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Friday, Sep 15, 2023 - 00:45 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

The Fear Of All Sums

"Fucking populist."

- our former* Speaker** of Parliament reflecting establishment globalist attitudes

[*Unparliamentary remarks later formally withdrawn; you just can't say "populist" in polite (pseudo-)liberal democratic circles any more! This gauche indiscretion entirely overshadowed the other half of the remark, and that after our PM had graciously provided him five months' grace period to set his affair in order. Our main opposition party would opportunistically try to take advantage... before it was revealed that their members were breaching safe distancing rules too. C'est la vie.]

[**With ample precedent; probably a consequence of the exceptional oral skills demanded of the post.]



Turn 13, Action Round 6 (Team Blue)

Meh, let's just get on with it and complete this Turn. Everybody knows what's coming after that... slightly-irregular switcheroo with The Compromised Five in Team Blue's previous Action Round, and Europe Scoring is indeed played, after having been revealed by the rogue Team Red agent:


Looks a little off-brand?
(Original source: twilightstrategy.com)


There's some straightening of backs in chairs and wiggling of spectacles as the card is put down, and several red-faced gents are up on their feet all at once - isn't Domination worth 7 VP, and Control automatic victory, for Europe?! It seems like the functionary's identity wasn't the only thing that got replaced in that covert operation! A smug Team Red representative seems to be asserting that this version of the Europe Scoring card is a genuine parallel import printing, to which a furious Team Blue immediately refers to the World Trade Organization for arbitration... what do you mean there aren't any appeal judges available? Well, well. Over in a corner, the captured - and trussed-up - secret operative is getting poked with increasing frequency by his frustrated handlers, to no avail.

Team Red appear willing enough to have the Game stalemated, with the Russian delegate nonchalantly TikTok-ing clips of the bogged-down Ukrainian counteroffensive on his improbably-large tablet, and Team Blue eventually relents on the updated numbers. Scoring proceeds, then!



That's a lot of Blue there
[N.B. Gameboard updated with release of new iOS alongside the iPhone 15!]
[Click to enlarge]


One understands why Team Red had to resort to their... economic leverage there, then. Some broad motifs might be recognized here: the absorption of the formerly-neutral Nordics into Team Blue proper, with Sweden and Finland*** joining NATO; the hardening of Poland against perhaps their oldest nightmare; but also France - probably the most-consequential of all the countries here - teetering between the two blocs, with much of Eastern and Southern Europe waiting for the best offer. And, in fact, the loss of the autovictory condition for Controlling Europe is probably the correct (updated) assessment of the region's importance in the new Cold War - for this edition, the primary contest will be over the original world-island: Asia.

[***In recent news, we have former Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin quitting politics altogether to join a London non-profit - well, let it not be said that we did not warn of that, the Game has gotten well above her - and their - paygrade.]

*grabs pen and paper* Okay, now for the math. Europe has no fewer than twenty countries, even after the reunification of the former East Germany, but it's not difficult to perceive a sea of blue here. Team Blue Controls the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Benelux, but it's their holding of (West) Germany and Poland that qualifies them for European Domination! That's five net VP in the bag with Team Red unable to get a foothold in for Presence (their best bets would have probably been Hungary and/or Italy, with outside chances at Yugoslavia and Turkey), plus two bonus VP for Battleground State Control, and another two for Poland and Finland being adjacent to Russia/Team Red. That makes... a seven VP lead for Team Blue, on a single Scoring event! What a turnaround!

As the colour commentator, however, I have got to note that Europe is - and by a very large distance - Team Blue's best region, and the rest of the map is hardly as kind for their cause. This officially concludes Turn Thirteen, then, and now, a word from our sponsors!



What's two guys gotta do, whey they have got US$300 billion in change, and 14 kids† between them? Bash each other up, that's what!
[†But let's face it, you'll never be as cool as Techno Mechanicus]
[N.B. In case Musk has second thoughts, he may have a ready-made second]
(Source: dailymail.co.uk)



As the arena clears with both Teams shuffling out for the intra-Turn entertainments, we might as well expound on the productivity hypothesis (i.e. polities which produce more eventually Dominate in the longer term) raised in the previous post, given that it appears to have attracted some... lively attention, in other mediums. A couple of points might be re-emphasized here: firstly, I personally do quite like democracy, even if it has never been too loved in local parts, and despite its ongoing degeneration in the West. Secondly, analyses made on this blog are mostly intended to be objective, even if they seem to go against mainstream FAKE NEWS opinion. In short, if a contention is made here that happens to be against your own, it really isn't about you. This has been a problem in head-to-head conversations, I realize, which is why I much prefer such object-less communications nowadays.

That clarified, back to production - or more precisely, GDP by purchasing power parity (which does seem recognized as a better indicator of comparative productive power, versus nominal GDP in dollars). Borrowing another historical example, it is widely accepted as self-evident that, once America had decided to join on the side of the Allies, their eventual victory was inevitable due to the sheer production advantage of the U.S. war machine. While it might be entirely true that the Axis powers were evil, and the Allies (comparatively) good - or more democratic - such factors are usually not seriously considered as instrumental to the outcome of the contest. Note that this is a description of reality, and not some moral or value judgment.

It is, then, in the same spirit that the productivity hypothesis was made. Setting aside actual names to try and further objectivity, if Country A has a GDP (PPP) of $X, and Country B has one of $3X (and top in the world), why exactly should Country A be regarded as the "leading superpower" over B? To further this demonstration, consider that Country B has a GDP (PPP) of $10X instead, with the second place at $X. It would be frankly ridiculous were any competitor to try and assert (peaceful) superiority, or: 我敢认第二 ，没有人敢认第一!


Tech can only make up for weight productivity difference...
up to twice your weight
(Source: baki-dou.com)


Taking the assertion as valid for discussion's sake, the natural question would be the value of X (as a multiplier over second place), for which the top-producing country can be considered as achieving unipolar hegemony - or at least undisputed leading superpower status. This seems like a fine research question for a history/polisci dissertation, but if forced to make a guess, I'd gather that "three" would just about do it. Coincidentally, this ratio was also roughly the disadvantage that (Nazi) Germany had to work against, and much of WW2 was a (ultimately failed) race by them and Imperial Japan, to secure resources (Lebensraum, Caucasus oil, armament factories, Malaysian & Indonesian rubber, etc.) towards closing the production gap.

Doshi in his The Long Game then asks if China has some Grand Strategy to displace the U.S., but truly one realizes that none such is required with a sufficiently-large production advantage. As a longtime Civilization player, once a huge production lead is opened, converting it to some other victory type is mostly trivial. Xi's China 2049 target for them to be established as a (read: the) global superpower, might then be understood alongside past GDP (PPP) projections, which tend to have X at somewhere between 2 and 3 by then. Frankly, I gather that American strategic planners understand (and accept) this broad line of thinking (thus the ongoing and increasingly-virulent denigration of China's economic potential), which remains better than resorting to special pleading/magical thinking. Look, Deng literally admitted that they were just "biding their time", so I don't see how they can be accused of deception on this at least.

Continuing, what does it take to prevent China from reaching X=3 (or thereabouts)? On this, one of the most eagerly-trotted-out Team Blue arguments against China has been their less-than-ideal demographics, with China's population set to shrink to... 1.31 billion by 2050. Since the Congressional Budget Office has U.S. population rising to 373 million by 2053, let's have it at 0.37 billion by 2050, which means that China would still have some 3.5 times America's population then. This in turn implies that X=3.5, were China to catch up on GDP (PPP) per capita; that China only has a slight overall lead now, is then wholly due to a large per capita difference (about $76.4k for the U.S. vs. $21.5k for China, according to the World Bank)


Absolut Convergence
(Source: cruel.org)


Skipping now to other disciplines, we skirt skittishly about anthropology, where research into racial/ethnic differences in intelligence has been verboten for some decades. So be it. Escaping to safer pastures, economics majors (like yours truly) might have encountered the Solow(-Swan) growth model - and more pertinently, its convergence hypothesis that posits eventual convergence of income (production), further assuming "similar characteristics" in the conditional convergence variant. Intuitively, this makes quite a bit of sense: if Countries A and B have comparable capital (i.e. technology) and labour (i.e. worker quality), given the same inputs (i.e. raw materials), the production/output should be expected to be similar too.

After all this, the core question is: assuming that China's individual labour potential is not significantly different from America's (or most any other nation's - which I personally think is accurate, because actually studying tends to still work)... what can be done to keep them from increasing X?

Since demographics are largely set in stone, bar the unthinkable (i.e. total war, Black Death-level pandemics, Armageddon), that leaves attacking raw resource inputs and technology access - both of which the U.S. are pursuing with alacrity, and very little disguise. Unfortunately, as sanctions on Russia have shown, restricting access to materials was always hard to enforce at best, with no lack of middlemen eager to play hide-and-seek for profit. As for technology, Huawei (i.e. China) has recently demonstrated their ability to manufacture 7nm chips (via SMIC), and really it's not like absolute transistor size/speed confers an insurmountable advantage in A.I. (and related military) research - barely a decade ago, the cutting edge was simply networking thousands of ordinary processors together.

So, how will America - and Team Blue - wriggle their way out of this bind? They do have a healthy VP lead as a cushion for now at least, and it won't be too long before the rascals on both sides return, for Turn Fourteen of The Greatest Game!



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Next: The Gall Of The Gaul


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