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Lessons from Rare Earths

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It’s weird that the press keeps discussing rare earths as a strange one-of-a-kind issue. As we noted here before that problem wasn’t an act of God—it was the Chinese figuring out something we didn’t.  We as a country were structurally incapable of planning for the future.  And we’re still that way. We haven’t always been quite so bad, but with the Republican private-sector orthodoxy and now Trump’s “intuitions” that’s where we are.

In that last piece I talked about slashed support for scientific research as a reason why we’re just waiting for the next such example to pop up.  But I should have been even more emphatic; there is an obvious example right now—our electrical infrastructure. We’ve mentioned that issue before in the context of climate change, but the impact goes further.

The US electric power network is antiquated, disorganized, and insecure. The Chinese could put it out of service any time they really wanted to. It needs major investment so that it can act as a resource for the economic development of the country.  This isn’t just a matter of tweaks—there is every reason to believe that that the electrical network is going to drive much more of the economy in the future than it does today.  That has to do with new power sources (e.g. fusion or other nuclear), new application areas (datacenters are just a first example), and also (whether we like it or not) climate change.  The network has to enable all kinds of new uses involving higher levels of electric power wherever it is needed.  China is already making huge investments, employing some higher-capacity technologies than we have here.

What are we doing?  We have to make major new investments to power the tremendous energy needs of the coming gigawatt datacenters.  But we aren’t even thinking about what that means for upgrades to our electrical network—we’re making it exclusively a matter for the datacenters themselves. And we’re prohibiting use of wind and solar in those datacenter projects—even though those are used in 90% of new electricity projects worldwide. There is no national project for development of a secure and capable electrical power infrastructure.  We’re going to build and power all of those datacenters and then figure out that hodge-podge of point solutions is no good for high-speed car charging (for example) or for other applications that will come out of China but not here. So we’ll just have to declare another emergency for the years it will take for the infrastructure to catch up.

We refuse to think beyond the immediate needs of today’s businesses. And that matters. Same as for rare earths.

An Example Says It All

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During the Covid crisis the Trump people carried on a campaign of blatant immorality that never got the attention it deserved. They got themselves vaccinated, but encouraged their supporters not to. Not getting vaccinated was an act of resistence to Biden, a gesture for freedom in the face of government overreach, and would be just fine. They killed supporters for their benefit.

That was handy for the campaign. It was a smokescreen for their botched handling of the early stages of the epidemic. So many people died from the anti-vax campaign that they could repeat their bottom line over and over again: “More people died from Covid under Biden than under Trump.”

Now cut to the present. As with Covid, it’s not an accident that Trump’s supporters are the ones hurt most by today’s Trump economy: the tariffs, the instability, the cuts to public services including medicare and social security. It’s certainly not the billionaires (or Trump himself) who are getting hurt. They’ve got their tax cuts, which is to say all those supposed savings from DOGE and other budget cuts went to them. The MAGA people–like the unvaccinated–are sacrificed to the program.

It’s the same internationally–who is getting hurt? Not Russia or China. He’s buddy-buddy with them. They’re all on board with the idea of spheres of influence, the idea that big powerful countries should be able to take what they can get. It’s US allies who trusted us. They’re easy targets, because they were on our side. They represented the first line of our defense against the USSR and now Russia. They didn’t have defenses against us (although they’re now learning).

It’s time to recognize that’s what Trump is. It’s easier to fleece people who considered themselves your friends than to fight enemies. He’s the ultimate confidence man. He’s enormously skilled in insinuating himself with people who are ambitious or have problems, and absolutely ruthless in taking advantage of those who have the misfortune to trust him. Whether he sees himself that way or not, that’s what he is.

There’s no arguing that the MAGA people, among others, have seen the prosperity of the country pass them by. There are real problems with the top-heavy distribution of wealth in this country. But Trump has sold them a story worthy of his talents: that poor immigrants and our foreign allies are the ones making them poor, while the billionaires who command real money and used their political power to create the wealth distribution are their friends! This amazing switch of responsibility is sold as free market economics, but it comes down to something as old as time–that the rich deserve all they can get and certainly should not be saddled with the needs of their inferiors. Unsurprisingly those billionaires are now cashing-in left and right while the others are standing hat-in-hand waiting for the ever-distant golden future.

The ultimate confidence man has delivered the ultimate win.

The Real Deal on Rare Earths

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The subject of “rare earths” is everywhere—now that Trump has discovered that not everyone he bullies backs down. (Like most bullies he clearly never thought of risks beforehand.)  But it is shocking how much of the discussion is both wrong and wrong-headed.

Let’s start with what’s wrong.  First of all, the set of rare earths includes 17 chemical elements that share some chemical properties, but whose significance is individual not collective.  Particular elements are important in particular ways.  Availability and processing requirements are not the same either.  So if Trump announces that we’re going to get rare earths from, say, Ukraine that may be relevant to an important issue or it may not be.  Similarly when someone announces with fanfare that we’re going to start processing rare earths somewhere outside of China, that may or may not have any importance at all—depending on what it is.

All that sounds like we need a lot of new information that would be hard to track down, but actually that’s not true.  There is an excellent, widely-available report from an unbiased source that goes right down the line on everything you would like to know.  And the answer is that there is nothing we are doing that is going to change China’s leverage any time soon (measured in years of course).  And that’s the news about rare earths. 

Wrong-headed is a different issue.  The important thing to realize is that the rare earth problem is NOT one-of-a-kind.  The rare earth problem is what happens when you don’t plan ahead for what the world is going to look like in the future.  There are two changes that made this problem happen:

  • The technology environment changed, so that suddenly these elements went from exotic to strategic.
  • The political environment changed to one of economic war with everyone, so that the US suddenly has to become economically independent of everyone whose arms it can’t twist. There is a strategic question with China, but we forced this issue by declaring war.

The impact of item one is only going to get worse.  Trump is preoccupied with the past (e.g. the 1950’s) not the future, so all kinds of necessary technologies won’t be here. He has done all he can to kill funding for future-oriented research at NIH and universities.  His climate denial has ceded leadership in all the (many) sustainable energy technologies to China.  His anti-trust policies favor existing large companies over new entrants.  He even told the troops on the aircraft carrier he visited that they should be happy it still used steam pressure to launch planes instead of the newer electronic system on the (single) new Chinese carrier.  We can count on being behind the eight-ball for the foreseeable future, and it’s going to be hard to reassemble the infrastructure to catch up.

On item two we have only begun to appreciate what it means to be at economic war with everyone.  We’re still in an environment where the US has many historical mutually-advantageous relationships with partners.  We benefit as participants in a common enterprise.  All such partners now find they are under attack.  Trump relies upon factors such as NATO membership and US market size to coerce other countries to do his bidding.  Neither form of coercion is permanent, as everyone can see that even Canada is under attack.  Resources and support come into question.  Whether we like it or not, allies are important.  And that’s not just a military matter.  It’s a basis of our economic strength and our standard of living.

Rare earths are no one-of-a-kind deal.  They’re a bellwether for our future.  

Towards a Constitution

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To continue the subject of the Constitution, it seems that the problems we face are more fundamental than we would like to think.

I want to begin by going back to the post-World War II America of my childhood.  At that time we were proud of our Constitution precisely because of the way in which it was able to adapt to new eras that could not have been imagined when it was written.  We were privileged to have a Constitution that was most fundamentally a statement of principles that could guide us on into the future—whatever that might be.

We now see that whole story was a myth.  The only way that the Constitution could play such a role was that in those days the country was largely unified in outlook.  Putting aside the anti-communist hysteria, the country was in a humanistic mood coming out of both the Depression and World War II, and we looked at the Constitution in that way. Also the history of the Constitution fit that mold—written by people who created a democracy by defeating a tyrant.  So the meaning of the Constitution was our shared idea of what the humanistic founding fathers would say about the problems of today.

We now understand that there is no solid legality behind any of that.  Nothing in the Constitution guarantees that interpretation, and the document can be interpreted in wildly different ways—both honestly and dishonestly—by different readers. (That’s not just a matter of “strict interpretation,” which in practice means getting rid of what you don’t like, with no constraint on what you do!)  From a practical point of view it’s hard to say how much of the Constitution exists at all—its meaning is entirely determined by the Supreme Court, and they don’t even have to say how they reach their conclusions. If a President can break the law in the exercise of his office do we still have rule of law?  Do we really have a Constitution?  What exactly do we need to do to get one that works?

As it turns out, two recent books help drive those problems home.  Steven Pinker’s latest “When Everyone Knows What Everyone Knows” talks about the whole notion of common knowledge—what gave us the Constitution of my childhood—as a kind of distributed process independent of its norms.  That’s no way for today’s internet-fragmented society to produce a basis for law.  The second was Jill Lepore’: ‘s “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution”.  In passing she notes that the Reconstruction civil rights amendments—numbers 13, 14, and 15—were interpreted out of existence by the Supreme Court for fully fifty years after passage!  It seems words on paper have never been enough.

So the Constitution is a large, serious problem area.  Somehow we have to fix the Supreme Court, determine what level of specificity we need for an enforceable Constitution, and deal with at least some of the other problem areas from our previous note.  That leads to a rather different relationship to the Constitution than we have today.  Instead of trumpeting our Constitution as a world-unique miracle, we’re going to need to turn pragmatic, to understand what the experience has been with constitutions worldwide. And somehow or other we’ll need to find a process to fix it without losing what we’ve got.

There is a lot that is good about the Constitution. In today’s world we’re more conscious of that than ever. But despite our past dreams it can’t defend or update itself.  That, today, is a problem for everyone.

Mathematics and Politics

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It strikes me that there is something to be said about mathematics and politics that goes beyond just numbers.  Mathematics, because it is a logical system, guards against some kinds of sloppy thinking that can get in the way or be exploited in propaganda.  Here are a few examples.

  1. Not every function is bounded or even linear.

I’m starting here because it came up in a previous discussion of climate change. Damage from climate change is not bounded or even linear.  The world just gets that much farther from what human civilization was built to deal with.

Destruction from climate change increases exponentially with the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  As noted there is no such thing as a “new normal” or even a price limit for the damage done by a ton of CO2.   So there is no alternative to preemptive action, hard as that is for any society to achieve.

2. Negative numbers are just as real as positive ones.

In our national budgets positive expenditure are discussed in terms of things bought:  for infrastructure, education, healthcare, safety net.  Deficits are abstractions: possible effects on the financing costs for the national debt for example.  In fact deficits are negatives of things bought—things not bought.  They have to be evaluated by tradeoff of what that money was spent on versus what now isn’t going to be bought—for infrastructure, education, healthcare, safety net.

3. You can’t understand a function of two variables without looking at values for both.

It may seem obvious, but it is still worth stating: if you have a function of two variables, you can’t understand anything by looking at variation in one.  Performance of Trump’s golden dome depends on how well the new defense handles the offense coming at it.  We already had a much-touted proposal like that under Reagan—his Star Wars.  That was an expensive program that sounded great and went absolutely nowhere—no successful tests even of highly-simplified versions!

We’re told the time has come to build another one, because defensive capabilities have increased so much that it’s time to finish Reagan’s job.  To my knowledge, no one has said a single word about what has changed with the offense.

4. You have to be able to learn from applicable results in different contexts.

This may seem abstract, but some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been made by recognizing that results in one area can be brought to bear on seemingly different classes of problems.  Life is like that, just generally.  You have to understand how things work, so you can apply what you know to new problems.

What have we as humans learned about how a society should function?  Most of all that chaos is a bad thing.  If we are going to live together successfully, we need rules of behavior and at least mutual tolerance.  There is also some notion of caring for the weak as an essential part of social cohesion.  That is built into essentially all successful cultures and all religions, because chaos is unstable, exhausting, and dangerous. It also undermines the stability needed for economic growth and prosperity.

For international relations we have nonetheless chosen to ignore that experience, on the grounds that of course we are going to win, rule the world, and steal everything of value from everyone else. That’s not new as motivation, but it is precisely the mentality that our species has learned is self-destructive.  Christianity has a few apt quotes:  “As a man sows so shall he reap” or more to the point “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”.

 In a age of proliferating nuclear weapons and accelerating climate change, that’s not something you want to think about too much.

5. There is one more relevant point:  not all functions are continuous.

It is natural to believe in continuity, that the features of one’s current life are somehow normal and can be relied upon.  That is felt as reality, not complacency.

But history has shown over and over again that there are no guarantees.  It’s all up to us.

Nuclear Proliferation Needs Its Own Story

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From a comment to the Washington Post:

There is one effect of Trump’s destruction of the international order that hasn’t received enough notice—nuclear proliferation. Every country—even Canada—now has to think seriously about nuclear weapons for defense. Otherwise they are sitting ducks for conquest.

Any kind of nuclear non-proliferation agreement is out the window. This is terrible. It not only increases the risk of use by national actors, it greatly increases the risk of theft for terrorism.

In our greed for conquest we are inviting catastrophe.

The Riots in Britain are a Lesson

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(from a NY Times article comment)

Post-Brexit Britain is a cautionary tale for the US: Britain is a nation whose bad choices made it dramatically weaker and poorer based on lies and rosy-colored dreams of past glory. Under such circumstances it not surprising that people will grasp for scapegoats. The British far right certainly has every incentive to whip up its supporters and try to sidestep blame.

I want to say more about the parallels to Brexit. Trump is proposing a US behind trade barriers and totally self-sufficient in its imperial power—just like the good old days. Kick out the foreigners and we don’t need anyone else. But we can’t be a world power out of selling over-priced cheap stuff to one another. We are a world power because of what we represent at a world scale. Our standard of living and our military power are both based on economic and technological power at world scale. Trump’s isolationism is retreat.

That’s not to say people don’t get hurt by foreign competition (or other changes), but we can’t fix those problems by running away from them. Taking care of people is the real job to do. Hiding behind nativism and xenophobia is Brexit, and just like Brexit it will leave its enthusiastic supporters worse off than ever. And ready, as in Britain, to jump on the next scapegoat bandwagon.

About Geopolitics

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As point of departure it’s worth asking a simple question: why after the second world war did the United States emerge as dominant, with the major powers of Europe clearly reduced to playing second fiddle? The answer is straightforward: even after recovery from the war the economic and military power represented by the US dwarfed anything that a single European could marshall. (In that it’s worth recognizing the tight coupling between economic and military power.)

So where are we today? If we compare the US to China, we’re close to being superceded as a production powerhouse and we’re certainly well-behind in population and market size (an issue for training of AI systems or for migration to electric cars). Does that mean we’re on the way out?

The answer is in how to think about it. Our economic and military unit is the US plus our allies in Europe and Asia, with an overall population and market size comparable to or greater than China’s. Like it or not they are all us. It’s important to recognize that our economic and military relationships are not benevolence–they exist to serve us. NATO in particular exists, because after World War II and still today the European allies are our first line of defense against the power of Russia. And it’s not just NATO.

The dimensions of power have changed, so that in the world of today we can’t think just domestically. At the end of the second world war, even enemies like France and Germany recognized that in the new world they had no choice but to learn to get along. We similarly need to go farther in defining bonds of cooperation. In that sense even Brexit is less important than establishing the dimensions of cooperation within the entire alliance.

In today’s world chest-beating xenophobia is suicidal (this recent article has some interesting examples of counter-productive domestic monopolies). High tariff walls translate to non-competitive industries with technology obsolescence and ultimately a lower standard of living and military weakness. Internationalism is necessary and in two distinct pieces. The working relationships with our allies are as important to get right as the working relationships between the states of the US. While those relationships are weaker, they count for market size, technology, and military power. Beyond that, relations are tougher, but there are some areas–peace, climate change, control of nuclear weapons–where it just has to happen. Ignoring those challenges is also suicidal.

Despite the messiness of everyday news we don’t necessarily live in bad or discouraging times. We just need to recognize our strengths and what it takes to leverage them. And the overriding common interest we all have in a single interrelated world.