Muzzling the Dragon

Muzzling the Dragon

A declining Chinese economy should be more a cause for celebration than despair

How reliable are China’s GDP numbers? In a country where delivery drivers with fake licenses can fill up their fake-brand motorbikes with fake petrol before delivering fake products to their customers, one would be forgiven for questioning the government’s official data. In most countries GDP is the sum of all produced final goods relative to their price, China ostensibly adopted this approach in line with UN guidelines in 1994 but when scrutinised the data appears somewhat suspect.

An Oligarchy, If You Can Keep It

An Oligarchy, If You Can Keep It

American decline is real, the only question is whether it’s terminal

“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”

  • Plutarch

Of all popular pastimes in American political punditry, comparing modern events to those of Ancient Rome has to be among the most cliched. Ever since Edward Gibbon published his definitive works on the Roman Empire in the 1790s, Rome has been the baseline for all great empires to compare themselves to. Google Ngram reveals that British publishers in the 19th century went through a phase of comparing themselves to late Antiquity. Americans adopted this legacy in the 1940s and have continued the habit into the present day. In many such books, America is compared to the early Roman Republic, skillfully beating its opponents through industrial power and advanced engineering, only to be corrupted by wealth and political infighting. The parallel portends that American democracy will inevitably come to an end and be replaced by some kind of imperial superstate. This same trope has been conjured up by science fiction writers like Orson Scott Card and Harry Turtledove. Its enduring popularity means that political pundits are constantly on the lookout for a Julius Caesar-like figure. The same analogy was made by New York’s Public Theater a little too obliquely in 2017 by having Caesar depicted as a large blonde man with a red tie during his assassination.


Why Autocracy Reclaimed Russia

Why Autocracy Reclaimed Russia

Explaining the resurgence

It will be very easy for future historians to look back on modern Russia and determine that the road to its authoritarian resurgence was inevitable. That all the signs were there from its very inception. The now-obvious parallels with the Weimar Republic make the case all the clearer. In the now familiar parallel, a defeated empire is weakened and down on its knees, beset with an economic crisis and a break up of its former territory. A narrative then emerges that it was betrayed, stabbed in the back by weak internal elements, and needs to use territorial conquest to reclaim its natural global position.


Sins of the Father

Sins of the Father

How a split in the IRGC could break up Iran

How sick is Iran’s supreme leader?

That has been the question on the tongues of many a foreign policy analyst as protests rage from Tehran to Baluchistan.

Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei, 83, had surgery some weeks ago for bowel obstruction after suffering extreme stomach pains and high fever, reported the New York Times in September.

“His doctors remain concerned that he is too weak to even sit up in bed,” they reported

A former president of Iran and protégé of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic republic, Khamenei assumed the position of the country’s top religious, political and military authority in 1989. But what happens when Khamenei dies? And who will succeed him?

The Assembly of Experts for the Leadership is an 88-member body of Islamic jurists, elected by direct popular vote every eight years. According to the Iranian Constitution, the Assembly’s mandate is to appoint, monitor, and even dismiss the supreme leader.

The Loneliest Dictator

The Loneliest Dictator

Xi Jinping's tenureship has been a global disaster

It was only a short time ago that ­covid-19 seemed to be a death-send to democracy and a gift to dictatorships. Watching the tables turn in the last few months is a reminder of how fast global trends can change.

For the last two years, it appeared to be western states suffering from political crises over the pandemic, but as the vaccine rollouts continued and people returned to work, life began to take on some semblance of normality. While in the autocratic world from Tehran to Moscow, strongmen have used the pandemic to shore up their power, making increasingly bad decisions as a result. In Russia's case, the calamitous invasion of Ukraine, and in China’s, a dogmatic zero-covid policy that has set the country on a path to economic turmoil not seen since the late 1980s.


The New Ottomans

The New Ottomans

How a resurgent Turkey is seizing power from Russia and Europe

Sunsets over Kurdistan get caught in the air pollution. Their rays fracture against fine particulate matter, dampening them so that the light dims into a sleepy haze. Like many other things in the mountains of northern Iraq, it becomes part of the background.

It’s worse south of Erbil, where the oil refineries belch out black smoke into the horizon. Spiteful black clouds rise up from the flares in a dust storm of smoke, hovering over the Neo-Sumerian minarets as though plotting their descent. But like the many forces which have surrounded the city, from the Assyrians to the Romans to the Americans to ISIS, they come and they go.

The Rough Estimate Podcast

The Rough Estimate Podcast

So we know reading isn’t for everyone. It takes time, you have to click on a website, and who has the time for that. We like writing our ideas about topics and we wanted to make them more accessible, so we decided to jump on the podcast bandwagon like everyone else.

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1uLdbtxnyM3AhOK6f38PpD

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCA2S4igiDg&t=215s

Itunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rough-estimate/id1608843631?ign-itscg=30200&ign-itsct=podcast_box_link

Fantastical Realism

Fantastical Realism

How Magical Realism Derailed Fantasy

Among fantasy genre aficionados, a joke persists that magical realism is what they call fantasy when it’s written by a South American author.

It usually evokes a laugh when at a fantasy convention, but there are many in the literary world who would raise eyebrows at the joke. Fantasy is escapism, they might say, while magical realism still forces its reader to remain in the real world.

Part of this distinction, the argument goes, is that magical realism stops short of world building, instead preferring to dish out abstract and unusual magical elements into its narrative rather than present an entire new world to its readers.

The Psyche's Hinterland

The Psyche's Hinterland

The search for modern spiritualism in an age of reason

If there is one thing that we can learn from the 21st-century entertainment industry, it is that modern people have a near insatiable appetite for ancient myths. Our digital screens are filled with all kinds of mythic beings adapted from historic literature. Not only Gods but wizards, angels, demons, and many other magical entities. Myth making is present in almost all popular forms of entertainment from fantasy novels, movies, and video games. Aside from Western culture, fantasy entertainment is popular in other parts of the world. Retelling epic narratives from India, China, and even the Middle East. The enduring strength of such myths is all around us, but probably most evident of all with superheroes.

The Best Books of 2021

The Best Books of 2021

It’s been a good year for books. Many an author was hard at work during last year’s lockdowns, and while we didn’t manage to read every single one which came out this year, the most thought-provoking novels quickly floated to the top of the list.

After a thrilling year, we are pleased to bring to your attention ten thrilling reads which we thought best encapsulated the literary achievements of 2021. That said, I heartily commend to you the best books we read over the last twelve months:

Multipayer

Multipayer

How virtual economies created the digital wild west

In June 2020, months before the US-backed opposition to the dictatorship collapsed, a group of Venezuelans had found a better way of earning money than turning up for work: playing video games online.

Players were mulling around an area known as the Revenant Caves, an area ripe for “gold farming”, a spot in the game where characters could be levelled up quickly and then traded for US dollars online.

The process involved waiting for in-game enemies to appear before killing them as a means of rapidly building a high-profile account. Do this for long enough, and the next step is to sell the account to someone with a disposable income willing to pay up in order to skip the time investment required to build a high-level character.

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The Innovation Pendulum

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The Innovation Pendulum

An authoritarian resurgence may just be signalling the end of a technology cycle

On an unrecorded day in 1938 a Soviet economist was sentenced by his government to life imprisonment in an old monastery town east of Moscow. But in this case the condemned didn’t end up serving much of his sentence because on the same day of the ruling, Nikolai Kondratiev was taken to a park on the outskirts of the city, and executed by firing squad.

The Green Shadow

The Green Shadow

How sustainable finance is becoming the next sub prime

“If you want to see where you are taking the most risk, look where you are making the most money.” ― Paul Gibbons, business adviser.

Much in the way that people in the inter-war period referred to World War I as “the war” or “the great war,” most financiers in the years between the global financial crisis and Covid-19 called the former simply “the crisis”.

Now, we have to be more specific.

The Softest Authoritarians

The Softest Authoritarians

South East Asia’s competing political models

As I write this article — while sitting in a cafe in downtown Saigon — a few streets away a group of protesters have just been re-sentenced to prison for advocating publicly for freedom of speech. Rather strangely this is something that their country’s own constitution includes among its citizen’s rights, but of course these rights only really apply under certain circumstances.

At the same time, just over 1000 kilometres to the north, the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) is ending their annual congress in Hanoi. Giant LED screens attached to office buildings are now showing the overweight, balding party leader solemnly explaining the great job that the party has done containing the coronavirus in Vietnam.

The Best Books of 2020

The Best Books of 2020

Below is a list of what Rough Estimate considers to be the best books of 2020, in order and with honorable mentions.

While some of these books came out in the months before the global spread of coronavirus, the year will undoubtedly be defined by the pandemic. We selected these books both for their implications for a post-Covid world as well as for their aesthetic appeal as interesting and evocative texts.

The list is not exhaustive, and with more time to read we both found the shortlist much more difficult than in 2019. Likewise, comparing a narratively complex novel with an interesting non-fiction book is akin to reviewing apples and oranges in the same listicle, and so a great deal of personal taste is inevitable in these lists. With that in mind, here are the best books of 2020:

Art's Golden Ages

Art's Golden Ages

How art periods rise and fall

The trope of the rise and fall of civilisations has been around as long as the first Greek historians put pen to paper. The idea that Empires conquer, expand, grow decadent, and collapse is embedded in the human psyche. It makes sense to most people that artistic development should follow a similar pattern. But when examined closely, artistic development seems to follow quite a different path. There are times when states emerge with little to no artistic development, and times when art styles flourish in empires that are on the decline. What then accounts for the emergence of different art styles at different times?

The Evolution of Myth

The Evolution of Myth

What a comparison of creation stories tells us about the human species

When the Greek traveller Aristeas visited the Gobi desert in 675 BC, Scythian nomads told him about an area where griffins hoarded gold, fighting all who dared approach. They were said to be lion-sized, curved beaks like that of an eagle.

The nomads warned the traveller against his trespass on the guarded land. Aristeas headed their warnings, and as good fortune would have it, was able to make his way through the desert free of griffin encounters.

He survived to return and tell his tale to the Greeks, where griffins were recorded and became one of many inclusions in the mythos of the land.

In the 1920s, American adventurer Roy Chapman Andrews followed caravan trails across China to the Gobi desert, tracking down the same trail Aristeas had walked 2,597 years ago before.

Crossing Mongolia, the adventurer found the fossilised remains of a Psittacosaurus, a beaked dinosaur the size of a lion, the same shape as those described by the nomads.

After thousands of years, the griffin had finally been uncovered.

The Mirror, the Snake, and the Sword

The Mirror, the Snake, and the Sword

Explaining the democratic recession

The Roman Goddess Iustitia stands blindfolded. She holds a sword in one hand, a mirror in the other, and stands on top of a serpent. Iustitia was in charge of executing laws and held the sword to deliver swift execution for lawbreakers. The mirror she holds up to criminals so that they can see their sins reflected, and the snake represents the evil which is kept at bay by her actions.

The blindfold was put on her by another Goddess, Fortuna, the goddess of luck, so that Iustitia could not see her mischief. Iustitia is known to us now as Lady Justice. Her likeness stands on top of the Old Bailey in London, as well as courts throughout the world from Brazil to Japan. To us she represents the rule of law, the idea that all people in a society live under the same rules, and are punished equally no matter their status or standing.