Sunday West: October 16

We're probably not going to all die in a nuclear war

Good morning. This week I began by writing about one of the most important battles in history (plugging a short book of mine). On Tuesday I wrote about why there is no wrong side of history (despite that being the name of this substack). And on Thursday about how sometimes it’s best that charity doesn’t begin at home.

Elsewhere, a slightly slimmed-down round-up as I’m trying to get a book finished.

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As regular readers will know, I’m fascinated by the political hypochondria around fascism. This week Ben Sixsmith wrote about how people are so keen to see fascism everywhere, even with quite mainstream and bland policies like child benefits.

Besides, policies to raise birth rates are being proposed and implemented across the world. You don’t like Orbán? Fair enough. South Korea offers parents money. Estonia offers parents money. Japan might soon offer parents money. Singapore offers parents money. Italy considered offering parents land. Thailand offers tax breaks for parents from the second child onwards. (Quick! Someone send Adam Rutherford to lecture them about the Nazis and eugenics!) Cuba asked its people to have more sex. Denmark asked its people to have more sex. Pro-natal policies transcend ethnic and ideological differences between nations. Williams focuses on Orbán because she knows Guardian readers will start to splutter and wring their hands. At least she didn’t mention Hitler.

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It's strange that whenever there is the tiniest deviation from progressive orthodoxy on immigration or gender roles, the most hysterical Nazi analogies come out, but those 'chilling echoes' are never heard when it comes to the state actively killing people.

That is why I strongly suggest that people read this piece by Rupa Subramanya, on Canada’s euthanasia situation.

Marsilla is 46, and she lives outside Toronto with her husband and daughter, a nursing student. She had known that her 23-year-old son, Kiano Vafaeian, was depressed—he was diabetic and had lost his vision in one eye, and he didn’t have a job or girlfriend or much of a future—and Marsilla asked her daughter to log onto Kiano’s account. (Kiano had given his sister access so she could help him with his email.) He never shared anything with his mother—what he was thinking, where he was going—and Marsilla was scared. 

That was when Marsilla learned that Kiano had applied and, in late July, been approved for “medical assistance in dying,” aka MAiD, aka assisted suicide.

His death was scheduled for September 22.

I find everything about this incredibly disturbing. One more slope that turns out to be really slippery — this keeps on happening!

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Stuart Ritchie writes about ‘growth mindset’, one of those ideas that seemed to be really big a few years ago, spurred on by some psychology papers (what could go wrong?).

People can change. That’s the basic idea of “growth mindset”, an idea which is now utterly unavoidable in any educational context: schools train teachers in how to encourage the idea in kids; kids do workshops in how to improve their growth mindset; charities hand out big grants for more research on it; endless books are written about how to harness it in your everyday life.

You can see why the idea—which originates with Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck—is so popular. It’s an uplifting message: if you aren’t doing well at some task, most obviously at school, then you can work hard and change your brain to do much better at it. The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, where you believe that people are stuck with a particular intelligence level and skill level and can’t ever improve themselves. It’s debatable whether anyone really holds this extreme view, but proponents of mindset argue that people vary in the extent to which they believe in growth.

I love this bit in particular.

The results? Here’s a sentence I could never imagine typing before I read this paper: learning about Gerry Adams (among other things) led to the Israeli and Palestinian children building a 59% higher spaghetti tower, p = .01. They were also, to quote the authors, “somewhat” quicker on the circle task, but the test had p = .06, so if you’re playing the statistical-significance game you can’t have this one.

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I’m a bit late to this but Richard Reeves’s book on boys and men sounds interesting.

Second, the boys and men struggling most are those at the sharp end of other inequalities, especially of class and race. The boys and men I am most worried about are the ones lower down the economic and social ladder. Most men are not part of the elite, and even fewer boys are destined to take their place. In 1979, the weekly earnings of the typical American man who completed his education with a high school diploma, was, in today’s dollars, $1,017. Today it is 14% lower, at $881. As The Economist magazine puts it: 

“The fact that the highest rungs have male feet all over them is scant comfort for the men at the bottom.” 

My boring take: men have far more variability than women, so will tend to dominate both boardrooms and homeless shelters. If you’re in the bottom 20% of women your male contemporaries will be worse off than you but if you’re in the 20% they will be doing better; if you’re in the top 5% of women, they’ll be doing way better, and the top 5% of women tend to have prominent voices in the media. But then both the economic and cultural changes of the past 60 years have tended to favour high-status women at the expense of low-status men.

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How will the Ukrainian war end? Timothy Snyder has some suggestions.

And so we can see a plausible scenario for how this war ends.  War is a form of politics, and the Russian regime is altered by defeat.  As Ukraine continues to win battles, one reversal is accompanied by another: the televisual yields to the real, and the Ukrainian campaign yields to a struggle for power in Russia.  In such a struggle, it makes no sense to have armed allies far away in Ukraine who might be more usefully deployed in Russia: not necessarily in an armed conflict, although this cannot be ruled out entirely, but to deter others and protect oneself.  For all of the actors concerned, it might be bad to lose in Ukraine, but it is worse to lose in Russia.

He seems quite optimistic. I agree it’s probably unlikely we’ll get nuclear war; top superforecasters at the Swift Centre say there is a 9% chance in the next few months. So only a one in ten chance of an approaching apocalypse — the 20s are turning out great so far!

But even if there aren’t nukes, this thing can surely kill a lot more people before one side is exhausted.  Russia does not have an infinite supply of men, but then I thought before all this began that the country must be too old to go to war to start with; might Putin continue sending men to the meat grinder for months or years in order to avoid defeat? Yes, of course, especially as he knows that Ukraine also faces demographic catastrophe and they can’t go on forever.

At the very least, I can much better appreciate the tragedy that occurred a century ago; looking back, following the unbelievable casualties of August and September 1914, one reads it and thinks ‘surely they must have seen that this can’t go on’. Yet it did.

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Finally, admittedly on another quite depressing subject – the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In particular, how much did it contribute to the industrial revolution in Britain, and our subsequent rise in living standards? It’s a technical question debated by economic historians but probably the most live historical issue in contemporary politics. On substack, Davis Kedrosky looks deep into the subject.