Kevin Drum

Here's an entire trip from Paris to Los Angeles in four photos. From the top: (a) our plane, (b) the village of Goussainville, about 30 seconds after takeoff, (c) Hudson Bay, halfway home, and (d) crossing the San Diego Freeway, about 30 seconds before landing.

It's the 20th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War Against the Terrorist Saddam Hussein, and many people think this is a good time for retrospectives. Personally, I'd prefer to forget about the whole thing, but I suppose that's a bad idea.

Still, although I've explained before why I eventually turned against the war,¹ I'm not sure I've ever explained why I initially supported it in the first place. It's no secret or anything, just something I've never gotten around to mentioning on the blog.

It's pretty simple, really. I grew up against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Cold War. US involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973, but in 1980 we began arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan. In 1983 we invaded Grenada. During the mid-80s we were arming the contras in Nicaragua. We armed Iraq against Iran. In 1989 we invaded Panama. In 1991 we invaded Iraq. In 1992 we sent troops to Somalia. In 1999 we bombed Yugoslavia. In 2001 we invaded Afghanistan.

All of these were things I paid some attention to, but not much. Like most people, I had other things to keep me busy, and the constant use of US troops throughout the world seemed like no more than the normal background hum of daily news reports. It was just the way the world was.

So when 2002 arrived, and the Bush White House rolled out its marketing campaign for invading Iraq, it seemed like just another US war. Obviously 9/11 was fresh on everyone's mind, and even though Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with that he certainly seemed like a very bad guy. Which he was. So sure, why not take him out? He certainly deserved it as much as Manuel Noriega or Slobodan Milošević.

This, then, is the real answer: I didn't examine the war super closely, mostly thinking of it as just another American military intervention. Nothing to get too excited about.

Oddly enough, it was blogging that put paid to that way of thinking. It forced me to pay a lot more attention to what was happening, especially the fact that the Iraq war was pretty obviously not a "last resort" against an implacable enemy who was hostile to important American interests. Rather, it was the longstanding desire of a particular ideological group that finally had a good excuse to sell it to the public.

All this seems sort of obvious now, but I suspect that the vast majority of Americans at the time, both pro and anti-war, didn't think all that deeply about this stuff. All I can say is that when I started to do that I concluded that American military intervention really should be used only as a last resort against implacable enemies who are hostile to important American interests. And that's where I remain today.

¹My support steadily diminished throughout 2002 and early 2003. At the beginning of March, after Paul Wolfowitz's speech and the forged yellowcake documents and, I think, the announcement of some ridiculous drones that were being touted as WMD delivery systems, I'd finally had enough and turned against the war. Two weeks later we invaded.

Here's the latest from the IPCC on our progress toward reining in climate change:

Bottom line: Current policies "lead to warming of 3.2°C." That's about 6°F for real Americans who don't use the metric system.

I sometimes think that this whole business of using temperature rises to describe climate change is misguided. In the US, of course, you have the problem that most people see 3° and just vaguely think it's 3°F, which doesn't seem like much. So summers used to 78° and now they're going to be 81°. So what?

Of course, I'm not sure what would be better as a single, all-around metric. Grain production? Acres of land flooded? Expected heat deaths?

We lost over a million people in the COVID-19 pandemic and the biggest effect seems to have been a huge national temper tantrum over mask wearing. Do you think a country like that is going to be even slightly moved by the prospect of 80,000 extra deaths several decades from now?

I'm stumped. If we could figure out a way to correlate temperature with gun availability or number of abortions, maybe we could get somewhere.

The Fed is fighting back. It's been criticized for not supervising Silicon Valley Bank properly, so now it's leaking the news that it did indeed supervise them:

In 2021, a Fed review of the growing bank found serious weaknesses in how it was handling key risks....But the bank did not fix its vulnerabilities. By July 2022, Silicon Valley Bank was in a full supervisory review — getting a more careful look — and was ultimately rated deficient for governance and controls. It was placed under a set of restrictions that prevented it from growing through acquisitions. Last autumn, staff members from the San Francisco Fed met with senior leaders at the firm to talk about their ability to gain access to enough cash in a crisis and possible exposure to losses as interest rates rose.

It became clear to the Fed that the firm was using bad models to determine how its business would fare as the central bank raised rates: Its leaders were assuming that higher interest revenue would substantially help their financial situation as rates went up, but that was out of step with reality.

This raises as many questions as it answers. Bloomberg, which reported this story first, says the Fed initially called out "operations and technology" problems. It didn't point out problems with interest rate risks until late last year.

So I remain puzzled. If the Fed really was up in SVB's grill, how is it that SVB was able to ignore them? And given SVB's capital and leverage positions, what exactly was the Fed worried about? In the end, even with deposits flowing out at a fairly heavy rate, SVB was able to raise $20 billion—which should have been plenty. It's true they had to take a substantial loss on the sale, but not one of life threatening size.

And beyond that, although the Fed is saying that it warned SVB of problems, there's no hint in either of these stories to suggest what the Fed wanted SVB to do about it. Nothing very dramatic, apparently. Just how concerned was the Fed about these problems, really?

More to come, I imagine.

Brad DeLong comments this weekend on a couple of essays that lament the difficulty of living in an era where technological progress is improving exponentially:

I read these, and I think: this is how it has been since the 1870s. Perhaps this is how it has been since the late 1830s.

Well, yes. But there's a difference. Back in 2013, in Part 1 of my robot trilogy,¹ I illustrated exponential growth using the analogy of filling up Lake Michigan. In the first year, you add one drop of water. Then two. Then four.

In the second to last year, you add a quintillion gallons of water. Then two quintillion. Then four. For five or six decades you can barely see anything more than a bit of sogginess. Then, in the final decade, suddenly the job is done and the lake is filled.

Both ends of the chart are exponential growth. But to human beings, the right edge is very, very different from the left. Exponential growth is much more impressive when it produces an elephant than when it produces a flea, even if, technically speaking, both are equally miraculous.

So go ahead and feel more disoriented than your great-great grandfather! After all, here's what Brad has to say about the wonders of ChatGPT:

The “entity” we are conversing with is very sub-Turing indeed. It is page-level autocomplete.

....I do anticipate the use of this page-level autocomplete will spread around the world, considerably faster than use of personal computers or use of the Internet. We are primed to have conversations....A kind of animal that attributes Turing-class intelligence to the lightning—which we, at least some of us, personified as a huge guy with a red beard and severe anger management problems—is primed to make much use of page-level autocomplete.

....Will we use it for good or ill? That is in our hands.

Quite so.

¹Part 2 is here. Part 3 is still in the works. Maybe next year?

The Washington Post has a story today about the demise of ER physicians. It used to be a coveted position for residencies, but now senior doctors are warning against it:

They warn of burnout after covid and patients’ increasing suspicion of doctors. The pay is not as good, they say, especially as hospitals rely more on nurse practitioners and physician assistants to staff emergency departments. And job prospects may be grim, they caution, as emergency medicine residency programs aggressively expanded in recent years.

....Emergency departments are under strain as they become congested with patients waiting for beds, veteran providers quit and violence against the remaining staff grows. These factors are damaging the emergency room’s reputation as an ideal place to learn by caring for a steady stream of patients with a wide range of problems.

Every year, graduating students apply for residencies and are matched with programs that are interested in hiring them. Here's what that looks like for emergency medicine:

Emergency medicine was in the SOAP in 2023. That is, there weren't enough applicants for all the open positions, which means that some ER residency programs had to hire doctors from the Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program, a sort of second-round draft for everyone who didn't get an offer from the first round of matching.

Of course, it's worth noting that, in the end, every ER position was filled. And every specialty has its ups and downs. Perhaps next year, with ER departments back to semi-normal, we'll see a rebound.

You're all probably tired of hearing me natter on about Silicon Valley Bank, but the conventional narrative continues to bug me.

The most persistent part of the narrative is that SVB had a bond portfolio exposed to lots of interest rate risk and they were morons for not hedging this risk. But normally, you hedge interest rate risk only if it's an extraneous factor to your main business and you don't feel like worrying about it. You don't hedge it if it's a deliberate investment strategy. What's the point?

So of course SVB didn't hedge their interest rate risk. If they wanted less exposure to interest rates, they would have put together a different portfolio in the first place.

What's more, they did hedge their short-term interest rate risk in the strongest possible way: by making sure that short-term losses wouldn't land on their books at all. Their $90 billion bond portfolio was deliberately marked as Hold to Maturity, which means that gains and losses only show up when the bonds are redeemed. That's several years away at a minimum.

Basically, SVB was (a) betting that interest rates would be low in five or ten years and (b) not betting at all on interest rates over the next two or three years. That may or may not be the smartest investment strategy, but it's perfectly reasonable.

Within the investor community, SVB's unrealized losses caused a bit of nervousness but not a lot. SVB collapsed not because of that, but because clients pulled out their money en masse. The proximate causes of this were (a) a Moody's downgrade, (b) a massive miscalculation by Goldman Sachs, and (c) a decision by Founders Fund to pull all their companies' money out of SVB. None of this was substantially related to SVB's unrealized losses.

Tom Nichols is unimpressed with today's story about John Connally's 1980 mission to let the Iranians know they should wait a while before releasing the embassy hostages:

Has it occurred to anyone that the Iranians hated Carter's guts because of the Shah and did what they did just to spite him? Of *course* they were trying to hurt Carter; they didn't need John Connally's help with that. https://t.co/X3Lv6cABfn

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) March 18, 2023

This has occurred to everyone. In retrospect, we all know that Khomeini was vanishingly unlikely to ever release the hostages while Jimmy Carter was president.

But that doesn't matter, because we didn't know it back then. Nor does it matter if Connally was an idiot. Or badly informed. Or whether his message ever got through.¹

What matters is that he tried. He tried to make sure the hostages would stay in captivity as long as there was any chance their release might help Carter. This is appalling beyond belief.

But did Reagan know about any of this? We don't have any firm evidence. But we already know there was a parallel effort underway with the same goal. And we know the hostages were released within minutes after Reagan was sworn in. And we know that arms began flowing from Israel to Iran a few days later, something that could happen only with a US blessing.

This fact pattern already suggests that Reagan cut a deal with the Iranians. The Connally story adds yet more evidence. And of course, we also know that the Reagan campaign was terrified Carter might negotiate a hostage release before the election. And we also know that Reagan was perfectly happy to trade arms for hostages later in his presidency.

Given all this, you'd have to be willfully obtuse to continue thinking it unlikely that Reagan—or at least his senior staff—knew what was going on. It's true that we don't have silver bullet proof. But come on.

¹Well, it matters a little bit because it let the Iranians know that Reagan was anxious for a deal—which meant they could trick Reagan into offering more than he had to. In particular, they took advantage of this to get arms in return for releasing the hostages, something Carter was unwilling to consider.

As we all know, Jimmy Carter lost his 1980 reelection bid against Ronald Reagan thanks in part to the long-running Iranian hostage drama. It's long been suspected that Reagan's team actively tried to persuade Iran not to release the hostages so that Carter wouldn't get a victory bump, but there's never been any firm proof.

Until now. In a story that's getting surprisingly little play, the New York Times reports that Ben Barnes, a major player in Texas politics back in the day, says he accompanied John Connally on a mid-election tour of the Middle East:

What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.

Then shortly after returning home, Mr. Barnes said, Mr. Connally reported to William J. Casey, the chairman of Mr. Reagan’s campaign and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefing him about the trip in an airport lounge.

The tour kicked off on July 18. Here's what Gallup polling looked like on that date:¹

Carter plummeted in the polls during the first months of the hostage crisis, but recovered in April and stayed ahead of Reagan for the next couple of months. Reagan opened up a small lead on Carter in July, but it was narrowing. It was precisely the time that the Reagan campaign was probably most worried.²

So that fits. Still, how do we know that Barnes is telling the truth?

Mr. Barnes identified four living people he said he had confided in over the years....All four of them confirmed in recent days that Mr. Barnes shared the story with them years ago....Records at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum confirm part of Mr. Barnes’s story. An itinerary found this past week in Mr. Connally’s files indicated that he did, in fact, leave Houston on July 18, 1980, for a trip that would take him to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel before returning to Houston on Aug. 11. Mr. Barnes was listed as accompanying him.

Did the Reagan campaign ask Connally to do this? Did they even know he was doing it?

Mr. Barnes said he was certain the point of Mr. Connally’s trip was to get a message to the Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election. “I’ll go to my grave believing that it was the purpose of the trip,” he said. “It wasn’t freelancing because Casey was so interested in hearing as soon as we got back to the United States.” Mr. Casey, he added, wanted to know whether “they were going to hold the hostages.”

There's no way to know for sure. But we know that Richard Nixon tried to sabotage a Vietnam peace deal before the 1968 election. This would be right in character.

¹I've erased the Republican convention bump in late August in order to provide a clearer view of what the polling trends looked like at the time.

²There's an extensive literature about the 1980 polls and whether they were accurate. But that doesn't really matter here. What matters is what people thought at the time, and the Gallup poll is a pretty reliable indicator of that.

With the release of ChatGPT, the chattering classes began to chatter about the safety of artificial intelligence. Partly this was about things ChatGPT could do right now (help kids cheat in school, for example) but mostly it was about the possibility of AI destroying humanity at some point in the future.

But there's an odd thing about these discussions: they almost all turn on the possibility of future AIs getting mad at us; or formulating goals that (sadly) require wiping the planet of humans; or going nuts and destroying the entire solar system in a rampage.

And sure, maybe. Anything is possible. But all of these things assume that AIs are like humans. They get angry. They have desires. They develop mental illnesses. They fear death and will protect themselves from it.

But none of that is remotely likely. These are things that developed in humans via evolution, and there's no reason for a computer to have any of them. They don't have lizard brains that still control their destinies because they never had lizard brains in the first place.

But you know who does still have lizard brains? Humans. The real danger of AI is not that it will spontaneously or mistakenly destroy us all. The real danger is that humans will deliberately deploy them for our favorite activity: killing each other. If you're really concerned about the safety of AI, this is what to focus on. I'd say it's about 99% of the real danger.