Estimates of China's implicit loan guarantees hover around $1 trillion. The stimulus package is valued at around $590 billion. The government also maintains state stockpiles of many raw materials--so I've been led to believe--and has been buying at an undisclosed clip (state secret? lots of things are).

China's total stimulus spending is easily roughly half of their entire economy. If they are projecting 8% growth, that means they lost round 40% of their economy in 2009.

Yikes.

Looking into law schools has led me to believe something important: for any form of professional degree, and even for non-professional degrees, universities generally don't rely on prestige to place students. The immediate reaction is: "but Harvard, Stanford, Yale!"

I would point out that a lot of schools you've never heard of have really surprising placement rates and starting salaries. Southwestern University, a third tier law school, has an acceptance rate of 33%, a 9 month placement rate of 90% and an average reported starting salary of around $80,000. Prestige isn't a factor, it's a widely known place for people who do somewhat poorly on their LSATs to obtain a law degree. It offers a host of part-time law school options. Et cetera.

What Southwestern has done is focus foremost on teaching and in building networks in the Los Angeles market. It has a reputation for producing solid graduates within its regional market, not tons of prestige. In law, there are lots of schools like that. I'm sure the same is true in most professions.

A few weeks ago I visited China for the first time, Beijing specifically. Written up more fully in a recent entry. That one is filtered, due to work-related content that is not especially secret but that I want to at least know who I'm telling it to.

It was just for a few days, and was mostly to do with talking to various Chinese and US officials about military expenditure, but I did get one day's tourism in when I went round the Forbidden City. Below are some pics which I have finally got around to uploading, after replacing lost cable and downloading lost software and stuff. (Has anyone else found LJ Scrapbook to be working incredibly slowly and erratically lately? Might this be a Windows Vista thing?) Anyway.

( pictures )

The first illusion of expertise is the most common by far: narrowness. Someone with narrow tastes, especially narrow and expensive tastes, often misinterprets this narrowness for expertise. Their narrow opinion will be commonly offered up as "expert advice" when it is, in fact, largely a function of personal preferences or even brand loyalty. Their larger-than-average knowledge-base enables them to out class most interlocutors; however, their weakness is apparent to people with a smaller but broader knowledge-base and broader taste or, at least, interest. When engaging people under the first illusion, it is helpful to keep an open mind about products, techniques or even places while assessing your own knowledge about the issue. You should be able to shut down any argument using your insights into the multiple factors that went into the various options in the topic space.

Common examples of illusion number one are:

(1) Insistence on the superiority of one brand of complex device like cars, airplanes, computers, housing or business structure. Generally, the exemplar will have misdiagnosed a single facet of these devices as the sine qua non of the class and has expanded this observation to exclude all but one member.

(2) The firm belief that one place is superior to all others. The most common example is the student returning from Europe or, really, nearly anyone returning from a vacation at an exotic location. Strategies to keep in mind are: many things which are good for tourists are continuous petty nuisances for locals or downright obnoxious for their quality of life (think, for example, of ordnances preventing buildings higher than the cathedral and its necessary impact on urban density); third world countries are marvelous for first world travelers because everything is cheap, as it happens life and labor is cheap thereby and hence not quite so enjoyable for the locals; often this is the only place they have been to abroad; they have no serious plans to move there, so it cannot be that superior as people move to many places under trying conditions ("trabajo en esta pais").

This is a very easy illusion to fall prey to and many factors from culture to marketing will work to encourage it. Your best bet for overcoming it is not to argue over the Internet and to cultivate self-honesty and perspective. Generally this illusion will be born out of a desire both to have your own preferences rule over all others and a sometimes willful ignorance of the complicated choices involved in building a product, forming an institution or crafting a place. Arguing over the Internet is, usually, about personal preference and tends to exacerbate these foundational issues.

I've been, in recent years, inclined to despair of the prospects for humanity tackling global warming. Sure, almost everyone seems to be accepting that it's a problem, the need to take action, but the proposals that are coming out are just so far short of what scientists say is necessary. Getting a binding agreement on reducing carbon emissions at Copenhagen next month looks dubious, and even if it happens, it will be totally insufficient to prevent catastrophic climate change, warming well over 2 degrees C. Of the two big players, the US has finally come up with an offer with a number attached. To cut US emissions by 17% compared to 2005 levels by 2020. That's the equivalent of a 4% cut compared to 1990 levels, the baseline the rest of the world uses. (The EU are saying 20-30%, Japan 40%). Meanwhile China has offered to reduce carbon intensity by 45% by 2020 - that is, the amount of emissions per unit of GDP. But with China's growth rate, that would still more than double their actual emissions by 2020. What's more, the flawed 'cap and trade' and offset scehmes being proposed to protect corporate profitability are likely to make much of these reductions smoke and mirrors. The prospects of the sort of cuts needed - most scientists seem to reckon 80% cuts by 2050 looks remote indeed.

But today I had a sort of revelation, and realized we've all been thinking about this totally the wrong way.

Everyone seems to be taking the message we're getting from the Earth, via the climate scientists, as a given, and working out how we can respond to it, how we can meet the Earth's demands. No-one, but no-one seems to be asking whether the message itself is reasonable.

I don't mean the climate change deniers. They're just burying their heads in the sand. Yes, the scientists might be wrong, they're doing their best to interpret the Earth's Delphic signals but are fallible like anyone else - but it would be dumb to bet on that. The consensus is overwhelming, and their methods are rather sounder than those of the Oracles of old. Our best assumption is that they are interpreting the Earth's demands more or less correctly.

What I am talking about is those demands themselves. Are they reasonable? Is the Earth being reasonable in what it is asking of humanity? And as soon as you ask that question, it becomes obvious that the answer is a resounding 'no'.

Sure, we get that the Earth is sore about all this stuff being poured into the atmosphere, it's hurting and it wants it to stop. And we're trying, we really are. But frankly, if it expects the sort of emission cuts I've been talking about, then the Earth is just not living in the real world. The Earth obviously has no comprehension of the economic and political realities behind these processes. It clearly does not understand the influence of the oil industry. Or the workings of the American political system, the jobs that are dependant on particular industries in different states, the constant campaigning pressures on Senators and Representatives. This is the most liberal Congress we're likely to get in a long while, and there just aren't the votes for the sort of cuts the Earth is demanding, or anything close to them. More fundamentally, it just doesn't understand the nature of the Capitalist system, the drive for continual expansion that underlies it and that cannot be denied without devastating economic consequences. I mean yes, the system needs reform, but doesn't the Earth understand that these things take time? Change like that doesn't happen overnight!

What is more, the Earth is just not behaving like a rational interlocutor. It has shown absolutely no willingness to come to the negotiating table and see if it can meet us half way. (OK, based on the US figures more like three quarters of the way, but we're just starting negotiations here). Far from it - every time our reluctant ambassadors, the scientists, bring us a new pronouncement it is yet more outrageous demands - 50% cuts, 60%, 80%! And yet wilder threats! 4 degrees, 6 degrees of warming! Ice melting ever sooner!

And tragically, the Earth's response to our failure to meet its outrageous demands seems to be just to lash out blindly - storms, floods, droughts, desertification and so forth all in the offing. Again, it seems not to understand that the people this is hurting most - those in poor countries, especially in the hotter regions of the world - are not even the ones most responsible for the Earth's pain. But because of its disagreement with us in the rich world (and its refusal even to consider our very reasonable compromise offers), it threatens to bring death and destruction to millions of relative innocents.

I said earlier the Earth is being unreasonable - I was too mild. This is extremism, even terrorism one might say.

The Earth must be made to understand that the global economy, global business, will not be blackmailed by its holding a gun to the head of the world's poor. It simply must be made to see that the way it is going about things will not lead to achieving its aims, only to more pain all round. The Earth must somehow be persuaded to snap out of its hissy-fit, sit down at the negotiating table, and work out a sensible compromise.

The only question is, how? Who will speak to it, and how can Earth be persuaded to change its behaviour?

I don't claim to have the answers. But this seems a much more likely approach than trying to overturn the whole basis of Capitalist political economy.