There’s an ongoing discussion in aviation circles about the slow death of general aviation in this country, one which points to some larger issues surrounding our society and the direction we’re going. By general aviation, I mean enthusiast aviation, the average Joe or Jane who loves flying and takes a small Cessna up on the weekend to feel the air beneath the wings and the magic of flight. If you don’t understand what that’s about, it’s okay, we’re not all the same, and maybe you have something else that gives you that feeling, but the forces that are killing aviation in this country are forces which are changing many aspects of our society.
General aviation used to be something that, if not an everyman activity, was at least wide-spread enough that it had a reasonably large constituency in this country. In the 1970s, the US light airplane industry was producing something on the order of 40,000 aircraft per year, mostly small four-seat piston airplanes. That was a high water mark which fell as lawyers in particular began holding manufacturers responsible for what were basically piloting errors (Such as running out of fuel due to lack of planning and crashing). Instead of blaming the person responsible, the pilot, society came to see “small airplanes” themselves as inherently dangerous. From the perspective of a non-pilot it perhaps made sense to blame the manufacturer for not building a device which was completely foolproof, but it ignored the entire concept of what and who a pilot is.
So what is a pilot? It is someone with good judgement. Period. As an old saying has it, the best pilot is the one who uses her superior judgement to avoid situations which would require her to demonstrate her superior pilot skills. It isn’t about hand-eye coordination. It’s certainly not about bravery (Although that’s required in some situations, usually on the ground, when someone’s pressuring you to do something flying related you know is wrong). It’s not about muscle mass and cojones. It’s about knowing the equipment, knowing the system, and knowing when, where and what you must do to fly safely.This is asking an awful lot of people. But that’s also why being a pilot is orders of magnitude more difficult, and thus rewarding, than, say, driving a car. It’s not foolproof. At all.
Coming back to the collapse of general aviation manufacturing after the 70s, there was a push from many manufacturers into higher-end “business” aircraft. The reasons were simple. Most such aircraft were operated by paid, professional pilots operating in a more structured regulatory environment than the average weekend warrior who just went up for an occasional spin. Thus liability was not a concern on the same level. In addition, business aircraft were orders of magnitude more expensive than the little four-seaters, and thus had far greater profit margins. However, they were considerably more expensive to design, certify and build, so the market had to be large enough to support the upfront investments required.
Enter Ronald Reagan, or rather “Reaganism” to the rescue. At the start of the eighties, the average corporate CEO pay was perhaps 80-100 times the pay of the lowest-paid company employee. By the end of the decade this gap had widened to 400 times. Today, a few decades later and with our political discourse framed by the wealthy themselves (Media concentration via corporate ownership hasn’t helped), the gap between the truly wealthy and average Americans is even larger. Which would be fine if there had been an increase in productivity at the very top to go along with that huge wealth reallocation. But instead of increased productivity, which economics textbooks say is why such wealth disparities occur, we have constant evidence of malfeasance, book-rigging, and misallocation of resources. This isn’t capitalism in any recognizable form, just an example of institutionalized and internalized greed by those who already started out with much more than the rest of us. Even today, it’s considered somehow impolitic to point out how incredibly much more of the pie the very rich are taking from our economy than they used to, which is mystifying to me. What’s politics about if not who gets what, when? Financial deregulation was supposed to unleash the creative and wealth-creating forces of capitalism (Anybody remember Reagan saying “We’ve hit the jackpot!” when S & Ls were “freed”. Didn’t turn out so well.), but instead just started a transfer, rather than creation, of wealth.
The whole “government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem” ethos ignores the very real benefits of intelligent, legitimate regulation. As a pilot especially, it’s obvious. While every flyer likes to crack jokes at the expense of the FAA, (Sample: what are the scariest nine words in the English language? “I’m from the FAA and I’m here to help.”), that’s all they are: jokes. Anyone who aviates knows without the regulation of maintenance, manufacture and training the accident rate in general aviation would be incalculably higher. Even now, there are a small number of pilots who still display shockingly bad levels of judgement in some situations, but the vast majority take the message of safety and working within the system to heart and are able to enjoy what is one of the most satisfying activities known to man.
Seeing first-hand, and being impressed by, the real and valid work of those federal bureaucrats makes me extremely skeptical of claims made by others that non-regulation of everything, everywhere, will somehow make the world better. It won’t. Freedom from government may be nice in the abstract, but in reality, it just means you’re at the mercy of whatever other yahoo is out there who doesn’t have a clue and who doesn’t care what happens to anyone as a result of his (or her) bad judgement.
There’s a direct line from the deregulation-as-its-own-good philosophy to the messes we’ve recently had to deal with in the financial sector. The cronyish capitalism of Reaganism had very real and detrimental effects for the middle class, from which the ranks of general aviation used to be filled. So this isn’t an abstract rant or argument about what those so-and-sos are doing; the policies we’ve been following for the last few decades have directly impacted one of the best activities of which I know.
But it’s not just economics.
The other factor which is strangling aviation is that enthusiasm which used to be the lifeblood of aviation has disappeared. As a child I dreamt of being a fighter pilot. Even with a dad in the military, bad (Or, rather, just not good enough) eyesight put paid to that dream, but my point is that for an earlier generation, zooming around the sky blasting bad guys was pretty much the acme of achievement, even if imaginary.
An arguable exception being an astronaut.
However, that love of speed, of movement, of freedom, has been, especially since the internet became a mass media of its own, supplanted by a social landscape in which individual achievement is somehow denigrated and devalued in favor of something as insipid as a virtual “like”.
Which is another nail in the coffin of general aviation: it’s hard. Now, flying an airplane through the sky isn’t actually that hard. I’m a flight instructor, and could teach the average person how to maintain an airplane in level flight in half an hour, at most. But that just means I can teach someone to drive around at a certain speed and altitude and (assuming they’re not insane) not have them turn us upside down or worse. It doesn’t mean I can make them a pilot. Again, a pilot is someone with good judgement. What that means is a good pilot has done the reading of the regulations. He has read the book on the aircraft systems and understands how every separate element in a complicated device works and interacts with other systems. She understands weather (Or, at least can functionally see bad from good). Oh, and after all that, he or she can maneuver a mechanical device traveling at speed safely onto the ground. That’s just when everything’s working correctly. Most important of all, and what takes up the vast majority of training, is learning what to do when things are NOT working correctly. And here is where the current infatuation with virtual-this and virtual-that is harmful to the growth of aviation. There simply is no such thing as a reset button in an airplane. It doesn’t exist. Yet the infatuation with electronics and the virtual world has created a dangerous mindset in the minds of many. It has devalued internalized knowledge in favor of a “hive mind” mindset. What use is doing the hard work of studying and internalizing necessary knowledge when you can just google it? If you can just IM someone for the answer to something, why bother learning it in the first place? And if knowledge and ability are of no importance, why not spend your brainpower on gathering “likes” or some other social media equivalent instead, like some dopamine-addicted rat in a lab experiment?
This is problematic in several respects for society in general, but in aviation it is utterly fatal. You can look up accident reports at the National Transportation Safety Boards website and see, in evaluation after accident evaluation that the finest aviation safety minds are agreed that the primary cause of general aviation accidents in light aircraft was and is “pilot error.” The most common reason for an aircraft to cease controlled flight remains the nut behind the yoke. It is thus, at least in some measure, a psychological problem. Pilots, in addition to a vast knowledge base, must also be humble, because there’s always a new way to die. But how can someone be humble who has a thousand virtual “likes”? If that’s the measure of success as a human being, rather than any true, real-world accomplishment, a person who’s a success in the virtual world must just naturally be better than a sober, responsible person (like, say, a good pilot), since everyone knows studious, introverted people are losers, right? This is a terrible mindset, not just for aviation, but for a host of activities, ranging from national security to finance to engineering.
It does no good to speak of the terrible feeling you get when something goes wrong at ten thousand feet and you know there’s no one to rely on but yourself. For many today, such an event is beyond their imagination. They simply cannot conceive of such a thing, since they are always plugged in, always chatting with someone, always going through some social ritual to establish hierarchy. However physics (Or economics. Or engineering. Or defense.) doesn’t care in the least about who said what to who and what do you think and I think this. Physics means that when the prop in front stops spinning, you’d better know what to do, or you will suffer the consequences. A pilot is in command, by definition, and that means you cannot delegate the authority. There is no reset button. There are no do-overs. What you decide to do, what your actions are, determines what will happen in an emergency, whether you survive or die and more importantly, whether anyone else flying with you lives or dies.
The danger of always on social media this and virtual that is that it affects the behavior and actions of individuals. It’s that first, they don’t seem to have any desire to accomplish something on their own, and second, they don’t even understand what it means to do something on their own. Which begs the question: if flying (Or any other complex, demanding activity) is something you must learn to do by yourself in order to secure the necessary internalized judgement to pursue it competently, how can anyone raised on a glowing screen ever function in a task-necessary, possible-emergency environment? Even with six-sigma manufacturing and fault-tolerant coding, devices still malfunction. Other people makes mistakes at best, are malevolent at worst. What then, when it comes down to the person nominally in control?
This a danger in the small corner of society that is general aviation, but it points to a greater worry. If actual achievement means so little, we face a future where no-one, or very few, will actually achieve anything. If everything depends on who you know (Or how many “likes” you have), and not what you know or can do, it is a bad sign for our society. Empires fall, if not attacked by some stronger force, because of internal weakness. Corruption, favoritism, tribalism… these are the forces that over time destroy previously successful societies. In this supposed new age of technological marvels I see nothing but the infestation of byzantine, small networks supercharged by the speed of electrons. Is the US destined to become the Ottoman Empire, weakened by an ever-increasing wealth disparity on the one hand and internecine and poisonous social and political process on the other? Are we doomed to abandon the individualism, freedom and industry which created our power in the first place? General aviation is a small and, in the larger picture, admittedly unimportant part of our society. But in the small details one can see worrying signs of greater social and economic changes. The death of economic opportunity for the common man is one such thing. The collapse of individual initiative and ability at the alter of some virtual socialization is another. It is disturbing that we seem to have abandoned our virtues with such ease and lack of consideration on the alter of mythical “convenience” which anyone who has lived a real life knows is a lie.
If we’re doomed to repeat history because people don’t remember it, those of us with some sense of the ebb and flow of human behavior can at least have a front row seat to what happens.
I thought of this while reading about developments in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A Saudi human rights activist has just been sentenced to a 10 year jail term for criticizing the government (such as it is) there. Put bluntly, this is not the behavior of a regime at ease with its own power. However, it does point to a worrying future even for those of us not subject to the arbitrary whims of feudalism in action. The reason is that Saudi Arabia matters to us here in the US, and if we don’t take care we can find ourselves once more pulled into events abroad in which we have no influence, or worse, where our actions are purely reactionary, as we try to make sense of events, governments and individuals of whom we are ignorant.
A reductionist view of America’s interventions abroad and their causes might go something like this: Once we had become a strong power, around 1900, we set about serving our industry by becoming a power believing in free trade and the propagation of “American values”. This idealistic strain motivated our participation in the Spanish-American war, at least partially. However, while we were flexing our newfound military powers very different factors were motivating actors in other nations. Primarily, thus came down to the incestuous and fragmented relationship between the powers of the old world. While France had veered between Republicanism and the ancient ways and Great Britain had evolved a democratic form of government while retaining their royalist trappings, Germany and Russia both had hereditary leaders who were fundamentally unsuited to governance. The intersection of these two on history’s stage shows why genetic inheritance is a terrible way to choose who gets to be in charge. In Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II was fundamentally flawed as a human being, let alone to be the head of Europe’s newest and strongest power, veering as he did between unjustified confidence and deep despair. He also had an extremely unhealthy personal identification of the state with himself. For one thing he felt on a personal level that Germany ought to have a navy fit to challenge that of Great Britain, with whose royal house, he was related. His determination to pursue this goal, despite any genuine geostrategic reason for it, ignited an arms race in Europe which drew away resources that could have been used for far better ends. Why did he do this? One could go back a few decades to his relationship with the one individual who actually had created the modern German state, Otto von Bismarck. While a nobleman, Bismarck was above all else a pragmatic, hardheaded realist. Arguments of divine guidance from on high held absolutely no water with him. Whatever one may think of his politics now, over a century removed, he both created the modern German state, and diffused the dislocative process of urbanization which threatened the social order by the introduction of what we now know as public health care and welfare. Hardly the actions of a purblind reactionary. However, there was only one Bismarck, and when the Kaiser forced him from power, there was no counterweight to Wilhelm’s own guidance. As noted, this was based on his own view of himself as the personification of martial teutonic virtue. Perhaps in compensation for the fact that he had, in fact, no direct military experience, he was extremely aggressive in advocating military solutions to “problems”, such as Germany’s need for a “place in the sun” alongside other colonial powers, which were primarily diplomatic in nature. As noted, his stubborn and somewhat childish, desire for a big German navy rattled not just sabers, but also the certainties of his counterparts on the continent. In an age when nationalism was becoming increasingly important as a means for the newly-created urban masses to form some form of identification, his constant calls for military strength and aggressiveness as the primary virtues of the new state were akin to adding kindling to a tinderbox.
Separated by a thousand miles, Russia was suffering its own reaction to the “leadership” of a man who had none of the qualities needed for such a description. Nicholas II had a father, Alexander, who had begun the process, albeit slowly, of bringing Russia into modern times. In the context of Russia, this meant somewhere along the timeline of a hundred years or so behind an actual modern nation such as the UK or US. Serfs, for instance, were to have some rights. While there was thus a push from above to reform, there were factions which wished for a total and clean break from the past. One of those elements caused Alexander’s death by a bomb, and was the mechanism for Nicholas’ ascension to the throne.
Two anecdotes, perhaps apocryphal, can serve to describe Nicholas’ unsuitability for the job. He was once said to have remarked to an intimate that there was nothing he would actually have liked more than to leave the court and its responsibilities for the sake of being a simple farmer. And he was reported to have claimed that every true Russian loved him because God was just. While this might be a nice thing to think, it’s hardly a manifest on which to base action.
The interaction of these two kings was, to modern eyes, simply weird. Even as he was thinking of waging war against Nicholas, Wilhelm often wrote personal, handwritten letters addressed familiarly to “Dear Nicky” in which he presumed to tell his distant cousin how to govern Russia and deal with other (non-German) pesky foreigners. Nicholas, for his part, worried about what the court, not government, of Great Britain might think of his actions. It was the fact that these idiots were in charge of the two most powerful land armies on the continent which made the First World War inevitable. Without the expansionistic desire of Wilhelm, Germany would not have had any reason to go beyond its strength in land warfare, and Britain would not have felt alarmed enough to forge strong alliances with Russia and France. Without Nicholas’ weak, and worse, reactionary, leadership, Russia might not have had such strong social tensions that made revolution practically inevitable, and led to the Soviet Union.
Again, this is a reductionist view, but without two hereditary rulers in positions for which they were patently unsuited, it is quite possible there would have been no First World War, no communist revolution in Russia, and thus no Lenin. The murder of a minor duke in a small nation would not have led to tens of millions dying if these rulers hadn’t aligned their personal prestige with that of their nations, and that of their nations with “blood relatives” fighting amongst each other in a small, relatively unimportant, place. If there had been no First World War, Germany would in all probability never had had Hitler come to power and there would have been no Second World War. If there had been no Lenin, there would probably have been no Stalin, and thus after the second World War no Cold War. If no Cold War, America would have never gotten involved in either Korea or Vietnam. As an aside, there would not have been any deposition of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, or Allende in Chile in 1972, both occurrences which created a reservoir of ill will with which we are still dealing, even if we did eventually win the bigger fight against communism.
History matters.
My point is this: when it is obvious that somebody is completely, patently and obviously unsuited for power, it behooves others to pay attention when that individual seems to be in danger of gaining power. The wrong people at the top, unchecked, can make decisions which have repercussions far beyond the borders of their own country. This is why democracy, as Churchill famously said, is the worst possible form of government, except for the alternatives. Hereditary leadership, as an alternative, is close to being the worst of all.
Coming back to Saudi Arabia, it would seem that there is some danger of ancient Russian history repeating itself. A reformist (somewhat cautious, but still) king nearing the end of his reign, while the heir to the throne seems, for all intents and purposes, ready to rule through divine inspiration and a return to the tried and true methods of repression. Is this a fair assessment? Hard to say, as secretive as the royal family of Saudi Arabia is, but piecing together reports seems to make it plausible. The worst part of having a single absolute ruler is that other nations, such as the US, cannot make decisions in how to handle the relationship on the basis of rational political calculus, but rather on the basis of a single individual’s psychology. Especially when that nation is one which has indirectly already caused the death of more Americans in a single attack since Pearl Harbor, this is worrisome. If Saudi Arabia really wants our military protection, which they do, I would make it conditional on a check-up of Prince Abdullah every year by the best of our analysts. We cannot continue to support a regime which shares none of our values, and which might well veer crazily to one extreme or the other in the future without some guarantee that the person in charge is at the least, sane and shares at least some of our basic human values.
In a perfect world, of course, the King would have to be a pauper for some years before gaining power, since one of the biggest problems of hereditary rulers is they have no conception of reality. Wilhelm’s childish obsession with boats to rival those of his relatives across the channel can be seen reflected in the Saudi family’s constant one-upmanship of each other with ever-larger private jets. Any normal, sane person, even a rich, normal, sane person would recognize this as compulsive behavior. In the context of practically infinite personal resources on the one hand, and ruthless courtier behavior on the other it makes a sort of twisted sense, but not in the real world. It is, in a word, worrying, that Saudi Arabia seems not only likely to repeat errors of the past, but seems completely oblivious to the fact that it might be doing so. Iron-handedness eventually leads to stagnation at best, else revolution. A revolutionary Saudi Arabia, run by a small band who themselves feel no compunction in sacrificing lives for some greater religion or ideology, and allied to what are still significant and important reserves of oil, would be even worse, but not by much. As Americans, we might choose not to pay attention what goes on there, leaving it to oil company analysts, defense and state department policy people, but if our kids get dragged into the Middle East with guns in their hands and die for no good reason in WW3, we won’t be able to plead ignorance.
Below are some links:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/09/world/meast/saudi-arabia-activists-sentenced
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011–13_Saudi_Arabian_protests
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/politics/2013/04/saudi-uprising-protests.html
http://www.thenation.com/article/166305/price-dissent-saudi-arabia#
There’s an interesting article in the Atlantic recently which covers the debate over drones (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/its-come-to-this-debating-death-by-autopilot/274753/), questioning whether they should be regulated as a new class of weapons.
When I was a teenager I happened to read a book (http://www.amazon.com/Giving-Up-Gun-Reversion-1543-1879/dp/0879237732), which stayed with me for a long time. It told the story of how feudal Japan dealt with a terrifying new military technology, in this case, firearms. As a quick recap: The Japanese around 1500 were a people constantly fighting each other in a form of clan warfare, the era of the Shoguns. Into this internecine picture came Portuguese traders bearing the fruits of European technology, the most important of which, to the militarized Japanese eyes at least, were firearms. The Japanese, fighting all the time as they were, quickly adopted, and even improved on, this new technology. The problem which arose wasn’t that more people started dying in battle, however, but rather that suddenly the elite of Japan, the samurai, could be felled by a single peasant. Driven by an ingrained code and centuries of tradition of fighting with sword, and gaining honor and thus status by defeating other samurai, the Japanese elites were loath to personally adopt firearms. To their mind, these new weapons were just a better way to mow down the ranks of illiterate peasants who were conscripted by their feudal lords to make up the numbers every time they decided to campaign against one another. That samurai themselves started getting killed, not by other samurai in honorable hand-to-hand combat, but by some social inferior from a distance, was a shock to the system which threatened the entire social order.
What to do?
Clearly, no feudal lord would voluntarily give up firearms on his own. His rivals would just take advantage and defeat him at the earliest opportunity. At the same time, peasants were losing their fear of their “betters”, which threatened all the samurai and shoguns alike. So, an existential threat to an entire culture and way of life, at least for the elites. In order to save face for all concerned, the emperor issued an edict requesting all firearms in the country to be turned in, in order to melt down the metal and create the largest known statue of Buddha. Here was a way for Shoguns to simultaneously disarm and step back from a technology which threatened them all, while saving face. Apparently it worked. Japan remained gun-free until Commodore Perry arrived in the mid-1800s. Social order was restored, peasants became frightened of their betters again, and Shoguns and samurai could go on enjoying an exalted social status.
At about the same time I read that book, in the early 1980s, the world was still threatened by nuclear weapons. That was the existential threat of the era, one that threatened not just a social order, but humanity itself. At the time, there were massive protests in Germany and the UK about American proposals to place medium-range nuclear missiles there. The reason was that the Soviets were known (They made no real secret about it), to be planning the invasion of Western Europe by conventional forces so massive that the American and allied militaries could not hope to withstand them.
Unless we used nukes.
And while the Germans especially were concerned about being the second place after Hiroshima and Nagasaki to have their cities and countryside leveled and irradiated, overall they agreed that it was indeed better to be dead than red, and we put in our missiles. The soviets dithered over whether or not to invade, their military expenditures grew unsustainable, the system grew rotten, and eventually collapsed, and we won the cold war. That’s a simplistic storyline, but broadly true.
It would be fair to say that nuclear weapons were the new military technology that proved so great a threat that they made the entire social order tremble. If the soviets would’ve invaded, we would’ve gone nuclear, they’d probably have retaliated, we would have retaliated, and then, just because of the logic of mutual destruction, we would’ve gone all out: if I’m gonna get wiped out, I’m taking you out too, and everybody dies in the ultimate zero-sum calculation.
Then in a thousand years the cockroaches take over.
The important point here is that nukes were scary not just to the ordinary soldiers who would’ve been vaporized in the first couple of strikes, but that they directly threatened the elites of both sides. Dr. Strangelove notwithstanding, living in a cave for a couple centuries as the only alternative to fighting isn’t very appealing to anyone, even delusional generals, politicians and tycoons (Or apparatchiks).
We now live in a world which, to my mind at least, is far less frightening. Nuclear reduction treaties have been successful in reducing stockpiles (Incidentally saving both sides tons of money in maintenance, research and upkeep), and a future is in sight where, while total disarmament might be too utopian, nuclear weapons number in the mere dozens. Enough to be a deterrent to any crazies out there, but not enough, if used, to End Humanity As We Know It.
Drones (unfortunately?), do not meet this test of existential threat. By which I mean, they do not threaten elites. They don’t change the calculus of decision makers, who have, post-cold war, gone back to being primarily obsessed with palace intrigues of various kinds (“How can I score points on talk shows and protect my bureaucratic turf,” or, in other places, “How can I keep the ear of his most exalted majesty/president for life?”) rather than this or that weapon. For this reason alone, I don’t believe attempts to regulate them out of existence as a class of weapon will meet with much success. They’re simply too easy to use.
Unfortunately the other side has drones too, ones which are much cheaper to manufacture and which are arguably as “smart”. People. Or to be more precise, zealots. What is a suicide bomber, after all, but a means of delivering explosives to a certain place at a certain point in time? However, while a suicide bomber costs nothing but the cost and investment in time of brain-washing and the minimal cost of the explosives themselves, drones are orders of magnitude more expensive. More importantly, while drone strikes might seem “surgical”, they carry extremely high ancillary costs in terms of our moral authority.
This is always a tricky thing to discuss, because there is always an immediate knee jerk reaction from realpolitikers (Basically, those who think the world is red in tooth and claw and might makes right) about anything as soft and fuzzy as morality. But it matters. It matters because, without thinking that the US was a better alternative than the USSR, Germany would never have agreed to host our missiles back in the eighties. It matters because without moral authority (Or, to use the current preferred term, soft power), “they” would have been more successful in converting others to their cause. In an very concrete sense, we couldn’t have won the cold war without it, and we’d all still be threatened with nuclear annihilation.
It is hardly the case that the other side in our current shadowy-ish conflict is better. A so-called religious person who sends some poor slob off to kill as many innocent people as possible just to advance some nonsensical ideology, and incidentally gain more personal power, is worse than despicable. But the perception of power cuts both ways for the US. We have an outsize military and security apparatus,which means that any strike, any at all, against us can be used as a symbolic victory. The perception of relative weakness can be as useful for our enemies as the perception of strength can be a problem for us.
Drones compound our problem of strength when we start using them for other than extremely urgent and vital strikes, which is what’s happened since we started using them against low level targets, just because we can. It’s one thing to send a missile from a drone to kill the commander of a terrorist network. It’s quite another to use a drone to kill somebody who might or might not be a threat, but, well, the wing commander or mission operator is new and wants to “get some”. Or worse, using drones to do the bidding of foreign governments, killing a regime opponent who poses no threat to the US but does to the foreign elite. It’s especially bad if that elite is unsavory to begin with, and the guy we take out might actually epitomize some legitimate grievances. Sure, a realpolitik kind of person would say we need to keep the people in power on our side, even if they’re unsavory. But that is a pernicious, not to say short-sighted, analysis. If an elite is distrusted by their own people, and we do their bidding, what happens? We no longer seem to be the enemy, we just actually made ourselves the enemy. In reality. And not just for the crazies out there, but for sane, normal citizens who want a better life than what their rulers are giving them. The kind of people who would never strap on a suicide vest themselves, but might start giving money to whatever the local cause might be. Or who would provide a safe house, or distribute and forward propaganda. Without the support of those normal people, terrorist movements whither and die.
This is why morality matters. Our morality, matters.
This is also why it’s frustrating to discuss, because what the adherents of realpolitik don’t seem to realize is that being moral isn’t just a good in and of itself, it’s also smart. Not to say you don’t shoot a guy pointing a gun at you if you have the chance, but you don’t shoot someone because he may or may not have a gun that he may or may not point at you at some time in the future.
Drones are pernicious because they keep the wielder completely out of harm’s way, and thus provide no real disincentive (Unless you count internalized reasoning like that in the previous paragraph) to their use. It is the military version of financial moral hazard. If you’re playing with other people’s money and you’re rewarded only if you win but pay no penalty if you lose, why not bet the house? Fiduciary responsibility? What’s that? Which is one big reason why we keep having financial crises. While that is a topic for another post, the same psychology applies. If you can sit ten thousand miles away and have a target, and have every incentive to blow away that target, but no real incentive not to, what do you do? Especially if your rules of engagement and operations in general are protected, bizarrely, by more stringent secrecy laws than those that apply to manned combat missions. Why on Earth wouldn’t you blow away every single target every single chance you get? Again, this individual incentive to do something ignores the public cost in terms of our standing with rational, normal people everywhere.
Drones are in the final analysis merely another weapon of war. The debate, such as it is, has moved on, unfortunately I think, from when and how they should be used to how they might be made better, and whether humans should be in the loop at all. This is a red herring, because the question isn’t whether they can be made better (of course they can), but within what rules and tactics, and to serve what strategy. It is too late to try to turn back to only manned equipment, and in any case it would ignore the real benefits that drones provide not just as flying assassins but for surveillance and reconnaissance, including non-military, humanitarian, uses.
We should, as a nation, discuss not just the tool, in this case drones, but the ends. What do we try, or hope to, accomplish? A war on terrorism is unwinnable. There will always be cowards ready to use others to destroy the lives of innocents. How can you “win” at preventing murderous scumbags from having reprehensible thoughts and acting on them? But we should not stoop to that level, just for the sake of doing something. When we remove the disincentives to assassinate we lose a significant part of what we are and should be fighting for, and we lose our standing in the eyes of those who could either harm or help us. Instead of debating the technology, we should debate the programming. Autonomous military vehicles will be here soon. Technology can’t be stopped in this case because it provides no existential threat, unlike nuclear weapons in the past century or firearms in feudal Japan, so a future ban is extremely unlikely.
But an autonomous vehicle will only do what it’s programmed to do. Having a human in the loop will not change the decision-making process to any appreciable degree unless there is a strong disincentive to use force in the first place. As we’ve seen recently with the use of drone strikes against less and less important targets, we have instead incentivized killing as its own end.
Instead, concentrate of international standards of drone design which emphasize graduality of escalation, with lethal violence being disincentivized unless certain, truly threatening or vital, conditions are met. What are those conditions? How can they be incorporated in an autonomous system? What programming checks or protocols will ensure such rules are unhackable or otherwise remain uncorrupted? How can we verify that others follow those rules if we do? What are the enforcement mechanisms for not playing by those rules?
That’s the debate.
We’ve had success in reducing nuclear stockpiles. Many countries (Shamefully, not yet the US) have agreed to ban land mines. Cluster bombs are next, rightfully so, in the sights of those who think and care about these things. Drones are just another technology the military uses to achieve their ends. What are those ends, and how can we assure those aren’t subverted? It’s a questions for technologists and moralists both.
A congressman was once attributed with the saying, apropos of the budget, “a billion here, and a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” It’s a saying which is too good not to be true, on some level. Especially when talking of the federal budget, where billions,let alone millions, can indeed be lost in the trillions which now make up our financial accounting, it’s easy for the regular citizen to be lost in the maze of numbers. But whatever the numbers are, the fundamentals of good book keeping remain. Except in times of war, our country has usually tried to maintain a balanced budget and a small or non-existent debt. The two things are not interchangeable. The deficit is how much more the government spends in a given year than it takes in, while the debt is the amount it owes in total. When the economy grows, revenues increase, and the government can (maybe) run a surplus, not a deficit. But unless it uses some of that extra revenue to pay off the debt, the debt remains. There’s a problem with public debt, on a Macroeconomics 101 level, because government debt absorbs private capital which could otherwise be used in the private sector for further growth.
Of course, not all government spending is bad, and not all private spending is good. Some government spending is incredibly effective in promoting economic growth. Things like the interstate system are used by all entities from corporations to private citizens, and could not be supplied by the private sector at anything like the cost the government “charges”. Other things, like our health care system, while private, are bloated and inefficient and provide comparatively bad service with bad outcomes, compared to international norms.
Still, all other things being equal, a government which has no debt and which does not run a deficit is better than what we’ve got now, which is a federal government that does the opposite. But there’s another sector which is where actual services are rendered to actual citizens where the debt-deficit equation hurts: locally. In states and municipalities, we have seen a bullwhip effect with regard to revenues,funding and spending. California is the most egregious example.
This bullwhip effect is common in systems where there are many steps between input and outcome,separated by time. Typically used to describe logistics failures, it describes the situation where, say, a factory suddenly is ordered to increase production for the quarter to meet a sudden surge in orders. The factory increases production by ordering more parts from a supplier, who may, in turn order parts for those parts from a third supplier. Each of these steps takes time as first the factory gets the order to increase production, then orders more parts from the secondary supplier, and so on. The problem is that by the time the entire supply chain has ramped up for the new, higher level of production, there may be a change in demand. Suddenly the new higher level of production is too much, and the factory slows production. But the second, third and other suppliers are still providing parts at the newer, higher, level. Parts that can’t be used pile up. This is inefficient, and explains why logistics is so important in any kind of manufacturing.
Something similar happens in government spending. When times are good, citizens and governments, both local and national, feel they can do more. Public employee pay and pensions are raised, plans made for new infrastructure, schools and clinics planned and built. Or we might go to war in foreign countries without raising taxes (Which is suicide from an economics perspective). These are typically projects which have long tails in terms of time. A school or a light rail extension might take a year, or years, to build, for instance. Pension promises must be funded as long as the (ex-) employee is alive. Wars drag on unpredictably. And so on. So the good feeling people act on when times are good has bad consequences when times are bad. Suddenly, if revenue falls, the projects must still be built, the pensions must still be paid, and soldiers overseas must still be provided with ammunition, food and fuel. But then suddenly the revenues aren’t there to support the commitments made earlier. So the government runs a deficit. It’s simpler for the federal government to do this because it prints the money, after all, including the treasury bonds which are the main IOUs of government debt. But state and local municipalities can’t really do that as easily. They may try to raise money through bond issues, but have to pay a high(-ish, at best) rate of interest. Which means less funding in the future, even if revenues go up, because part of that new revenue can’t be used for nice things like more pay for police, parks or new schools, but just to pay off debt.
We have had two bubbles in our economy in the last decade and a half. First the internet bubble, then the housing/finance bubble. In both cases both ordinary citizens and governments mortgaged the future against current plans based on the assumption that the bubbles would continue. The Dow would hit 36,000. House prices would keep going up forever. Needless to say, neither occurred. Instead the hucksterism at the heart of both crises caused economic contraction. That would be the normal ebb and flow of economic life except that the government still has to pay for promises made in that spirit of giddiness. Corporations have responded by slashing spending, killing their pensions and other benefits to employees, and circling the wagons when it comes to investment. They can do this because they have, basically, no responsibility except survival. Not so for government.
What’s the solution?
Citizens have tried to shackle government’s impulses in spending by enacting,in many states, a requirement for a balanced state budget. It’s an idea, but it ignores the fact that citizens still demand services at a higher rate than what they’re typically willing to spend through taxes. At the same time external factors can distort government spending. Two examples : first, rich Americans used to see a high tax rate as a sign of social success. In the 1950s there were even advertisements for luxury items which explicitly appealed to those paying over 50% in income tax, appealing to the snobbery of someone so successful they could contribute a greater share to the greater good. The fancy term for this is a sense of noblesse oblige. That has, especially since the counterculture backlash of the 1970s and 80s, been almost completely destroyed, and the richest Americans typically now lobby government for ever decreasing taxes on themselves. Because they have the money to back their views, and because we don’t have a public system of campaign finance, their views are disproportionately influential. This anti-tax rhetoric isn’t just limited to rich individuals, who may in any case not be but a smallish segment of possible tax revenue for the federal government. It seeps from that lobbying into other sectors and is especially corrosive on the state and local level. This is where taxes on rich individuals and locally-based companies makes a disproportionate difference. Parks, schools, pensions, all are to a great degree affected by falls in local government income. Now, not all government spending is good, and just because somebody works for government doesn’t make them a saint. But because we do live in a democracy, however imperfect, government does (well, should) respond to citizens. But citizens can’t have it both ways. They can’t buy into anti-tax rhetoric (Which is especially weird when it comes from people who aren’t wealthy themselves and get far more out of government than they pay in), and yet complain about lack of services.
Our continual attempts to buy votes both by giving people services they want and yet not funding them with higher taxes is unsustainable. Both major parties in this country are complicit in the problem, although one is far more unreasonable on the subject than the other (Where’s that elephant in the room?). On the level where it affects us as ordinary citizens though, we have to share the blame. The politicians are only giving us what we’re asking for after all, stuff we want to have but don’t want to pay for. Until the wealthiest and most influential among us stop taking their good fortune for granted and start feeling some sense of common responsibility, and until all us others start demanding fiscal realism, rather than platitudes and promises, the system won’t change. It’s unfortunate, because safe streets, good schools and pleasant parks benefit us all far more than they cost. A company that orders far more items than warranted by demand, or that continually miscasts inventory soon goes bust. That isn’t usually the case for government, local or national, but the costs of not having a sense of fiscal discipline are real. They’re just pushed into the future.
Is there a solution? Sure. Taking money out of elections and simplifying corporate taxes would be a start. In the first case, a bad manager couldn’t save his or her position by buying support in the form of attack ads. So politicians would actually have to manage the public’s finances or get called to account by voters. In the second case, we wouldn’t have a system where investments are steered more by quirks of the tax code than economic sense, which would boost GDP, create more jobs, and all the other good things that ensue when capitalism actually works like it should.
There are other things we could do to fix the wrongful way we deal with fiscal matters, but those are two pretty good places to start. Are they likely, though? That’s a subject for a whole other essay.
Worldly Philosophy 