Psychodrama of the Reformation

Luther's personal demons drove the split of European Christendom. A second post from "Fatal Discord", a double biography of Luther and Erasmus, by Michael Massing.

It is hard to believe, but Martin Luther was ridden with self-doubt. That is what drove him to become a monk, to confess his sins for hours a day, and to search for a way out through the scriptures and other theological writings. When he came across Augustine, he underwent a sort of conversion experience which seems to have led to a decade-long burst of energy, rebelling against the Catholic church and pouring out a prodigious flow of theses, tracts, and books on his new evangelical theology, including a full German translation of the Bible. (It is worth noting parenthetically that in these early days of printing, the pamphlets and books brought out by Luther and his adversaries were easily as intransigent, abusive, and uncivil as our current twitterverse, an atmosphere that may have had something to do with the brutal wars that ensued.)

"Now, in reading Augustine himself, Luther found nothing about free will, good works, or doing one's best. Instead, he found stern pronouncements about human wickedness, divine majesty, and undeserved grace. If Augustine was correct, the selfish urges and prideful thoughts that were continually welling up in him represented not simply his own personal failings, but ingrained features of human nature. As forbidding as Augustine's theology might seem to others, Luther took great comfort in the idea that his fate was not in his own hands."

The issue was free will. If god creates everything, rules all, and sees all time, then how much power do humans have? None, obviously. It was John Calvin who took Luther's position to its full extent, arguing for full pre-destination of everyone's fate, with a decided minority pre-destined (elected) to enter heaven, and all others going to hell. The Catholic church, despite Augustine's influence, took the more practical route of claiming some free will, such that prayer, putting money in the collection plate, feeding the poor, and even buying indulgences, would all be put on the sinner's tab when they got to the pearly gates.

Opening page of Matthew from the Luther Bible, 1534.

It is difficult to run a society without rewards for good behavior, so while the Catholic church did not go the whole way to Pelagianism, it did run a middle course, rewarding (in the next world, at least!) good works, while also holding god to be super-powerful, just not all-powerful. Luther's epiphany that faith alone saves, and that good works count for nothing, solved his personal dilemma, and fueled his world-shaking rebellion. But it also left his parishoners with little incentive to do good works, or even to attend church. Luther was faced with continuing apathy through his later years in Wittenberg, reduced to berating his dwindling flock for its moral and religious laxity.

It was in the peasant's rebellion, starting about seven years after his electrifying theses, that the problems of Luther's theology really became apparent, causing self-doubt and confusion to creep back in, gradually sapping Luther's confidence, productivity, and influence. The peasant's revolt was driven by a new crop of preachers more extreme than Luther. If rebellion against the Catholic church for its worldly excesses and oppression was permissible, why not rebellion against the landowners and lords whose oppression was even worse, and whose theological support far weaker? And if all believers are priests, and all can read and interpret the bible, then why listen to the doctors of theology from Wittenberg? Luther was aghast at what he had unleashed, and turned completely around to support the nobility in this bitter and ugly fight, full of unspeakable tortures and massacres.

Luther continued to collaborate closely with the temporal authorities for the rest of his career, and the Lutheran church became a state-affiliated chuch, ridden with many of the same compromises and theological perplexities that characterize the Catholic church, and which Luther had originally thought he had escaped. The energy of the reformation would re-emerge in the Calvinists, Puritans, Methodists, Quakers, and countless other sects of which there are now many thousands. Purity is always energizing, but neither practical nor defensible in what is, in reality, a godless and complicated world. In the end, the attentive tolerance of humanism regularly turns out to be the better solution.

• Machines are winning.
• Think of the bees.
• Paul Ryan- a fraud, just not a very good one.
• The story of abortion.
• More on Russia and our sleazebag in chief.
• Apparently lying isn't so easy.
• Coding is not for everyone, and is not the same as literacy.

Fight For the Biosphere

The Story of the Earth Liberation Front: If a tree falls.

What is sacred? No one lives without deep values, whether conscious or unconscious. When I recently travelled to a small midwestern town, I was struck by its devotion to its institutions of reproduction- the high school, the church, the football game, the picket fences. Small town American is under perpetual siege from the outside, from the Amazons, Wallmarts, cheap drugs, bombarding media, and changing values. From capitalism in general, though no one would put it that way. Getting young people to stay instead of heading out to the big city or the coast is one challenge. Another is facing a flow of poorer immigrants who do want to come, but who drop the bottom out of the local labor market and are difficult to assimilate. The FOX and Sinclair propaganda channels harp constantly on "traditional values", as though applying a magic incantation against change (even as they and the right end of the political spectrum work to remove what fetters are left on capitalism, and to destroy the public goods & institutions that these communities rely on). No wonder Trump found a fearful and responsive electorate.

But everyone has their god- communists worshipped the sacred revolution, into whose maw millions were fed. And into the bargain had their trinity of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. To others, capitalism is a glowing, sacred value, and to some extent for good reason. The adoption of capitalism in China has brought about the most massive and rapid transition out of poverty, ever. (Even though the means to get there has been ecocidal technology.)

But these major ideologies and religions are weakening in our time. People are becoming disaffiliated with the cultural structures and institutions that used to cultivate sacred values, whether those of explicit religion or of its various modern ideological substitutes. The balance is often made up, on a personal level, by "nature". This is our instinctive and "natural" religion- the groves of the pagans, the auspicious birds and other animal spirits, the awesome scale and impurturbability of the surrounding vista, not to mention our own mystifying biology.

A fairy ring in a wooded grove.

The dedication to conservatism that pervades small town America is deeply in conflict with respect to this deeper set of values, as well as being counter-historical. A mere six or seven generations back, these lands were peopled by Native Americans, before being invaded by pioneers. These pioneers found, in their westward expansion, an undreamt-of natural abundance of game, fertile soil, and plant and wildlife of all sorts, which they promptly set about chopping down, shooting, poisoning, and generally extirpating. The illusion of stasis upon which rural Americans are so intent on staking their politics belies tectonic shifts to their natural surroundings and supporting ecosystem.

For the world is on fire. It is not just the loss of wolves, and the invasion of exotic species, and the relentless spread of pesticides, and countless other piecemeal assults that are degrading what we imagine to be perennial nature. It is global warming that is making nature itself a shadow of her former self. California has been literally on fire the last couple of years. Seasons are palpably shifting. Droughts are spreading. The Arctic sea ice is dwindling. Corals are dying en masse all over the world. Wildlife has been halved over the last half-century. Forests continue to be burned and clear-cut.

Those who see the sacred in nature are deeply appalled and affronted by all this. In the late 90's and early 00's, the Earth Liberation Front formed to take direct action against this desecration, not just by protesting, but by attacking those responsible for the clear-cutting, especially of old growth forests. The Northwest is full of roads that have a thin screen of trees to shield the innocent driver from vast clearcuts hidden behind. What are called "National forests" are in reality more tree farms than forests.

El Dorado "national forest"

The documentary "If a Tree Falls" is a moving story of a fight in defense of sacred values, against the modern Maloch of the timber industry. Whether this fight is noble or not is one of the themes of the piece. But the timber cutters have another set of values, more in line with the conventional property and rapine program of American capitalism, and get to brand the ELF activists as "terrorists".

The irony of the ELF actions is sadly unmistakable, using fossil fuels like diesel oil to burn down the buildings of the forest destruction complex, (i.e. the forest service and the timber companies), which will be immediately rebuilt using yet more timber. The bulk of the film profiles one of the last holdouts from Federal investigation and prosecution, Daniel McGowan. A pudgy, unprepossessing terrorist indeed, he gradually comes into focus as unshakable in his deep sense of sacred values which are in total opposition to the established order. Likewise, the prosecutors and investigators are profiled at some length, embodying their dedication to the values of law and order under the existing system. Yet they are visibly uncomfortable with what those values ultimately stand for and accomplish in this case.

Capitalism is fundamentally amoral, and exists to serve whatever we as private people want to have. It is a tool, not a value system. If we want houses made of wood, it supplies that wood, no matter the incidental cost to public lands and the animals and plants that live there. If we want electrical power, it will burn the coal to supply that power, and transmit it over fragile lines that regularly cause devastating conflagrations in high winds, abetted by global climate heating. We can not blindly trust capitalism to safeguard our long-term interests, let alone our sacred values, from our short-term needs. That is the work of government. And the last people to whom we can entrust that government are those who own and benefit from the capitalist system.

• Conservation vs conservatives.
• Pakistan shows who its friends are.. the Taliban.
• "Free speech" in Europe is a little different than in the US.
• The media is not so great in Britain, either.
• Facebook remains a cesspool. 
• Burn it up. The destruction of social trust favors Republicans.
• Fellow sleaze, in a completely illegal appointment.
• The US excels in diagnosing and treating rare diseases.
• Economic graph of the week... Left cities are economically more equitable, which is perhaps not saying much.

Economic mobility in various cities, vs overall employment growth.

Iran and Saudi Arabia

Modern propaganda and ancient hate.

Frontline has an excellent three-hour series on the conflict between Iran and Saudi-Arabia. They come off like minuature versions of the US and the Soviet Union- superpowers of the Muslim world enmeshed in an ideological and tribal battle that is fought through proxy forces throughout the Middle East, making a hash of smaller countries and making strange bedfellows with the likes of Israel.

The Shia-Sunni split was always an undercurrent in the Islamic world, but was sharpened by the advent of modern fundamentalism. While the Saudis have always been fundamentalist in theory and corrupt in fact, Iran plunged into total fundamentalism with the revolution of 1979. The documentary discusses how sharply this changed the dynamics in the Muslim world, with Iran suddenly vaulted into the vanguard of the fundamentalist movement. This perennial "back-to-basics" feature of religion became a deeply ideological and psychological response to the muddled end of colonialism and the general failure of modernity in the Muslim world. We hear mostly of its Sunni / Salafist incarnation, as ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. But for the Shia, it had an extra edge of tribal revolt against Sunni oppression.

Shia make up roughly 1/3 of Muslims in the Middle East, with populations in each country. They are a majority in Bahrain, though they have no role in the government. That was the situation in Iraq as well until recently. Iran's fundmentalism is sectarian, not pan-Muslim. Thus, despite ethnic divisions, it has been an instrument to unite Shia populations across the region, such as the Hezbolla party in Lebanon and the now-ruling parties in Iraq. Iran's reach is obviously limited by this sectarian character, but they have been willing to arm their friends to the hilt and send their minions into battle for the most dubious causes, especially the Assad government in Syria, which is composed of another Shia sect.

Saudi Arabia is petrified by all this, partly because they have their own Shia population, but more because their own power projection has been so bungled in comparison. They have assiduously funded fundamentalist madrassas and terrorists, and what do they have to show for it? Hatred from the West, yes, but also quite a lot of hatred from their own spawn, such as Osama Bin Laden, whose disgust with the top-heavy, spoiled, corrupt Saudi institutions was emblematic. Their best friend, the US, conquered Iraq and not only botched the whole project disastrously, but left the country in Shia hands. And in Pakistan, one of their most successful test beds of miseducation, does all the fundamentalism add up to a strong state or a good friend? No, it has led to chaos, double-dealing, and misery.

One of the themes going through this story is propaganda. No one in Iran gets Lebanese Hezbolla fighters to die in Syria for Assad without a very heavy dose of propaganda. A bunch of Saudis do not fly into the World Trade Center without lengthy indoctrination. Fundamentalism in general is the triumph of poorly thought-through ideals and archetypal images over reason and basic decency. The Palestinian cause, now in its twilight, was one long piece of performance art- of grievance and rage as policy and, occasionally, power. And the long Saudi / Wahhabi campaign of Jesuit-style fundamentalist eduction has only furthered the weakness and backwardness of the Muslim world in general, not to mention its violence, particularly against women. The record is appalling, but the mechanism teaches universal lessons- that people can be led in disastrous directions by well-crafted propaganda, based on supposedly profound fantasies.

It is something we are learning in the US as well, to our peril. Does free speech mean that private broadcast networks can spew the most pleasing, and scurrilous, falsehoods? Just how much bilge can the internet contain, and not blow up? Conflicts like the one above, between Iran and Saudi Arabia, are made possible by propaganda, which moves people to extraordinary emotion and effort. World War 2 remains a textbook example, with Germany and Italy transformed by deeply emotional, false, and effective, propaganda. We are in the US at a tipping point, with half the population feeling themselves part of the Republican team, whose life support comes from propaganda that seems, at least to this biassed observer, unworthy of any political discourse or intellectual respect, headed by a President who lies so casually and habitually that we now take it as absolutely normal. How can reason and empathy penetrate this jungle of mean self-righteousness?

Returning to the topic, the current administration's support for Saudi Arabia and hatred for Iran is not easy to understand, on the face of it. Saudi Arabia is at least as destabilizing a force in the world and in the Middle East. Both are explicitly fundamentalist, and both seek to export their ideologies abroad. Both are sources of oil, though the Saudis have far more and play the lead role in world oil prices. We do not care that much on our own behalf anymore, but have strong interests in keeping the oil infrastructure (political, military, and physical) of the Middle East intact on behalf of the developed world, for much of which (Europe, Japan) we have explicit defense responsibilities. So sure, we want to be friendly with Saudi Arabia and continue to have military bases in the area. But we have interest in friendship with Iran as well, which has far greater human and intellectual potential. Both countries have a fraught relationship with Israel, though Saudi Arabia has of late been much more accommodating, in its cynical and conservative/authoritarian way. But Iran's problems with Israel seem similarly superficial, just a way to gain credibility with the Palestinians and other disaffected Muslims. And our own difficult history with Iran, and their vitriolic propagada against us, is hardly reason to fall in line with Saudi Arabia's sectarian program. It would be better to turn the other cheek, as the Obama administration started to do.

If the struggle for supremacy in the Middle East were prompting a flowering of cultural, scholarly, and scientific advances, that would be one thing. But the reality is far more tawdry, where the Saudis just buy more arms from the US to dump on Yemen, and Iran coopts and arms Shia communities in the neighborhood, destroying Lebanon in the process, and bidding to do the same in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. The collision of irrational ideologies, served by up-to-the-minute propaganda methods, run by governing structures ranging from dysfunctional to medieval, is a toxic brew not likely to enhance the culture or living conditions of those in the region any time soon.

• The next level for propaganda.
• What happens when police don't care.

Too Damn Many People

We are in a population crisis.

Virtually every serious crisis we are experiencing now, from anti-immigrant attitudes, to climate change, lack of housing, homelessness, inequality, warfare, drought, desertification, traffic, scarcity of natural resources, and loss of wildlife, share a common root cause of overpopulation. Like any wonderful thing, it is the dose that makes something great turn into something less great.

The top line of damage is of course environmental destruction. In the last 50 years, the population of wild animals has fallen by half. CO2 in the atmosphere has doubled, which promises an eon of pain for the biosphere. The oceans are awash with trash, and all habitats from the arctic, to prairies, coral reefs, and rainforests are either being directly destroyed by humans and / or are being impaired indirectly by our global effects.

Summer arctic sea ice in dramatic decline.

Politically and socially, the idea that Europe should welcome millions of refugees from Africa and the Middle East, driven themselves by environmenal degradatation and overpopulation, and the conflicts they generate, is creating an understandable backlash. Just as global heating is reducing water and arable land, populations are growing all over these regions due to a modicum of medical and agricultural technology, combined with lack of human development. But is further human development the answer? From an environmental perspective, hardly- while development typically reduces birth rates, it explodes appetites and capacities to degrade the ultimate resource- the Earth- its minerals and biosphere.

An example is China. China carried out one of the most important environmental policies of all time when it instituted the one-child policy. It was, thanks to its draconian nature, effective in keeping population growth under control. Now China has a billion more people than the US, but it could easily have been two billion, in far more miserable condition. It played a big role in enabling the ensuing economic development, which has made China the biggest emitter of CO2 in the world, and generated countless other environmental problems, of global as well as local scope. They are building coal-fired power plants at a breakneck pace, and will be almost doubling worldwide coal-fired power capacity over the next decade or two. This is not driven by population, but by development of existing populations.

We are living far beyond the carrying capacity of the Earth, and our long-term choice is to either live sustainably or to have fewer people. Both seem impossible options, given that true sustainability is far more arduous than what any country has attempted to date, and is very hard to envision. Carrying capacity has many different aspects, from aesthetic features that come with a healthy biosphere, to critical minerals, water supply and agricultural capacity. Each of these has different relations to human population, and different elasticities based on our needs and technology. But we can safely say from the many ways we are degrading the global environment that we are well beyond many individual capacities, especially those that pertain to the biopshere in general, and animals other than ourselves.

Population is unfortunately, precisely the area where we care least about others. Our desires for family and legacy are very personal, often construed as a human right of some sacred or sovereign nature. But summed over the globe, it amounts to another tragedy of the commons, where my chastity merely makes room for someone else's profligacy.

There is no population bomb in the traditional sense. The agricultural technology we have, and the economic systems that drives its use, will insure all can be fed to some degree. There is a bomb, however, in a larger environmental sense. The degradation of the biosphere by humans is a slow-motion attack, as though several nuclear bombs were unleashed every year, rendering large areas uninhabitable, and sprinkling the rest of the globe with all sorts of trashy, choking fallout. These bombs are going off steadily and silently, year in and year out, till we will end up living in a global trailer park.

• Sectarianization?
• Economic injustice? We are great again.
• Very little wage growth here. Economic graph of the week:

A Cosmos of Fear

Not Your Father's Star Trek Federation: Cixin Liu's dark vision in "The Dark Forest". (Warning: Spoiler alert)

After slacking off most of the book, Luo Ji gets down to the business of saving humanity in the last couple of chapters, even as he is spat upon by his beneficiaries as a false prophet. It has not been easy for the wallfacers project, which Earth developed after learning not only that there are extra-terrestrial aliens, but that they are intent on taking over Earth, and are also listening in to everything humans are doing. The idea was to nominate a few super-people to think and scheme in the privacy of their own minds, where the Trisolarians (aka Alpha Centurians), couldn't listen in. Sure, this involves a total lack of accountability. But on the other hand, it is humanity's only hope for secure strategic innovation. Sadly, Luo Ji's three colleagues have either committed suicide or disgraced themselves with schemes bordering on insanity.

Luo Ji's strategic insight is borne of a shockingly negative view of how intelligent civilizations would operate and relate in the greater cosmos. It incidentally offers a fascinating and neat hypothesis to the question of why we have never detected, let alone been visited by, aliens. The hypothesis is that natural selection operates in a particularly brutal way among rapidly developing, and far-distant civilizations. Communication is essentially impossible due to the distances involved. Yet the technological scope of civilizations that have a billion or two years on us is still remarkable, including missiles made of strong-force matter, vastly harder than regular matter, missiles capable of destroying whole stars, star-based amplification of messages that can easily be heard by the entire galaxy, and manipulation of sub-atomic / string theory dimensions to create protons with special computational and communication properties. The upshot is that a civilization can grow to highly threatening capability before others even know of its existence. All civilizations at some far level  of advancement are mortal threats, in principle, to others they know about, and given some with fewer scruples, some of them will simply extinguish any local threats they learn of, before asking too many questions.

Thus the cosmos becomes a very dark place, where announcing your existence is tantamount to a death sentence, there being far, far more advanced civilizations always listening and on the lookout for either room to grow, or just threats to their own comfort and security. Nothing could be farther from the positive vision of Gene Roddenberry, which, admittedly, was developed out of a social agenda rather than a study of galactic sociology and biological imperatives.

What is one to think of all this? Firstly, much of the science underpinning this vision is fictional, such as star-killing technologies, and matter manipulation at theoretical or inconceivable scales. Secondly, insofar as the model is biological evolution, it takes far too dim a view of the possibilities and benefits of cooperation. Evolution has shown countless times that there is room for cooperation even amidst the struggle to survive, and that cooperation is the only way to gain truly vast benefits, such as from multicellularity, eukaryotic organelle specialization, and human sociality. Thirdly, we also know from our strategic games with existentially destructive weapons, such as is presently playing out with North Korea, that deterrence rather than offense becomes the principal goal among those having achieved such powers. Would deterrence work in cosmic game theory? It is a problem, since, given a star-killing capability that takes many years to travel to its target and presumably could not be detected at launch or perhaps even at close proximity, offense might happen with impunity. (The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across.)

But perhaps the most persuasive argument is simple morality- that despite the cold logic Cixin Liu develops, intelligent beings of such vast sophistication are probably more likely to wish to learn about other civilizations than to destroy them, whether out of boredom or out of a Prime-Directive kind of respect and interest. It is sort of unimaginable, to me at least, that the explicit goal of any advanced civilization would be to sterilize its environment so completely, even if unadvanced human history does offer that as a common, blood-drenched, theme.

• Toles on the maelstrom.
• Noonan, defending the indefensible.
• Do we want open borders? Not if we want a welfare state and other public goods.

What if Coal Were All We Had?

What if there was no renewable energy, or sustainable options to keep advanced civilization afloat?

I was reading an article about coal country, and the tradeoffs, dreams and delusions surrounding it, when it struck me what a different position we would be in if coal was all we had. Our civilization floats on a miasma of oil, gas, and coal, with some nuclear and hydropower thrown in. Wind and solar are growing, but fossil fuels make up 80% of energy resources, and will for years to come, especially as India and China continue to commit to more coal-based power. For all the oil we guzzle in transportation, heating, chemicals, and other uses, we use more than twice as much coal, to the tune of roughly ten billion tons per year.

But what if we lived in an alternate world where we did not have fracked natural gas, or renewables, or even oil? What if coal were all we had? Our industrial development would be a different place, clearly. Though World War 2 demonstrated that one can make practically anything from coal that can be made from oil, the processes are quite a bit more difficult. We would have more trains and streetcars, and fewer automobiles. More importantly, though, we would be facing much different choices in global warming, and pollution generally.

We would be in a world more like Victorian England, and contemporary China, where coal pollution is choking. The irony is that installing scrubbers to take out the most noxious pollutants, not to mention sequestering the CO2, is very expensive, not only in financial terms, but in energy terms, wasting even more of the fuel that in this world would be so precious. Coal would still be a limited resource, with a time horizon of maybe 200 to 300 years in all. Foresightful planning would regard this as an extremely precious resource, if not substitute were available, ever.

So from both the foresight and the pollution standpoints, we would be forced to conserve energy- that would be the solution to such a noxious resource. We would be much farther along in taxing carbon/coal to reduce usage to amounts consistent with local human health and future global health, even if strip-mining it were cheap and its many local costs acceptable. Hopefully, natural beauty would not be a distant memory in such a world, if we made these decisions in time- a time much earlier than we have the luxury of doing today. Would the human population be as high as currently? Given that the poorest areas of the world typically have the highest population and population density, that is quite likely. We would just all be poorer, crimped by a resource base that would be dirtier and scarcer than the one we have today.

Thankfully, we have a much brighter future in reality. In the developed world, pollution is not an in-your-face threat to human existence, but rather an invisible, subtle menace that needs to be met with responsibility and foresight if we wish to preserve much of the natural world that we evolved in, and have known in our own lifetimes, intact.

• Notes on the moral conservative perspective.
• For-profit health insurance destroyed everything.
• And then corrupted everyone.
• Mainstreaming alt facts and alt media.
• I am inherently patriotic.
• And Russia is my best friend.
• Oh, no! A pot shortage!
• Wages are not a normal economic concept.
• A beautiful take on Harry Potter, from Japan.

The Rich Get Richer

Inequality is immoral and unjust: Review of "The Anatomy of Inequality: Its Social and Economic Origins- and Solutions", by Per Molander

Second only to global warming and our vast debt to the future of the biosphere, inequality is the most pressing issue of the day. The two issues incidentally interact, since the slide towards inequality has correlated with a glaring lack of care and empathy by the upper classes, not only towards their fellow citizens and humans, but towards all other life on the planet.

This book is the third of a powerful triumvarate of recent analyses of economic inequality, and of them perhaps the most profound. Its point is very simple- that inequality is absolutely intrinsic to our socio-economic relations, and proceeds naturally to extreme levels unless stopped by special political or social interventions. Inequality is not fair, it is not reasonable, just, or virtuous, but rather is a mechanistic and inexorable consequence of game theory, by which, as the title and the saying have it, the rich get richer.

Life is full of negotiations- with family members, with sellers of products, with employers. Not all negotiations are obvious, but when we are faced with a difficult choice, there is probably some kind of negotiation at the heart of it, influenced by other people. A paradigmatic negotiation is for a job. A seeker has labor to offer, and an employer has money to offer in return. What is the employer's need for labor vs the seeker's need for money? Already one can see a deep asymmetry at work. Add selective secrecy that hides the pay of other employees, an entire department of people devoted to getting the best deal for the company, and a social hierarchy based on seniority, and the result is clear- a lot of underpaid employees.

In negotiations, the more powerful / richer party is substantially advantaged. The employer may not only have the advantages above, but also have political influence to engineer other non-market advantages, from H1B visas to union-busting legislation and regulation (or non-regulation). This process was far more stark historically, obviously, as kings and other nobles gave themselves ownership of all the land, and made peasants into serfs. The advantages of a strong pre-existing negotiating position are so persistant that, in the natural state of affairs, inequality inexorably goes towards infinity, with the only limit being the dominant party's interest in keeping the whole iniquitous system going. As Molander puts it:

"There is no reason to believe that people in hunter-gatherer cultures have a different constitution or capacity to exert moral pressure that would curb the power of a ruling class. These societies are egalitarian quite simply because there is very little room for inequality when a society is close to the subsitance level. In societies with a larger suplus of goods, what restricts the power imbalance between the affluent and the impoverished is the former's interest in keeping the latter alive and reasonably fit for work."

Herein lies the two-income trap, the stagnation of wages over the last few decades, and the increasing share of wealth and income going to capital in the US. It is a mechanism analogous to natural selection, both of which amplify the smallest differences (or vagaries of fate and luck) into existential propositions. In any negotiation about economic issues, the person with a bigger cushion of money is better off, even when all other aspects are identical. Who needs the money more and will give in first? Clearly the person with less of it. Who is better able to take investment risks, and get higher long-term returns, even at the expense of volatility? Again, the one with more money. Having money, whatever its source, is like having the wind at your back, giving rise in turn to more money, higher status, more opportunities, and better bargaining positions vs others, and thus widening inequality.

While we in this new gilded age are nowhere near medieval serfdom, we hardly exist in a fair system, either. Take the example of Bill Gates. Smarter and more productive than your average person? Yes. But 80 billion times more? Probably not. His (borrowed) operating system was, even at the time, hardly the best available. But he parlayed a lucky industry paradigm and a strong but bumbling partner- IBM- into the world's biggest fortune.

Now, for all the money he is giving away, he can't help but make billions more each year from investments. Can you or I stand back and have billions come in the door? Probably not. Such passive income, derived not from investment risk (given the wealth backing him up, there is zero risk to practically any financial action) or from accumen (which can be purchased), is almost purely parasitic on the labors of everyone else in society. Add in the ability to bequeath this horde to his children, (think Paris Hilton, and the Republican obsession to eliminate estate taxes entirely), or to use it to derange our political and social system (think Kochs, or Mercers) and the corrosive nature of this concentrated and unearned wealth is obvious.

Historically, there have been several solutions to this ratchet of inquality. Catastrophes, such as plagues and wars, have been great levelers. Our own Depression, World War, and Cold War era was when many large fortunes dissolved and the stage set for several decades of low inequality and general prosperity. But in normal times, the ratchet of wealth accumulation runs inexorably and unfairly. Molander mentions the Jewish tradition of a debt Jubilee, which reset land ownership and debt bondage in Israel every 50 years. Outright revolution is another method, such as experienced in France and Russia, or the various democratic / demagogic episodes in Greek history. Or on a more modest scale, land reform, which shares out what was previously held by large landowners.

Molander notes that constitutions and social constracts are of limited help against this natural process of differentiation, which in his engineering terms is a positive feedback. We need more dynamic, negative feedback social mechanisms to resolve this fundamental economic and social injustice. The end of his book is taken up with peans to the social democracy of his native Scandinavia. But one problem is that social cohesiveness is both a product of, and a precondition for, substantial economic equality. We can not wait around for the number of social democrats in our national instutions to exceed one. As previously discussed, we in the US used to have, around our founding, the conditions of rough equality, which led in large part to the enlightened consitution and unwritten institutions we cherish and have benifitted by so much.

But now we don't, and our conditions, barring some unwelcome catastrophe, are trending strongly in the wrong direction. We need a new institutional structure that fights systematically against the natural ratchet of unequality. This would be something like the Federal Reserve, which has numerical targets that it is structured to hit in its management of the macroeconomy. For the Fed, this is the interest rate, of 2%, plus other goals of financial stability and (a very distant third) high employment. The Department of Economic Justice would target a basket of goals, including the Gini index (about 0.3), and employment (an unemplyment rate of nor more than 4%, or 10% in broad measures), and wealth distribution (no quintile owning more than the twice the next-lower quintile).

There are many tools that can be used to hit these targets. But it is significant at the outset that explicit, ambitious, and sustaintable targets be set. Some inequality is a good thing, fostering human development, work, and innovation. But too much degrades economic prosperity, and far more importantly, our social and political environment. The Department of Economic Justice may not have direct powers, perhaps only to report on conditions and propose legislation and regulation. Or it may have regulatory powers, such as for antitrust and fee or tax-based regulation of the financial industry. There are many available tools, from the obvious like taxing high incomes and taxing wealth directly, to financial transaction taxes, raising minimum wages, dramatically increasing public goods and infrastructure, and providing a job guarantee, which help raise the floor of economic conditions.

Molander provides a crucial service in reframing the inequality phenomenon as one that is natural and inexorable, but also mindless and unjust. The Galts of the world have very rarely invented the steel on which their fortunes rest, let alone the fortunes which their fortunes in turn make on a passive basis. We do not have to collectively put up with it.

• Object lesson in the brutality of power inequality, in even small amounts.
• Workers are underpaid.. what else is news?
• Some great signs.
• Honestly, are we capable of self-government?
• News from Afghanistan, cont.: corruption rampant.
• Reflections on truth.
• Stiglitz on a modern welfare (or, perhaps, fair) state.
• The last mask is off. The tax give-aways go to the rich and to Trump, not to his voters. But maybe they don't care.
• Which makes Trump "perfect".

Fighting the Civil War, Over And Over Again

Reflections on the election.

There- we have had our election, and the rednecks (and orange haired) won. Why the bitterness? Why the perpetual lack of understanding of what the other side values and thinks? Why the deep differences of values in the first place? Coalitions may have always been fluid in the US, but the divides between North and South, and between rural and urban, have been relatively durable. There are differences of interest, of upbringing, of tone, and education reflected in this geographic segregation. It is a typical path for any promising young person to leave the country, go to college, and make a new life in the urban, elite centers, forsaking and perhaps even repudiating the culture she or he sprang from.

On top of that rural/urban, or heartland/bicoastal split is the North-South split, which is more cultural in origin: the culture of slavery, to be specific. The many poisons of slavery- its devaluing of humans and casual terrorism, its terror of disruption of a hierarchical social order, its lazy economics of privilege and stasis, its pathetic, patriarchal, and false romances of militarism, chivalry, and the lost cause, seeped so deeply that we continue to fight the Civil War, over and over and over again.

Many cultures have drawn durable victimization narratives from traumatic loss, such as the Muslim Shia's defeat in the battle of Karbala in 680, or the Serb defeat in the battle of Kosovo in 1389, or the Jewish episodes of slavery in Egypt, exile in Babylonia, and final loss of Jerusalem. Such narratives tend to be pathetic, racist, romantic, unrealistic, and for all those reasons, highly effective.

It is evident that politics is conducted in narratives, not policy. Hillary may have had her 23 point plans, and they surely would have served Trump's voters better than Trump's own policies, which as far as we can tell, consist of giving lots of money to rich people like himself, (no wonder he isn't taking the salary!). But the media decided that the email controversy was a better hook with which to explore her personal narratives of secretiveness and control. How they squared this with a bemused attitude towards Donald Trump, who was actually in court for fraud, among a countless other number of obvious scandals, is hard to understand. The media clearly did not understand the nature of Trump's methods or message. This, after two decades of FOX news.

In the absence of narratives on the scale of world wars, which did so much to unify the country in the 20th century, the US political system is structured in a particularly bad way for a politics of emotional narratives. Our two-party, winner-take all system amplifies very small differences into momentous swings in power, focuses campaigns on only a few swing states and small populations, and sets the two parties as a duopoly that excludes new ideas / narratives and rheifies a binary tribal split in the electorate.

So, the perpetually disgruntled South makes a reliable partner in the modern Republican party for the CEO and financial class, united only in their fear of progress- social or regulatory, respectively- towards a modern state that would foster a fairer, more equitable nation by ameliorating the ravages and inequities of the free market, and the inherited social and economic disabilities that keep the class and racial structure so entrenched.

Barack Obama almost sank his first presidential campaign when he was recorded as saying that the rural folks cling to their guns and religion. It was a classic gaffe- as impolitic as it was true. The divide is real. Is the distain deserved? As a liberal atheist in favor of gun control, my natural inclination is yes, it is deserved. This election proves it yet again, that a tasteless, racist, and shallow blowhard could propose a set of policies almost totally at odds with the interests of his voters, not to mention the country and the world, yet win on narratives of hate and revanchism.

Is the distain from the other side deserved- that the US has become a feckless, feminized country of politically correct pansies? Are the elites incompetent? Yes, that has its truth as well. Just looking at the state of public management, where public employees get over-generous pay and pensions, as though the last forty years had never happened, yet accomplish so little, which is apparent as sclerotic breakdowns of public institutions and infrastructure, and the impossibility (or astronomical expense) of building anything new. It is an easy, perhaps lazy critique, but our infrastructure is symptomatic of a nation whose public policy is not keeping up with public needs, or an optimistic, future- and growth-oriented outlook.

All of which does not justify this step into a political abyss, however. Does progress in reason-, law- and process-based public policy necessarily end up in gridlock, as an excess of process and attention to every possible stakeholder, including corrupt interests and non-human species, extends decision times to infinity? No, it is the political gridlock that is far more damaging, since where there is a coherent will, there is a way. With the (white) South firmly in its pocket due to a hermetic social and media atmosphere, and supporting regressive policies in general, the Republican party has now spent decades as the party of shameless, regressive, and especially, destructive politics. It is an inheritance from Newt Gingrich, and from Roger Ailes at FOX. The refusal to consider Obama's last Supreme Court nominee was the epitome of partisan depravity. The Bengazi investigations were a witch hunt in the purest sense, and have now at long last paid their final dividend.

It is worth noting that during and after the Civil War, the Republican party (what a different party, then!) led a surge of progressive public policy, from land grant colleges and banking to railroads. The nation was suddenly unshackled from the political weight of the South, and though the necessities of war had their dramatic effects, the philosophy of the Republican (prior Whig) party were also an important ingredient. One wonders what might have happened had the South succeeded in its secession. We might have become a spectrum of Americas from the progressive and industrial Canada and Union nations to the more feudalistic Confederacy and Mexican nations.

• We are now a banana republic.
• Krugman, horrified.
• A little history.
• Globalization needs a rethink.
• It has been harder to find a job and switch jobs, as companies have more power in the labor market.
• Even Japanese workers have little bargaining power, despite a tight labor market.
• Who needs banks? The next economic institution of security: blockchain.

Animals Don't Care about Global Warming

It is entirely a human problem.

Global warming is the biggest problem of our time and the next one too. The icons of this problem may be the stranded polar bears, the ravaged coral reefs, the species ranges moving steadily northwards. But what do the animals think about this? Not much, really. Only we have the conscious scope and appreciation of future and past to recognize what is happening. Only we can stand back in awe and horror at what we ourselves are doing, and deem it bad.

Stranded polar bear.

So while the problem of global warming affects the biosphere, killing off species and decimating ecosystems, it is only we who can care about it. Whether our care focuses on the harm that this heating is doing to us directly, via hotter living conditions, drought, impaired agriculture, disease, war, etc., or whether our care focuses on other aspects of the biosphere that we appreciate from a more aesthetic and nature-loving perspective, it is all on us.

Back when we were killing off the North American megafauna, humans themselves probably had almost as little consciousness of what they were doing as the animals they were killing. Except, perhaps, for a twinge about hunting out one area and having to move on to the next, a process that may have encouraged the remarkably rapid settlement of the Americas clear down to Monte Verde.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde

But now things are different, and the cultural, political, and economic divide comes down between those who do not want to look and those who do, and who see devastating loss. The temptation of keeping our consciousness under wraps, and of denying our hard-won conception of the vast reality around us so that we can consume endlessly and reproduce geometrically, is hard to fight, when all the other side has to offer is an aesthetic, pro-nature and pro-posterity viewpoint.

• Are climate voters pivotal in this election?
• Past annals of climate change.
• Who's carrying those pitchforks?
• Gun nuttery reductio ad absurdum.
• Could central banks take over all basic banking?
• And who needs monetary policy anyhow?
• In-depth on Turkey and the Gülenists.
• But is it treason?
• Which side is Hillary on? At least she's not on Putin's side.
• Can we keep going down the capitalist road? The problem isn't capitalism per se, but the capture of the media, culture, and politics by its winners- the 1%, which leads to an unwillingness to regulate it properly.
• Tobin tax, Si!
• Our egghead in chief.

This is Progress?

We are eating ourselves out of house and home.

Werner Herzog made a documentary about Chauvet cave, the respository of spectacular cave art from circa 31,000 years ago. One striking aspect is that virtually all the animals pictured there, and whose remains are found there, are extinct. The aurochs, cave bears, steppe bison, northern rinoceri, cave lions, cave hyenas- all gone. These are animals that had taken hundreds of thousands, if not millions years, to evolve, yet a few tens of thousands of years later, they, along with the mammoths and other denizens of countless prior ice ages, are gone. What happened to them? We killed and ate them.

We then proceeded to raise human populations through agriculture, and carve up the Earth's surface for farming. We have been clearing competitors continuously, from wolves and lions, down to insects. After a false start with overly destructive DDT, agriculture has now settled on neonicotinoids, which, while less persistent in the food chain, have created a silent holocaust of insects, resulting in dead zones throughout agricultural areas, the not-so mysterious collapse of bees, and declines in all kinds of once-common insects.

Similarly, the oceans have been vacuumed of fish, with numerous collapsed and collapsing populations. And topping it all off is climate change and ocean acidification, which is gradually finishing the job of killing off Australia's Geat Barrier Reef, many other reefs around the world, as well as terrestrial species at high latitudes and altitudes.

Have humans made progress? We have, in technical, organizational, and even moral terms. But while we pat ourselves on the back for our space age, smart phones, and hyper-connected intelligence, we also live on an ever-more impoverished planet, due mostly to overpopulation plus the very same develpment we value so much. Institutions and ideologies like the Catholic church who continue to see nothing wrong with infinite population increase in a competitive quest for domination by sheer, miserable numbers are, in this limited and declining world, fundamentally immoral.

The US, after its destruction and displacement of Native Americans, has grown up on an ideology of open frontiers and endless space. But now the political and social ramifications of overpopulation and overdevelopment are beginning to be felt. Trumpism is one reaction- the visceral feeling that we just do not have the room any more, given our unwillingness to develop the requisite infrastructure, and our evident environmental degradation, even in a relatively sparsely populated country, for millions of further immigrants.

Economic inequality is not directly associated with this deep underlying Malthusian trend, since humans can degrade their environment under any economic regime- socialist, capitalist, or Keynesian. But it does provide a metaphor, with us humans lording it over our fellow creatures on the planet. Creatures whom we frequently invoke in our art and spiritual rhetoric and claim to regard with caring stewardship, even humane-ness. But then we keep killing and mistreating them anyhow.

We need to take sustainability seriously, both in terms of human populations and stewardship of the planet generally. E. O. Wilson has advocated for returning half our land to the wild, for the creatures that need it so desperately. This would be a supreme act of generosity and abstention. Though not even enough, in this age of global warming, it is part of the answer towards true sustainability.

• Was agriculture a mistake overall?
• Laissez-faire in debt collection.
• Brazil's crisis was about corruption. But whose? And what happens to the Amazon now?
• Is Trump unacceptable, or acceptable?
• China's economy is in some disarray.
• Capitalist indoctrination really works.
• Republican pundit has second thoughts.
• Expansionary policy options have different effects.
• God and the artist formerly known as Prince.
• What is the point of finance?
• Adam Smith on our gilded, callous, age.
• Markets are not rational.

The Housing Crisis- or is it a Transportation Crisis?

Bustling areas of the US are in the grips of a housing, transportation, and homelessness crisis.

While tracts of empty houses remain from the recent near-depression in areas like Florida, Nevada, and Detroit, other areas suffer from the opposite problem. Average detached house prices are at a million dollars in the San Francisco Bay Area. While this number is proudly trumpeted by the local papers for their satisfied home-owning constituents, the news for others is not so good. Houses are priced far above construction cost, clearly unaffordable for average workers, and rents are rising to unaffordable levels as well. How did we get here?

One of the great ironies is that environmentalism has allied with other status quo forces to stall development for decades. Existing homeowners have little interest in transforming their sprawly neighborhoods into denser, more efficient urban centers. Then they pat themselves on the back for preserving open space and small-town ambiance, along with inflated property values. Public officials have been stymied by proposition 13 and other low-tax movements from funding infrastructure to keep up with population growth. Local roads are now frequently at a standstill, making zoning for more housing essentially unthinkable. Add in a drought, and the policy response to growth is to hide one's head in the sand.

Then ... a scene from Dark Passage.

There is a basic public policy failure to connect population and business growth with the necessary supporting structures- a failure of planning. No new highway has been built for decades, even as the population of the Bay Area has increased by 10% since just 2000, the number of cars increased even more, and the population of the state has doubled since 1970. How was that supposed to work?

Now ... at the bay bridge.

An alternative approach would have been to limit population growth directly, perhaps via national immigration restrictions or encouragement for industry to move elsewhere. But that doesn't seem attractive to our public officials either, nor is it very practical. In a tragedy of common action, people flock to an attractive area, but eventually end up being driven away based on how crowded and unbearable the area becomes. A Malthusian situatuion, not from lack of food, but of other necessities. But with modern urban design & planning, it doesn't have to be that way- just look at Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, and other metropolises.

In the post-war era, the US, and California in particular, built infrastructure ahead of growth, inviting businesses to a beautiful and well maintained state. But once one set of roads was built, and a great deal of settled activity accumulated around them, expansion became inceasingly difficult. Now that a critical mass of talent and commercial energy is entrenched and growing by network forces, the contribution from the state has descended to negligible, even negative levels, as maintenance is given short shrift, let alone construction of new capacity, for roads, housing development, water, and sewer infrastructure. Prop 13 was, in retrospect, the turning point.

It is in miniature the story of the rise, decline, and fall of civilization. For all the tech innovation, the Bay Area is showing sclerosis at the level of public policy- an inability to deal with its most basic problems. The major reason is that the status quo has all the power. Homeowners have a direct financial interest in preventing further development, at least until the difficulties become so extreme as to result in mass exodus. One hears frequently of trends of people getting out of the area, but it never seems to have much effect, due to the area's basic attractiveness. Those who can afford to be here are also the ones investing in and founding businesses that keep others coming in their wake.

The post-war era was characterized by far more business influence on government, (especially by developers, the ultimate bogey-men for the environmentalists and other suburban status-quo activists), even while the government taxed businesses and the wealthy at far higher levels. Would returning to that system be desirable? Only if our government bodies can't get their own policy acts together. The various bodies that plan our infrastructure (given that the price signal has been cancelled by public controls on development) have been far too underfunded and hemmed in by short-sighted status quo interests- to whom the business class, which is typically interested in growth and labor availability more than holding on to their precious property values, are important counter-weights.

The problem is that we desperately need more housing to keep up with population, to keep housing affordable, and ultimately also resolve the large fraction of homelessness that can be addressed by basic housing affordability. But housing alone, without a full package of more transportion and other services, makes no sense on its own. So local planning in areas like the Bay Area needs a fundamental reset, offering residents better services first (more transit, cleared up roads) before allowing more housing. Can we build more roads? Or a new transit system? We desperately need another bridge across the bay, for example, and a vastly expanded BART system, itself a child of the post-war building boom, now fifty years old.

BART system map, stuck in time.

Incidentally, one can wonder why telecommuting hasn't become more popular, but the fact that a region like the Bay Area has built up a concentration of talent that is so enduring and growing despite all the problems of cost, housing, and transportation speaks directly to the benefits of (or at least the corporate desire for) corporeal commuting. Indeed, it is common for multinational companies to set up branches in the area to take advantage of the labor pool willing to appear in person, rather than trying to lure talent to less-connected areas cybernetically or otherwise.

One countervailing argument to more transit and road development is that the housing crisis and existing road network has motivated commuters to live in ever farther-flung outlying areas, even to Stockton. Thus building more housing first, in dense, central areas, might actually reduce traffic, by bringing those commuters back to their work places. This does not seem realistic, unfortunately. One has to assume that any housing increment will lead to more people, cars, and traffic, not less. There is no way to channel housing units to only those people who will walk to work, or take transit, etc., especially in light of the poor options currently available. The only way to relieve the transportation gridlock is to make using it dramatically more costly, or to provide more transportation- especially, more attractive transit options.

Another argument is that building more roads just leads to more usage and sprawl. This is true to some extent, but the solution is not to make the entire system dysfunctional in hopes of pushing marginal drivers off the road or out of the area in dispair. A better solution, if building more capacity is out of the question, is to take aim directly at driving by raising its price. The gas tax is far too low, and the California carbon tax (we have one, thankfully!) is also too low. There is already talk of making electric vehicle drivers pay some kind of higher registration or per-mile fee to offset their lack of gas purchases, but that seems rather premature and counter-productive from a global warming perspective. To address local problems, tolls could be instituted, not just at bridges as they are now, but at other areas where congestion is a problem, to impose costs across the board on users, as well as to fund improvements. This would also address the coming wave of driverless cars, which threatens to multiply road usage yet further.

In the end, housing and transportation are clearly interlinked, on every level. Each of us lives on a street, after all. Solving one problem, such as homelessness and the stratospheric cost of housing, requires taking a step back, looking at the whole system, and addressing root causes, which come down to zoning, transportation, money, and the quality and ambition of our planning.

• Hey- how about those objective, absolutely true values?
• Bernie has some mojo, and doing some good with it.
• We know nothing ... at the State department.
• The Fed is getting ready to make another mistake.
• For the umpteenth time, we need more fiscal policy.
• Cheating on taxes, the Trump way.
• Yes, Trump is this stupid, and horrible.
• Another disaster from Hillary Clinton's career.
• Corporations are doing well the old-fashioned way, though corruption.
• What happens when labor is too cheap, and how trade is not so peaceful after all.

For Whom Shall the Robots Work?

When robots do everything, will we have work? Will we have income? A review of Martin Ford's "Rise of the Robots".

No one knows when it is coming, but eventually, machines will do everything we regard as work. Already some very advanced activities like driving cars and translating languages are done by machine, sometimes quite well. Manufacturing is increasingly automated, and computers have been coming for white collar jobs as well. Indeed, by Martin Ford's telling, technological displacement has already had a dramatic effect on the US labor market, slowing job growth, concentrating economic power in a few relatively small high-tech companies, and de-skilling many other jobs. His book is about the future, when artificial intelligence becomes realistic, and machines can do it all.

Leaving aside the question of whether we will be able to control these armies of robots once they reach AI, sentience, the singularity ... whatever one wishes to call it, a more immediate question is how the economic system should be (re-)organized. Up till now, humans have had to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. No economic system has successfully decoupled effort in work (or predation / warfare / ideological parasitism) from income and sustainance. The communists tried, and what a hell that turned out to be. But Marx may only have been premature, not wrong, in predicting that the capitalist system would eventually lead to both incredible prosperity and incredible concentration of wealth.

Ford offers an interesting aside about capitalism, (and he should know, having run a software company), that capitalists hate employees. For all the HR happy talk and team this and relationship that, every employee is an enormous cost drain. Salary is just the start- there are benefits, office space, liability for all sorts of personal problems, and the unpredictability of their quitting and taking all their training and knowledge with them. They are hateful, and tolerated only because, and insofar as, they are absolutely necessary.

At any rate, the incentives, whether personal or cooly economic, are clear. And the trends in wealth and income are likewise clear, that employment is more precarious and less well paid (at the median), while income and wealth have concentrated strongly upward, due to all sorts of reasons, including rightward politics, off-shoring, and dramatic technological invasion of many forms of work. (Indeed, off-shoring is but a prelude to automation, for the typical low-skill form of work.) There is little doubt that, left to its own devices(!), our capitalist system will become ever more concentrated, with fewer companies running more technology and fewer employees to produce everything we need.

What happens then? The macroeconomic problem is that if everyone is unemployed, no one (except the 0.00001%) will be able to buy anything. While the provision of all our necessities by way of hopefully docile machines is not a bad thing, indeed the fulfillment of a much-imagined dream of humanity, some technical problems do arise; of which we can already see the glimmerings in our current society. Without the mass production lines and other requirements for armies of labor that democratized the US economy in the mid-20th century, we may be heading in the direction, not only of Thomas Piketty's relatively wealth-heavy unequal society of financial capital, but towards a degree of concentration we have not seen lately outside of the most fabulous African kleptocracies.

What we need is a fundamental rethinking of the connection between income and work, and the role of capital and capitalists. The real wealth of our society is an ever-accumulating inheritance of technology and knowledge that was built in common by many people. Whether some clever entrepreneur can leverage that inheritance into a ripping business model while employing virtually no actual humans should not entirely dictate the distribution of wealth. As Ford puts it:

"Today's computer technology exists in some measure because millions of middle-class taxpayers supported federal funding for basic research in the decades following World War II. We can be reasonably certain that those taxpayers offered their support in the expectation that the fruits of that research would create a more prosperous future for their children and grandchildren. Yet, the trends we looked at in the last chapter suggest we are headed toward a very different outcome. Beyond the basic moral question of whether a tiny elite should be able to, in effect, capture ownership of society's accumulated technological capital, there are also practical issues regarding the overall health of an economy in which income inequality becomes too extreme."

As a solution, Ford suggests the provision of a basic income for all citizens. This would start very minimally, at perhaps $10,000 per year, and perhaps be raised as the policy develops and the available wealth increase. He states that this could be funded relatively easily from existing poverty programs, and would at a stroke eliminate poverty. It is a very libertarian idea, beloved by Milton Freidman, (in the form of negative income tax), and also emphasizes freedom for all citizens to do as they like with this money. Ford also beings up the quite basic principle that in a new, capital-intensive regime, we should be prepared to tax labor less and tax capital more. But he makes no specific suggestions in this direction ... one gets the impression that it cuts a little too close to home.

This is the part of the book where I part company, for several reasons. Firstly, I think work is a fundamental human good and even right. It is important for us to have larger purposes and organize ourselves corporately (in a broad sense) to carry them out. It is also highly beneficial for people to be paid for positive contributions they make to society. In contrast, the pathology surrounding lives spent on unearned public support are well-known. Secondly, the decline of employment in the capitalist economy has the perverse effect of weakening the labor market and dis-empowering workers, who must scramble for the fewer remaining jobs, accepting lower pay and worse conditions. Setting up a new system to compete at a frankly miserable sub-poverty level does little to correct this dynamic. Thirdly, I think there is plenty of work to be done, even if robots do everything we dislike doing. The scope for non-profit work, for environmental beautification, for social betterment, elder care, education, and entertainment is simply infinite. The only question is whether we can devise a social mechanism to carry it out.

This leads to the concept of a job guarantee. The government would provide paying work to anyone willing to participate in socially beneficial tasks. These would be real, well-paying jobs, geared to pay less than private market rates, (or whatever we deem appropriate as the floor for a middle class existence), but quite a bit more than basic support levels for those who do not work at all. Under this mechanism, basic income is not wasted on those who have better paying jobs. Nor are the truly needy left to fend for themselves on sub-poverty incomes and no other programs of practical support. While the private market pays for any kind of profitable work no matter how socially negative, guaranteed jobs would be collectively devised to have a positive social impact- that would be their only rationale. And most importantly, they would harness and cultivate the human work ethic towards social goals, which I think is a more socially and spiritually sustainable economic system, in a post industrial, even post-work, age.

The problem with a job guarantee, obviously, is the opportunity for corruption and mismanagement, when the market discipline is lifted in favor of state-based decision making. Communist states have not provided the best track record of public interest employment, though there have been bright spots. In the US, a vast sub-economy of nonprofit enterprises and volunteering organizations provides one basis of hope and perhaps a mechanism of expansion. The government could take a set of new taxes on wealth, high incomes, fossil fuels, and financial transactions, and distribute such funds to public interest non-profit organizations, including ones that operate internationally. It is a sector of our economy that merits growth and has the organizational capacity to absorb both money and workers that are otherwise slack.

Additionally, of course, many wholly public projects deserve resources, from infrastructure to health care to combatting climate change. We have enormous public good needs that are going unaddressed. The governmental sector has shown good management in many instances, such as in the research sector, medicare, and social security. Competitive grant systems are a model of efficient resource allocation, and could put some of the resources of a full job guarantee to good use, perhaps using layperson as well as expert review panels. Improving public management is itself a field for development as part of the expanded public sector that a job guarantee would create.

In an interesting digression, Ford remarks on the curious case of Japan. Japan has undergone a demographic shift to an aged society. It has been predicted that the number of jobs in health care and elder care would boom, and that the society would have to import workers to do all the work. But that hasn't happened. In fact, Japan has been in a decades-long deflationary recession featuring, if anything, under-employment as the rule, exemplified by "freeters" who stay at home with their parents far into adulthood. What happened? It is another Keynesian parable, since the elderly are poor consumers. For all the needs that one could imagine, few of them materialize because the income of the elderly, and their propensity to spend, are both low.

The labor participation rate in the US.

Our deflationary decade, with declining labor participation rates, indicates that we are heading in the same direction. We need to find a way to both mitigate the phenomenal concentration of wealth that is destroying our political system and economy, and to create a mechanism that puts money into the hands of a sustainable middle class- one that does not rely on the diminishing capitalist notions of employment and continue down the road of techno-feudalism, but which enhances our lives individually and collectively.

• For instance, we can afford a post office.
• Poverty is permanently damaging.
• Welfare and public goods feed economic growth.
• Do we have a perpetual savings glut?
• Bill Mitchell on labor-capital relations. Such as they are.
• Panopticon and the modern office.
• Bernanke: I was pwned. Krugman: ... and anyway, the deficits were more important than the Fed bailouts.
• We are, typically, fools.
• ... to believe that CEO pay relates to performance.
• Bill Mitchell on why banks are pushing for higher interest rates. Hint: it is not to help the rest of us.
• Further map of Taliban control in Afghanistan. The long-term institutional failure of short-term engagement.