The way modern business works, a wide range of retailers charge you less if you swipe a loyalty card so they can engage in some nefarious data tracking schemes. The problem is that I only want to carry a certain number of cards with me on a daily basis. Consequently, I end up paying somewhat more than I’d like to and various retailers end up with less data than they want. Shouldn’t someone make some kind of generic loyalty card that different chains could then sign on to?

That way I could just walk around with one card that I swipe at Safeway, at CVS, at Ace, at Chopt, etc. and everyone wins. Is there some obvious problem here, or should I be quitting my job to make millions in the annoying Kevin Drum industry?

Something to keep in mind when you read stories about the “success” the Irish or Baltic countries are having with austerity and internal deflation, is that by the standard generally claimed here (GDP fell, then stopped falling, then started rising again) we had a huge success with Keynesian stimulus in the USA:

Now since Americans live in America, it’s hard for Americans to focus on that chart and not notice that actually the economy is terrible. Tons of people are unemployed, recent graduates can’t find jobs, and lots of people in their 40s and 50s have taken huge negative hits to their savings. But it’s right there on the chart. Output didn’t tumble and then keep tumbling. Output didn’t even tumble and then stagnate. Output tumbled and then—especially during the ARRA era when we were actually stimulating—it rose again. If this counts as success in Ireland or Latvia, then it’s success here too. I wouldn’t call any of it success, but you need to score these things consistently.

Last week Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan, and Karl Smith were talking about their optimistic and pessimistic forecasts for the future. I take it the goal here is in some sense to forecast relative to the conventional wisdom baseline. So here goes, I am:

— Optimistic about China: I think American commentators have gotten obsessed with “bubbles” and are missing a China that’s (a) steadily growing its capital stock, and (b) determined not to let millions of people sit around idly out of fussy dislike of waste. They could keep growing at close to this clip for 20 years and still be well behind Portugese living standards, and I see no reason why Chinese people should forever be poorer than Portugese. Don’t listen to the haters

— Pessimistic about America: Because we now have well-sorted ideologically polarized political parties, our national institutions of government have become dysfunctional. But precisely because we now have well-sorted ideologically polarized political parties, efforts to point this out end up viewed through a short-term lens and dismissed as special pleading. Meanwhile, those who do see that there’s something wrong tend to daydream about third parties rather than attacking the real issues. Nothing terrible will happen as a result of this, but I think we’ll keep on not fixing our very fixable problems.

— Optimistic about health care costs: People spend too much time looking at wild CBO projections and arguing about politics and not enough thinking about the applications of informative technology to health care that are coming down the pike. If computers can play Jeopardy at a high level, they can also take over a huge share of routine diagnostic work.

— Pessimistic about immigration: The electorate seems to be becoming less sensible about the desirability of foreigners moving here at the same time Mexicans seem increasingly disinclined to risk their lives walking across the desert to live and work here under conditions of persistent legal harassment. The trendlines in Europe look similar, and starting from a worse baseline.

— Optimistic about small developed countries: People don’t talk about it enough, but one of the main consequences of the world becoming more peaceful and the costs of transporting goods falling is that a lot of the traditional returns to scale that used to exist for large countries have gone away. At the same time, I think smaller polities have a much easier time of focusing political attention on delivering adequate and cost-effective public services. A bunch of excellent small countries (Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Finland, Denmark) have temporarily shot themselves in the foot by signing up for the euro but this will pass. Small is beautiful.

— Pessimistic about climate change: Coordinated global action on the scale necessary to avert climate catastrophes is just hard to do. But for a while it looked like all the different clocks were lining up right for action in 2009-2010. It didn’t happen. There’s now just no way mitigation will get done on a scale and timetable adequate to prevent major ongoing dislocations. Human civilization has survived a lot of terrible disasters in the past (look at the 1914-45 period) so I don’t think we’re “doomed” the way some environmentalists say, but people my age and younger are looking at a cascading series of avoidable climate disasters and it makes me angry.

Obviously, it’s in the nature of this exercise that I’m probably going to be all wrong.

It seems to me that circa 2008-2009 or so, the stability of our allies in the government of Pakistan was a key reason we needed to be in Afghanistan. Now it seems to be the reverse. We want the Pakistanis to take on the Haqqani network, but they don’t want to and we can’t make them:

They said General Kayani, who was under great pressure from his troops after the humiliation of the Bin Laden raid, had recovered some ground and recouped some prestige. He has no intention of giving in to the Americans now because he is betting that they still need Pakistan as the supply route for the Afghanistan war, they said.

But the larger reason is a divergence of strategic interests with the United States. The Haqqani network is seen as an important anti-India tool for the Pakistani military as it assesses the future of an Afghanistan without the Americans, a situation Pakistan sees as not far off.

So we’re in Afghanistan fighting the Haqqanis. And the Pakistanis are backing the Haqqanis because they don’t think we’ll stay in Afghanistan. And the Pakistanis are using the fact of our presence in Afghanistan is leverage to resist our demands. It all seems kind of oddly circular.

Brad DeLong offers us another window into the forgotten years of the American economy, when resources pulled out of the residential construction sector were allocated into different sectors:

That’s how an economy is supposed to work. It’s not that no firms go bust, or no workers are laid off, or no sectors are declining. Rather, the idea is that some firms are failing while others are striving. People get laid off then they go get new jobs. And it was working until one day in 2008 when the export and business investment sectors that had been growing suddenly started declining as well.