Ukraine's trillions in critical minerals. The economics of crime. Chinese science at war.
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Berna Reale in Ordinário (Ordinary, 2013) pushes a handcart full with anonymous bones of homicidal victims from the metropolitan area of her hometown of Belém. Courtesy of Galeria Nara Roesler
Eying Ukraine’s trillions in critical minerals.
Ukraine has large underground deposits worth up to $11.5tn of critical minerals, including lithium, graphite, cobalt, titanium and rare earths such as gallium, that are essential for an array of industries from defence to electric vehicles. But these deposits, uncommon in Europe, have not undergone any significant exploration or development — processes that take years even under stable jurisdictions. Data is also lacking on the quality of the reserves, which is information investors need before pouring millions into new mines. … Ukraine’s subsoil holds an estimated 10 per cent of the world’s reserves of lithium, used in battery production, according to government figures. Reserves appear across some 820 sq km, but none have been mined so far. Among critical minerals, Ukraine has substantial proven reserves of zirconium, used in jet engines, and scandium, both of which are not yet mined. Some of its deposits of tantalum, used in semiconductors, niobium, which has superconducting properties, and the aerospace sector metal beryllium are being extracted at small scale, but their potential, Ukrainian officials say, is vast.
Ukrainian officials also say their country is in the top 10 in the world for reserves of titanium, used for missiles, planes and ships. Only about 10 per cent of its proven reserves are being developed however. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal argued earlier this month that Ukraine could replace Europe’s Russian titanium imports. But Roman Opimakh, former director-general of the Ukrainian Geological Survey, said last week there was “no modern assessment” of rare earth reserves in Ukraine, and estimates were based on old, Soviet-era studies. The minerals rhetoric amounted to “heavy political posturing . . . The data is not modern, we have very little information about what’s there,” said Gracelin Baskaran, a director at the US Center for Strategic and International Studies. … Ukraine’s mineral resources are located across the country but since the full-scale invasion in 2022, upwards of 20 per cent are located in areas under Russian control, according to Kyiv’s estimates. Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. … Trump said last week the US was owed $500bn worth of Ukraine’s resources — from mineral deposits to oil and gas, and even infrastructure such as ports — in exchange for past military assistance to defend against Russia. That is significantly more than the total $69.2bn in military assistance Washington has given since 2014 …. The Trump approach has enraged his European allies, with officials at the Munich Security Conference last weekend comparing it to “mafia blackmail tactics”, “usury” and “colonialism”. “It’s one thing to say we will help you liberate your land and then exploit the resources under the ground there,” (sic!!!) said a second European official. “It’s another to demand: ‘Pay this bill for the help we’ve already provided’.”
Source: Christopher Miller in Kyiv, Polina Ivanova in Berlin, Camilla Hodgson in London and Henry Foy in Financial Times
US Farm labour is far more expensive in the US than in either Canada or Mexico.
More and more the US relies on imported fruit and veg
Source: Bloomberg
Russian inflation hits 9.5 percent
Source: The Moscow Times
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“Ordinary”, 2013, photography register during performance
Chicago school: the precarious economics of crime
Since Gary Becker’s seminal work (1968), economists have viewed crime as driven by higher returns to criminal activities than to legal work. During the crack epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, ethnographies and surveys suggested reality was more complex: though some offenders earned high wages via theft and drug selling, many earned the minimum wage in both criminal and noncriminal labor markets concurrently (e.g., MacCoun and Reuter 1992; Wilson and Abrahamse 1992; Hagedorn 1994). Drawing on a defunct Chicago gang’s payroll records, Levitt and Venkatesh (2000) showed a starker pattern: most of that gang’s drug sellers earned less than the minimum wage despite enormous risk of injury and death. These findings inspired modifications to Becker’s framework to explain why people would do criminal work at low wages and high risk (e.g., Becker, Murphy, and Werning 2005; Grogger 1998; Levitt and Venkatesh 2000). Much has changed since then. The crack epidemic receded and was followed by the rise of opioids and methamphetamine. Many cities’ hierarchical gangs fractured into small groups. National violent crime rates fell far below their 1990s peak, while prison rates rose dramatically before starting a modest recent decline. Meanwhile, low-wage labor markets have seen the rise of automation, gig work, and less predictable schedules, and the real minimum wage has declined. Yet evidence on how people involved in crime make work choices in this new environment has not kept up. We have almost no modern understanding of the labor markets this population faces or the choices they make, especially among those involved in serious violence. This paper provides new data on how people at extreme risk of violence engage with formal, informal, and criminal labor markets. Our access to this population comes from a field experiment evaluating the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative (READI), which offered stable, legal work alongside cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to men at very high risk of gun violence involvement in Chicago (see Bhatt et al. 2024 for details).
We surveyed 66 participants about their employment and earnings in a typical week prior to READI. While the sample is modest in size, limited to a single neighborhood and selected on READI participation, these are some of the only contemporary data on the economic activities of this population. We show that, even among this deeply disconnected population, formal and informal work are common and pay roughly the minimum wage at the median. Criminal work— most likely drug selling—is widespread but far from universal. The median criminal worker earned about twice the minimum wage. Sectoral specialization may reveal important variation in worker type. Half of those working in the criminal sector reported doing so exclusively, earning close to the minimum wage at the median. The other half did both criminal and noncriminal work; relative to men who specialized in crime, they earned median crime wages three times as large and faced much lower earnings variance. We highlight several candidate hypotheses about what may explain these choices.
Source: Kapustin, Max, Monica P. Bhatt, Sara B. Heller, Marianne Bertrand, and Christopher Blattman. 2024. "Employment and Earnings of Men at High Risk of Gun Violence." AEA Papers and Proceedings, 114: 58–64.
Building a Nation at War
During the Second World War, China was stretched to its utmost as it sought to resist the Japanese invasion: troops, resources, and government were all made to carry loads that they were never meant to bear. Yet even at this time of peril for the still-young Chinese Republic, there were significant efforts to try and create a formula for progress and development even at a time of war. One such effort was the Chinese attempt to develop its own scientific capabilities. It is this drive toward using science to “build the nation” by winning the war and shaping the peace that is the subject of J. Megan Greene’s well-written and significant new book, Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II. Greene’s book examines the careers and choices of Chinese scientists involved with the war effort in the years 1937 and 1945. They were working in the areas controlled by the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government of Chiang Kai-shek, which had gained precarious control of China in 1928 but had been forced to retreat to the temporary southwestern capital at Chongqing in 1937, after the outbreak of war with Japan. These scientists were not of one mind about the utility of science in those years: some embraced it as a means of providing further resistance to the Japanese invasion, while others were insistent on the idea that China should develop a pure science capacity, as befitted a nation that aspired to premier global status. As Greene argues (6), Nationalist China aspired to do both: develop science that could underpin the war effort, but which would also help build a settlement in the postwar. An important contribution of the book is that it shows that the generation of scientists who came of age in wartime China had real impact on the postwar development of the country, on both sides of the Taiwan straits. Weng Wenhao was one of the best known of those figures. One of China’s most prominent geologists, he served also as minister of economic affairs and worked with other prominent government figures to provide a postwar reconstruction plan that would make full use of the geological and engineering skills that had been nurtured in wartime conditions (43–4). There was not necessarily consensus on how this plan should be used: Weng believed that the plan should be broad, whereas others wanted to use it as a much more granular blueprint. In this debate, we see emerging in China a global phenomenon of the era, the idea that planning was at the heart of creating a successful war economy, and that there must also be an economic plan for reconstruction after the conflict was over. Eventually, of course, China’s communist revolution did mean that this sort of planning was central to the reconstruction of the country, albeit with Soviet rather than American assistance. And as Greene notes, significant numbers of the trainees produced by the wartime program stayed behind in the mainland after 1949; although Weng Wenhao did briefly leave the country, his expertise was such that Mao invited him back in 1951, and he spent the rest of his career working in the PRC (242). Yet for those who did go to Taiwan, the skills they brought in the scientific development of agriculture and industry were invaluable in the development of its capitalist, developmentalist economy (246–7). Greene’s book is part of an important and exciting subfield: a reassessment of the Nationalist regime’s wartime state capacity, and a more positive account of its achievements during those straitened times. Nicole Barnes’s fine monograph Intimate Communities (2018) is one key work in that direction, giving an account of how health policy was used by the Nationalists to reshape ideas of gender, health, and civic identity. Greene’s book adds another substantial and important contribution to this field, showing that science was not just important to wartime China, but to the shaping of the state both in the mainland and Taiwan after 1949.
Source: Rana Mitter on J. Megan Greene. Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1221–1222, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae196
Ordinary”, 2013, photography register during performance, 70×50 cm
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