The Nuclear Triad

I did a blog post about MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction, almost exactly a year ago.  The title of that post was "MAD History" (see  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/08/mad-history.html).  I wrote the post because it had become apparent to me that a lot of people were not familiar with what MAD was about and why it was important.  The same thing has happened again.

A public figure about my age recently demonstrated little or no knowledge of what the "Nuclear Triad" is all about.  Someone quite a bit younger than him would have some kind of excuse.  Fear of a global nuclear war has justifiably receded in the minds of pretty much all of us.  So the importance of this kind of thing for the younger generation has understandably diminished.  But this person lived through fears of nuclear Armageddon, discussions of Global Winter, the Cold War, and the like.  It should have gotten baked into his DNA to know all about these kinds of things.  But it didn't.  So apparently we have a problem here.  I can solve it.

I actually spent a significant amount of time on the Nuclear Triad in my previous post.  I am going to recapitulate to some extent.  But I want to plow new ground for the most part in this post.  So I will.

The Nuclear Triad consists of three classes of vehicles for delivering nuclear weapons.  They are by airplane, by missile launched from a silo situated on land, and by missile launched from a silo housed in a submarine.  The airplanes came first.  Then the land launched and sea launched missiles arrived at close to the same time.  The sea launch system is a little newer.  And here I digress into history.  (I go into more detail here than I did in my previous post.)

The B-17 "heavy bomber" airplane was developed by Boeing in the run up to World War II.  The great depression was still on so cost was definitely a factor.  Once the War was well and truly under way Boeing developed the B-29.  It was more capable in every way.  It was bigger, slightly faster, could carry more bombs further, and flew a lot higher.  And, of course, it was a lot more expensive.

The main defense used by bombers at the time was to fly high.  The B-17 couldn't fly that high so it was pretty vulnerable both to Anti-Aircraft artillery firing "flak" and to fighter airplanes.  You can fly up to about 12,000 feet without supplemental oxygen.  The B-17 could barely operate much higher than this and tended to spend most of its time at a low enough altitude that the crew could forgo using their masks..  The B-29 could fly much higher so it was much more immune to flak and you had to have a much more capable (more expensive, harder to build) fighter to reach it.  The B-29 was the plane that was used to deliver the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan.

The B-17 and B-29 were "prop jobs".  They used propellers to move them through the air.  That made it hard for them to fly really fast.  It is hard to make a propeller plane go more than about 350 MPH because to achieve higher speeds the tips of the propellers end up needing to go supersonic.  But the Germans introduced jet planes in a small way (luckily) during the War.  And jets were the future because, among other things, they didn't have the supersonic propeller tip problem.  So various jets were developed after the war.

They could go much faster.  They could also fly higher.  In several steps this culminated in the B-52.  It is bigger and better (and much more expensive) than a B-29 in every way.  But to a great extent it relied on the same defenses.  It flew high and fast.  (A number of "countermeasures" had been added to them at onetime or another but the foundation of their "survivability" was this traditional "high and fast" approach.)  The last B-52 was built in the mid '60s, roughly 50 years ago.

The Germans also came up with the V-2 rocket during World War II.  They didn't have much range.  They weren't that accurate.  And they could only carry a tiny bomb.  But it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that they were the future.  So a lot of money was poured into rocket development after the War.

The first thing that happened was a scramble for Nazi resources.  Roughly speaking the Russians got most of the equipment but the US got most of the people.  Remember, however, that at this time the US was spending a lot of time, money, and energy, on what became the SAC, the Air Force Strategic Air Command, and the B-52 bomber, a true technological marvel of its time.   They were so marvelous that the US Air Force flies them to this day.

So the Russians got the jump on us on the rocket front and launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite.  As I noted before, if you can put a satellite into orbit you can put an ICBM warhead in your enemy's capitol.  Or so the thinking of the time went.  So the US played "catch up" but by the mid '60s they had the Minuteman ICBM.  This was a rocket capable of delivering a large nuclear weapon pretty much any place we wanted it put.  It wasn't all that accurate but then it didn't have to be.

It is not that hard to stop B-52s, the argument goes.  And the Minuteman is vulnerable because you know where its silo is.  If you can catch it before launch that's all she wrote.  So we desperately need, the Navy argued, something that is not as vulnerable.  By this time the capability existed to build a fairly large nuclear submarine.  One of them was cut in half and a middle section was added.  Into this middle section was place two rows of 8 silos.  And into each silo an MRBM (Medium Range Ballistic Missile) was placed.  And in a true feat of engineering magic a whole system was developed that allowed the missiles to be launched while the submarine was submerged.

The MRBMs did not have the range or payload of the ICBMs but the submarines could be positioned close enough to Russia for the whole thing to work.  And at the time that was good enough.  A second generation (the Ohio class) of submarines that could accommodate 24 silos and a bigger missile (the original missiles class was the "Polaris", the second generation missile was the "Poseidon")  was eventually developed and deployed, starting in the mid '70s.

And now for a small aside.  What's with this "B for ballistic" business?  Ballistic means unpowered.  The classic example of a ballistic missile is a cannon ball.  Once it leaves the barrel of the cannon it follows a "ballistic" trajectory.  It goes where gravity and air friction decide.  There are no other forces acting on it.  When it comes to ballistic missiles the business of figuring out where it will end up is a little more complicated but the general idea is the same.  The rocket motor burns for a relatively short period of time at the start of the flight.  After that ballistics determines where it is going to come down.

It made sense to use a ballistic design for early rockets.  It was the simplest approach.  But it's not the best way to go.  There is, for instance, FOBS - Fractional Orbital Ballistic Systems.  You put the warhead into low earth orbit where for technical reasons it is harder to shoot down.  Then after less than a full orbit (i.e. a fractional orbit) you have it re-enter the atmosphere and land where you want it to.  And the orbit doesn't have to be fractional.  The possibilities are nearly endless.  But in one of those unwritten "gentleman's agreement" things the US, Russia, and as far as we can tell all the other nuclear powers, agreed to make all their nuclear missiles ballistic.  Back to the main thread of this post.

We have had the triad in roughly the same configuration for 50 years now.  But while a lot has changed in the rest of the world, the nuclear triad has changed little.  This doesn't make sense, except perhaps in a MAD world.  So what's going on?  Let me address each leg separately starting with bombers.

The US has taken a couple of shots at upgrading its nuclear bombers.  The B-1 was supposed to replace the B-52.  The B-52 was subsonic.  That's not exactly fast if there are supersonic planes around.  So the idea was to do a supersonic bomber.  The B-1 is a lot faster than the B-52 but it turned out to not work much better at the "penetration" part of "penetration bomber".  By this time anti-aircraft missiles and radars and so forth had gotten much better.  The new idea was not to go high but to go low, really low, as in a couple of hundred feet off the ground.  This was literally "flying under the radar".  The B-1 was really terrible at this because it couldn't maneuver worth shit.  The Air Force ended up doing a major (and successful) refit to B-52s so they could hug the ground effectively.  Oops!

So the next try was the B-2.  By now "stealth" technology had come on to the fore.  The B-2 was slow, probably slower than a B-52, but it was very maneuverable and was almost completely invisible to radar and other airplane detection technologies.  But it turns out that the plane is wildly impractical.  You have to almost repaint it after each mission to keep it stealthy.  The Air Force has gotten some use out of the B-2 but not as a nuclear weapon carrier.

And then there is the whole "drone" thing.  In many ways the cruise missile is an early variant on the drone.  It is slow, very maneuverable, very hard to detect, and relatively cheap.  The only un-drone-like thing about it is that it drives itself.  And, as I indicated in my previous post, the early cruise missiles were nuclear capable.  I think that in the same way the Aircraft Carrier obsoleted the battleship in World War II the drone/cruise missile has obsoleted the heavy bomber.  But the Air Force is now in the process of spreading money around in an effort to come up with a B-3.  Will it be fantastically expensive?  Hell, yes.  Will it be an improvement on the alternatives?  I'm pretty sure the answer is going to turn out to be "no".  And in a tremendous irony, the B-52 turns out to be a great launch platform for cruise missiles.  Sheesh!

So how about ICBM's?  All they have done is get more vulnerable.  Both the US and Russia purposely built inaccuracies into their official maps at one time in an effort to effectively hide their missile silos.  If you aim for where the map says it is, you are going to miss it.  But GPS, cheap satellite imagery, etc. has put an end to that sort of thing.  The Russians know where our silos are to plus or minus a few inches.  We know the same about theirs.

The US took a stab at something called the MX missile system a number of decades ago.  This involved railroads and tunnels and a lot of other stuff.  The idea was to hide where the ICBMs were.  But it was never implemented and is now illegal according to various arms treaties.  So we have the same old missiles in the same old silos.  The only significant change is that the missiles GPS so their navigation is now dead on.

I talked about MIRVing, putting multiple warheads on one missile in my previous post.  Both US land and sea missiles were MIRVed.  (I presume the Russian missiles were too.)  But, also as I got into before, MIRVing is destabilizing and makes it difficult to stay within the limits of various treaties.  So a lot of de-MIRVing has now happened.

This has affected the missiles in the submarines but the submarine itself is little changed.  The Navy wants a new generation of submarine but I don't know how it will be much different.  Except, of course, for the whole "not 50 years old and falling apart" thing.  These new boats are bound to be expensive.  If you build one boat and put one unMIRVed missile in it then it becomes fantastically expensive.  So lots of missiles per boat and lots of MIRVing per missile makes sense as it reduces the cost per deliverable warhead.  But the Navy won't be able to do that so it is in a pickle.

There is what at first appears to be an obvious solution.  You can fit a nuclear capable cruise missile into the torpedo tube of a Los Angeles class "attack" submarine.  (This class of submarines is designed to do the kinds of things a World War II submarine did but do it in the modern world against modern defenses.)  But both the US and Russia have jumped through all kinds of hoops in order to make various nuclear weapon reduction treaties verifiable.  The primary thing that has been done is to separate things out into "obviously nuclear" and "obviously non-nuclear".  It must be easy to reliably categorize something as being "nuclear capable" or not.  And the operating assumption is that "nuclear capable" means "actually nuclear".

And it must be possible to use "national technical means" (satellites, etc.) to tell the two groups apart.  That means you don't put a nuclear equipped cruise missile into a supposedly "not nuclear capable" attack submarine.  Doing so would automatically put all attack submarines into the "nuclear capable" category.  They would all then have to be counted as "nuclear delivery systems".  And that means they would be counted against the "delivery systems" limit specified in the treaty.  We have, relatively speaking, a lot of attack submarines.  So we don't want them tangled up in nuclear weapons treaties.  And that means you can't take the obvious path.  And that makes things very complicated.

So to summarize:  The Nuclear triad consists of three kinds of methods of delivery of nuclear weapons.  They consist of bombers (airplanes), ICBMS (rockets in silos on land), and MRBMs (rockets in silos on submarines).  All three legs of the nuclear triad have failed to keep up with the times.

Taking bombers first, Cruise Missiles, possibly launched from B-52s (or alternatively launched from a not very heavily modified and, therefore cheap by military standards, commercial airplanes like the 767) look like a big improvement.  But instead of retiring nuclear capable bombers entirely, or taking the obvious alternate path of going with a modified commercial airplane, the Air Force is gearing up to spend a whole lot of money trying for the third time to come up with a viable alternative to the now more than 50 year old B-52.

The Navy's approach to their SLBM problem (the boats are old and break down frequently) is also to come up with a new version of the same old thing.  The new submarine would have a missile load similar to the first generation design that the Ohio class replaced.  The Ohio class boats were bigger and better.  I don't know if there is any new stealth enhancements that would make the new boats harder to detect than the Ohio boats are.  If such technology exists then it is going to cost a hell of a lot of money to move to it.

And then there is the math problem.  A lot of boats with a lot of silos, each containing a highly MIRVed MRBM, is hard to fit under the caps in current arms reduction treaties.  It will be almost impossible to do it if a new treaty lowers the limits.  I can actually see Putin going for a treaty update that lowers the allowable counts.  I can't see Trump going for it.

And the leg that has seen the least change has been the ICBM leg.  They have been MIRVed and GPSed.  But that's about it.  And I can't really see a change that it makes sense to make other than the obvious one or retiring a bunch of silos and missiles.

To me it makes sense to reduce the allowed numbers of nuclear weapons and delivery systems.  As I argued before (and I haven't changed my mind in the intervening year) going down to a number in the 200-400 range makes sense to me.  You can credibly play the MAD game with 200 warheads.  That will work for anything from North Korea to Russia or even China.

In this context a complete rethink of the whole "triad" thing, an artifact of history, politics, and technology, makes sense to me.  Start with a clean sheet of paper.  Figure out what makes sense in this new (modern technology and a limit of 200-400 warheads) environment.  Then figure out how to get from here to there.  Flexibility needs to be married to verifiability.  And it wouldn't hurt to throw in cost (it should be possible to make the whole mess much cheaper both to build and also to maintain than the current system) and reliability.

To pull this off, however, requires a leader who is thoughtful, careful, and detail oriented.  It will also be necessary for that leader to be committed to investing considerable effort and political capital in this sort of thing.  Donald J. Trump represents pretty much the opposite.  So it looks like our best option for the next few years is stasis.  Change nothing and hope he pays no attention.  Since he would likely to find the subject boring I think we have a good chance I will be being granted my wish..

Balance of Power

This post can be seen as a follow up or a continuation of a post I did about 18 months ago called "Game of Houses".  Here's a link to that post:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/01/game-of-houses.html.  The connection is in the title.  In that post I looked US Middle East policy.  Implicit in that post was the US position as the one and only Superpower in the world.  As such it was a matter of looking at how the US should or could approach the problem and how the rest of the world could, should, or would react to that.  Here I am going to turn the telescope around and consider the rest of the world's view of the position of the US in the world.

The phrase "balance of power" is historically associated with a political and military strategy employed by a "Great Power", Britain, for example, to get on top or to stay on top.  It is part of the "Game of Houses" game I discussed in the earlier post.  But the name most commonly used for this game in the context of British actions is "The Great Game" because that is the name the British themselves most often used.  But whatever the name it's all the same game.

The British deployed the strategy in two different contexts.  In a colonial context, say in India, they used it to describe the system of propping up and/or tearing down various local factions in order to insure that there were various native factions vying for poser and that no one faction got to far ahead of or behind the rest.  That way the British could play king-maker and control all of them.

The British also used the same strategy when dealing with other "Great Powers" residing on the European continent.  They would form and break allegiances in order to prop up or tear down one faction or another.  Here the plan was not to dominate them.  As a group they were too powerful and there was too much history of relations between Britain and the various continental powers for them to stand that.

But by keeping a number of different powers in the game but at similar levels of power Britain was able to keep them all squabbling among themselves while the British grew their colonial network in the rest of the world.  By the time the continental powers caught on Britain has a substantial lead.  At one time "the sun never set on the British empire".  The same could never be said of the empires of the French, Dutch, Italians, Germans, etc.

But after all that windup I am not going to use "Balance of Power" in that way.  Instead I am going to use it in its simplest sense.  What is the relative power of various countries around the world and what are the trends in the balance of power?

In the early sixties when I first took a look around at this sort of thing the power of the US was at its peak.  It represented 50% of the world GNP (Gross National Product - technically different from the more accurate GDP - Gross Domestic Product that we now use but the differences are not material for this discussion.)  And the US ran surpluses in both its balance of trade and balance of payments.  The US was in a real sense "king of the world" at that point.  But this was in a substantial way due to some unique circumstances.

There were theoretically a number of competitors.  But Japan had been reduced to rubble by World War II.  It was recovering but it was not recovered.  The same was true for the traditional European powers like Britain, France, Germany, etc.  The US was unique among the major industrialized countries in having been spared bombing or other damage to its industrial base.  It also had lost relatively few men of prime working age so its labor force was intact.  Britain, France, Germany, and Japan had suffered the loss due to death or major injury of a substantial part of their prime workforce.

I have left out Russia, then the USSR, but the story is much the same.  The western parts of Russia were heavily damaged by the War and they lost a substantial part of their prime workforce due to death or major injury.  There were some differences.

In the years immediately following the War they had stripped a lot of the industrial base of "Eastern Europe" and relocated it to Russia.  That meant that their industrial base bounced back much more quickly than it otherwise would have.  But Eastern Europe was now under Russian control and it had suffered the same kind of loss of prime workforce.  And it was subject to the devastation of bombing and other damage.  And it had suffered when Russia stripped much of its manufacturing base and moved it east.  So Eastern Europe was actually a drain on Russia.  Finally, Russia suffered under the inefficient "communist" economic system.  So Russia was in bad shape too.

By the sixties Russia had sacrificed much to develop an advanced military capability consisting of a large inventory of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them over long distances.  This matched a similar US capability.  So at the time the balance of power rankings were considered to have four tiers.  There were the two "Superpowers", the US and Russia.  There were several second tier "Great Powers" like Britain France, etc.  Then there were the "Developed Countries", most of which were in Europe.  Finally there was the lowest tier, the "Third World", those countries with little economic and/or political power.  Most of the countries in the world fell into this Third World tier.

But a lot of this was a result of World War II.  As I indicated above, the US suffered little damage.  And its industrial base was built up as it manufactured most of the material used by the "Allied" side.  So at the end of the War it had an intact population and a pumped up industrial base.  Meanwhile large parts of the rest of the world had been devastated by the effects of the War.  So the US had been able to "sit astride the world like a colossus" for roughly 20 years by this time (the mid '60s).

But the situation couldn't last.  The parts of the world that had been devastated by the War got rebuilt.  And their was a population boom that replaced the losses from the War.  By the middle sixties lots of men of prime working age were reaching their adulthood and were ready and able to contribute to the economy.  And under the "Pax Americana" banner their countries could concentrate on economic growth without having to spend a lot of time, energy, or money on military so they quickly recovered their traditional positions in the economic pecking order.  This inevitably meant that relatively speaking (and it's all and always relative) the US was going to lose position to some extent.  And they have.

The US represents about 5% of the world, population-wise.  We also represent a similar percentage of land area.  The US might have slightly more physical resources, things like Oil, Iron Ore, good agricultural land, etc. but here too the percentage of these kinds of resources that the US represents are perhaps 10% at most.  Why does this matter?  Because the foundation of political power is economic power.  The reason the US was so powerful in the '60s was because at that time it produced half the economic output of the world.  This let us buy favor through things like foreign aid.  It also allowed us to impose our will by using the large military establishment we could afford to maintain.

Some more history.  In his famous farewell address President Washington warned of the evils of "foreign entanglement".  The US engaged in a foreign adventure shortly after he left office called "the War of 1812" in US textbooks (and no where else).  Domestically it was viewed as a disaster so a strong isolationist movement developed and held power over foreign affairs for a long time.  Then World War I came along.  The US very reluctantly got involved.  And again the result was judged to be less than a complete success.  So again the isolationist position was reinforced.

But Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared War on us a few days later.  The lesson of World War II was we would inevitably get entangled in world affairs so we might as well get involved and stay involved in the hope that we could steer things in a beneficial direction.  And it looked like this new "engagement" strategy was working pretty well when viewed from the perspective of the '60s.  It didn't hurt that by this time the Russians had ICBM rockets that could use a nuclear warhead to wipe out Omaha Nebraska and the rest of the historically isolationist heartland.  Engagement looked like a necessity whether we liked it or not.

But that was then.  Some deterioration in our position was inevitable.  But it certainly looked like the US could maintain a position of "first among equals" and also be seen as "necessary to the process", whatever the process was, for an indefinite period of time.  But the US percentage of world GDP continued to shrink.  And the costs of being "policeman to the world" continued to grow, especially as a percentage of US GDP.

By the '90s Russia had imploded so the US was seen as the sole Superpower.  But rather than turning out to be a benefit it made things worse.  There was now no reason in the eyes of the rest of the world that the US shouldn't be involved in everything.  And, since we were the sole Superpower and everyone else was a lesser power, the rest of the world thought it only fair that we carry a larger and large portion of the load.  So the cost/benefit calculation kept looking less and less favorable to the US.

These trends became apparent to me in the '90s.  I could see that the world of the '90s was a much different place than the world of the '60s had been.  And that meant that strategies and policies had to be updated.  I felt that it was still advantageous to the US to maintain its position of "first in the world" and "indispensable participant".  It gave the US greater leverage with which to influence events to its advantage.  But in this changed environment I concluded that to be successful the US needed to be more clever and careful as its position was much weaker than it had been in the '60s.

China has been one of the preeminent powers in the world for millennia.  But they fell on hard times and were reduced to being a basket case by 1900.  They did not significantly improve their situation until well into the second half of the twentieth century (i.e. after the '60s).  They have seen tremendous growth in their economic ability for about 50 years now and their economy is the second most powerful one in the world now. 

India took a long time to get going after they gained independence in 1948.  Pre-48 they had been a collection of small feuding duchies.  But one of the things the British gifted them was a united country.  It took them some time to get their act together but they have now been growing in economic power for roughly as long as the Chinese have.  Economically they are now one of the Great Powers.

Most of the rest of Asia was a satellite of China.  Later it was the satellite of one or another European power.  Japan was the first country to get out of this trap and grow substantially in economic power.  But several other countries, most notably South Korea, have been able to generate substantial economic growth.  This group consisting of Asian countries less China, Japan, and India, is now, when taken as a group, a substantial economic power.  And I note that since about 1980 the growth rate of the economies of all these countries has been much faster than that of the US.  So their economic position relative to the US is tremendously improved.  And that means that the economic position of the US in world terms, but especially relative to these counties, is considerably diminished.

So what about the traditional powers?  Russia's post-WW II economic growth was mostly powered by the relocation of all that industrial economic equipment after the WAR.  Once that had played itself out their economy has grown poorly.  For the last several decades they are best seen as a resource extraction play.  They looked good for a while because Oil prices were high and they had Oil.  But once Oil prices dropped as a result of Fracking their economy has declined.

The European countries and Britain experienced substantial growth as their economies got rebuilt.  Since about 1970, however, growth has slowed.  It has been relatively steady (unlike Russia) but it has been modest.  The same has been true for a long time in the US.  It used to be that if GDP growth was below 3.8% the incumbents got thrown out in Presidential Elections.  Economic growth in the US in the last couple of decades has been problematic.  The "dot com bomb" in the early '00s and the Wall Street created crash of '08 have created significant dips.  Even absent these problems growth during this period has been anemic.  The Obama era has seen growth of about 2% per year.  Trump promised a "return to the good old days" of growth at 3% per year.  That's not exactly setting the world on fire.

In the '50s and '60s the US was a willing and active participant in all kinds of international and multilateral activities.  We used to have an active Foreign Aid program that was primarily aimed at humanitarian activities rather than being tied tightly to political and military activities.  But the humanitarian component of our Foreign Aid has withered to almost nothing and the rest of the world has taken note.

And our Foreign Policy has become almost entirely a military endeavor.  We've been fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for over ten years now.  If there was a purely military solution to either we would have won a long time ago.  Out military capability in both areas is second to none.  But both conflicts have a substantial non-military component.  And a concerted effort has been successful in blocking any tilt away from a purely military approach and toward one that also includes substantial political and humanitarian components.  So both conflicts drag on and on with no end in sight.  And the rest of the world takes note.

So our relative economic power continues to diminish.  And this "all military all the time" approach to all international problems is widely seen as stupid.  We spend more on our military than the next eight countries combined.  But lacking a multipronged strategy this high level of military spending has proved ineffective in maintaining our position in the world order.  And out support for things that are not seen as directly promoting our own interests is seen as having dropped off to almost nothing.  So our position as "the shining beacon on the hill" is no longer taken seriously.  So it is now about raw power.  And we are seen as doing a piss poor job of deploying what power we have in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So the question is "can we be ignored"?  Can the rest of the world go its own way without paying due deference to us?  Economic power always underpins everything.  But you can be smart and "punch above your weight" as Britain did for about a century.  Or you can be stupid and fritter away the options great economic power gives you.  I always expected that at some point the fundamental effect of the US's eroding economic position, at least in relative terms, would slowly and inevitably change the answer to the above questions to "yes", at least some of the time.  If, however, we were smart about it I expected that time could be pushed a long way out into the future.  I assumed, in other words, that we would be smart.  But I was wrong.

When it comes to Foreign Policy, Donald J. Trump is the most inept President we have had at least since World War II.  He might be the most inept President ever.  It's hard to tell if he is the most inept ever because many potential candidates for "Bungler in Chief" presided over periods when the US was completely isolationist so they had little opportunity to bungle in any important way.

As I write this the latest G-20 meeting has just wrapped up.  The group is now more accurately described as the G-19 with the US being the member who is no longer relevant.  The G-20 governments have only been interacting with the Trump Administration for a few months.  But that has been long enough for them to figure out that rather than exerting leadership or at least being an active, willing, and reliable participant, the Trump Administration can be counted for nothing beyond presiding over photo opportunities.  The G-19 threw us a couple of fig leaves so we could pretend we were an active and significant participant.  But that's all they were, fig leaves.

The G-20 meeting demonstrated in stark terms that the US is no longer the top tear "Superpower" that it was.  It may not even be a second tier "Great Power" in terms of our ability to influence other countries.  Out "bluster, bluff, and then move on" approach to Foreign Policy means countries don't even need to fear us.  Our ability to effectively punish other countries that do things we don't like depends on our ability to implement a consistent coherent plan. That seems to be beyond the capability of the current administration.  And if other countries neither admire us nor fear us why should they pay any attention to us.  And that makes us a third tier "Developed Country".

I expected to see the US drop down from Superpower to Great Power sometime in my lifetime.  I figured that we could stave this drop off for a considerable period of time.  But it was inevitable as China, India, etc. continued to grow in economic power.  If we had focused on maintaining our standing in the world and on maintaining sustained economic growth that time could have been pushed down the road a goodly distance.

But the Iraq Invasion bungle (along with others) by the George W. Bush Administration (his dad's handling of Foreign Policy was actually pretty good as was that of the Reagan, Clinton, and Obama Administrations) coupled with the breathtaking bungling of the Trump Administration have accelerated our decline.  And they have done what I would have heretofore said was impossible.  Not only have we dropped from the Superpower tier but we dropped all the way to the Developed Country tier.  And instead of the process taking decades they have managed to pull this feat off in a matter of months.

Europe and Japan are creating an alliance without consulting us or taking out interests into consideration.  The G-19 reaffirmed the Paris Accord and pledged to keep working on implementing it.  Here they will have to work around the US but they seem ready, willing and able to do so.  There are various deals in the works in Asia.  None of them involve the US or US interests.  Absent the US the big dog is China and Asian countries are starting to modify their behavior accordingly.

Before World War II it was routine for the world to conduct much of its affairs without consulting with or including the US.  I could imagine that sort of thing happening at some point in the far distant future.  But the future is now.

The Politics of Spying

I have been following spying and the intelligence business for a long time.  And there are two kinds of spying:  fictional spying (fake spying?) and actual spying.  They are quite different.  Actual spies do not drive Aston Martins and hang out with gorgeous babes in sexy dresses.  It makes them conspicuous and being conspicuous makes you ineffective.  And, in spite of the fact that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, actually worked in Intelligence during World War II, James Bond was a terrible spy.  With that I leave the realm of fictional spies and focus exclusively on spying in particular, and the intelligence business in general, as it is conducted in the real world.

Real world spying goes back thousands of years.  And even if we narrow our focus to the US, which I intend to do, there were spies during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.  But these efforts were not organized and institutionalized to any extent.  George Washington, for instance, would designate an underling to create a pretty informal network of agents.  When the Revolutionary War ended Washington moved on and whatever network had been built was allowed to fall apart.

In the US this behavior changed, at least temporarily, with World War I.  The US did not have an elaborate intelligence operation during the War but various efforts were undertaken.  And to some extend this continued on after the War.  This consisted primarily of talking the international telegraph companies into providing whatever government intelligence group existed at the time with copies of diplomatic telegrams.  All of these were encrypted so the bulk of the effort consisted of trying to crack the various codes used.

This change in behavior arose in large part due to the famous Zimmermann telegram.  The British intercepted a telegram from a German official named Zimmermann who was trying to get the Mexicans to enter World War I on the German side.  This had a substantial effect on the US decision to enter the war.  And this incident also convinced a number of government officials that having some kind of intelligence operation was a good and important thing to do.

Then Henry L. Stimson became Secretary of State in 1929.  He famously opined that "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail" and set things back in the US almost to zero.  So before World War II intelligence was not a big deal and, to the extent it existed, it certainly had no clout.

In the mean time J Edgar Hoover got himself put in charge of the FBI.  He was a consummate political operative.  So he spent a lot of time and effort playing the politics game.  He famously collected dirt on politicians and then blackmailed them into providing the FBI with a nice budget and leaving him in charge and giving him a free hand to run the FBI as he saw fit.  But blackmail was not the only card Hoover played.  Blackmail was the "stick" part of his strategy.  He also had a "carrot" component.  He would provide politicians with dirt on their enemies and adversaries.  So being in Hoover's good side could prove very beneficial.

And one of the things Hoover did with his power was make sure the FBI was in charge of "domestic" intelligence.  If it happened inside the borders of the US then the FBI had primary jurisdiction.  And his success at playing the political game meant that the manifest failures of the FBI to do anything about the mob (presumably their primary focus) or communists (the intelligence part of the FBI's portfolio) didn't matter.  Politicians loved him and/or feared him so he went on his way.  And there's a lesson in all this.

Another thing Hoover was good at was the public relations side of things.  There were innumerable movies made featuring intrepid FBI agents busting crime and, when World War II got underway, breaking up numerous spy rings.  It was mostly complete fiction (or a great deal of exaggeration) but the public didn't notice.  So it worked.  The FBI's reputation with the general public was generally high.

And that brings us to World War II.  This was the real start of large bureaucratic intelligence organizations in the US.  And the poster child for all this was "Wild" Bill Donovan and the OSS.  Serious analysis of the track record of the OSS (see for instance, "The Secret War" by Max Hastings) indicates it was none too good.  They were good at making noise.  But blowing up the odd train was often very hard on the locals and produced little short term benefit and no long term benefit at all.

And the OSS was terrible at providing consistent, reliable, useful, intelligence.  The best source of intelligence turned out to be operations like the one at Bletchley Park.  The work was terribly hard and terribly unsexy but also terribly important in the end.  So why was the OSS so celebrated and, more importantly supported by astute politicians like Roosevelt?  Because it served an important purpose.

It was great for PR.  This was especially important in the early and middle part of the War.  And the best way to explain this was with something that was not an intelligence operation.  I'm talking about the Doolittle air raid on Tokyo early in the War.  The raid itself did almost no damage.  And we lost a bunch of planes and trained pilots at a time when there was a real shortage of both.  But Roosevelt was able to say "see -- we are doing something".  And, in the case of the Japanese, they severely over-reacted.  So from a strategic military sense the operation was a big success.

Most OSS operations were decidedly less successful.  But in the period before D Day in June of '44 it allowed Roosevelt to say "see -- we are doing something".  Now the Germans did not over-react so the strategic military "benefit" of these OSS actions was negative.  But look at France after the War.  The French Resistance was always a pretty small operation that was generally ineffective.  But after the War a lot of French could claim, whether it was true or not -- and usually it was not, that they had been on the side of the good guys and not a dirty collaborator.  This helped heal a lot of wounds after the War.

Donovan always ran an effective PR operation.  He hoped it would be enough to allow him to stay on after the War but he came up short.  But the people who ran the intelligence organizations that rose from the ashes of the OSS and can be traced back to the "National Security Act" of 1947 did pay attention to how Hoover and Donovan had conducted themselves and tried to do better.  They paid careful attention to the political side of things.

And let's be clear about something.  There is something sexy about the intelligence game to politicians.  It's called "plausible deniability".  Going back to "The Prince" by Machiavelli, powerful people know or quickly find out that their power is limited.  Even dictators don't have complete power.  There is always something they want to be able to do that for one reason or not they can't do.  And often the problem is that there is some kind of accountability that's getting in the way.  So there is always appeal in an "off the books" operation or organization.  A term of art is "unvouchered funds".  You can spend money and you don't have to tell anybody what it was spent on.

So in the same way that Hoover would provide untraceable dirt on an opponent or adversary to a politician intelligence organizations provide a way to go "off the books" when it comes to something a politician wants done.  And, oh by the way, as these intelligence organizations are going about their entirely legitimate business they might, just might, find out dirt on a politician.

The intelligence services were very popular with both politicians and the public in the '50s.  At one time the head of the CIA was the brother of the Secretary of State.  And the two got along very well together.  The CIA could (and often did during that period) meddle in ways that the State Department, which was accountable to both the US public and the rest of the world, couldn't.  The State Department had and frequently asserted total "plausible deniability".  To quote Sergeant Shultz, a character on the old "Hogan's Hero's" TV show:  "I know nothing - nothing!".

And the CIA saw it as part of its job to be the fall guy.  "It was the CIA's fault, not that politician or very important person."  The CIA put out the word that they were willing to play patsy but they expected something in response.  And, in exchange for services rendered, they got a fat budget and little oversight.

And this all worked fine until the Vietnam War blew up.  The intelligence community was made to shoulder a great deal of responsibility.  And in general, their scope of action was reduced as were their budgets.  And then the Soviet empire, the great villain in the intelligence melodrama, fell apart.  In the aftermath the whole justification for giving the intelligence community a lot of money and freedom seemed to no longer exist.  It was lean pickings for a long time.

Then 9/11 came along.  And the intelligence communities showed how well they could play the politics game.  If you have only weak cards in your hand and everyone knows it you are in for a tough night.  But if someone deals you some good cards and you play them well things can change for the better in a second.  And one result of 9/11 was to hand the intelligence community some very nice cards.  And they took full advantage of them to massively improved their situation.

A case could be made that 9/11 was an intelligence failure.  But that was not the story the Bush Administration wanted to tell and the Intelligence community smelled opportunity (some decent cards for a change) and pounced.  The Bush Administration was extremely interested in "off the books" and "plausible deniability".  So the NSA in particular said "if you give us a lot more money, a lot more authority, and a lot less oversight we will promise you this will never happen again".

This narrative supported the idea that 9/11 was not a Bush Administration screw up.  And it was not an intelligence screw up.  It was those bad old laws that are hamstringing us.  This was total baloney but the Bush Administration and the Intelligence community quickly locked arms and sold the hell out of this "new and improved" narrative.  And it worked.

The result is that the intelligence community got a lot of money to play with.  It got a lot of authority to play with.  And it got essentially no oversight.  As an executive, what's not to like about this situation?  So starting in about 2002 the intelligence community has been riding high.  The heads of the various organizations have tons of money and little restraint on how they spend it.  The fact that this has delivered very little doesn't matter as long as the PR keeps working.

And it kept working just fine during the Obama Administration.  Their authority got dialed back a little.  But this was okay because various excesses that tend to result from too much money and too little oversight was damaging the reputation of the intelligence agencies with the public.  So a little pull back was good for keeping the gravy train rolling for a long time.  And it wasn't totally one sided.  The intelligence community did get Bin Laden.  So the Obama people were happy with the intelligence community and the intelligence community was happy with the Obama people.

But then to a certain extent greed set in on the part of the intelligence agencies.  Hillary was likely to be pretty compatible with them.  But one of the techniques that worked with Obama was to scare the shit out of him in the briefings.  Being inexperienced he is not as able from his own experience to sort through what he is being told and figure out what was real and what was scaremongering.  I think by the second term he could do a better job of sorting the wheat from the chaff but the intelligence communities were well entrenched by then.

But Hillary had been in government for a long time.  So she had been around the intelligence block a few times and was in a much better position to detect scaremongering.  Trump on the other hand was a total greenie.  He should be easy to manipulate so from an intelligence community perspective he looked like far the better candidate.  Well, that has not worked out as well as they thought it would.

What they did not count on was that Trump trusts Alex Jones of "Info Wars" fame and various other people like him who peddle conspiracies for a living.  And it should be noted that they make a very comfortable living doing so.  Now if the intelligence community doesn't tell Trump what Alex Jones is telling him then they are suspect ("fake").  And if the do tell him what Alex Jones is telling him then why does he need them when he already has Alex Jones?  So Trump is not the intelligence community's friend.

The standard vehicle for coopting the President is the PDB, the President's Daily Briefing.  That's the vehicle they used to get to Obama.  But Trump doesn't even get them.  He lets Vice President Pence receive them.  And Pence has very little policy influence on Trump or the people that surround them.  So that's what's been going on with the "foreign" part of the intelligence community.  What about the "domestic" part, the FBI?  That question now pretty much answers itself.

I have not been a fan of James Comey for a long time.  But I am not part of the FBI establishment.  They love him.  Why?  Because he obviously would take a bullet for them.  Whatever flaws the man has, and I think he has many, he is fiercely loyal to the FBI.  And the FBI is fiercely loyal to him.

A lot of people in the FBI have, for a lot of reasons (most of them bogus in my opinion), not liked Hillary Clinton.  So when Comey misbehaved with respect to the Email "controversy" that lost him few if any points within the FBI.  And conservatives are generally pro "law and order" and that stand is good for the FBI as an institution.  So if Trump is a true conservative he should be good for the FBI.  But what is becoming obvious to even the most politically conservative FBI agent is that he is not their friend.

And my point is that these people, both the "foreign" and the "domestic" arms of the intelligence community know how to play the politics game and they are very good at it.  If Trump has people experienced in politics and governance around him they could tell him "don't mess with the intelligence community".  But he doesn't.  And even if he did he is poor at taking advice from experts.  So he has done a lot of things to make all parts of the intelligence community unhappy with him.

And, as I said, they know how the game is played.  And you can watching them play it right this very minute.  There are very careful to be reserved and diplomatic and temperate in public.  Except Comey, that is, who got fired and is pissed.  But still the habits of a lifetime in the trenches are evident in his actions.  He has been very careful to go only so far and no farther.  But that "only so far" has included calling Trump a liar in public.

The usual way these people operate is in the shadows.  So you are seeing a steady drumbeat of leaks.  And, with the exception of a very small fry who was obviously freelancing it, no one has been caught.  Expect the leaks to continue.  Expect no one of significance to be caught.  Expect the leaked information to be devastating.

One final observation.  The FBI's remit includes organized crime and drug rings.  They have a tool called RICO.  RICO means that if you can prove something is the "ill gotten gain of a criminal operation" it can be seized.  If they choose to, and at some point they very well may, they can go after Trump for a variety of financial crimes.  If they succeed they can begin seizing assets.  And these assets don't have to be closely linked to the crime.  They can sweep up all kinds of assets.  In drug cases they have seized cash (obviously), cars and boats (also assets with a pretty direct connection to the crime), but also homes, even if no criminal business was transacted in the home and even if the home is in the name of an ex-wife, oh, and businesses, even if the business was a legitimate front unconnected with criminal activity.

So, if the FBI got mad enough at Trump, and if they were successful, they could turn him into a pauper and throw him into jail.  And if the rest of the intelligence community is mad enough at Trump they can feed all kinds of evidence to the FBI.  Some of it might not be usable in court.  But it could point the FBI in the direction of evidence that they could use in court.  Is it likely to come to this?  At this point the answer is no.  These organizations are mad enough at Trump to make life uncomfortable for him but not mad enough to try to do what I am suggesting is possible.

But who knows what the investigations that are already under way will turn up?  The intelligence community is definitely mad enough at Trump to impede efforts he might undertake to derail these investigations.  And who knows what Trump will do from here?  I certainly don't.

Ground truthing

I have liked the phrase "ground truth" since I first encountered it.  It comes from the early days of the space age.  I was a kid when Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, was launched.  The phrase "ground truth" comes from a little later.  Sputnik was primarily a publicity stunt.  It just beeped.  And it beeped in such a way that amateur radio enthusiasts could pick the beeps up and tell what direction they were coming from.  This meant that there was never any doubt that the Russians had launched an artificial satellite.

But Sputnik was quickly followed by satellites that actually did things.  And one of  the big things they did was measure things.  But what did the measurements mean?  That's where "ground truth" came in.  Scientists would take a look at some satellite measurement of something happening on the ground.  Then they would go out and see what was actually happening there.  That allowed them to be able to say "if the result of some satellite measurement is X then that means this specific thing is happening on the ground".  They were establishing the ground truth behind a satellite measurement.  That way they didn't have to assume they knew what a certain measurement meant, they would actually know.

And the business of being able to actually know is important tome.  So I periodically go out and try to establish the "ground truth" of something.  And this is not limited to satellite measurements.  It relates to anything.  If it looks like this what is it actually?  If you have performed a ground truth then you know.  So let's look at some of the ground truth efforts I have made.  You will see that this can be applied very broadly.

And let me start with an embarrassing but very enlightening moment that happened at about the time I was introduced to the phrase "ground truth".  At some point I learned that Galileo was the first to demonstrate that if you can ignore air resistance and the like then the flight of a cannonball follows a parabolic curve.  And the teacher put up a proof on the blackboard that this was true.  And the proof was pretty simple and straightforward.  Then he gave us Galileo's proof.  How hard could it be?

Well, it turned out to be extremely hard.  I never did really figure it all out.  Unlike the proof the teacher put up it was very complex, difficult, and hard to follow.  So what was going on?  It turns out that the mathematical tools Galileo had access to were very primitive.  They consisted primarily of Euclidian geometry.  If that's all the tools you have to work with then you have to be brilliant and persistent to come up with a proof.

In general this is a common situation.  The ancients look dumb to us.  They believed stuff we now know to be wrong and their "brilliant achievements" now seem pretty obvious and trivial.  But that's because we have a modern perspective.  And part of that modern perspective includes a lot of tools the ancients didn't have.  If you have Analytic Geometry then proving a cannonball follows a parabolic trajectory is pretty easy.  But Galileo didn't have Analytic Geometry.  So the most obvious thing I learned was Galileo was a really smart dude.  And that's a really important point.

Besides Galileo having only primitive mathematical tools at his disposal teachers have had hundreds of years to come up with a simple and straightforward way to prove something and that's what they now give us students.  But a whole lot of work has been put into these "simple" proofs by a whole lot of smart people.  There was no one before Galileo so if he didn't come up with it, it wasn't going to happen.  It is much easier to refine something someone else has created than it is to come up with it in the first place.  So since then I have had tremendous respect for whoever does something for the first time.  It's really hard.  If it was easy it would have already have been done.

I am not great at math but I am better than most people are.  So trying to make sense of Galileo's proof is definitely not most people's cup of tea.  But there are ways to ground truth things that are not so math heavy.  But before I get to them let me go to what I would call a "math light" example of ground truthing.

The Protestant Revolution is usually dated from when Martin Luther posted his "95 theses" on the front door of the that church in Wittenberg Germany. English translations of the document (it's not very long -- each thesis is just a sentence or two) are readily available on the Internet.  So I took a look at them.  And it was very instructive.  The document was a "proof" of a position Luther was taking.  Basically he was saying that the Catholic Church was doing something wrong (selling indulgences, if you care).

Now I agree with Luther that selling indulgences is bad and contrary to what the church has to say about good and evil.  But that was not what I wanted to know.  I wanted to know if Luther had proved what he set out to prove.  And much to my disappointment I decided he didn't.  And the problems were technical.  There is a certain way you operate when you are trying to prove something.  I thought his argument was incoherent and disorganized.  So its technical flaws meant it was not a proper proof.

Now, unlike in the Galileo case, I didn't have any problem following Luther's logic.  And I found no individual thesis problematic.  I just thought there were gaps in the proof that possibly could have been filled in but weren't.  To the extent that I could follow Galileo's proof I found no gaps.  It was a properly constructed proof.  I just couldn't follow it, at least given the amount of effort I was willing to invest.

What was enlightening about all this was that no one cared whether Luther's proof was flawed or not.  They only cared that it existed at all.  So at least on the Catholic Church side they didn't really think the truth of the matter was very important.  And unfortunately I find that the attitude of the Catholic Church at that time applies to pretty much all religious people pretty much all the time.  They just don't think the truth is very important.  Other things, typically faith, are far more important.

Now let me move on to something profoundly scientific but almost completely free of mathematics.  And that's evolution, at least the aspects of it that I am going to talk about.  The foundational document on the scientific side is On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.  This book is NOT a technical treaties designed to be read only by experts with specialist knowledge.  It was explicitly written to be read by average people who knew about things people of the time knew about like animal husbandry.  But understanding the book required no specialized expertise at all.  There is absolutely no scientific mumbo jumbo or high falootin math or anything else that would put off the average person. The language is now slightly archaic but not so much so that anybody living today can't read and understand what he has to say.

So I read the book a few years ago.  Well, I actually skipped past a number of portions.  (I'll explain why in a minute.)  Darwin was very clear about what he was saying and why he thought he had the right of it.  And most people don't know that the book went through several revisions.  Why?  Not because he bungled things or got them wrong.  Instead he carefully listened to people's objections and added additional material to clarify points that were being misunderstood and adding further evidence to show why this or that objection was wrong. And that's why I skipped large portions.  He went on and on belaboring a point just to make sure that people could see the amount of evidence available to back up what he was saying.  So I would go through the first part of the evidence, be convinced, and skip the further evidence he piled on at great length after that.

And a revelation to me was that the anti-evolution people have not come up with anything new in the roughly 150 years since the book was published.  Every few years somebody comes out with a "new" reason why Darwin was wrong.  But over and over you will find that Darwin addressed that point in nauseating detail either in the original version or in one of the updates.  But since the anti-evolution people don't bother to read the book they don't know this.

Let me move on to another example of "they didn't bother to read . . .".  What I'm talking about is gun rights and the whole Second Amendment thing.  The definitive case law on the subject is a US Supreme Court case called "Heller".  I wrote about all this in detail in a post all the way back in 2013.  You can find it here:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2013/01/second-amendment-rights.html.
It turns out you can read Supreme Court decisions online.  There is a link to the full text of the Heller decision in the previous post.  The majority and therefore prevailing opinion was written by Justice Scalia.  And the guts of his opinion, in my opinion, is a 2 page section (Section III) in which Justice Scalia says it is completely constitution to regulate fire arms.  He just says the regulations must be reasonable and then outlines what he sees as reasonable regulation.

So the Heller case is one of those "I know it when I see it" cases.  It is settled law that it is constitutionally permissible to reasonably regulate fire arms.  The whole argument is about what is "reasonable" and what isn't.  One person's reasonable is another's unreasonable and vice versa. So when I listen to someone on either side I try to determine if they understand this.  Unfortunately, I find very few people on the pro-gun side that understand this.  So I conclude that they haven't read Heller and don't know what they are talking about.  In other words, I ground truth them and they come up short.

I recommend everyone read the odd court decision.  I'm sure that there are obscure cases having to do with some arcane or obscure corner of this or that where I would have no clue as to what's going on without specialist expertise.  But I don't read those kinds of decisions.  Judges in the cases whose decisions I read are trying very hard to make what they have to say accessible to the general public and I think they almost entirely succeed.

I do cheat but only in one small way.  Decisions are littered with "citations", references to a decision on some earlier case.  I don't pay attention to the actual citation.  After making the citation the Judge will tell us why some aspect of that case is important to this one.  I just take it on faith that the Judge is honestly and correctly interpreting the previous case.  I have found that generally Judges do play fair on this.  And if they don't then I depend on the dissenting opinion to point this out to me.  By taking this shortcut I may get misled but if it happens it doesn't happen very often.  And that's good enough for me.

I have mentioned that I have taken a stab at reading Galileo's proof and had more success reading On the Origin of Species.  In general I like to dabble in the foundations of science.  I have read other documents from the history of science.  Some years ago I read Optics by Sir Isaac Newton.  I found it pretty readable.  It concerns the properties of light.  Newton did some experiments with prisms and lenses and was able to come to some profound conclusions.  I think Optics is pretty accessible to the average person.  His other and more important work is Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (usually shortened to "Principia").  That is a heavy lift.  I am taking a second run at it but I do NOT recommend it to the average person.  I'm not sure I will be able to make my way all the way through it.  But I am going to give it a try.

Let me introduce my final suggestion by telling a story.  I used to read The Wall Street Journal In High School.  I know, that's weird.  But I did (and you don't have to).  But my point is this.  This was long enough ago that when I started reading the Journal the US ran a surplus balance of trade (flow of goods and services) and a surplus balance of payments (flow of money).  The Journal thought this was a good thing and got all up in arms when first the balance of trade and later the balance of payments went into deficit.  They argued that both of these were very bad.  And their arguments made perfect sense to me.

But then I waited.  The reason these were bad things was because they would inevitable result in other bad things happening to the US.  But somehow those other bad things never happened.  And the US has been running deficit balances with respect to both trade and payments for many decades now.  The bad things the Journal predicted never came to pass.  And that was a real lesson to me.  Remember their argument for why these developments (i.e. both trade and payments going from surplus to deficit) were completely convincing to me.  So there was nothing wrong with the argument except it ultimately turned out to be wrong.

So one of the things I look for is predictions.  The Journal predicted that bad things would happen.  That's good because that is a prediction and we can see if it comes to pass.  But it didn't come to pass and that means the initial argument has been cast into doubt.  I like predictions.  I mistrust anyone who believes so little in what they are saying that they will not make a prediction.  But a prediction is a two edged sword.  If it's right then kudos to the predictor.  But if it's wrong then a serious effort needs to be made to understand why the prediction didn't pan out.  I also mistrust people who won't admit it when a prediction goes wrong and then won't make a serious effort to understand why it went wrong.  I have seen little or nothing out of the financial community admitting that their predictions were wrong in these cases nor any analysis as to why they turned out to be wrong.

This thing I just talked about is something anyone can do.  All you have to do is note what predictions people make then let some time pass.  Then you go back and see whether the prediction panned out.  This is something the press should routinely do.  But they are erratic.  They sometimes will "go to the tape" and show someone predicting something that didn't pan out.  That's good but it is not enough.  They need to go the next step and that's no longer paying attention to someone who makes a lot of predictions that go wrong.  The press is about ratings.  They go with the people they think will generate ratings even if they have a demonstrated track record of getting it wrong.

This has gone on long enough that we are now in the situation where people flat our lie routinely.  Yet the press hangs on their every utterance because covering them is good for ratings.  And they don't contextualize them as known anti-experts (people who frequently get it wrong) or known liars.  People who don't have the time or inclination to keep track are left on their own.  And that has led to what can politely be called "confusion".

So everyone can engage in ground truthing.  In lots of areas it helps to have some mathematical ability.  But other areas do not require any mathematical ability.  No mathematical ability is required to read a legal opinion.  Reading legal opinions is a good way for figuring out who knows what they are talking about and who doesn't.  But you don't even need to do that.  You can jut play the memory game.  What did that person or group used to say and what are they saying now?  Republican back in the Cold War days were very proud of our open borders because walls are for oppressive Communist Regimes.  Now it's "build a wall" and "isn't Putin just great"?

But all this ground trothing is only important if knowing the truth is important.  If whatever your belief system tells you, what you have faith in, is more important than knowing what is true and what is false then ground truthing is counterproductive.  But if ground truthing is counterproductive then you don't get to use it to bolster your side of the argument.  You are either fact based or you are not.  You don't get to cherry pick.

Cyrpto: Offense or Defense?

Some people have always found it valuable to hide the contents of messages from others.  A common method is Cryptography, or Crypto for short.  Crypto methods date back to the ancient Romans and probably even further back than that.  And for a long time writing was good enough in most cases.  Most people couldn't read so whatever you wrote was safe from the prying eyes of a large percentage of the population.  Only the elite members of society could read so only members of the elites figured into your calculations.

And the two elite groups who were most interested in Crypto were the military and the diplomats.  Both were interested in communicating reliably with their friends while keeping their enemies in the dark.  And this led to a variety of systems.  Simple systems just scrambled the order of the letters or substituted one letter for another.  But by the middle ages the most common method was the Nomenclator.  It consisted of a long list of words or phrases organized into two columns.  The word or phrase in one column replaced the corresponding word or phrase in the other column.  The system was clunky so it was mostly used by diplomats who had embassies that employed code clerks.  The military, who needed systems they could use in the field under combat conditions, pretty much stuck with letter substitution schemes.

The population of people who found Crypto a part of their life got wider with the introduction of the telegraph.  Traveling representatives of companies needed to communicate over long distances and they didn't want competing companies to know what they were up to. So Nomenclators morphed into Telegraphic Codes.  And there was another reason Telegraphic Codes became popular.  They could save money.  The coded message was cheaper to send then the "plain text", the term of art for the original message, because it was shorter.  This got to be a hassle for the telegraph companies so they ended up restricting people to using one of a small number of approved "Commercial Codes".  The telephone eventually doomed all this.

And up to this point all the work was being done by people.  This restricted the options to things people could reliably do in a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable amount of effort.  That all changed with the introduction of Crypto machines in the 1930's.  The most famous of these is the Enigma machine used by the Nazis during World War II.  Mechanical Crypto machines quickly evolved to become computer based Crypto machines.  But for a long time the use of Crypto was, with the exception of the Telegraphic Commercial codes, restricted to the elites in general and the military and the diplomatic corps in particular.

That all changed when the general public got access to the Internet.  By this time computers were very powerful and capable of implementing very powerful Crypto systems.  And all of a sudden pretty much everybody used Crypto whether they knew it or not.  You care whether your credit card transactions are secure and reliable or not.  And that security and reliability depends critically on Crypto.  Thus endeth the history lesson.

And so far I haven't said a word about the ostensible subject of this post.  Here's where I start.

I am using the words "offensive" and "defensive" the way a military person would use them.  If you are attacking the enemy you have gone on the offensive.  If you are implementing measures to make it more difficult for the enemy to attack you, or for the attack to succeed, you are on the defensive.

So how does this translate into the world of Crypto?  Well, if you are encrypting your messages you are making an attempt to protect them from the other guys.  That is a defensive move.  If you are attempting to decode the other guy's encrypted messages that is an offensive move.  And there is a war going on here.  One side may make a defensive move by deploying a new and hopefully improved Crypto system.  The other side tries to counter this by upping their offensive game.  One side typically has the advantage at any given point.  But the "move - countermove" game goes on and on.  It is commonly referred to in other contexts as an arms race.

I want to get at the question of whether we are striking the appropriate balance between offense and defense.  And this question has been around for a long time.  How much time and effort do you put into developing or enhancing the Crypto systems you use versus attempting to crack the other guy's Crypto systems?  This question was important to ordinary people only at one remove before.  You usually had some investment in some army or another or in some government or another.  So Crypto success for those people you were invested in was a good thing and crypto failure was a bad thing.  Now the impact is more direct.

Recently we had a new computer virus outbreak.  This was different.  It was a "ransomware" attack.  Just like other arms races virus attacks change over time.  Originally a virus attack would wipe out data on your computer.  Then virus attacks evolved into ones that stole data.  Your credit card information (or military and diplomatic secrets) is very valuable if it can be gotten into the right hands.  The value to the attackers of a successful ransomware attack is very direct.  You pay them money.

And the core of the ransomware attack is Crypto.  Your files get encrypted.  Now if this was a movie or TV show at this point we would cut to a shot of one or more people frantically typing, typically onto laptops.  This might be intercut with shots of photogenic arrays of computer screens or of worried people.  All the while dramatic music would be thumping so we would know that something VERY IMPORTANT AND DRAMATIC was happening.  But never fear.  After not very long (we audience members get bored quickly) someone would shout something equivalent to "Eureka".  The Crypto had been cracked and we were all saved.  Happy endings all around.

But in the real world things didn't and don't go that way.  Nobody cracked the virus.  If you didn't send the ransom payment you never would be able to read the files that had been encrypted again.  In short, the offense won and the defense lost.  Why?

Looked at from another perspective this ransomware attack contains some good news.  And the good news is "Crypto works".  (That's something I have noted previously.  See:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/02/digital-privacy.html).  So if Crypto works and (being the pedantic kind of guy I am I feel the need to repeat myself) it does, then why isn't it used more widely?  And the answer to that question feeds directly into my thesis.

For a very long time the arms of the US government that deal in Crypto have chosen to invest a lot of effort in offensive Crypto and have criminally neglected defensive Crypto.  Governments, including ours, keep deciding it's more fun to crack the other guy's systems than it is to make sure the other guy can't crack their own systems.  They have convinced themselves that their own Crypto systems were unbreakable but that with the proper amount of effort the other guy's systems weren't.  And more and more the arms of the US government have decided that literally any system that is not a US government system is an "other guy" system.

And there is a direct connection between the two.  If everybody is using poor Crypto systems then it is much easier to crack them.  Crypto systems have been cracked going all the way back to the Romans (and probably before).  But somehow the fact that we have succeeded in cracking the other guy's systems (at least some of the time) does not lead to the obvious action of looking hard at our own systems.

There is a trap that governments have been falling into for millennia.  "Our systems can't be cracked".  And there is usually a good reason to believe this.  There is a universal system for cracking Crypto systems.  It is called the "brute force" approach and it consists of trying all the possibilities.  Let's say that it takes a minute to try a possibility, a reasonable figure during the middle ages.  Then if a person lives to be a hundred years old and never stops to eat or sleep they can try about fifty million possibilities in a lifetime.  But let's say our system has a billion possibilities.  Then it can't be cracked using a brute force approach.  It was easy, even a thousand years ago, to come up with a Crypto system that allowed for a billion possibilities.  So these systems were completely secure, right?  Obviously not.

So what's the secret?  The secret is what the British called a "crib", something a student would do to cheat on a test.  The most obvious crib in the Crypto world is to steal the key.  You now have not a billion possibilities to try but one.  But cribs come in lots of different flavors.  Let's say you could find something out or figure something out that reduces the possibilities from a billion to a thousand.  Then the system can be cracked after less than 24 hours' worth of effort.  Cribs that powerful are hard to come by.  But cribs can be combined.  And maybe they only reduce the list to ten thousand or a hundred thousand possibilities.  That's still a big improvement.  Governments tend to assume that they are crib-proof.  But they rarely are.  And the fact that they succeed in developing cribs with which to attack the other guy tends to not have the obvious effect, namely a thorough and careful review of their own Crypto systems.

And the whole Enigma business with Bletchley Park and Magic and all the rest of it is a classic example of this.  Lacking the appropriate cribs it turns out the Enigma machine couldn't be cracked.  Enigma was used by many branches of the Nazi government.  But messages were never cracked for many of those branches.  There is a thing called "Cypher discipline".  This is where you religiously follow all the proper procedures and protocols.  Some Nazi departments were very careful and other departments were sloppy.  But wait, there's more.

Bletchley was a British show but the Americans were heavily involved.  And the Americans ran a parallel operation against the Japanese with considerable success.  Again, some departments of the Japanese government were softer targets than others due in large measure to the degree of adherence to Cypher discipline.  And one of the big beneficiaries of what was cracked was the US Navy.  So did the Navy learn the obvious lesson and make sure they were using good Crypto and good Cypher discipline?  Nope!  The Japanese had a great deal of success cracking US Naval codes and using what they learned effectively.

So has anything changed since World War II?  Yes!  Things have gotten worse.  Various Crypto responsibilities can be found in many parts of the US government.  The NSA, officially the National Security Agency and unofficially "No Such Agency", is a big player in all this.  And the NSA is all offense and no defense.  It turns out that the basic code for the ransomware attack was stolen from the NSA.  It us unclear whether the NSA developed it or just obtained it from elsewhere.  But what they definitely did not do was notify Microsoft of the vulnerability the attack exploited so that a fix could be issued.  Microsoft found out about the vulnerability when leakers posted an NSA list of vulnerabilities and the code that could be used to exploit them on the Internet.  Microsoft immediately issued a fix but a lot of computers were left unprotected for one reason or another.

But wait, there's more.  As I indicated above, there are lots of ways to do Crypto.  For decades the NSA has seen it as their right to decide which systems people can use.  And they want those systems to be easy for them to crack.  Then some civilians came up with a system called RSA, which turns out to be completely secure if no cribs are handy.  And this was a Crypto system that the NSA could not control.  This forced the NSA to respond by issuing a pretty good Crypto system called DES.  But we wouldn't have DES if we hadn't had RSA first.

And this policy of doing their best to keep good Crypto out of the hands of anybody but the US government has been a long standing policy of the US government with the NSA often taking the lead.  A couple of decades ago the "Clipper" computer chip was announced.  All computes were supposed to use a Clipper chip to do their Crypto.  But the Clipper came with a back door that the NSA, the FBI, and other government agencies could use.  Fortunately, that proposal died quickly.

9/11 produced the USA Patriot Act.  It in turn produced the most complete gag order in history.  Agencies like the NSA and the FBI can ask you for any kind of data they want and you are forbidden from even disclosing that a request had been made.  Companies like Google and the mobile phone companies were ordered to disgorge vast amounts of data about literally everyone.  At the same time they were forbidden from even telling anyone about the existence of the order let alone its contents.  This was all revealed by Edward Snowden.  The Snowden revelations have caused these kinds of provisions to be dialed back but only to a modest extent.  The main provisions are still in effect.

The FBI was in the news a few months back because they were asking Apple to hack their own phones.  This is because newer versions of the iPhone use better and better Crypto to effectively keep the data on them private.  Various government agencies, including but not limited to the FBI and the NSA, have repeatedly asked for legislation mandating back doors into consumer devices like phones.  They have also asked for back doors into data centers run by Google, mobile phone companies, and others.

There is an obvious value in letting the appropriate agencies in the appropriate circumstances get access to the appropriate data.  But it's the whole "appropriate" thing that is the problem.  It turns out that you can't draw a bright line indicating where the boundary between appropriate and inappropriate should be.  And even if you could the boundary is not a real boundary.  If the appropriate agencies can get appropriate access then inappropriate agencies will also be able to get inappropriate access.

The news has been littered with these stories for the past few years.  Credit card data gets stolen so routinely that it now hardly qualifies as news.  And if the NSA can get into Iranian computers the North Koreans can get into the computes at Sony Pictures studio.  And Russian hackers can get into the computers of the US State Department, campaign committees belonging to both the Democrats and the Republicans, and so on.  Apparently the only place they couldn't get into was Hillary Clinton's home email server.

These systems could be much more secure.  But various US government agencies have been doing what they can to keep them insecure.  It is beneficial to these agencies for them to be able to get into the systems of other countries.  But the cost is great because it means that our systems are vulnerable to other governments like Russia, China, and even the likes of Iran and North Korea.  They are also vulnerable to criminals both domestic and international.  It even means that our systems are vulnerable to amateurs interested in celebrity sex tapes, gossip, and the like.  It's gotten to the point where even some kid who wants to cyberstalk another kid can break into a surprising number of places.

All of this is the cost of the policy pursued by so many in the government of keeping our online systems vulnerable.  And the big problem is it is an unacknowledged cost.  It affects us all in ways we notice and ways we don't.  Is the benefit really worth the cost?  I don't think so.  Reasonable people may disagree with me.   But the big problem is that almost nobody knows that this tradeoff is being made on out behalf.  So they don't even know that it is a question that needs to be investigated.

Residential Real Estate

This is one of those subjects that I like to tackle.  Why?  Because there is so much nonsense and half baked analysis out there.  Straightening all that out is one of the reasons I write this blog.

I live in Seattle.  If you are part of the government of a city this is one of those "I wish I had that problem" problems.  Real Estate prices in Seattle are literally skyrocketing.  For several years now prices in Seattle have gone up more quickly than pretty much anywhere else.  The well respected Case Shiller index has rated Seattle as the place where prices have gone up the fastest for several months in a row now.  It has now been going on long enough that people are shouting "something has to be done".  But what?

Rather than doing my usual historical backgrounder at this point I am going to do a "fundamentals" backgrounder.

Residential real estate is a "market".  It is the very thing economists are talking about when they talk about a markets.  As such it is subject to the rules of supply and demand.  In an unconstrained market (more about this later) if there is more demand than supply prices go up.  If there is more supply than demand prices go down.  And that's what has been happening in Seattle.  Little new supply has come online.  Meanwhile Amazon, the web retailer, has been hiring like mad for jobs in buildings located in Seattle.  A lot of these are high paying jobs.  So these new hires have money in their pocket and they are looking for a convenient place to live.

And it's not just Amazon.  Business in Seattle is doing well.  So employment has been skyrocketing.  That in turn has driven up demand for housing.  That in turn has driven up prices.  And so far that has not resulted in a bunch of new housing getting built.  And that takes us to the whole "unconstrained market" thing.

Consider Houston, Texas for a moment.  Houston is in the middle of nowhere.  And by "nowhere" I mean it's surrounded by cheap flat land as far as the eye can see.  If Houston needs bare dirt on which to build houses it just annexes a big chunk of land adjacent to city limits and tell developers to get on with it.  And Houston has essentially no zoning laws.  Developers cna build pretty much anything they want and they do.  Houston has been growing very quickly for a long time now.  But housing is still cheap.  And this is because increased supply keeps up with increased demand.  Houston is a classic example of an unconstrained market.  And it demonstrates how supply and demand works in one situation.

Let's look at another situation, Detroit, Michigan.  Detroit is a big place.  It sprawls over 140 square miles.  That's big.  And back in the day Detroit had a large enough population to fill all that land up.  But the auto industry declined.  And production moved to the south.  And automation drastically reduced the number of people it took to build a car.  So good paying jobs went away.  And eventually so did the population.  Detroit has plenty of supply.  You can literally pick up a nice house for $10,000.  But there is no demand.  People with no jobs and no other source of income can't afford a house even if it only costs $10,000.  So a plentiful supply coupled with a total lack of demand has driven housing prices in Detroit effectively to zero.

There is something else going on here, something mostly ignored by economists.  That is the rate at which the market can respond to supply/demand pressures.  Economists generally look at the situation as a static one.  They can use the supply/demand curve to calculate what direction the market is being pressured to move toward.  But they generally ignore the rate at which the market can respond.  If, for instance, we are talking stock prices then things can move quickly.  With high volume computerized trading large moves can happen in less than a second.  That is not true with the housing market.  It takes years for the market to respond.

Detroit grew relatively slowly from the start of the twentieth century to roughly the middle.  There was a steady growth in jobs.  So there was a steady demand for more housing.  Developers could see not only the current state of the market (favorable toward additional construction) but also the trend (also favorable to additional construction).  So the city annexed land and developers developed it and Detroit has a housing market that stayed in balance.

But in the last few decades Detroit has suffered shock after shock.  And they have turned the pressure for housing from positive (build more) to negative (we already have too much).  And while the methods for adding housing are well understood by all the players (cities, developers, consumers) the methods for reducing housing are not well understood by the same set of players.  So nobody has responded well.  The city has gone bankrupt.  Developers have either gone broke or moved somewhere else.  Consumers have been stuck with houses they can't afford and can't sell.  Lots of Detroit housing stock has been foreclosed on or abandoned.  It has turned from an asset into a blight. 

But hope springs eternal.  So the sensible idea of bulldozing the dangerous derelicts and consolidating the city down to a size more consistent with the actual population, a move that would save the city tons of money by reducing the footprint of utilities, street maintenance, police/fire, bus service, etc. has, in the short run, proved impossible.  Detroit and Seattle are opposites.  The market has changed drastically.  In Seattle's case it is for the good and in Detroit's case it is for the bad.  But in both cases the market has not been able to change quickly enough to put things back in balance.  This fundamental unwillingness to understand that the problem in both cases is a slow response to changed market conditions has generated a lot of anguish in both cases.

But back to the whole "unconstrained market" thing.  It has been more than 50 years since Seattle has been able to add undeveloped land by annexation.  It is now too late.  Seattle is surrounded on all sides now.  It is bounded by water on two sides and by other municipalities on the other two sides.  Even if it succeeded in annexing land that annexation would not help.  Houston can still annex undeveloped land but all the land surrounding Seattle is already developed. So the Houston solution is unavailable to Seattle.  Here's where math kicks in.

It's all about density.  If the population goes up the fact that Seattle can't get any bigger means the density goes up.  It really is that simple.  So one solution is to freeze or decrease the population.  But before you do that it might be a good idea to ask Detroit how that worked for them.  And in fact, Seattle's population actually stayed nearly constant from 1960 to 1990.  That means the housing stock stayed the same, right?  Well, actually no.  By 1960 Seattle had pretty much developed all the land that existed within its city limits.  Oh, there was the odd lot here and the odd lot there. But there were no large tracts of undeveloped land.  And that means that construction of your standard stand alone house on its own lot contributed little or nothing to the increase in housing stock.  But housing stock did grow.

Year by year multifamily development took place.  This was a mix of apartments, condominiums, and town houses.  So pretty much every year the number of square feet of space available for residential use went up.  And mathematics demands that the average resident kept consuming more space on average.  In 1960 most houses were occupied by families.  So two, three, four, perhaps more people occupied each house.  By 1990 the average number of people in a house had declined a lot.  I live alone in a house that that in the past has hosted between two and four people.

There are now many houses with one or two people in them.  This large decrease in the total number of people living in houses has been balanced by a large increase in the number of people living in apartments, condominiums, and town houses.  The two changes, the decrease in the population living in stand alone houses and the increase in the number of people living in multiple family dwellings, pretty much exactly balanced each other out.

At least that was the story through 1990.  The 2000 census showed for the first time in a long time a significant increase in Seattle's population.  The 2010 census showed a big jump.  And all the numbers say that since 2010 Seattle's population has been skyrocketing.  For a couple of generations the Seattle political establishment operated in an environment where the population of Seattle was very stable.  They had no experience with what to do when things changed and the population started to grow and then started to explode.

Standard market analysis tells us what the solution is.  If demand is growing the proper response is to increase supply.  And, as noted above, adding undeveloped land and then developing it (the Houston solution) is not an option.  And, assuming we take the "drive the population down" option off the table, the only option is to increase density.  And that means more apartments, condominiums, and town houses.  It's really that simple.

But that clashes with Seattle's vision of itself.  Seattle sees itself as some kind of suburb where single family houses on generous lots sprawl as far as the eye can see.  So a few years ago Seattle put in an ordinance limiting the heights of residential buildings and constraining where they could be built.  "Multifamily is just not Seattle."  And it worked in that far too little multifamily residential development has taken place.  And that's why supply and demand are currently so far out of whack.

And so we are back at it.  The Seattle City Council has recently been raising allowable building heights in several neighborhoods.  This has created lots of unhappy people.  "You are destroying the neighborhood."  But it doesn't matter how good or bad a neighborhood's ambience is if you can't afford to live there.  And that's what is happening.

People are getting priced out.  Renters have seen rents skyrocket.  I have already mentioned that home prices have shot up so more and more people are being priced out of the market.  So we are not talking about whether things are going to change.  They are.  It's inevitable.  We are talking about how things are going to change.  Pretty much nobody has figured that out.  So a lot of what I hear boils down to "I want things to stay the same."  That's not an option.

So among the actual alternatives how do we want things to change?  Take increased density as a given.  We are going to see more apartments, condominiums, and town houses.  And the most basic question revolves around economics.  How expensive do we want these units to be?  There is a lot of hew and cry that Seattle needs more low income housing.  Say that is so for the sake of argument.  How do we proceed?

Well the consensus among low income housing advocates, and they are a large and well organized group in Seattle, is that developers should be required to create lots of units that are priced below market so that low income people can afford them.  This is a variation on rent control.  The rent on some units is artificially controlled to be below market.  You can argue about the specifics for decades, and people have, but that's the basic idea.  So right now in Seattle certain projects are required to include a certain number of these units.  But the demand always vastly exceeds the supply.  So a big bureaucracy must be put in place to decide who gets to actually occupy the units.  And there are always lots of deserving people who don't make the cut.  What do you do with them?  Nobody's figured that out yet.

And there is lots of experience with rent control.  New York City started out doing it a long time ago on a small scale.  Then since demand always vastly exceeded supply they kept expanding the program and making it more bureaucratic and baroque.  And it never quite worked.  And it produced the New York of the '70s.  You had large numbers of buildings that were falling down because they were badly maintained.  Landlords decided that it was better to let the buildings fall apart than maintain them.  Why?  Rent control.

And for one reason or another there was a benefit to the owners to frequently selling the buildings so they did.  The result was a long term downward spiral in the condition of a very large amount of what had initially been perfectly good housing stock.  New York has gotten rid of a lot of its rent control and lots of new residential construction has been the result.  But they haven't figured how to get rid of the last vestiges of rent control.  So it limps on.  And it's not like they figured out how to do rent control right somewhere else.  The New York experience is particularly extreme but it hasn't really worked anywhere else either.

You can probably tell I am not a fan of rent control.  So what's the alternative?  It is a variation on the Houston plan.  If developers can make money developing inexpensive housing that relatively poor people can afford they will.  But the profit margin on expensive housing is higher.  So builders will only develop inexpensive housing if the market for expensive housing is already saturated.  That is definitely not true in Seattle.  And that's reflected in the fact that there is a lot of housing going up.  But it is all aimed at the high end of the market.  Advocates are correct in the short run in saying that developers are tearing down relatively inexpensive housing in order to build expensive housing and that's making the problem for poor people worse.  But I suggest taking a longer view.

Lots of the people moving into the new expensive housing are currently living in less expensive housing.  As they move up it will free up mid market housing.  Now the market in Seattle is so hot that this will not help much in the short run.  But short run thinking is what got us where we are now.  Developers always overbuild if given the chance.  So the first thing that needs to be done is to give them a chance.  The amount of housing coming on line this year (2017) and next will set records.  That should depress prices.  That is unless the market is so out of balance that this massive amount of additional supply still doesn't put us in balance.  And in Seattle's case that is a significant possibility.

But that just means that the developers of the current slate of projects will make a ton of money.  And that will just encourage more and more developers to build more and more projects.  At some point they will get ahead of themselves.  That is if they are allowed to.  And the city's recent actions of increasing allowable building heights is a step in the right direction.  The first step is allowing developers to develop.  That is pretty straight forward.

The next step is much harder.  Once they have saturated the expensive end of the market they will look down market toward the inexpensive part of the market.  And a lot of crap inexpensive housing has been built at one time or another in one place or another.  Housing advocates are almost as worried about this as they are about pricing people out of the market.  So they tend to react by advocating for complex zoning whose objective is to force developers to build "nice" projects.  The problem is no one has figured out how to write zoning rules that mix nice with inexpensive.  Lots of zoning rules promote expensive.  But they have a poor track record of promoting inexpensive buildings that are also nice.

My brother is an expert in this sort of thing.  He hasn't figured out how to do it.  He argues that it is possible to make a development both nice and inexpensive.  He can show you a whole bunch of examples of this being done.  But he hasn't figured out how to write zoning or other codes that makes it happen.  And neither has anybody else.  My recommendation is one of those that no one will like.  I think zoning should focus on safety and that sort of thing.  If developers want to build ugly buildings, let them.

And I think my recommendation will eventually fix Seattle's problem.  If developers build enough supply then eventually it will outrun demand.  At that point prices will moderate.  But the soonest I can see my recommendation fixing the problem is five years and I have to admit it might take longer.  And no one wants to wait that long.  So we will probably screw things up in Seattle by doing some kind of idiotic variation on rent control.  That will discourage developers from developing and put off the day when supply outstrips demand and prices moderate.

So I fear we are in for a lot more nonsense and half baked on this subject.  Oh, well.