Too Much Heaven: A Brief Look Back at 1979

With the new year starting, it is now forty years since 1979. Forty of course is a biblical number, which is fitting because 1979 was a year in which religious belief became decisively political. Some of these events are still well remembered – Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, the Camp David Accords between Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat, and Menachem Begin. Other key events however are often forgotten, so that 1979 does not usually get the acknowledgment it deserves as being a year of unmatched religious and political action.

The year began with the full resumption of diplomatic relations between the US and China, on New Year’s Day, ending three decades of formal estrangement between the two countries. This was followed by Deng Xiaoping visiting the White House at the end of the month, the first time a Communist leader of China had ever done so.

This new relationship had an immediate political impact when, on January 7^th, the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia fell to the invading Communist Vietnamese. Five weeks after that, China invaded Vietnam, launching a short but brutal war against Vietnamese forces that had been fighting the US only six years earlier.

While the political importance of China and America re-establishing their alliance is obvious, its religious significance tends to be overlooked. It has, however, helped lead to one of the largest increases in any religion in recent history: the adoption of Christianity by many tens of millions of Chinese since the 1970s. In 1979 China’s Three-Self Patriotic Movement church was legalized by the Chinese government. It and many other much smaller churches have been so successful in the decades since that today China and America have probably the two largest Protestant populations in the world. China’s overall Christian population is difficult to estimate, but 100 million is a common guess.

Of course, it was in the Middle East where the biggest religious and political upheaval in 1979 took place. In Iran, the Ayatollah came to power on February 11^th, the Shah having fled to Egypt three weeks earlier. In a foreshadowing of events that would come at the end of the year, on February 14^ththe US ambassador was kidnapped and killed in Kabul, while on the same day Iranian militants temporarily took control of the US embassy in Tehran, kidnapping a Marine there.

But what goes down also goes up. On March 26, the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty was signed. This was an event of great significance, considering that the two countries had fought four wars against one another in the preceding three decades, yet have not fought a single war against one another in the four decades since. Israel returned the Sinai Desert to Egypt as part of the deal, while Egypt became the first Arab state to recognize Israel.

The month ended on a less peaceful note in a different arena of religious and political conflict: Britain. On March 30 Airey Neave, the Tory party’s Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, was assassinated outside of the British Parliament by a car bomb planted by Irish militants. The assassination took place just two days after a no confidence vote had brought down a Labour government; Margaret Thatcher was elected Britain’s first female PM a month later.

This assassination would be followed by an even larger attack later in the year. On August 27[1], the Provisional Irish Republican Army killed eighteen British soldiers with two roadside bombs in Northern Ireland, while on the same day killing Lord Mountbatten (an uncle of Prince Phillip, who had formerly been head of the Royal Navy, head of the Armed Forces, and Viceroy of India), his grandson, and two others by planting a bomb on his boat[2].

A month later, Ireland would host its own biggest religious event in decades, when the Pope visited the island. The Pope was welcomed by a crowd estimated to include 2.7 million people, nearly the entire population of the Republic of Ireland[3].

This however was not the Pope’s most important trip abroad in 1979, nor the one to attract the largest crowds. John Paul II, who had only become Pope at the end of 1978, was the first non-Italian Pope in 450 years. He was, even more importantly, Polish, at a time when Poland was the largest country in the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. The Pope’s visit to Poland in June of 1979, often referred to as the nine days that changed the world, was the first trip by a Pope to a Communist country. It played a substantial role in the rise of the Polish Solidarity movement, and so in turn arguably helped end the Cold War.

The Pope’s influence also attracted enemies. When, at the end of 1979, the Pope was visiting Turkey, a man named Mehmet Ali Agca, who was then beginning a life sentence in prison for killing the editor of a Turkish newspaper earlier that year, escaped from jail and fled to Bulgaria. Two years later, Agca would shoot the Pope in St. Peter’s Square. Given Bulgaria’s position in the Warsaw Pact, many people speculate that the Soviet Union was behind this attack in some way[4].

Acga would later claim that a reason for the shooting was that the Pope had orchestrated the siege of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, a siege which was taking place when Acga made his jail break in November of 1979. This siege, which lasted for two weeks at the holiest site in Islam, involved tens of thousands of hostages[5], several hundred gunmen, and one false messiah. It took place on the first day of the new millennium of the Islamic calendar (1400 A.H.), during the annual Hajj pilgrimage. Saudi forces finally ended the siege after a number of failed attempts and hundreds of deaths, by secretly enlisting the help of France, which sent three of its Special Forces soldiers to Mecca. They quickly converted to Islam in order to enter the holy city, then used gas to sedate the gunmen, who by then had taken refuge in the catacombs beneath the Mosque.

The siege arguably had a major impact on Saudi culture and foreign policy, and a direct legacy in future events such as the emergence of Al Qaeda. It is a sad, fascinating story worth reading about, one that is often forgotten due to a Saudi media blackout and the 444-day Iranian hostage crisis, which had begun several weeks earlier and was consuming much of America’s attention.

At the time, the siege had a number of immediate consequences, owing partly to confusion as to who had orchestrated it. As we have already seen, Acga claimed the Pope was involved. Many others believed the US was behind the siege. This resulted in the destruction of US embassies by mobs in Libya and Pakistan on December 3. Others believed Shia revolutionaries in Iran were behind it. This led to an uprising in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where the country’s Shia minority population lives and most Saudi oil is located. People there had been attempting to celebrate Ashura on November 25, a major Shia holiday prohibited in Saudi Arabia.

Shia-Sunni political relationships were also deteriorating elsewhere in the Middle East in 1979, part of a process that helped lead to the most deadly war in the recent history of the region, the Iran-Iraq War, the following year. At the start of the year Iraq and Syria had been discussing the possibility of unifying their armed forces and merging into a single state[6], to counter Egypt’s new relationship with the US and Israel. The Shia Islamic revolution in Iran however created the possibility of a closer relationship between Iran and Syria. Syria’s government, led by Hafez al- Assad and the country’s minority Allawite (a branch of Shia Islam, sort of) elite, was at the time fighting Sunni groups such as the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Syria also had interests in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990)[7], a religious sectarian war in which Shia forces – a few years later emerging as the Party of God, Hezzbolah – were being energized by the Iranian revolution as well as by Israel’s invasion and subsequent withdrawal from Shia-inhabited South Lebanon in 1978.

In Iraq the reverse situation existed. The Iranian revolution frightened Iraq’s Sunni elite, in part because a majority of Iraq’s population were disenfranchised Shia. This may have led Saddam Hussein, then vice president of Iraq, to overthrow his elder cousin Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, the president, on July 16, 1979. A week later Saddam carried out a public purge of Iraqi politicians, claiming they had been plotting with Syria to overthrow the government of Iraq. The following April, he ordered the execution of Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al Sadr (whose son-in-law, the cleric Muqtada al Sadr, is today arguably the most influential politician in Iraq), along with al Sadr’s sister Amina, before beginning an eight-year war against the ayatollahs in Iran in the fall.

The year ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve[8]. This was followed two days later by the Soviets killing their former ally, Communist Afghan President Hafizulla Amin[9]. US president Jimmy Carter then signed the order for the CIA to provide lethal aid to the Afghan mujahedeen. Most of this aid was facilitated by the Pakistani regime of Zia ul Haq, who came to power in a coup at the end of 1978 and would, more than any other figure, be responsible for transforming the Pakistani state from secular to theocratic. The decade-long resistance of the mujahedeen against the Soviets and their allies would result in the deaths of perhaps a million people.

Thus it can be seen that 1979 was also a turning point in the extremely violent Cold War. From a time of “national malaise” in the US (to reference the famous speech by Carter that year[10]), which was dealing with an energy crisis, a hostage crisis, and recent memories of Vietnam[11], 1979 would set in motion forces that would lead to a US victory in the Cold War ten years later. But then, it would also lead the US to its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at the start of another new millennium.

Ultimately, 1979 was significant not only because of its mix of religion and politics, a mix which obviously was not new at the time and has not gone away since. It was also important because the events of that year helped to shape the views of a generation of people who, today having reached their fifties, sixties, or seventies, can now shape events themselves[12]. Perhaps this has contributed to the fact that American relationships with Iran and Russia remain hostile just like they were in 1979, while American relationships with countries like China, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt remain cooperative just like they were in 1979. True, there are signs that some of these relationships may be beginning to change. But for today at least, 1979 remains a guide worth remembering.

Notes:

[1]This attack took place just as a public debate over whether or not it was appropriate to satirize religion was taking place in Britain, as only ten days earlier the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian had first been released. The movie was banned in the Republic of Ireland until 1987.

[2]Another prominent figure assassinated in 1979 was Park Chung-hee, who had been the president of South Korea since 1963, first coming to power in a military coup in 1961. He was shot by his close friend, the head of Korea’s CIA. Park’s daughter was recently president from 2013-2017, but was then impeached.

[3]Two weeks before the Pope’s visit, Ireland passed the Health Act, which legalized the selling of contraception for the purposes of family planning. China then said I’ll raise you one better, launching, in effect, mandatory contraception: 1979 was the year the one-child policy was born.

[4]Actually, Agca himself later claimed the KGB was involved. But he has a track record of making untrue, self-aggrandizing statements, so this does not prove anything.

[5]Most of whom were released at the beginning of the siege. There were an estimated 50,000 pilgrims in the Mosque to begin with, but only a relatively small percentage of them were kept hostage during the siege’s two-week duration.

[6]Like Syria and Egypt had done from 1958 to 1961.

[7]Another arena of political conflict, Cold War rivalry, and religious activity was Central America, where wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua were taking place around this time. A key event in El Salvador’s civil war (1980-1992) was the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, which took place while he was at mass in March of 1980, a day after he had publicly asked Salvadoran soldiers not to carry out orders to kill civilians.

[8]Though not in Orthodox countries like Russia, where Christmas is on January 7.

[9]He was not the only Amin to be ousted from power in 1979. Uganda’s Idi Amin (no relation) was removed too, by an invading Tanzanian army.

[10]Though Carter never actually used the word malaise in the “malaise speech”.

[11]At the 1979 Academy Awards, The Deer Hunter won Best Picture while Jon Voight and Jane Fonda won Best Actor and Best Actress for Coming Home. Both were films about Vietnam.

[12]In 1979, Donald Trump started building Trump Tower. Bill Clinton was elected governor of Arkansas at the age of 31. An 18-year-old Barack Obama moved to the US mainland to attend a liberal arts college in Los Angeles. Xi Jinping finished his degree in chemical engineering, as a “Worker-Peasant-Soldier student” in Beijing. Angela Merkel too was becoming a chemist in a Communist state, having finished her physics degree at the end of 1978 in Berlin. Shinzo Abe finished his degree at the University of Southern California. Narendra Modi graduated from the University of Delhi in 1978 and began working for the Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization, the RSS, in 1979. Theresa May graduated from Oxford in 1977; Jeremy Corbyn entered politics as local councillor in 1979. Bibi Netanyahu and Mitt Romney were coworkers and friends at the Boston Consulting Group.

2 Radical Goalie-Pulling Strategies

In recent years there has been an evolution in the way NHL coaches pull their goalies. Goalies are now being pulled much earlier in games than they used to be. There has been no revolutionary change, however. Goalies are still being pulled at the very end of games. Once pulled, they tend to stay pulled until a goal is scored or there is a face-off outside of the offensive zone.

This begs the question of whether any radical change to the strategy of goalie-pulling could still be worth trying. Here are two such ideas:

Pull earlier than usual in order to take advantage of exhausted opponents stuck on a very long shift

The risk/reward ratio of pulling a goalie might be far more favourable when an opposing team’s players are exhausted from being stuck on the ice in the middle of an especially long shift.

There are five reasons this may be the case:

First, the ability of players to score into an empty net will decrease when they are exhausted.

Second, you greatly reduce the risk that, immediately upon pulling your goalie, the opposing team will manage to clear the puck out of their zone before your extra attacker is even able to get himself involved in the game.

Third, the ability of tired players to reach the bench for a line change will decrease when the opposing team pulls its goalie. Typically, players that are exhausted by a long shift are able to escape to the bench either by having their goalie stop play or by getting a lucky bounce off of a missed shot, blocked shot, errant pass, or rebound, which then allows them to clear the puck out of their zone and complete a line change. When playing 5-on-6, however, the likelihood of a goalie being able to force a stoppage of play by making a save decreases, because the goalie’s vision is more likely to be obstructed and the shots that the goalie faces are likely to be harder to save. The likelihood of getting a lucky bounce also decreases, as there is less open ice and there is less likely to be a blocked or missed shot. Plus, even if there is a lucky bounce, it will still be difficult for tired players to clear the zone against six attackers. As such, the tired team may be unable to change lines, and so become even more tired, making the situation even more favourable for the trailing team. And, even if the tired team’s goalie does succeed in stopping play, the trailing team could simply choose to put its goalie back in net for the ensuing face-off.

Fourth, the willingness of players to even attempt to score an empty net goal will decrease the more tired they become. The reason for this is that if such a scoring attempt fails, it will most likely result either in an icing (which will lead to an even greater tiredness imbalance between the two teams, especially now that there has been a rule change that prevents coaches from using their timeout after an icing) or in an odd-man rush (because tired players will be much less able to get back on defence). As a result, rather than try to score, the tired team may instead focus on trying to get a line change in. During any such line change, the trailing team will usually be able to put its goalie back in if it wants to do so.

And fifth, pulling you goalie can allow you to bring your own best offensive player fresh off the bench, at a time when your own players already on the ice are likely to be somewhat tired themselves.

As a result of these factors, I suspect that it would sometimes be in a team’s interest to pull its goalie earlier than it normally would, in order to capitalize on situations in which the opposing players are exhausted from being stuck on an especially long shift. The question is: how much earlier?

A related question is this: how many goal behind does your team need to be to make such a strategy worth trying at a given point during the second period? Most of the opportunities to score against tired opponents stuck on a long shift occur in the second period, because of the long change.

2. A “5.5-on-3”: introducing a goalie-defensemen hybrid during a desperate two-man advantage

Most 5-on-3 power plays last much less than two minutes long, and on average the odds of a team scoring on a 5-on-3 only become better than the odds of scoring on a typical 2 minute 5-on-4 in cases where the 5-on-3 lasts at least a minute long.

So, not wasting time is crucial. If the penalty killers can kill time by dumping the puck down the ice, or if the power play wastes too much time trying to get the perfect shot (which they often do, as they know that if they do not get a perfect shot, the penalty killers might grab the rebound and dump it down the ice), then that 5-on-3 will be unlikely to score.

In this strategy, then, the goalie on the power play is pulled near the end of the 5-on-3, and replaced with a “safety”: a player who stays near to his or her own empty net in order to protect against long empty net goals, quickly respond to any dumped puck so as to minimize the amount of time the opposing team can waste, and allow his or her own team to avoid wasting time searching for the perfect scoring attempt. This “safety” specialist should excel at being able to serve, in effect, as a player-goalie hybrid.

As an added bonus, by quickly responding to pucks that are dumped or chipped out of the offensive zone, the safety will also make it more difficult for the penalty killers to change lines, which may lead the penalty killers to become fatigued in cases where they have been on the ice for a long time.

The goalie will be put back in the net before the 5-on-3 comes to an end.

In cases where the team is more desperate to score (if they are trailing late in the third period, for example), then this “5.5-on-3” strategy could also be used earlier in the power play.

A Hybrid Strategy

There might also a be a useful hybrid of the two strategies above: A “5.5-on-4”, used in desperate situations against exhausted penalty killers.

Imagine, for example, that your team is trailing by a goal with five minutes left in the game, and is a minute into a power play in which the opposing team’s penalty killers are becoming tired. Ideally, you want to prevent these tired penalty killers from being able to make it to the bench for a line change. By putting in an extra “safety” attacker at this point, but positioning him in the neutral zone, you might be able to help prevent the tired penalty killers from being able to change lines, while still preventing the tired penalty killers from having an easy shot at an empty net.

Plus, having the extra attacker already on the ice means that you could have the option of having him quickly move up into the offensive zone for a conventional 6 on 4 or (once the penalty ends) 6 on 5, as the clock ticks away and your team’s desperation increases. So, for example, you could try a 5.5 on 4 with a minute left in the power play against tired penalty killers, then a 6 on 4 with thirty seconds left in the power play against exhausted penalty killers, then either put your goalie back in or keep the extra attacker on for a 6 on 5 (which, if the exhausted ex-penalty killers are still stuck on the ice, could be useful even if there are still a few minutes left in the game).

…Yes, I realize how crazy that just sounded.

South America

Argentina in 2019

A version of this article was originally published on Rosa & Roubini Associates

When Argentina’s president Mauricio Macri was elected at the end of 2015, investors rejoiced to see the end of the two Kircheners, Nestor (president from 2003-2007) and Cristina (president from 2007-2015). Argentina’s stock market boom, which began in 2013 but faltered just prior to the 2015 election, then continued until this past February. By the start of 2018, Argentina’s stock market had risen tenfold in value in only five years.

Macri had poor timing, however. Just as he was coming into office, commodity prices were falling worldwide. Crude oil prices had been over 110$ a little over a year before he was elected; they fell below 30$ during his first month in office. Soybean prices experienced a similar decline, albeit less sharp of one. This has been painful for Argentina, which is a significant commodity exporter and the world’s largest soy exporter apart from the US or Brazil.

Food exports account for an estimated 62% of Argentina’s total merchandise exports. To put that into perspective, the next highest “food exports as a % of merchandise exports” figure among major economies is Brazil’s, at 32%, followed by Spain at just 16%. Food prices may not have caused the current peso crash — that has been the result of a mix of factors, including the fact that Argentina holds a large amount of USD-denominated debt at a time when the value of the USD is rising. But food prices (and drought) have played a part as well.

The irony, however, is that while Argentina is now struggling as much as almost any country, even having to go back to the IMF which Argentininans have such distaste for, the country is actually uniquely well-suited to facing two of the major, global trends that most pundits and many economists think are likely to occur: rising interest rates and rising tariffs.

The case of tariffs is fairly obvious: Argentina’s exports are equal to only an estimated 11 % of its GDP, lower than any major economy (only the US, Japan, and Brazil even come close). Very few of these exports are to the US. Indeed, Argentina may to an extent even benefit as the US raises tariffs, since doing so leads countries to retaliate by placing tariffs on American food exports that compete directly with Argentinan food exports.

The case of interest rates could similarly benefit Argentina by hurting its competitors’ food exports — in this case, those of Paraguay, Bolivia, and especially Brazil — while leaving its own economy relatively unscathed. Argentina can withstand higher interest rates because it is not a capital-intensive economy; neither in its agricultural sector nor in its non-agricultural sectors. Argentina has low food production costs because its farmland is fertile and has access to ports via navigable rivers. In Brazil, in contrast, farming requires capital-intensive techniques to coax harvests out of acidic, nutrient-poor soils. Those harvests must then be trucked across Brazil’s mountains to reach the sea.

Argentina’s general economy is also not capital-intensive, owing to characteristics particular to its population. To begin with, it s in that goldilocks position of having relatively few elderly citizens or children that require expensively taking care of. It is, moreover, almost wholly urban. 92% of Argentinians live in cities, higher than in any major country apart from Japan or the Netherlands. This can create efficiencies, especially as it is a uniquely concentrated urban population: 38% lives in Buenos Aires. No other major economy surpasses this: the next highest is Tokyo, at 32% of Japan’s total urban population, followed by Paris at 21% of France’s total urban population. With such a large, working-age population, Buenos Aires could be a true economy of scale.

A concievable scenario for Argentina is that rising interest rates will limit soybean and other food production in countries like Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia, while at the same time rising tariffs will limit US soybean and other commodity exports. Both will boost Argentina’s export revenues, even as Argentina itself is not hurt very much by rising tariffs or interest rates. If this occurs, Argentina may become a darling of investors yet again.

North America, South America

RoRoRo Your Car

By far the biggest advantage that a large truck has over a small truck is that a large truck has lower labour costs, per unit of cargo transported. Self-driving technologies that reduce or eliminate labour costs may therefore lead to an increased use of smaller trucks.

This could be particularly likely to occur in areas that have rugged terrain, where labour costs tend to be especially high as a result of slower driving speeds and higher insurance costs.

Small vehicles are also better at handling rugged terrain than large vehicles are. They can make sharper turns, have better control on narrow lanes, can pass through narrower tunnels or overhangs, and can manage steeper inclines.

Indeed, the biggest beneficiaries of automation might be the smallest roads of all: mountain paths that can today only be used by very small vehicles or pack animals. Very small autonomous vehicles could revolutionize transport on such paths not only by eliminating the need to pay drivers’ wages and insurance, but also by gaining more space to carry cargo as a result of no longer needing space for the driver, the steering wheel, and spare tires. These vehicles could be used to facilitate shortcut routes that pass through rugged terrain, or to open up rugged terrain to increased economic activity.

The use of small autonomous vehicles in rugged terrain might also allow for the introduction of another new technology : roll-on, roll-off ropeways. These would be ropeways that small autonomous vehicles would drive on and off of, or clip on and off of, in order to be carried above natural barriers such as steep inclines, rivers, flash-flooded roads, or snowed-in high-altitude mountain paths.

They could be especially efficient at handling inclines, not only by allowing direct as-the-crow-flies routes to replace winding, hairpin roads, but also because ropeways operate as a pulley system wherein the weight of descending vehicles does much of the work — and often does all of the work — of lifting the weight of the ascending vehicles.

Here you can see a very primitive RoRo-Ropeway at work. Here, you can see a somewhat less primitive, though still limited, version built in a Volkswagon factory in Slovakia. If automation leads to a proliferation of small autonomous cars, working ant-like to transport goods in rugged terrain, then perhaps we will see systems like these increase and improve. Economically, it may be as close as we get to flying cars anytime soon.

North America, South America

Superhighway in a Box

Roads and railways are great, but they are not portable, scalable, or particularly well suited to ideally handling rugged terrain. You cannot easily disassemble a road or railway in order to move it from location to another. You cannot easily drive trucks or trains up and down steep hills, or across icy or snowy or flooded-out landscapes. And, you cannot widen a road or railway very much without facing sharp increases in expense. The wider you build them, the more likely they are to find a natural or man-made barrier in their way. The widest stretches of highway in the world rarely exceed 150 metres.

Ropeways, in contrast to roads or railways, are portable, are scalable, and are ideally capable of handling rugged terrain. You can fairly easily disassemble and transport them. You can scale them horizontally or vertically. Ropeway corridors could be made extremely wide without being blocked by natural barriers. So long as they are portable and temporary, wide ropeway corridors might also be able to avoid unduly bothering the owners of the private farmland they would inevitably need to cross above at times.

Their potential combination of portability and scale could make ropeway corridors useful for transporting bulk, time-dependent goods: for transporting crops at harvest time, or transporting cargo during the rainy season when roads are flooded out, or in snowy areas during the winter, or to help construct and access mines or dams.

There are a number of factors that could make ropeway corridors become common in the future:

cheaper intermodal transportation as a result of autonomous cargo transferring. Thus far, the costs associated with transferring cargo from one mode of transport to another have led trucks to account for an estimated 70% of all US cargo transport, despite trucks being generally much less efficient than railways or waterways. If loading, unloading, and handling cargo becomes automated, we might expect that railways, waterways, and perhaps even ropeways will become used more widely as a result
automating cargo-handling also means that ropeways would be able to add many more entrance and exit points than they have had in the past. Loading cargo on and off ropeways is especially labour-intensive, because the cargo arrives and departs at a slow trickle, each vehicle on the ropeway carrying much less than a truck or train. This has meant that ropeways have tended to move goods only from point A to point B, without many or any intermediate stations. Autonomous cargo-handling could change this, dramatically increasing the usefulness of the ropeway system
cargo tracking systems — ropeways are slow, which in the past created uncertainties for those waiting for the goods they are bringing. With today’s cheap GPS tracking systems and software that can estimate arrival times (and adjust those estimations when there are unexpected delays of one sort or another), these uncertainties are reduced
partially-autonomous maintenance: some of the technologies now being deployed or developed for maintaining vast electric grid systems should be applicable for ropeways as well. These include, for example, sensors and computer systems that monitor the entire length of the system in real-time, and drones that can be used as cameras to make inspections
in some cases passenger cable cars might be able to share the same ropeway as cargo systems – perhaps with passengers being transported during the daytime and cargo transported overnight. Ropeways might also benefit, therefore, from technologies that facilitate intermodal passenger transportation: for example car-sharing, ride-sharing,autonomous valet parking, and other technologies might make it easy for a passenger to drive to a cable-car’s entrance and then get in a different car at the cable-car’s exit.

East Asia

The Birthplaces of China’s Leadership

In democratic countries, political analysts often try to sniff out any regional divisions that exist within a given country by looking at the voting patterns of that country’s electorate. In Italy’s recent election, for instance, it has been thought to be significant that Italians living in northern Italy tended to vote centre/right (including for the Northern League), whereas in southern Italy people tended to vote for the Five Star Movement.

In countries like the People’s Republic of China, however, where no such elections are held, different factors may be looked at instead, in order to gauge the level of regionalism that might exist.

One interesting thing to note here is that almost none of modern China’s top politicians were born in peripherally located areas in the country’s southeast, southwest, northwest, or northeast. The only province in southeast or southwest China to have produced a somewhat notable number of Politburo members is Fujian, a relatively small province where Xi Jinping served 17 years of his career, which is important to China in part because it shares unique social and linguistic connections with the nearby island of Taiwan.

The chart above shows, by birth-province, the number of members in the politburo, politburo standing committee, party secretariat, central military commission, provincial party secretary, or previous politburo standing committee members going back to 1990, adjusted to take into account the varying population sizes of each province. Apart from Fujian and Qinghai (which ranks high on this list only because it has such a tiny population, by China’s standards), all of the provinces at the top of this list are in the north or central coastal regions.

China’s most populous province, Guangdong, has had no leaders on this list. As of 2017, Guangdong may have also broken a thirty year tradition by having its provincial governor not be a native of the province. It is now one of the few provinces not to have a native-born governor.

china standing committee birthplaces.png

Birthplaces of China’s new Politburo Standing Committee

In this picture above, we see the birthplaces of China’s current top leadership, the members of the Standing Committee. Here we also see the one big exception, Qinghai-born Zhao Leji. Zhao’s career is noteworthy. Zhao served as party chief of Qinghai, breaking the unwritten rule that a person should never be party chief in their birth-province. Zhao was later party chief in Shaanxi, where his parents were from; this too broke an unwritten rule, that a person should not be party chief in their “native” province. Now, Zhao has not only reached the Standing Committee, but has taken over Wang Qishan’s anti-corruption job, a critical position. Some have argued that Zhao has been able to rise in this way mainly because Xi Jinping’s family is also from Shaanxi.

A chart of the birthplaces, by province, of Chinese members of the Politburo, the Politburo Standing Committee, the Central Military Commission, the Communist Party secretariat, provincial party secretaries, provincial governors, or past politburo standing committees going back all the way to about 1990, not adjusted for provincial population sizes. — Correction: Yunnan, the largest southwestern province (unless you count Sichuan as southwestern too), I left off this list by accident. It would have been at the bottom of the list, just above Hainan

Here’s a map of the birth-provinces of the current 25-member Politburo Central Committee (which includes within it the 7 members of the higher-ranked Standing Committee):

And here, finally, is a map of the birth-provinces of the current provincial party chiefs:

North America

An Electric Car-Bike Lane Plan, for Cities like Toronto

Many Conservatives disparage electric cars and bike lanes, while many Liberals fetishize electric cars and bike lanes. The correct approach lies between: some bike lanes and some electric cars are good. Others are not.

For bike lanes, geography can be decisive. Cities like Amsterdam—which is almost entirely flat, and which has no months in which average daily highs exceed 22 degrees celsius or fall below 6 degrees celsius—are ideal for cycling. But most cities are much hillier, hotter, and colder than that. These cities need bike lanes too, but not the same type of bike lane system that Amsterdam has.

For electric cars, size and speed can be decisive. The electric cars currently being marketed to us—the Tesla S, the Nissan Leaf, etc. — are actually far too big and fast to be environmentally or economically efficient. Their batteries expend a lot of pollution during their production, do not provide enough range before needing to be either charged or swapped-out (plus, slow-charging stations, fast-charging stations, and/or battery-swapping stations are all problematic, for various environmental or economic reasons) and are too heavy and bulky to come even close to being ideal.

This is a shame, since electric vehicles in general can be more efficient and eco-friendly than gasoline-fueled vehicles. This is (among other reasons) because they do not contribute to local air pollution, and because they receive their power from power plants, which can be several times more energy-efficient than internal combustion engines and can use energy sources other than fossil fuels.

Electric cars that are much lighter and/or slower than, for example, the Nissan Leaf do not face the same significant battery limitations that electric cars like the Leaf face. If, hypothetically, we all were to decide to buy cars that are closer in their size and speed to golf carts rather than to today’s style of North American automobile, urban areas would very likely experience a substantial economic and environmental gain as a result. The reduced speed limit of the cars would not even cause average driving speeds to drop by much during rush hour, because traffic congestion in urban areas is usually severe enough that vehicles’ average driving speeds already tend to be far below speed limits.

Of course, the goal is not to make people drive tiny cars. Apart from being illiberal, such cars would not be practical or safe on expressways and in suburban areas in which low speed limits would be limiting. The goal, rather, should be to make it safe and comfortable for drivers in urban areas to use small lightweight cars (whether privately owned or, more likely at first, car2go-style rentals), even while sharing the road with much larger, heavier conventional cars.

Designating certain road lanes (or, better yet, entire streets or downtown cores) as slow-speed limit lanes might accomplish this. Lighter and slow electric cars could safely drive in these lanes alongside conventional vehicles.

Moreover, this could also allow for bike lane systems ideal for cities like Toronto; cities that have a lot of days that are too hot and a lot of days that are too cold/snowy/icy/ to bike comfortably or safely, especially up hills (in summer) or down hills (in winter):

Like electric vehicles, cyclists too would be able to use the slow-speed car lanes relatively safely and comfortably. This could mean three things, all of them good:

the city would generally be much more bike-friendly than would otherwise be the case
if you put a two-lane bike lane on one side of the street (see image below), then cyclists would have the option of either using the bike lane or using the slow-speed car lanes — in other words, cyclists would have the option of biking on the sunny side or the shaded side of the street, no matter what time of day it was. This should be very useful on hot days, when cyclists are trying to get to work without breaking a sweat
instead of having three or four winter months a year in which bike lanes are extremely underutilized, you could instead use the bike lanes during the winter as a parking lane and extra slow speed lane for some of the smaller very small cars (one-seaters or especially narrow 2-4 seaters) that would become common as a result of the slow-speed car lanes. Having a parking lane in the winter would be useful for older people who are at risk of slipping on ice and falling if they have to walk longer distances from their car to their destination.

So, there it is: a plan to promote efficient electric cars, rather than inefficient ones or none at all; and a plan for having bike lanes that could be useful during hot summers as well as during cold winters.

Future Economics

financial and geopolitical forecasting