Jacobin Magazine: Closed Rooms and Class War

He presents himself as both insider and outsider to this world. As if sketching a scene for a film script, he recounts a meeting with Larry Summers in a Washington bar, where Summers tells him that he must decide which he is going to be: an insider or outsider. It is clear that Varoufakis glories in being one of them, while still wanting us to believe that he is simultaneously on our side. He speaks of how great it was to have the support of Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, and other figures on the Right, but it was support for whom, for what, and in whose class interests? Class analysis is far from the foreground of the picture sketched out here. [...]

However, Varoufakis’s book conceals as much as it reveals. Most importantly, it does not clearly conceptualize the sociohistorical forces at play, both because of an overbearing egocentrism and a lack of systemic analysis. Capitalism disappears in the play of elite personalities, primarily his own. [...]

Varoufakis constantly uses phrases like “my solitary struggle” and tells the story in a way in which everyone else’s role is blurred, distorted, or even invisible. Syriza barely exists. The Greek Left are nearly absent. The Greek people fade into the background. It is a landscape of elite players and anonymous masses. [...]

He declares early on that there are “no goodies or baddies in this book,” but only people doing their best, as they understood it, in circumstances not of their choosing. This is not, however, how he writes it. He characterises some players as goodies, primarily himself and his band of star foreign economists, and others as baddies, although he is kinder to the troika than to certain figures in Syriza, whom he accuses of treachery. His preference for figures of the Right, such as Norman Lamont and Jeffrey Sachs, over the Left, in addition to his conceptualisation of many matters, make me wonder if he even understands the difference between right and left.

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The New York Review of Books: Nuclear Diplomacy: From Iran to North Korea?

The new US policy has layers of contradictions. By not rejecting the nuclear deal the administration tacitly acknowledges that it’s working, yet senior officials continue to harshly criticize it. This extreme distaste for an agreement that has removed—at least for a decade—a nuclear threat that a few years ago raised the specter of another war in the Middle East is even odder when set against the standoff with North Korea. If anything were needed to underline how much safer the Iran deal has made the United States, the menace of North Korea’s nuclear development surely qualifies. [...]

Iran has accepted around-the-clock supervision by IAEA inspectors, cameras, and monitoring equipment at its nuclear facilities. There have been no problems with access. These inspections include some places, like uranium mines and centrifuge rotor production facilities, that have never previously been subjected to international oversight in other countries. Their inclusion makes it much harder to operate a covert program. Iran has adhered to allowed limits on R&D, and an innovative mechanism to track sensitive imports has been created.

Two years ago critics in the United States were deeply skeptical that these steps would be carried out. Today they are facts. Most of the commitments extend for ten or fifteen—and in a few cases twenty-five—years. Iran remains a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (North Korea withdrew in 2003), and several of the deal’s enforcement provisions strengthen the treaty by serving as models for application elsewhere.

In this light, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent description of the agreement as “the same failed approach…that brought us to the current imminent threat that we face from North Korea” is simply bizarre, betraying either ignorance of the facts or a willingness to wholly distort them. A “failure” like this would be an unimaginable success in North Korea. [...]

Parsi’s answer is domestic politics. Because of what he dubs the Supreme Leader’s “incentive structure”—by which he presumably means the policies Ayatollah Ali Khamenei favored and hence rewarded politically—Tehran convinced itself that “the nuclear issue ultimately was a pretext the West used to pressure Iran, to deprive it of access to science, and to deny it the ability to live up to its full potential.” This would keep Iran from being able to challenge US domination of the region. The right to enrich uranium became a symbol of national pride, technological prowess, international standing—and fairness. How could the great Persian nation be denied the right to do something that eight other nonnuclear weapons states were doing? At the least, having given up so much else, drawing the line at enrichment was a way for Tehran to keep the deal from looking, and feeling, like a defeat.

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Vox: Is Trump hiring too many generals?

The country is still mired in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it’s not surprising that Trump would seek military guidance. But Trump’s reliance on military personnel has raised fundamental questions about the role of civilian leadership in the American system.

It also raises serious questions about whether the Pentagon could take steps that start new wars or deepen US involvement in new ones. Mattis effectively has free rein to set troop levels in Afghanistan, the top US commander in Afghanistan dropped the biggest non-atomic bomb ever used in combat without anyone in the White House knowing or signing off, and the US has sharply stepped up its military activities in both Yemen and Somalia. [...]

So it’s fairly common for military people to cross over and work on the civilian side at the highest levels of government. This may be slightly pronounced in the Trump administration, but it’s not that out of step with previous administrations. [...]

If military people are deciding policy, that would be a real concern. But I’m not sure that’s the case. Leave aside the public statements. How many more additional resources have been sent into Iraq or Afghanistan. Have we sent in ten thousand more troops? Have we sent in extra bomber squadrons? Until you start seeing resources moving around, I would say this is mostly a standard approach. Sure, Trump seems adamant about letting his commanders decide what to do on the battlefield, but that too is fairly standard. [...]

What you don't want to see, and I don't think we will see, is people in uniform at political rallies. You don't want to see people in uniform endorsing candidates at all. Nor do we want military officials openly posturing for political positions. It's just not the way we do it. Because, again, this year's candidate can become next year's president or senator or governor or whatever the case may be. You have to be prepared to serve loyally and faithfully, regardless of who is elected.

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CityLab: The Relationship Between Subways and Urban Growth (JUN 2, 2016)

While Americans frequently ride on subways and transit lines built at the turn of the 20th century, the study finds a substantial uptick in subway construction since the 1970s and ‘80s in cities around the world. In total, the report identifies 7,886 operational subway stations and 10,672 kilometers (over 6,600 miles) of subways across 138 cities as of 2010. Of these, 53 subway systems are located in Asia, 40 in Europe, 30 in North America, 14 in South America, and just one in Africa. [...]

Although European cities are the smallest and growing at a relatively slow rate, their subway systems are larger and their service levels are higher than in any other continent. All together, European subway systems serve an average of 32,000 people per station. Over two-thirds of large European cities have subway systems, compared to less than a third in North America, less than a fourth in South America, and around 15 percent in Asia.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the study also finds that subways do not necessarily spur population growth. Even though larger cities tend to house more extensive subway systems, the study finds no correlation between the size of a system and the size of a city. Although Asia houses the majority of the world’s large cities, and South America has the largest cities on average, both continents cannot compete with subway service in Europe and North America. This may have something to do with the fact that subways in Europe and cities like New York were built before auto use was common, at a time when cities were smaller. By contrast, Asia has undergone rapid urbanization in recent years and is more reliant on its cars and roads. [...]

Although one might expect cities with more extensive transportation to be denser and more concentrated in and around their downtown cores, the study does not find this to be the case. Instead, it finds that cities with larger subway systems are less centralized. In fact, the addition of one standard subway line causes a 0.5 percent decrease in centralization (measured by the concentration of satellite light) in the city center. This effect is still quite a bit smaller than that of roads and highways, which, according to other research, account for up to a 9 percent decrease in centralization. In particular, the study finds North American cities with subway systems to be more spread out than most.

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Quartz: We still have no idea why humans speak over 7,000 languages

We could ask this same question of the entire globe. People don’t speak one universal language, or even a handful. Instead, today our species collectively speaks over 7,000 distinct languages.

And these languages are not spread randomly across the planet. For example, far more languages are found in tropical regions than in the temperate zones. The tropical island of New Guinea is home to over 900 languages. Russia, 20 times larger, has 105 indigenous languages. Even within the tropics, language diversity varies widely. For example, the 250,000 people who live on Vanuatu’s 80 islands speak 110 different languages, but in Bangladesh, a population 600 times greater speaks only 41 languages. [...]

Undoubtedly, a wide variety of social and environmental factors and processes have contributed to the patterns in language diversity we see across the globe. In some places topography, climate, or the density of key natural resources may be more critical; in others the history of warfare, political organization, or the subsistence strategies of different groups may play a bigger role in shaping group boundaries and language diversity patterns. What we have established for now is a template for a method that can be used to uncover the different processes at work in each location.

Language diversity has played a key role in shaping the interactions of human groups and the history of our species, and yet we know surprisingly little about the factors shaping this diversity. We hope other scientists will become as fascinated by the geography of language diversity as our research group is and join us in the search for understanding why humans speak so many languages.

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