A single terabyte is the equivalent of 1,024 gigabytes, with a gigabyte the equivalent of 1.5 million WhatsApp messages." At Our World In Data, Hannah Ritchie writes:
"An abatement cost curve measures two key variables, as shown on McKinsey’s chart below: abatement potential and the cost of abatement. ‘Abatement potential’ is the term we use to describe the magnitude of potential GHG reductions which could be technologically and economically feasible to achieve. We measure this in tonnes (or thousand/million/billion tonnes) of greenhouse gases (which is abbreviated as carbon dioxide equivalents, or CO2e). Note that our measure of CO2e includes all greenhouse gases, not just CO2. So, on the x-axis we have the abatement potential of our range of options for reducing our GHG emissions; here, each bar represents a specific technology or practice. The thicker the bar, the greater its potential for reducing emissions. "On the y-axis we have the abatement cost. This measures the cost of reducing our GHG emissions by one tonne by the year 2030, and in this case is given in € (i.e. € per tonne of CO2e saved). But it’s important to clarify here what we mean by the term ‘cost’. ‘Cost’ refers to the economic impact (which can be a loss or gain) of investing in a new technology rather than continuing with ‘business-as-usual’ technologies or policies. To do this, we first have to assume a ‘baseline’ of what we expect ‘business-as-usual’ policies and investments would be. This is done—for both costs and abatement potential—based on a combination of empirical evidence, energy models, and expert opinion. This can, of course, be challenging to do; the need to make long-term predictions/projections in this case is an important disadvantage to cost-abatement curves. … "if we look at the lowest end of the scale we see that installing energy efficient lighting is the cheapest option (providing a high economic return through efficiency savings). However, its total abatement potential is very limited. If we were looking for an investment which could save a large quantity of GHGs, we might have to select an option which is more expensive, but has a greater abatement potential. The trade-off between cost and potential is an important one." In the NYRB, Roderick MacFarquhar reviews Ian Johnson's new book, The Souls of China:
"Chinese religion, Johnson writes, had little to do with adherence to a particular faith. Instead, it was primarily “part of belonging to your community" ... Johnson explains the differences between Chinese religious traditions—Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism—and the “Abrahamic” faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: “Chinese religion had little theology, almost no clergy, and few fixed places of worship.” … for Chinese it was not really a matter of choosing: the three traditional “teachings” were a smorgasbord on offer to all and sundry in the community, and representatives of each would perform on demand, and for a price, their particular rituals on appropriate occasions such as funerals. According to Johnson, “for most of Chinese history, people believed in an amalgam of these faiths that is best described as ‘Chinese Religion.’” And: [Christian] "Missionaries persisted, and though the rate of conversion was disappointing, their influence grew through the establishment of schools, colleges, and hospitals. Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary who led the struggle that brought down the Qing dynasty in 1912, was converted, as was his successor Chiang Kai-shek. But they were infused with a modernizing zeal that held that traditional Chinese faiths, particularly folk religions, were superstitions and had to be suppressed; hundreds of thousands of folk temples were destroyed. Only the most important Buddhist and Daoist temples survived. … "Assuming these are at least approximately accurate figures, around a third of the country’s 1.3 billion people admit to a need for a faith to sustain them." China has parity in 6 out of 9 areas of conventional capability critical in showdown over Taiwan6/7/2017 Graham Allison writes in the Atlantic:
"Within a month of becoming China’s leader in 2012, Xi specified deadlines for meeting each of his “Two Centennial Goals.” First, China will build a “moderately prosperous society” by doubling its 2010 per capita GDP to $10,000 by 2021 ... If China reaches the first goal— which it is on course to do—the IMF estimates that its economy will be 40 percent larger than that of the U.S. (measured in terms of purchasing power parity) ... "As the Financial Times’s former Beijing bureau chief Geoff Dyer has explained, “The Communist Party has faced a slow-burning threat to its legitimacy ever since it dumped Marx for the market.” Thus the party has evoked past humiliations at the hands of Japan and the West “to create a sense of unity that had been fracturing, and to define a Chinese identity fundamentally at odds with American modernity.” … "2015 RAND study found that by the end of 2017 China will have an “advantage” or “approximate parity” in six of the nine areas of conventional capability that are critical in a showdown over Taiwan, and four of nine in a South China Sea conflict. It concludes that over the next five to 15 years, “Asia will witness a progressively receding frontier of U.S. dominance.” At Science of Us, Thomas MacMillan reports:
"if you’re going to build a joke around a big violation, you need to invest enough time to make it benign. McGraw offered Louis C.K. as an example of a comedian who can get audiences to laugh at shocking, terrible things, because he knows how much to linger on benign qualifiers ahead of the violation, to make something very wrong feel very funny. "McGraw pointed to one of Louis C.K.’s “of course, but maybe” jokes, in which Louis C.K. says that while of course kids with deadly allergies should be protected from exposure to nuts, just maybe “if touching a nut kills you you’re supposed to die.” Louis C.K. spends over a minute setting up the context — he assures everyone that he really believes that dangerous foods absolutely must be kept away from vulnerable people — in order to present the idea that people should just let kids die so that it lands just right. “I think that what Louis C.K. explicitly or implicitly knows is, if he’s going to say something on its own that would be terrifying, he needs to spend time to offset it,” McGraw said. The audience still feels like letting kids die is a shocking idea, which gives the joke its transgressive power, but Louis C.K. has put in the time to make it okay to laugh at that idea." Karl Smith at Niskanen writes:
"The economic growth literature suggests that in a free market economy, r roughly equals g. It was this fact that made me doubt Thomas Piketty’s thesis even before his book was published. In everything he said and wrote, r > g played a major role. Yet r > g is not sustainable. If it was, then you could obtain infinite growth in finite time simply by investing the interest payments from r in private sector capital. "Not coincidently, you can understand this as the inverse of the thesis outlined by Piketty. Suppose r > g lasted in a normal—that is, non-infinite—economy. This would cause a long term divergence between financial claims on the economy (wealth) and economic productivity of the economy (income). "Since that can’t go on forever, it stops. That inability for asset prices to grow unmoored to underlying productivity is the fundamental driver of corrections in asset markets. … In short, the underlying assumption that the economy will grow faster than the interest rate on public debt is well-grounded, both theoretically and empirically. By contrast, the assumptions in Trumps budget are grossly outside the mainstream, completely untenable and deserve all of the criticism they are receiving." And Matt Bruenig, at Jacobin: “The problem with Piketty’s story, which Naidu and his peers get at in various ways, is that it doesn’t match reality. Assets like real estate, equity, and debt are not assessed according to the quantity of savings that go into creating them. They are assessed according to the expectations of how much income those assets will deliver to their owners in the future. Put simply: asset values are forward-looking, not backward-looking. … Ownership of something like a company share does not entail ownership of capital goods in any real sense. It amounts to owning a bundle of legal rights to future flows of income. ... “Piketty may well have everything backwards. If capital increases its ability to extract income from the economy, that would boost the future flow of income that goes to owners of existing assets, and thereby increase the capital share. When a greater portion of the national income is being funneled to owners of assets, the market value of those assets will go up, causing measured wealth to go up as well." Lapham’s Quarterly excerpts a bit of Philip Ball’s The Water Kingdom:
"To the perplexity of Western observers (not least when confronted with Chinese maps), the innate mental compass of the Chinese points not north–south, but east–west. The Chinese people articulate and imagine space differently from Westerners—and no wonder. All of China’s great rivers respect this axis. But two in particular are symbols of the nation and the keys to its fate: the Yangtze and the Yellow River. These great waterways orient China’s efforts to comprehend itself, and they explain a great deal about the social, economic, and geographical organization of its culture and trade. The rivers are where Confucius and Lao Tzu went to think, where poets like Li Bai and Du Fu went to find words to fit their melancholy, where painters discerned in the many moods of water a language of political commentary, where China’s pivotal battles were fought, where rulers from the first Qin Emperor to Mao and his successors demonstrated their authority. They are where life happens, and there is really nothing much to be said about China that does not start with a river." And: “The Yü Ji Tu (“Tracks of Yü” Map), carved in stone sometime before the twelfth century, shows how Chinese cartography was far ahead of anything in Christendom or classical Greece. In medieval maps of Europe the rivers are schematic ribbons, serpents’ tails encroaching from the coast in rather random wiggles. But the Yü Ji Tu could almost be the work of a Victorian surveyor, depicting the known extent of the kingdom with extraordinary fidelity and measured on a very modern-looking grid.” |
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January 2018
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