… but that won’t change any minds

It’s now six months since the US-Israel war on Iran began with air attacks which killed the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei as well as around 200 schoolchildren. The war has dragged on a long time. But before that surprise attack, it had appeared that the US planned to rely on naval power to coerce the Iranian regime into submission.

Early in February 2026, Trump deployed a carrier strike group (CSG) to the region, with a second arriving shortly afterwards. This show of force was described (with a striking lack of historical awareness) as an “armada”. The lead ship of that group, the USS Abraham Lincoln, is now limping home after what is generally admitted to have been a disastrous tour of duty.

As many people have pointed out to me over the years, I’m not a naval expert. But I can count. So, when the armada arrived, I checked the numbers and concluded that the threat was a hollow one.

The escorts are critical. They provide missile defence using AEGIS and Sea Sparrow systems, and once their interceptor stocks fall to low levels they must withdraw to be replaced or rearmed.

This creates an arithmetic problem. A Hobart-class destroyer has 48 blocks, each capable of carrying one AEGIS-controlled SM-2 or SM-6 interceptor. Alternatively, each block can carry four Sea Sparrows, but these are less capable.

Standard USN doctrine calls for the use of two defensive missiles against each incoming missile. On the assumption of 100 usable missiles per escort, that’s 50 defensive actions per escort or 200–250 in total. No one knows how many missiles Iran has available, but typical estimates suggest at least 3000, of which 1000 or more could be used in an anti-ship capacity. Even assuming successful air attacks on launch sites, use of aircraft against missiles, etc., hundreds of missiles will pose a threat, and at least some of them will cause enough damage to force escorts to withdraw.

A carrier-based bombing campaign couldn’t be sustained for even ten days without exhausting the carrier group’s defences and requiring the USN to “declare victory and go home”.

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who could count. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (a hawkish and generally navalist think tank) looked at the numbers and concluded that the available force could do some damage but not enough to produce regime change. And, pretty clearly, the US military drew the same conclusion, except for the bit about going home.

Like CSIS, I didn’t expect a massive air campaign beginning with the killing of the top Iranian leadership. But once the full-scale war began, the vast majority of the attacks were made by land-based aircraft. The carrier-based air arm fired most of its Tomahawks from a safe distance, with only modest effects. Iran responded by attacking land bases with a level of success that could have produced a catastrophe if it had been focused on the navy.

The role of the USN was reduced to its long-stated mission of keeping vital sea lanes open. When that failed, it shifted to the secondary task of imposing a blockade on Iran. Unsurprisingly, this has not produced a surrender — no naval blockade in recorded history has forced an adversary nation to surrender without the deployment of land forces.

Meanwhile, it is reported that the costs of the futile campaign have wrecked the Navy’s budget. A Navy official, quoted in the Guardian, says:

The money for payroll was robbed to pay for overseas contingencies and is being backfilled by money that hasn’t been spent. They are backfilling payroll so we get enough money in our paycheck.

More succinctly, a former official said:

They’re fucked. They shot all their weapons; they trashed all their ships; they ran out of their money.

The 2020s haven’t been a great decade for navies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine began with the destruction or capture of almost the entire Ukrainian navy. Then, despite having no navy of their own, the Ukrainians wiped out much of the mighty Black Sea Fleet, with the remnants sheltering in a Russian port as far away from Ukraine as they can get.

The Iranian war began similarly. The destruction of the Iranian Navy was rapid and complete. The most notable feature was the perfidious sinking of a ship returning from a training exercise in India, with the survivors of the initial attack being left to drown, even though their rescue would have posed no risk.

The US Navy suffered nothing more than the failures described above, but that was bad enough. Following the earlier failure to dislodge the Houthis, who now control access to the Red Sea, it is clear that naval forces cannot reliably keep trade lanes open or defeat even a low-level land-based opponent.

But having been through many rounds of this debate, I am confident that nothing will persuade navalists that their beloved flat-tops and frigates are little more than floating targets. Pirates, grey zones, reconnaissance, diplomatic visits, disaster relief and tiger-repelling rocks will all be wheeled out. Still, for any government in serious fiscal trouble (and aren’t they all), reducing the navy* to a coast guard would save a heap of money that would otherwise be wasted.

Anticipating this, I won’t reply to any comments restating points of this kind. If you have something actually new to say, go ahead.

* I haven’t talked about submarines here. The doomsday machines waiting to unleash nuclear Armageddon from the deep ocean floor are too much for me to think about. The ordinary kind, designed to sink ships from concealment, now seem like an expensive way of doing the job of a low-cost missile or drone, and even their invisibility is a depreciating asset.

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, responding to a challenge* to write about the economic aspects of Taylor Swift. Not long after that, the world lost the marvellous Dolly Parton. Parton’s lifetime income almost certainly exceeded a billion dollars, but she gave huge amounts away.

Her biggest philanthropic endeavour was the Imagination Library, which sends free books to children every month from birth to age five. There are currently 3 million children enrolled, and the program has given away over 300 million books.

That didn’t leave Parton poor. Her estate was estimated at $400 million, mostly tied up in property rights of the kind discussed below — copyrights and her theme park, Dollywood. She lived well, in a substantial house on 60-odd acres of land just outside Nashville. But lots of people have substantial houses and, at least for an Australian, 60 acres doesn’t sound like much. More notable was her ostentatious, but deliberately cheap, self-presentation — rhinestones rather than diamonds.

Now for a repeat of the Taylor Swift analysis.

The claim “Every billionaire is a policy failure” is pretty widely accepted these days, formulated most clearly in Ingrid Robeyns’ case for limitarianism (a hard cap on the maximum wealth anyone can have). Looking at the Forbes list of the richest people in the world (one woman in the top 20), it’s hard to disagree. Most are thoroughly objectionable, and even those who aren’t personally appalling mostly made their money from monopoly (for example, Warren Buffett) or inheritance (members of the Walton family).

But what about the good billionaires, a category for which Taylor Swift (ranked about 2000 in the list) seems like the ideal example? Before her, there was J. K. Rowling, but look how that turned out. Swift seems to tick all the boxes. Apparently a nice person (if you ignore the promotional feuds with other celebrities), generous with her money, treats her employees well, politically progressive without being obnoxious about it, and a philanthropist, though nothing like Dolly Parton.

And she’s made her money honestly, selling records and concert tickets to people who want to buy them. Revealed preference arguments need to be treated with care (Tom Slee’s No One Makes You Shop at Walmart is the classic here), but Swifties have plenty of alternatives on offer. At the margin, a dollar spent on Swift is a dollar less for other entertainers, but that’s not a consideration we usually regard as relevant in our current system.

So, if there’s a problem with Swift’s wealth, it’s not a problem with her, but with the system that makes such massive wealth possible. For Swift, that comes about in several ways.

First, the money she makes from selling records and merchandise depends on the system of “intellectual property” (in this case, mostly copyrights and trademarks). Unlike many entertainers, she’s been highly successful in capturing this for herself rather than letting record companies grab it.

Second, her returns from ticket sales to her concerts depend on the availability of stadiums. These are sometimes explicitly subsidised by the public and always dependent on land-use regulation.

Finally, the returns she gets when she invests her wealth are higher than those available to ordinary households. This is at the core of the r > g point made by Piketty a while back.

These compounding effects would be greatly reduced by a more progressive income tax system (a top marginal rate of 70 per cent) and by wealth taxes, capturing the excess returns to high wealth. In combination, these would make it very difficult to become a billionaire by entertaining people. Other measures would be needed to deal with the massive accumulations of corporate wealth represented by the multibillionaires.

Given her dependence on the society that made her wealth possible, Swift can have no legitimate moral objection to a tax system that shares it out more evenly. But is there an economic cost here? The standard story is one about incentives and effort. But it’s hard to believe that Swift would write fewer songs, or perform fewer concerts, if the return were in the hundreds of thousands rather than millions or billions. And, as I already observed, most of the ultra-rich have made their money in actively harmful ways. Even where there is an actually useful product involved, the super-profits have come mostly from monopoly or speculation.

In summary, in a society which produces billionaires, there’s no reason to object to Taylor Swift becoming one. But we could have all the music we need or want in a society without billionaires. Indeed, with policies like a participation income or livable income guarantee, we could see a lot more people making music, some of which might turn out better than what the industry currently gives us.

* In support of my fundraising for the Brisbane to Gold Coast ride against cancer, which was hugely successful. Thanks, everyone!

Yesterday, on my Substack Newsletter, I ran my first gimmick promotion for the Brisbane to Gold Coast Ride against Cancer [1]. I invited anyone who donated $100 to nominate a topic on which I should write a post. Reader Daniela Brins-Norris has taken me up on the offer, and asked for a piece about the economic significance of Taylor Swift. Although this is a bit outside my usual set of topics, readers who know me well won’t be surprised to know that I have spent some time thinking about this and have strong (but weakly held) opinions.

I’ve been thinking about two questions. First, how did Swift become the cultural and economic phenomenon she is now? Second, what does her status as a self-made billionaire say about income distribution and public policy? I’ll write about the first today. If anyone would like to donate another $100, I’ll do the second.

For the first question, I’ll offer some amateur cultural analysis along with a bit of economics. As background, although Swift has had a long and successful career (beginning in 2006 at age 16) there was, until recently, nothing to predict the phenomenon we see now. As of 2015, she could have been seen as first among equals in a group of white female pop singer-songwriters that included Adele, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande and Meghan Trainor. That’s not a genre I follow closely (the female singer-songwriter I really admire is the marvellous Judy Small who is about as dissimilar as possible), but the song from that group I liked best was All About That Bass by Trainor, which seemed to prefigure huge success, rather than her subsequent sequence of modest hits.

Swift’s transformation began in 2021 when she re-recorded her back catalogue, outmanoeuvring the record companies who owned the masters of the originals. This turbocharged her career, setting the stage for the 2023 Eras tour, which turned her from a pop megastar (big, but not exceptional) into a cultural and economic phenomenon, whose tours were sought after by prime ministers and presidents. By this point the relevant comparisons weren’t with her contemporaries but with cultural figures like Elvis, Dylan, The Beatles and Michael Jackson.

As the re-recording episode shows, Swift is an exceptionally good businesswoman. Her success here contrasts sharply with that of the stereotypical 1960s rocker, forced out on the road again because their accountant has looted the bank account.

There’s still a puzzle remaining to be resolved. Taylor Swift has a lovely voice and is a talented songwriter, but, unlike the people I’ve named, she’s not a radical innovator. That’s not true of Swift alone. From the beginnings of rock-and-roll in the 1950s, through heavy metal and psychedelia to rap in the 1970s, radical innovation was the norm. Since the 1980s, new styles have mostly been hybrids and recombinations (acid house , dubstep and so on) or attempts at returning to rock purity (grunge and, before that, punk).

Drawing a long bow, I’d link to this to the decline of the teenager as a central category in music and culture generally. Before the 1950s, the word “teenager” was almost unknown. Young people turned from children at 13 into legal adults at 21, with the “awkward age” of adolescence in between. The advent of mass secondary schooling, followed by the impact of the Baby Boomers produced a large group whose tastes, for the first time, dominated popular music. And since the teen years are short, the demand for something new was ever present.

There’s not much of this left today. Teenagers are once again the subject of adult and parental concern rather than the central actors in cultural drama. The audience for popular music is no longer segmented by age in the way it used to be. This in turn makes it possible for someone like Taylor Swift to build up both an audience and a repertoire over decades rather than years.

That audience maps on to her own career remarkably well. The core group of Swifties is dominated by women aged between 16 (her age when she began her career) and 36 (her age today). Her songs chronicle her own journey through those years, and resonate with her fans. That broad spread makes it possible for her to pack stadiums around the world, even at the eye-watering ticket prices that prevail today,

As I mentioned at the beginning, this success has made Swift a billionaire. As someone who holds the view that “every billionaire is a policy failure”, that raises some questions for me. If you want my answer now, donate here. Otherwise you will have to wait.

Again, you can support me here

How Hegsethian heroes destroyed themselves and their entire civilisation

I haven’t yet seen the Odyssey film[1], but reviews mention a minor obsession of mine, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Greek Dark Age. I first encountered this at the end of Ken McLeod’s Intrusion where the character Geena compares modern nihilists to the mysterious “city burners” responsible for the massive destruction of cities in the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE.

Following this up, I learned that the periodization I was taught in school had been totally abandoned over the second half of the 20th century. In that story, the Bronze Age was succeeded by the technologically superior Iron Age. Progress continued until Roman decadence led to barbarian invasion and the Dark Ages, now more neutrally described as the Early Middle Ages.

Instead, the end of the Bronze Age was followed by a centuries-long Dark Age, with regression much more complete than after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Greek civilisation, centred on the Mycenaean palace culture, collapsed almost completely, to the extent that writing was completely lost. Homer’s account of the Bronze Age was written centuries after the event, and with nothing but oral tradition to go on.

Obvious candidates for the cause were the mysterious Sea Peoples, whom the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III claimed to have defeated around 1187 BCE. This claim was discovered in the 19th century, hadn’t been much discussed outside Egyptology (a point made by Emily Wilson in her highly critical review). In the film, Odysseus admits to his wife that “we are the Sea People” and foreshadows the Bronze Age collapse.

More recent scholarship sees the city burners, whoever they were, as secondary causes of a collapse induced by, and reinforcing, the breakdown of the complex economic structures required by the need for copper and tin to produce bronze. Bronze weapons and armour were the central requirement of the aristocratic warrior class represented by the Acheans at Troy. Climate change, always a suspect in civilisational collapse, also appears as a possible cause.

The eventual emergence of iron as a cheap (though initially inferior) replacement ended the era of the heroic warrior. Iron weaponry produced something analogous to the modern mass army, in which the entire male citizen class was expected to serve (Socrates, for example, was an Athenian hoplite, noted for bravery).

All of this is directly opposite to the pop culture of the American manosphere. Rome wasn’t brought down by the decadence of Nero and Caligula but by the shift of power to what is now Istanbul centuries later. The Hegsethian heroes described by Homer either destroyed their own society (a reading perfectly consistent with the endings of the Iliad and Odyssey) or were brought down by their failure to manage the economy and the environment.

Add in an absurd misreading of Thucydides’ Melian dialogue, and you have the MAGA theory of history.

fn1. I have now, but I wrote this first and saw no need to change it

My son Daniel points me to a piece by Nate Silver which announces the discovery that highly educated workers with low or precarious income are the natural constituency of the Democratic Socialists of America. We’ve been over this at length here and at Crooked Timber, starting as far back as 2012 (and it wasn’t new then). Given that Silver treats the question as new, I thought it might be useful to restate the basic points from this discussion.

• Always and everywhere, controlling for education and other variables, higher income is correlated with rightwing voting
• Nearly always and everywhere, controlling for income and other variables, more education is correlated with leftwing voting<
• Because income and education are positively correlated, these two tend to cancel out
• With the (now only historical) exception of parts of the US, rural voters in developed countries are reliably rightwing
• Because of the history of slavery, civil war and segregation, US, Southern Whites in the US vote like an ethnic bloc, defined in opposition to Blacks. This fact largely accounts for the greater success of Trumpism compared to European far-right parties
• The most important form of identity politics is default identity politics, based on the idea that members of the unmarked category (in the US, white Christian men) are the natural representatives of the country and should therefore run it
• All of these are tendencies rather than uniform rules. There have always been “working class Tories”, “millionaire liberals” and so on

A nearly final observation following from this. As a conceptual tool for analysing voting patterns, the term “working class” is too ambiguous to be useful. It can mean anything from “wage workers in labouring and manual trade occupations” (perhaps 20 per cent of the population) to “below median income” (50 per cent by definition) to “did not complete 4 years of college” (about 60 per cent) to “income not primarily derived from capital ownership” (95 per cent), with only partial overlap between these categories. All of these definitions are useful in some contexts, but in debates over voting patterns they form a hopeless jumble.

And finally a restatement, While I’ve linked all of this to my own posts, I’m not claiming originality for these ideas. Just making the point that Silver is claiming as a discovery something that anyone paying attention could have observed at least a decade ago.

As I observed last year, the statement that “The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” is just as true of nations, and in particular the US. That was a little controversial at the time, but now it’s become sufficiently conventional wisdom to be restated in the New York Times. I’ve been working on an update. and that seems like a signal to get it out

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