Whither Hegemony? Prof. Wen Tiejun Foreword to Michael Hudson’s The Destiny of Civilization

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Yves here. Michael Hudson has graciously allowed us to publish the forward to his new book The Destiny of Civilizations. Professor Wen Teijun, Executive Dean, Institute of Rural Reconstruction of China, explains how Hudson looks at America’s finance-led hegemony contains the seeds of its own destruction, and is separately suffering from conflict with China’s very different political-economic system, which draws on an industrial capitalism model and seeks to check rentier activities.

For those interested in buying Hudson’s book, you can get a better price and avoid enriching Amazon by procuring it through exlibris.

By Professor Wen Teijun, Executive Dean, Institute of Rural Reconstruction of China, Southwest University, China. Translated by Alice Chan

The most important factor affecting the global economy is the increasing strain caused by U.S. hegemony. Its diplomacy has shaped the economic and trading rules enforced by the IMF, World Bank and other international institutions in America’s favor after World War II. U.S. leadership reached its peak with its Cold War victory over the Soviet Union in 1991, consolidated by increasingly aggressive military diplomacy over the next twenty years. But since 2008 this U.S. diplomacy has become so aggressive that it is now self-destructive, driving other nations out of the U.S. orbit, leading America’s international influence to fall increasingly short of its ambition to siphon off the world’s income and wealth for itself despite its own weakening economic power.

The principal conflict in today’s world is between the United States and China. This book by Professor Hudson explains this conflict as a process of international transformation, above all in the sphere of economic systems and policy. He explains why the U.S.-China conflict cannot simply be regarded as market competition between two industrial rivals. It is a broader conflict between different political-economic systems – not only between capitalism and socialism as such, but between the logic of an industrial economy and that of a financialized rentiereconomy increasingly dependent on foreign subsidy and exploitation as its own domestic economy shrivels.

Professor Hudson endeavours to revive classical political economy in order to reverse the neoclassical counter-revolution. The essence of 19th-century political economy was its conceptual framework of value, price and rent theory. Its idea of a free market was one free from economic rent – defined as the excess of market price over intrinsic cost-value, and hence unearned income. The classical aim was to free markets from landlords, monopolies and creditors. Yet the reverse has occurred in the West, particularly since the globalization of neoliberal policies in the 1980s.

Historically, the way for industrial nations to gain wealth and power was to make their government strong enough to prevent a landlord class from dominating, and indeed to suppress the rentiersector as a whole. To promote industrial prosperity, governments provided public services to reduce the costs of living and doing business. Basic services were provided at subsidized prices that would have been replaced by exploitative monopoly prices if key public infrastructure were turned over to private owners.

Economically, the most important service that all economies need to function smoothly is the provision of money and bank credit. When privatized, it becomes a rent-extracting choke point. That is why 19th-century economists developing the logic of industrial capitalism concluded that money and banking needed to be a public utility, so as to minimize financial overhead unnecessary for industrial production.

Today’s anti-classical economics regards financial charges as income earned productively by providing a “service,” which is categorized as output and hence part of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That statistical methodology treats financial profits, along with other forms of economic rent, as additions to GDP, not as an overhead burden. This produces an illusion that the real economy is growing. But what actually is growing is the rentiersector, which does not create real economic value, but merely transfers income from debtors, renters and consumers to creditors, landlords and monopolists. This rentiertakeover is achieved by privatizing the public sector to create rent-extracting means for monopoly capital, organized mainly by the financial sector.

This book by Professor Hudson is based on the lecture series on finance capitalism that he presented for the Global University for Sustainability. The series is directed towards the Chinese audience because he believes that China’s mixed economy with its classical industrial policy has best succeeded in avoiding the neoliberal American disease. These lectures explain why the U.S. and other Western economies have lost their former momentum: A narrow rentierclass has gained control and become the new central planner, using its power to drain income from increasingly indebted and high-cost labor and industry. The American disease of de-industrialization has resulted from the costs of industrial production being inflated by the economic rents extracted by this class under the system of financialized monopoly capitalism that now prevails throughout the West.

The policy question for China is how it can best maintain its advantage and indeed, avoid falling prey to American ideological and diplomatic pressure. Professor Hudson summarizes his prescription as follows: First, national statistics should distinguish the productive sectors that create real value from the financialrentiersectors that merely transfer income from the rest of the economy to themselves. A transfer payment is not production. Second, all successful economies have been mixed economies. Money and credit, land, public services and natural resources should be controlled by the government so that they can be provided at cost or on a subsidized basis, thereby lowering the cost of living and doing business in the private sector. Third, the way to prevent unproductive debt overhead is to tax away economic rent so that it will not be financialized and paid out to banks as interest by speculators and buyers of rent-extracting opportunities.

A central point of Professor Hudson’s analysis is that U.S. diplomacy is an extension of the neoliberal ideology sponsored by its rentieroligarchy. “U.S. exceptionalism” means that the United States can ignore international laws, dictate the policies of other countries, and demand that they relinquish control of potential rent-yielding assets (banking, mineral-resource extraction rights, and high-technology monopolies) to U.S. multinational corporations and those of U.S. economic satellites.

For nearly the entire 75 years since World War II, pro-creditor laws have been imposed on all nations within the U.S. diplomatic orbit. This U.S. drive has imposed austerity on Global South countries when they have not been able to pay their dollarized debts, sacrificing their domestic economy and the well-being of their people to pay foreign bondholders.

What is ironic is that the United States itself is by far the world’s largest international debtor. It has turned the dollarized system of international payments into a way to make other countries finance its global military spending by making the foreign reserves of the world’s central banks take the form of loans to the U.S. Treasury – holdings of U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. bank deposits and other dollar-denominated assets. That is the buttress of today’s debt-based Dollar Hegemony. To break out of this dollar trap, China should stand with other independent nations to develop a new system of international payments and formulate new principles of international law for trade and investment relations. These principles require an overall economic and political doctrine along the lines described in this book.

What I find strange is that despite the West’s economic, political, social and cultural problems stemming from its neoliberal anti-classical ideology being obvious for many years, many people in China still look to Western schools and leaders for guidance, as if their own native institutions, civilization and even their own race are inferior. The defeat of a country starts with the defeat of the people’s self-confidence in its institutions. Yet as an American scholar, Professor Hudson, who has studied U.S. finance his entire life and worked on Wall Street for decades, recognizes China’s institutional advantages. As long as we have the scientific spirit to continue self-reflection, self-correction and self-enhancement, there is no reason not to believe that China’s social organization and its ideology of Common Prosperity can lead its society toward a higher form of civilization. The key is to pursue our institutional advantage and abandon the shortcomings of the post-industrial Western rentiereconomies, not follow the Western neoliberal path and fall into dependency on the U.S. hegemony and ideology that has ground prosperity to a halt in most Western economies, subjected as they are to debt-ridden austerity.

Behind today’s finance-capitalist crisis is thus a profound civilizational crisis. The world is at a crossroad in which all humanity now shares a common prospect: Barbarism or Ecological Civilization.

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28 comments

  1. Acacia

    > many people in China still look to Western schools and leaders for guidance

    Are they looking for guidance, for education, for knowledge, or are they looking for the safe, social capital of being identified with a global “brand” (e.g., Yale, NYU, etc.)?

  2. Micah

    The last sentence is the money shot. We either get our shit together and learn to live within the confines of our ecosphere or we forced to live within those confines in a rather dramatic fashion. Unfortunately, I think that it almost certainly going to be the latter.

    1. drumlin woodchuckles

      Can individual personal shit together-getters live a shit gotten-together life in public view of their friends and neighbors? Could they model the visible possibility of a shit-gotten-together life which is still “okay” and “good enough” to be settled for?

  3. The Rev Kev

    I suppose that the truth of the matter is that because of climate change and the radical changes it will produce, all political systems will be tested to the hilt to see which is more resilient and more capable of changing in the face of adversity. And if it comes down to a choice between the Chinese system and the western neoliberal system, I am going to have to put my money on the Chinese system. Dammit. The neoliberal system will refuse to react to an emergency unless there is new profits and rents to be found for yet another group of corporations first.

    1. JTMcPhee

      If you look at the War Department’s plans for how the Pentagram expects the environmental collapse crisis to play out, a significant part of the playbook is dedicated to just that — creating opportunities for Supra-post national corporations to continue to “make a killing.” Whether it is by dominating the remainder of agricultural production, provision of “engineering services” and construction work to respond to sea level rise, or locking down the planned “interoperability” of every nation’s military and national police with the Hegemonic Empire, or any other choke point or scarce-resource extraction and allocation, the Imperial military is in lockstep with the neoliberal Owners/Rentiers. So of course there will be manifold “new profits and rents to be found” for existing and merged corporate scum.

      “Trends and Implications of Climate Change for National and International Security”

      http://www.climateneeds.umd.edu/reports/Defence%20Science%20Board-Climate%20Change%20and%20National%20and%20International%20Security.pdf

      That’s a 2011 document, which has been I believe updated but carries the same freight regarding the opportunities climate change (to be overseen and controlled by the US and “interoperable” militaries, of course) provides to “industry partners.”

  4. Susan the other

    Prof. Wen Teijun has written such an accessible summary of Hudson’s position it makes me wonder why no professor in the US has ever done so. The best ones here do refer to Hudson, almost reverently, but they avoid the kind of detail above. So that’s interesting. All of our universities are fully vested in the rentier economy, no doubt. I think we locked ourselves into this unfortunate trap of killing off our own economy and paying for it by destroying the environment (free trade) because we couldn’t quit. Because of debt and profit perversions. That’s a hard one to admit. So far we have escaped the debt collector; but it won’t be long now – as we are more desperate for oil, to control oil, than for international financial hegemony. Oil provides us with an exchange commodity that is money itself as the source of industrial and military power. Literally. Oil is money at this point in our evolution. For us to run dry is a disaster no one can even mention. Apparently not even China. Unless we get real, we are going to go to war for all the oil in the Middle East and southern Russia. It could tip the climate. And we will make up any story to justify it because without it we are powerless. Talk about Fate.

  5. lance ringquist

    i only included snippets, but i understand if it gets the boot.

    this was said in lincolns time about free trade, “Barbarism or Ecological Civilization.”

    https://www.thoughtco.com/economic-ideas-advanced-by-henry-clay-1773361

    “Agriculture and Manufacturing Clay envisioned a diversified American economy in which agricultural interests and manufacturers would exist side by side. Essentially, he saw beyond the argument of whether the United States would be an industrial or agricultural nation. It could be both, he insisted.When he advocated for his American System, Clay focused on the need to build growing home markets for American goods. He contended that blocking cheap imported goods would ultimately benefit all Americans. Nationalist Appeal His program had strong nationalist appeal. Developing home markets would protect the United States from uncertain foreign events. Self-reliance could ensure that the nation was protected from shortages of goods caused by distant conflicts. That argument resonated strongly, especially in the period following the War of 1812 and Europe’s Napoleonic Wars. During those years of conflict, American businesses suffered from disruptions.The ideas put into practice included building the National Road, America’s first major highway; chartering the Second Bank of the United States, a new national bank, in 1816; and passing the first protective tariff the same year. Clay’s American System was essentially in practice during the Era of Good Feelings, which corresponded with the presidency of James Monroe from 1817 to 1825.”
    —————-

    https://americansystemnow.com/henry-clay-attacks-free-trade-as-british-colonialism/

    No Such Thing as Free Trade”In that speech, Clay contends that the seven years since the adoption of the Tariff of 1824 had been the period of greatest prosperity which the country had enjoyed since the establishment of the Constitution, freeing the economy from foreign domination.  He demolishes the myth – still peddled today – that the tariff only benefited northern manufacturers at the expense of the South, and shows that the North, South, and West all enjoyed the beneficial effects of protection.  But yet there were those who wanted to destroy this system.””The system that existed during the colonial period, differed in only one particular, from that being advocated by the free-traders of the 1830s, says Clay:  in the colonial period the British system was enforced by power; now it is to be carried out by the force of circumstances.”

    “And Today?We should note that, in recent decades, the shoe has been on the other foot: the United States has joined Great Britain in using the International Monetary Fund and other institutions, to enforce the “Washington Consensus:” that developing countries must tighten their belts, and enforce austerity, while foregoing investments in infrastructure, and promotion of agro-industrial development, which could bring them beyond being mere exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods.The alternative is the adoption of American System principles by all sovereign nations—leading to an international system of cooperation between nations who control their own currencies and credit (national banking), have a commitment to building a modern infrastructure, and protect their populations’ welfare (including by tariffs). As American System Now  has stressed before, none of these policy planks functions without the others.The writings and speeches of Henry Clay and other the  proponents of the American System should be studied and mastered by anyone who regards himself or herself as an American patriot today.”

  6. Hidari

    Why do people from the ‘East’ still look up to people from the ‘West’, especially the United States, for ‘guidance’?

    Simple.

    The US is big, it’s rich, it has lots of guns (by which I mean, ICBMs). That’s it. That’s the only reason.

    There’s a Thom Disch short story from back in the 1960s, in which a ‘typical’ loudmouthed American tourist is on holiday in France, patronising the locals, being generally a pain in the ass, when Russia (the USSR as it was then) launches a surprise nuclear attack which is completely successful. Suddenly, the United States is simply removed from the face of the Earth.

    After the initial shock, the American quickly discovers his life unravelling. Suddenly the locals aren’t so obsequious. Suddenly no one is going to bend over for him, being ‘nice’. Suddenly no one is so charmed by his accent, and his ignorance, and is arrogance. And with the United States gone, so is the US banking system, and all the things he has taken for granted. And suddenly no one cares.

    Because ‘American-worship’ is ultimately based on fear. Fear that the Americans will blow us all up, economically, militarily. Fear and power-worship. When the US has lots of money and lots of ICBMs, people grovel to it.

    Remove that and people suddenly realise that McDonalds tastes like shit and most programs on Netflix are terrible, and Google can’t actually locate anything, actually.

    Remove American financial power, remove American military power, and the problem of Eastern worship of the West will take care of itself.

    1. Peter Beattie

      Spot on. Hidari, would you please share the name of this short story, or the book in which it can be found?

      1. c_j_b

        Based on the description provided by Hidari, it sounds like “Casablanca,” which can be found in “Fundamental Disch” or “Fun with your head“. A summary of the story found at tvtropes.org: American tourists in Morocco in the story “Casablanca” quickly become unwanted foreigners after the US is annihilated in a nuclear exchange.

  7. Hepativore

    As neoliberalism has proven to be as resilient as it is pernicious, I predict that further disasters are only going to entrench it even further in the US political system. This is like a systemic parasite in its later stages; it is hard to tell where neoliberalism ends and what remains of our political structure begins.

    I think that any future ecological fallout will just cause the financial elite to impose harsher austerity measures on the already suffering precariat while the elite sits in its town-sized yachts and bunker-like mansions guarded by entire platoons of private security forces to defend against what they see as the gibbering hordes.

    The thing is, though, as China becomes the dominant world hegemon in the face of US decline, its financial elite might also become lured in by the hypnotism of the neoliberal system, and they might eventually invent Chinese-flavored neoliberalism.

    1. Acacia

      Or perhaps already have invented it? Chapter 5 of David Harvey’s 2011 A Brief History of Neoliberalism is entitled:

      “Neoliberalism ‘with Chinese Characteristics’ “

  8. drumlin woodchuckles

    ” The Last shall be First and the First shall be Last” is still the same-old-game of First and Last. Having a different hegomon replace the current hegemon is still hegemony. Civilizationist Chauvinists of the Euro-Asian tradition remain unable to imagine a possibility of “no such thing as a hegemon”.

    What would the opposite of hegemony be? There isn’t even a word for it. Perhaps people should start coining words for “no hegemony anywhere” and see if those words take hold. Words like ” nogemony” or “antigemony” or anyone else’s better suggestion.

    Large parts of North and South Great Turtle Island remained free of hegemony before the arrival of alien hegemonist explorers. Large parts of Africa remained free of hegemony in the teeth of native empire builders’ efforts to build native empires . . . Egypt, Songhai, others whose names I forget.
    “Australia” remained free of hegemonism before the arrival of hegemonist settlers.

    People looking forward to the ascendancy of the coming Great Han Lebensraum One Ball One Chain China Prosperity Sphere hegemony are still hegemony-supporters. They hope a Great Han China hegemony will be kinder and gentler than the current hegemonies they labor under. They could be right.
    They will find out.

    Meanwhile, what if a critical tipping-point mass-load of “Americans” were to decide to “go Indian”? And turn this whole country into a sort of Turtle Island 2.0? With just enough means of applied violence to exterminate any future effort to restore somebody’s hegemony upon Turtle Island 2.0 the way the EuroSettlers imposed their hegemony upon Turtle Island 1.0 ?

    1. Acacia

      What would the opposite of hegemony be? There isn’t even a word for it.

      There is the word multipolarity, as in “multipolar world order”. One important source seems to be the “China-Russia: Joint Declaration on a Multipolar World and the Establishment of a New International Order” from 1997. By 2005, Chantal Mouffe was writing in the South Atlantic Quarterly that the only way out of current US-centric hegemony was a multipolar world order, and she invoked none other than Carl Schmitt to support her case.

    2. juno mas

      Maybe the opposite of hegemony is the multi-polar world being envisioned by Russia, China, and India. While China has become a manufacturing behemoth, they still need food and fuel. Russia, of course, can supply plent of that. India has a strong data/engineering culture and likely would provide tangible service in that area.

      The goal, as Michael Hudson seems to view it, is providing ALL nations an opportunity to flourish within their own cultures, without a financial hegemon.

      1. drumlin woodchuckles

        An industrial hegemon is still a hegemon. A brute-force hegemon is still a hegemon. A world divided between several regional hegemons is still a hegemonic world, divided among a Council of Hegemons all respecting eachother’s regional hegemony.

        It might be a better world than the current Forcey Free-Trade Corporate Globalonial Hegemony with Financialist Overlay of today. I am sure the Great Han One Ball One Chain ChinaGov will try it within its own Zone of Reach. And it might be a better hegemony for the people within it in some cases, and perhaps not in other cases.

        For example, I predict that if the ChinaGov can somehow figure out how to do it without leaving fingerprints, the ChinaGov will try getting Bolsonaro “re-elected” and re-installed in power in Brazil so as to advance the One Ball One Chain agenda of burning down every tree in the Amazon to plant more soybeans for China.

    1. drumlin woodchuckles

      Well, actually . . . it is. And so is every economy based on economic growth. When the resources die, the growth will stop.

  9. Krishna @lineballtennis

    I think neoliberal colonialism and its imperialistic state, aka modern hegemony, via corprotocracy + technocracy can be replaced by #Brexit values! :

    “A British nationalist elite can think independently to articulate its political-lobbying eg ERG of cabinet member Rees-Mogg. Hence we are less subject to new EU blocks, and as for upstart septic ‘tanks’ – old country punches more than its weight…”.

    China is still the question mark along with Russia + India + Brazil –

    BRICS SCARES PLUTOCRACY! ks x 18May22

  10. David in Santa Cruz

    I assume that Professor Wen penned this excellent summary and preface before the recent European unpleasantness got underway, but it seems prescient. The conflict in “Ukraine” was stoked by American attempts to suppress Russian initiatives toward multi-polarty with China and India.

    Ironically, the buffoonery of Trump and his cronies made it difficult for China and India to take the Russian initiatives seriously. Today, Blinken’s naked arrogance and Biden and Yellen’s beyond short-sighted theft of Afghan and Russian dollar reserves has shown that there is no room to temporize with the hegemon.

    It appears that China, India, and possibly others such as Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Vietnam will see the wisdom of Russia’s multi-polar initiatives. The down side is that the American rentier cabal will simply double-down on their extraction of the assets and savings of Americans. Like scorpions, rent-extraction is their nature

  11. Stallworth

    “the way to prevent unproductive debt overhead is to tax away economic rent so that it will not be financialized and paid out to banks as interest by speculators and buyers of rent-extracting opportunities.”

    I am not sure how would this be done, can someone please explain / mention an example?

    1. Jacob Hatch

      It’s easy enough to pull an example from the name rentier. A higher tax on rental property, 2nd homes, etc, vs. self-use homes, set at a rate that makes acquiring self-use homes at a premium and turning them into depressed value rental homes unattractive. Another way is to tax capital invested in REITS at a much higher rate than capital invested in production of goods and services. tax IPR at an inverse rate to the number of license issued.

      1. Stallworth

        Thanks Jacob. Just for me to understand it all writing it out I assume the speculators and buyers of rent extracting opportunities finance their purchases with debt. Taxing their activities makes the purchase an unattractive, possibly losing proposition. No purchase = no debt issued and therefore no rent channeled to to banks in the form of interest. This also curbs demand for debt, therefore asset price appreciation I suppose.

  12. Tom Pfotzer

    There are a few things that occurred to me as I read this piece:

    a. Dr Hudson selected Professor Wen to write this forward, and Professor Wen elected to write it. Both are significant. Professor Wen is proxy for China Culture, and can provide authoritative insight, clear contrast, between China-way and West-way. Dr. Hudson thinks we need to hear it.

    b. Professor Wen provides a “situation report”. Here’s where ya are, Mr. and Ms. America.

    c. If I could, I would love to ask Professor Wen “What do you recommend that we do, each of us Americans, to course-correct onto a more promising heading?”

    I note, occasionally, a well-cloaked sense of frustration, maybe even despair in Dr. Hudson’s delivery. I have yet to encounter in his works a paragraph that reads “Here ya are, Tom, see that little red button over there, the one that’s labeled “E-A-S-Y”..see that? Just press that button, and all will be well.”

    I haven’t seen that yet, and I think maybe it probably hasn’t and won’t ever get written.

    So, I wonder what Professor Wen would say in response to my question. Allow me to project a little – this is just my conjecture.

    I think Professor Wen might say “Tom, you’re going to need to do some mods on your culture”. He might say “the Chinese trajectory from where we started to where we are today traversed rough terrain, and here were some of the key turning points, and you’ll note that those turning points were mainly cultural ones”.

    May I interject a story that may provide a viable metaphor. As many know, I have a farm, and for that farm I have an aspiration: “make my living while fixing the planet”. One tool in that endeavor is plant selection, and in that endeavor I came across Phillip Rutter, of Badgersett Research in Minnesota. Minnesota is conventional-ag-central. Biological desert, monoculture, high-energy-input annual cropland. Rutter proposed perennial crop, adapted species, supports man and natural world concurrent. Method: hazelnuts. Sourced genetics from Asia, native U.S., and Europe, conducted systematic breeding program.

    3 source-gene-pools, can interbreed, but were looonnng time separated land-mass, great big genome, big variation in traits. So, combinatorial math says “gargantuan rubik’s cube to solve” in order to get a genetically stable cultivar which exhibits the traits we want.

    Melting pot, waaayyy different constituent inputs. Sound familiar?

    That breeding program will take a few generations to conduct. No tomorrow solution. Situation parallels Land Institute (Kansas, breed perennial prairie grass to produce adapted cultivars which feed us and the natural world).

    How do you run a breeding program? Grow some plants, see if they exhibit desirable characteristics. Discard the ones that don’t, feed the ones that do. Repeat a bazillion times till you get it right. The concept is “Apply Selection Pressure”.

    Sometimes, when I hear the frustration seep out around the edges of Dr. Hudson’s public discussions, I imagine this man, carrying a great big boat-anchor-load on his back, who spent his whole life trying to figure out this stuff, and speak it aloud. He’s aging, powers gradually diminishing. Crouched over under the load, teeth gritted against fatigue. And still, he takes time to explain, patiently delivering the wisdom he’s fought so long and hard to acquire.

    Selection pressure: when one of those plants exhibits the desired traits, if you’re smart (an effective breeder) you feed that plant.

    What type of selection pressure can we apply? Buy the book. Read the book. Think about what the book means. Critique the book. Think how joyous Dr. Hudson would be if someone, just once, told him something he doesn’t already know. Would that not lighten the load for a few minutes? Damned straight it would.

    I have taxed your patience many a time harping on “bottom up development”. Next time you hear that phrase, substitute “apply selection pressure”.

    In my household I have supreme co-command over my wallet, my thoughts, my communications, my effort. No external dependencies whatsoever. My wife and I rule.

    In order to apply selection pressure, you must first have a crisp definition of the plant traits you wish to achieve. How can you be a good archer, if there’s no target?

    A great project manager paints a sharp target. Acquires the right resources for the job (matches resources to load). Manages expectations – “this project is long duration, don’t get antsy”.

    If Professor Wen said “Tom, ya gotta mod the culture” – if he said that, how would we do it?

    Do we have a clear target? Right resources? Agency? Do we know how, where, and why to apply selection pressure?

    Could we tell Dr. Hudson: “OK, we get it. No easy button, long-duration job, need to get right tools for the job, understand what you advise re: desirable plant traits. Check. We’re on it. Breathe easier, great man, we are preparing to take that baton, and run the next leg of the race”.

    1. Tom Pfotzer

      Upon reflection, I’d like to offer a few edits to this post:

      a. I said that Dr. Hudson is “aging, powers diminishing”. Yes, he’s aging, and that tends to reduce one’s physical capacities. He’s sure not diminishing emotionally or intellectually. Still on the upswing.

      b. “Professor Wen” isn’t his proper name; it’s “Professor Wen Teijun”. Sorry for getting that not-quite-right.

  13. Steven Greenberg

    When will you figure out that when you italicize a word, you must include the following space in the italics. Otherwise the last letter of the italicized word leans into the following space making it look like there is no space?

    rentier economies

    It is even worse when there is no following space.

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