All posts by yni957

Integrated bus-bike system

After much delay, the last paper Sida and I wrote together came out last week in Transportation Research Part C.   Growing out of the last chapter of Sida’s PhD dissertation, the first draft of the paper was completed before he went back to China in the summer of 2020, at the height of COVID19 pandemic.   In part, the long delay was due to Sida’s transition to his new job at Beijing Jiaotong University.   I am glad he pressed on despite the early setbacks and eventually published the paper  in a descent journal.  Here is the abstract for those who wonder what is an integrated bus-bike system.


Abstract: This paper examines the design of a transit system that integrates a fixed-route bus service and a bike-sharing service. Bike availability – the average probability that a traveller can find a bike at a dock – is modelled as an analytical function of bike utilization rate, which depends on travel demand, bike usage and bike fleet size. The proposed system also recognizes the greater flexibility provided by biking. Specifically, a traveller can choose between the closest bus stop and a more distant stop for access, egress or both. Whether the closest stop is a better choice depends on the relative position of the traveller’s origin and destination, as well as system design parameters. This interdependence complicates the estimation of average system cost, which is conditional on route choice. Using a stylized analysis approach, we construct the optimal design problem as a mixed integer program with a small number of decision variables. Results from our numerical experiments show the integrated bus-bike system promises a modest but consistent improvement over several benchmark systems, especially in poorer cities with lower demand density. We find a large share of travellers, more than 20% in nearly all cases tested, opt not to use the nearest bus stop in an optimally designed system. The system also tends to maintain a high level of bike availability: the probability of finding a bike rarely drops below 90% except in very poor cities.

How the world really works

My former colleague and mentor, Prof. David Boyce, loved Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works.  In a short email sent earlier this year, he urged me to read it, adding, “of the nearly 100 books I read this year, this one was the best”.  As encouragement he even mailed a hardcopy to me all the way from his retirement home in Arizona, to my pleasant surprise.  I’ve never heard of Smil before.   According to Wikipedia, he is a prolific and decorated author who counts Bill Gates among his fans.  An immigrant from Czech Republic, he had a PhD in geography but wrote about a wide variety of topics ranging from energy and environment to economics and public policy.

I don’t quite know how to make sense of the book’s seemingly pretentious title. If not for David’s recommendation, the title would probably have turned me away.  Having read the book, I suspect Smil had chosen the title to hide the controversial thesis of the book, which I think is an earnest pushback on the current “mainstream” climate policies and initiatives. Had the book been entitled to reflect this position, however, I imagine many people from the left would reject it out of hand as a manifesto from yet another climate change denier.  Here is Smil’s thesis in a nutshell:

“Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances. But who is going, willingly, to engineer the former while we are still lacking any convincing, practical, affordable global strategy and technical means to pursue the latter?”

Let me first unpack how he reached this conclusion.

Citing Ludwig Boltzmann, Smil argues that free energy (i.e., energy available for conversion) is “the object of struggle for life”.   In the past two centuries, humans have gradually gained access to “a tremendous amount of energy at low cost” from burning fossil fuels.  This has largely transformed life on earth, from scarcity and misery that plagued much of human history to abundance and comfort that so many today had taken for granted.  By 2020, the annual energy consumed by an average person reached 34 GJ, equal to the energy content of about 0.8 tons of crude oil.  If the person would source this amount of energy from physical labor, Smil estimates they would need 60 adult servants working non-stop, day and night.  In affluent countries, this number would increase to approximately 200 to 240.  Clearly, before the energy revolution, only a very small minority could ever hope to avoid hard labor necessary to sustain and advance civilization.  As Thomas Piketty explained in his Capital in 21st Century, in such a world, social inequality was not only inevitable but maybe necessary because “if there had not been a sufficiently wealthy minority, no one would have been able to worry about anything other than survival.” Moreover, “without a fortune it was impossible to live a dignified life”.   Of course, the energy revolution did not eradicate inequality; but living a dignified life and thinking beyond mere survival is no longer the privilege of the super-rich. For this newfound luxury we have the fossil fuel industry to thank.

Central to Smil’s argument is, therefore, the observation that humanity has become deeply dependent on the cheap energy provided by fossil fuels.  The book explores this dependency in the production of electricity, food, industrial materials, and transportation.

  • Although the share of renewable energy (hydropower, solar and wind) in global electricity generation has reached 32% by 2022, fossil fuels (coal and natural gas) remained the dominant source (about 60%). As the uptake of renewables continues, however, the challenge lies not so much in converting solar and wind energy to electricity as in addressing their uneven spatiotemporal distribution.   Tackling this challenge requires the ability to store a massive amount of electricity and transmit it across vast distances. The former is contingent upon a technological breakthrough and the latter, even if we tolerate the cost of transmission, needs expensive infrastructure that currently does not exist. As Peter Nihan pointed out, there is a reason why “95 percent of humanity sources its electricity from power plants less than fifty miles away”.  Indeed, Germany had to keep almost 90% of its fossil fuel power plants as backup despite more than half of the country’s electricity is now generated from renewable sources.
  • The agricultural industries depend on fossil fuels for synthetic fertilizers, among other things (e.g., power for machinery). Smil estimates that more than two thirds of the nitrogen needed for growing crops worldwide is supplied by fertilizers produced from natural gas using the Haber-Bosch process. If we decide to only feed crops by organic wastes, he concluded, more than half of the current global population would be wiped out, and those lucky enough to stick around would struggle to afford regular consumption of meat.  To drive home the crucial importance of fossil fuel to our food supply, Smil painstakingly calculated the life cycle “oil contents” in several staple food items. Perhaps the most memorable example was the tomato grown in the heated greenhouses of Almería, Spain, which consumes more than half liter diesel fuel per kilogram of edible fruit. In contrast, a kilogram of chicken, the most “efficient” meat in terms of energy conversion, can be produced with as little as 0.15 liters of diesel fuel.
  • Smil also surveyed the ubiquitous presence of cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia in our life. The production of these “four pillars of modern civilization”, as he like to call them, relies heavily on energy- and carbon-intensive processes, collectively accounting for about one sixth of the global energy supply and a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption.  Smil asserts that we won’t be able to displace these materials anytime soon given their extensive current utilization. Nor could they be readily decarbonized because their established production processes have no “commercially available and readily deployable mass-scale alternatives”.
  • As for transportation, there are two major obstacles. First, electric motors are still far from a viable substitute to turbofan engines currently powering long-haul aviation.  After all, the energy density of today’s best Li-ion batteries only amounts to about 5% that of jet fuel.  Second, the raw materials needed to build batteries – lithium, cobalt, and nickel, to name a few – may not be able to keep up with the enthusiasm of EV advocates.   To reach a 50% EV market share globally by 2050, Smil estimated that the demand for lithium, cobalt and nickel would grow by a factor of, respectively, 20, 19 and 31.  Take cobalt for example.  A quick Google search shows that, as of now (2022), the world has a cobalt reserve of about 8.3 million tons and an annual production of about 190,000 tons. Per Smil’s estimation, the production of cobalt would rise to nearly 4 million tons in 2050, or nearly half of the entire current reserve.

Having explained why we will be stuck with fossil fuels in the foreseeable future, Smil turned to address what he considered hyperbolic responses to the unfolding climate crisis.  To be sure, Smil is no climate change denier. However, he does raise serious concerns regarding climate science and the way it is being portrayed to mobilize mass action.   Smil tells us the cutting-edge global climate models contributed little to advance our understanding about the greenhouse effect and its long-term consequences.   Instead, the scientific community has been “aware of them for more than 150 years, and in a clear and explicit manner for more than a century”.  He also questions the value of performing long-term forecast with these large, ostensibly sophisticated, and complex models.  Such exercises may produce headlines decorated with impressive numbers.  However, riddled with “layered and often questionable assumptions”, they are little more than “computerized fairy tales”, whose primary function is to help the users
reinforce their own prejudices or to dismiss plausible alternatives”, rather than reliably informing decision making. Smil’s distaste for complex forecasting models reminds me of Douglas J. Lee who, in his famous Requiem for Large-Scale Models, criticized the development of integrated land use and transportation models for the purpose of infrastructure planning. To explain why a more complex model isn’t necessarily better, Lee wrote,

“Including more components in a model generates the illusion that refinements are being added and uncertainty eliminated, but, in practice, every additional component introduces less that is known than is not known”.

In a nutshell, the climate models cannot really tell us what is going to happen in 30 years and to believe otherwise is “to mistake the science of global warming for the religion of climate change”.  Thus, Smil rejects the grim warning that our fossil-fueled civilization will soon collapse unless we immediately take drastic actions to decarbonize the world economy.   He also dismisses the grandiose claims that technological breakthroughs will somehow save humanity from this impending calamity, if only we have faith in them.  He ruthlessly mocks the “techno-optimists” –– who promised that 80 percent of global energy supply can be decarbonized by 2030, and an economy fueled by 100% renewables actually “needs less energy, costs less, and creates more jobs” –– and likens them to “green hymn” singers.

So, what is Smil for?  First, he prefers steady and mundane strategies to “sudden desperate actions aimed at preventing a catastrophe”. Two specific actions he suggested does make sense: reducing food waste, which shockingly amounts to a third of the overall food supply, and curtailing the ownership of SUVs, whose wide adoption had more than offset in the past decade the decarbonization gains resulting from the slow adoption of EVs.  Second, he wants us to “be agnostic about the distant future”, to admit the limits of our understanding, to “approach all planetary challenges with humility”, and to recognize no amount of planning can assure ultimate success.

Smil likes to build his argument around numbers and facts.  However, absorbing all the numbers can sometimes become such a mental burden that the reader may be distracted from the flow of the book.  Of course, this may be a feature rather than a bug; after all, Smil also wrote a popular book called Numbers Do Not Lie.  The chapter discussing risks and life expectancy seems a little baffling to me: it may be interesting in its own right, but a poor fit for the main theme.   That said, the book is a joy to read overall: Smil writes elegantly, his argument well-construed and his conclusions convincing.  Harsh as his critique of the climate modelers may be, it did resonate with me –– and I am a bit of a modeler myself.  However, I am probably not the kind of audience that Smil intends (need) to win over. To young liberals like AOC and Greta Thunberg, Smil’s even-headed message may be too conservative to swallow.  They might even find his lectures on “how the world really works” nerdy and old-fashioned, if not condescending and insulting.  Many a climate action enthusiast would probably never have time and patience to hear the old man out anyway, as they are so preoccupied by the continuous flow of new bad news that implore them to do something, anything, here and now, and at any cost if necessary.

Bob Camilone Memorial Scholarship

Hongyu Zheng, a fourth year PhD student in my group, had won 2023 Transportation and Development Institute Bob Camilone Memorial Scholarship. The other recipient of the award is Adrian Hernandez, another PhD student in our transportation program.

Congratulations to both gentlemen! We take pride in their accomplishment and are confident that they  will continue to excel in his academic and professional pursuits.heir

 

美国反对美国

《美国反对美国》是王沪宁教授1988年访美的见闻录及政治评论。在美期间,他“走访了三十多个城市,近二十所大学,在数十个政府和私人部门做过调查”。短短半年时间里, 他通过这些调研,对美国社会各方面的历史和现状了解之深,理解之透,我这个在美国呆了二十多年,大学里教了十多年书的人也自愧不如。更难得的是,那时他不过三十出头的年纪,但笔下透出的知识积淀,学术修养,思辨能力,都已经有相当的火候。写这本书的时候,王教授还是复旦大学的少壮派学者,今天他早已学而优则仕,历侍三朝,两次入常,成为名动天下的“中共大脑”。从这本书看,他能以纯理论家身份脱颖而出,闻达于诸侯,大概并非侥幸,确是实力使然。

从经济学人播客听说这本书后,我的好奇心就像水烧开后的茶壶盖一样按耐不住。王教授这位乐于以“读书人”自居的政治学家,在访美的半年里,到底从美国政制中发现了何种我等凡夫俗子所不能见者,帮他照亮了一条截然不同但却更光明美好的中国发展之路?王教授在自序中写道,“美国反对美国”这个书名,是为了表明美国社会不是一个“简单的均质的整体”,它既有肯定性的力量,也有否定性的力量,读懂这两种力量构成的内在矛盾以及形成它们的历史-社会-文化机制,才能回答“为什么有美国”这个“简单问题”。全书以美国的政治经济制度、民族性格、社会管理等十方面为线索,以亲身访谈见闻为素材编织而成,而神韵所在,往往见于每章结尾的评述。个人觉得见闻实录有趣的地方不多,也许因为缺乏时代感,也许因为受众本就是不了解美国的国人。 分析评论部分,虽然因为结构的缘故有些碎片化,论证不够连贯,逻辑也稍嫌松散,但其中有些见解即使今天看来仍发人深思,值得一读。下文试作归纳整理并稍加剖析。

王教授视价值体系为政制的基础,并把美国价值体系的三要素总结为自由、平等和民主(即权力之源在民)。这套体系对公权力有强大约束力,形成了地方政府优于联邦政府、小政府优于大政府的治国理念。政府囿于有限权力,无法承担管理社会的全部责任,而只能依赖资本主义那只“看不见的手”,即所谓“社会自组织系统”。他写道,

“政府系统只从上面管制社会的自组织系统,但不陷入其中,因而政府的负担不重。社会的自组织系统有一整套规则、程序和运作,它们的运作是稳定的。政治的变化往往不影响这一整套机制的运作。它们在运作中追求自己目标的同时,推动了社会系统的运转。”

王教授认为这套“双轨制”是美国政制的优点,因为在“人口达数亿之众的社会,政府直接和全面管理社会各个层面,各个领域的可能性不大”,而“由于体制设计而走上这条道路的社会,政治和行政系统往往没有很好地解决社会的很多基本需要,积累下来成堆的问题”。当然,他也指出在“看得见的手”的模式下,“政治的火车头”虽然负担较重,但却“易于向一个方向有规则地行驶”。王教授推崇地方政府在美国政制中的强势地位,认为地方政府在具体运作上各有千秋,适应了当地的传统、观念和需要,而“任何政治体制,只有做到这一点才能良好运转”。他还补充道,“政治体制越是划一的社会,政治体制的适应性越小”。所指为谁,自不待言。

在个人自由和社会平等之间,王教授认为美国人无疑偏爱自由。而自由之所以成为主流价值,是“社会不同集团之间的利益冲突”的结果。美国政制只保证“形式上的政治平等,而非社会平等、经济平等”。要求其他方面的平等,必然带来利益冲突。譬如为实现经济平等劫富济贫,在一定程度内是为民众接受的。但当高税收对私人产权形成实质威胁时,社会便会反弹,反对以牺牲自由为代价来实现平等。王教授认为这种对平等心口不一的承诺,是美国成为一个贫富两极分化社会的重要原因。美国这个商品极大丰富的国家为什么能看到满街露宿街头的乞丐?为什么不能有另一种分配方式让“所有无家可归的人都过上体面的生活”?他的解释是以自由为核心价值观的美国政制无法容忍这样的分配方式。

自由滥觞带来的后果当然不只是社会平等的理想无法实现。王教授警告我们,“任何准备用于自己的政治权利,都要准备与别人分享,否则自己也会丧失它们”。而权利给得越多,社会就越难管理。他以结社自由为例,说明这个本来为鼓励政党活动准备的权利,会被别有用心的人利用,成立黑白两道通吃的“犯罪”组织。政府碍于自由原则,无法有效控制或取缔这些组织,终将成尾大不掉之势。王教授很看重“分享权利”的分寸,以缺乏这个分寸为最大弊政。 他写道,

“任何社会在设计体制时,均会遇到这类问题,想禁止的由于想允许的决定而不能禁止,不想给予的由于想给予的决定而只能给予。…美国政制在给予和允许方面是一个十分成功的政制,但在禁止和防范方面不是一个值得赞扬的政制。”

关于美国民主,王教授主要着眼两点。第一,它如何平衡大型社会形成政治领袖过程中对民主和集中的要求;第二,以利益集团为基础的民意收集方式到底在多大程度上反映了全民利益。

对于第一点,他认为美国是通过把政党和国家分离来解决的。简言之,因为政党处于政治体系之外, 可以用相对集权的方式产生政治领袖(如总统和国会议员候选人);而选民可以在这个集中过程完成后再做选择。这样,尽管选民的选择非常有限,但整个过程依然“表现为一个民主的外观”。王教授对美国政制里集中和民主这对矛盾的评论算是切中肯綮。至少在产生总统候选人这个环节上,大部分选民能做的确实有限。以最近的新闻为例,超过七成的美国选民表示不希望看到现任总统Biden参加下一届竞选,但如不出意外,他获得民主党的提名应该毫无悬念。

至于利益集团,王教授说它们的作用是“收集、综合、归纳、输送社会的利益要求,是政治系统得以满足最大利益要求的重要条件”。由于资源有限,政策制订的目标往往不是满足所有利益要求,而是以最低的代价满足最多的利益要求。但是普罗大众往往没有利益集团做代表,政治领袖们未必能听到他们的呼声。即使能听到,他们的利益如果跟其他强大集团的利益相左,在效用主义的分配原则下,也未必能够受到重视。

所以王教授说,“美国的民主是否民主够了?这是可以打一个问号的”。他也说,不管以何种方式选择政治领袖,社会的管理权总归是掌握在极少数“英才”手中的;而“英才统治是资本主义制度下的社会的共同特征”。他据此质疑“严格意义上的民主是否符合大规模人类社会的发展规律或称内在要求”?对这个问题他没有直接回答。我的理解是,如果终极目标是选出英才来管理社会,那不管通过民主程序,还是举贤荐能,甚或科举(公务员)考试,白猫黑猫,抓着老鼠就是好猫。而从民主时不时选出奇葩领袖的历史经验看,也许它“并不符合人类社会的内在要求”。

美国政制价值体系还有一个很奇怪的矛盾:一方面,它重视自由,美化甚至神话个人主义;但另一方面,它又十分重视传统。对传统的重视,尤其体现在美国人对宪法的“迷之崇拜”和面对种种貌似表面文章的“政治规矩”—如竞选中失败一方需公开发表败选宣言,并祝贺自己的对手当选—时的战战兢兢。王教授解释道,这种情况看似匪夷所思,个中缘由其实并不复杂。个人主义的盛行,反而造成个人权威难以形成,而“越是在没有人说了算的地方,传统便具有越大的权威。”

对这种政治传统的巨大力量,王教授的态度很纠结。他承认政治传统和规矩是写在人们信仰里的法律,比写在文字上的法律更有力量,甚至社会政治的发展之路,“就在于把政治原则和信念变为政治规矩和政治传统。”而传统一旦形成,则标志着社会不同利益集团之间的权力关系进入稳态。当然,传统最重要的功能也许是保证政权交接的稳定性。关于这个政制中“最为根本的问题”,王教授写道,

“政权的交接是人类政治生活中的一件最难解决的事情。不少社会在这个问题上没有发展出完善的程序,成为政治不稳定的原因。”

他认为美国通过政治传统解决了这个难题,这套规矩深入人心,任何违背它的企图,都“不可能得到承认,不可能具备合法性”。当然,王教授那时虽然已经崭露头角,毕竟还是一个初出茅庐的青年学者。他在政坛格物致知多年之后,修为想来早已臻知行合一的化境,中国特色的政权平稳交接、万世不替的大关节大概早几年就参透了。

在承认传统正面作用的同时,王教授也认为传统桎梏的背后隐藏着严重危机。在全书的开头,他援引美国阿马拿共产主义社群解体的案例,指出造成社会制度失稳最根本的原因是“年轻一代对现有价值体系的放弃和冷漠”。新陈更替是社会发展的铁律,如果任其自然,不对旧的价值体系进行升级换代,获得新一代的认同,则社会对制度基础的信任危机难以避免。他问道,“谁来完成(升级价值体系)这项社会功能呢?”很明显,不能指望传统,尤其是美国这样通过制度安排刻意拒绝变化的传统。虽然在这里王教授又一次回避了自己提出的难题,但细心的读者当不难在书中寻得草蛇灰线。王教授说,美国人对宪法如此迷恋,深层原因是没有人有力量去改变它,所以“维持并解释它是唯一出路”。而宪法之所以如此难以改变,是因为制定者对人性所持的悲观主义。他认为“这是西方文化与东方文化的一大差别,”甚至可以用来解释东西方政治发展的差异。表面上看,王教授这个观点似乎有悖于中国法家和秦制对人性本恶的基本判定。但也许他这里说的人性,并非普通民众之人性,而是社会精英之人性。西方文化拒绝相信尧舜禹汤般的存在,而东方文化貌似对此深信不疑。因此,为了引导社会价值体系升级,只能靠伟人来对抗传统的惯性。具体来说,要靠属于每个时代的、凌驾于传统之上的威权领袖。最后这一点纯属个人揣测。但是,自九十年代以来,中共从邓小平理论到三个代表,再由科学发展观到新时代特色社会主义,每一代领导核心在价值体系上的推陈出新和灌输宣传,恰是在回应王教授在本书中对这一危机的担忧,而方法和手段也一脉相承。

八十年代末期,正是日本经济如日中天,信心爆棚之时。跟朝气蓬勃的日本相比,彼时的美国看上去颟邗无能,垂垂老去。在全书的结尾,王教授在对美日种种经济数据进行对比之后,得出了美国正在被日本超越的结论,而原因是“美国的体制、文化和价值反对美国本身”,令其最发达地位难以为继。 他写道,

“美国的体制,总体来说建筑在个人主义、享乐主义和民主主义的基础上,但它正明显地输给一个集体主义、忘我主义和权威主义的体制。”

那么美国能拥有这些“更有效的体制”吗?王教授的答案是否定的,因为文化和价值观决定体制,而美国的文化和价值观跟这样的体制无法兼容。这种体制上的劣势意味着,“日本只是第一个向美国挑战的民族。在下个世纪里,必然会有更多的民族也向美国提出挑战。”

对美日竞争,王教授猜中了开头,没有猜到结尾。日本的GDP在1995年超过美国GDP的70%以后,一直停滞不前,到2021年只剩下美国的21%。而美国,虽然一如既往地拒绝对传统价值体系进行“创新”,但这种抱残守缺似乎并没有耽误美国人在科技领域一路领先。从互联网、社交媒体到自动驾驶, 从区块链、行星际航行到最近的大语言模型,这些改变世界的技术创新里,有哪些是集体主义,忘我主义和威权主义催生的呢?

王教授预言的后半段倒是已成现实:一个比当年的日本更强势,似乎也更高效的民族确实横空出世,向美国发起了挑战。如果以GDP总量为标尺,它和美国的距离,已经比当年的日本更近。毫无疑问, 这一辉煌成就跟王教授推崇的、建立在东方文化和价值体系之上的“有效体制”不无关系。但是,日本由盛而衰的前车之鉴说明,价值体系跟经济发展和技术创新的关系远比王教授分析所及更复杂,而美国那一套民主自由的陈腐旧套,虽然依旧是耽于分裂而患不均,却也没有遇到“不可阻挡的危机”而一蹶不振。今天回顾这段历史,仿佛来到王教授三十五年前走过的那个十字路口,但极目远望,却甚感茫然。到底是“美国反对美国”,还是 “中国反对中国”, 是“中国反对美国”,还是 “美国反对中国”?这些烧脑的问题,不知再过三十五年,是否能见分晓?

 

Wardrop equilibrium can be boundedly rational

As one of the most fundamental concepts in transportation science, Wardrop equilibrium (WE) was the cornerstone of countless large mathematical models that were built in the past six decades to plan, design, and operate transportation systems around the world. However, like Nash Equilibrium, its more famous cousin, WE has always had a somewhat flimsy behavioral foundation. The efforts to beef up this foundation have largely centered on reckoning with the imperfections in human decision-making processes, such as the lack of accurate information, limited computing power, and sub-optimal choices. This retreat from behavioral perfectionism was typically accompanied by a conceptual expansion of equilibrium. In place of WE, for example, transportation researchers had defined such generalized equilibrium concepts as stochastic user equilibrium (SUE) and boundedly rational user equilibrium (BRUE). Invaluable as these alternatives are to enriching our understanding of equilibrium and advancing modeling and computational tools, they advocate for the abandonment of WE, predicated on its incompatibility with more realistic behaviors. Our study aims to demonstrate that giving up perfect rationality need not force a departure from WE, since WE may be reached with global stability in a routing game played by boundedly rational travelers. To this end, we construct a day-to-day (DTD) dynamical model that mimics how travelers gradually adjust their valuations of routes, hence the choice probabilities, based on past experiences.

Our model, called cumulative logit (CULO), resembles the classical DTD models but makes a crucial change: whereas the classical models assume routes are valued based on the cost averaged over historical data, ours values the routes based on the cost accumulated. To describe route choice behaviors, the CULO model only uses two parameters, one accounting for the rate at which the future route cost is discounted in the valuation relative to the past ones (the passivity measure) and the other describing the sensitivity of route choice probabilities to valuation differences (the dispersion parameter).  We prove that the CULO model always converges to WE, regardless of the initial point, as long as the passivity measure either shrinks to zero as time proceeds at a sufficiently slow pace or is held at a sufficiently small constant value. Importantly, at the aggregate (i.e., link flow) level, WE is independent of the behavioral parameters. Numerical experiments confirm that a population of travelers behaving differently reaches the same aggregate WE as a homogeneous population, even though in the heterogeneous population, travelers’ route choices may differ considerably at WE.

By equipping WE with a route choice theory compatible with bounded rationality, we uphold its role as a benchmark in transportation systems analysis. Compared to the incumbents, our theory requires no modifications of WE as a result of behavioral accommodation. This simplicity helps avoid the complications that come with a “moving benchmark”, be it caused by a multitude of equilibria or the dependence of equilibrium on certain behavioral traits. Moreover, by offering a plausible explanation for travelers’ preferences among equal-cost routes at WE, the theory resolves the theoretical challenge posed by Harsanyi‘s instability problem. Note that we lay no claim on the behavioral truth about route choices. Real-world routing games take place in such complicated and ever-evolving environments that they may never reach a true stationary state, much less the prediction of a mathematical model riddled with a myriad of assumptions. Indeed, a relatively stable traffic pattern in a transportation network may be explained as a point in a BRUE set, an SUE tied to properly calibrated behavioral parameters, or simply a crude WE according to the CULO model. More empirical research is still needed to compare and vet these competing theories for target applications. However, one should no longer write off WE just because it has no reasonable behavioral foundation.

A preprint can be downloaded at ArXiv or SSRN.

The End of the World is just the Beginning

It’s a little embarrassing to admit that I was drawn to the book largely because of the provocative title. The “end of something” is one of my favorite genres – somehow part of me just cannot resist that whiff of fatalism.  In any case, if you crave for apocalypse, Peter Zeihan will not disappoint.

I should first clarify that the “End” spoken of here is not really the “world” itself, but rather the “Order”, the US-led, post-cold-war world order that centers on globalization.  Here is Zeihan’s verdict on the Order in his characteristically assertive tone:

“The globalization game is not simply ending. It is already over. Most countries will never return to the degree of stability or growth they experienced in 2019.”

Let me first walk you through why Zeihan thinks the game is doomed.

First and foremost, the Order is not normal. It was possible entirely because the only superpower on earth, the US, guarantees global security by suspending geopolitical competition.   Zeihan asserted our current era is “the most distorted moment in human history” and thus cannot be indefinitely sustained.

Second, globalization has been subsidized by America’s massive military spending and voluntary de-industrialization of her heartland. However, in the past five decades, this policy has squeezed the once mighty American middle class so hard that a major course correction seems inevitable.

Third, globalization went hand in hand with industrialization, urbanization, and women’s rights movement, which, while pulling billions out of poverty, has depressed birth rate below replacement levels in all but a handful of countries that “have managed a high degree of development”.  Where these processes were artificially accelerated thanks to rapid diffusion of technologies –– the so-called latecomer advantage –– populations also age at an artificially accelerated pace, fast approaching what Zeihan called “postindustrial demographic collapse”.   In fact, Zeihan claims that many countries have already passed the point of no-return, demographically.  The shrinking population will pull the rug out from under the consumption-based global economy.

To summarize Zeihan’s proposition, the Order is inherently unsustainable, can no longer be sustained as of today, and has already produced its own grave digger: the impending population crash.

Well, that explains the “end”. What about “the beginning” part, namely what is going to happen when the Order dissolves?

The first casualty is long-haul transportation.  According to Zeihan,  once the US   withdraws from policing the ocean surface, the global shipping industry will kiss goodbye to its most important asset: the impeccable safety record. Even a small uptick in the risk of losing cargo to pirates or rogue states will drastically increase transportation costs, in the form of rising insurance premiums, lost time, and disruptions to today’s hyper-efficient supply chains.  Without reliable and cheap transportation, moving raw materials and goods halfway around the world would make no economic sense.  As a result, every country must become less specialized and more self-sufficient –– growing all (or most) of one’s own food, rather than importing it from another continent, will become the new norm.  The countries that have selected (or been selected) to turn their entire economies into niche specialties at the behest of globalization will face upheavals, if not existential threats.   Unfortunately, not every country will make it.  Zeihan predicts the places that don’t have “the right geography to make a go of civilization” before the Order will experience not only depopulation –– a euphemism for mass starvation –– but also de-civilization (whatever that means).

The next victim is what Steven Pinker would call Long Peace.  Without effective law enforcement, the world will morph into the jungle that it once was. Under the rule of Darwinism, smaller nation states will have trouble protecting and feeding themselves.  A natural coping strategy is to coalesce around their regional hegemons to form military and economic alliances that would look disturbingly similar to the great powers of the past centuries. As these new empires begin to quarrel over resources and territories, violence ensues. Indeed, war has already returned to Europe when Putin’s Russia launched its bid to regain control over Ukraine about a year ago. Many people thought Putin had committed a huge blunder. However, if the future were to unfold as described in Zeihan’s book, the invasion may well be understood as a strategic imperative: grabbing “the granary of Europe” to ensure Russia can feed her own people when things go south.

While desolation will be widespread, not every country will suffer equally. Zeihan thinks the US and its neighbors will be doing just fine, because collectively they are endowed with rich natural resources, relatively young and still growing populations, and above all a powerful military that can secure industrial inputs and protect trade routes wherever needed.  America’s European allies, however, will not be so lucky.  The shockwave will break up Europe into small blocks led by the legacy powers – the likes of UK, France, Germany, and Turkey – who unfortunately can no longer count on colonialism and imperialism to get ahead like in the good old days.

That the biggest loser will be China Zeihan is absolutely certain.  The first and foremost problem for China is demography.  Most peoples in the world are getting older, but Chinese would allow no one to beat them at the game of speed, including aging.  Even according to official data, China’s population has already begun to shrink in 2022, with a birth rate standing at 1.3 and (most likely) still dropping.  Thanks in part to a ruthless but successful family planning scheme, China has become “the fastest-aging society in human history”, and at this point, her demographic collapse is inescapable and imminent. Second, China is highly specialized in low-value-add manufacturing to which long-haul transportation is indispensable.  This economic model must be completely restructured to cope with a post-Order world. However, the transformation will dramatically slow the economic growth, thereby undermining the foundation for legitimacy and stability of the Chinese polity.  Third, China could even lose full access to the resources essential to support her current population, including agriculture products and their inputs (fossil fuels and fertilizers), because she does not have a navy capable of projecting power a continent away.  In fact, as Zeihan remarked contemptuously, the Chinese navy “can’t make it past Vietnam, even in an era of peace.”

Specious as Zeihan’s doomsday theory might sound, he did attempt to back it up with witty geopolitical analysis and (re)interpretation of the history of technology and economics.  In fact, most pages of the book are filled with those contents, which, unlike the hysterical predictions, often make a more enjoyable read.   However, Zeihan’s central thesis is so preposterous that it hardly deserves a serious rebuttal.   History tells us doomsday predictions, especially something this extreme, rarely come true.  It is almost certain that the Order won’t end anytime soon, and when the end does come, won’t be in the same fashion imagined by Zeihan.

Zeihan is right about the formidable challenges posed by rapidly aging populations, and the unprecedented nature of the current demographic shift.  Older societies will grow more slowly because their people work and consume less on average. However, a slower accumulation of wealth does not have to trigger a panic stampede and tear the world apart in its wake.  Living in an older world could simply mean we must fix our deeply entrenched obsession for perpetual exponential economic growth.

Zeihan is right about America’s withering commitment to global security and leadership.  It may be true that the cost of upholding the Order has become too high to bear by any single country. However, it does not follow that the US and her allies would sit idly watching the Order collapse in front of their eyes.  If, as Zeihan prophesized, most countries will be so much worse off without the Order, why would they not fight with everything at their disposal to keep it alive?

Zeihan is also right about the worldwide retreat from globalization. The trend has been accelerated dramatically by COVID-19, which had exposed the startling vulnerability of the current system to large-scale disruptions, and forced many countries and cooperations to re-consider the premiums set for resilience and reliability.  However, this does not mean international criminals and thugs will come out overnight in droves, wipe out inter-continental commerce, and shatter the Earth Community into pieces.  Homo sapiens have seen better for far too long to willingly return to the dark ages.

Sometimes I doubt Zeihan actually believes his outlandish predictions. After all, he seems too smart to fall for the fallacies.   Maybe he thinks crying wolf gets the ears anyway, not only of ordinary readers like me, but also of politicians and even world leaders.  My other theory is that he was writing to vent his grievances.  To be sure, he pointedly denied this allegation, claiming in the epilogue that his book is not “a lamentation for the world that could have been”.  Yet, right after this disclaimer, he grumbled about America’s “lazy descent into narcissistic populism”.  He chastised the Europeans for their inability to come together for “a common strategic policy”.   His loathing of China and Russia feels strangely personal, and his harshest words and most vicious prophecies are always reserved for them, especially China.  Here is a remarkable paragraph he wrote at the end of the book.

“China and Russia have already fallen back on instinct, heedless of the lessons of their own long sagas. In the post–Cold War era, the pair benefited the most by far from American engagement, as the Order …created… the circumstances for the greatest economic stability they have ever known. Instead of seeking rapprochement with the Americans to preserve their magical moment, they instead worked diligently—almost pathologically—to disrupt what remained of global structures. Future history will be as merciless to them as their dark and dangerous pasts.”

In some sense China was indeed the largest beneficiary of the Order. However, this does not mean her incredible fortune will continue if she just promises to stay the course.  A geopolitical analyst like Zeihan should know strategic decisions are Markovian: they are always driven by the national interest in the future, not the rewards received in the past. Could China preserve her magical moment by simply “seeking rapprochement with the Americans”?  I doubt it.  Once China is deemed to have become too powerful for the Order to contain, she must either faithfully subscribe to the Order’s ideology or conspire to replace it with a new world order.  Judged by the recent developments, China has unequivocally rejected the first option.   Is her choice a stupid and fatal mistake, the lesser of two evils, or, as Toutiao (头条) News would make you believe, about to usher in the greatest era in the five thousand years of Chinese history?  The die has been cast; only time can answer the question.

红太阳

网上断断续续地听了高先生很多关于党史和新中国史的讲座和讲课录音,对他的学养、见地、胆识和口才很是敬服。成书于上世纪末的《红太阳》应该是他的成名作。全书洋洋数十万言,名为讲述延安整风运动的来龙去脉,实则很像超长版的《太祖本纪.前传》。由于包含大量不合“正史”的故实、评述与解读,大陆读者一直无缘一见庐山真面目。高先生在后记中自许以秉笔直书的太史公为楷模,以“板梁甘坐十年冷,文章不写一字空”为信条。从《红太阳》内容之敢言和参考文献之浩繁来看,他大概当得起“不写一字空”这个评价。所叹者,先生缁铢累计,皓首穷经十余年写成的与人为鉴的历史,到头来落一个“自向荒郊寂寞红”的结局。不知先生泉下有知,是否会自悔当年入错了行?

延安整风在党史和新中国史上占据极为重要的地位,是因为它为中国未来一个世纪设定了意识形态:有中国特色的马克思主义。这标志着党摆脱了莫斯科对理论解释体系的控制,从此以自身的理解来定义革命的目标、主体、对象和方式。

事实证明,有中国特色的马克思主义是个非常有创意的想法,因为它像美国宪法一样,可以通过重新解释达到与时俱进,海纳百川的效果。当然,它比美国宪法灵活高效太多,后来的领袖们会发现,这一颗美丽的羊头下面,可以卖的又岂止是狗肉。高华总结说,在延安整风完成的时候,这个新意识形态有四大原则:一、树立“实用第一”的观点,“坚决抛弃一切对现实革命目标无直接功用的理论。” 二、全力肃清“五四”思想在党内知识分子中的影响,确立集体至上、个人渺小的新观念。三、确定农民为革命主力军。四、把宋明新儒家“向内里用力”的观念融入党内斗争的理论。”

对我而言,上述第四点很是振聋发聩。我知道阳明心学在当今中国是显学,但从没想过它居然也是太祖哲学思想之所本。高华写道,

“(整风运动的)运作方式和操作实践的背后,还有着浓厚的中国内圣之学的痕迹。干部坦白交代和自我剖析与宋明新儒家的「格物致知」,寻求「天人合一」的路向几乎异曲同工,只是词汇和解释系统不同,而在手法上更具强制性”。

回想起前几年回国偶然有机会跟一干政府官员吃饭,席间某副市长侃侃而谈自己研究阳明心学的心得,其他官员纷纷加入讨论,气氛之热烈,不亚于小型的阳明研讨会。当时我对王阳明的所知还停留在《明朝那些事》里看来的一鳞半爪(现在也进益无多),对天朝高级干部哲学素养之高,印象极为深刻。不过,如果真如高华所说,阳明心学跟有中国特色的马克思主义有如此渊源,显学之名确是顺理成章。

在高华看来,延安整风是太祖自井冈山以来惨淡经营的巅峰之作,他老人家精心铸造的马克思主义中国化这柄倚天长剑,终于让全党同志心悦诚服,自觉地团结在以之为核心的的党中央周围。党从缔造以来第一次迎来了一位强势、自信、拥有绝对权威的领袖。整风运动以中共七大为终结,不仅奠定了新中国前二十五年坎坷发展、“砥砺前行”的基调,更开集中先于民主之新风,为党国权力定于一尊之滥觞,对中国政局影响深远,绵延至今。

前面说过,《红太阳》明写延安整风事件,实则处处为太祖立传。在高华笔下,他拥有无可争议的军事天才、超凡入圣的政治直觉和百折不挠的钢铁意志,即使异见者也不能不为之折服,甘为犬马前驱;但作为领导者,他执政则刚愎自用,霸道专横,为达目的不择手段;其性格则多疑善变,翻云覆雨,睚眦必报。他对绝对权力的眷恋与对人格尊严的漠视形成鲜明对比;他对知识分子从由衷的嫌恶和怀疑,发展为有意无意的的羞辱和打压 , 态度颇似孙绍祖之于贾迎春,“窥着那读书种子如蒲柳,作践得教授学究似下流” 。这种“精神消灭法”危害之烈,流弊之广,恐怕两千年前他那位偶像始皇帝的“肉体消灭法”也不能望其项背。

不过话说回来,高华对太祖的判语,出国前的我如果在白纸黑字的出版物上看到,也许会被震到头晕眼花(所谓秉笔直书是也),但对于在舆论宽松的环境里生活了二十年的人来说,其实并无太多新意。我反到觉得他对太祖诛心太过,负面评价过多,仿佛作者心中早有定论,文章笔处龙蛇,无非是为支持这个结论罗织证据而已。作为史家,给读者留下这种印象,不能不说是败笔。另外,全书结构稍显拖沓冗余,前后章节主题相似,而时间跨度颇多重叠,影响阅读体验,也算一个遗憾。文字来说,个人觉得最好的部分还是臧否太祖那些段落。隔着这么多年的岁月,你还是能清楚地感受到,高先生在写下这些文字的时候,心中的那一种沧桑和板荡。

 

Games without rules

Before August 2021 I knew almost nothing about Afghan history. Nor did I care.  As a country, Afghanistan seems neither interesting nor important, culturally or geopolitically.  Yes, it is famous for feverish Islamism, extreme poverty, and brutality against women; but there are plenty of such failed states to go around in the world.  Yes, it is nicknamed the “graveyard of empires”; but to most Chinese, there is nothing mysterious about burying empires in what Chairman Mao would call “boundless ocean of people’s war”.

Then, in April 2021, President Biden announced the plan to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of August that year.  Shortly after, Taliban soldiers began to emerge from caves and tunnels. As they swept through the country with breathtaking speed, their opponents, more than 300,000 strong and trained, equipped, and paid for by NATO, simply melted away.  To be sure, Americans did not think highly of the Afghan legions procured with their money, initially predicting they could not hold off Taliban offense for more than a year.  Yet, they were still caught completely off guard when the Afghan government collapsed in Mid-August, well before the deadline of the planned withdrawal. If Americans had dreamed about a gracious if melancholy farewell from a country that they thought they had liberated and rebuilt, the dream had turned into a nightmare that will be remembered for generations to come.

Like most observers, I watched the events unfolding in Afghanistan that summer with shock, amusement, and confusion.  How could a poorly trained guerrilla force defeat a larger, better-equipped national army in just a few months? Why did not most Afghans fight harder to protect their political freedom, personal liberty, and women’s rights, the things that Americans insisted they should cherish the most? Even Biden seemed genuinely baffled at Afghans’ lack of will “to fight for their own future” despite Americans had given them “every tool they could need”.  These questions had prompted me to find answers in Afghan history.   The book I stumbled on was Games Without Rules by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan American author who was born in Kabul after WWII. Ansary covers the 250-year history of modern Afghanistan, starting from its legendary founder, Ahmad Shah Baba, and ending with the Islamic Republic in the 21st century.   An easy and enjoyable read, the book did not just answer most of my questions, it answered them head on, as if the author knew the questions would be asked ten years later.

First, a few things that surprised me.

I once thought that Afghans have always been living under a somewhat barbarous regime similar to Taliban, and that it was Americans who incidentally liberated them from the subjection by their antiquated institutions.   I was wrong.

Taliban movement was in fact a new phenomenon that bears little resemblance with most Afghan regimes that came before it.  The reign of Abdur Rahman Khan (1880-1901) ––also known as the Iron Amir––may be a close match in terms of brutality and religious rigidity, but he is also remembered by many as the king who united Afghanistan under one flag and set her on the path toward modernization.  Like many peoples that came in contact with the West in the past two centuries, Afghans had gone through, sometimes not under their own initiatives and terms, multiple iterations of modernization projects.  Amanullah Khan (1919 -1929), who fought for and won Afghan independence from the British Empire, was a radical reformer.  Among his daring edicts was a new law meant to replace Shari’a, which guaranteed many basic human rights, including freedom of religion and women’s rights – yes, a hundred years ago, Amanullah’s code already proclaimed no girls should be denied the right to education and no women should be required to wear burqa.   However, Amanullah’s reform was way ahead of its time.  Afghans rebelled and kicked him out of the country; he ended up in Italy as a refugee, where he spent the rest of his life working as a carpenter.  After a few years of turmoil, the reign of Zahir Shah (1933 – 1973) charted a more moderate and successful trajectory, which culminated in the enactment of the 1964 constitution.   By introducing free elections, a parliament, civil and political rights and universal suffrage––and effectively banning any members of royal family to hold high-level government offices––the constitution created a modern democratic state that is, in principle, similar to the Islamic Republic of 2000s. By early 1960s, Ansary wrote,

“in the big city of Kabul, women were beginning to appear in public showing not just their faces but their arms, their legs, even cleavage. Afghan girls of the elite technocratic class were beginning to cotton to Western fashions. They were wearing miniskirts and low-cut blouses. Nightclubs were popping up, which served beer and wine and whiskey—and not just to foreigners. Afghans were drinking and making no bones about it.”

So, how did Afghanistan descend from this lovely modern democracy to Taliban’s Islamic Emirate? Well, it had much to do with geopolitics.

Contrary to my naïve preconception, Afghanistan has been enormously important to the struggles of great powers, especially those between Russia and the West. In the 19th century, the Russians attempted to reach the Indian Ocean from the central Asia. Determined to protect their enormous trade interests in the region from Russian interferences, the British took Afghanistan as their protectorate by force.  If the objective was to stop Russians, the British succeeded.  However, their control of the country had always been fragile and treacherous.  According to Ansary, they had “won jurisdiction of every patch of Afghan territory their guns could cover—but not one inch more”. Eventually, after countless lives on both sides lost to violence and a world war that permanently weakened Europe, the British granted independence to Afghans. However, the domination of great power politics did not fade away. Instead, it morphed into a form that had briefly become a benefactor, when Russians and Americans, in their attempt to recruit Afghans to fight for their causes in the Cold War, offered extravagant aid packages.  In 1950s and 1960s, the two superpowers “constructed over twelve hundred miles of superb paved roads through some of the planet’s most difficult terrain”, which connected “all of Afghanistan’s major cities”. Unfortunately, this relatively peaceful and prosperous era was interrupted by the rise of the communist movement in the late 1960s.   Social unrest ensued, followed by three coup d’etat in the 1970s.  From the upheavals a deeply unpopular communist regime emerged in 1978, whose internal strife soon killed its pro-Soviet leader, Nur Mohammed Taraki, and forced his slayer and successor, Hafizullah Amin, to consider jumping ship to the Americans. The Soviet Union intervened, plunging into a 10-year war from which she would never recover.  Like the British in the 19th century, Russians soon discovered that their war machine could easily crash the Afghan army and state but not the Afghan people.  Frustrated by the tenacious opposition led by Mujahideen (Islam Jihadists), the Russians resorted to a scorched earth policy that aimed at depopulating rural Afghanistan. Their grotesque tactics did little to win the war but unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportion.   According to Ansary, a million Afghans were killed and six million displaced in 1985 alone.

An entire generation of Afghan boys would grow up in the refugee camps and receive education in religious madrassas (schools).  Having suffered through the worst childhood on earth, they were “allowed to imagine that it might be their destiny to establish the community that would save the world”.   From the schools of these refugee camps would rise the loyal followers of Mullah Omar, the founder of the “student movement”, or Taliban (literally means students in Arab).   Under Omar’s leadership, Taliban would win a bloody civil war in 1990s, only to be dethroned a few years later in the wake of America’s anti-terrorist crusade.

The rest is history.

Let me get back to the questions that drew me to this book in the first place. Why didn’t the Afghan people fight harder for their freedom? The short answer is there were two Afghan peoples: westernized urban elites and common folks from the countryside. The “Afghan people” often spoken of in the western media might only refer to the former.  While the elites considered Taliban an archenemy, the masses did not see Taliban’s moral and religious imperatives conflict with theirs.  While the elites were supposedly in charge, they have never gained full control of the other Afghanistan.  Most importantly, when push comes to shove, they had no idea how to “fight the fight and win the war”.

Why is Afghanistan so deeply divided?  As a collection of tribes and ethnic groups that loosely coalesced around an Islamic culture over a tough terrain, Afghanistan is an inherently weak state. This made it very hard for anyone, even the most powerful country in the world, to penetrate through the layers of physical and cultural barriers that historically separate urban centers from rural communities. Without a strong state, most Afghans naturally turned to tribal and religious authorities for such basic state services as security, law enforcement and education. Ansary likened ruling Afghanistan through a puppet government to swinging a pot by grasping its handle: the foreign powers thought they could swing the pot however they wanted; yet, because the handle was never firmly attached to the pot, they often ended up shattering the pot while holding nothing but a useless handle.

The innate weakness of the Afghan state was further reinforced by the powerful legacy of Islam and the recurrent interventions by the West.  Unfortunately, the Islam and the West have long been at odds with each other, and the animosity had only grown stronger in the past century.  As a result, the head of the Afghan state faces a constant dilemma.  On the one hand, as they need the support of the West––money, permission, or both––to secure power and to modernize the country, they must subscribe, or at least pay lip service, to Western values.   On the other hand, they could not afford to alienate the masses who remain loyal to traditional values, or risk being thrown out of the palace like Amanullah.  The balance between the two acts is so delicate that few could make it work, not for a long time anyway.  As a result, modernization in Afghanistan, because it is “foreign” in name and in essence, had actually widened the cultural and wealth chasm between the elites who welcomed the western influences and the masses who continued to resist them.  Any attempt by a foreign power to correct course by direct intervention, regardless of methods or intention, only serves to pour fuel on the fire.

Seen from this light, the Bush plan to rebuild Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion was doomed from the beginning.   On display in that 20-year nation building project, largely funded by American taxpayers, is not so much America’s idealism as her arrogance and ignorance of history.  Biden was right to cut the loss as soon as he could.   In the end, Ansary told us Afghanistan would probably do okay, regardless of who was in charge, if only other countries are willing to leave her alone.   Let’s see if the world will heed his advice this time.

 

胡鑫宇

仔细看了新闻发布会的通告(澎湃新闻),没发现明显的破绽。当然,这个判断的前提是通告里提到的事实没有捏造。大量网民对这些事实本身的质疑一定程度上反映了政府公信力的欠缺。但是,没有大家认可的基本事实,吃瓜群众参与理性讨论的基础将不复存在。

阴谋论支持者的问题是他们除了网上各种截屏,提不出任何有力证据来支持他们的种种理论。提出指控的人需要举证,这是基本常识。有些阴谋论很容易证伪,有些很难;但是很难证伪的阴谋论并不比容易证伪的更靠谱。罗素说,如果我告诉你地球和火星之间有个茶壶在按照椭圆轨道绕太阳飞行,你们看不见只是因为它离太远了,你们该不会觉得我是犯傻吧?(known as Russell’s teapot).

他们更大的问题是没有办法合理解释为什么一个15岁的普通高中生会被想象中权势熏天的幕后黑手相中作为谋杀的对象;当然他们也没有办法解释这个幕后黑手为什么选择这个时间点高调的抛尸;让他永远消失难道不是更好的选择?

每当这类涉及青少年自杀的事件出现疑点,中国网民除了条件反射般地质疑政府掩盖真相,也条件反射般地忽略自杀对青少年的潜在威胁;实际上美国每年死于自杀的人大概是谋杀的两倍还多,在青少年里,自杀已经超越他杀成为非正常死亡的第二大原因 ,研究表明有大约9%的高中生尝试过自杀。在中国,这个数字大概是7%。对胡鑫宇事件更合理的解读似乎应该是青少年心理健康危机的警钟;可惜两千年来对政府的依赖和依恋,让我们习惯了把目光投向政府来进行思考,那里是权力之源,力量之源,信心之源;当然也是一切问题之源。

Idea of History

I learned about R.G. Collingwood and his famous book from a Chinese podcaster who quoted Collingwood as saying, “All history is the history of thought” (in Chinese, 一切历史都是思想史). Struck by the profoundness of the quote, I decided to dig deeper.  Collingwood is known as the most underrated philosopher in history, a reputation largely earned by “The Idea of History”. The book was published posthumously after his premature death in 1943, at age of 53.

By “all history is the history of thought”, Collingwood means history can only exist in the re-enactment of the past in a historian’s mind. The past events are over, cease to exist, and hence cannot be perceived and studied as a real, actual object. Thus, history is knowable only by thinking, and the proper object of history is thought itself: “not things thought about, but the act of thinking itself”.   It follows, I believe, there is no such a thing as the true past, or the real history.  History is idealistic in nature.  Seen in this light, the translation—“一切历史都是思想史” —is misleading. The quote should rather read, “一切历史都是思考史“。

Collingwood believes that a historian must go beyond the materials inherited from authorities.  Otherwise, he is a mere “copy-and-paste” historian. Collingwood goes so far as suggesting history, like novel, is the work of imagination, and in this regard, they do not differ.  The historian must tell a coherent and believable story in which the actions of his characters are justified by circumstances, motives, and psychology.  I suppose Collingwood’s novelistic historian is in sharp contrast with most Chinese historians, who actually praised and cherished the copy-and-paste tradition, sticking to Confucian’s famous precept: 述而不作(pass on the wisdom of the sages without adding anything new to it).

Collingwood argues the purpose of history is to inform the present, by revealing “what man has done and thus what man is”.  Reconstructing the past is always done to know the present and to tell us what to do in the present.  Moreover, the past and the present are the same object in different phases and therefore inseparable: we come to know the present naturally by studying the past, because the past is part of the present.

Collingwood believes all history is biased because everyone approaches history with their own biases. Indeed, if it were not for these biases, nobody would write history in the first place.   He does say a good historian must take no sides and “rejoices in nothing but the truth”, but how much of history is written by good historians?

Finally, Collingwood harshly criticized the “scientific” theories of universal history, i.e., the idea that the progress of human history is governed by some universal law.  Chinese students of my generation can attest this is exactly what we had learned in history classes.  According to Collingwood, the value of these theories “was exactly nil”, and, if they have been accepted by so many, it is only because they have “become the orthodoxy of a religious community”.  He claims only two types of people were still writing universal history at his time: the dishonest attempting to “spread their opinions by specious falsehoods”, and the ignorant naïvely writing down everything they know without “suspecting that they know it all wrong”.

To someone growing up in China where historical materialism is treated as the one and only truth, Collingwood’s idea seems like heresy at first glance.  However, the more I read, the more I agree with him.  Since much of the book was compiled from lecture notes, the experience is close to taking a philosophy course: not exactly fun but worth the effort.