Attempting Analogy: Japanese Manchuria and Occupied Iraq

http://hnn.us/articles/5247.html

The Similarity is Flawed Industrial Policies Driving Flawed Foreign Policies

The problem about economic motivations is that political leaders are so often economically incompetent. A truly progressive technology tends to be comparatively disengaged from government. One does not  call a lawyer in, and pay him a fee, to solve a problem which one can fix with a design change. Industries become politically engaged only when they are beginning to run out of choices. This means that a politician who essentially "takes counsel of his bribes" is likely to be proceeding on faulty industrial intelligence.

Japan did have options at a point. Certainly, once it was in Manchuria, Japan had abundant gross resources. At a certain level, this would have been a good time to cease advancing and give the world time to forget its annoyance. Japan could probably have gotten away with Manchuria, if it had not tried to raise the stakes by pushing down into China proper and Southeast Asia. The push into Southeast Asia rested on essentially two materials-- oil and  rubber, neither of which was required in huge quantities (unlike coal, for example). In the course of the ensuring World War, one or other of the combatants were forced to synthesize both from more abundant materials.  See Arthur Squires, cited below, for a discussion of the American synthetic rubber program. Japan  built the two  biggest and most advanced battleships in the world, the Yamato and Mushashi. The same skill and steel could equally well have gone into economic autarchy. Postwar Japan  has taken a leaf from the Dutch and begun to expand into the sea. The Japanese "metabolic school" architect Kenzo Tange's  unbuilt _Tokyo Bay Project_ (1960) may be considered as a kind of "counsel of perfection in this matter, comparable to the Zuider Zee (see Banhan, cited below, for details). This is, again, something that could have been done earlier.

The American oil industry has long since ceased to be technologically progressive. Its most advanced oil exploration techniques are essentially cribbed from medical electronics practice. Its refineries are rusting behemoths with persistent environmental problems, which sometimes explode for reasons amounting to gross negligence. The proposal to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, is, in engineering terms, a kind of declaration of intellectual bankruptcy. It is expensive, it will take time, and it will not provide a long-term solution. Thoughtful engineering opinion runs to increasing the efficiency of automobiles as an immediate measure. The Japanese automakers are leading the way, just as they did in the last oil crisis, because they place the least reliance on being able to pull political strings in Washington. It is entirely feasible, through technological means, to go beyond oil, and consequently, beyond middle-east politics as they are presently understood. The automobile is long overdue for fundamental rethinking, on a whole series of grounds, ranging from highway fatalities to traffic congestion, to  emissions, to oil imports, to flood control and soil conservation (pavement run-off). In fact, detailed and practical proposals were worked out in the 1960's (see Tomorrow's  Transportation... and Metrotran-2000, cited below). Instead, we merely project our internal problems onto the Arabs.

What impresses me about the present situation is the sheer extent to which government policy is driven by the technologically obsolete, not just with respect to oil and automobiles, but with respect to a whole range of technological issues, most notably copyrights and patents. Similarly, I am concerned by the the extent to which the most technologically progressive elements are writing political manifestos along the lines of  "when in the course of human events..." The computer techies are becoming increasingly  interested in the Boston Tea Party as a precedent. That is dangerous. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan precipitated a revolution in Russia, growing out of tensions which already existed in Soviet society. Do not exclude the possibility that it could happen here.

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Tomorrow's  Transportation: New Systems for the Urban Future,  U. S.  Department  of  Housing  and  Urban  Development,  Office  of Metropolitan  Development, Urban  Transportation  Administration,  Washington  D.C.,  1968 (Library of Congress catalog  number  68-61300)

Metrotran-2000:  A  Study  of  Future  Concepts  in  Metropolitan Transportation   for   the  Year   2000,   Cornell   Aeronautical Laboratories,  Inc., by: Robert A. Wolf, Transportation  Research Department, CAL No. 150, October 1967

Amey Stone and Carol Vinzant,  Lean, Green Tips for Energy Savings
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jun2004/nf2004061_9370_db016.htm

Arthur M Squires, _The Tender Ship:  Governmental Management of Technological Change_,  Boston : Birkhäuser, 1986, ISBN: 081763312X

Reyner Banham, _Megastructure, Urban Futures of the Recent Past_, Harper and Row, New York, 1976

HNN posts, re: Mark A. LeVine, From Live Aid to Live 8: Do They Know It's not Christmas Anymore?



RE: http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/12521.html


https://web.archive.org/web/20050714020929/http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/12521.html

(06/23/2005 09:33 AM)

Benefits of Empire Debatable

The new world silver in the sixteenth century does not seem to have had a particularly constructive effect on Europe. It was not really a material in the ordinary sense of the word. I grant that the silver produced a keynsian stimulation, but it did so in a particularly destructive way. The Hapsburgs used it to finance the  counter-reformation, which resulted in Germany being more or less put to the sword. The obvious big winner of the wars of  religion was England, very much a third-rate country in  1500, with about a tenth of the population of France. England was  very much a johnny-come-lately to the business of empire, but what it did do was to take in refugees. All kinds of industries popped up in this fashion. By 1700, England's empire consisted of a swath of North America, and a bunch of islands and offshore trading posts  in the  rest of the  world.


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I am appending a precis of a relevant book.
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Geoffrey  Parker,  The  Army of Flanders and  the  Spanish  Road, 1567-1659 (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History),  Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972,

Parker treats the eighty-years-war between Spain and the Netherlands  in terms  of what he  calls 'logistics,' which is half  lines  of communication and half finance.
   Spain  was only able to conduct operations in the  Netherlands and  northern France because it could find and control a land  or sea   route.  During  the  16th  century,  the  main  artery   of communication was the 'Spanish Road': Genoa (ally), Savoy (ally), Franche  Comte  (Hapsburg), Lorraine  (ally),  Netherlands.   An eastern branch went from Lorraine via Alsace (Hapsburg) either to the   emperor's  German  lands  or  via  Switzerland  to   Italy. Significant no-go areas were France, the Palatinate, and the more militant cantons of Switzerland, eg. Geneva.
   As  France recovered from its civil wars, it resumed a  policy of expansion. In 1601 it relieved Savoy of some of the headwaters of the Rhone, and the Spanish Road was pinched between France and Geneva.  Savoy  soon  shifted  into  French  alliance.  With  the outbreak  of the Thirty Years War, the Hapsburgs  improved  their position by the conquest of the Palatinate. They developed a  new road,  from  Milan  (Hapsburg)  to  the  Valtelline  (which  they occupied)  to  the  Tyrol (Hapsburg). But in  the  1630's  France occupied Alsace and Lorraine, and brought Switzerland and  Venice into  alliance.  The Spaniards now moved their troops  and  funds along  the English coast (being for the time being at peace  with England). But even this became impossible under the Commonwealth, with its inclination to champion English colonial interests.
   The  other  half  of the 'logistics'  problem  was  financial: obtaining  the money to pay the troops.The Hapsburg  empire  was overextended,  and there was never enough money to do  everything that  needed  doing.  So  it  was  rarely  possible  to  exploit victories.  The  unpaid troops would mutiny, their version  of  a strike.  They would take over a town, commence raiding  from  it, and demand their back pay. The crown could only pay them off, and hope the idea would not spread too rapidly to the other troops.
   The  king was continually borrowing, but he was also  becoming unable  to  meet his obligations. So he was  obliged  to  default (which in many cases actually ended up meaning renegotiating  the terms  of repayment). In the long run, this merely  impaired  his ability to borrow. About 1580, the silver production from the new world  increased  dramatically, but that  too  was  progressively  anticipated  and alienated to creditors. Finally, catastrophe  of catastrophes,  in  1629,  the dutch 'sea  beggars'  captured  the treasure fleet that was supposed to be used to pay the creditors.
   In response to these difficulties, Spain had been compelled to develop  what  was  by now the most  advanced  modern  logistics operation  in  Europe.  The  crown  supplied  the  soldier   with everything  he needed, arms, food, clothing, etc. and stopped  it against his pay, whenever that should materialize. This kept  the mutiny rate down to a manageable level.
   Yet it was not good enough. Spain was simply too overextended, trying  to hold too many territories, too far from home.  Parker  is arguing  along the same lines as Garrett Mattingly (The Spanish Armada), about the  finiteness of the Spanish military miracle.

Well, the question is not  whether there was an impact. The question is whether the impact was positive or negative. The most obvious and  immediately provable impact of the Spanish silver was that a large swath of Europe was, as I said, put to the sword. If you  want to get a feel for what that  worked out to in practice, read Grimmelshausen (Adventures of a Simpleton) or look at Callot's etchings. It became foolish to build things like windmills because the soldiers would only torch them when they passed through. Agricultural productivity suffered. Cropland went out of production because the soldiers had looted the seed-corn. The productivity of medieval/ early  modern agriculture was not  very high at the best of times, and farmers needed to set aside a third or a quarter of their grain crop for seed in any case.  It didn't take very much looting at harvest time to do damage that might require fifty years to recover from. It is estimated that the population of Germany  dropped by something like a third during the thirty years war, between 1618 and 1648, making it comparable to the Black Death. Of course, there were fresh outbreaks of that too, in the disturbed post-battlefield conditions.

Practically none of the things of apparent value imported back to Europe from the global south before 1700 had any real use-value. The things imported were either money, or things which functioned like money, as status symbols. The net result of these imports was  inflation, and in the long term, Europe  was none  the richer for them, any more than Weimar Germany was the  richer for printing unlimited numbers of Reichsmarks. The one thing which was of value was cultivars and livestock.  Before 1500, the world was divided into about five ecological zones by seas, mountains, and deserts.  There was a general exchange of token quantities of  things like potatoes, and maize corn, and peanuts,  and pigs, and turkeys, which the recipients bred up to usable numbers. Paradoxically, these  agricultural products were the ones which the Europeans could have had by asking nicely in any case.

I think it would be fair to say that silver was a kind of economic narcotic, consistently destructive to all parties involved.
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To the further reply that silver was needed to buy tea from the Chinese, I agreed (06/24/2005 11:04 AM), while disputing the relevelence:

That is it-- the Chinese were exporting tea in exchange for silver. If I recall rightly, Pepys said (in the  1660's or 1670's):  "I did send for a dish of Tay, a China drink which I never had before."  At the time, things like tea and tobacco commanded a fancy price precisely because they were  not articles of mass consumption. They were lucrative in  much the same sense as cannabis.  The fancy price made it economic to ship the things in primitive ships for  fifteen thousand miles or so, a round-trip  voyage taking a couple of years. The ships which traded with the far east were immensely heavily armed. Bjorn Landstrom (The Ship: An Illustrated History, 1961, p. 186) refers to an East Indiaman of 1725 with 54 guns. It might have displaced a thousand tons, and had a crew of five hundred men.  In modern terms, that would  have been something like a  pocket battleship.  Since the ship had to run the gauntlet of Southeast Asia in its  way home, such armament was necessary. Tobacco production rapidly took root in England, despite the Virginia Company's legal monopoly, on much the same  basis as  moonshining. Similarly, silk originally came from China, but the secret got out fast enough, and the caterpillars were soon chomping away on mulberry leaves in  Italy. Trade boiled down to a residue of   products which could not be grown in a European climate. There were reasonable local substitutes-- for example, the mulled ale which Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew  Aguecheek are  dipping into in Twelth Night.  Similarly, you can make tea from things like dandelions, nettles, etc.  However, if everyone has a status symbol, it is no  longer a  status  symbol. Status  symbols are thus  subject to inflation,  in much the same way as money.  That is what runs through Europe's  interaction with the global south. The proceeds were in the last analysis things of essentially transitory value.

European industry did not rely very greatly on imports from the global south until the  nineteenth  century,  when the steamship radically reduced the cost of ocean shipping. The near exception was cotton in the eighteenth century, and as the  Lancashire cotton industry grew, cotton  was planted in the West Indies, and later in  America, a  mere three or four thousand miles from the factory. However, the key "manufactures of superiority," such as iron and steel, or shipbuilding, were  built out of European materials. The early machine-making towns, such as Augsburg, were on top of mining districts.

The global south did not have very much of a monopoly of climates. It was usually possible to bridge the  difference with a greenhouse, except where that would have been  self-defeating. Likewise, the global south did not  have a  monopoly of mineral resources. As  against that, the global south was distant, and expensive to reach, and found its natural niche as a supplier of goods whose value consisted primarily in their scarcity.

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RE: Re: A good statement of an old and fatally flawed argument.
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Well, I think he's referring to tantalum, used in  electrolytic capacitors. I suppose that at this stage in the proceedings, it probably goes into power supplies. I don't suppose there's  much need for LC oscilator circuits anymore. People use tiny surface-mounted capacitors to damp digital signal lines between chips, but I doubt those amount to very much.

http://www.worldwatch.org/live/discussion/81/
https://web.archive.org/web/20050714020929/http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/12521.html

As you will see from this table (I cited one for 2003) the vast majority comes from Australia. Parenthetically, I know there's work being done on aluminium electrolytic capacitors, which are obviously more economical for power-related uses.