Climate Change, Development, and Conflict

The Journal of Peace Research has a special issue on the security implications of climate change. The issue can be found here, and is open access through the end of February. Over at DoM, Cliff Bob has already posted some (very good) thoughts, and highlights the main takeaway from the issue:

Only limited support for viewing climate change as an important influence on armed conflict. However, framing the climate issue as a security problem could possibly influence the perceptions of the actors and contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That is one takeaway, but Eric Gartzke makes a much more provocative claim: from the perspective of global security, climate change might actually be a good thing. That is, climate change is a byproduct of increased economic activity, increased economic activity is an indicator of increasing wealth, and increasing wealth is associated with a more stable security environment. Or, as Gartzke puts it:

Ironically, stagnating economic development in middle-income states caused by efforts to combat climate change could actually realize fears of climate-induced warfare.

In a series of posts a few years ago I argued that it was not contradictory to believe that climate change was real and would have a non-negligible impact on the planet, but that we shouldn't do anything to stop it. This is true if you believe the costs of mitigation would be lower than the costs of prevention. There are pretty good reasons to think that is true, particularly in the developing world. Gartzke offers another possible worry along those lines.

Winning the Future

The World Is Still Not a Dyad

At the risk of redundancy, I'm wading back into the discussion of China's relative power growth vis-a-vis the U.S. that continues to occupy the IR/FP blogosphere. (I covered the last go-round here.)

Michael Beckley comes back at Eric Voeten, arguing that the answer to "Is American power in decline?" depends on how you define "decline". Beckley says that even if the relative per capita income gap between the two countries is narrowing, the absolute gap is widening, a useful point which is often lost in these discussions. Dan Nexon makes the point that Beckley is almost surely defining decline too narrowly, which is true even though Nexon's characterization of Beckley's argument is less generous than it could be.

But, again, all of this is quibbling over issues that, I think, are peripheral. Here's the question we need to answer before we can start really analyzing the roles of China and the U.S. in global politics: What are we referring to when we talk about American decline relative to China? I see two possibile answers:

1. The bilateral relationship: The ability of China to prevail in a conflict against the United States, or vice versa, or for one side to be able to significantly compel the other to take actions that they otherwise would not.

2. The systemic relationship: The ability of China to alter the geopolitical order that the U.S. has been cultivating since the end of WWII, or otherwise thwart the U.S.'s global ambitions, in a way that is different from the past.

It only makes sense to talk in circles about which statistic more accurately captures the relative bilateral gap between the U.S. and China if we're referring to the first of these. Yet I am quite sure that if I polled everyone involved in this discussion and asked them to offer up a subjective probability that the U.S. and China will war against each other in the next three to four decades, every single one of them would assign a probability very close to zero. This is true for several reasons. First, the presence of large nuclear arsenals in both countries which seem to have had, if anything, a pacifying effect on great power interactions since the Cuban missile crisis. Second, the U.S. and China are interdependent economically in large and growing ways, which also decreases the likelihood of conflict. Third, despite sharing many characteristics with previous imperial regimes the United States has no ambitions towards territorial expansion; neither, historically, has China. Neither have given any indication that this is likely to change. Nor is there any threat that a global Communist/anti-capitalist ideological movement, now more inconceivable than at any point since 1848, will re-emerge to challenge U.S. interests. Not even China wants that.

Therefore, it makes little sense to fret much about a traditional Sino-American conflict. Still, one might think that the ability of one side to coerce the other may be changing with the relative distribution of capabilities. This seems unlikely to me as well. The U.S. has been unable to compel China in a meaningful way for decades (if it ever had that ability); this has been obvious since the Korean War ended in a stand-off, and was codified when the mainland took China's seat on the U.N. Security Council in 1971. Similarly, China has not been able to compel the U.S. to take any significant actions that it otherwise would not. If whatever compellence power the U.S. might have been able to exert against China was defunct by the 1950s or 1960s -- despite the enormous disparity in capabilities between the two -- how long would it take for China to gain that ability over the U.S. even if current rates of growth were sustained indefinitely? Many decades, at least, and perhaps never. It would likely take some major technological break-through, or some other unforeseeable system-altering event. That is, it is inconceivable in the literal sense, and would likely require the destruction of the current geopolitical system as presently constituted. Deterrence capabilities have remained more or less unchanged over the past few decades, although the inclination to employ them may have lessened.

So what we're really talking about is the second of the two choices above. If that's the case, then why do we continue to employ monadic, or even dyadic, evidence to try to reach conclusions about a wider system? As should not surprise regular readers, I am skeptical that China's systemic power has increased very much at all over the past few decades. Yes, China is able to block U.N. resolutions that it doesn't like, but that's been true for forty years. Yes, China is expanding its trade and business networks globally, but mostly by going to places where the U.S. has few interests -- Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. While these investments have yielded some fruit, the process has not been seamless. Yes, China is collecting the world's malcontents -- Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Burma, Sudan, North Korea -- but I'm not sure that's evidence in support of China's growing global clout. More like their desperation for friends of any sort. In any case the U.S. has done fine without close ties to these countries.

China has stockpiled trillions in financial reserves, but seems to have no purpose for them. They haven't been able to use them to buy much influence in the U.S.'s sphere. They haven't been able to employ them on investments that are likely to yield a high return, instead investing in U.S. Treasury bills and GSE securities. Any unwinding of those positions will impair China's growth model, which still depends on a dear dollar, and the erosion of the value of their remaining dollar assets. Those assets, in other words, are more an albatross than an opportunity. And if owning lots dollars makes one powerful, then the country that can create an unlimited supply of them must be very powerful indeed.

What China has not done, and not even attempted to do, is change or overthrow the key components of the post-WWII system: a global U.S. military presence, a series of international institutions, and a set of inter-locking alliance structures that facilitate international integration on security, trade, and finance. In each of these areas China has become more integrated into the existing system over the past few decades, which will make it harder to fundamentally alter that structure in the future. And while they have expressed some interest in marginal changes to the institutional apparatus, they've not pushed for qualitative changes nor have they been able to achieve many of their lesser aims. Nevertheless, China hopes to become more integrated into institutions like the WTO and IMF, not less. China wants more involvement with the other institutions from the G20 to the Basel Committee... this is the U.S.'s playground, and the games played there are played accordingly to the U.S.'s rules. At the same time that China's rise has attracted some countries, it has pushed other countries closer towards the U.S. Arguably the latter -- e.g. India, Japan, Indonesia -- are likely to be more important in the coming decades than those that have moved closer to China, which are mostly a collection of regimes in various states of collapse.

Does China's rise mean that nothing has changed, or will change in the future? Of course not. The rise of Japan and Germany changed some aspects of the international system, as did the waxing and waning of the USSR. It just didn't change the system itself. The question is whether China's rise will be accommodated by the existing system, or whether systemic transformation will take place. If the former is true then the influence of the U.S. is likely to surpass China for the foreseeable future. If the latter is true it may not.

All indications are that the former is true.

If China does continue to integrate into the current system, then that makes the system that much more durable. Which, in turn, further embeds the central position of the U.S. within the system. Which, in turn, could actually increase the power of the U.S. Put another way, the U.S. clearly has more influence over China's trade practices with China in the WTO than it had when China was outside of it.

So it's not about whether GDP growth is a better comparative measure than GDP per capita, or about CINC scores or anything like that. It's about who is better able to influence, control, shape, and mold the global political and economic systems. In order to play game China has had to accept the U.S.'s rules. To the extent that that persists little else matters.

Slower Chinese Growth Could Be Good for the Global Economy

One thing that we hear a lot is that global economic performance increasingly depends on the BRICSAM countries, particularly China which is now the world's second largest economy. If China's astonishing growth slows, this thinking goes, then they can drag down the rest of the world.

That could be true, but it doesn't have to be. There is a scenario in which slower measured Chinese growth is actually good for the global economy, and also good for the Chinese. I do not refer to beggar-thy-neighbor mercantilism, in which the rest of the world expropriates from China, but to an arrangement that is Pareto-improving in aggregate. To see why we just need to remember our Econ 101 national accounting device:

GDP = C + I + G + (X - M)

See that minus sign in there? If China increases its imports without anything else changing then its measured GDP growth would be negative. Yet this would in no way be a bad thing... everyone agrees that Chinese citizens should be consuming more, some of which should probably be imported goods, and many also argue that the macroeconomic imbalances contributed to by China's large trade surplus increases financial instability. Meanwhile, many countries outside of China would like to increase the exports in order to boost job growth. Narrowing the gap between 'X' and 'M' would be a positive for China and for the rest of the world as well. Some of this might be happening. Chinese consumption has been growing faster than GDP, and imports had been growing faster than exports until last month. A prolonged, multi-year trend of this sort would be good for everyone... and would also show up in the data as a slowdown in Chinese GDP growth.  

A broader point is that we often pretend that GDP measures one thing -- the well-being of a society -- when it's really measuring something different -- the composition of economic activity in a society. Well-being can increase under a variety of scenarios including the increase of imports, which drags down the GDP measure. Or GDP could increase in a way that doesn't benefit society, if e.g. the government spends $100mn building a skyscraper then another $100mn knocking it down. Broad measures like GDP are often useful as proxies for other quantities we're interested in, but not always.

Definitely Not Expansionary, Maybe Not Even Austerity

Dan Drezner has a post on whether we are now at a focal point that will discredit the idea of expansionary austerity:

The Greek sovereign debt crisis was another such focal point. Greek profligacy seemed to be a synecdoche for excessive government borrowing and lax fiscal discipline. With the global economy seemingly still in the doldrums, a lot of Europrean governments climbed on the "expansionary austerity" bandwagon. By the Toronto G-20 summit in June 2010, the consensus had switched from Keynesian stimulus to fiscal rectitude. Oh, sure there were mutterings about "short-term austerity makes no macroeconomic sense whatsoever in a slack economy" but even Barack Obama started talking about slashing government spending. 

Are we at another focal point? Consider the following: 

1) According to the New York Times' Stephen Castle, European leaders now seem to recognize that austerity on its own ain't working... 

2) The data is starting to come in on governments that have embraced austerity whole-heartedly, and it's pretty grim. Cue Paul Krugman on Great Britain:... 

3) Even commentators who would be tempermentally sympathetic with austerity are starting to bash Germany question whether it's a solution. Consider Walter Russell Mead:...  

4) U.S. 4th quarter data reveals that, consistent with GOP criticisms, the government has been the real drag on the U.S. economy. Not quite consistent with GOP criticisms: the reason why the government is dragging down the U.S. economy. Cue Mark Thoma:...

Before I get into this too deep, I should just note that I've always thought the accusations of belief in "expansionary austerity" from the Krugman/DeLong wing have always been something of a strawman.  The strongest view I've seen regularly expressed is that fiscal policy has essentially a null effect on growth because of forward-looking rational expectations, or because the central bank moves last, not that austerity will actually lead to expansion. I haven't even seen much supply-side voodoo being expressed lately. Can't recall the last time, actually.

First of all, I'd quibble with the claim that the G-20 ever climbed on the "expansionary austerity" bandwagon. Look at the Toronto Summit Declaration that Drezner mentions. No seriously, read it. There's a lot of language like "Unprecedented and globally coordinated fiscal and monetary stimulus is playing a major role in helping to restore private demand and lending" and "To sustain recovery, we need to follow through on delivering existing stimulus plans". Here's the first thing it says about budget deficits (emph added): "At the same time, recent events highlight the importance of sustainable public finances and the need for our countries to put in place credible, properly phased and growth-friendly plans to deliver fiscal sustainability, differentiated for and tailored to national circumstances."

To be fair, the next sentence advocates "consolidation" for countries with "serious fiscal challenges", but does that sound like doctrinaire Treasury View economics? Not to me, and certainly not for anyone outside of Club Med. And while Obama started talking about cutting government spending as Drezner notes -- not sure "slashing" is at all the right word -- other than token cuts all of the significant stuff was reserved for a few years down the road when the recovery was expected to well in progress. The Obama administration also thought in 2010 that growth was taking off; remember "Recovery Summer"? If they'd been right, it would be time to start thinking about cuts in the shortish-run future.

As for European views, it's possible that some people thought Greece's short run growth potential would benefit from austerity, but I don't remember much of that. After all, austerity is called austerity for a reason. All the talk I heard was about austerity as a sufficiently strong commitment mechanism that donors from the EFSF and IMF could be convinced that their transfers to Greece wouldn't be squandered, nor that they would be embedding moral hazard into the EMU that would encourage future profligacy. Now that may not be the best possible economic strategy, but this is a political game not an optimization problem, and in any case it doesn't follow from this observation that anyone believed that austerity would lead to expansion. The Germans cared about getting their money back, not generating growth in Greece, except to the extent that the two are related (and maybe not even that much). My recollection of the early discussions was that if European leaders believed in any of Krugman's oft-mentioned myths it was the "Confidence Fairy", not expansionary austerity.

And, while we're on the subject, the most recent proposal is for lots more austerity for Greece, with Germany taking over Greece's political system if they can't manage that themselves. It doesn't sound like the austerity consensus is at risk of breaking.

Regarding Great Britain and the United States, I'm not sure that the "austerity has failed" line is all that accurate. Here's Scott Sumner:

Here are the three biggest budget deficits of 2011: 

1. Egypt 10% of GDP 

2. Greece: 9.5% of GDP 

3. Britain: 8.8% of GDP 

A slightly more respectable argument is that the current deficit is slightly smaller than in 2010 (when it was 10.1% of GDP.) But that shouldn’t cause a recession. Think about the Keynesian model you studied in school. If you are three years into a recession, and you slightly reduce the deficit to still astronomical levels, is that supposed to cause another recession? That’s not the model I studied. ...

To get a sense of just how expansionary UK fiscal policy really is, compare it to France (5.8% of GDP), Germany (1.0% of GDP), or Italy (4.0% of GDP). Lots of people blame ECB policies for the recession, but Britain is not in the eurozone. Outside the eurozone you have Denmark (3.9% of GDP), Sweden (zero), Switzerland (1% surplus).

In other words, any "cuts" in spending have to be considered in context. Britain's cuts were from an insanely-high (and completely unsustainable) level to an exceptionally-high (and completely unsustainable) level. You can call that "austerity" if you like, and blame the lack of recovery on it if you like, or you could say that Britain has run historically high deficits in each of the last few years. Which is, pretty much, the opposite of austerity. (In any case, Cameron's administration knew that these cuts would not be expansionary, estimating that they'd cost more than a million jobs over five years.)

Similarly, with regards to the United States, Kevin Grier notes that "Federal spending is still [sic] than 30% higher than it was in January of 2007. State and Local spending is still around 12% higher than it was in January 2007. Is this really austerity? ... Can we really run a trillion dollar deficit and bemoan austerity simultaneously?"

I would tend to answer that question with a loud "No".* "Austerity" does not mean "not spending more on infrastructure". "Austerity" does not mean "not enacting a major jobs program". The U.S. did not continue to use fiscal stimulus at the same rate as the emergency measures taken in 2009, but that doesn't mean there's been all that much retrenchment. We haven't stopped mailing the food stamps. We haven't cut off Social Security payments. We haven't raised any taxes, and have cut quite a few. How is that austerity? Maybe that's not enough for Krugman's your taste -- and in fact I'd support higher deficits right now -- but fiscal transfers are political choices, subject to political pressures. Doing more now implies a greater burden for certain segments of the population later, and Obama's continued pursuit of a "millionaire's tax" and "Buffett rule" and "TBTF tax" and corporate tax reform and international corporate minimum tax just drives that point home.

So upper-income Americans don't have to believe in expansionary austerity to oppose further deficit spending; they just have to realize that when the bill does come due they'll be the ones paying it. They couldn't care less whether the fiscal multiplier is greater than 1 or not, because they won't be getting most of the benefit but will be paying almost all of the cost. Substitute "Germans" for "Upper-income Americans" and you're describing the Euro-crisis as well.

Drezner refers to an austerity "gospel", but I'm not seeing all that many true believers. I see it more as a competition between interests.

*Perhaps ironically, so does Krugman. From the article Drezner links: "True, the federal government has avoided all-out austerity" although he contradicts Grier by saying right after "But state and local governments, which must run more or less balanced budgets, have slashed spending and employment as federal aid runs out — and this has been a major drag on the overall economy". Grier provides data, so I'd tend to believe that he's more right, but Krugman usually doesn't make that sort of error so maybe a more nuanced perspective is needed.

Global Financial Markets FOTD

Major U.S. banks have about $80bn in exposure to troubled European sovereigns, about $30bn of which is protected via CDS. Think $50-80bn is a lot? It is. But remember that TARP was a $700bn program. Remember that the Fed will hold interest rates at zero percent through 2014. Remember that these same five banks control over $9tn (with a 't') in assets. $50-80bn isn't very much for these companies.

Yes, there is still secondary risk from a sovereign default tipping over European banks, which then hold up U.S. banks. That's not nothing at all, but isn't everything either: unless it's a huge event, large enough to take down all the big banks in Europe, then I wouldn't be exceptionally worried about it. And if it's that big then there's likely nothing you can do about it anyway.

The European mess is mostly a European mess. We're not nearly as susceptible to them as they were/are to us.

(ht: @EconOfContempt)

A Debate I'd Like to See

I haven't yet had a chance to read Alex Tabarrok's new e-book, Launching the Innovation Revolution, but judging from this Atlantic precis of it as well as a number of blog posts I'm wondering if we can goad him into a debate with Tyler Cowen. The debate could be had either at MR or some other forum (Bloggingheads?), and could be conducted along the following lines:

The sort of infrastructure investment that Tabarrok wishes to see -- e.g. nationwide wi-fi, more/better airports, a smarter electricity grid -- are intended to harness human capital in an effort to spur innovation. Cowen argues that the innovations we see right now, particularly in the area of information technology, may improve the human condition but do not boost material resources. Given that, it is unwise to invest more of our stagnating resource base on infrastructure investments that will not replenish it.

If Cowen agreed with something close to this proposition he could affirm it and Tabarrok could adopt the opposing side. Cowen has argued that he expects innovation to resume in the future; perhaps as part of the discussion he could more clearly articulate what policies he would adopt to hasten that day.

I'm less interested in the areas where the two agree, e.g. over a massive revision of the regulatory code. I'm more interested in where they do not agree, which seems to include their macro views of the economy and the relative likelihoods of different possible futures.

There Is No Great Stagnation, Only Great Integration

There are a lot of ways to think about what's happened to the flattening of median American income growth. One of the most interesting is Cowen's stagnation hypothesis, which attributes the lack of wage growth to not generating enough job-creating innovation. I like some parts of that hypothesis -- although I prefer to look at changes to political systems and developments in the global economy -- but there have been other things going on as well. One of them is this:

I want to focus on the period ending around 2000. If you go from the early-1970s trough to the late-1990s peak, the U.S. added about 9 percentage points of its labor to the workforce in about 30 years. At current population levels, that's about 30 million people. Even if you go from 1970 peak to the 2000s average, it's about 15 million people or so. Often these would be members of disadvantaged groups, such as women and minorities, whose wage potential would be lower than that of white males that were already in the workforce, so we're adding a bunch of relatively low salaries to our statistics over that stretch.

Looked at that way, it's almost impressive that median wages have been flat. If there had actually been stagnation, median wages would have gone down as more people got added to the labor force at low wages.

Or, instead of looking at median individual wages, we could look at median household wages:

As you can see, until the 2000s we had pretty strong growth that was actually accelerating over time. This doesn't consider everything -- more two-worker households means greater expenses for child care, etc. -- but we generally think employment is good for its own sake. It yields psychological benefits, allows greater flexibility for satisfying preferences and tastes, etc. In terms of social justice, excluding fewer women and minorities from pursuing the good life is also a good thing.

If we're thinking about trends in the U.S. economy over the past few decades we might consider it good news that we've been able to integrate more people into the workforce and that household incomes have increased. That's not stagnation. That's improvement.

This only gets us up to the 2000s, and it doesn't tell us anything about the future, but it's a component of the U.S.'s postwar economic history that doesn't get talked about enough.

It's A System, Not a Dyad

There's a lot of discussion of China's rise and it's implications for the U.S. Michael Beckley published an article in International Security arguing that China's rise over the past two decades has been dramatically overstated. Phil Arena and Eric Voeten criticize Beckley's thinking -- although not conclusively, I don't think -- while Dan Drezner argues that things is looking up for the U.S., Roubini and Pettis argue that things is looking down for China, Chang (again) says China is gonna collapse, while Liu and Chen think China will democratize. Joffe thinks that the U.S. still has time to act to prevent its slide into "Just Another Country" status, while Subramanian thinks that China has already surpassed the U.S. and Rodrik demurs.

That's a lot of different views being espoused by a lot of different people, most of who are pretty smart, all from the past month or two (and most from the past week!). And while I could quibble with a lot of individual points being made by most of them, I'd like to instead shift the focus a little bit. All of these discussions have either been monadic -- focused on internal aspects of either the U.S. or China -- or dyadic -- the relationship between the two and/or the relative gap between them. While these examinations have their uses, in terms of importance for geopolitics we should think of the systemic as well as the monadic and dyadic.

Similar discussions were being had in the 1980s. Back then it wasn't China's rise that threatened the U.S.'s position, but the advance of Japan and other rapidly-industrializing countries. In response to the prognosticators of the day, Susan Strange wrote a series of articles (e.g. here and here) arguing that many folks were missing the point. In response to those complaining that the U.S. was losing its manufacturing base Strange wrote (second link, p. 5), "Is it more desirable that Americans should wear blue collars and mind the machines or that they should wear white collars and design, direct, and finance the whole operation?" To ask that question is to answer it, but then why has everyone lost their breath over the disclosure that Apple products are assembled in outside of the United States? As Strange noted, what it's important is controlling the information and collecting the profit. In fact, the spread of influence of American corporations outside of the U.S. borders and into other countries actually strengthened American power, according to Strange. Think of it as more fingers in more pies.

Rather than focusing on short-term trends in simple metrics like GDP, Strange was concerned with the "structural power" rather than "relational power". Structural power contained four metrics: the ability to exercise control over others' security; control the system of production and trade; determine the structure of global finance and credit; have the most influence over the global stock of knowledge.

Regarding the first, a forthcoming paper in Conflict Management and Peace Science by Cranmer, Desmarais, and Menninga (all UNC folks) analyzes "Complex Dependencies in the Alliance Network" and confirms what one Chinese official recently said (from memory; can't find the reference now), that China has "only one ally" and it's the one that no one would want: North Korea. The United States, by contrast, has robust ties to nearly every major power in the world and is a central member of NATO, perhaps the strongest defense relationship in the history of the world. (In the Cranmer et al paper, see Figure 4.) In terms of traditional capabilities the U.S. far out-paces everyone else too, but it's the structural relationships that really give the U.S. significant influence.

Regarding production and trade, a recent study looking at networks of corporate ownership found a highly-skewed distribution: 147 firms control nearly 40% of corporations worldwide. Of the top 50 firms in terms of "corporate control", nearly half (24/50) are U.S. firms; exactly one is from China, and it's the last on the list (#50). China is the world's largest exporter, but that is an indication of its dependence on the rest of the world for growth rather than the opposite. And remember that U.S. equities have out-performed China's during the past few years. Is China an important global actor in terms of production and trade? Yes of course. Have they become as embedded into knowledge and production as the U.S.? Not yet.

In terms of the structure of global finance and credit, I have a paper (with Thomas, Sarah, and Andy Pennock) that deals with some of this, currently in the revise and resubmit stage. We've blogged about this before too, so I'll refer you to those rather than re-write the whole thing. (Some other relevant past posts are here.) The gist is that China has surprisingly little presence in the global financial system -- as in, almost none at all -- while the structural position of the U.S. is unparalleled. That's one lesson from Eichengreen's Exorbitant Privilege as well, applied to the monetary/currency systems.

Regarding the fourth of Strange criteria -- control of the global stock of knowledge -- it is true that China has been churning out many more students than the U.S. in STEM majors, and that the quality of Chinese education has improved dramatically, but China remains well behind more developed economies in terms of innovation: Of the 100 most innovative firms in a recent study, 40% are in the U.S.; none are in China. In terms of military technology, the U.S. has a lead of decades on China, and continues to dramatically out-spend China in military R&D. That, coupled with the embeddedness of the U.S. within the global security system, provides a huge structural advantage over China.

I could go on, but this should be enough to give you the gist. It's not enough to just look at recent trends in GDP growth rates and conclude that China will eclipse the U.S. within the next decade. The U.S. has spent decades deeply integrating itself into the global economy, financial system, security apparatus, and knowledge networks. Those positions will likely privilege the U.S. for the foreseeable future. It seems likely that China recognizes this, which is why it hasn't begun challenging the U.S. on any significant dimension yet.

SOTU Bingo

Jon Kropko -- UNC poli sci PhD, now at a postdoc at Columbia -- puts together bingo sheets every year for the State of the Union address. Here ya go, but be forewarned: it usually doesn't take all that long for someone to line 'em up, so it pays to be familiar with your layout ahead of time.

(The link is to a pdf containing 30 sheets, with randomized placements of key words likely to be spoken by Obama tonight. Instructions for making your own sheets can be found at Jon's web site.)