LRS
Goodbye, ruble Tuesday
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine led to swift and severe international sanctions on Moscow. On its headline figures, though, the Russian economy seemed to be holding up for a long time. But Vladimir Milov, an economist and the country’s former energy minister, thinks that the situation is changing rapidly. Interviewed in Frontelligence Insight, he points out that the ruble has plunged to uncomfortably low levels, a sign of far wider problems: Inflation has been dangerously high, and interest rates are at 21% and likely to rise. The high cost of debt is holding back the economy and “everyone expects that the worst is yet to come,” says Milov, “which, I believe, is the main reason behind [the] ruble’s collapse.”
The central bank is right that reducing interest rates would lead to hyperinflation, says Milov. But critics are right that not reducing them means killing the real economy, because companies can’t make enough money to borrow at 25-30% commercial rates. And no one will mention “the elephant in the room — the war against Ukraine, which is the root cause.” The war causes military spending and a huge labor shortage, which drive inflation. “Ending the war would solve most issues,” says Milov, but the central bank and the government pretend they are operating in a normal economy.
This land is…
The US was created through blood, the economics writer Noah Smith notes: “Most of its current territory was occupied or frequented by human beings before the US came; the US used force to either displace, subjugate, or kill all of those people.” But that was also true before the US existed. If you replaced the US with the last recorded tribe in each area, “you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors.” US citizens are not “on Indigenous land,” although “land acknowledgements” are common in progressive spaces.
That doesn’t mean that we should deny the country’s “brutal, cruel, violent history of conquest and colonization,” he argues, but in no other circumstance do we think of land as belonging to a race, but rather to institutions: France is not the land of the Frankish race, but of the French nation, and citizens of non-European origin are part of it too. Smith, a descendant of Lithuanian Jews, argues that assigning land ownership to ethnic groups is ethnonationalism, and “it leads very quickly to some very dark futures.”
Nostalgia for the future
The future used to be exciting — glamorous. The 1939 New York World’s Fair had an exhibit, The World of Tomorrow, imagining the US of 1960, full of gleaming skyscrapers and high-tech farms. Disney’s Tomorrowland, opened in 1955, promised “a vista into a world of wondrous ideas, signifying man’s achievements.” As a child, the politics writer Virginia Postrel, born in 1960, felt lucky: “I’d be only 40 in the year 2000 and might live half my life in the magical new century.”
Instead, she writes in Works in Progress, the picture changed. The future “morphed into a place of pollution, overcrowding, and ugliness… Progress seemed like a lie.” The growth of environmental consciousness may partly explain the change, but not the whole thing. The real story, Postrel thinks, is that while life really did get better, it was still just life: “When the glamorous future becomes the real-life present, [it] loses its mystery and reveals its flaws… Sure, running a vacuum cleaner is easier than beating a rug or scrubbing a floor, but cleaning still feels like a never-ending chore.”