Somali Pirates in the Indian Ocean

Until recently most people in the west, particularly the US have thought of Piracy as anomaly of the distant past and rather romantic, (in the persona’s of Errol Flynn, Kirk Douglas, Johnny Depp, etc.)  However piracy has existed (in one form or another) ever since people took to the Sea, and it has taken place in every place where you have craft carrying any form of wealth.  There are many places where it has been rare or almost unknown, but there are other places it has been the norm and not the exception.  The Horn of Africa is one of those hotbeds.  Today you hear most news of Pirates coming out of that part of the world but in reality Piracy of various sorts is common in many places.

This article on TheStrategyPage  is one of the best ones I’ve read dealing with the ‘Somali’ piracy from an economic strategic standing. If you change some of the words and places you could turn that article into one written by Spanish author talking about the Caribbean, or a Roman author discussing the Saxon Shore.

Piracy in general is very hard to stamp out unless the ‘host’ country controls its coastline and wants to suppress piracy.  In fact it may have been easier to suppress it in times past because the tools of the trade were costly and conspicuous (fast ships and big crews and/or heavy weapons.)  Also piracy on any scale is not a lone wolf occupation, you have to be able to convert your booty into ready cash and that takes a pretty sophisticated network.

Another sad throwback that you should note in the article is the rather cold-blooded off-hand comment about the pirates butchering the crews of the smaller African or Arabian vessels they capture.  This was the norm in most times and places, and accounts for the harsh justice dealt out to captured pirates. it was assumed that the pirates had murdered a lot of people before they were captured, or would have if they had gone uncaught.

Piracy has been with us for such a long time because it is not one phenomenon.  At the small-scale end a pirate can be a starving fishermen who has bad catch and reacts violently to a rivals good luck; at the other end of the scale they can be rich nobles or merchants given carte blanche to attack the enemies of their sovereign in undeclared war.  Piracy around the Horn of Africa today (as is typical of most objectionable human activities) is fomented/supported by a mix of elements, with poverty and geopolitics key among them.

One comment I’ve received in writing sci-fi is the frequent reference to space piracy.  Some have found it unlikely that piracy will emerge in space, that the technology is too expensive and the environment too dangerous to make it worthwhile, etc.  But we all forget how vast and dangerous the sea was to our ancestors, and that ships, even craft we would call boats, were once the epitome of technology.  Unfortunately (at the personal level at least) when we establish a complex civilization in space there will be pirates and they will be as bloody handed as they have ever been. 

Yes I am a pessimist in that I do not think that humans or human societies can be perfected in the way that some have dreamed of.  You can perhaps program piracy out of future-sapien and its Utopia but I would argue that the people would not be human as we are human, and that the Utopia would not be a society/civilization as we have today.  And I would expect such a Utopia to be fragile and/or more utterly ruthless than the most bloody handed pirate.

Piracy is a human activity and as long as there are creatures that are human there will be pirates.

Pirates AARGH!!!

I am frustrated with the silliness that passes for wisdom these days.  To much of what is said is based on simplistic assumptions and understandings, with solutions crafted for sound bites not reality. One recent example is the call for more Consumption.  The argument is that we are a consumer economy and that more consuming will by itself drive the economy forward and up.  This seems to be based on a simplistic interpretation of the meaning of what a consumer based economy is all about. 

 In the beginning the early mass production auto manufacturers had it right.  They paid their workers enough to buy the product that they were building.  The rationale was that they could buy the cars(or other products) which required labor and materials:  sheet steel, wood frames, rubber tires, copper wire, iron castings, etc, all of which required labor and materials from a lower level supplier.  Each time the money passed through it was 1) applied in as effective way as possible, 2) stimulated value added labor, 3) Brought more people 4) got people to think of ways to do the job more efficiently so they could capture more profit.  This was the Consumption based economy, an engine of progress. 

But if you think about it the productive effect of a dollar spent on different consumption has vastly different leverage, spend it in Defense to buy a new jet or missile and you get a huge leverage (mostly US parts, mostly special equipment and special designs, high value add.)  Spend it on a Twinkie and its smallish, a few low paid workers and raw materials.  Spend it on a hamburger and its even smaller, spend it on consumer electronics and most of the value goes to Asia.. 

The problem I see with today’s version of the consumer economy is that any consumption is good.  In an economy at full steam that may be true, an extra dollar would go into buying a car, RV or adding value to your home.  But in a down economy most of that next dollar goes to base consumption such as food or buying a DVD or video game only a small fraction of that money goes to drive some version of the cycle above, most of it vanishes into profits and raw materials with very little processing / value add.

Something I said the two paragraphs above is a key reason I think that our economy has not done worse than it has during the great recession (if that’s what it really is.)  Huge amounts of money have gone into buying military equipment over the last five years.  Ninety percent of this equipment has come from US producers and money has leveraged out through the economy.  Now war isn’t a very popular stimulus method but in my opinion it has buffered us from something that could have been vastly worse and has ensured that the money was spent reasonably effectively.

But with the war economy ramping down what comes next.  More Twinkies are not going to get us out of a recession.  We have to find something that has the excitement, mass and leverage to get the wheels of the economy back in line.  I have not seen it yet, but I see a lot of opportunities, which I will talk about in another post.

 I wish that it were some grand adventure like a drive into space, low-cost space access exploration for resources among the near Earth asteroids and the moon, the generation of power in orbit, missions to mars and beyond.  But I can see that as yet the ‘value proposition’  (value / costs) of space is too low to pull a big effort out of government / society which has lost its appetite for (or maybe its ability to sell) risks and long-term pay backs at least for now.