Why the Pentagon buys Chinese-made ships, growth in the Philippines & the libidinal fantasy of campus.
Great links, reading and images from Chartbook newsletter by Adam Tooze
Mur Rose, Jeremy Liron (2023) Source: Eric Linarde Editions
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The scandal of America’s industrial policy in commercial shipping
The United States has had an industrial policy aimed at boosting its domestic shipbuilding industry since the passage of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, commonly known as the Jones Act. Whatever the arguments for the passage of the bill a century ago, it has over time been a disaster for the US maritime industry, and continues to impose significant costs on other parts of the US economy. Colin Grabow goes through the arguments in “Protectionism on Steroids: The Scandal of the Jones Act” (Milken Institute Review, Second Quarter 2024, pp. 44-53). The Jones Act “requires that vessels engaged in domestic transportation be registered and built in the United States as well as crewed and at least 75 percent owned by U.S. citizens.” However, the underlying rule goes back to an 1817 law “prohibiting foreign vessels from transporting goods within the U.S.”
Excellent write-up this by Timothy Tayler of the Conversable Economist
So inefficient and atrophied has American ship-building become that to talk of an American ship-building industry in the “global context” borders on the absurd.
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Or this ..
Red Sea (and Suez) bypassed
For the ones that clicked .. and get to see the really rather staggering graph showing the plunge in Egypt’s Suez canal revenue. ….
You will just get more and more of this kind of thing:
Without fanfare, the Philippines is getting richer
The Philippines is often an afterthought for investors: neither a giant like India nor a manufacturing superstar like Vietnam. But growth has been brisk at around 6% a year since 2012 (except during the pandemic). The economy has quietly boomed under a variety of regimes, from the liberal President Benigno Aquino (2010-16) to the thuggish President Rodrigo Duterte (2016-22). The run is set to continue under President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos (see chart 1). The World Bank says the Philippines will soon be an upper-middle-income country. … He has continued with his predecessor’s efforts to upgrade the infrastructure linking the archipelago’s 7,600 islands to each other and the world. Returns on investment in physical and digital infrastructure in the Philippines are higher than in neighbouring countries because “the gaps are huge”, says Ndiamé Diop of the World Bank. … remittances from its 2m citizens working abroad, steering ships on the high seas or nursing patients in the Gulf (generate a huge cash flow). Though their numbers are equivalent to a mere 4% of the labour force in the Philippines, they send home the equivalent of 9% of gdp a year, a cash gusher that flowed steadily even during the pandemic.
Source: Economist
Jeremy Liron, Infinie Distance Des Choses Dans Leur Temps Source: Arts Hebdo Medias
And extraordinarily smart stuff like this ....
Campus is a fantasy
Samuel P. Catlin on the libidinal logic of “campus panic” is simply brilliant.
Look over here, (2) Do not look over there. Overreact to this, overlook that.[1] Look at the US, not at Palestine. Look up at what is happening in the clouds over Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a plane trails a banner declaring, “HARVARD HATES JEWS”; do not look at what is happening on the ground in Gaza … for all its proximate urgency. Campus panic is a sustained note in the American public conversation; from Vietnam to Gaza, it has never let up … Perspectives from a range of academic disciplines can help us understand campus panic’s persistence. From political economists, media critics, American historians, and sociologists, we can learn about higher education as a switching-point of class mobility and reproduction; about how legacy media institutions serve as clearing-houses for the best, or least most expensively, educated Americans; about simmering populist anti-intellectualism and resentment of the academy; about the history of student protest; about ballooning tuitions and debts; and about the contradictory status of the most elite schools as emblems of American identity. However, we also need to be more precise about what we are talking about when we talk about “the campus.” For campus panic is, specifically, campus panic. It is the campus which we have collectively cathected—not the university, not higher education. For instance, the trope that circulates in the media today is not “university antisemitism,” but “campus antisemitism,” and this rhetorical pattern holds across the history of campus panic.Perspectives from a range of academic disciplines can help us understand campus panic’s persistence. From political economists, media critics, American historians, and sociologists, we can learn about higher education as a switching-point of class mobility and reproduction; about how legacy media institutions serve as clearing-houses for the best, or least most expensively, educated Americans; about simmering populist anti-intellectualism and resentment of the academy; about the history of student protest; about ballooning tuitions and debts; and about the contradictory status of the most elite schools as emblems of American identity. However, we also need to be more precise about what we are talking about when we talk about “the campus.” For campus panic is, specifically, campus panic. It is the campus which we have collectively cathected—not the university, not higher education. For instance, the trope that circulates in the media today is not “university antisemitism,” but “campus antisemitism,” and this rhetorical pattern holds across the history of campus panic. Anecdotally, I find it exasperatingly difficult to get non-stakeholders to care very much about “the university,” a social institution which is, in fact, suffering an ongoing polycrisis (albeit not the one narrated in the discourse of campus panic). Yet some of the same people who could not care less about “the university” get alarmingly excited about “the campus.” To explain this, we will need to think psychoanalytically—to think about fantasy and desire. We need, in short, a theory of the campus. What follows is a series of preliminary theses intended to contribute to such a theory.
Source: Parapraxis Magazine
And poems at full length …
"Paysage 197", 2021 de Jérémy LIRON - Courtesy de l'artiste et de la Galerie Isabelle Gounod
If you have scrolled this far …