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And perhaps it did not start in the United States? Here is more from David Rozado, including a full research paper:
Great Awokening is a global phenomenon. No evidence it started in US media. Analysis of 98 million news articles across 36 countries quantifies. Exception: state-controlled media from China/Russia/Iran using wokeness terminology to criticize/mock the Westhttps://t.co/yHwPMSR4D0 pic.twitter.com/RF30c2UmWQ
— David Rozado (@DavidRozado) April 6, 2023
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One model of a future course is a super-textbook: lectures, exercises, quizzes, and grading all available on a tablet with artificial intelligence routines guiding students to lectures and
exercises designed to address that student’s deficits and with human intelligence—tutors—on call on an as-needed basis, possibly for extra marginal fees.
That was Tyler and I in our 2014 paper. Here’s the Washington Post on the Khan Academy and OpenAI colloboration.
…last week, the private Khan Lab School campuses in Palo Alto and Mountain View welcomed a special version of the [GPT] technology into its classrooms.
Rather than solve a math problem for a student, as ChatGPT might do if asked, Khanmigo is programmed to act like “a thoughtful tutor that’s actually going to move you forward in your work,” says Salman Khan, the technologist-turned-educator who founded Khan Academy and Khan Lab School.
Khanmigo was developed in concert with OpenAI, the nonprofit tech start-up that created GPT-4, the underlying technology for the latest version of ChatGPT. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on the partnership.
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The central claim of our work is that GPT-4 attains a form of general intelligence, indeed showing sparks of artificial general intelligence. This is demonstrated by its core mental capabilities (such as reasoning, creativity, and deduction), its range of topics on which it has gained expertise (such as literature, medicine, and coding), and the variety of tasks it is able to perform (e.g., playing games, using tools, explaining itself…). A lot remains to be done to create a system that could qualify as a complete AGI.
From a group of Microsoft researchers. They are correct.
The post Baby AGI is Here appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
In The New Madness of Crowds I argued that SVB failed because “Greater transparency and lower transaction costs have intensified the madness of the masses and expanded their reach.” A piece by Miao, Zuckerman and Eisen in the WSJ now adds to to the other side of the problem. Depositors were working on twitter time, the regulatory apparatus was not.
Depositors were draining their accounts via smartphone apps and telling their startup networks to do the same. But inside Silicon Valley Bank, executives were trying to navigate the U.S. banking system’s creaky apparatus for emergency lending and to persuade its custodian bank to stay open late to handle a multibillion-dollar transfer.
As Matt Levine summarizes:
Instead of hearing a rumor at the coffee shop and running down to the bank branch to wait on line to withdraw your money, now you can hear a rumor on Twitter or the group chat and use an app to withdraw money instantly. A tech-friendly bank with a highly digitally connected set of depositors can lose 25% of its deposits in hours, which did not seem conceivable in previous eras of bank runs.
But the other part of the problem is that, while depositors can panic faster and banks can give them their money faster, the lender-of-last-resort system on which all of this relies is still stuck in a slower, more leisurely era. “When the user interface improves faster than the core system, it means customers can act faster than the bank can react,” wrote Byrne Hobart. You can panic in an instant and withdraw your money with an app, but the bank can’t get more money without a series of phone calls and test trades that can only happen during regular business hours.
It’s not obvious whether the right thing to do is slow down depositors, at least in some circumstances, or speed up regulators but the two systems can’t work well at different speeds.
The post The Great Digital Divide: Panic at Twitter Speed, Respond at AOL Speed appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I am seeing estimates that over 97% of the funds are not FDIC insured, and many of those accounts are held by start-ups. An outright failure would be calamitous for the Silicon Valley start-up ecosystem. Likely the best outcome is if a major bank steps up and buys the thing, rendering depositors whole. Without such a buyout, regulators are in an awkward position. Leaving depositors hanging might generate additional bank runs or financial market runs. Making depositors whole, however, sets a crazy precedent (“in fact, we’re raising the guarantee to $10 million!).
So what exactly does the FDIC/Fed/Treasury have to do to get a deal consummated ASAP? What kind of behind the scenes horsetrading will be involved?
Here is NYT coverage of the basic facts. Note that every now and then the U.S. banking system is semi-insolvent, but matters work out because “on paper” losses do not have to be either realized or reported as such. Remember the 1980s? One danger is that if other banks start selling their bonds at a loss, the problems in the system will become increasingly transparent and compound themselves. That is not the most likely scenario, but it is something to watch out for. And here is the black humorous but not true take…
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Here is the audio, video, and transcript, Yasheng is a China scholar and a professor at MIT. Here is part of the episode summary:
Yasheng joined Tyler to discuss China’s lackluster technological innovation, why declining foreign investment is more of a concern than a declining population, why Chinese literacy stagnated in the 19th century, how he believes the imperial exam system deprived China of a thriving civil society, why Chinese succession has been so stable, why the Six Dynasties is his favorite period in Chinese history, why there were so few female emperors, why Chinese and Chinese Americans have less well becoming top CEOs of American companies than Indians and Indian Americans, where he’d send someone on a two week trip to China, what he learned from János Kornai, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Now, in your book, you write of what you call Tullock’s curse— Gordon Tullock having been my former colleague — namely, embedded succession conflict in an autocracy. Why has Chinese succession been so stable up to now? And will we see Tullock’s curse whenever Xi steps down, passes on, whatever happens there?
HUANG: I do want to modify the word that you use, stable. There are two ways to use that term. One is to describe the succession process itself. If that’s the situation we’re trying to describe, it is not stable at all. If you look at the entire history of the PRC, there have been so many succession plans that failed, and at a catastrophic level. One potential successor was persecuted to death. Another fled and died in a plane crash. Others were unceremoniously dismissed, and one was put under house arrest for almost 15 years, and he died —
COWEN: But no civil war, right?
HUANG: Yes, that’s right.
COWEN: No civil war.
HUANG: That’s right. There’s another way to talk about stability, which is stability at the system level, and that, you are absolutely right. Despite all these problems with these successions, the system as a whole has remained stable. The CCP is in power. There’s no coup, and there were not even demonstrations on the street associated with the succession failures. So, we do need to distinguish between these two kinds of stability. By one criterion, it was not stable. By the other criterion, it is quite stable.
The reason for that is, I think — although it’s a little bit difficult to generalize because we don’t really have many data points — one reason is the charisma power of individual leaders, Mao and Xiaoping. These were founding fathers of the PRC, of the CCP, and they had the prestige and — using Max Weber’s term — charisma, that they could do whatever they wanted while being able to contain the spillover effects of their mistakes. The big uncertain issue now is whether Xi Jinping has that kind of charisma to contain future spillover effects of succession failure.
This is a remarkable statistic: Since 1976, there have been six leaders of the CCP. Of these six leaders, five of them were managed either by Mao or by Deng Xiaoping. Essentially, the vast majority of the successions were handled by these two giants who had oversized charisma, oversized prestige, and unshakeable political capital.
Now we have one leader who doesn’t really have that. He relies mostly on formal power, and that’s why he has accumulated so many titles, whereas he’s making similar succession errors as the previous two leaders.
Obviously, we don’t know — because he hasn’t chosen a successor — we don’t really know what will happen if he chooses a successor. But my bet is that the ability to contain the spillover effect is going to be less, rather than more, down the road, because Xi Jinping does not match, even in a remote sense, the charisma and the prestige of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. There’s no match there.
Recommended. And I am happy to recommend Yasheng Huang’s forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of the East.
Pre-order here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300266367?ref_=cm_sw_r_cp_ud_dp_CXCHDSQB8JBKEXM4J5BE
The post My Conversation with Yasheng Huang appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Amazon is pulling back from its second headquarters expansion in Crystal City (yes I still call it that), and this will herald a new age of lesser competition for businesses and their main offices:
…the growing difficulty of courting corporations. If Amazon stiffs Northern Virginia, future politicians elsewhere may be less eager to promise tax breaks and infrastructure investments, not to mention spend their reputational capital. Politically speaking, it will be harder for urban and suburban leaders to rise to the top by attracting a new major corporate tenants. “Pro-business” local governments may be less common in the years to come.
Another relevant trend is the work-from-home and hybrid models. Why should a major corporation invest in more office space if a lot of that space will be used only part of the time?
It is worth thinking through how remote and hybrid work will affect regional evolution. There have already been “booms” in some relatively small resort areas, such as parts of Maine, Long Island and West Virginia. But there will be a more general impact as well. To the extent corporations give up on clustering their talent in big office buildings, people will spread out where they live. Not everyone will set down stake in the Hamptons or along the Irish coast. Plenty of people will want to live near family or where they were born, or perhaps a few hours away from the main office as part of a hybrid arrangement.
In this new world, it will be much harder for a well-governed region to rise to the top. Even if its leaders succeed in convincing a company to relocate, for instance, there may be fewer workers who do so. Or perhaps there will be the same number of workers but they will come into the office less frequently and live scattered in many directions, sometimes in other states or metropolitan areas.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with this outcome. But the potential parvenu region just won’t feel that exciting, and the level of activity won’t feed upon itself in terms of attracting more retail and cultural amenities.
And:
Overall, there may be less competition to attract corporations. At the same time, political competition for residents may become more intense, because more people will be able to choose where to live regardless of where they work. This competition could lead to improvements in schools and parks.
Here is the rest of my Bloomberg column.
The post Competing for residents rather than businesses appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
A new paper puts forth a fascinating theory: Maybe remote work is making it easier for couples to become parents—and for parents to have more children.
The economist Adam Ozimek and the demographer Lyman Stone looked at survey data of 3,000 American women from the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey. They concluded that female remote workers were more likely to intend to have a baby than all-office workers, especially if they were richer, older, and more educated. What’s more, remote workers in the survey were more likely to marry in the next year than their nonremote counterparts.
Remote work might promote family formation in a few ways. Remote workers can move more easily, because they don’t have to live within commuting distance of their job. This flexibility might result in more marriages by ending the “two-body problem,” where romantic partners find employment in different cities and must choose between their career and their relationship. What’s more, remote work reduces commutes, and those weekly hours can be shifted to family time, making it easier to start or grow a family.
Fertility is an awkward topic for journalists, because starting a family is such a complicated and intimate decision. But fertility rates aren’t declining simply because more people are choosing not to have children—American women report having fewer kids than they want, as Stone has documented in previous research. If remote work is subtly restructuring the contours of life to enable more women to have the families they want, that’s great news.
That is all from Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.
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Academic freedom and intellectual merit are under attack in the United States, from both the left and the right. The norms of the university and intellectual life are fragile and need protecting because such norms are always in tension with political and economic power.
The undersigned members of the GMU Department of Economics express their commitment to academic freedom and to intellectual merit.
Addressed to the George Mason University (GMU) community and the public at large
~~~
American universities have professed allegiance to two ideals. First, the ideal of academic freedom – the right of students and faculty to express any idea in speech or writing, without fear of university punishment, and secure in the knowledge that the university will protect dissenters from threats and violence on campus.
Second, the ideal of intellectual merit – the right and duty of academic departments to hire and promote the most brilliant, creative, and productive faculty in their fields, and admit the most intellectually promising students, without pressures from the administration.
These ideals are the cornerstones of liberal education. They protect faculty and students who hold views unpopular on university campuses. Academic freedom protects existing students and faculty who dissent from current dominant academic opinion and ideology. No matter how unpopular their views, they know the university will protect them. As stated in the University of Chicago Statement on freedom of expression and as quoted in GMU’s “Free Speech at Mason” Statement:
[We must hold a fundamental commitment to] the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.
Intellectual merit protects prospective students and faculty who speak and write against current dominant viewpoints. No matter how unpopular their views, they know that university administration will not obstruct or prejudice their admission, hiring, or promotion.
Recently, both of these ideals have come under attack. Pressure for conformity has intensified and universities have increasingly interfered with departments’ personnel decisions. For example, at some universities, one of the more egregious new practices is the requiring of written “diversity” statements by prospective students, staff, or faculty, then used to discriminate among candidates, often by quarters of the university with interests other than those of the department or unit. Such methods recall arrogations of the past, such as The Levering Act of 1950, used against radicals.
We strongly believe the attacks on academic freedom and intellectual merit are deeply mistaken. The classic rationales in favor of these ideals are sound. To protect them, viewpoint diversity must be celebrated and academic departments must maintain their ability to select, hire, and promote students and personnel based on intellectual merit. We insist that the degree of institutional autonomy that the GMU Department of Economics has traditionally enjoyed is vital to the health of viewpoint diversity not only within the university but within the academy writ large.
It is vital that every department in a university enjoys independence, so it can dare to be different and keep viewpoint diversity alive. George Mason University has excelled in supporting viewpoint diversity with a variety of diverse departments, centers and organizations. Viewpoint diversity at George Mason has benefited the university, the United States, and the wider intellectual world.
Indeed, some of the Department’s chief contributions have taught that all forms of authority can exert power to excess, and that guarding against such excess calls for the very ideals affirmed here, respect for dissent and intellectual merit.
We, the undersigned members of the GMU Department of Economics, look forward to continuing our independence to do good economics according to our judgment, guided by the ideals of academic freedom and intellectual merit.
Signed by the following GMU Department of Economics faculty (full-time & emeritus):
1. Jonathan P. Beauchamp
2. James T. Bennett
3. Donald J. Boudreaux
4. Bryan D. Caplan
5. Vincent J. Geloso
6. Timothy Groseclose
7. Robin D. Hanson
8. Garett Jones
9. Daniel B. Klein
10. Mark Koyama
11. David M. Levy
12. Cesar A. Martinelli
13. John V.C. Nye
14. Thomas C. Rustici
15. Vernon L. Smith
16. Alex Tabarrok
17. Karen I. Vaughn
18. Richard E. Wagner
19. Lawrence H. White
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One of the highlights of any year, here is the letter, part about Yunnan, part about Chinese locksdowns, but this time only a smidgen about music, and much more. Here is an excerpt:
The situation worsened if one tested positive. A trip to a centralized quarantine facility (often a bed in a convention center) would await. That was sometimes the least concern. The city’s policy was to separate children from their parents if either tested positive; fear of separation drove parents mad with worry, until an outcry prompted the city to drop the policy. Dog-owners who couldn’t find another household willing to host their pet had to decide whether to leave it alone at home for the duration of their illness; or let it loose outside and hope for the best. (A viral video of a health worker beating a corgi to death with a shovel did not help to make the decision easier.) A positive test would summon cleaning staff into one’s home, who could soak everything—clothes, books, furniture—in disinfectant…
Psychologically, the most difficult thing was that no one knew how long the lockdown would last: a few days or a few weeks more. Every so often a video would circulate that purported to show someone who jumped from a balcony. Friends spoke about three types of shock. First, the raw novelty of extended physical confinement. Second, the wonder of feeling food insecure in this age and in this city. Third, a disenchantment with government pronouncements. Many people kicked themselves for trusting officials who said that Shanghai would impose no lockdown. They saw how positive cases in their own neighborhoods would be absent from the city’s data releases. And they shared a recording of a health official who said that these controls were unscientific.
And:
But life in Yunnan was much better than being in the big cities last year. “Far from being seen as a regrettable backsliding and privation,” Scott writes: “becoming a barbarian may have produced a marked improvement in safety, nutrition, and social order.”
I advocate for departing from the court center too. So it’s time to say: it’s a barbarian’s life for me.
Dan Wang — very highly rated but still underrated!
The post Dan Wang’s 2022 year in review appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Consider that last year, the IMF predicted Russian GDP would shrink by 8.5% in 2022 and by 2.3% in 2023; for its part, the White House projected a year-on-year decline in Russian GDP of 15%. Last month, the IMF revised its growth estimate for Russia to 0.3% for 2023 and 2.1% in 2024—higher than the eurozone and the United Kingdom.
What happened? For the first eight months of the war, thanks to a 250% increase in hydrocarbon prices combined with an unavoidable lag in sealing off imports, Western sanctions actually raised Russian revenues from exports to the European Union. Sanctions only started to inflict significant damage on the Kremlin at the very end of 2022, after which the Russian Finance Ministry reported a budget deficit of nearly $25 billion for January, and an overall decline in revenue of 35%. In the meantime, however, Russia managed to tap gray and black trade markets across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia while continuing to sell oil around the world and provide petroleum services like maritime shipping and insurance. The EU has admitted to not knowing the quantity or nature of the Russian central bank assets it’s supposedly blocked. At the same time, thanks to China, Russia now imports more semiconductors than it did before the war.
Here is more from Jeremy Stern at Tablet.
The post Russia facts of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
ARSTechnica: On Monday, researchers from Microsoft introduced Kosmos-1, a multimodal model that can reportedly analyze images for content, solve visual puzzles, perform visual text recognition, pass visual IQ tests, and understand natural language instructions. The researchers believe multimodal AI—which integrates different modes of input such as text, audio, images, and video—is a key step to building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can perform general tasks at the level of a human.
In 2020 Metaculus forecasters were predicting weak general AI by around 2053. Now they are predicting weak general AI by 2028 and strong general AI which includes:
I never expected to witness the birth of aliens. It is a very strange time to be alive. If you think the world isn’t changing in a very uncertain and discontinuous way you just aren’t paying attention.
The post AGI is Coming appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
CHIPs details to raise costs:
1) Mandated daycare
2) Davis Bacon pay regulations
3) Buy American
4) Consult, engage, coordinate with unions
5) NEPA compliance
6) Source materials from small, minority, and women owned business https://t.co/2TLrdbrBmP— Adam Ozimek (@ModeledBehavior) February 28, 2023
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By David Rozado, who has hit a bunch of home runs lately. Look at his charts, to my eyes they show woke terminology in the NYT as having peaked and as now declining. Here goes, they are very different from the earlier charts (also at the link) ending in 2019:
Climate change issues, however, continue to receive more coverage. Not all of the charts “go my way,” but this is hardly what you would expect if Wokeness were simply rising, rising, rising out of control. Oh, and check out these trends in pronoun usage. Also here is more from Rozado, mostly on how the positive sides of woke rhetoric are gaining at the expense of the negative sides.
The post Update on the New York Times Word Frequency Chart appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Via the excellent Gavin Leech.
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Anna was excited to open her birthday present from her husband. He had been hinting at something special for weeks, and she couldn’t wait to see what it was. She tore off the wrapping paper and lifted the lid of the box. Inside was a beautiful necklace with a pendant shaped like a heart. It sparkled in the light and looked very expensive.
“Oh, honey, it’s gorgeous!” Anna exclaimed, hugging her husband. “Thank you so much! How did you afford this?”
He smiled and kissed her cheek. “Don’t worry about that. It’s your birthday, and you deserve the best. I love you.”
Anna put on the necklace and admired herself in the mirror. She felt like a princess. She decided to wear it to the party they were going to that night.
At the party, Anna received many compliments on her necklace. She felt proud and happy as she showed it off to her friends. She thanked her husband again for his wonderful gift.
Later that night, as they were driving home, Anna noticed that her husband seemed tense and nervous. He kept checking his phone and looking at the rearview mirror.
“Is everything okay?” she asked him.
He nodded quickly. “Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine.”
Anna shrugged and leaned back in her seat. She closed her eyes and smiled, thinking about how lucky she was.
Suddenly, she heard a loud bang and felt a jolt of pain in her chest. She opened her eyes and saw blood spilling from her necklace. The pendant had exploded.
She looked at her husband in horror. He had a gun in his hand and a cold expression on his face.
“I’m sorry, Anna,” he said calmly. “But I had no choice.”
He pulled the trigger again.
There are religious and spiritual undertones regarding temptation, sin, and mortality in this story. The pendant, the gift, represents the forbidden fruit of knowledge that leads to a fall from grace. The gift made Anna happy but also made her prideful and sinful. The sequence of Anna putting on the necklace, showing it off to other people, and then being killed with it can be seen as a metaphor for pride preceding a fall. The husband manipulates Anna by giving her such an extravagant gift before revealing his violent nature. This reflects how abusers often use a “cycle of abuse”, alternating between kindness and cruelty to reinforce control. The husband wants Anna to understand that she has done something terribly wrong even if she isn’t yet aware of what it is. The husband appears evil but the heart shaped pendant indicates a kind of true love. “I’m sorry,” he said calmly, “But I had no choice.”
Sadly, shortly after she wrote The Gift, the author was lobotomized. Perhaps she knew.
Hat tip: Jim Ward and also Claude for assistance in interpretation.
The post The Gift: An Analysis appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
On a tropical Pacific atoll irradiated by U.S. nuclear testing and twice since evacuated because of the fallout, Cary Yan and Gina Zhou planned to create a unique paradise for Chinese investors.
They wanted to turn Rongelap — an atoll in the Marshall Islands totaling eight square miles of land and 79 people — into a tax-free ministate with its own legal system that, they claimed, would be able to issue passports enabling visa-free travel to the United States.
It would have a port, luxurious beachfront homes, a casino, its own cryptocurrency, and a full suite of services for offshore companies registered in Rongelap. With 420 miles of sea between it and the capital, Majuro, it would be relatively free of oversight.
All the couple had to do to make this a reality was bribe a swath of politicians in the Marshall Islands, once occupied by the United States and now a crucial U.S. ally in the Pacific, to pass laws to enable the creation of a “special administrative region” — the same classification given to the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macao.
The venture is not on track to succeed, and the two are now awaiting sentencing. The entire story reflects one of my broader worries about charter cities. The most powerful nations in the world, in this case the United States, do not necessarily favor small enclaves that possibly can be turned to favor their rivals. In other words, the relevant hegemon here did not at all support the charter city plan.
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What are your comments and rigorous analyses (notice the prompt) on the recent shoot downs? And no, I do not mean the Chinese balloons. Comments are open…
The post Shooting down intruders? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Then all nine remaining students entered, each carrying a piece of paper. One by one they read a paragraph….I had used racist language. I had misgendered Brittney Griner. I had repeatedly confused the names of two black students. My body language harmed them. I hadn’t corrected facts that were harmful to hear when the (now-purged) students introduced them in class. I invited them to think about the reasoning of both sides of an argument, when only one side was correct….
One might be tempted to dismiss this as another old, white male complaining about the kids but the speaker is Vincent Lloyd, highly-regarded director of Africana Studies at Villanova and the author of Black Dignity, “a radical work by one of the leading young scholars of Black thought…an effort to describe the philosophy underlying the Black Lives Matter movement.”
I have no doubt that I would disagree with much of what he has to say but Lloyd has a calling, he believes in his students, in the virtue of teaching and in the power of the humanities to make us better:
…a seminar requires patience. Day by day, one intervention builds on another, as one student notices what another student overlooked, and as the professor guides the discussion toward the most important questions. All of this is grounded in a text: Specific words, phrases, arguments, and images from a text offer essential friction for conversation, holding seminar participants accountable to something concrete. The instructor gently—ideally, almost invisibly—guides discussion toward what matters.
The seminar assumes that each student has innate intelligence, even as we come from different backgrounds, have different amounts and sorts of knowledge, and different skills. We can each be formed best if we take advantage of our differing insights to push each other, over time, again and again. When this practice is occasioned by carefully curated texts—not exclusively “great books,” but texts that challenge each other and us as they probe issues of essential importance—a seminar succeeds.
A seminar takes time. The first day, you will be frustrated. The second and the third day, you will be frustrated. Even on the last day, you will be frustrated, though ideally now in a different way. Each intervention in a seminar is incomplete, and gets things wrong. Each subsequent intervention is also incomplete, and also gets things wrong. But there are plenty of insights and surprises, for each participant looks at a text with different eyes.
It is tempting to add: Such is life. Such is democratic life. We each have different, partial knowledge. We each get things wrong, over and over. At our best, we enter the fray by listening to each other and complementing and challenging the insights of our fellows. In the process, over years, decades, we are oriented toward justice and truth.
You can feel Lloyd’s pain when his students reject this gift.
Read the whole thing.
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But it turns out that China’s effort has been underway for more than a decade. According to a declassified intelligence report issued Thursday by the State Department, it involves a “fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations” that have flown over 40 countries on five continents.
That is from the Washington Post. And:
Balloon operations obviously make sense for the Chinese. The United States has military bases in Japan and elsewhere from which it can launch daily flights by P-8 and other surveillance planes that fly perilously close to Chinese airspace. China doesn’t have similar options.
The frequency of these American “Sensitive Reconnaissance Operations,” or SROs, has increased sharply from about 250 a year a decade ago to several thousand annually, or three or four a day, a former intelligence official told me. China wants to push back, and collect its own signals; it wants its own version of “freedom of navigation” operations. Balloons are a way to both show the flag and collect intelligence…
Let’s look at another tit-for-tat motivation: China claims in its internal media that the Pentagon has aggressive plans to use high-altitude balloons, in projects such as “Thunder Cloud.”
It turns out the Chinese are right. Thunder Cloud was the name for the U.S. Army’s September 2021 exercise in Norway to test its “Multidomain Operations” warfighting concept, following a similar test in the Pacific in 2018, according to the Pentagon’s Defense News.
Here is my previous post on the game theory of the balloons. Worth a reread.
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FreshRSS 