How should the U.S. deal with Germany? The Germans did a great deal of economic damage to the U.S. (and even more to the EU) in the 2010s; they seem to lack knowledge of basic economics (e.g. countries with trade surpluses should not run large fiscal surpluses, if you punish bankrupt countries they will go even more bankrupt, etc).
How do we prevent this from happening again? What kind of pressure would best work against the German government?
Another one: "Hi again, Claire, Do you think our biggest problems are related to our small worldviews? The old Weltanschauung is not what it used to be! We know we live in the universe and all worldviews are necessarily subsumed by an integrated view of the universe. A little start as it happens when we apply base-2 to the Planck base units if we assume Planck Time is the first moment of time. There are just 202 base-2 notations from that first moment to this day and time. Most people can handle 202 steps to get a handle on everything, everywhere for all time.
But within that view many new perspective open up. Pi seems to drive everything, the best dynamic expression of continuity, symmetry and harmony. http://81018.com is where I have begun playing with these concepts."
Another one: "What practical plan is there for eventually pruning the invasive species homo sapiens back to strictly limited and severely patrolled environmental niches, restoring as many as possible myriad species to their pre-homo ecological balances?"
None, I hope! While I agree that it's our duty to care for other species in a loving and responsible manner, I also believe that human life is sacred and should never, ever be curtailed.
A surprising number of invasive plant species have important medical applications, making them more essential than most people realize. Surely we are worth more than plants!
Another one: "Claire: I’d like your team’s view on what posture the US should take on the India/Pakistan relationship. Should it take any position? Should we treat India and Pakistan individually without regard for their enmity? Should we try to broker common interests like water supply, global warming, pandemic response, whatever? An international affairs discussion group will be convening via Zoom next Tuesday, US. Your correspondents’ thoughts would be helpful to me." We're on it!
It’s a family argument, any involvement by the US (?) would be a pretty thankless task and probably moving half blind. Most of the iceberg’s below the surface.
A good & challenging question. Like many regional tensions, that between India & Pakistan is both longstanding & hard to get a handle on. I'll defer to experts for better-informed takes on this, but here's my personal, off-the-cuff response, for what worth. The rivalry between India & Pakistan might be usefully framed as the sibling rivalry of twins. Born on the same date from the same parentage, India & Pakistan arguably share considerable cultural-genetic homology, so to speak -- a genetic sharing that's both literal & figurative. This is a situation in which long-game efforts to strengthen a sense of these deep fraternal ties in the cultural sphere may have intangible but significant ultimate benefits in the political / diplomatic sphere.
Beyond that rather general thought, it's a good question what helpful role the Biden-Harris Administration might be positioned to play, as the new tenure of a post-Trump era in US foreign policy begins to unfold.
Thinking in terms of US diplomacy with India more specifically, the thought arises that Kamala Harris (with her South Indian family roots) could perchance be called on (perhaps in the context of a future state visit) to articulate in amicable & appealing ways a new chapter of American idealism as related to India's own challenge with the same style of nationalist divisiveness that has recently plagued the United States, and out of which miasma we're making efforts to emerge.
Let me add a few questions that subscribers sent by email, presumably for anonymity:
"How does what y’all are doing differ from the mission of The Economist magazine?" (An excellent question because this weekend, we're working on our business plan, and that's part of what we're asking ourselves. Thank you, anonymous subscriber! We're on the job.)
For one thing (for my underlying position, folks can read my first comment on the TCG's first and introducing article), the TCG crowd can be taken much more seriously than anything The Economist puts out that strays the least little bit from pure economics (which most assuredly does not include political economics).
These are sensational questions--and I'm not sure why I'm surprised. After all, who would subscribe to this publication except the kind of person who'd ask these questions? But I confess that after hitting "send," I worried, "What if I throw a party and no one shows up?" I feared no one would ask anything. So waking up and seeing all these really good, serious questions is very gratifying--for the whole team. CG seems to have exactly the right readers. You're really out there, and you're genuinely interested in exactly the kinds of questions that interest us. This will keep us going for months.
I daresay President Biden's seriousness as President, and his robust efforts to make good on his campaign promises, are (or should be) rather self-evident to any attentive observer (unless perhaps blinkered by the narrow perspectives of echo-chamber rightwing media framings) -- particularly when considering the President's sharp focus on honestly & compassionately addressing the challenges of the pandemic crisis that continues to threaten both the health & livelihood of the nation & the world.
Watching at least a few of the the lengthy, detailed, valuable, DAILY press briefings with which President Biden's articulate Press Secretary, Jen Psaki has been regaling the Washington Press Corps day after day, week after week, it's evident to me (at least) that the Biden Admin. is 1,000 times more serious & articulate & organized in thought & action than what's been seen in recent years in the White House.
I see no evidence that Biden is any more prepared to deal with the plethora of crises that will shortly fall on our heads (many of which predate the pandemic) then any of his predecessors. America is still in the Neville Chamberlain stage of national denial of reality.
I see evidence of this almost every single day -- simply starting with the press briefings & President Biden's public statements, ALL of which reflect 10,000% more seriousness of thought / intent / organization / etc. than we've lately seen in the WH, then moving on to his immediate & obvious actions. His appointments in general also somewhat speak to the question you raise.
True a major current focus is on the pandemic -- as arguably it should be. But if you see no evidence of positive change & amped-up competency & crisis-preparedness, I wonder if you're really looking?
No President is Superman. What I'm seeing so far from Joe frankly surpasses what I might've expected six months ago. I believe he's connecting with the spirit of his role and the spirit of the American people. Are there crazy challenges ahead? No doubt. Anyway, I'm seeing sincerity, competency & responsiveness from on high & this makes me generally hopeful.
If Biden is not still with the program cognitively, then almost by definition someone else is operating the presidency. And it does feel like a redo of the Obama presidency. But I guess to boil it down, do you guys think Biden is there cognitively?
My own view as a layman with a graduate degree in experimental psych (brain-neural oriented, but nothing I'd hang out a shingle on) and a man with personal experience with Alzheimers (father and MIL), I see two things in Biden.
One is signs of early stage dementia. He's able to function at a high level, but not for long at a time, at least on his feet in public (and physical stress impacts mental stress). I see him swaying more as he stands at a podium than he used to do. I also listen to his speech--coherence, clarity of enunciation, quality of voice--and compare it with his speech of four years ago and earlier. I see and hear degradation.
The other thing is this. I hear him, these days, occasionally struggle with words more than he used to do.
But: he's always had to deal with a stutter, much more successfully in the past. His seeming increased struggle could be just the result of "ordinary" aging and not at all symptomatic of mental degradation.
I also put his performance in a contextual backdrop. He never appeared in public when he could avoid it on the campaign trail, and he never took unscripted questions. He never met the press without his senior staff present or Jill sitting next to him at a sit-down interview, and her prompting him on answers was frequent. He almost never does today, to the point of never meeting the press for a solo press conference.
And Pelosi's effort to legislate a trigger for the 25th Amendment seemed more aimed at a Biden Presidency than a Trump one--she'd/Congressional Progressive-Democrats generally already had tried that on Trump, and it failed miserably.
Colleagues who know him up close and personally clearly know more about his condition than we do.
Like, maybe, Fiona Hill's interagency coordination group that she professed herself "quite cross" about a President actually disregarding and bypassing?
Or Biden's handlers who are keeping him away from the press and his occasional appearances brief, questions limited?
Or VP Harris being handed the foreign policy portfolio?
Yet lack of evidence one way or the other didn't prevent your unsubstantiated No.
Is this what you're referring to when you say, "VP Harris being handed the foreign policy portfolio?" https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/26/kamala-harris-foreign-policy-vp-471721 Or do you have some other reason for saying. that? Because that article certainly doesn't say she's been handed the portfolio--not in the sense that she, not Biden, is making the significant decisions. I just do not believe that. The buck, I think, is stopping with him.
That's one of them. I've seen another reference, too, but naturally I can't find it again.
Harris is certainly being pushed to plus up on foreign policy, and that ordinarily would be useful. However, in light of how carefully Biden's public and press time is being handled, my questions arise.
I was born in New York City and have lived here my entire life (except for four years of college in New England). It’s never been this bad; not even in the early 1970s when the Daily News wrote its famous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” and not in the 1980s when criminals rampaged undeterred.
Personal anecdotes are worth only so much but I’ll mention mine. I live in a safe New York City neighborhood in an apartment building without a doorman. Deliveries are left on a table in the lobby for residents to retrieve. In the last three months, I’ve had five packages stolen. That’s never happened before.
Crime has escalated to intolerable levels largely because the criminal justice system has ground to a halt and cash bail has largely been eliminated. There is simply no question that New York City cops are afraid of proactive enforcement. They don’t want to be the next face splashed on the front pages accused of bigotry.
The subways are unsafe with muggings, stabbings and shootings a daily occurrence. Fair beating isn’t even prosecuted any longer.
Stores are boarded up everywhere, even in the fashionable parts of town like Madison Avenue.
New York’s millionaires and billionaires are decamping at light speed. These folks pay a wildly disproportionate share of New York taxes. Despite this, our elected politicians think that raising taxes before they flea will provide the City’s salvation. It’s nuts.
To make matters worse, the City has decided to do away with gifted and talented classes in the public schools on equity grounds. Apparently the powers that be can’t stomach the fact that children of Asian heritage earn a disproportionate number of the limited seats in gifted and talented classrooms. The inevitable result of all of this will be a mass exodus of upper middle class families from the City to the suburbs in Westchester, Long Island and New Jersey. In fact, it’s already happening.
Midtown is a ghost town. Thanks to remote work, office buildings are practically empty and the businesses that depend on the workers in those buildings are dead or dying. It’s been a revelation; my company does as well (and maybe even better) with our employees working remotely. We are offering it to employees as a permanent option. By the way, recruiting employees nationally (and occasionally even internationally) gives us a wider talent pool to chose from and employees love to live wherever they want. My guess is that those midtown office buildings will never fill up again.
Like many New Yorkers, I’ve purchased a place in Florida and can’t wait to move.
The CG philosophy is that we always want our reporting to be done by people who actually live in the place from which they're reporting--and ideally, by long-term residents who know the place backward and forward. In this case, you'd be ideal. We don't have anyone among us who can speak as authoritatively about New York as you can. So we have to defer to you.
For what it's worth, Paris, too, is a shadow of itself. Every time I go outside, I see another sign that says, "Bail à céder" (lease for sale). The government has tried heroically to prop up small businesses, but they're collapsing anyway, one after the other. It's terrible to see them fold. They're a very large part what makes this city *Paris*--the bakeries, the cheese sellers, the pâtisseries, the little soap and perfume shops, the boutiques that sell vintage clothing--every day, I go out and see that another place I cherished has gone under.
And we're all worried that even when it's over--even when everyone's vaccinated and the tourists come back--it will never be the same. Big corporations will swoop in and gobble up the real estate. The small *commerçants* will never be able to reestablish themselves. Everyone who can move will have moved.
The only thing that's mildly positive is that Paris is will be much more pedestrianized. People have how much better the city is without so many cars, and that may well stick. Paris wasn't built for cars, obviously; it's built at a pedestrian scale (and perhaps the scale of horses and carriages). It's been a pleasure to breath clean air. But that hardly compensates for the loss of the city's commerce and vibrancy. I think it will take decades for the city to recover.
However, in the long run, it will recover. Of this I'm sure. Cities are the most resilient geographic entities in human affairs: You can't kill them. You can siege them, starve them, bomb them, nuke them--but you can't kill them. Once you have a city-like human settlement of a certain size, it's there for good. The ownership may change hands--the territory may formally pass from one state to another; and the city may change so much it would be almost unrecognizable to inhabitants of an earlier era, but cities never disappear. The geographic features that made people congregate there in the first place (a temperate climate, access to rivers and natural harbors) don't change, so people will always want to live there. New York will recover sooner or later. So will Paris. How much later? I genuinely don't know, and there's not much (relevant) precedent we can look at to make an informed guess.
WigWag, you're
It's possible that things will bounce back faster than we think. After all, there's no reason *except* the pandemic for this, so maybe things will come roaring back once we've got herd immunity. Though the scale of the destruction makes me think that's optimistic. And some changes will be permanent: Office workers probably aren't ever going back to offices: The economic benefits of not having an office--not paying for commercial real estate--are just too significant. Now that everyone's made the switch, I can't see very many switching back. So Midtown, for example, probably isn't ever going to be a bustling commercial center again.
The crime you described, WigWag, is probably half to do with the pandemic and half to do with the cops being afraid to enforce the law. We're not seeing that kind of crime in Paris. In fact, the crime rate has plummeted, which people attribute the lockdowns, though I'm not sure that's why, because the rates didn't rise again after the lockdowns were lifted. Burglaries are down 70 percent, for example: https://www.20minutes.fr/societe/2795655-20200609-deconfinement-paris-chiffres-delinquance-repartent-hausse-inferieurs-ceux-2019
This may be because the cops here haven't been intimidated; or maybe it's because the social safety net is stronger; or maybe it's even because criminals are affected by the pandemic the way small businesses are? Maybe they *can't* do as much pickpocketing because there are fewer people out on the streets with pickable pockets? (I just realized the question, "Why has crime declined in Paris?" is an interesting one, and I should look into it.)
Anyway, New York's crime wave won't last forever. I don't know what's causing it, but I assume it's a combination of lax policing, the pandemic, the recession, and perhaps other sociological changes. Whatever they are, they're not permanent. There will be a backlash against tolerance for criminality and New York will have another hard-nosed mayor who locks them all up and brings down the crime rate. The pandemic will end. The economy will rebound. So in the long run, New York's not toast.
But in the long run we're all dead, and you may very well be wise to move to Florida before that happens.
Cities may not disappear, but empires and civilizations do fail. I think that may happen to the US, partly because our education system is so awful (if I’m right about our education system ). On the other hand, I’m guardedly optimistic about NYC for no good reason that I can think of. I have some family in the city, my own family settled there in 1654. I’m not a New Yorker though, I live in Miami.
Claire, you’re right to be depressed. Think about what’s happening in the biggest states in the United States. California is about to approve a recall election of its Governor. New York is experiencing a new incarnation of the Warlock Hunt (aka a moral panic). Smelling blood, they can practically taste the opportunity to install one of their own in the Governors Mansion in Albany. See,
In my own response I was reluctant to speak too much as to what is going on in New York City as I have not been there since the pandemic started so I voiced my views more in the context of Florida and Texas vs the Northeast Corridor of the US of which I can speak more about from personal experience. In particular I have been into the Financial District and the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston along with Kendall Square(where Moderna and Pfizer R&D are based) several times since Covid-19 started. Obviously the pandemic has had a huge impact but I would not say any of those three areas are "ghost towns" by any stretch although Kendall Square is probably more lively at the moment than the Boston Financial District(in part due to vaccine related work that must be done on-site). I would also say traffic on I-93 near where I live at least travelling to and from Boston and Cambridge during commuting hours is not at pre-Covid-19 levels by any stretch but it is also well off of it's lows at the height of the pandemic.
I guess the icing on the cake for me as to this question was when the CEO of Moderna was asked if he had any interest in moving Moderna from Cambridge, MA to Miami in light of the Mayor of Miami making a big splash in the national media about attracting tech companies to which Moderna's CEO responsed there was absolutely zero chance of Moderna moving from Cambridge to Miami. A question I will throw out for WigWam is whether he has any thoughts on the degree to which Boston Mayor Marty Walsh was treated with kid gloves by Senate Republican during his confirmation for Labor Secretary. I am pretty sure if it was Bill De Blasio being nominated for Labor Secretary the GOP would have ripped him apart which posits the questions what makes Marty Walsh and Bill de Blasio so different from each other despite being big city Democrat mayors and both being perceived as being on the left flank of their party before becoming mayor.
Perhaps these two articles below give some answers:
While this might make me sound too much of a Boston booster I actually think Boston is a bigger competitive threat to NYC than Miami. I could definitely see Pfizer moving it's top executives from Manhattan to Kendall Square in Cambridge post Covid-19(something that has been rumored for years). Also I could see moves in finance and asset management industries from the Big Apple to Beantown. The one area where I think Miami might have an advantage over Boston is media. I think Fox News if it left NYC would be far more likely to move to Miami than Boston.
Moderna isn’t going anywhere. Flagship Pioneering, the hedge fund that founded the company, is headquartered in Cambridge and Robert Langer, the investigator who invented the lipid membrane that encapsulates the mRNA is a faculty member at MIT.
I agree with you, the greater Boston area is not nearly at as much risk as New York. Biotech, which is mostly centered in Cambridge and the Longwood Medical Area is highly dependent on Harvard, it’s affiliated hospitals, MIT and to a lesser extent, Tufts, BU and Brandeis.
The only geographical area that can compete with Boston’s biotech dominance is San Francisco with its Stanford and UCSF research titans. As a biotech hub, New York is, at best, number 3 and the Research Triangle area in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, Nashville and Atlanta are not that far behind.
Boston is set for now; but remember, it’s a one industry town. It’s got biotech and Pharma and not much else (its vigor in higher education is beginning to erode.)
Biomedical research is hard to conduct remotely. Wet labs and lab animal colonies need to be attended to in person.
Much of the far more diverse range of industries headquartered in New York is much more amenable to remote work. That’s the major reason New York will do so much worse than Boston. Plus, New York depends far more on tourism than Boston and for the time being, tourism is dead.
Look at the rest of Massachusetts outside of Boston and it’s suburbs. It’s one disaster after the next.
Have you been to Worcester or Springfield recently? If so, you know what I mean.
No, I haven't been to Worcester or Springfield recently but I am well aware of the pockets of urban poverty in the outlying smaller cities of the state like Lawrence, Haverhill, Gardner, Fitchburg etc. places that I have been to recently. BTW, these types of places exist in Florida and Texas too think Port Arthur or Kissimmee, FL or Hialeah, FL. I would really take issue with the argument that Massachusetts outside of Boston is one disaster after another. I don't think this applies to Cape Cod and the Islands nor does it apply to the Far Western Berkshires region. Northampton is not a disaster nor is Longmeadow.
I would also disagree with Boston being a one industry town. I would view Finance, Software/IT, Higher Education, and government(Boston being the state capital of Massachusetts) as all having significant presences in addition to healthcare and pharma.
Regarding "What use New York is anymore [?]" -- I can chip in with some personal anecdotage. I started writing about "new music" in my 20s when living in the SF Bay Area in the 1980s. New York City kept exerting a pull -- especially when Meredith Monk (a multimedia composer / performance artists based in SoHo loft culture) brought her mesmerizing opera The Games to Zellerbach Hall (UC Berkeley) in 1986. In autumn of the following year, I experimentally ventured to New York, living in a small residential hotel on the upper west side for 3 months. The following year, I rented (sight unseen, from California, via an ad in the Village Voice) a room in a Staten Island house. Eventually, a waiter at Caffe Reggio (in Greenwich Village) told me I could rent a room upstairs from the cafe. I lived there for a year. In all I closed out the '80s with a few years residing in that lively / delightful city, writing & editing at (the late) EAR MAGAZINE in SoHo, while working (usually the graveyard shift) as a word processor in big midtown law firms.
I think my experience was not atypical. New York is a creativity magnet. I found it warm place socially -- this impression was a 1st impression, and a lasting one. I met so many intelligent, thoughtful, caring, urbane, gifted, interesting people who either lived there or at least threaded their way through that metropolis.
I believe New York City continues to function in that way, for wave after wave of drop-souls in the wide ocean of the world. It's a place wherein one need not remain forever; but so many find they enjoy & benefit from spending at least a couple-few formative years there.
Damn! Out of all of the 68 Cosmopolitan Globalists, not one lives in New York. This is by design: We figured that's the one place in the world that *doesn't* need more media coverage. As far as the English-language media's concerned, New York, Washington, and London are the only places in the world, right? We do have a Londoner among us, but not a single person in New York. But we'll do our best with this one. We've got a few people who grew up there and we're not unfamiliar with the place.
By "go nova," do you mean "suddenly shine millions of times brighter and enlighten the whole galaxy?" Or do you mean "run out of fuel and die in a fiery explosion?" Is it positive or negative?
It seems to me that being on the outside of New York City would give a measure of objectivity to assessing its future. So long as the assessment isn't itself biased by stereotypes of animus or enamorousness.
While I am not officially affiliated with the CG I will try to give an answer in part by asking a similar but different question and giving my answer to it. That is will either say the Texas triangle of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio or the Florida megapolis of Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach plus Orlando & Tampa overtake the "Acela" corridor of Washington, NYC, and Boston as dominant economic topography in the United States America. My answer is absolutely no way no matter how much some more "Trumpist" minded Americans may wish it.
First on the southern end of Acela corridor notwithstanding various people elected to government from time to time that pledge to shrink the size of Federal govt especially the parts centered in the nation's capital I think there is a pretty strong track record to indicate that the economy of the Washington, DC area and the size of the Federal government centered in it just keep growing and growing. In particular an outgrowth of the efforts I referred to earlier to "shrink" the size of Federal govt is over the past 30 and 40 years there has been a huge increase in private sector workers making private sector salaries in the Washington, DC area whose employment is completely dependent on the size and existence of the Federal government. So say back in the 1960s and 70s there were a lot of formal civil servants living around Washington, DC but they made civil service wages. Now you have lots of lobbyists, lawyers, consultants, contractors etc dependent on the Federal govt but now earning "private sector" salaries making the Washington, DC area not just one of the nation's biggest metropolitan areas but also one of the riches. I highly doubt any of this will change.
On the other end of the Acela corridor up in my neck of the woods is Boston. Perhaps I can sum up the economic status of Boston in the Covid-19 era in one sentence. The overwhelmingly majority of the research worldwide into RnA technology(even that was used by BioNTech in Germany) came out of the Boston Metropolitan Region etc. Enough said about the economic future of Boston. In terms of NYC, well at a bare mininum it is right in the middle of this Acela corridor stretching from Boston to Washington. It obviously has it's own longstanding economic advantages that others might wish to comment on.
In terms of the urban vs suburban distinction in New York City and the other Acela corridor cities. Well first the housing supply is heavily limited in all of the suburban areas up and down the corridor due to zoning restrictions. There is some potential on the north end to push further into New Hampshire and on the south end to push further into Virginia but between NYC and Philadelphia the suburbs of each essentially bleed into one another say around Princeton, NJ. The geography of the NYC area also makes suburb to suburb commuting kind of a pain in the neck. You can't go that easily from Long Island to suburban Connecticut except by driving first into NYC. At least the suburbs of Boston and DC have the I-495/Route 128 and Capitol Beltway belts respectively running around them.
The final point is remote work and I think I will let others chime in with there opinions on it's long term future.
While this might seem like bragging on my part on second thought I will go further in discussing at least from my perspective what I think the pluses and minuses of where I live currently and how they might apply to in post Covid era if we continue to stay in an environment of remote work. First I live in Andover, Massachusetts a relatively well off suburb of Boston(with good schools but I don't have kids) about 30 minutes to it's north directly up Interstate 93 and right at its intersection with the I-495 belt around Boston(I invite Jon Nighswander to chime in as I think he is originally from this same area). Within 2 hours to 2 and half hours north there is extensive skiing and hiking in the White and Green Mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont. Four hours to the north of driving you are in Montreal. There is also a smaller hiking and skiing area called Wachusett Mountain just about an hour to the west of me down I-495 and MA State Route 2. I am also within easy access in the summer to the beaches and coastline of Maine/New Hampshire and Cape Cod. Going around the I-495 belt southwest away from Boston I am about a 4 hour drive to New York City. Additionally I can get on the Acela train in Boston for NYC and Washington, DC quite easily. From the main airport in Boston(right next to downtown Boston) during non Covid times there are hourly shuttle flights to both New York City and Washington, DC. From Boston there is a non stop air service to every major city in the US and one stop service to just about every place in the US with any airline service.
Internationally there is one stop air service to most destinations in the world from Boston and nonstop service to every continent other than Australia. Before Covid there was even an morning flight(rare for US destinations) to London that got in early enough at Heathrow to connect on to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam etc so I could even avoid jet lag when travelling to Europe. On another note compared to some other places I have lived in the US I find New England generally and even more local area to have far more variety in resturants and shopping(this remains true with Covid). There is also some of the most advanced medical care in the world in the Boston area and the New England regions of the US more broadly.
So if you are someone like myself who considers themselves to be a cosmopolitan globalist yes, in an era of remote work it might be a lot cheaper to leave Andover, MA to live in Peoria, IL but why the hell would I want to do that. That is not to say I intend to stay in Andover or even the Boston area(or the US as a whole) for the rest of my life but I have no intention of moving to some Trump supporting hellhole just because it is cheaper and easier because of remote working(We in Andover voted Biden 67%).
And BTW if you aren't familiar with the geography of Boston and the surrounding region when I say the Airport is right next to downtown I mean it is "right next" to downtown like the old Kai Tak Airport was in Hong Kong as this video shows if you have never had to fly in or out of Boston.
How serious are the Greece - Turkey tensions? Will they impact the Greek economy, particularly the tourist sector? Any guess when US citizens will be able to travel to the UK? Is Fall possible, or maybe not to 2022?
The Norway Wealth Fund, having amassed $1.3 Trillion from North Sea oil is taking the high road now and refusing in invest in fossil fuels, with particular opprobrium directed at Canada's oil sands. The World Bank is being encouraged to cease any investments in fossil fuels. Car makers are committing to build EVs, which will allow wealthier drivers to buy Teslas, subsidized by other tax payers. Biden forbids a pipeline supplying Canadian oil to Gulf Coast refineries that were built to process that Canadian oil, resulting in it being shipped by rail. Meanwhile, China and India buillt more coal fired plants to build on the progress made so far in bringing their masses out of abject poverty, and China offers to build same for neighbours in Asia, and in Africa. The West, struggling with the debts from dealing with Covid, takes on the Green Mantle and its cost, while advising developing counties to spurn cheap energy and build wind mills instead.
Unleash your brain trust and tell us how all this could go wrong.
Hi Eric, we're actually going to have at least a couple article in the near(ish) future touching on some of these points. One will be focused on nuclear power, and how if we want to move away from fossil fuels it's absolutely vital—and how we can work to help swing public opinion back in favour.
The next article (different author) will look at the energy transition. Generally it's been framed a a battle between "good guys" (renewables), and "bad guys" (hydrocarbons), ignoring everything else. We'll talk about the everything else. So stay tuned, I think you'll find both to be very interesting!
Your comments correctly point out that a lot of the current action on the energy transition is more about virtue signaling—more doing anything so as to be seen doing something—than actually taking the actions that make the most sense. In those articles I mentioned, we'll discuss some better ways forward.
Also, if you just can't wait (and want a more in depth look), I'd recommend checking out Michael Shellenburger's book Apocalypse Never.
As it happens I am in the nuclear industry in Canada. In any case I am now going to shock you all by saying I don’t believe global warming is an existential crisis. I take Bjorn Lomborg’s view that there are far more pressing concerns. My point was if we in the West turn our economies upside down to play the king Canute card and tell the tides of CO2 to retreat, what could be the unintended consequences. Incidentally the production of steel, concrete for nuc plants and lithium for batteries all produce large amounts of CO2.
Also, let me surprise you even more. I'm a geologist working in the oil and gas sector. I see my job as helping keep the wheels of civilization turning till we find something better (nuclear, preferably fusion). But we'll always need hydrocarbons for manufacturing the countless products that make up our lives.
I'd agree with him as well. Relatively minor action in reducing CO2 + adaptation and mitigation is the way forward. "Rather be a rich Dutchman than a poor Bangladeshi" right?
Economic development is the best way to "climate-proof" (and weather-proof) poor countries. Someone living in the slum of a tropical country won't care if we manage to prevent .1 degree of temperature rise by 2100. They'll care if they have access to electricity and air conditioning!
It's impossible to eliminate our impact on the environment. But we can reduce it by going increasingly high tech, not backwards as many environmentalists seem to prefer. Nuclear is far superior to renewables, GMO crops far superior to organic farming, wealth better than poverty (aka "sustainability" for poor countries), etc.
I am going to disagree with both of you along these lines. Technically you can make plastics out of Hydrogen produced using electrolysis it is just wicked expensive. This was kind of my point about the French nuclear power program back in the 1990s. Technically they could have just gone on building nuclear plants and used the surplus to make hydrogen from electrolysis(and France is already one of the world's largest producers of hydrogen from fossil fuel steam reformation). I guess the question I am still grappling is was this a mistake. Should they have the kept building cheap nuclear plants and gone full steam ahead with all sorts of exotic uses of electricity(You can also use Hydrogen from electrolysis in steel production too) or not? Was this a missed opportunity?
Good question. And we've actually been working all week on an energy piece: We argue it's time to bring back nuclear. Stay tuned for that. We'll answer your question specifically, but in our internal discussions, the question CG is asking itself is why nuclear has almost dropped from the debate, given its reliability, economy, cleanliness, and safety. We grasp that perhaps a debate needs to be had, but we're puzzled that nuclear wasn't even *discussed* during, for example, the recent festival of partisan misreporting on the lessons of Texas's blackout. It's as if people have forgotten that nuclear power is an option. We find this strange. We're trying to figure out why this is.
I am kind of curious about your internal deliberations regarding why nuclear has been largely forgotten? I have some more data points below that might provide an answer. I am actual curious how people like Bruno Tertrais and Francois Heisbourg might answer this question or Arun Kapil given my data points are very French centric and rightly so as France has the most advanced civil nuclear power generation program in the world.
1. After 1989 the possibility of a geo-political energy crisis centered in the Middle East occuring at the same time as an aggressive USSR military posture was eliminated. Thus the theory of Messmer and Pompidou expounding on original Gaullist doctrine that France not only needed nuclear weapons but also nuclear power generating electricity to secure it's national independence and great power status seemed a lot less pressing.
2. The Western success during the 1990-91 Gulf War showed that the the Western powers could easily defeat a military centric attempt to control and limit the supply of fossil fuel supplies in the Middle East. Furthermore it made countries like Saudi Arabia more inclined to offer consumer friendly pricing towards the West including France.
3. France had significant power surpluses during the early 1990s. These could have been used to promote for example electric vehicle usage however, the French oil and gas industry was in bad shape during this time. The largest oil company in France Elf Acquataine was engulfed in sex and bribery scandals. This is the whole Charlene Deviour Joncquire era(Charlene was a Elf employee who was having sexual relations with government officials including Mitterrand Foreign Minister Roland Dumas in France in order to get more favorable treatment for Elf). To push on with more nuclear power in France could very well have sunk the entire French fossil fuel industry.
4. The last first generation nuclear plant was only finished in 2002 with only a six year gap before the most recent and unbelievably expensive Flamanville plant started construction in 2008.
5. The French nuclear industry may have been seduced in terms of allowing the nuclear buildout to slow and eventually stop in France in the 1990s on the basis there would be an opportunity to build more advanced reactor designs such as the one at Flamanville but these designs have turned out to be wicked expensive. France also made a big and successful play to host the ITER fusion project which emerged out of a Reagan-Gorbachev era agreement but ITER and fusion are even more behind schedule than Flamanville is.
6. Much like with Minitel it is hard for a country like France to make a technological standard and way of doing things successful without buy-in from other countries and most of the rest of the world has not been particularly interest in France's nuclear power program.
7. Making France 100% nuclear and net zero might be an interesting proof on concept to show it can be done but France's existing CO2 emission are a drop in the bucket. The French govt should probably be trying to reduce CO2 emission in the rest of the world instead wasting time dealing with France's own way way below average emissions.
I think the nuclear question needs to be broken down by country. The reasons I think nuclear power was forgotten as an option in the US circa 1980s are different than in France circa 1990s and 2000s(I don't think nuclear was ever forgotten in France but there was a conscious decision to "slow" down nuclear in France in the early to mid 1990s). My own initial stab at this question in the French context is even the French civil power producing nuclear program in the 1970s and 80s was an outgrowth of the cold war(and many of the engineers who worked on it transferred over from the French atomic bomb program of the 1960s far more so the US civil and military nuclear programs during the cold war) and once the cold war was over there was less inclination in Paris to push on with a very costly endeavor. BTW, France and the European Space Agency were far closer to having there own indigenous manned space program than most Americans realize using the Ariane V rocket and the Hermes Space Plane but this too was left on the cutting room floor after 1989(Ariane V would go on to be introduced for unmanned missions in 1995).
Bill Gates is kind of making a similar point in his new book on climate change which is that from a global perspective getting the 15% of CO2 emissions the US emits to zero is actually kind of irrelevant from a global perspective. What Gates argues the US can and should be doing is using it's power of innovation to build technologies that China, India, and Africa can all use to drive there CO2 emissions to zero over the next 30 years.
The pushback to Gates' strategy I think is implicitly Gates strategy(actually more like quite explicitly) involves the US undertaking research on advanced technological research efforts like advanced nuclear, fusion, and research into other hard to curb emissions areas like steelmaking and cement production not just putting up a lot of windmills and solar panels.
TCG's assessment of the Biden administration roughly 6 weeks in. Particular (but not exclusive) attention to:
-the administration's foreign policy performance and separately, who's in charge of American foreign policy among the nominal head in the American formal governance structure, the Vice President, and the ad hoc interagency coordination group
-the administration's view of borders and national sovereignty, particularly (but not exclusively) in light of Biden's having reconstituted in large part the Obama staff and policy
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." (John Adams)
Liberal democracy is an invention of the West though it is now practiced in some nations not in the West. As an ideology it derives from the European enlightenment.
Post World Two Europe was run by Christian Democratic political parties. Mid 20th Century decolonization efforts were inspired by enlightenment values in the West and it was those same values that motivated the colonized to demand their freedom.
The United States (until recently) has been a profoundly religious nation; it’s precursor was originally established by immigrants with Calvinist ideas.
Here’s the question for the Cosmopolitan Globalists;
With the ascendency of secularism and the decline of religiosity in the West, do you believe the values you articulate as being important can survive?
If it's any consolation, I know quite a few atheists who are firm supporters of both Liberal democracy and interested in living moral lives. This isn't a guarantee that Adams got it wrong nationally, but I can promise you it can work on an individual level. And I hope it scales, I really do, for all our sake.
Just to follow-up on this point take the example of someone like Sophie In't Veld who is prominent classical Liberal(in the European sense) Member of the European Parliament who is also an atheist.
Going even further Sophie is one of the strongest supporters of a full fledged United States of Europe in active politics today.
One more thing I will add is that Altiero Spinelli(whom I got into a big Twitter conversation about a few weeks back and whom the European Parliament building in Brussels in named after) who was the most prominent intellectual proponent of European Federalism and a United States of Europe through his authorship of the Ventotene Manifesto(written while Spinelli was imprisoned by Mussolini) was an Italian Communist.
Even closer to John Adams, Adams was a huge critic of the Quebec Act for what he considered it's illiberal nature passed by the British Parliament yet in Canada the Quebec Act is considered a foundational document of Canadian liberalism(To be fair there are different ways of interpreting the meaning of the Quebec Act even in Canada the Adams interpretation of probably closer in modern times to Maurice Duplessis than that of Pierre Trudeau). The Duplessis/Adams interpretation was that Quebec and it's people was allowed to be exempt from the civil rights and freedoms granted to English speaking North Americans whereas the Trudeau interpretation would see the Quebec as primarily a cultural and linguistic document dealing with areas under provincial "jurisdiction" under modern Canadian constitutional practice and by no means were Quebeckers to be granted fewer "rights" than there fellow English speaking citizens of the North American continent and Trudeau put his money where his mouth is during the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982 from the United Kingdom on this subject.
So hence my point there can be multiple interpretations of what is Liberal democracy although while Adams and Trudeau were believers in Liberal democracy Duplessis was not(a long story for those unaware of Canadian and Quebec political history).
Excellent question. We're on it. My own answer may be too depressing to print on its own. Fortunately, we're not all as gloomy as I am. (I hasten to assure you that while I'm very gloomy about the long-term future of the West, I'm personally quite cheerful.)
How should the U.S. deal with Germany? The Germans did a great deal of economic damage to the U.S. (and even more to the EU) in the 2010s; they seem to lack knowledge of basic economics (e.g. countries with trade surpluses should not run large fiscal surpluses, if you punish bankrupt countries they will go even more bankrupt, etc).
How do we prevent this from happening again? What kind of pressure would best work against the German government?
Very good question. I'll put this one to our in-house Germany experts.
Another one: "Hi again, Claire, Do you think our biggest problems are related to our small worldviews? The old Weltanschauung is not what it used to be! We know we live in the universe and all worldviews are necessarily subsumed by an integrated view of the universe. A little start as it happens when we apply base-2 to the Planck base units if we assume Planck Time is the first moment of time. There are just 202 base-2 notations from that first moment to this day and time. Most people can handle 202 steps to get a handle on everything, everywhere for all time.
But within that view many new perspective open up. Pi seems to drive everything, the best dynamic expression of continuity, symmetry and harmony. http://81018.com is where I have begun playing with these concepts."
Another one: "What practical plan is there for eventually pruning the invasive species homo sapiens back to strictly limited and severely patrolled environmental niches, restoring as many as possible myriad species to their pre-homo ecological balances?"
None, I hope! While I agree that it's our duty to care for other species in a loving and responsible manner, I also believe that human life is sacred and should never, ever be curtailed.
A surprising number of invasive plant species have important medical applications, making them more essential than most people realize. Surely we are worth more than plants!
I should add, these are my own views. I've no idea how many of the other CG folks agree.
I do.
I thought you probably did... but one never wants to assume!
Freeze evolution.
Wow.
Eric Hines
Another one: "Claire: I’d like your team’s view on what posture the US should take on the India/Pakistan relationship. Should it take any position? Should we treat India and Pakistan individually without regard for their enmity? Should we try to broker common interests like water supply, global warming, pandemic response, whatever? An international affairs discussion group will be convening via Zoom next Tuesday, US. Your correspondents’ thoughts would be helpful to me." We're on it!
It’s a family argument, any involvement by the US (?) would be a pretty thankless task and probably moving half blind. Most of the iceberg’s below the surface.
A good & challenging question. Like many regional tensions, that between India & Pakistan is both longstanding & hard to get a handle on. I'll defer to experts for better-informed takes on this, but here's my personal, off-the-cuff response, for what worth. The rivalry between India & Pakistan might be usefully framed as the sibling rivalry of twins. Born on the same date from the same parentage, India & Pakistan arguably share considerable cultural-genetic homology, so to speak -- a genetic sharing that's both literal & figurative. This is a situation in which long-game efforts to strengthen a sense of these deep fraternal ties in the cultural sphere may have intangible but significant ultimate benefits in the political / diplomatic sphere.
Beyond that rather general thought, it's a good question what helpful role the Biden-Harris Administration might be positioned to play, as the new tenure of a post-Trump era in US foreign policy begins to unfold.
Thinking in terms of US diplomacy with India more specifically, the thought arises that Kamala Harris (with her South Indian family roots) could perchance be called on (perhaps in the context of a future state visit) to articulate in amicable & appealing ways a new chapter of American idealism as related to India's own challenge with the same style of nationalist divisiveness that has recently plagued the United States, and out of which miasma we're making efforts to emerge.
Let me add a few questions that subscribers sent by email, presumably for anonymity:
"How does what y’all are doing differ from the mission of The Economist magazine?" (An excellent question because this weekend, we're working on our business plan, and that's part of what we're asking ourselves. Thank you, anonymous subscriber! We're on the job.)
For one thing (for my underlying position, folks can read my first comment on the TCG's first and introducing article), the TCG crowd can be taken much more seriously than anything The Economist puts out that strays the least little bit from pure economics (which most assuredly does not include political economics).
Eric Hines
These are sensational questions--and I'm not sure why I'm surprised. After all, who would subscribe to this publication except the kind of person who'd ask these questions? But I confess that after hitting "send," I worried, "What if I throw a party and no one shows up?" I feared no one would ask anything. So waking up and seeing all these really good, serious questions is very gratifying--for the whole team. CG seems to have exactly the right readers. You're really out there, and you're genuinely interested in exactly the kinds of questions that interest us. This will keep us going for months.
What’s next for India? Apocalypse, success, both - or something more low key?
Is Biden president in name only?
I daresay President Biden's seriousness as President, and his robust efforts to make good on his campaign promises, are (or should be) rather self-evident to any attentive observer (unless perhaps blinkered by the narrow perspectives of echo-chamber rightwing media framings) -- particularly when considering the President's sharp focus on honestly & compassionately addressing the challenges of the pandemic crisis that continues to threaten both the health & livelihood of the nation & the world.
Watching at least a few of the the lengthy, detailed, valuable, DAILY press briefings with which President Biden's articulate Press Secretary, Jen Psaki has been regaling the Washington Press Corps day after day, week after week, it's evident to me (at least) that the Biden Admin. is 1,000 times more serious & articulate & organized in thought & action than what's been seen in recent years in the White House.
I see no evidence that Biden is any more prepared to deal with the plethora of crises that will shortly fall on our heads (many of which predate the pandemic) then any of his predecessors. America is still in the Neville Chamberlain stage of national denial of reality.
I see evidence of this almost every single day -- simply starting with the press briefings & President Biden's public statements, ALL of which reflect 10,000% more seriousness of thought / intent / organization / etc. than we've lately seen in the WH, then moving on to his immediate & obvious actions. His appointments in general also somewhat speak to the question you raise.
True a major current focus is on the pandemic -- as arguably it should be. But if you see no evidence of positive change & amped-up competency & crisis-preparedness, I wonder if you're really looking?
No President is Superman. What I'm seeing so far from Joe frankly surpasses what I might've expected six months ago. I believe he's connecting with the spirit of his role and the spirit of the American people. Are there crazy challenges ahead? No doubt. Anyway, I'm seeing sincerity, competency & responsiveness from on high & this makes me generally hopeful.
You mean, is there some secret power behind the throne? No. Do you have a more specific question we could address?
If Biden is not still with the program cognitively, then almost by definition someone else is operating the presidency. And it does feel like a redo of the Obama presidency. But I guess to boil it down, do you guys think Biden is there cognitively?
My own view as a layman with a graduate degree in experimental psych (brain-neural oriented, but nothing I'd hang out a shingle on) and a man with personal experience with Alzheimers (father and MIL), I see two things in Biden.
One is signs of early stage dementia. He's able to function at a high level, but not for long at a time, at least on his feet in public (and physical stress impacts mental stress). I see him swaying more as he stands at a podium than he used to do. I also listen to his speech--coherence, clarity of enunciation, quality of voice--and compare it with his speech of four years ago and earlier. I see and hear degradation.
The other thing is this. I hear him, these days, occasionally struggle with words more than he used to do.
But: he's always had to deal with a stutter, much more successfully in the past. His seeming increased struggle could be just the result of "ordinary" aging and not at all symptomatic of mental degradation.
I also put his performance in a contextual backdrop. He never appeared in public when he could avoid it on the campaign trail, and he never took unscripted questions. He never met the press without his senior staff present or Jill sitting next to him at a sit-down interview, and her prompting him on answers was frequent. He almost never does today, to the point of never meeting the press for a solo press conference.
And Pelosi's effort to legislate a trigger for the 25th Amendment seemed more aimed at a Biden Presidency than a Trump one--she'd/Congressional Progressive-Democrats generally already had tried that on Trump, and it failed miserably.
Colleagues who know him up close and personally clearly know more about his condition than we do.
Eric Hines
Thank you, Eric.
What's your basis for your unsubstantiated and automatic "No?"
Eric Hines
Well, I suppose it's possible there's a secret power behind the throne. But I'd need to see evidence for that.
Like, maybe, Fiona Hill's interagency coordination group that she professed herself "quite cross" about a President actually disregarding and bypassing?
Or Biden's handlers who are keeping him away from the press and his occasional appearances brief, questions limited?
Or VP Harris being handed the foreign policy portfolio?
Yet lack of evidence one way or the other didn't prevent your unsubstantiated No.
Eric Hines
Is this what you're referring to when you say, "VP Harris being handed the foreign policy portfolio?" https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/26/kamala-harris-foreign-policy-vp-471721 Or do you have some other reason for saying. that? Because that article certainly doesn't say she's been handed the portfolio--not in the sense that she, not Biden, is making the significant decisions. I just do not believe that. The buck, I think, is stopping with him.
That's one of them. I've seen another reference, too, but naturally I can't find it again.
Harris is certainly being pushed to plus up on foreign policy, and that ordinarily would be useful. However, in light of how carefully Biden's public and press time is being handled, my questions arise.
Eric Hines
I suspect we can all agree where the burden of proof lies, but disagree on what it takes to meet that burden.
I’d like to know if you guys think New York City will be able to return to its recent Golden Age. Or even what use New York is anymore.
Also, do you think the USA is going to go nova in the near future?
I was born in New York City and have lived here my entire life (except for four years of college in New England). It’s never been this bad; not even in the early 1970s when the Daily News wrote its famous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” and not in the 1980s when criminals rampaged undeterred.
Personal anecdotes are worth only so much but I’ll mention mine. I live in a safe New York City neighborhood in an apartment building without a doorman. Deliveries are left on a table in the lobby for residents to retrieve. In the last three months, I’ve had five packages stolen. That’s never happened before.
Crime has escalated to intolerable levels largely because the criminal justice system has ground to a halt and cash bail has largely been eliminated. There is simply no question that New York City cops are afraid of proactive enforcement. They don’t want to be the next face splashed on the front pages accused of bigotry.
The subways are unsafe with muggings, stabbings and shootings a daily occurrence. Fair beating isn’t even prosecuted any longer.
Stores are boarded up everywhere, even in the fashionable parts of town like Madison Avenue.
New York’s millionaires and billionaires are decamping at light speed. These folks pay a wildly disproportionate share of New York taxes. Despite this, our elected politicians think that raising taxes before they flea will provide the City’s salvation. It’s nuts.
To make matters worse, the City has decided to do away with gifted and talented classes in the public schools on equity grounds. Apparently the powers that be can’t stomach the fact that children of Asian heritage earn a disproportionate number of the limited seats in gifted and talented classrooms. The inevitable result of all of this will be a mass exodus of upper middle class families from the City to the suburbs in Westchester, Long Island and New Jersey. In fact, it’s already happening.
Midtown is a ghost town. Thanks to remote work, office buildings are practically empty and the businesses that depend on the workers in those buildings are dead or dying. It’s been a revelation; my company does as well (and maybe even better) with our employees working remotely. We are offering it to employees as a permanent option. By the way, recruiting employees nationally (and occasionally even internationally) gives us a wider talent pool to chose from and employees love to live wherever they want. My guess is that those midtown office buildings will never fill up again.
Like many New Yorkers, I’ve purchased a place in Florida and can’t wait to move.
New York City is toast.
This is sad and depressing.
The CG philosophy is that we always want our reporting to be done by people who actually live in the place from which they're reporting--and ideally, by long-term residents who know the place backward and forward. In this case, you'd be ideal. We don't have anyone among us who can speak as authoritatively about New York as you can. So we have to defer to you.
For what it's worth, Paris, too, is a shadow of itself. Every time I go outside, I see another sign that says, "Bail à céder" (lease for sale). The government has tried heroically to prop up small businesses, but they're collapsing anyway, one after the other. It's terrible to see them fold. They're a very large part what makes this city *Paris*--the bakeries, the cheese sellers, the pâtisseries, the little soap and perfume shops, the boutiques that sell vintage clothing--every day, I go out and see that another place I cherished has gone under.
And we're all worried that even when it's over--even when everyone's vaccinated and the tourists come back--it will never be the same. Big corporations will swoop in and gobble up the real estate. The small *commerçants* will never be able to reestablish themselves. Everyone who can move will have moved.
The only thing that's mildly positive is that Paris is will be much more pedestrianized. People have how much better the city is without so many cars, and that may well stick. Paris wasn't built for cars, obviously; it's built at a pedestrian scale (and perhaps the scale of horses and carriages). It's been a pleasure to breath clean air. But that hardly compensates for the loss of the city's commerce and vibrancy. I think it will take decades for the city to recover.
However, in the long run, it will recover. Of this I'm sure. Cities are the most resilient geographic entities in human affairs: You can't kill them. You can siege them, starve them, bomb them, nuke them--but you can't kill them. Once you have a city-like human settlement of a certain size, it's there for good. The ownership may change hands--the territory may formally pass from one state to another; and the city may change so much it would be almost unrecognizable to inhabitants of an earlier era, but cities never disappear. The geographic features that made people congregate there in the first place (a temperate climate, access to rivers and natural harbors) don't change, so people will always want to live there. New York will recover sooner or later. So will Paris. How much later? I genuinely don't know, and there's not much (relevant) precedent we can look at to make an informed guess.
WigWag, you're
It's possible that things will bounce back faster than we think. After all, there's no reason *except* the pandemic for this, so maybe things will come roaring back once we've got herd immunity. Though the scale of the destruction makes me think that's optimistic. And some changes will be permanent: Office workers probably aren't ever going back to offices: The economic benefits of not having an office--not paying for commercial real estate--are just too significant. Now that everyone's made the switch, I can't see very many switching back. So Midtown, for example, probably isn't ever going to be a bustling commercial center again.
The crime you described, WigWag, is probably half to do with the pandemic and half to do with the cops being afraid to enforce the law. We're not seeing that kind of crime in Paris. In fact, the crime rate has plummeted, which people attribute the lockdowns, though I'm not sure that's why, because the rates didn't rise again after the lockdowns were lifted. Burglaries are down 70 percent, for example: https://www.20minutes.fr/societe/2795655-20200609-deconfinement-paris-chiffres-delinquance-repartent-hausse-inferieurs-ceux-2019
This may be because the cops here haven't been intimidated; or maybe it's because the social safety net is stronger; or maybe it's even because criminals are affected by the pandemic the way small businesses are? Maybe they *can't* do as much pickpocketing because there are fewer people out on the streets with pickable pockets? (I just realized the question, "Why has crime declined in Paris?" is an interesting one, and I should look into it.)
Anyway, New York's crime wave won't last forever. I don't know what's causing it, but I assume it's a combination of lax policing, the pandemic, the recession, and perhaps other sociological changes. Whatever they are, they're not permanent. There will be a backlash against tolerance for criminality and New York will have another hard-nosed mayor who locks them all up and brings down the crime rate. The pandemic will end. The economy will rebound. So in the long run, New York's not toast.
But in the long run we're all dead, and you may very well be wise to move to Florida before that happens.
Cities may not disappear, but empires and civilizations do fail. I think that may happen to the US, partly because our education system is so awful (if I’m right about our education system ). On the other hand, I’m guardedly optimistic about NYC for no good reason that I can think of. I have some family in the city, my own family settled there in 1654. I’m not a New Yorker though, I live in Miami.
Claire, you’re right to be depressed. Think about what’s happening in the biggest states in the United States. California is about to approve a recall election of its Governor. New York is experiencing a new incarnation of the Warlock Hunt (aka a moral panic). Smelling blood, they can practically taste the opportunity to install one of their own in the Governors Mansion in Albany. See,
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/12/06/the-warlock-hunt/
Texas, the largest energy producer in the United States can’t seem to keep the lights (and heat) on when it gets a bit cold outside.
Compared to all of that, Florida looks like a good bet as long as the rise in sea level holds off for a few more decades.
The New York I see is most certainly not the New York of '89, regardless if your porch pirates.
In my own response I was reluctant to speak too much as to what is going on in New York City as I have not been there since the pandemic started so I voiced my views more in the context of Florida and Texas vs the Northeast Corridor of the US of which I can speak more about from personal experience. In particular I have been into the Financial District and the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston along with Kendall Square(where Moderna and Pfizer R&D are based) several times since Covid-19 started. Obviously the pandemic has had a huge impact but I would not say any of those three areas are "ghost towns" by any stretch although Kendall Square is probably more lively at the moment than the Boston Financial District(in part due to vaccine related work that must be done on-site). I would also say traffic on I-93 near where I live at least travelling to and from Boston and Cambridge during commuting hours is not at pre-Covid-19 levels by any stretch but it is also well off of it's lows at the height of the pandemic.
I guess the icing on the cake for me as to this question was when the CEO of Moderna was asked if he had any interest in moving Moderna from Cambridge, MA to Miami in light of the Mayor of Miami making a big splash in the national media about attracting tech companies to which Moderna's CEO responsed there was absolutely zero chance of Moderna moving from Cambridge to Miami. A question I will throw out for WigWam is whether he has any thoughts on the degree to which Boston Mayor Marty Walsh was treated with kid gloves by Senate Republican during his confirmation for Labor Secretary. I am pretty sure if it was Bill De Blasio being nominated for Labor Secretary the GOP would have ripped him apart which posits the questions what makes Marty Walsh and Bill de Blasio so different from each other despite being big city Democrat mayors and both being perceived as being on the left flank of their party before becoming mayor.
Perhaps these two articles below give some answers:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/01/10/business/marty-walsh-boston-elected-labor-leader-ended-up-with-business-friendly-mayor/
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/03/card-carrying-union-member-walsh-bidens-labor-nominee-wins-businesses-respect-465730
While this might make me sound too much of a Boston booster I actually think Boston is a bigger competitive threat to NYC than Miami. I could definitely see Pfizer moving it's top executives from Manhattan to Kendall Square in Cambridge post Covid-19(something that has been rumored for years). Also I could see moves in finance and asset management industries from the Big Apple to Beantown. The one area where I think Miami might have an advantage over Boston is media. I think Fox News if it left NYC would be far more likely to move to Miami than Boston.
Moderna isn’t going anywhere. Flagship Pioneering, the hedge fund that founded the company, is headquartered in Cambridge and Robert Langer, the investigator who invented the lipid membrane that encapsulates the mRNA is a faculty member at MIT.
I agree with you, the greater Boston area is not nearly at as much risk as New York. Biotech, which is mostly centered in Cambridge and the Longwood Medical Area is highly dependent on Harvard, it’s affiliated hospitals, MIT and to a lesser extent, Tufts, BU and Brandeis.
The only geographical area that can compete with Boston’s biotech dominance is San Francisco with its Stanford and UCSF research titans. As a biotech hub, New York is, at best, number 3 and the Research Triangle area in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, Nashville and Atlanta are not that far behind.
Boston is set for now; but remember, it’s a one industry town. It’s got biotech and Pharma and not much else (its vigor in higher education is beginning to erode.)
Biomedical research is hard to conduct remotely. Wet labs and lab animal colonies need to be attended to in person.
Much of the far more diverse range of industries headquartered in New York is much more amenable to remote work. That’s the major reason New York will do so much worse than Boston. Plus, New York depends far more on tourism than Boston and for the time being, tourism is dead.
Look at the rest of Massachusetts outside of Boston and it’s suburbs. It’s one disaster after the next.
Have you been to Worcester or Springfield recently? If so, you know what I mean.
No, I haven't been to Worcester or Springfield recently but I am well aware of the pockets of urban poverty in the outlying smaller cities of the state like Lawrence, Haverhill, Gardner, Fitchburg etc. places that I have been to recently. BTW, these types of places exist in Florida and Texas too think Port Arthur or Kissimmee, FL or Hialeah, FL. I would really take issue with the argument that Massachusetts outside of Boston is one disaster after another. I don't think this applies to Cape Cod and the Islands nor does it apply to the Far Western Berkshires region. Northampton is not a disaster nor is Longmeadow.
I would also disagree with Boston being a one industry town. I would view Finance, Software/IT, Higher Education, and government(Boston being the state capital of Massachusetts) as all having significant presences in addition to healthcare and pharma.
You’re right. Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard are doing just fine. Pittsfield, however, not so much.
Stockbridge and Great Barrington are doing just fine and they are right next to Pittsfield too.
Regarding "What use New York is anymore [?]" -- I can chip in with some personal anecdotage. I started writing about "new music" in my 20s when living in the SF Bay Area in the 1980s. New York City kept exerting a pull -- especially when Meredith Monk (a multimedia composer / performance artists based in SoHo loft culture) brought her mesmerizing opera The Games to Zellerbach Hall (UC Berkeley) in 1986. In autumn of the following year, I experimentally ventured to New York, living in a small residential hotel on the upper west side for 3 months. The following year, I rented (sight unseen, from California, via an ad in the Village Voice) a room in a Staten Island house. Eventually, a waiter at Caffe Reggio (in Greenwich Village) told me I could rent a room upstairs from the cafe. I lived there for a year. In all I closed out the '80s with a few years residing in that lively / delightful city, writing & editing at (the late) EAR MAGAZINE in SoHo, while working (usually the graveyard shift) as a word processor in big midtown law firms.
I think my experience was not atypical. New York is a creativity magnet. I found it warm place socially -- this impression was a 1st impression, and a lasting one. I met so many intelligent, thoughtful, caring, urbane, gifted, interesting people who either lived there or at least threaded their way through that metropolis.
I believe New York City continues to function in that way, for wave after wave of drop-souls in the wide ocean of the world. It's a place wherein one need not remain forever; but so many find they enjoy & benefit from spending at least a couple-few formative years there.
Damn! Out of all of the 68 Cosmopolitan Globalists, not one lives in New York. This is by design: We figured that's the one place in the world that *doesn't* need more media coverage. As far as the English-language media's concerned, New York, Washington, and London are the only places in the world, right? We do have a Londoner among us, but not a single person in New York. But we'll do our best with this one. We've got a few people who grew up there and we're not unfamiliar with the place.
By "go nova," do you mean "suddenly shine millions of times brighter and enlighten the whole galaxy?" Or do you mean "run out of fuel and die in a fiery explosion?" Is it positive or negative?
Claire, I meant run out of fuel and die in a fiery explosion. Probably a big enough explosion to destroy all of western civilization, not just the US.
It seems to me that being on the outside of New York City would give a measure of objectivity to assessing its future. So long as the assessment isn't itself biased by stereotypes of animus or enamorousness.
Eric Hines
While I am not officially affiliated with the CG I will try to give an answer in part by asking a similar but different question and giving my answer to it. That is will either say the Texas triangle of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio or the Florida megapolis of Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach plus Orlando & Tampa overtake the "Acela" corridor of Washington, NYC, and Boston as dominant economic topography in the United States America. My answer is absolutely no way no matter how much some more "Trumpist" minded Americans may wish it.
First on the southern end of Acela corridor notwithstanding various people elected to government from time to time that pledge to shrink the size of Federal govt especially the parts centered in the nation's capital I think there is a pretty strong track record to indicate that the economy of the Washington, DC area and the size of the Federal government centered in it just keep growing and growing. In particular an outgrowth of the efforts I referred to earlier to "shrink" the size of Federal govt is over the past 30 and 40 years there has been a huge increase in private sector workers making private sector salaries in the Washington, DC area whose employment is completely dependent on the size and existence of the Federal government. So say back in the 1960s and 70s there were a lot of formal civil servants living around Washington, DC but they made civil service wages. Now you have lots of lobbyists, lawyers, consultants, contractors etc dependent on the Federal govt but now earning "private sector" salaries making the Washington, DC area not just one of the nation's biggest metropolitan areas but also one of the riches. I highly doubt any of this will change.
On the other end of the Acela corridor up in my neck of the woods is Boston. Perhaps I can sum up the economic status of Boston in the Covid-19 era in one sentence. The overwhelmingly majority of the research worldwide into RnA technology(even that was used by BioNTech in Germany) came out of the Boston Metropolitan Region etc. Enough said about the economic future of Boston. In terms of NYC, well at a bare mininum it is right in the middle of this Acela corridor stretching from Boston to Washington. It obviously has it's own longstanding economic advantages that others might wish to comment on.
In terms of the urban vs suburban distinction in New York City and the other Acela corridor cities. Well first the housing supply is heavily limited in all of the suburban areas up and down the corridor due to zoning restrictions. There is some potential on the north end to push further into New Hampshire and on the south end to push further into Virginia but between NYC and Philadelphia the suburbs of each essentially bleed into one another say around Princeton, NJ. The geography of the NYC area also makes suburb to suburb commuting kind of a pain in the neck. You can't go that easily from Long Island to suburban Connecticut except by driving first into NYC. At least the suburbs of Boston and DC have the I-495/Route 128 and Capitol Beltway belts respectively running around them.
The final point is remote work and I think I will let others chime in with there opinions on it's long term future.
While this might seem like bragging on my part on second thought I will go further in discussing at least from my perspective what I think the pluses and minuses of where I live currently and how they might apply to in post Covid era if we continue to stay in an environment of remote work. First I live in Andover, Massachusetts a relatively well off suburb of Boston(with good schools but I don't have kids) about 30 minutes to it's north directly up Interstate 93 and right at its intersection with the I-495 belt around Boston(I invite Jon Nighswander to chime in as I think he is originally from this same area). Within 2 hours to 2 and half hours north there is extensive skiing and hiking in the White and Green Mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont. Four hours to the north of driving you are in Montreal. There is also a smaller hiking and skiing area called Wachusett Mountain just about an hour to the west of me down I-495 and MA State Route 2. I am also within easy access in the summer to the beaches and coastline of Maine/New Hampshire and Cape Cod. Going around the I-495 belt southwest away from Boston I am about a 4 hour drive to New York City. Additionally I can get on the Acela train in Boston for NYC and Washington, DC quite easily. From the main airport in Boston(right next to downtown Boston) during non Covid times there are hourly shuttle flights to both New York City and Washington, DC. From Boston there is a non stop air service to every major city in the US and one stop service to just about every place in the US with any airline service.
Internationally there is one stop air service to most destinations in the world from Boston and nonstop service to every continent other than Australia. Before Covid there was even an morning flight(rare for US destinations) to London that got in early enough at Heathrow to connect on to Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam etc so I could even avoid jet lag when travelling to Europe. On another note compared to some other places I have lived in the US I find New England generally and even more local area to have far more variety in resturants and shopping(this remains true with Covid). There is also some of the most advanced medical care in the world in the Boston area and the New England regions of the US more broadly.
So if you are someone like myself who considers themselves to be a cosmopolitan globalist yes, in an era of remote work it might be a lot cheaper to leave Andover, MA to live in Peoria, IL but why the hell would I want to do that. That is not to say I intend to stay in Andover or even the Boston area(or the US as a whole) for the rest of my life but I have no intention of moving to some Trump supporting hellhole just because it is cheaper and easier because of remote working(We in Andover voted Biden 67%).
And BTW if you aren't familiar with the geography of Boston and the surrounding region when I say the Airport is right next to downtown I mean it is "right next" to downtown like the old Kai Tak Airport was in Hong Kong as this video shows if you have never had to fly in or out of Boston.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQhvGlkYlKI&t=9s
How serious are the Greece - Turkey tensions? Will they impact the Greek economy, particularly the tourist sector? Any guess when US citizens will be able to travel to the UK? Is Fall possible, or maybe not to 2022?
We're on it. We follow the Eastern Med dispute very carefully.
Oops. I wrote travel to the UK, but I meant to write travel to the EU, Greece being of the most interest.
Oh! Okay, glad you mentioned that. We were at work on travel to the UK!
I can only apologize if I was the cause of unnecessary work.
Not to worry. We hadn't got too deep into it.
No worries, nobody pitching a fit.
The Norway Wealth Fund, having amassed $1.3 Trillion from North Sea oil is taking the high road now and refusing in invest in fossil fuels, with particular opprobrium directed at Canada's oil sands. The World Bank is being encouraged to cease any investments in fossil fuels. Car makers are committing to build EVs, which will allow wealthier drivers to buy Teslas, subsidized by other tax payers. Biden forbids a pipeline supplying Canadian oil to Gulf Coast refineries that were built to process that Canadian oil, resulting in it being shipped by rail. Meanwhile, China and India buillt more coal fired plants to build on the progress made so far in bringing their masses out of abject poverty, and China offers to build same for neighbours in Asia, and in Africa. The West, struggling with the debts from dealing with Covid, takes on the Green Mantle and its cost, while advising developing counties to spurn cheap energy and build wind mills instead.
Unleash your brain trust and tell us how all this could go wrong.
Hi Eric, we're actually going to have at least a couple article in the near(ish) future touching on some of these points. One will be focused on nuclear power, and how if we want to move away from fossil fuels it's absolutely vital—and how we can work to help swing public opinion back in favour.
The next article (different author) will look at the energy transition. Generally it's been framed a a battle between "good guys" (renewables), and "bad guys" (hydrocarbons), ignoring everything else. We'll talk about the everything else. So stay tuned, I think you'll find both to be very interesting!
Your comments correctly point out that a lot of the current action on the energy transition is more about virtue signaling—more doing anything so as to be seen doing something—than actually taking the actions that make the most sense. In those articles I mentioned, we'll discuss some better ways forward.
Also, if you just can't wait (and want a more in depth look), I'd recommend checking out Michael Shellenburger's book Apocalypse Never.
As it happens I am in the nuclear industry in Canada. In any case I am now going to shock you all by saying I don’t believe global warming is an existential crisis. I take Bjorn Lomborg’s view that there are far more pressing concerns. My point was if we in the West turn our economies upside down to play the king Canute card and tell the tides of CO2 to retreat, what could be the unintended consequences. Incidentally the production of steel, concrete for nuc plants and lithium for batteries all produce large amounts of CO2.
Also, let me surprise you even more. I'm a geologist working in the oil and gas sector. I see my job as helping keep the wheels of civilization turning till we find something better (nuclear, preferably fusion). But we'll always need hydrocarbons for manufacturing the countless products that make up our lives.
I'd agree with you Eric that it's not an existential crisis (pretty much the thesis of that Apocalypse Never book I mentioned). Did you see that TED talk by Lomborg a few years back? https://www.ted.com/talks/bjorn_lomborg_global_priorities_bigger_than_climate_change?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare
I'd agree with him as well. Relatively minor action in reducing CO2 + adaptation and mitigation is the way forward. "Rather be a rich Dutchman than a poor Bangladeshi" right?
Economic development is the best way to "climate-proof" (and weather-proof) poor countries. Someone living in the slum of a tropical country won't care if we manage to prevent .1 degree of temperature rise by 2100. They'll care if they have access to electricity and air conditioning!
It's impossible to eliminate our impact on the environment. But we can reduce it by going increasingly high tech, not backwards as many environmentalists seem to prefer. Nuclear is far superior to renewables, GMO crops far superior to organic farming, wealth better than poverty (aka "sustainability" for poor countries), etc.
I am going to disagree with both of you along these lines. Technically you can make plastics out of Hydrogen produced using electrolysis it is just wicked expensive. This was kind of my point about the French nuclear power program back in the 1990s. Technically they could have just gone on building nuclear plants and used the surplus to make hydrogen from electrolysis(and France is already one of the world's largest producers of hydrogen from fossil fuel steam reformation). I guess the question I am still grappling is was this a mistake. Should they have the kept building cheap nuclear plants and gone full steam ahead with all sorts of exotic uses of electricity(You can also use Hydrogen from electrolysis in steel production too) or not? Was this a missed opportunity?
I should add I look forward to your insights. I am delighted the Quebec Act found its way into your deliberations.
Good question. And we've actually been working all week on an energy piece: We argue it's time to bring back nuclear. Stay tuned for that. We'll answer your question specifically, but in our internal discussions, the question CG is asking itself is why nuclear has almost dropped from the debate, given its reliability, economy, cleanliness, and safety. We grasp that perhaps a debate needs to be had, but we're puzzled that nuclear wasn't even *discussed* during, for example, the recent festival of partisan misreporting on the lessons of Texas's blackout. It's as if people have forgotten that nuclear power is an option. We find this strange. We're trying to figure out why this is.
I am kind of curious about your internal deliberations regarding why nuclear has been largely forgotten? I have some more data points below that might provide an answer. I am actual curious how people like Bruno Tertrais and Francois Heisbourg might answer this question or Arun Kapil given my data points are very French centric and rightly so as France has the most advanced civil nuclear power generation program in the world.
1. After 1989 the possibility of a geo-political energy crisis centered in the Middle East occuring at the same time as an aggressive USSR military posture was eliminated. Thus the theory of Messmer and Pompidou expounding on original Gaullist doctrine that France not only needed nuclear weapons but also nuclear power generating electricity to secure it's national independence and great power status seemed a lot less pressing.
2. The Western success during the 1990-91 Gulf War showed that the the Western powers could easily defeat a military centric attempt to control and limit the supply of fossil fuel supplies in the Middle East. Furthermore it made countries like Saudi Arabia more inclined to offer consumer friendly pricing towards the West including France.
3. France had significant power surpluses during the early 1990s. These could have been used to promote for example electric vehicle usage however, the French oil and gas industry was in bad shape during this time. The largest oil company in France Elf Acquataine was engulfed in sex and bribery scandals. This is the whole Charlene Deviour Joncquire era(Charlene was a Elf employee who was having sexual relations with government officials including Mitterrand Foreign Minister Roland Dumas in France in order to get more favorable treatment for Elf). To push on with more nuclear power in France could very well have sunk the entire French fossil fuel industry.
4. The last first generation nuclear plant was only finished in 2002 with only a six year gap before the most recent and unbelievably expensive Flamanville plant started construction in 2008.
5. The French nuclear industry may have been seduced in terms of allowing the nuclear buildout to slow and eventually stop in France in the 1990s on the basis there would be an opportunity to build more advanced reactor designs such as the one at Flamanville but these designs have turned out to be wicked expensive. France also made a big and successful play to host the ITER fusion project which emerged out of a Reagan-Gorbachev era agreement but ITER and fusion are even more behind schedule than Flamanville is.
6. Much like with Minitel it is hard for a country like France to make a technological standard and way of doing things successful without buy-in from other countries and most of the rest of the world has not been particularly interest in France's nuclear power program.
7. Making France 100% nuclear and net zero might be an interesting proof on concept to show it can be done but France's existing CO2 emission are a drop in the bucket. The French govt should probably be trying to reduce CO2 emission in the rest of the world instead wasting time dealing with France's own way way below average emissions.
I think the nuclear question needs to be broken down by country. The reasons I think nuclear power was forgotten as an option in the US circa 1980s are different than in France circa 1990s and 2000s(I don't think nuclear was ever forgotten in France but there was a conscious decision to "slow" down nuclear in France in the early to mid 1990s). My own initial stab at this question in the French context is even the French civil power producing nuclear program in the 1970s and 80s was an outgrowth of the cold war(and many of the engineers who worked on it transferred over from the French atomic bomb program of the 1960s far more so the US civil and military nuclear programs during the cold war) and once the cold war was over there was less inclination in Paris to push on with a very costly endeavor. BTW, France and the European Space Agency were far closer to having there own indigenous manned space program than most Americans realize using the Ariane V rocket and the Hermes Space Plane but this too was left on the cutting room floor after 1989(Ariane V would go on to be introduced for unmanned missions in 1995).
Bill Gates is kind of making a similar point in his new book on climate change which is that from a global perspective getting the 15% of CO2 emissions the US emits to zero is actually kind of irrelevant from a global perspective. What Gates argues the US can and should be doing is using it's power of innovation to build technologies that China, India, and Africa can all use to drive there CO2 emissions to zero over the next 30 years.
The pushback to Gates' strategy I think is implicitly Gates strategy(actually more like quite explicitly) involves the US undertaking research on advanced technological research efforts like advanced nuclear, fusion, and research into other hard to curb emissions areas like steelmaking and cement production not just putting up a lot of windmills and solar panels.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bill-gates-how-to-avoid-climate-disaster-vaccines-1133481/
TCG's assessment of the Biden administration roughly 6 weeks in. Particular (but not exclusive) attention to:
-the administration's foreign policy performance and separately, who's in charge of American foreign policy among the nominal head in the American formal governance structure, the Vice President, and the ad hoc interagency coordination group
-the administration's view of borders and national sovereignty, particularly (but not exclusively) in light of Biden's having reconstituted in large part the Obama staff and policy
Eric Hines
In case you’re interested, here’s the answer that Walter Russell Mead of the Wall Street Journal gives to your question.
His assessment is pretty bleak.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-rough-start-with-the-world-11613430041?page=1
Saw that. So's mine, but I don't want to prejudice the TCG's commentary.
Not yet, anyway.
Eric Hines
Excellent questions. We're on the job.
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." (John Adams)
Liberal democracy is an invention of the West though it is now practiced in some nations not in the West. As an ideology it derives from the European enlightenment.
Post World Two Europe was run by Christian Democratic political parties. Mid 20th Century decolonization efforts were inspired by enlightenment values in the West and it was those same values that motivated the colonized to demand their freedom.
The United States (until recently) has been a profoundly religious nation; it’s precursor was originally established by immigrants with Calvinist ideas.
Here’s the question for the Cosmopolitan Globalists;
With the ascendency of secularism and the decline of religiosity in the West, do you believe the values you articulate as being important can survive?
If it's any consolation, I know quite a few atheists who are firm supporters of both Liberal democracy and interested in living moral lives. This isn't a guarantee that Adams got it wrong nationally, but I can promise you it can work on an individual level. And I hope it scales, I really do, for all our sake.
Just to follow-up on this point take the example of someone like Sophie In't Veld who is prominent classical Liberal(in the European sense) Member of the European Parliament who is also an atheist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jn4lrX2WrM&
Going even further Sophie is one of the strongest supporters of a full fledged United States of Europe in active politics today.
One more thing I will add is that Altiero Spinelli(whom I got into a big Twitter conversation about a few weeks back and whom the European Parliament building in Brussels in named after) who was the most prominent intellectual proponent of European Federalism and a United States of Europe through his authorship of the Ventotene Manifesto(written while Spinelli was imprisoned by Mussolini) was an Italian Communist.
Even closer to John Adams, Adams was a huge critic of the Quebec Act for what he considered it's illiberal nature passed by the British Parliament yet in Canada the Quebec Act is considered a foundational document of Canadian liberalism(To be fair there are different ways of interpreting the meaning of the Quebec Act even in Canada the Adams interpretation of probably closer in modern times to Maurice Duplessis than that of Pierre Trudeau). The Duplessis/Adams interpretation was that Quebec and it's people was allowed to be exempt from the civil rights and freedoms granted to English speaking North Americans whereas the Trudeau interpretation would see the Quebec as primarily a cultural and linguistic document dealing with areas under provincial "jurisdiction" under modern Canadian constitutional practice and by no means were Quebeckers to be granted fewer "rights" than there fellow English speaking citizens of the North American continent and Trudeau put his money where his mouth is during the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982 from the United Kingdom on this subject.
So hence my point there can be multiple interpretations of what is Liberal democracy although while Adams and Trudeau were believers in Liberal democracy Duplessis was not(a long story for those unaware of Canadian and Quebec political history).
Excellent question. We're on it. My own answer may be too depressing to print on its own. Fortunately, we're not all as gloomy as I am. (I hasten to assure you that while I'm very gloomy about the long-term future of the West, I'm personally quite cheerful.)