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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

This has been a consistent theme to responses to major crisis in US has faced in my lifetime - every time, after the crisis the situation is worse than it was before the crisis. Not because of the crisis, but because of the response. 9/11, the 2008 recession (QE is still with us) and now COVID.

The scars from the first two really should have healed a long time ago. It'll be a pretty dire future if the COVID response isn't completely unwound, some serious compromises to freedom were made through this.

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You can see the failure of American leadership and an inability to engage in global crises in a decisive manner since Vietnam due to our inability to get over our incompetence and total misunderstanding of the political situation during the war there.

I have a strong suspicion that American foreign policy wonks still don't understand why we failed in Vietnam; why applying the lens of containment and the same policy everywhere was an asinine idea cloaked in arrogance that has haunted us for decades because of our inability to accept our mistakes. I think this refusal manifests itself as a steady refusal to engage in well-reasoned policy engagements and wasted opportunities to exert US influence in a positive direction.

You see this in the way we celebrated "liberating" Grenada. You see it with the weak humanitarian effort in Somalia. You see it with the increasing reliance on air power and a failure to have firm policy objectives when we do commit land troops.

You see this in the way we celebrated "liberating" Grenada.

A nitpick, but Grenada celebrates the US liberation with a Thanksgiving Day holiday, on October 25:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_Day#Grenada

Appearances at the time were misleading. It is one of the few interventions that I think the US got right.

Well put. There was a book from ages ago called The Ugly American which caused a big stir in US political circles because of the way it decried US foreign policy. It contrasted the US approach (dinner parties in the Embassy) withe the Russians - who learned the local languages, respected local cultural nuances and customs, and taught locals how to more effectively till their lands.

That contrast caused a huge stir in Washington but nothing changed. Americans (forgive my generalization) still prefer dropping bombs to building schools. Hammer, rather than quill.

> who learned the local languages, respected local cultural nuances and customs

The US is the only country who requires every single Foreign service officer to learn the local language before being stationed in a country.

The Foreign Service Language institute is the most prestigious language school in the world.

US foreign policy has plenty of problems, but leaning the local culture and language is not one of them.

The Foreign Service and our embassies and consulates are on of the shinning successes of US foreign policy (among many failures).

My apologies if I got that wrong. Can you provide any references though? I understand from my own research that the ability to speak a foreign language is not mandatory for a posting. Wikipedia only mentions knowledge of a foreign language as influencing an applicant's chances of getting the posting he or she requested, not as a requirement.

Sorry the source is my brother who worked at the FSI, and every single is not really correct because of edge cases, but that's the officers and the people at the FSI talk about it. Some countries speak more than one language, some speak English (which all Foreign Service Officers are already required to speak), and in some countries there are many positions where you will be almost exclusively dealing with English speakers even if it isn't widely spoken there (some positions in Iraq). And finally not all postings are really what you'd think of as being a "diplomat" (dealing with Americans who lost their passport for example).

Each posting has a number of language designated positions, which range from 90% of the total positions in Columbia to 8% in a Iceland (where English is almost universally spoken).

In this example at least 90% of the officers in Columbia are required to speak Spanish (and it's likely that most of the other 10% do as well). If there aren't enough people proficient in a language they will train more at the FSI. In most countries language designated positions are the majority.

So yes it's not strictly required to speak Spanish to be posted in Columbia, but you're only going to be able to get one of the 10% of non language designated positions which aren't likely to be positions that we would think of as diplomatic work.

Additionally when you join the Foreign Service you have 5 years to become proficient in a Foreign Language before you get forced out, and during that time you can only serve in the limited non language designated positions.

There are plenty of religious folks who would debate the bit about Russians (I presume you’re referring to soviet Russia) respecting local culture. Cult (worship) is the root of culture, and the soviets were not well known for religious freedom.

Edit: not a defense of US foreign policy, which has been abysmal. Just pointing out that the track record is abysmal across the board.

> Cult (worship) is the root of culture

"cult" is indeed a substring of "culture", but the etymology is likely the other way around. both come from the latin verb "colo", which concretely means something like "till" or "care for" (in the sense of agriculture). it's used more abstractly to mean "worship", but this likely comes from the idea of caring for / tending to an actual effigy or temple of a deity.

Worship (cultus) is a part of the etemology in most places I’ve read, but yes cultivation is primary. Either way, the main point stands. A central part of nearly all cultures throughout space and time is some sort of local cult. And that was not respected by the Russians. It’s rarely been respected by modern empires.

cultus, which is itself a participle of colo.

I don't disagree with the core point. the rosy image of the USSR respecting local culture does not exactly mesh with my understanding of the history either (though this could be my own ignorance). as an ex-classics major, I simply can't resist the opportunity to engage in some etymological pedantry :)

The Ugly American was a work of fiction.

Not sure I get the point. Yes it was a political novel, a piece of fiction. It was however, based on fact.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American

“Based in fact” doesn’t tell you much. Plenty of historical movies are based on fact and contain entire fabrications.

Yet the USSR is long gone and we're still here.

Looking pretty path dependent at this point. Don't mistake luck for good policy.

That's not an endorsement of US foreign policy

Domestic policy is the real problem. US foreign policy is always an extension of domestic policy anyway.

The USA had an almost resounding success in Vietnam in its true objectives - it completely destroyed the (somewhat) functional North Vietnamese socialist state, and prevented any kind of spread of that idea in the area. It's true that 50 years later Vietnam is now a relatively well-functioning state again, but after the war in Vietnam there was no other attempt in the area.

The real failure in Vietnam was not retreating soon enough, and letting public opinion turn against the war - that did have a huge effect on future US public opinion about other wars, and could have been avoided if they had finished it earlier.

To be clear, I am extremely opposed for what they did in Vietnam and consider that the amount of war crimes and the fundamentally inhumane objectives are to be condemned. But it is pretty clear that the rational objectives that the architects of the war had set were achieved relatively quickly and efficiently, and with long-lasting effects. This was not a blunder.

Neither were Iraq or Afghanistan for that matter. The real blunders of US foreign policy have been the reinstatement of the Shah of Iran (which led to the Iranian revolution), and the continued failures of taking down Iran and Cuba.

Even in terms of containment, the Vietnam war was a huge failure, shortly after Laos and Cambodia went communist, directly supported by the Vietnamese communists.

I have no idea how you can reasonably claim that the war "prevented any kind of spread of that idea in the area", or that the "rational objectives" were achieved "relatively quickly and efficiently".

The North Vietnamese state successfully expanded to southern Vietnam, Vietnamese-trained revolutionaries took over neutral Laos after and largely because the US dropped as much ordinance on it as Europe during WWII and Vietnam successfully invaded Cambodia and installed its still current leader after Cambodia infamously disastrous experiment with a unique homegrown variant of socialism. And it wasn't as if Vietnam would have been on course to be a superpower without the bombs.

The only part of US Indochina strategy that worked was pumping Thailand full of money. Ironically, dangling that carrot could probably have tempted Vietnam into more "market reforms" and fewer collective farms a lot earlier, given that Ho Chi Minh was fond of quoting the Founding Fathers as well as Marx and appealed to the US when he was fighting his anticolonialist war.

> Not because of the crisis, but because of the response. 9/11, the 2008 recession (QE is still with us) and now COVID.

Is it a coïncidence that all occurred under a GOP/Republican administration?

Clinton treated the 1993 as a crime instead of an act of war, and prosecuted those that were responsible:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...

Meanwhile Bush (really Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz) went galavanting into other countries.

Obama was hamstrung by a GOP Congress with (so-called, supposed) deficit hawks that were screaming about deficits, debt, and austerity… which they promptly abandoned they were in power to pass the giant December 2017 tax cut bill:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017

Of course now that Biden looks likely to win they're reverting to form:

> The short version: A Senate GOP strategist privately confided to Bloomberg that a key Republican goal right now is to lay the groundwork to revert hard to austerity, should Biden prevail, crippling the possibility of any serious stimulus efforts next year, even amid continued economic misery.

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/14/how-repub...

Paul Krugman has an entire section on this in his latest book Arguing With Zombies.

Lumping QE with this is absurd - QE is actually one effective tool for monetary expansion among many.

QE for 2008 recession will pale in comparison with QE for the pandemic. Luckily for us everyone else that matters (that is, who's not New Zealand) is equally fucked, so it's not entirely a losing proposition, but for someone of moderate means and with an income/savings that do not track the stock market these are perilous times indeed. Whatever cash or cash equivalent savings they had are turning into a pumpkin within a few years.

Not entirely. Any fixed rate loans such as the mortgages or student loans that people hold today will be much easier to pay when inflation soars. So go ahead, secure new loans, bundle home and auto and pay as slowly as possible until 25-50% inflation kicks in.

That's how all those Russian oligarchs got rich. Borrow from the government (corrupt, of course), buy a factory, then a year later return pennies on the dollar. The ruble was falling so fast retail prices had to be updated twice a day for a while.

QE for 2008 recession will pale in comparison with QE for the pandemic.

22% of all US dollars that exist were created in 2020. Expect some serious inflation to happen in the next few years.

But we are still nowhere near Weimar levels of money printing, so that’s something. Except in places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela of course but that was happening before COVID.

> 22% of all US dollars that exist were created in 2020. Expect some serious inflation to happen in the next few years.

I think you're looking at M3?

Yes, currently 2.94T, up from 2.3T at the start of the year, so 22% of current money would be about 700B out of 3,000B.

From June 2007 to June 2008 went from 1.5T to 2.3T, so it was valid to say in June 2008 that "34% of all US dollars that exist were created in the last year"

On top of that M3 carried expanding:

From March 2007 to March 2009 went from 1.4 to 2.6T, where you could say "half of all US dollars that exist were created in the last 2 years"

Inflation from 1996 to 2006 was an average 2.54%

Inflation from 2006 to 2016 was an average 1.76%

So for the response to the pandemic, measured in M3, to have the same affect as the M3 from 2008, the US would have to create another $1.6T by January 2022. Then you could say "half of all US dollars that exist were created in the last 2 years"

So far the increase is 74B a month, or 1.8T over 2 years.

I think this is quite telling that the economic aspects almost immediately pops up. I believe that over the decades we have shifted more and more from "people first" to "economy first", to the point that sometimes it feels like people exist only to serve economy.

people first" to "economy first", to the point that sometimes it feels like people exist only to serve economy.

I don’t see these as mutually exclusive. The state of the economy dictates what we can afford in terms of healthcare, infrastructure, education, defence and much more. It is directly correlated with life expectancy and quality of life. Sure top-line numbers don’t tell the whole story, but they do tell a lot of it.

I am no economist, so I am probably wrong there: USA or China have a better GDP than France or Germany, yet the European countries have better healthcare, education systems and life expectancy. Different priorities?

People _are_ the economy. If you don't think economic collapse does not affect "people" I invite you to read about the Great Depression.

No. The economy is people plus a whole lot of relationships that economists ignore, but which happen to be critical to a functioning civilisation.

Of course economic collapse hurts people. But there are only two causes of economic collapse - external stressors, and internal mismanagement.

And the only situations in which they're not the same are when physical disasters permanently destroy significant productive capacity. Everything else should be manageable.

Covid - and the Great Depression - both prove the economy is badly mismanaged. It should be possible to hit a pause button on non-essential activities, keep as many people as possible safe, fed, entertained and possibly even educated, and then hit restart when the threat is over.

"Possible" does not mean "trivially easy." But it does mean "Can be handled successfully with some adjustments and minimal attrition."

This culture just can't do it. Its primary engine is debt-fuelled plutocracy and short-term profit-seeking, and it's so inherently unstable it can't cope rationally with a relatively minor and short-lived challenge like a nasty but not spectacularly deadly virus.

> People _are_ the economy

Most popular economic performance metrics are quite distant from the real world effects on most people, largely because measures that incorporate distribution rather than simple aggregates are not popular.

So while the people are the economy in a very real sense, discussion of economic performance impacts of real or hypothetical policy tend to focus on impacts that have a distant, loose relationship to the experience of most people.

Popular economic performance metrics include things like median household income and the unemployment rate.

I would say that are immediately and direct impacts on the experience of most people.

That's a very long winded and obfuscated way of saying that people would be utterly fucked if the economy collapsed, which was my original point. "Experience of most people" would be pretty awful with 50% unemployment, and once economy stops it's very hard to get going again, let alone get it going to the extent we saw in January.

This did help to stave off (if not prevent) the total systemic collapse of the world economy though. So let's not lose the sight of that.

It had no general inflationary effect at all.

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