By John Zaw and Michael Sainsbury

Pope Francis’ visit to Myanmar and neighboring Bangladesh has coaxed an overdue show of compassion from Aung San Suu Kyi for her Muslim Rohingya countrymen.

In tandem with confirmation of the typically packed papal itinerary that begins in Yangon Nov. 27 and winds up in Dhaka six days later, Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party is launching an unprecedented interfaith peace prayer rally across the country.

In a welcome show of leadership by the ruling NLD party, the event, certain to cause domestic controversy amid the party’s Buddhist base, includes prayers for Rakhine, the state where the ethnic Rohingya Muslims have suffered unspeakable sometimes-deadly mistreatment at the hands of Myanmar’s military.

But although the Rohingya tragedy will rightly loom large over Pope Francis’ visit, the Vatican has taken pains to insist that the pope’s broad message is focused on peace, outreach to the Catholic minorities and interfaith dialogue. As part of that, millions of people living on the globe’s economic margins are the central theme of the visit.

Myanmar’s first Cardinal Charles Bo told ucanews.com that the pope’s motto is love and peace: Love among the ethnic groups, among the religious people and the majority Buddhist and other religions. And peace means to end decades-long civil wars, which are still raging in the country’s north.

“If we say that the pope’s visit is mainly on the Rohingya issue, it is out of context,” said Cardinal Bo.

The cardinal was sure that the pope would address the Rakhine crisis and the ongoing civil war in Kachin State in ways acceptable to Myanmar’s authorities, the military and the Buddhist majority.

Pope Francis has prayed for the persecuted Rohingya community three times, calling them “good people” who are “our brothers and sisters.”

More than 500,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh in just a month following a military crackdown in Rakhine State in response to Aug. 25 attacks on government posts by Rohingya militants. Hundreds more continue to flee the ethnically divided Rakhine State.

Myanmar’s State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi has been under criticism from the international community for her lack of moral action over the plight of the Rohingya.

Inside Myanmar, the plight of the Rohingya is not told, and thousands of people turn out to support Suu Kyi’s government. Many of Myanmar’s people regard the Rohingya as Bengalis, illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and accuse the international media of taking a one-sided view of the ethnic group.

As if to show public support for the government, interfaith prayer services have been performed across the country beginning Oct. 10 and will be held on every Tuesday of the month.

Catholic priests, nuns, brothers and laypeople are among the 30,000 participants from different religions taking part in the interfaith prayer program in Yangon where Cardinal Bo gave a short speech Oct. 10 about peace.

Regarding the crisis in Rakhine, Cardinal Bo said the world was pointing fingers at Myanmar and telling it what to do. At this moment, the country needs to be united, he said.

“We want the world to know that we have the morals and ability to manage our own problems,” he said.

Cardinal Bo said the world needs to understand and help the NLD government. But it is important not to ignore international concerns and Myanmar should strive to uphold its image.

Nyan Win, a central executive committee member of the NLD party, said the interfaith rally was launched to pray together for peace, especially in Rakhine State.

“The pope’s visit to Myanmar is good timing for the country’s development and peace and what he says will impact the peace process of the country,” Nyan Win told ucanews.com.

Kyaw Min, a chairman of Yangon-based Rohingya party, Democracy and Human Rights, sees the interfaith prayer rally as a move by the NLD to bolster public support.

“In our country, most people follow what the religious leaders say, so the NLD government is seemingly using the opportunity to show harmony and peaceful coexistence among religions despite the deadly violence in northern Rakhine,” Kyaw Min told ucanews.com.

Kyaw Min has high hopes that the pope’s visit to Myanmar will help improve the rights of minorities in the Buddhist majority country.

Pe Than, a lower house lawmaker for hard-line Buddhist party, the Arakan National in Rakhine State, said the pope should not use the term Rohingya, which is a sensitive issue.

“The Rakhine crisis is neither religious nor communal violence between the Rakhine and the Rohingya but it is a terrorism issue that was carried out by people who are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh so Pope Francis should know this reality,” Pe Than told ucanews.com.

By Giancarlo Elia Valori*

In early October, King Salman of Saudi Arabia – with 1,500 members of his private entourage and 459 tons of luggage – landed at the Vnukovo airport for the first official visit of a Saudi king to the Kremlin. At military level, Saudi Arabia has already bought from Russia the S-400 Triumph anti-missile system (NATO reporting name: SA-12 Growler), already fully operational in China, which can intercept aircraft and missiles at a speed up to 4.8 kilometers per second (17,000 kilometers per hour) and has the ability of intercepting up to 36 targets at the same time.

In addition, the Saudi purchase of the anti-tank missile Kornet and other advanced weapon systems is already in an advanced phase of negotiations between the two countries.This is a deal worth 3 billion US dollars, but the sale of weapons is a fundamental strategic priority for Russia.

According to the 2016 data, the Russian Federation produces over one fifth of the weapons sold in the world while, also thanks to Russia, India and China have now almost reached technological and military self-sufficiency.

Hence Russia is looking for other markets to sell its weapons, with the consequent and immediate strategic and economic influences and constraints.

Currently everything works thanks to the unquestionable success achieved so far in Syria.

Hence Russia is looking for new markets in the Middle East, an excellent area for selling weapons.

At military level, however, the commercial relations between Russia and Saudi Arabia had already begun in 2012, when the latter had bought a C-300 missile system, with the tacit agreement that said supply would not be sent to Iran.

The C-300 is one of the most powerful anti-missile systems currently available.

In my opinion, Saudi Arabia is reemerging from the long phase of more or less explicit support to the jihad in the great arc of crisis stretching from Afghanistan to Syria.

In Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia is moving away from the well-known support for the Taliban, backed with the largest amount of funds.

On August 7 last, Mishari al-Harbi, the most prominent Saudi diplomat in Afghanistan, defined the Taliban as “armed terrorists,” while the Saudi Kingdom is seeking in all ways to block the private donations of its citizens to the Afghan “students”.

There is a fully rational reason underlying this new policy line: Saudi Arabia can no longer see a political advantage in arming and supporting the Taliban, but above all it wants to put a spoke in the wheels of the mediation, organized by Qatar, between the Kabul government and the above-mentioned “students” trained in the Pakistani Qur’anic schools.

At the beginning of jihad in Afghanistan, the United States and the other countries present there interpreted the Pakistani and Saudi support as a way to contain the Iranian designs in the Western part of the country, but now King Salman is radically changing the Saudi foreign policy.

Whatever happens, Afghanistan will have wide regional autonomy – hence the jihad to keep Iran and its regional allies out has no longer much reason to exist.

From this viewpoint the radical change, which has long been experienced in the relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, is significant.

The meaning of this unusual manoeuvre is obvious, namely to join forces against Iran and its old and new proxies.

Nevertheless, as recalled by one of the leaders of the Afghani Mujahidin, before 2013 Saudi Arabia had strongly supported Qatar’s efforts to “open up” to the Taliban. But now that the relations of the “Afghan students” with Turkey, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have weakened, Saudi Arabia is revising its preferential relations with the old supporters of the Afghan jihad (Turkey, the Arab Emirates and Egypt) and, above all, it is isolating Qatar, the only support left to the jihadist “students”.

It is a fact that the Taliban still collaborate with Iran and Qatar.

Hezb’ollah was born as a movement of Islamic resistance, without any preconceived idea vis-à-vis the various traditional factions of Islam.

However, can the support of these two countries replace the relationship with the Saudi private individuals and their Kingdom? Probably so.

In all likelihood, the Saudi efforts to separate the United States from Qatar – hosting its CENTCOM – could push the United States directly into Saudi hands, while Qatar is putting pressures on the US forces for a quick transfer of their Command, which could possiblybe moved to the Al Dhafra base in Abu Dhabi.

Reverting to King Salman’s State visit to Russia, he has understood that Russia – and no longer the United States – is now distributing cards in Syria and hence he acts accordingly.

In all likelihood, the now old King Salman is also promoting the Russian support for his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is expected to inherit his throne.

An agreement to increase the oil price, which is essential for both countries, has been still discussed, but nothing leaks out of the Kremlin, while Putin has argued for the need to further use the Saudi sovereign funds in the Russian economy.

Out of the 10 billion US dollars promised by Saudi Arabia to Russia in 2015, only one has been provided so far.

The King’s visit to Russia had been promised in a phone call with Putin as early as March 2015, but it had been postponed many times.

Ironically, however, the USSR was the first to recognize the independence of the Kingdom created by King Abdulaziz.

The official relations between Russia and the Kingdom of Hejzah and Nejid – the official name of the Al-Sauds’ Kingdom until 1936 – started as early as 1926.

The strategic reason is obvious and is similar to the one which led Stalin to be the first to recognize the State of Israel, namely to be a thorn in the flesh in a region dominated by the British Empire, by favouring both the “quasi-friends” (Israel) and the “future enemies” (Saudi Arabia).

In 1938, however, following the “elimination” – during the Stalinist purges – of the Russian envoy to Saudi Arabia, Karim Kharimov, who was a personal friend of the King, the relations between the two countries were broken off.

Bilateral relations were resumed only in 1991.

An “Indian Spring”, the distance between Russia and Saudi Arabia, an extraordinary stroke of luck for the US strategic and economic interests in the Middle East – a stroke of luck that today, with the meeting between Putin and King Salman, is virtually over.

King Faisal, assassinated by his nephew Faisal bin Musaid in 1975, when he was Saudi Foreign Minister, visited Russia only in 1933, but it was a visit having scarce bilateral importance.

It is worth recalling that, after discarding the other three previous candidates, last mid-July Russia had provided to Saudi Arabia its agreement on the appointment of Ahmed al Wahishi as Yemen’s Ambassador to Russia.

Russia is interested in not making the conflict in Yemen turn into a war against Iran.

While for Iran the primary strategic interest of the Houthi insurgency in Yemen is to create an expensive, unpredictable, lasting and dangerous engagement for Saudi Arabia.

Well before the meeting between Putin and King Salman, an agreement had been signed between the two countries to further reduce the oil output, thus making the crude oil price increase.

After a long struggle to become China’s first supplier – won by Russia against Saudi Arabia in 2014 with the signature of a 30-year contract with China worth 400 billion US dollars only for natural gas – last year King Salman signed contracts to the tune of 13 billion dollars with Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam.

In October 2016, however, the Russian Federation purchased – through Rosnet – a 49% shareholding of Essar Oil, the first private Indian oil company having a 50% stake in Kenya Petroleum Refineries Ltd, which is fully owned by Essar.

India is the primary market where, in the future, Russia and Saudi Arabia will clash for their oil and gas.

Currently Saudi Arabia and Russia together produce a quarter of all the oil used in the world. Obviously, the agreement between the two countries to limit the extraction of crude oil is related to the new extraction of oil and gas in the United States, which is already a danger to all the old OPEC countries or the autonomous countries such as Russia (or Norway).

Reducing the crude oil price means potentially driving the US shale oil and shale gas out of business – and this is the first strategic goal uniting the Russian Federation and Saudi Arabia.

The Russia-OPEC agreement on the reduction of crude oil price has finally been postponed until March 2018, but said agreement will be probably extended at least until the end of 2018.

Saudi Arabia, however, still wants a closer relationship with the Trump’s US administration, which can provide technology to put an end to Saudi Arabia’s economic dependence on oil by the end of 2030, according to King Salman’s plans.

This is key to the current relationship between Russia and Saudi Arabia: the latter agrees with the winner in Syria, namely Vladimir Putin, to reduce the crude oil price and put the United States in trouble. Nevertheless the latter remains the primary market for transforming the Saudi economy – by force, taking the fast track, as was the case with the Soviet “five-year plans”.

Moreover, it is the same plan of the current Russian leadership that can achieve it only by signing effective agreements with all OPEC countries.

The magnitude of Saudi investment in the United States is still extraordinary and unique: last May Saudi Aramco signed a 50 billion dollar contract with the US oil companies, while Minister Khalid al Falih has finalized a further 200 billion US dollar contract to produce in Saudi Arabia goods and equipment that were previously imported from the United States.

King Salman’s plan, however, is to limit Saudi Arabia’s oil dependence and, in the meantime, to turn his country into an active trading platform for the Greater Middle East.

Hence no more trouble spots in Saudi Arabia’s neighbouring countries.

With the exception of Iran and its allies, at least for the time being.

They are the only oil, political and religious competitors capable of attracting and pushing the many Shiite minorities throughout the Sunni Middle East to rebellion – including the Saudi largest oil extraction region.

Another bilateral economic system, which was certainly not disrupted – at least for a short time – was that of military supplies between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

While, according to 2016 data, Saudi Arabia currently absorbs 35 billion US products and services, it is worth noting that the Saudi Kingdom is the fifth largest arms buyer in the world.

In 2017 the Saudi military spending alone has accounted for 61 billion US dollars, namely 21% of the country’s current budget.

As is well-known, the United States is currently the largest exporter of weapons in the world.

Hence it is by no mere coincidence that the first meeting between King Salman and Putin has been held precisely for the purchase of a Russian weapon system that the United States has not at such an advanced level and that could block its missiles.

Therefore Saudi Arabia fears the possible reactions of Middle East countries which have US-made missiles available.

A goal that defines Saudi Arabia’s utmost strategic autonomy from the United States.

Not to mention a globally important project – certainly designed by the Saudi leaders to “make money”, namely Aramco’s new presence on the stock market.

Next year Saudi Arabia is expected to start selling a 5% shareholding of Aramco on the market – the largest takeover bid in the stock market history.

The competition between the New York and the London Stock Exchange to obtain this transaction is already fierce, but – at this juncture – nothing prevents the Russian Federation from acquiring oil companies of the Saudi network.

Yet another level of contrast between the two old bilateral competitors, namely the old United States and the old Soviet Union, in the new guises prepared for celebrating globalization.

King Salman, however, does not want to put all his eggs in one basket.

In fact, last May the Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman, already visited Russia to discuss the Syrian and oil issues.

As far as Syria is concerned, Saudi Arabia recognizes the de facto victory of the Russian-led coalition and accepts the possible construction of the South Pars gas pipeline from the sea between Qatar and Iran across the Syrian territory- probably in exchange for a financial compensation.

In all likelihood, Jordan – a traditional ally of Saudi Arabia – will play a special role in the new gas pipeline.

Later Saudi Arabia and the Russian Federation signed a 3.5 billion US dollar military cooperation agreement, preceding the one previously mentioned, envisaging technology transfers that are extremely important for the new Saudi local industry.

With specific reference to Syria, it is worth recalling that, only thanks to Saudi Arabia, Russia could have a platform for the negotiations – through Egypt – between the Russian forces and the Syrian opposition for Ghouta East and Rastan – an agreement that would have never been possible without the Saudi mediation.

In short, King Salman does no longer want clashes around his country. He only wants a peaceful route for the new future trade that will characterize the Saudi non-oil-dependent economy.

Moreover, the rapprochement between Russia and Saudi Arabia is viewed favourably by Israel, which – as many people say – is Russia’s “silent ally” in the Greater Middle East.

It is worth recalling that Iran is using the clash in Yemen to push Saudi Arabia into a very long, expensive and unpredictable war.

Russia has no reason to support Iran in the Houthi insurgency against the Yemeni Sunnis. Russia does not need many clashes around its immediate strategic interests in the Middle East oil fields.

Not even in Syria, Russia and Iran shall have the same goals in the future.

Iran wants an allied and dependent Syria, while Russia does not want only Westerners near its military ports in the Mediterranean exercising hegemony over a traditionally friendly country like Syria.

Neither does it want Syria and any other Middle East country to be too closely dependent each other, because this would deprive the Russian Federation of its autonomous line of communication with its Mediterranean ports.

Not to mention the control of jihad – a contagion that could spread to Chechnya – and the creation of a rampart towards the Arabian peninsula.

Another Russian essential goal in Syria.

Obviously while Russia is particularly interested in a new relationship with Saudi Arabia from the oil, economic and strategic viewpoints, it has no reason to disregard Iran.

The common interests between Russia and Iran are decisive and inevitable in Afghanistan, Iraq and also in Syria.

Russia cannot certainly lose these strategic axes only to rush to embrace Saudi Arabia.

Hence the Russian Federation will maintain its ties with the Shiite Republic. It will accept some Saudi interests in the Middle East region, between Jordan and the Lebanon, but it will support Iran in the Central Asian system, which Russia cannot certainly neglect.

Nevertheless it will not even disregard the new oil and military system, established in the new agreements with Saudi Arabia, which could also be a stabilizer of Russian interests in the Middle East and an economic partner to be taken away from the United States.

If all goes well, Russia could create a strategy based on two options between Saudi Arabia and Iran, without either of them being in a position to threaten – too closely – the Russian interests stretching from the Greater Middle East to Central Asia.

About the author:
*Professor Giancarlo Elia Valori is an eminent Italian economist and businessman. He holds prestigious academic distinctions and national orders. Mr Valori has lectured on international affairs and economics at the world’s leading universities such as Peking University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Yeshiva University in New York. He currently chairs “La Centrale Finanziaria Generale Spa”, he is also the honorary president of Huawei Italy, economic adviser to the Chinese giant HNA Group and member of the Ayan-Holding Board. In 1992 he was appointed Officier de la Légion d’Honneur de la République Francaise, with this motivation: “A man who can see across borders to understand the world” and in 2002 he received the title of “Honorable” of the Académie des Sciences de l’Institut de France.

Source:
This article was published by Modern Diplomacy

By Robert C. Thomas

North Korea is once again vying to hold the top spot among the most pressing and nerve-wracking global security crises of the moment. Although it is entirely reasonable to be concerned about how to respond to an aggressive and erratic state developing ever more powerful nuclear weapons and longer-range missile delivery technology, it is actually extremely dangerous to confine policymaking on North Korea to the immediate nuclear crisis. The challenges posed by North Korea to US (and, indeed, global) interests are serious, they are not new, and they frame the provocations of the moment as part of a broader challenge that will not simply fade if we put out the current fire. The policies of the United States and other regional stakeholders need to be focused on addressing the threat of an aggressive and potentially unstable regional military power over the long-term, likely for decades to come.

For the United States, stepping back and focusing requires a clearer accounting of what our broader interests are and how to pursue them. This involves looking beyond the more immediate question of whether Pyongyang is willing and able to launch a nuclear missile toward Honolulu, Seattle, Chicago, or New York in the next day, week, or year. At a minimum, this demands an explicit breakdown of the US interests at risk, the strategic conditions for meeting them, and the actual tactics that might help secure those conditions. It also means thinking through how US interests should be pursued even if the latest tensions are resolved peacefully, recognizing that these interests must be ranked, and accepting that the United States may face cases where there is no choice but to place lower priority goals at greater risk to focus on those that are even more central.

The first and most pressing goal should be protecting citizens of the United State, its allies, and regional bystanders (in that order) from widespread direct physical harm by the North Korean government and military, not just in 2017 but for as long as they continue to pose a plausible threat. The second goal should be preventing further proliferation of nuclear weapons technology to other states or rogue actors, whether by deliberate North Korean policy or by their failure to reliably control their existing materials. The latter is disturbingly likely if the government in Pyongyang eventually collapses into civil war or anarchy due to pressures from within or without. The third goal should be securing the safety and welfare of the North Korean civilian population, who face significant harm from their own government even in peacetime.

The ranking of these priorities is crucial. For example, US policymakers may have to postpone efforts to aid suffering North Korean civilians in order to prioritize securing North Korean nuclear materials in the event of a civil war or total state collapse in the country. Unfortunately, foreign policy often involves making tough choices about the least bad of several painful courses of action.

Whether or not a major provocation or an unplanned crisis forces an abrupt response any time soon, securing these interests will require the leaders of the United States and other interested countries to take sustained action to change at least one of three factors that continue to shape the dangerous long-term behavior of the North Korean government:  its capabilities, its leadership, or its incentives.

The most frequently discussed responses to the North Korean nuclear program are unlikely to solve these problems. Even with a limited ability to defend against North Korean nuclear missile attacks, going to war with North Korea to cripple their military capabilities or leadership would almost certainly be a far more brutal and costly campaign for to the United States than anything the country has faced since the Vietnam War. Even in the best case scenario, it is virtually certain that there would be massive civilian casualties in both North and South Korea, with a high likelihood that the damage would extend well beyond the peninsula. Any attempt to quickly decapitate North Korea’s nuclear weapons, artillery, and leadership capabilities with a more limited preemptive strike looks unlikely to succeed.

Meanwhile, diplomatic negotiations are unlikely to resolve the issue over the long run for the simple reason that North Korea’s leadership will almost certainly continue to distrust US commitments to refrain from challenging their security or stability. The popular middle course of sanctions remains unsuccessful in truly changing North Korean behavior, particularly given the regime’s efforts to circumvent international restrictions. Given these limitations, continuing to deter North Korean aggression with credible and consistent communication about US plans for retaliation will be crucial in the near-term, but won’t be a substitute for a long-term solution to North Korea’s destabilizing role. At best, the status quo involves a set of stalling tactics that can provide time to try other approaches.

With popular tools either horribly costly or seemingly doomed to fail, subtler but more persistent techniques may be the better bet.  One promising move would be to double down on efforts to disseminate outside media and ideas as widely as possible among the North Korean population, boosting political dissent and public skepticism toward the regime’s hostility to outside powers. While North Korean civilians will continue to face serious risks of violent repression if they let any signs of dissent show, the alternative to such attempts at covertly informing and educating the population is to leave them incapable of successfully restoring order if Pyongyang collapses due to failures and infighting among the leadership—let alone mounting any credible bottom-up challenge to their totalitarian oppressors that might produce a less threatening future government.

Although it may seem counterintuitive in light of the constant emphasis on sanctions, another possible tactic would be to identify ways to reinforce black and gray markets operating in North Korea and to link them to non-Chinese partners. This wouldn’t require any relaxation of sanctions used to pressure the core leadership and official state-driven economic enterprises. Instead, the aim would be to create alternative economic options for the population and to weaken the Pyongyang leadership’s relative monopoly control over the economy.

The ultimate goal for both moves would be to broaden the economic and political independence of North Koreans outside the core of the current leadership, as well as to diversify their network of current and potential partners outside North Korea. While certainly not a silver bullet, fueling a larger and more diversified set of cultural, economic, and political players in North Korea might generate domestic pressure for greater openness—or at least strengthen the network of domestic actors capable of contributing to stability if the regime falls into crisis. A more benign, robust, and stable North Korean polity to collaborate with is exactly what the US will need to secure itself and its allies for the long-term, to combat nuclear proliferation, and to ensure a better future for the North Korean population going forward.

If we are lucky, the immediate emergency in US-North Korean relations may continue to ease for the moment, but the lasting challenge of a hostile and potentially unstable North Korean regime won’t disappear because we choose to set it aside to deal with another time. It is well past time to prioritize the long game in North Korea.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the authors are theirs alone and don’t reflect any official position of Geopoliticalmonitor.com, where this article was published.

Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) has long been a source of intrigue and mystery. How did such a small community of people build so many impressively large statues? And what happened to cause that community to collapse? Researchers have also been curious about what kind of contact Rapa Nui’s inhabitants, known as Rapanui, might have had with South Americans prior to the arrival of Europeans. Earlier evidence seemed to support early contact between the Rapanui and Native Americans .

But a new study of ancient DNA evidence collected from archaeological samples and reported in Current Biology on October 12th calls those findings back into question. The new study finds no genetic evidence that ancient inhabitants of Rapa Nui intermixed with South Americans. While the findings can’t exclude the possibility that cultural contact took place between the two populations, if long-distance treks across the ocean did occur, “they did not leave genetic traces among the individual samples,” said Lars Fehren-Schmitz of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We were surprised that we didn’t find any Native American admixture in our ancient Rapanui specimens.”

The idea that there had been early Pacific contact with South America, or even that a Southern Pacific migration route contributed to the peopling of the Americas, has been a long-standing debate in the field. In their new study, Fehren-Schmitz and colleagues wanted to find out what DNA from ancient Rapanui samples had to say on the matter.

The researchers sequenced DNA from five individual samples representing Rapanui both before and after European contact. They report that the DNA, including both complete mitochondrial genomes and low-coverage autosomal genomes, indicates that the DNA of the sampled individuals falls within the genetic diversity of present-day and ancient Polynesians.

“We can reject the hypothesis that any of these individuals had substantial Native American ancestry,” Fehren-Schmitz said. “Our data thus suggest that the Native American ancestry in contemporary Easter Islanders was not present on the island prior to European contact and may thus be due to events in more recent history.”

The new study highlights the value of ancient DNA for testing hypotheses about the past. It’s clear from earlier evidence that living Rapanui do have a small proportion of Native American ancestry. But, the researchers in the new study say, “it is especially difficult to disentangle movements of people in the prehistoric period from more recent times.” The question remains: How and when did this population exchange happen?

The researchers say they’d now like to generate genome-wide data from additional ancient Oceania and western South American populations. The goal is to develop a more detailed picture of the populations that lived within each of these regions and potential interactions among them.

While strong seasonal hurricanes have devastated many of the Caribbean and Bahamian islands this year, geologic studies on several of these islands illustrate that more extreme conditions existed in the past. A new analysis published in Marine Geology shows that the limestone islands of the Bahamas and Bermuda experienced climate changes that were even more extreme than historical events. In the interest of our future world, scientists must seek to understand the complexities of linked natural events and field observations that are revealed in the geologic record of past warmer climates.

In Bermuda and the Bahamas, the geology of the last interglacial (LIG; approximately 120,000 years ago) is exquisitely preserved in nearly pure carbonate sedimentary rocks. A record of superstorms and changing sea levels is exposed in subtidal, beach, storm, and dune deposits on multiple islands. Extensive studies by the authors over the past decades on these islands have documented stratigraphic, sedimentologic, and geomorphic evidence of major oceanic and climatic disruptions at the close of the last interglacial.

Dr. Paul J. Hearty, a retired Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and Dr. Blair. R. Tormey, a Coastal Research Scientist at Western Carolina University conducted an invited review of published findings. It demonstrates that during a global climate transition in the late last interglacial, also known as marine isotope substage 5e (MIS 5e), abrupt multi-meter sea-level changes occurred. Concurrently, coastlines of the Bahamas and Bermuda were impacted by massive storms generated in the North Atlantic Ocean, resulting in a unique trilogy of wave-transported deposits: megaboulders, chevron-shaped, storm-beach ridges, and runup deposits on high dune ridges.

While perhaps more mundane than the megaboulders (found only locally on Eleuthera), the sedimentological structures found within chevron ridge and runup deposits across islands throughout the Bahamas and Bermuda point to frequent and repeated inundation by powerful storm waves, in some locations leaving storm deposits tens of meters above sea level.

During the last interglacial, sea levels were about 3-9 meters higher than they are now. The geologic evidence indicates that the higher sea-levels were accompanied by intense “superstorms,” which deposited giant wave-transported boulders at the top of cliffed coastlines, formed chevron-shaped, storm beach ridges in lowland areas, and left wave runup deposits on older dunes more than 30 meters above sea level. These events occurred at a time of only slightly warmer global climate and CO2 (about 275 ppm) was much lower than today.

The authors emphasize “the LIG record reveals that strong climate forcing is not required to yield major impacts on the ocean and ice caps.” In our industrial world, rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 has surpassed 400 ppm, levels not achieved since the Pliocene era about 3 million years ago, while global temperature has increased nearly 1 °C since the 1870s. Today, ice sheets are melting, sea level is rising, oceans are warming, and weather events are becoming more extreme.

Drs. Hearty and Tormey conclude that with the greatly increased anthropogenic CO2 forcing at rates unmatched in nature, except perhaps during global extinction events, dramatic change is certain. They caution that, “Our global society is producing a climate system that is racing forward out of humanity’s control into an uncertain future. If we seek to understand the non-anthropogenic events of the last interglaciation, some of the consequences of our unchecked forward speed may come more clearly into focus…a message from the past; a glimpse into the future.”

Around the world, mothers speak differently to their children than they do to other adults — and Princeton researchers have found a new way to quantify that vocal shift.

With their kids, mothers switch into a special communicative mode known as “motherese” or “baby talk” — an exaggerated and somewhat musical form of speech. While it may sound silly to adults, research has shown that it plays an important role in language learning, engaging infants’ emotions and highlighting the structure in language, to help babies decode the puzzle of syllables and sentences.

And now, Princeton researchers have identified “a new cue that mothers implicitly use to support babies’ language learning,” said Elise Piazza, a postdoctoral research associate with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI). “We found for the first time that mothers shift their vocal timbre.

“Timbre is best defined as the unique quality of a sound,” explained Piazza. “Barry White’s silky voice sounds different from Tom Waits’ gravelly one — even if they’re both singing the same note.”

She and her colleagues found that the timbre shift was consistent across women who speak 10 languages, including English, and that the differences are strong enough to be reliably picked out by a machine learning algorithm. Their work appears in the journal Current Biology.

To investigate the timbre of baby talk, Piazza and her colleagues, Marius C?t?lin Iordan, also a PNI postdoctoral research associate, and Casey Lew-Williams, an assistant professor of psychology, invited 12 English-speaking women into the Princeton Baby Lab, where researchers study how babies learn to see, talk and understand the world. The researchers recorded the mothers while they played with or read to their 7- to 12-month-old infants and while they spoke to an adult experimenter.

Quantifying baby talk

The scientists then quantified each mother’s vocal fingerprint — the overall statistical profile of her timbre — using a measure called the mel-frequency cepstrum. They found that adult-directed and infant-directed speech had significantly different fingerprints.

“It’s so consistent across mothers,” said Piazza. “They all use the same kind of shift to go between those modes.”

She and her colleagues found that the mothers’ speech timbre differed enough that a computer algorithm could learn to reliably classify infant- and adult-directed speech, even using just one second of recorded speech.

The researchers did not investigate fathers or other caregivers. “We used mothers to keep overall pitch range fairly consistent across participants,” said Piazza. “However, I’d predict that our findings would generalize quite well to fathers.”

Baby talk is not a new discovery, of course.

“We’ve known for a long time that adults change the way they speak when they are addressing babies,” said Jenny Saffran, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in this research. “They speak more slowly, use shorter sentences, talk at a higher pitch and swoop their pitch up and down more often than when they are speaking to other adults.”

What sets this work apart, Saffran explained, was that “this is the first study to ask whether [mothers] also change the timbre of their voice, manipulating the kinds of features that differentiate musical instruments from one another. This is fascinating because clearly speakers are not aware of changing their timbre, and this new study shows that it is a highly reliable feature of the way we speak to babies.”

Once the Princeton team had established that the 12 mothers all had measurable shifts in their vocal timbre, they began thinking of how to expand the study, said Piazza.

“We wondered if this might generalize to mothers who aren’t speaking English,” she said. “So we took a second set of 12 mothers, who did not speak English as their native language, and asked them only to speak in their native, non-English language in all of the recordings. So now we have this new, rich dataset of recordings from Mandarin, Polish, Russian — nine different languages in all.”

When they looked at the data, the researchers found that this timbre shift between adult- and child-directed speech was “highly consistent” across languages from around the world: Cantonese, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Mandarin, Polish, Russian and Spanish.

These shifts in timbre may represent a universal form of communication with infants, said Piazza.

Is timbre the same as pitch?

“Imagine the entire orchestra simultaneously playing the exact same pitch as they tune up,” said Piazza. “You hear the different rich timbres that separate the different instrument families.”

Vocal descriptors like raspy, gravelly, hoarse, nasal, or velvety apply to timbre, not pitch, she added. “We use it all the time to distinguish people, animals and other sounds,” she said.

Piazza and her colleagues isolated a shift in the vocal fingerprint of baby talk “through a combination of clever methods of measuring timbre and machine learning algorithms,” said Patrick Shafto, a data scientist and associate professor of mathematics and computer science at Rutgers University. The result is “the first successful quantitative formalization of vocal timbre which has been validated through modeling and an automatic method for classifying infant-directed versus adult-directed speech across languages.”

Their technique for quantifying timbre could also open doors to other types of speech analysis, noted Piazza.

“Our findings could enable speech recognition software to rapidly identify this speech mode across languages. Our work also invites future explorations of how speakers adjust their timbre to accommodate a wide variety of audiences, such as political constituents, students and romantic partners.”

A Zika virus outbreak in coastal Ecuador in 2016 was likely worsened by a strong El Niño and a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that struck the region in April, according to a new study.

A new research commentary suggests the earthquake left more people exposed to disease-carrying mosquitos, and climate variability associated with the 2014-2016 El Niño event created more favorable mosquito breeding grounds. Warmer temperatures and increased rainfall, combined with destruction of the region’s infrastructure and a population influx into large cities, likely caused the number of Zika cases to increase 12-fold in just three months, according to the study’s authors. The research was accepted for publication in GeoHealth, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Zika was first observed in Africa in the 1950s and recently spread to South America and Southeast Asia. The disease is transmitted by mosquitoes and usually causes a mild illness with symptoms such as headaches, rash and eye infections. Zika virus infection in pregnant mothers can result in a variety of birth defects. As of September 2017, approximately 6,811 suspected and confirmed cases of Zika have occurred in Ecuador, according to a World Health Organization report.

El Niño is the warm phase of a regular climate pattern that occurs in the Pacific Ocean. It brings warmer air temperatures and higher rainfall levels to the west coast of South America. Previous research established a link between the 2014-2016 El Niño and the spread of Zika in South America, but the new study goes further and examines the interaction between these two events and the 2016 earthquake.

The new commentary suggests changes in the climate can amplify the worst effects of natural disasters and disease outbreaks in socially vulnerable regions. Areas that are already stressed by short-term climate changes like El Niño can be sent over the edge due to a catastrophe and may struggle to recuperate afterwards, said Cecilia Sorensen, a Living Closer Foundation fellow in climate and health policy at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora, Colorado and lead author of the new study.

The authors studied the effects of short-term changes in Ecuador’s climate, not long-term global warming patterns. But extreme El Niño events such as the one observed in 2016 are projected to increase in frequency due to human-caused climate change. Sorensen’s team suspects that the combination of increased extreme events and long-term warming could lead to conditions that favor the spread of mosquito-borne diseases.

The findings are important because of their applicability to recent events, like recent earthquakes in Mexico and hurricanes in the Caribbean and the U.S., according to Ángel G. Muñoz, a research associate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

“The main message of the authors is related to the important question of how a combination of natural hazards can increase the vulnerability of the population, making people’s exposure higher and lowering their adaptive capacity during and after the occurrence of such hazards,” he said.

Examining the Zika outbreak

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the province of Manabi in coastal Ecuador on April 16, 2016. The quake affected approximately 720,000 people, destroyed much of the region’s sanitation and healthcare infrastructure, and resulted in a massive influx of displaced residents into urban areas.

Sorensen and the study co-authors worked with the non-governmental organization Walking Palms Global Initiative to operate a mobile health clinic after the earthquake. They saw many women and children coming in with symptoms typical of mosquito-borne illnesses like dengue fever and Zika. In July of 2016, UNICEF reported the number of Zika cases in Ecuador spiked from 92 cases before the earthquake to 1,106 cases just three months after the event. 80 percent of these new cases occurred in Manabi.

The research team set out to study how damage from the earthquake and short-term changes in weather associated with El Niño could have potentially exposed more people to mosquitoes and exacerbated the outbreak.

“We saw so many people affected by the earthquake that were sleeping outside without any shelter from mosquitoes, so we were worrying that the region’s changing climate could facilitate the spread of diseases,” Sorensen said. “Natural disasters can create a niche for emerging diseases to come out and affect more people.”

Link to climate changes

Sorensen’s team reviewed the existing research on the link between short-term changes in climate and disease transmission. They then applied those findings to explain the role of the earthquake and El Niño in the Zika outbreak.

The researchers suggest El Niño created ideal conditions for Zika-carrying mosquitos to breed and make more copies of the Zika virus. The warmer air temperatures and increased rainfall brought by El Niño have previously been associated with a higher likelihood of dengue outbreaks. Warmer temperatures can accelerate viral replication in mosquitoes and influence mosquitos’ development and breeding habits.

Additionally, the El Niño event brought warmer sea-surface temperatures, which have been shown to correlate with outbreaks of mosquito-transmitted diseases. Estimates from remote sensing data in coastal Ecuador show that sea-surface temperatures were higher than average from 2014-2016.

The team also believes an increase in water scarcity after the earthquake indirectly benefitted mosquito development. The quake damaged municipal water systems, forcing people to store water in open containers outside their homes. These containers served as additional habitats for mosquito larvae to grow in.

The new findings could be used by governments to identify and protect vulnerable communities before natural disasters happen, Sorensen said.

“One idea is to develop disease models that can use existing climate models to predict where these vectors will show up due to climate variability,” she said. “Applying these new models to areas that have pre-existing social vulnerabilities could identify susceptible regions, allowing us to direct healthcare resources there ahead of time.”

New research shows that Twitter activity can help predict the result of football matches when combined with betting market prices.

The tone of Twitter posts can predict when a team is more likely to win and soccer bets are mispriced, the study by the University of East Anglia (UEA) found.

Researchers examined 13.8 million tweets – an average of 5.2 tweets per second – during an English Premier League (EPL) season. These were compared with in-play betting prices available at the same time on Betfair, the world’s largest online betting exchange.

They found that if the combined tone of tweets in a given second during a match was positive – as measured by a micro-blogging dictionary – then the team was more likely to win than the betting market prices implied.

Tweets were particularly informative in the aftermath of goals and red cards, suggesting that social media content is particularly useful in assessing the implications and significance of new information.

Social media is used as a forecasting tool by a variety of firms and agencies, but the researchers wanted to find out how useful and accurate it is. They measured the aggregate tone of all tweets for each team, in each second of 372 matches that took place during the 2013/14 season.

The study, published today in the journal Economic Inquiry, was conducted by Dr Alasdair Brown, of UEA’s School of Economics, and colleagues at the Universities of Dundee and Reading, and Birkbeck, University of London.

Dr Brown, a senior lecturer in economics, said: “The modern forecaster has a number of tools at their disposal. In particular, prediction markets and social media have proved extremely popular.

“We know that prediction markets, such as Betfair, generally lead to accurate forecasts, and outperform individual experts and polls in many settings. However, we wanted to find out if social media has anything to add. Can we combine probability forecasts from prediction markets with social media output to improve our predictions?

“We find that Twitter activity predicts match outcomes, after controlling for betting market prices. Much of the predictive power of social media presents itself just after significant market events, such as goals and red cards, where the tone of Tweets can help in the interpretation of information.

“In short, social media activity does not just represent sentiment or misinformation. If sensibly aggregated it can, when combined with a prediction market, help to improve forecast accuracy.”

The researchers constructed a number of betting strategies to quantify the degree of mispricing that social media predicts. Using conservative estimates of the commission paid to Betfair, and a strategy of betting when Tweets on a team are positive, a bettor could have earned an average return of 2.28 per cent from 903,821 bets. This compares favourably with average returns of -5.41 per cent across the matches studied.

Dr Brown said these were significant returns given the size of the Betfair betting market for EPL soccer matches, the very short horizon – less than 90 minutes – of the holding periods for most bets, and the fact that bets usually have negative expected returns.

The authors also wanted to examine whether tweets were particularly informative before a goal was scored, in which case this would suggest that social media users break news faster than betting/prediction markets. However, they found no evidence of this.

“These results fit in with recent evidence that social media content can be useful as a forecasting tool,” said Dr Brown. “For example, there is evidence that social media output, both on Twitter and on financial message boards, predicts future stock returns.

“At first glance this may be surprising, as we might think that an individual in possession of valuable information would bet or trade first, and post later. However, if we think that valuable information is dispersed among a number of individuals, then we might understand why social media content leads market prices, as it does in this study and elsewhere.”

Dr James Reade, sports economist at the University of Reading and a co-author of the study, said: “This is a real ‘wisdom of crowds’ kind of outcome. It says that if we listen to the right parts of the crowd, we can gain more information and make better predictions.

“It’s great for football fans, who always want to know what others think of their team. Betting prices, allied with the general mood on Twitter, can give a really accurate picture of where a match is going, in real time.”

Recent reports regarding Harvey Weinstein have spurred the New York Police Department to open a criminal investigation, Variety confirmed on Thursday, October 12.

“Based on information referenced in published news reports the NYPD is conducting a review to determine if there are any additional complaints relating to the Harvey Weinstein matter. No filed complaints have been identified as of this time and as always, the NYPD encourages anyone who may have information pertaining to this matter to call the CrimeStoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS.”

A chorus of women have detailed accounts of sexual harassment with the movie executive, including Ashley Judd, Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow and Cara Delevingne.

In a bombshell New York Times report last week, eight women spoke out against Weinstein, accusing him of inappropriate behavior. The paper also reported that Weinstein reached private settlements with eight women, including actress Rose McGowan.

Following the initial report, Weinstein said in a statement that he was working with therapists and planned to “deal with this issue head-on.” He has since been fired from his powerhouse studio, The Weinstein Company, and his wife, Marchesa designer Georgina Chapman, has announced she’s leaving him.

Rising inequality and stagnating manufacturing wages have many in the Western world questioning whether immigration may be responsible. This column takes a close look at data for the US, and reveals that tighter immigration controls are unlikely to improve the fortunes of low-skilled workers. Long-term demographic changes in the Americas imply that the pressure from illegal immigrants on US labour markets is already abating and will continue to do so.

By Gordon Hanson, Chen Liu and Craig McIntosh*

Over the decades leading up to the Great Recession, illegal immigration was indeed a potent driver of growth in the aggregate supply of unskilled labour in the US. The Pew Research Center estimates that between 1990 and 2007, the US population of undocumented residents – which as of 2013 accounted for nearly two-thirds of the US foreign-born adult population with 12 or fewer years of schooling – had an annual average net growth of 510,000 individuals (Borjas 2016, Passel and Cohn 2016). These inflows contributed to a sizable increase in the US supply of low-skilled foreign-born workers (Figure 1). Over the 1990 to 2007 period, the number of working-age immigrants with 12 or fewer years of schooling more than doubled, rising from 8.5 million to 17.8 million individuals.

The decade since the Great Recession has seen this substantial cross-border flow of labour stall out. The undocumented population declined in absolute terms between 2007 and 2014, falling by an annual average of 160,000 individuals, while the overall population of low-skilled immigrants of working age remained stable. Net migration between Mexico and the US from 2010 to 2015 was -141,000 (Gonzalez-Barrera 2015), meaning that roughly 25,000 more Mexican-born individuals were leaving the US than entering it per year.

Figure 1 Foreign-born workers in the US

While the proximate causes of the drop in net migration were economic crises and a ramp-up in border enforcement, these have coincided with a deeper and more permanent source of change, namely, a dramatic fall in fertility rates in Mexico and much of Central America. Our recent work has documented the extent to which differential growth in labour supply, arising from rapid population growth in the developing world, serves as a push factor for the international migration of unskilled labour (Hanson and McIntosh 2009, 2010, 2012). For decades, the Mexico-US border has been a relatively permeable barrier between regions with sharply divergent population growth rates. Consequently, the US has absorbed a substantial share of the labour force growth that occurred in Mexico and Central America between 1980 and the Great Recession.

Now, the sharp decline in population growth in these countries is generating labour force growth rates that are similar across the Americas. The total fertility rate in Mexico was seven in 1965, which then plummeted over the next several decades, dropping to 2.5 by 2000, close to the US level of 2.1 (Tuiran et al. 2002). This means that in the past decade, a major demographic driver of unskilled immigration to the US has effectively switched into neutral. These demographic changes are likely to have substantial impacts on the relative scarcity of unskilled to skilled labour, regardless of which immigration policy the US pursues on its border. In combination with border enforcement that appears unlikely to weaken in the near future, even a return to robust labour demand growth in the US seems incapable of causing undocumented immigration to approach its pre-recession levels. The policy dilemma facing the US in the future is thus not so much about how to arrest massive increases in the supply of foreign labour, but rather how to prepare for a future with less low-skilled immigration.

What will be the repercussions of changes in immigration pressures for the US? First, a source of downward pressure on the wages of low-skilled Americans is being reduced. Our estimates suggest that the immigration-induced slowdown in the growth of the unskilled labour force decreased the 2015 skill-based wage gap in US labour markets by 6-9%, relative to what would have happened if unskilled labour force growth had continued from 2008 to 2015 at its prior trend.

The declines in the number of undocumented immigrants are likely to be particularly strong from countries such as Mexico that have seen the most rapid fertility declines. Central American countries, some of whose populations will continue to grow, will continue to have higher rates of net emigration. Because these countries are so small relative to the US, however, the effects of their emigration will not come close to duplicating the shock to US low-skilled labour supply represented by undocumented migration of Mexicans in previous decades (Figure 2).

Figure 2 Migration from Central America to the US: rates versus counts

The coming years will also see a dramatic ageing of the first-generation US immigrant population. Declining fertility rates in sending countries are coinciding with a drop in immigration among younger foreign-born cohorts, leading to a distribution of the foreign-born that is strongly centred on 40-year olds in 2015. Social policy issues around the provision of services to undocumented people in the US will shift from schools to elder care (including health care). Our prediction suggests that in 2040 there will be fewer Mexican-born 30 year olds than today, but three times the number of Mexican-born 65 year olds (Figure 3).

Figure 3 Age frequencies of Mexican-born in US, by year

Our demographic perspective on US inflows of foreign labour speaks directly to some of the most contentious debates currently raging over immigration. When it comes to further strengthening enforcement on the US-Mexico border, the net benefits of such investments are likely to be small when one considers the dramatically weakened pressures for immigration over the long haul.

Diminished long-term pressures for immigration also suggest that a major argument against amnesty for undocumented immigrants is weakening. The moral hazard generated by an increase in the perceived probability of future amnesty will drive foreign-born individuals to want to migrate. To the extent that illegal migration pressures are abating, the perverse effect of granting citizenship to immigrants currently in the country (such as ‘Dreamers’) may be modest.

Using the demographic lens to take a global, long-term perspective, some clear lessons emerge. As future global population growth moves to being dominated by Africa (see Figure 4a and 4b), the demographic pressures on migration move to the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Countries such as Spain, Italy, and the UK that are highly exposed to African emigration will face particularly strong pressures for labour inflows. In European and Middle Eastern destinations, immigration policy will thus be increasingly salient and consequential.

It is also important to consider the demographic drivers of migration from the perspective of the origin countries. The possibility of emigration served as a critical safety valve for the burgeoning populations of Southern Europe and Ireland as they went through their own demographic transformations in previous centuries. Our earlier work shows that emigration to the US, Canada, the UK, and Spain was strongly driven by demographic growth in Latin America and the Caribbean during the latter half of the 20th century. Strikingly, this pattern does not hold at the global level. Countries with rapidly growing populations that lack the benefits of proximity or large established migrant populations already in OECD destinations see lower migration rates than more slowly growing countries. In Hanson and McIntosh (2016), we predict that the number of African-born first-generation migrants aged 15 to 64 outside of Sub-Saharan Africa will grow from 4.6 million to 13.4 million between 2010 and 2050. During this same period, the number of working-age adults born in the region will expand from under half a billion to more than 1.3 billion, meaning that international migration would only absorb 1% of the overall population growth. Given an African continent expected to contain almost 4 billion people by 2100, the absence of a migration safety valve would have profound implications.

While populists in the US may be fighting yesterday’s battles by focusing on border control, in Europe decisions over how and whether to combat illegal immigration will be a major driver of the international movement of low-skilled labour in the coming decades.

Figure 4a Percentage change in population ages 0-14, 1970–1980

Figure 4b UN-forecasted percentage change in population ages 0-14, 2040–2050

*About the authors:
Gordon Hanson, Pacific Economic Cooperation Chair in International Economic Relations and Director of the Center on Global Transformation, UC San Diego

Chen Liu, PhD candidate in Economics, UC San Diego

Craig McIntosh, Professor of Economics, School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego

References:
Borjas, G J (2016), “The labor supply of undocumented immigrants”, NBER, Working paper no 22102.

Gonzales-Berra, A (2015), “More Mexicans leaving than coming to the US”, Pew Research Center, Hispanic Trends, Washington, DC.

Hanson, G H and C McIntosh (2009), “The demography of Mexican migration to the US”, American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 99(2): 22–27.

Hanson, G H and C McIntosh (2010), “The great Mexican emigration”, Review of Economics and Statistics 92(4): 798–810.

Hanson, G H and C McIntosh (2012), “Birth rates and border crossings: Latin American emigration to the US, Canada, Spain, and UK”, Economic Journal 122(561): 707–726.

Hanson, G H and C McIntosh (2016), “Is the Mediterranean the New Rio Grande? US and EU immigration pressures in the long run”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 30(4): 1–25.

Hanson, G H, C Liu and C McIntosh (2017), “The Rise and Fall of US Low-Skilled Immigration”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.

Passel, J S and D Cohn (2016) “Overall number of US unauthorized immigrants holds steady since 2009”, Pew Research Center, Washington, DC.

Tuiran, R , V Partida, O Mojarro and E Zúñiga (2002), Fertility in Mexico: Trends and forecast, Report of the United Nations Population Division, New York.

To protect financial markets from possible harm, investors’ perceived “short-sightedness” occupies an important place in the regulatory agenda.

The preoccupation with short-term trading led Keynes to compare financial markets to “beauty contests,” arguing that investors made decisions based on the expected capricious behavior of their colleagues — the perception of what others will find valuable — rather than on any understanding of real value.

Some researchers maintain that this kind of behavior breeds informational inefficiency, in which investors tend to give excessive weight to public information in their prediction of asset prices. Moreover, the forecast of short-term price fluctuations could lead to market players overreacting, thus intensifying such fluctuations and contributing to market meltdowns.

In an article published in The Journal of Finance, IESE’s Xavier Vives and Giovanni Cespa explore the limits of the “beauty contest” analogy. Their research reveals that short-termism does not by default generate informational inefficiency. They demonstrate this by means of a market model characterized by persistent activity among liquidity traders (major banks and institutional investors) and risk-averse, privately informed short-term investors.

Persistence Is Key

The authors claim the persistence in the positions of liquidity traders has a significant effect on how investors react to private information.

When liquidity traders’ orders are correlated in the model’s two trading periods, investors can retrospectively evaluate the evidence obtained during the first period in conjunction with new information. Having this opportunity to review their forecasts, the authors believe, generates strategic complementarities in the use of private information that can yield multiple stable equilibria.

Specifically, Vives and Cespa identify two potentially stable informational equilibria: high information equilibrium (HIE) and low informational equilibrium (LIE). With HIE equilibrium, prices are good indicators of fundamentals (the companies’ basic financial, accounting and economic data), volatility is low and liquidity high. With LIE, the opposite is true.

Public and Private Information

In their analysis, the authors verify that, when liquidity providers orders are predictable, the effects of short-termism on traders in observable market data depend on the quality of public information.

As a result, one of two scenarios occurs:

1. When public information is not much more precise than private signals, the retrospective inference channel is not particularly strong. In this case, a stable equilibrium arises that is characterized by low volatility, high liquidity, high price informativeness, high volume, and low levels of disagreement. This equilibrium exists alongside another equilibrium in which prices are more volatile and less informationally efficient, the market is thinner, volume is low, and disagreement is high.

2. When public information is either very precise or very poor, the low-volatility equilibrium disappears or becomes unstable while the high-volatility equilibrium survives.

Thus, the authors’ analysis indicates that there could be a nonlinear effect of public information on market observables.

Expectations

The research also clarifies the role of expectations in asset pricing. With liquidity trading persistence, prices are driven by average expectations about fundamentals and about liquidity trading. This dynamic can move prices either systematically farther away from or closer to fundamentals — along the LIE and the HIE, respectively — as compared with the consensus of investors.

Vives and Cespa show that when public information is either very precise (compared with private signals) or very poor, prices are farther away from fundamentals compared to consensus. However, a public signal of intermediate precision makes the HIE stable, drawing prices closer (than consensus) to the fundamentals.

This analysis establishes the limits of the beauty contest analogy for financial markets and provides empirical implications to assess the effect of expectations on asset prices.

As the authors conclude, the beauty contest aspect does not necessarily imply that asset prices will be lower, nor that investors will display inertia or react slowly to changes in fundamentals. They refute the premise that short-term trading will always amplify demand shock or lead to uninformative prices or excessive volatility.

Indeed, they interpret the recent financial crisis as a transition from HIE to LIE, in response to abrupt changes in the volume traded and in the precision of the public information.

Methodology, Very Briefly

The authors work from a two-period market model where short-term, informed, competitive, risk-averse investors trade on private information and accommodate liquidity supply while facing persistent demand from liquidity traders.

Vives acknowledges financial support from the European Research Council under the Advanced Grant project Information and Competition (no. 230254) and from project ECO2011-29533 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation at the Public-Private Sector Research Center at IESE.

Defending Indian airspace from any potential Chinese aerial challenge or intrusions in the future with the proliferation of stealth aircraft in the region, will be eventualities that the Indian Air Force must contend with.

By Pushan Das

The People’s Liberation Army Airforce (PLAAF) is beginning to make a transformative shift in its war fighting capabilities with the commissioning of its first fifth-generation fighter aircraft — the Chengdu J-20A. The induction of the J-20A will present a greater and fundamentally different threat for militaries in the Asia Pacific compared to the Russian Su-30/35 Flanker family derivatives that currently form the mainstay of Chinese air power. The J-20A represents a fast-emerging capability for low-observable strikes inside Indian airspace by China in a crisis. And for an Indian Air Force (IAF) struggling to mass combat potential on any given day, the latest developments in Chinese airpower require imaginative and cost effective counter capabilities, given the limitations of the defence budget.

Stealth technology is a core component in the transformation of the PLAAF from a predominantly territorial air force to one capable of conducting both offensive and defensive operations. The twin-engine J-20A, built by Chengdu Aerospace Corporation, is a single seat stealth fighter designed for long-range fighter missions which can pose a significant threat to forward bases in the opening phase of any conflict due to its radar evading properties, long range and ability to carry significant amounts of munitions.

The J-20 contains three weapons bays for air-to-air missiles and a variety of missiles and surface attack weapons. The J-20 also features an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, nose-mounted infrared search and tracking sensors, and fuselage-mounted cameras to give its pilot 360 degree imaging. These capabilities are set to grow as the platform matures in the coming years saddling China’s rival air forces with a formidable challenge.

The IAF’s fleet of current ageing combat aircraft including the numerically dominant fleet of Sukhou-30 MKI, has few answers to an aircraft like the J-20A. Stealth aircraft will always have the capability to detect the Su-30MKI from very long ranges, and can take positions to either avoid it or engage under the best possible attack parameters.

Defending Indian airspace from any potential Chinese aerial challenge or intrusions in the future with the proliferation of stealth aircraft in the region, will be eventualities that the IAF must contend with. Currently, the IAF is on course to fall seriously short in both the quality and quantity of its fighter force to pose a counter with its entrenched procurement plans out to 2032 when it hopes to achieve its elusive 42 fighter squadron strength which the considers the benchmark to effectively take on China and Pakistan.

The IAF needs to adopt a more flexible approach to countering emerging Chinese air combat capabilities like stealth. One solution could be to pursue the acquisition of modern Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft, which can improve the situational awareness of the IAF and help better utilise its limited 4^th generation combat aircraft an idea of where to look for low-observable aircraft. Second, developing a modern and potent ground-based integrated air defence system (IADS) with long-wavelength frequency agile ground radars focused on counter-stealth capabilities for defence against China, paired with a smaller number of fourth and 4.5 generation multirole fighters to provide flexible air defence. This combination, far more than any aircraft which the IAF has in the procurement or development pipeline at present, is likely to remain a serious threat to any low-observable would-be intruders into Indian airspace. Building on the acquisition of the long range S-400 air defence systems from Russia in terms of quantity and quality could prove the first steps in the second option.

While analysts have critically pointed to the fact is that it is comparatively simple to develop flying prototypes that look like fifth generation fighters, case in point the J-20A or the Russian Sukhoi T-50 which India plans to acquire at some point in the future. It is exceedingly difficult to transition to produce something in quantity that performs like a fifth generation fighter, both in low-observability and sensor fusion-enabled situational awareness.

While western fifth generation aircraft may still have significant advantages in low-observable technologies or situational awareness capabilities, once the Chinese J-20A enters the PLAAF in significant number in the coming years, it will represent transformative capability jump in any conflict over less capable militaries in Asia including India.

From the BBC:  “The prime minister of Spain has two requests for the leader of Catalonia.

First: Clarify whether the region is, indeed, declaring independence from Spain. And second: If that is the case, take it back.

Otherwise, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy says, Spain will suspend Catalonia’s current autonomy, institute direct rule and possibly even jail the Catalan president.”

It seems like Madrid means business and plans to use whatever means necessary to prevent Catalan independence. I will certainly fault Catalonia’s leaders for declining to issue a clear declaration one way or the other on independence. It seems that they are using the threat of independence as bargaining power and Madrid is calling the bluff. No wonder the many people who recently voted to support secession seem disappointed and confused by the government’s dance.

We’ve had many good comments on this issue.

For readers interested in hearing both side of the independence argument, here are some links:

• Debating Europe has this summary of the arguments for and against independence.
• Americans for Catalonia has gives these grounds in support of independence.
• The Foundation for Economic Education has this piece on why Catalonia should be allowed to go its own way.
• The Bologna Center Journal of International Affairs has this article in favor on an independent Catalonia.
• Foreign Policy makes this case against independence for Catalonia.
• U.S. News explains why we should support Spain over Catalonia.

My view remains that the people of Catalonia should be free to decide whether they will be governed by Madrid or whether they should chart their own course. Large central governments too often make one-sized-fits-all decisions and lack the capacity to govern on a human scale. If Catalonia is serious about independence, we should support them in the experiment of self-government.

This article was published at The Beacon.

By Victor V. Claar*

In the wee hours of Monday morning here in the United States, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that it had awarded the 2017 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to a single recipient, the University of Chicago’s Richard Thaler, for his work in behavioral economics. Thaler’s work raises important questions about the state’s influence over human action.

Unlike the other Nobel prizes which tend to recognize, relatively speaking, recent discoveries and achievements, the economics prize has historically been presented to economists in recognition of their body of work which, over time, has significantly altered the path of theoretical and empirical research in a lasting way. Stated another way, the economics laureates typically do not win the prize in celebration of isolated accomplishments; instead these legendary economists often challenge and undo prevailing paradigms in ways that influence all future inquiry. The laureates help us understand the economic order of things better than we previously had.

In  some years two or three economists share the prize for their collective contributions to a specific line of inquiry, but this year the 72-year-old Thaler was the sole recipient for his accumulated accomplishments in behavioral economics. Put simply, behavioral economics is the application of insights from other social sciences, such as psychology, to the decision-making that economic agents like you and me face every day. Consider the pesky problem of time-inconsistent behavior. Tomorrow it will be just as important for me to get up and start my day at 5:30 a.m. as it is tonight. The utility-maximizing choice regarding what time to get up shouldn’t depend on when you ask me about it. Yet, even though I set my alarm for 5:30 tomorrow, by the time 5:30 arrives I likely may not follow through on what I know to be the optimal plan—getting up at 5:30—and instead hit the snooze button once. Or twice.

Though such time-inconsistent behavior doesn’t fit neatly into our depiction of homo economicus, behavioral economics attempts to augment traditional economic models in order to make them more resonant with our own experiences and behaviors. Further still, behavioral economists like Thaler are convinced that even small deviations of individual behavior from predicted rational choices can add up to significant shifts, for society more broadly, away from what pure economic theory might have suggested, and such accumulated shifts may prove costly.

Here’s the good news: All of us find ways to deal with the human limitations articulated by behavioral economics. For example, if I am worried that my 5:30 a.m. persona might make a bad choice about the snooze alarm, then tonight I might place my alarm on the other side of the room so that in the morning I will have to get out of bed to make it stop. And, even though it makes no rational sense, we all engage in some form of mental accounting in which we envision our savings – which are fungible! – as being specifically designated for a variety of future planned expenditures (e.g., rent money, college fund, retirement savings). Some of us even still maintain Christmas club saving accounts for fear we will not have money left by the time the holidays arrive to buy gifts for our friends and neighbors, though all we really need to do is save accordingly. You don’t have to have multiple bank accounts to do the right thing with your earned resources. You just need to plan, and to have the discipline to save as needed.

Behavioral economics brings a variety of other insights to bear on our decision-making. For example, we tend to discount the consequences for our future selves of our actions today. We know we should eat better, but we don’t always do it.  But if we could see our future selves – or even our future Facebook profiles — more clearly when we consider whether to work out, save, eat broccoli, or be kind to others, we would behave in ways that are more time-consistent—and our lives would be better for it.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Thaler’s legacy is that it has led to a phenomenon known as “nudge units.” Drawn from the title of Thaler’s bestselling book Nudge (coauthored with Cass Sunstein), nudge units are government agencies specifically intended to nudge you and me into making choices that are better than the ones we might make otherwise. Several countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, created such nudge units, and their job is to reframe the decisions we face so that we will be nudged into better choices for diet, exercise, saving, etc. Though the United States nudge unit expired with the end of the Obama presidency, defenders of public nudging argue that you and I still face the same range of options, though the clever positioning of the choices by the nudge unit might steer us in a better direction.

Corporate marketing attempts to nudge us all the time. Option “C,” which might seem lame as a take-it-or-leave-it proposal on its own, begins to look remarkably attractive once we have seen earlier options “A” and “B.” Our employers and insurers attempt to nudge us into wellness activities. And every parent tries to nudge his or her child into better behavior by reframing the stakes for the youngster.

But there is a fundamental tradeoff to be considered when government undertakes the task of being “nudger in chief.” While it’s true that such nudging might encourage us to engage in the right behavior in the short run, it may very well weaken our innate ability to do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do. If nudging weakens our capacity to see clearly the future consequences of our own actions, or erodes our fortitude to follow through, then we risk becoming a society of sheep: going in whatever direction we’re nudged, without any ability to make virtuous choices of our own.

About the author:
*Victor V. Claar is associate professor of economics at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, where he holds the BB&T Distinguished Professorship in Free Enterprise. He is a coauthor of Economics in Christian Perspective: Theory, Policy, and Life Choices, and author of the Acton Institute’s Fair Trade? Its Prospects as a Poverty Solution.

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This article was published by the Acton Institute

In Las Vegas on 1 October 2017, it appears that one man (although it might have been more) killed 59 people and shot and injured another 241 (with almost 300 more injured while fleeing). The incident got a lot of publicity, partly because the man managed to kill more people than most mass killers. However, because the killer was a white American and had a Christian name, he was not immediately labelled a terrorist, even though his death toll considerably exceeded that achieved in many ‘terrorist attacks’, including those that occur in war zones (such as US drone murders of innocent people attending weddings).

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there is now an average of one mass shooting (arbitrarily defined by the FBI as a shooting in which at least four victims are shot) each day in the USA. By any measure, this is a national crisis.

However, while there has been a flood of commentary on the incident, including suggestions about what might be done in response based on a variety of analyses of the cause, none that I have read explain the underlying cause of all these mass killings. And if we do not understand this, then any other suggestions, whatever their apparent merits, can have little impact.

The suggestions made so far in response to this massacre include the following:

1. Making it much more difficult, perhaps even illegal, to own a gun. See ‘Guns’.

2. Drastically reducing the prescription of pharmaceutical drugs (which are almost invariably being consumed by the killer). See ‘Drugs and Guns Don’t Mix: Medication Madness, Military Madness and the Las Vegas Mass Shooting’.

3. Recognising and addressing the sociological factors implicated in causing the violence. See ‘violence is driven by socioeconomic factors, not access to firearms’ argued in ‘Another Mass Shooting, Another Grab for Guns: 6 Gun Facts’ and ‘a deep sickness in American society’ argued in ‘The social pathology of the Las Vegas Massacre’.

4. Identifying whether or not the killer had ideological/religious links to a terrorist group (in this case ISIS, as claimed by some). See, for example, ‘ISIS Releases Infographic Claiming Las Vegas Gunman Converted 6 Months Ago’.

5. Identifying and remedying the ways in which constitutional provisions and laws facilitate such massacres. See ‘Las Vegas Massacre Proves 2nd Amendment Must be Abolished’.

6. Recognizing the way in which these incidents are encouraged by national elites and are sometimes, in fact, false flag attacks used as a means to justify the consolidation of elite social control (through such measures as increased state surveillance and new restrictions on human rights).

7. Limiting the ways in which violence, especially military violence, is used as entertainment and education, and thus culturally glorified in ways that encourage imitation. See ‘People Don’t Kill People, Americans Kill People’.

However, as indicated above, while these and other suggestions, including certain educational initiatives, sound attractive as options for possibly preventing/mitigating some incidents in future, they do not address the cause of violence in this or any other context and so widespread violence both in the United States and around the world will continue.

So Why Does Someone Become A Mass Killer?

Human socialization is essentially a process of inflicting phenomenal violence on children until they think and behave as the key adults – particularly their parents, teachers and religious figures – around them want, irrespective of the functionality of this thought and behaviour in evolutionary terms. This is because virtually all adults prioritize obedience over all other possible behaviours and they delusionarily believe that they ‘know better’ than the child.

The idea that each child is the only one of their kind in all of living creation in Earth’s history and, therefore, has a unique destiny to fulfil, never even enters their mind. So, instead of nurturing that unique destiny so that the child fully becomes the unique Self that evolution created, adults terrorize each child into becoming just another more-or-less identical cog in the giant machine called ‘human society’.

Before I go any further, you might wonder if the expression ‘phenomenal violence?’ isn’t too strong. So let me explain.

From the moment of birth, human adults inflict violence on the child. This violence occurs in three categories: visible, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’. Visible violence is readily identified: it is the (usually) physical violence that occurs when someone is hit (with a hand or weapon), kicked, shaken, held down or punished in any other way. See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

But what is this ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that is inflicted on us mercilessly, and has a profoundly damaging impact, from the day we are born?

In essence, ‘invisible’ violence is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to them Self thus destroying their internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops communication and behavioural dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine their sense of Self-worth and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, parents, teachers and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioural responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioural outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing their feelings (e.g. by screaming at them when they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behaviour that is generated by their feelings (e.g. by hitting them, restraining them or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the individual will now easily suppress their awareness of the feelings that would tell them how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and they will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviours, including many that are violent towards themselves, others and/or the Earth.

Moreover, this emotional (or psychological) damage will lead to a unique combination of violent behaviours in each case and, depending on the precise combination of violence to which they are subjected, some of them will become what I call ‘archetype perpetrators of violence’; that is, people so emotionally damaged that they end up completely devoid of a Self and with a psychological profile similar to Hitler’s.

These archetype perpetrators of violence are all terrified, self-hating and powerless but, in fact, they have 23identifiable psychological characteristics constituting their ‘personality’. For a full explanation of this particular psychological profile, see ‘Why Violence? ‘and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’. Of course, few perpetrators of violence fit the archetype, but all perpetrators are full of (suppressed) terror, self-hatred and powerlessness and this is fundamental to understanding their violence as explained in ‘Why Violence?’

Rather than elaborate further in this article why these perpetrators behave as they do (which you can read on the documents just mentioned), let me explain why the suggestions made by others above in relation to gun and drug control, socioeconomic factors, ideological/religious connections, constitutional and legal shortcomings, resisting efforts to consolidate elite social control, and revised education and entertainment programs can have little impact if undertaken in isolation from the primary suggestion I will make below.

Once someone is so emotionally damaged that they are effectively devoid of the Self that should have defined their unique personality, then they will be the endless victim of whatever violence is directed at them. This simply means that they will have negligible capacity to deal powerfully with any difficult life circumstances and personal problems (and, for example, to resist doctors prescribing pharmaceutical drugs), they will be gullibly influenced by violent ideologies, education and entertainment, and they will have virtually no capacity to work creatively to resolve the conflicts (both personal and structural) in their life but will do what was modelled to them as a child in any effort to do so: use violence.

And by now you have probably realized that I am not just talking about the mass killers that I started discussing at the beginning of this article. I am also talking about the real mass killers: those politicians, military leaders and weapons corporation executives, and all those other corporate executives, who inflict mass violence on life itself, as well as those others, such as academics and those working in corporate media outlets, that support and justify this violence. This includes, to specify just one obvious example, all of those US Senators and Congress people who resist implementing gun control laws. See ‘Thoughts and Prayers and N.R.A. Funding’.

In essence then, if the child suffers enough of this visible, invisible and utterly invisible violence, they will grow up devoid of the Selfhood – including the love, compassion, empathy, morality and integrity – that is their birthright and the foundation of their capacity to behave powerfully in all contexts without the use of violence.

Instead, they will become a perpetrator of violence, to a greater or lesser extent, and may even seek employment in those positions that encourage them to support and/or inflict violence legally, such as a police or prison officer, a lawyer or judge – see ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’– a soldier who fights in war or a Congressperson who supports it, or even an employee in a corporation that profits from violence and exploitation. See ‘Profit Maximization is Easy: Invest in Violence’.

In addition, most individuals will inflict violence on the climate and environment, all will inflict violence on children, and some will inflict violence in those few ways that are actually defined as ‘illegal’, such as mass killings.

But if we don’t see the mass killers as the logical, if occasional, outcome of (unconsciously) violent parenting, then we will never even begin to address the problem at its source. And we are condemned to suffer violence, in all of its manifestations, until we inevitably drive ourselves to extinction through nuclear war or climate/environmental collapse.

If you are looking for a lead on this from political leaders, you are wasting your time. Similarly, there are precious few professionals, particularly in the medical and psychiatric industries – see ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’ – who have any idea how to respond meaningfully (assuming they even have an interest in doing so). So why not be your own judge and consider making ‘My Promise to Children’?

In addition, if further reducing the violence in our world appeals to you, then you are also welcome to consider participating in the creation of communities that do not have violence built into them – see ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’– signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ and/or consider using the strategic framework on one or the other of these two websites for your campaign to end violence in one context or another: Nonviolent Campaign Strategy and Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

In summary then: For the typical human adult, it is better to endlessly inflict violence on a child to coerce them to obey. Of course, once the child has been terrorized into this unthinking obedience, they won’t just obey the parents and teachers (secular and religious) who terrorized them: they will also obey anyone else who orders them to do something. This will include governments, military officers and terrorist leaders who order them to kill (or pay taxes to kill) people they do not know in foreign countries, employers who order them to submit to the exploitation of themselves and others, not to mention a vast array of other influences (particularly corporations) who will have little trouble manipulating them into behaving unethically and without question (even regarding consumer purchases).

Or, to put it another way: For the typical human adult, it is better to endlessly inflict violence on a child to coerce them to obey and to then watch the end-products of this violence – obedient, submissive children who are powerless to question their parents and teachers, resist the entreaties of drug pushers, and critique the propaganda of governments, corporations and the military as well as the media, education and entertainment industries – spiral endlessly out of control: wars, massive exploitation, ecological destruction, slavery, mass killings…. And to then wonder ‘Why?’

For these terrorized humans, cowardly powerlessness is the state they have been trained to accept, while taking whatever material distractions are thrown their way as compensation. So they pass on this state to their children by terrorizing them into submission too. Powerfully accepting responsibility to fulfil their own unique destiny, and serve society by doing so, is beyond them.

The great tragedy of human life is that virtually no-one values the awesome power of the individual Self with an integrated mind (that is, a mind in which memory, thoughts, feelings, sensing, conscience and other functions work together in an integrated way) because this individual will be decisive in choosing life-enhancing behavioural options (including those at variance with social laws and norms) and will fearlessly resist all efforts to control or coerce them with violence.

By Tho Bishop*

The biggest winner of the Trump presidency is also the most surprising: Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen.

After all, Yellen was a constant target for criticism by Candidate Trump, going so far as to accuse her of being “more political than Hillary Clinton.” Beyond Mr. Trump’s barbed rhetoric, pundits such as Paul Krugman predicted that Trump’s ascendency would be disastrous for the US economy and the stock market in general, which would have wiped out the modest recovery that Yellen’s legacy depends on.

Almost a year after Trump’s election, the world looks quite different. Not only has Wall Street toasted the Donald’s victory, but the president continues to keep open the possibility of re-nominating Janet Yellen for a second term. Of course, given Trump’s surprisingly strong understanding of how current Fed-policy was a positive for the administration, perhaps this reversal should have been as predictable as Paul Krugman being wrong.

For Yellen, more important than Trump’s willingness to compliment her performance is what his presidency has done for the reputation of the Fed. Prior to this year, the Fed had been constantly forced to backtrack on planned interest rate hikes and downplay talk of balance sheet normalization due to economic stagnation.

For example, in 2016 the Fed was only able to hit one of its projected four interest rate hikes during the year, and that one came after the market surged following Trump’s election. Still, many traders were skeptical of the Fed’s forecast of three interest rate hikes.  Earlier in the year, Yellen was even forced to admit that forward guidance, a communication tool that was favored by Ben Bernanke, no longer worked because people simply stopped taking the Fed’s projections seriously.

2017 has been a better one for those in the Eccles Building. The Fed is on schedule with its rate hikes and feels comfortable enough following through on its plans to slowly — very, very slowly — unravel its balance sheets that ballooned from various rounds of quantitative easing. While we are still years away from anything resembling normal pre-crisis monetary policy, at least the Fed has been able to make the appearance of trying to get there for the first time since 2008.

Why the change?

Well in spite of the Trump administration’s public frustrations in achieving legislative victories, it has seen success at one of the stated goals of former strategist Steve Bannon: the (partial) deconstruction of the administrative state.

As the Completive Enterprise Institute reported earlier this month, the Federal Register now stands at 45,678 pages — less than half of the 97,110 pages that existed during the Obama administration. While that is still an extraordinary amount of government red tape (the equivalent of over 50 copies of Human Action), it is a significant step in unraveling one of the most underreported disasters of Barack Obama’s tenure in DC. Further, executive orders made during Trump’s first weeks in office required agencies to eliminate rules prior to writing new ones, which has helped stymie the rate in which new rules are being written.

Not only has this led to saving tens of billions in regulatory compliance cost, but — coupled with continued hope for tax reform — it has been a major boon to business confidence. IECONOMICS finds business confidence at the highest it’s been in 10 years.

Meanwhile, NFIB has finally found recovery from post-crisis lows.

In short, Trump hasn’t needed Congress to do some real good for economic activity  — he just needed to not govern like Barack Obama.

The results from this renewed optimism in America’s economic landscape has been increased investment and employment — which have been routinely referenced by the Fed this year while announcing their policy decisions, over the objections of Minneapolis Fed Chair Neel Kashkari and other more dovish critics.

To their credit, in spite of their toxic advocacy for even easier-monetary policy, there is substance in Kashkari’s criticism. In spite of increased business confidence — itself partially grounded on inadequate tax reform that quite possibly may not come to fruition — wages outside of the financial sector and technology still lag — in no small part due to consequences of the very monetary policy hyper-doves are advocating. Meanwhile, while reduction of the regulatory code is a very important step, nothing has been done to address other systemic issues, such as Washington’s complete inability to curb its hedonistic addiction to debt — that too being subsidized by the Federal Reserve’s own policies. Not to mention the ever looming threat of a trade war being just a tweet away. And, of course, these gains have all been assisted directly by the Fed’s accommodative monetary policy — a bubble is still a bubble, even if the resulting boom is a historically modest one.

In spite of these very real dangers to the US economy, it’s understandable why the economy is second only to his IQ in topics he enjoys bragging about.  As such, with reports swirling that he will soon be making an announcement about next year’s Fed chair, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Trump maintain the status quo and re-nominate Janet Yellen. After all, it’s one thing to attack the swamp from the outside, but quite another when you’re in charge. Trump’s campaign rhetoric made it clear that he understands what will happen when the Fed truly changes course, he’s not going to want to be there when that “big fat bubble” pops.

About the author:
*Tho Bishop directs the Mises Institute’s social media marketing (e.g., twitter, facebook, instagram), and can assist with questions from the press.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute

Spanish consulting and technology company Indra has launched the deployment of the pilot in Madrid of the AUTOCITS European innovation project, that will test autonomous driving in the metropolitan area of Spain’s capital, as well as in Lisbon and Paris. These three cities, the largest in the Atlantic Core Network Corridor, comprise roads that are regarded as priorities for developing Europe’s transport infrastructure.

The project’s goal is to contribute to modifying the regulatory framework, traffic control centers and infrastructures to autonomous driving to enhance the interoperability of autonomous vehicles while ensuring correct use on all types of roads in every country in Europe and safe coexistence with other vehicles. To achieve this, it will develop intelligent transport services based on cooperative systems (C-ITS) that will enable communication and safe exchange of data between vehicles, users and infrastructures, using the ITS-G5 European communication standard.

Three C-ITS services have been developed for the pilot in Madrid, which will broaden the autonomous vehicle’s “vision” and enable decision-making through alerts; for example, notifications of construction work on the road, traffic jams or adverse weather conditions.

These C-ITS services have been integrated in Indra’s proprietary Horus traffic and tunnel management solution, for which a new module has been created to manage the sending of information to the autonomous or connected vehicle as well as taking advantage of the data these vehicles generate, processing these in real time and providing valuable information for decision-making by managers, the connected vehicles themselves and drivers of conventional vehicles.

The in-cloud Horus platform obtains information from incidents through the DGT information channel using the DATEX2 protocol, a European standard for exchanging information among traffic control centers.

The first RSU (Road Side Units), that use various ITS-G5 communication and mobile communication technologies, are already being installed at the pilot scenario, the bus-HOV lane of the A-6 highway that connects with the M-30 beltway in Madrid. These devices will remit information to the autonomous and connected vehicles when they use the reversible, high-occupancy lane of the A-6.

In addition to the initial deployment, the first tests are being done with an autonomous vehicle in a closed circuit at Indra’s facilities in San Fernando de Henares to verify that information is correctly sent and received. The tests at both this setting and the bus-HOV are being executed in line with DGT-approved regulations, which makes available to companies and research centers open regulations for performing tests, given the fact that it is not bound to the Vienna Convention.

Exchange of services among pilot projects

The pilots in Madrid as well as Lisbon and Paris are the very first of their kind in the Atlantic Core Network Corridor and among the first ones in Europe to include tests of autonomous vehicles, from different providers, both closed and open to conventional traffic on urban and arterial roads and highway interchanges. It is expected that the services and systems tested in one city will be exchanged with the other two to verify their interoperability and proper functioning.

The pilot in Lisbon will take place using the A-9 highway. Those C-ITS services to be deployed will send the autonomous vehicle alerts on traffic jams, notifications of slow or parked vehicles, and warnings about adverse weather conditions. For communications with the vehicles, six RSU (Road Side Units) will be installed, and at least two autonomous vehicles will be deployed, of the IPN and the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), and an instrumented vehicle for validation tests of services and infrastructures alike.

In addition, for tests in more urban settings, another two low-speed autonomous vehicles will be used as shuttles on the IPN to transport passengers along a stretch of approximately 500 meters.

In Paris the system will issue warnings not only about dangerous situations but traffic jams as well, offer information on speed and recommended or alternative lanes, etc., using communications between the control center and autonomous vehicles. Tests will be performed on the A-13 highway on the city’s outskirts.

Partnership ecosystem

In addition to Indra, participants in AUTOCITS include Spain’s General Traffic Directorate (DGT), the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), Portugal’s National Road Safety Authority (ANSR), University of Coimbra (UC), Instituto Pedro Nunes (IPN) and Inventors for the Digital World (INRIA). The project has a budget of €2.6 million and receives funding by the CEF (Connecting Europe Facility) European program.

AUTOCITS collaborates, furthermore, with other European R&D&I initiatives on a European scale in this area, as for example, the C-Roads platform and C-Roads Spain project, as well as with other organizations interested in projects related with the connected and autonomous vehicle. To this end, a series of open sessions are underway to incorporate organizations interested in this field, so that they may contribute their vision about the autonomous vehicle and the activities carried out over the course of the project.

The last workshop was held on October 10 in Lisbon. The President of the ANSR, Jorge Jacob, closed the session, which also counted with the participation of companies and institutions like BRISA, ITS Portugal, IMT and Indra itself.

The European Commission published its yearly report on Labour Market and Wage Developments in Europe on Friday, which confirmed the positive labor market trends that have been witnessed in the EU region.

According to the report, EU employment has surpassed pre-crisis levels with more than 235 million people at work. Unemployment which now stands at 7.6% is also approaching levels prior to the recession.

In addition, the report shows that it has become easier for unemployed people to find a job. On the other hand, more flexible working arrangements have brought advantages to both firms and individuals, but have led in some cases to a divide between workers holding different types of contracts, with people in temporary employment and self-employment being less well protected.

Marianne Thyssen, Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs, Skills and Labour Mobility, said, “More and more people in Europe are able to find a job and we witness the highest employment level ever recorded. Europe is reaping the benefits of targeted policy reforms. At the same time we need to address further challenges. We must ensure fair working conditions and protection for all workers, independent of their employment status. On the basis of the European Pillar of Social Rights, which we launched on 26 April, we are working to modernise the rules on employment contracts and social protection to achieve better working and living conditions across the EU.”

The 2017 Labour Market and Wage Development Report also shows that in 2016, wages in the euro area rose by 1.2% and they increased in almost all Member States. Member States with comparatively low wage levels (such as the Baltics, Hungary and Romania) recorded the highest increases. This means wages are converging across Europe. However, in many countries, the growth rate of wages is still lower than expected based on the recent falls in unemployment. In addition, in almost all Member States, wages of temporary workers are lower than those of permanent workers, especially in Member States where the share of temporary employment is higher.

Delivering on the European Pillar of Social Rights, the Commission presented a legislative proposal to improve work-life balance of working parents and carers, and launched social partner consultations to modernize the rules on labour contracts and on access to social protection for all. These initiatives could – once adopted – provide answers to the challenges highlighted in this year’s Labour Market and Wage Developments in Europe report, such as labor market segmentation and lack of protection of workers in non-standard forms of employment.

The Labour Market and Wage Developments in Europe report analyses the labor market from a macroeconomic perspective. It provides an analysis of recent employment and wage developments, looking at the euro area and the EU as a whole in comparison with its global trading partners. Each edition includes a thematic chapter that deepens the macro-economic analysis of a relevant issue. Previous editions of the report can be found here.

On July 2015, many Iranians were out on the streets of Tehran celebrating the triumph of diplomacy when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was signed by Iran, the United States, and the P5+1 countries which included Great Britain, France, China, Russia, and Germany.

This landmark achievement was the first internationally recognized deal that was reached between the United States and Iran since the severing of diplomatic relations in 1979. The nuclear deal also ended a decade of punitive sanctions on the Iranian economy.

Two years later, with a new sheriff in Washington, Donald Trump wants the United States to withdraw from the agreement, which was a promise he made on the campaign trail towards his presidency.

At the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump made these comments to the rest of the world “The Iran Deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into. Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States, and I don’t think you’ve heard the last of it.”i

However, none of the signatories to the JCPOA share this view. Even some of Trump’s cabinet members like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis don’t share Trump’s harsh approach to the Iran deal. European Union Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini stated that the Iran deal is working, “There is no need to renegotiate parts of the agreement because the agreement is concerning a nuclear program and as such is delivering.”ii

From the American perspective, the Trump Administration feels confined by the JCPOA, and many of their political allies were critical of relieving the sanctions too quickly because it would allow Iran to fasten its research and development of nuclear weapons. In addition, the White House has been a strong advocate against Iran’s role in the Middle East from supporting Bashar Al Assad in Syria to supporting Shia militias in Iraq, and supporting the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The White House also wants limits to Iranian ballistic missiles that are covered in the deal. Decertifying the deal would put Washington in a more confrontational position with Iran and the last thing the American people need is another conflict in the Middle East in an already unstable, confusing region.

However, decertifying the Iran deal does not mean that the deal is dead. The Europeans, the Chinese, and the Russians are confident that they can hold their end of the bargain, but a pullback would not be good for American leadership around the world, and it would only isolate us.

For the United States to unilaterally force the other signatories, including our European partners to renegotiate the deal is a violation of the deal. The irony when the Iran deal came into effect was that Iran would walk away from the deal, but a complete 180 happened when President Trump took office. Now, it looks like the United States is the one that will walk away first. The critics of the JCPOA are putting too much emphasis on Iran’s regional role rather than on the nuclear issue, and that is a cause of concern. This agreement was not in relation to Iran’s role in the Middle East, but it is about a narrow focus on the nuclear issue.

So far, Iran has been subject to very strict IAEA inspections of nuclear sites and the IAEA has repeatedly said eight times that Iran is complying with the JCPOA. Through the inspections, the IAEA has a tremendous amount of information on what is going on inside the Iranian nuclear program, and the frame of this issue is US trustworthiness around the world.

A majority of the global community does not have a problem with the deal, except for Israel and Saudi Arabia, but the world is having a problem with Donald Trump violating and killing the deal. Within the details of the inspections, it is very difficult to find any violation from the Iranian side.

For obvious reasons, the Iranians will not allow inspections inside military sites, but there is a mechanism that if the IAEA presents credible evidence of fishy activity in military sites, it would request access, and as long as the United States works with all the stakeholders at the negotiating table, the Iranians could open up their military sites for inspections.

The problem for the Trump Administration is that they do not have any credible evidence of Iranian violations of the deal. US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley went to Vienna and presented nothing to convince the IAEA to buy into the Trump Administration’s views of the deal. Instead, Ambassador Haley tried to strong-arm the IAEA towards encouraging access to military sites, but the IAEA pushed back on this for a very simple reason. That reason is if the IAEA is used as a tool for the Trump Administration rather than a referee of the agreement, the IAEA would lose its credibility, and if it did lose its credibility, the deal would collapse. This would be dangerous because a collapse of the deal would allow Iranian hardliners to quickly moves towards a nuclear weapon, and we would blame ourselves for not taking the rational measures for this.

A US withdrawal from the JCPOA would drive the Europeans in the same position as the Russians and the Chinese against the United States. U.S policymakers need to realize that there is no crisis with the JCPOA. The deal is working, the IAEA has certified that it is delivering, and Iran is living up to the deal.

In addition, a de-certification will turn into a crisis because President Trump has turned a functioning agreement that was overwhelmingly welcomed by the global community into a crisis. The most important aspects of the JCPOA, the inspections, and the additional protocol will be permanent.

So long as Washington lives up to its end of the bargain on year eight of the agreement, the Iranians are obliged to ratify the additional protocol and make it a part of the law. In order for Iran to garner support from the global community, Tehran needs to go through a period where they need to prove that they can be trusted. This is why the IAEA is conducting reports and making sure that Iran is abiding by its end of the agreement.

And so far, the eight most recent IAEA reports have made it very clear that Iran can be trusted to live up to the deal. In addition, if Iran abides by the agreement for the full fifteen years with a clean sheet, the path towards an achievable solution can be accomplished and the JCPOA should serve as both a role model for diplomacy and multilateralism. Also, if Iran continues to comply with the framework, they will be treated similar to any other member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran will not seek nuclear weapons, and they are obliged not to seek nuclear weapons, but they are entitled to have a nuclear program for peaceful purposes that includes enriching uranium.

In order for the Iran deal to keep functioning, Iran must continue to abide by the agreement despite the confusing signals coming out of Washington, and the Trump Administration must re-evaluate its role in the Middle East as well. If the JCPOA can become a success, maybe a rapprochement with Iran can help US interests such as security issues like combating terrorism, maybe an Iran can give the United States a maneuver in the region, economic issues like sending American businesses to Iran, increasing trade, cooperating on social issues like cultural exchanges, and fundamentally understanding each other is important not only for both Tehran and Washington, but for the entire Middle East.

The Trump Administration needs to take Iran seriously as a regional player and if we can open cooperation with Iran, we can find peaceful solutions to the Middle East’s continuous, cancerous problems.

i. “Remarks by President Trump to the 72nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly” September 19, 2017 White House https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/09/19/remarks-president-trump-72nd-session-united-nations-general-assembly
ii. “No need to renegotiate Iran nuclear deal: EU” September 21, 2017 The Sun Daily http://www.thesundaily.my/news/2017/09/21/no-need-renegotiate-iran-nuclear-deal-eu

The European Commission has cleared under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed acquisition of Abertis by Atlantia, both leading companies in toll road and infrastructure management.

The Commission concluded that the merged entity would continue to face effective competition in the relevant markets.

Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition policy, said, “Together, Atlantia and Abertis would be the largest toll motorway operator not only in Europe but also in the world. We can approve the transaction because our analysis under EU merger control found that the European markets for motorway concessions will remain competitive”.

The Commission examined the impact of the proposed transaction on the markets where the activities of Atlantia and Abertis overlap, mainly: the management of toll motorway concessions; the provision of electronic toll services, in which Atlantia’s Telepass system is a strong player; and the provision of equipment and services for intelligent transport systems.

The Commission found that the proposed transaction would raise no competition concerns on these markets. This is due to the presence of other significant competitors, the limited geographic overlaps between Atlantia’s and Abertis’ motorway networks, and the fact that the market for toll motorway concessions is a highly regulated bidding market.

Additionally, the investigation looked at the effect of the transaction on a number of related markets, in particular food services on motorway service areas, given that Atlantia’s largest shareholder Edizione is also the majority shareholder of food services provider Autogrill. In this regard, the Commission found that the merged entity would not be able to weaken competition on the market for food services, notably because strong competitors to Autogrill will be able to continue bidding for food services concessions.

Therefore, the Commission concluded that the proposed acquisition would not endanger competition in any of the markets concerned.