gbejm | A Surprising Step Toward Decentralization: Report Card (Reply)

The December 4 chart has run its course, so let's see how the predictions held up. (The July 4 chart remains in effect until December 4.)

We find ourselves in a familiar situation where we have to get by without effective leadership from the top... detachment or aloofness in the house of the elites. I don't think these need any additional comment.

...people may have to establish new, unfamiliar ways of communicating rather than relying on established sources of information. On this one, I'm not sure I was entirely on the mark. The major players are floundering in some regards. For example, CNN+ folded mere weeks after its launch. Lately, even Facebook is starting to exhibit some of the initial signs of decline. At the same time, alternative channels still seem mostly in the embryonic stages. We have Substack providing an outlet for voices facing cancellation elsewhere, but even there it still serves as more of a niche player (though an important one) than a mainstream one. At best, what I described is probably a long-term trend and not something that had any particular turning point in the last eight months.

...a sign of a financial bubble... The markets generally pulled back instead of rallying further. It's possible we went from overvalued to slightly less overvalued, but that's not what I had in mind at the time and I'm marking this as a miss.

...naivety or foolishness in foreign affairs. Allies may be frustrated and adversaries delighted in the months ahead. While there weren't any major disasters on par with the Afghanistan evacuation, this wasn't a bright point either. I thought the administration was overly eager to restore the nuclear deal with Iran, and surprisingly that's one area where we've seen something resembling leadership by the adminstration as they've taken a firmer stance than I expected. Also, NATO has shown more unity than it has in a while -- though admittedly that's grading on a curve -- and it looks it has a good chance of adding two new members who have some decent military capabilities. However, that's about the extent of the good news, such as it is. Speaker Pelosi's recent visit to Taiwin hasn't started World War III yet, but by stirring the pot without making any substantive change to the situation she may have managed the astonishing trick of simultaneously leaving the US, China, and Taiwan all worse off. Relations with Mexico have been strained lately, and they haven't been shy about expressing it, whether by skipping the Summit of the Americas or by declining to join the sanctions against Russia. As for Saudi Arabia, apparently the difference between a pariah state and a fist bump from the President of the United State is an extra couple bucks in the price of a gallon of gasoline.

...suggesting that the global supply chain snafus will ease. By the middle of next year, for example, we may see fewer cargo ships idly waiting for port space. Oops. That was a complete miss. The eighth house also covers foreign debts, so I think this may have been pointing to something else: the US and its allies have frozen hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Russian assets. On paper, the Russian government and the sanctioned individuals may still retain their ownership, but if they can't enforce it, does it really matter? It's as if a homeowner decides to stop paying their mortgage and the mortgage company finds itself unable to foreclose. The homeowner is clearly better off, and likewise the lender is worse off.

I expect the court to be drawn to a more open ended ruling [on the Dobbs case] between those extremes, where the federal government would step back and gives states latitude to set their own laws, however permissive or restrictive. Spot on, though there had been plenty of mundane hints in that direction anyway.

They [the legislature] achieve nothing of lasting consequence. Pop quiz: name a single piece of legislation Congress has passed recently. Even the much ballyhooed Build Back Better Act, now rebranded as the Inflation Reduction Act, is still merely under consideration.

A number of institutions have arguably overstepped their authority while simultaneously undermining their own legitimacy (e.g., by neglecting even a pretense of acknowledging that they serve at the consent of those they govern). This might be the time period when those actions finally come back to bite. If public health officials' track record when it comes to the coronavirus epidemic weren't enough already, I have just two words to add: baby formula.

the theme I'm seeing here is one of political decentralization. This wasn't really a specific prediction, but there seemed to be something in the air in this regard. Only a couple weeks after I cast that chart, President Biden remarked that "there is no federal solution" to the epidemic. Keep in mind, at the time he made that comment OSHA was still theoretically trying to nationally mandate that employers require their employees get vaccinated. This summer we got the Dobbs ruling, kicking a contentious issue mostly back to the states. Shortly thereafter, the Texas GOP adopted a platform asserting that the state has a right to secede and that the state legislature should hold a referendum on the matter. Let that sink in for a moment -- the dominant political party of the second largest state has as its official position that the state can leave the union at will and that this is a question worthy of active consideration. While that technically isn't an endorsement of actual secession, they're laying the foundation for such an event.