Over the past year or two I've commented on three conventional narratives that strike me as dead wrong:
- The Afghanistan withdrawal was a disaster.
- The CDC's response to COVID-19 was atrocious.
- Silicon Valley Bank was a time bomb waiting to go off.
The common thread for all of these was an almost instant desire to find catastrophe whether it existed or not. The Afghanistan and SVB narratives literally coalesced within a day. The CDC narrative took a little longer, but not much.
Now, the usual thing at this point would be to blame social media for speeding up our expectations. We want answers now, and when a disaster is only a few hours old there are no answers available except the most obvious ones. And the most obvious ones are tales of error.
But this still wouldn't be a problem except for the next step: conventional narratives freeze in stone almost instantly nowadays. Nothing about social media is obviously to blame for this. But whatever the cause, neither the media nor anyone else seems willing to back off and reassess things as more evidence becomes available.
Some of this is political. The Afghanistan withdrawal, for example, was literally only a disaster during its first four or five hours. The rest of it went reasonably well, and in the end more than 100,000 people were airlifted out. But Republicans had a vested interest in making it look bad, and that affected the press coverage, which was relentlessly negative the entire time.
That said, the three narratives I mention above are entirely bipartisan. Both Democrats and Republicans alike promote all of them. Politics affects some narratives, obviously, but it's not the whole answer.
But what is? I think it's mostly that Americans have become addicted to doom. Any reasonable read of the evidence suggests that things have been going fairly well for most people over the past couple of decades, but it doesn't matter. We're all convinced that things are far worse than they really are. And once your mind is caught in this frame, narratives of catastrophe will always find a friendly home.
We are all doomscrollers now. But if things are actually going fairly well, why?
I think you are right; we're addicted to doom. We've done politics as entertainment for so long now that we've forgotten how to govern (the art of compromise), and give ourselves a rage-jizz from impending doom.
We've forgotten how to stand up and be proud of our accomplishments.
We've forgotten to appreciate the abundance of liberal success, the decrease in poverty, increased participation in economic activity for women and minorities, decline on pollution, advances in science, particularly in health care.
Life for most people has improved since the halcyon days of the 1950's.
It’s the media that’s addicted to doom — they invented “If it bleeds it leads”. Unfortunately they spread that negativity and fear to the public which is very damaging to our democracy. The excuse they give is that is what the public wants but there is solid evidence that isn’t true:
“In September 2020, the media research company SmithGeiger showed people in six U.S. cities TV news stories — both traditional, problem-focused stories and solutions stories covering responses to problems, and interviewed them.
The results? Solutions journalism outperformed the traditional approach on three criteria:
More audience appeal: Solutions stories were more interesting, trustworthy, deep and uplifting, and less upsetting.
Better ratings: Solutions stories were a reason to watch TV news more often and seek out the stations that told these stories.
Greater impact: Solutions stories changed people’s understanding of issues and inspired them to get involved. They talked to friends and family about these stories.”
https://sjn-static.s3.amazonaws.com/SmithGeiger2020.pdf
I think one reason these narratives become the conventional wisdom is that nobody is pushing back against them. For some reason Democrats seemed very reluctant to defend Biden on Afghanistan, and the CDC didn't have many friends during the Trump administration. Trump himself was at odds with the CDC and with his own medical advisors, so the government was refusing to support its own agency. As for SVB, the fault apparently lies with the Founders Fund, but if they didn't do anything illegal, someone had to take the blame.
Time and again I have seen Democrats get crucified by the media when they tried to fight back. Remember how the media reacted when Hillary rightly pointed out that they were obsessing over rightwing faux scandals (Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, Vince Foster’s “murder”) but ignoring the “vast rightwing conspiracy” that was creating these false narratives? (I would also have liked to have had her point out that we should be asking why the mainstream media kept falling for those lies but that would have really enraged those self-righteous hypocrites.) Instead of admitting the truth and importance of what Hillary had said, journalists and pundits decided to mock her for saying there was a vast rightwing conspiracy behind those stories. It was obvious that she was being sarcastic when she used that term but the media chose to make the story “First Lady exaggerates” not “top journalists duped by rightwing lies”.
Later when that great chickenhawk George W. Bush had his henchman attack John Kerry’s vert real war heroism the media put its focus on how Kerry responded. When Kerry first decided not to dignify those ridiculous accusations with a reply, the media slammed him for looking weak. Later when he did fight back they said he looke defensive — and therefore weak. In contrast when Bush claimed he had had nothing to do with those attacks the media gave him a pass. They knew those attacks were funded by top donors to Bush and some of his good friends. The media also knew it was standard operating procedure for the Bush family’s dirty tricksters Lee Atwater and his acolyte Karl Rove to identify their oppenents’ strengths then find a way to attack that. They would then get “independent” “outside” groups to do the attacking so they could stay above the fray. Atwater had already revealed that that was how the race-baiting Willie Horton ad was created — the sainted Poppy Bush personally approved that ad and Atwater got an “independent” group to run it. But they still accepted Bush’s dishonest denial of responsibility.
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/jeb-bush-willie-horton-118061
Add in the pandemic, which has been going much better recently -- yet large chunks of Americans refuse to see any difference between now and 2020.
Not following the news (and not doomscrolling) has reduced my anxiety levels 90%. Give it a try. If you don’t take specific actions in response to news items you read then why read/watch them?
I have long felt that reporting on climate change should be based on coverage of actual actions that people can take. The media could cover, for example, various organizations taking steps to counter climate change, thereby presenting us with a range of options we might choose to contribute to. In an even more basic sense, the media could drop "both sides" reporting and simply report the obvious truth that one of the major American parties is much more likely to support climate initiatives than the other: that empowers people with essential information for voting in a climate-conscious manner.
What we get instead, of course, is one report after another telling us that we're all doomed. I can't tell you how many climate-related newscasts I've heard that lay out a terrible future scenario and then just leave it at that. And, to put it mildly, this approach is counter productive. It ignores human nature. We are ultimately forced to ignore that kind of news. Our psychology cannot withstand the nihilism. We need some kind of productive action in order to feel that we still have agency over our own lives. And if, as you point out, the news refuses to provide that, it might be doing more harm than good.
Re: #1
https://www.axios.com/2021/08/20/trump-taliban-agreement-doha-biden
An image of Pompeo and the Taliban.
Another narrative that were set in stone for way too long:
- "the ACA/Obamacare is unpopular"; Dems were running away from supporting it. It took Republicans effort to nearly overturn it (thank you Sen McCain) for people to understand what they were going to lose. Now, nobody campaigns on overturning it. It's all about "shoring it up" or fixing it.
- "pro-abortion stance is unpopular." Oh man, this one is infuriating. Dems candidate were all like: we have to make sure there are fewer abortions, so we need to take steps to reduce the number of abortions. The idea was that it's unpopular to defend abortion, but if you concede just enough to Republicans, maybe they will not want to protect it. Was that dumb, or what. Now we see that "the government has no business regulating our bodies" is an actually popular stance. It took the repel of Roe in Dobbs to unset that take from the stone.
Pot, kettle, Kevin "We're gonna have a recession whoo hoo!" Drum.
The Afghanistan withdrawal was both ill-considered and ill-executed. Biden's haste to get out, and his willingness to indulge the Afghan president's desire not to appear abandoned resulted in the chaos at the airport that day and our continuing inability to retrieve all the Afghans who had helped our military at considerable risk. And this is the opinion of one who has voted for Biden every time he had the opportunity, will be pleased to do so again, and believes he will be one of our most consequential presidents.
We still have more than 2,000 soldiers in Iraq protecting the government from ISIS; it would have been simple to leave enough troops in Afghanistan to do the same for the Taliban. If our diplomatic and military leaders couldn't see at the time that bugging out would lead to the hardship and chaos the Afghan civilians are now facing, including all the girls denied education and the attendant religious extremism, I have a few Iraqi WMDs to sell them. Made in 2003, never used.
As a people we have a truly miserable record of abandoning our allies (ask the Iraqi marsh Arabs, abandoned after Desert Storm, who stoned the "liberators" coming up from Kuwait in 2003). It does not give me great hope for the future of Ukraine.
The CDC did a reasonable job for an organization under the thumb of a crazy.
As far as SVB goes, that might have worked out if the hedgies (Hail Thiel!) hadn't panicked. It was an under-regulated time bomb but didn't have to go off. The only good thing about that bank failure is that it probably won't have very high direct costs, and may lead to sterner oversight of some of the other. Somewhere out there is, I suspect, a time bomb.
I think it is highly debatable that leaving 2,000 soldiers or some other number ?? in Afghanistan would in the long run make any difference. I think the parallel to Iraq is not accurate. For all the flaws, Iraq was and is in far better shape than Afghanistan was 2 years ago despite our 20 years of military involvement in Afghanistan and Isis is far less formidable than the Taliban.
I think Biden showed a lot of courage ignoring the misleading assurances of our military who wanted to stay there seemingly forever.
Here is a picture: https://www.axios.com/2021/08/20/trump-taliban-agreement-doha-biden
It took twenty years of kicking the can down the road by numerous administrations before Biden finally did what was necessary. I don't think you'll get much support here for calling it "hasty" after 20 years, though I have no doubt right-wing sites would be happy to support you in your opinion.
And the idea that we could withdraw from a war while under fire without any casualties is naive in the extreme, though it certainly feeds the right-wing narrative nicely.
IMO, you've mistakenly placed a generation's effort on the pedestal by championing what was a lost cause from the get go. The occupation of Afghanistan was the original sin. The myth that somehow that Afghanistan could become a nation was foolish. The hubris that was slung day after day that disparate peoples almost as if they were plucked from a time machine encircled by an arbitrary border drawn haphazardly by powers long ago turned to ghosts that then could be made to see eye while awash in US dollars and under the watchful silicon eyes of drones and the barrels of M4's is the very pinnacle of conceit.
And then pulling off an operation that will be studied for generations on how to organize an ad hoc airlift with a skeleton force (remember they reinforced at the start of the op) while basically in the guillotine is closer to miraculous instead of ill advised. Yes, friends were left behind, promises broken, backs turned. Just as our troops suffered at the hands of their supposed allies, equipment issued and sold the same day, orders given to stand post as bait while rotated through there for almost two decades. I'm sure there were folks that thought Dunkirk could fit into the same category that you qualify "this disaster."
Biden's "haste" go get out?!? WTF are you smoking. You can criticize the withdrawal for some reasons, though I'll go on the record to say that I think it was remarkably well done given the sitrep. But "haste" is the last word I'd use to describe getting out of an occupation that lasted 20+ years and 3 Administrations, 8 of which Biden was a part of. Nothing hasty about it. It was long past due.
Interesting points, though I don't really think the Afghanistan withdrawal is really seen as any kind of catastrophe, just botched, and even that as you mention isn't really the case. Aside from that, I think the interest in it is fading over time as predicted, and the benefit of the larger action to be considered better and better as we progress more into this conflict with Russia (and potentially China).
As for the CDC, although they were not "atrocious", they clearly did not perform admirably or with great excellence across the board, I'll leave it at that, but "atrocious" is a severe mischaracterization. In my view, they did "alright", good and bad, with the communication strategy being hap-handed (which is anathema in a public emergency), and overall a success not a failure. But they and other gov't agencies could have been a lot better, and they and we will learn from this experience, because as you say Kevin, initial impressions tend to stick, especially in this social media echo chamber age, so there's some new insights to process/integrate AND need to fallback to age-old wisdom about public decisiveness and communication in a crisis.
As for this bank crisis, aren't people getting kind of used to this now? It sucks for a while as we deal with the repercussions and then the ship rights itself. The important thing is to focus on who is consistently bailed out without question, and who is not, and why that is (electoral finance corruption, corporate person, etc.).
"That said, the three narratives I mention above are entirely bipartisan. Both Democrats and Republicans alike promote all of them." I can't say I think that's true. Maybe in the usual bothsides way, 10:1 or 100:1 GOPs doing it. Although 3 seems less partisan, although excusing Theil, ! and 2 are decidedly pro-GOP narratives.
What we're looking at is the asymmetry of FOX providing consistently pro-GOP propaganda on one side and the supposedly liberal, feckless MSM on the other.
Mr Optimistic is probably correct...as a doom scroller myself, I should take his words of wisdom...and I would if I had time, but I have a lot more finance and/or war scrolling to do today...so much a'happening, so little time...lol, Best Wishes, T
Apropos of nothing, I was this morning raving to the Usual Group of Suspects about having just watched the first episode of "The Last of Us". Clearly, it was dystopic, and we discussed briefly how the sf of the 1930s and 1940s was pretty optimistic: the conquest of space, meeting fantastic new species, settling widely throughout the galaxy, and the like. Then in the 1950s the genre shifted abruptly to catastrophes, gloom, dystopias, the continuing collapse of society.
No explanation; just bringing it up. We seem to be in a mode now where the reporters on current events like the catastropic, dystopic model. Maybe they think it makes them sound "serious." Maybe it's a result of journo-mandatory Republican spin ... note that all of these "disasters" mentioned are being pinned directly on Joe Biden.
A substantial part of what changed regarding SF was not, IMHO, because of "politics' and the outside world, it was because of REALITY.
Imagine SF in the 20s through 40s. The history of science (specifically, but not only, physics) that they lived through was of anything being possible. Relativity, GR, QM -- nothing in the world was what it seemed, so why couldn't psi powers be possible? Why couldn't faster than light travel be possible? Why couldn't flying cars or atomic rockets be possible? Were they any weirder than quantum mechanics or general relativity?
But after the 40s reality set in in physics. As we began to really understand the new physics, we also began to understand the constraints it placed on reality. It didn't leave any realistic loopholes for psi, or faster than light travel. It didn't change the classical physics that made flying cars problematic in so many ways, or provide some sort of magic that allowed for non-dangerous atomic rockets.
And if SF was supposed to be (at least somewhat...) grounded in science as understood at the time, well a drastically constrained and limited science also meant a drastically constrained and limited SF.
None of this was anyone's "fault", and I think it would have happened that way regardless of Hiroshima or the Cold War; it was just the inevitable result of the massively unexpected (physics from about 1890 to Schrodinger) followed by consolidation and understanding (Schrodinger to Shelter Island).
Some of the earliest works of science fiction could be categorized as dystopian à la Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, even not all of HG Wells' works could be considered utopian, and others.
This isn't to disagree totally, I'm just pointing out that commercial success shouldn't be the barometer of the genre.
"even not all of HG Wells' works could be considered utopian"
All of his famous stuff is rather dark: War of the Worlds, Invisible Man, and Doctor Moreau--a lot of it has themes of technology enabling bad things. I wouldn't say it's anti-technology, or pessimistic per se, but evern something like the Time Machine is rather grim, as the Traveler doesn't go to some utopian future, but one in which the pursuit of utopia results in a lesser world of ruins and a diminished humanity.
No idea if that's part of the canonization process that happened in the ensuing century, or if Wells-in-the-time-of-Wells was perceived differently, of course.
To your list of early dystopian science fiction, I'd add Capek's R.U.R., which in *1920* basically encapsulates every type of grim A.I. story told for the following hundred years (humanity creating slaves, economic unrest when machines make everything, robots rising up, robots destroying humanity, robots being the true inheritors of the earth, etc.). Plus something like JH Rosny's "The Xipehuz," in which early humanity uses reason to wipe out a competing and apparently alien species, but then mourns the loss of that other life.
There is a common theme here which has unexpected parallels across multiple domains.
What every Stats 101 student learns is that the sum of IID variables is Normally distributed. What most of those students forget is the INDEPENDENT part of IID...
Most of our intuitions about how the world works are implicitly founded on the assumption of summed IID variables. We assume that liberal democratic politics will work out because people will hear multiple different opinions and come to some sort of "average" opinion that's probably reasonable. We assume that things like finance will work out because withdrawals and failures will be un-coordinated. The Wisdom of Crowds only works when the opinion of each crowd member is independent of the rest of the crowd.
But the pattern of human experience, since about Gutenberg, has been that this intuition is more and more decoupled from reality. Ever since Gutenberg we've had a situation where more and more of the supposedly independent opinions you hear, or the supposedly independent events you encounter, are not in fact independent. Opinions are, ever more rapidly, disseminated in such a way as to result in an almost immediate correlated set of opinions. Likewise for important events in business, politics, or finance. The danger was probably always present – *very few* people actually possess the independence of mind claimed by most. But the danger was much less important when every opinion was created within an individual by talking to multiple other, very different individuals, and synthesizing very different views (each understood relative to the vagaries of that individual's experience).
Printing (first books, then magazines, then newspapers), the telegraph then radio and TV, now the internet, each break down this process. We all hear more or less a single opinion (the newspaper story or some initiating tweet), and we all then hear confirming opinions from a select set of voices.
And, like I said, once you're adding together correlated random variables, it's game over. There is ZERO reason to assume Normality and all that implies in terms of damping down extremes...
And so we land up where we are today. The problem is NOT EXACTLY that most of us are followers, that's always been the case; and it's NOT EXACTLY social media. It's that
- the voices we want to hear (generally people like us, along with a smattering of the charismatic and articulate)
- because of technology (ability to transmit and sift data instantaneously)
- are all saying the same thing
- which reinforces the same thing that they are all saying ("everyone I know agrees that X")
There's no obvious way to break this.
- Most people want to listen to a limited set of voices
- Most people don't want to think independent thoughts
- Tech means massive immediate *correlation* in thoughts
- Which leads to huge correlated swings in opinion -- instead of one normal distribution of opinion, we get eg two sharp spikes at two extremes.
The points Kevin mentions (party politics, people liking a doom narrative) are second order effects. Correlated thought is the primary issue.
You can see this by looking at opinions in other non-political spaces. You'll see a similar frozen narrative where opinions that used to form over a period of weeks, months, years, and by talking to multiple different people, are now formed within a day based on what's superficially a wide collection of on-line opinions, but which is in reality an extremely limited set of rephrasings of the same correlated opinion.
Hell go to Twitter right now. Is nVidia poised for great things? Of course they are, *everyone* says so -- based on having all just seen Jensen's keynote at GTC and having the exact same opinion about it...
And further...I must strongly disagree with Mr John Pearce above.
The Afghanistan withdrawal was just fine...an excellent military execution of a difficult order. Anyone that has been in active combat knows that matters can go sideways in the blink of a moment....13 dead is a very small cost for such a large maneuver. We lose that many service members most every year in just training exercises. Never have so many people been moved successfully so quickly...hats off to Mr Biden and our military.
If Mr Pearce wanted the US to take in more refugees...just what is his number? A million, two million...everybody in Afghanistan wanted to evacuate to the United States...and I don't blame them at all for...this desire, this wish. My complaint is against Mr Pearce in not saying what he wanted in these regards.
Lastly, wanting to leave 2,000 troops is pure insanity....see Điện Biên Phủ...JFC!
Nuf` said
I agree on your characterisation of the operation. But this country could do with a million or five millions of refugees. Not only for the humanitarian reasons but for economic ones as well. Our nation is on a perpetual hallucinatory trip when it comes to its myths of its exceptionalism, especially when it comes to sharing them.
Kevin, unless you understand Magnitsky you will be blind. Putin began a concentrated effort to influence U.S. politics beginning with the Magnitsky sanctions and has large propaganda efforts working constantly to undermine the U.S. political system in an effort to elect those who will get rid of the sanctions. These efforts are well documented and there are millions of dollars directed into U.S. politics as part of the process. The Magnitsky process explains an enormous amount. We are in a new world of cyber conflict.
Doomscrolling happens because that's how social media works--frequent engagements. If everyone only checks Twitter once a month, Twitter fails. So the intent is to make everything seem like an emergency, urgent, developing, "happening NOW," so you'll stay engaged, while wanting you to react emotionally and fearfully, because that boosts engagement too.
But this is coupled to a second purpose: inaction. If we were frequently bombarded with social media stories about small but incremental changes and their positive effects, about how someone's life was saved by the ACA, about the good that our "corrupt" institutions sometimes do, that would be reassuring, which reduces engagement, and it would work against the narrative that the entire system is broken. But it might also drive people to action. The wealthy and powerful always have advantages in coordinating, whether directly or indirectly. Trump makes a statement and Fox boosts it network-wide, while the media repeat the statement and then cover its horse-race effects. But Fox doesn't care what some "nobody" posts on a blog. Nothing gets amplified that way.
And yet social media can be an amplifying and organizing force for "regular people." And that's a threat to undermine the powerful and few. How do you undermine people's desire to coordinate and take concrete and specific steps to promote incremental improvements to our institutions? Here's a hint: people protesting that a hospital murdered its patients by not giving them horse medicine are unlikely to be much concerned about medical errors increasing because of diminished, overworked, underpaid hospital staff. The best "crisis" is one where there's no clear way to resolve the "doom" being mentioned and the social media response is anger, fear, and outrage, not engagement or pressure for stepwise reform.
If it's the apocalypse, of course society falls apart and it's everyone for themselves. Collective action and reforms work, which creates incentives for the people opposed to such things to propagate their uselessness.
Take the banking "crisis." Elizabeth Warren has concrete suggestions, but they'll get drowned out by the doomscrolling. Better to blame the system, blame "wokeness," blame anything that doesn't involve any clear steps that your average social media reader can actually take. I have more savings than many Americans, but my bank accounts are still under the FDIC insurance cap. I have no influence, no real stakes in the game outside outrage. I've read dozens of stories on Silicon Valley Bank, but can name not one person who was "responsible" for its failure (unless you count Thiel). I can follow the news and the social media, but I can't DO anything and none of the people I've read have suggested otherwise.
If this were a small problem instead of an insurmountable one, then it would be addressable. So presenting all problems as insurmountable ones helps shore up the status quo for those who benefit disproportionally from it, while discouraging everyone else from thinking change is possible.
That may depend on one’s vantage point. For example, Afghan women likely disagree.
Pretty simple
If it bleeds, it leads. It gets clicks
I think your post below about House Prices leveling out is an excellent example of how this happens. We get crappy reporting from major media outlets (like the fact that house prices have been declining for almost ten months but it's just reported now by the NYT because they report it very oddly in annual aggregate terms rather that the way you explain it) and are left to wonder why it sounds so wrong. Who doesn't assume things are worse than they are (and fail to see why it's not so bad) when even the NYT is basically lying (a lot) on the facts of the stories it tells?
Two possible Kevin posts:
#1 “ As expected, the sun rose over the San Something mountains this morning and as its rays caressed the patio, Charlie stretched lazily under the Bougainvillea bush”
( full story below)
#2 “ A local cat terrorized the neighborhood this morning while murdering a family of black eyed yellow beaked tanangers”
( full story below)
Which one do people read?
It's slightly older, but I'm surprised you left off lead in Flint.
One problem is that readers don't want their narratives to be changed, so media wanting to keep their readers are not going to work on changing narratives. We saw this week that NYT is still interested in maintaining the fiction that the Iraq War was a good idea at the time.
Yeah, it’s really weird. And these days it really feels like expressing optimism or less than doomerism is being intentionally naive or provocative. Sick of it.
The most obvious answers are tales of malice and dark conspiracies.
Forget these things. If it is doom you're looking for, climate change has you covered.
Dear painedumonde, I respect your honest response re Refugees. I would however probably disagree that this, while not even an unreasonable number, all things considered, would be politically possible.
To the degree that Wiki can be trusted, the true number of evacuees was 122,000 of which 76,000 through one means or another made it to the United States. It is this latter number I question, somewhere around 55, 000 there began a...(sizable?) push back against this influx as opposed to South of the US Border for example....let alone Eastern Europe, the Caucasus etc .
Still this number is better than I expected....maybe we could have squeezed an additional 50,000 without blowing up the Biden Presidency....maybe.
But the time didn't exist and there was building a certain Taliban resentment to the evacuation of their best and brightest....not that they in the end had any use for these people, but at the time, this was a question.
Thanks for making me work.
Why?
"Bad" things are judged quickly.
Good things take time to understand.
Short attention span.
Tik Tok.
I have explained several times why you are wrong about CDC so its you who are set in stone.
Imo, the departure was chaotic and then improved but the country poofed into non existence instantly. That's why it's viewed as a huge disaster. Because the Taliban flicked a pinkie and everything we did for 20 years poofed away.
There are addition all possibilities:
1. The Afghan Government collapsed so quickly because it always was a
quixotic chimera...
or, has been reported
Qatar paid for this result, the collapse
https://tfiglobalnews.com/2023/02/06/its-official-qatar-had-a-role-in-taliban-2-0/
But we know that SVB was a time bomb waiting to go off.
We now know that the Fed had identified serious deficiencies but nothing was done to correct these problems.
We now know that the bank lobbyist 'analysis' which Kevin relied on conclude that SVB would have passed any stress test with flying colors was in fact wrong as it ignored the rule that previously required banks like SVB with large foreign exposure to anticipate larger withdrawal amounts. The faulty analysis also appears to conveniently forget that the bank would have been analyzed daily, not just at Dec 31st 2022 as implied in the analysis. As things deteriorated in January, it would have failed the stress tests and actions would have been required.
Big miss on this one.
Afghanistan experienced the most rapid and profound demographic transition of any nation in recorded history from 2000-2020.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=AF
If America and other nations had stayed there for another 10 - 20 years the process would have been completed and arguably the geopolitical risk from one of the most dangerous nations of the world would have been neutralized at a comparatively low cost. The cost of ignoring the social problems in Afghanistan has been significant in the past. As we have seen in other nations of the world as TFR moves below 3 the inherent potential for military aggression is greatly reduced. Most of the conflicts of the last century at their core have been conflicts about high fertility. Afghanistan has been one of the most notable fertility outliers in the world. Interestingly, in Afghanistan a central strategy to achieve their extreme fertility rate has been to prevent the education of their girls.
If Afghanistan had completed the transition to a modern level of total fertility of around 1.8, then they could have avoided all the hardship that most other nations have had to experience. England required centuries to transition through to below replacement fertility and during this transition had to work through all the problems that would arise in such a transition (e.g., childhood labor in coal mines etc., emergence of counter-ideologies to capitalism (such as communism etc.)). Yet, if Afghanistan had stayed the course it could have went directly to a post-modern, post-economic society without all of those traumas.
If the Afghan wives and daughters were not willing to kill their husbands and bothers all of who were willing to kill them, then why should it be my responsibility to kill all these husbands and brothers?
Personally, I was not willing to spend another one Trillion dollars and 4,000 American lives and countless wounded for another 10 or twenty, (or 30?) years.
Please answer paragraph one for me....and I will note that 30% of the Ukraine armed forces, to include combat roles, are filled by capable women.
To so transform a society the question is sufficient killing...Germany and Japan required up to 10% of their population to be dead....that means 4 million Afghans in a land locked country bordered by countries not amenable to helping in this task.
Good people can argue differently, but the next 20 years of transformation must be accomplished by the Afghans.
Best Wishes, Traveller