Vindman on Russia and Ukraine

Not enough appeasement, or not enough deterrence?

I have been watching the Harry Potter series of films, a decade or two after first reading the books. Aside from being extremely entertaining, they show Rowling to have been weirdly prescient about the moral dilemmas only developing as she was writing, and now flourishing in grotesque fashion. How large sectors of supposedly civilized populations can be attracted to blatant racism. How cruelty, destruction, and contemptuous corruption can likewise become an attractive political brand. How corrupt powers corrupt the truth first, and then replace merit with lickspittle devotion among their followers, with predictable consequences. What seemed comically phantasmagoric has now turned into our day-to-day reality, with phones taking the place of wands.

It is not only relevant to US political scene, but also internationally, in the turn taken by Russia from a struggling post-Soviet democracy or at least quasi-democracy, back to an imperial emperorship under Vladimir Putin. After sending clouds of misinformation into the West, he started attacking Georgia and Ukraine with dementors, trying, without success so far, to squeeze the soul out of his "little brother". 

Alexander Vindman has something to say about the matter, in his new book, "The Folly of Realism". Vindman came to fame through his testimony against Voldemort, -er, Trump- during the first impeachment hearing, which revolved around corrupt conditioning of aid to Ukraine to get false political testimony against his foes. Vindman was on the NSC, and had participated extensively in Defense department and White House policy development around the changing conditions in Ukraine and Russia. His book recounts the long historical road that led to the current Ukraine war, and the many missteps by the US that are now part of that history.

The question is about US policy around the catastrophe in Ukraine- what was the US role in it? What should our policy have been, and what should it be now? The "realism" in Vindman's title refers to the foreign policy school that foreswears idealism. It says that we should ignore any sympathetic feelings about democracy or independence for Ukraine and recognize that Ukraine was always going to be in Russia's sphere of influence and not get tangled up in its defense. Under this reading, our policy mistake was to lure Ukraine towards the West with empty promises of joining NATO and the EU, while our paramount interest was actually in maintaining a stable relationship with Russia so that no one starts World War 3. 

On the other hand would be a more values-based, idealistic approach. Under this reading, our promises were not wrong, only our unwillingness to back them up. It is patently obvious that neither Russia nor anyone else is going to use nuclear weapons in these kinds of conflicts- that would be self-defeating when the aim is to gain territory and population (or even to defend one's own population, when pitted against other nuclear powers). In all honesty, having nuclear weapons is more of a prestige thing at this point than a real factor of military strategy, let alone tactics. But to give Putin his due, he used them with consummate skill, rattling the nuclear saber at critical times to cow the West and particularly the US from intervening in Ukraine, much to our shame.

Idealism posits that our interests are inextricably linked to our values. There are no durable and dependable international relationships without shared values, and we should be extremely grateful that, at least up to the current administration, the liberal West has had a solid core of shared values that undergird our entire collective security structure. Thinking that we can pursue "interests" that conflict with those values is chimerical and tends, as we are seeing in the current administration, to sell out and destroy exactly what is most valuable to us on the international stage. 

But perhaps even worse than the philosophical differences within the US policy establishment that led to the schizophrenic and catastrophic approach to Ukraine was the inattentive way we sleepwalked into it. Emblematic of this is Obama's "reset" with Russia. Even after Putin had declared that the loss of the Soviet empire was the most catastrophic event in the last century, even after Russia attacked and set up a simmering conflict with Georgia for trending democratic, even after Russia had spent years pumping offensive and destabilizing propaganda into its enemies in the West, Obama was anxious to get Russia off his plate and initiated the reset. This was a policy of turning a blind eye to all the geopolitical trends that clearly showed that Russia was not going to be a democratic partner to the West, but was, on the contrary, heading rapidly in the opposite direction, despite the window dressing of Dmitri Medvedev. More specifically, it failed to recognize that Ukraine was in mortal peril from these trends. The prior president Bush had declared that his ultimate goal was to bring Ukraine into NATO. But no plan was offered, no timeline or support was given, even while Russia's apoplexy over the prospect was, to those who were paying attention, growing by the year. 

Current status of NATO. Whatever the rhetoric, the new eastern European members of NATO are members in order to defend themselves against Russia. The whole point of NATO is to unite Europe defensively against Russia. Naturally, Russia takes this as an insult, but the history is self-explanatory, as is the same historical reasoning in case of Ukraine. As long as Russia takes no responsibility for its many past crimes, and its current lies, offensive behavior, and ongoing crimes, there can be no question of reversing this fundamental relationship.

The reset ignored all this and assumed, as we all did, that a new war in Europe was inconceivable- whatever complaints Russia had would be raised in some appropriate forum. During this time, Russia was carefully playing its cards for Ukraine, using Paul Manafort to dress up its proxy, Viktor Yanukovych, electing him president, and getting him to cancel progress towards joining the EU. Unfortunately, in 2014, the Ukrainian people wised up to the direction all this was going, and ousted Yanukovych in a popular uprising, sending him fleeing to Russia. Immediately thereafter, Russia extracted its pound of flesh, invading and taking over Crimea, and for good measure starting a war in Eastern Ukraine, to be kept on the simmer. 

All this should have been foreseen by US policy makers. But instead, they had their reset, with a few temporary benefits weighing against the disastrous direction portended by Russia's actual policies and intentions. If the US model for Ukraine was the same as for Belarus, we should have been honest about that and not promised any future relationship or alliance such as NATO. We should have clarified that Ukraine was in Russia's sphere, and tough luck.. they would have to deal with the neighbor that nature had dealt them. On the other hand, if we truly valued the independence of Ukraine and its civilized aspirations, in light of its being in its own right a very large country, both in area and in population, then we would have put more effort into deterring Russia rather than appeasing it. 

Ukraine was not ready for NATO membership- that much was understood. We can see by the example of Hungary how dangerous it is to have backsliding, regressive and frankly traitorous countries within the alliance. Ukraine's democracy was by no means ready for full membership. In light of that, the US should have offered a direct security relationship, as the Georgia war played out, to put teeth behind our desire for Ukraine to remain independent and work out its own relationship with democracy and with Europe. The point was not to influence the government or people of Ukraine, but simply to deter Russian meddling. For by this time, the truth was visible- that Russia wanted to rebuild its empire / sphere of influence, whether its neighbors wanted to be assimilated or not. The race was on, between the gathering strength and determination of Russia to recover "its" former possessions, and its neighbors' growing sovereignty and ties to Europe. 

One might ask.. how is this model different from Vietnam? Wouldn't this have tied us to a corrupt government that would have been fatally impaired, politically speaking, by taking assistance from the US? Wouldn't Ukraine have come to rely on our security crutch, while thumbing its nose at Russia and miring itself ever deeper in corruption and dysfunction? I think the differences are significant. Firstly, the Ukraine war had not happened yet. We would be deterring, not trying to repel, an attack. Secondly, the ultimate prize of European integration remained as a more significant goal, quite beyond any bilateral relationship with the US. It is clear that the people of Ukraine were quite strongly motivated in that direction, and part of that was gaining a functioning liberal political system.

As a Ukrainian by birth, Vindman was and is appalled by the path to war, some of it paved by the US. He is casting about for historical counterfactuals and alternative paths, and, given the dysfunctions of our own political system, those are hard to come by. Perhaps preventing the first election of Donald Trump would have been significantly more productive than any policy adjustments farther back in time.  But I have to agree that our split-the-difference approach to Ukraine, which was initiated in the Bush administration, was fundamentally in error, and was a temporizing solution (which the Obama administration fatally continued) to a problem that turned out to be far more urgent than was anticipated. Though it should have been anticipated.

• Are we second-rate yet?
• There's something about postmodernism... 
• War is now IT.

What is the Matter With the Labor Market?

Labor's share of the economy has rarely been lower- what is going on?

We will start with a graph of share of income, to labor, vs capital. Note that labor here includes all the highly paid executives- all those fat salaries. The share has been going down for decades, while the profit and capital share has been going up. The seventies were the high-water mark, when unions reached their apogee, and after which the Reagan revolution put business and management back in the driver's seat. 

Labor's share of national income is at an all-time low.

The neoclassical theory of labor is that businesses will hire as many employees out of a perfectly liquid labor market until the last hire is exactly as productive as her labor cost. Every worker would be hired into their most productive possible job, with the commensurate pay. Over the economy as whole, this mechanism would mean that everyone who can be productive will be employed, and that every company produces as much as it can sell. And also that wages grossly equal the productive capacity of the workers, as judged by what buyers are willing to part with. 

In a very rough sense, there is logic to this model, which at least has the virtue of generally equating what is being spent by buyers with what companies are making as revenue and paying out for their inputs, including labor. But there are a lot of problems when you get into the details, making the whole topic of labor market operation and wage-setting far more complicated, and far less fair, than capitalists and their favorite economists envision. It is a bit like the market for medical care, which has grievous flaws. One wouldn't want to go to a Stalinist system of state job assignment and wage-setting, but that doesn't mean the market mechanisms are operating fairly and efficiently.

One would have thought that the internet, enabling rapid and nation-wide job posting and hunting, would have fundamentally changed the job market, in favor of workers. But the graph above disagrees- things have gotten worse instead of better. One thing that internet job boards do not mention is pay. That remains a closely held secret, never discussed with workers or with prospects, until the moment when they have already been reeled in and gone through numerous interviews, and the low-ball is offered. There are many other structural asymmetries and power dynamics. Productivity is extremely hard to gauge, and ends up being whatever one's manager gets into her or his head. The whole job-finding process is extremely averse, full of humiliation, uncertainty, and pain, enforcing inertia in current employees, and thus power for employers. 

For example, a paper from a few years back shows that, when women enter a profession and change its composition, the pay across that profession goes down. The scholarly language is restrained, but the lesson is obvious. Pay is set by intuition and power relations, not by an analysis of productivity, or the magical workings of a fair labor market. The 80's started the greed-is-good movement in American business, as executives were empowered to take pieces of the business for themselves. Before, managers were employees, often well paid. Now, their pay became increasingly an expression of power rather than productivity- how much they could extract from the business as rent. Naturally, the more money from the business (whether via salary, stock, or other benefits) went into executive's pockets, the less was left over for workers. Similarly, the whole theory of business underwent a change as well, from an organization with multiple stakeholders and purposes, including civic ones, to a singular focus on profit and rewarding investors. Labor ceased to be involved as a stakeholder, but was demoted to an input, to be paid as little as possible. 

One additional influence is the idea of the sufficient wage. Most people are most keenly interested in having income sufficient to live on, in some style considered in their social sphere to be decent. When wages across society fall below this level, revolutions occur. But do wages ever rise above it? Employers are sensitive to these dynamics, and as part of their wage setting know what workers will put up with, regardless of productivity, fairness, revenue, etc. This is particularly relevant with the addition of women to the workforce. What used to be regarded as a decent wage, in that it supported a family, now only has to support half a family, since most families have two earners. The perverse effect of women entering the workforce is thus, on this admittedly vague social theory, not only to subject them to outright socially based discrimination, but to lower the general level of wages, insofar as employers can get away with that without generating an insurrection. 

The value of the federal minimum wage over time.

Now we are at a dramatic point, where a soaring stock market rides on ever-higher profits taken by US businesses, while a vibe-cession and plunging consumer sentiment show that most Americans are struggling, unhappy, and underpaid. Billionaires are sprouting like mushrooms, each of whose dollars is taken from the hands of labor. So what is fair, and what do workers deserve? We need to take a whole-society view here, rather than confining ourselves to what pure capitalism sees as an ideal. Much of income inequality comes from a minimum wage that simply has not kept up, not even with inflation, let alone with worker productivity. A recent book outlines much of the evidence, but it is well known that raising minimum wages is hugely positive, increasing economic activity and helping low-power workers get a fairer deal out of the system, at very little cost to job creation or profits. The authors suggest (very modestly, one must say) generally keeping minimum wages at sixty percent of the median wage, which is currently 64,000 per year, thus would work out to about $18.50 per hour. Lower pay than that generally reflects power dynamics of oppression, and feeds into bad working conditions and the maintenance of low-value industries.

At the upper end, a new social contract needs to be drawn up to re-orient the corporation to a more socially positive role. Competition, which is the most important discipline on businesses, needs to be fostered. Taxation needs to be raised and made fairer, removing escape hatches, offshore shelters, conduits, etc. Capital needs to be taxed at least equivalently with labor, not less, as is shamefully done now. The chances of any of this taking place in the corrupt environment of the current administration and congress is nil, obviously, but if they won't do it, then the workers they are so blatantly betraying have the votes to forge a new path.

Notice that these are not technical issues, but social ones. The growth of inequality and loss of labor's wage share is a story of lost social cohesion, self-serving ideologies, and political corruption. Hopefully we do not need a crisis on the scale of World War 2 or the Civil War to recover some degree of care for each other, but the current environment would need a dramatic reversal to even begin going in that direction.

• More on the debt.
• How can this staggering loss be sold?
• When labor gets out of hand.
• When companies become tax cheats. We all should have a Carribean subsidiary!

Dalio on Debt

Review of Ray Dalio's "How Countries Go Broke". 

It is difficult to focus on important policy issues, as the national media is led around by the president's revolving fixations like a cat by a laser pointer. But focus we must, if we are not going to decline faster than we already are due to incompetent and corrupt leadership. One looming area is the federal budget. As a card-carrying acolyte of MMT economics, it is hard to say this, but there are limits to federal borrowing. 

A recent book by super-investor Ray Dalio lays out a set of patterns, which he calls the big cycle, that tracks government solvency over roughly eighty year cycles, which typically start out tight and solvent, using relatively hard money, and end up overextended and in crises that are resolved by some mix of inflation, depreciation, and restructuring / reneging on debts. It is a perpetual and international set of cycles. As an investor, he is not much of a writer or economist, so the book is repetitive, poorly written, and markedly incurious about the origins of the patterns he finds. But still, it makes some significant points. 

First is that the cycle happens for all monetary systems, whether fiat and borrowing domestically, or hard currency and borrowing in foreign currencies. But the consequences are far more severe for the latter than the former. Having your own currency, as MMT economists well know, is a blessing when you want to borrow and manage a domestic economy. Second is that even with a fiat currency, the limits are different, but there still are limits to government borrowing, which we are gradually running into. 

Trajectory of US government debt.

Trajectory of interest compared to other US government spending.

At the beginning of a big cycle, the foregoing crisis has scared everyone into hard currencies, like gold, or some properly revalued local currency backed by a solvent government. Probity is everything. Later on in the cycle, the money is softened up due to increased borrowing and laxer standards. Eventually, there are private debt crises, where the central bank is obliged to take on a large part of the private debt and expand its balance sheet. Eventually, the central bank no longer bothers to unwind its balance sheet after such crises, and holds on to both private debts and government debt that it monetizes. And at the far end of the cycle, the debt service paid by the government threatens to become so onerous that a crisis develops- investors flee, interest rates go up, inflation goes up, and the debts, fiat though they are, become unsustainable. There is "restructuring".

This is a big cycle because it is superimposed on the regular business cycle that takes much shorter time- something like five to ten years. And it concerns the government's management of the money, not the private sector's vacillating enthusiasm about business conditions. Turkey is currently in the far end of such a cycle, plunged into high inflation and struggling to find a way to put itself back on a sound basis after massive mismanagement. And obviously the US is somewhere late in the same continuum. The issue is not the size of the federal debt, or its relation to GDP, but the amount we have to pay in interest from the annual budget. That is heading towards one trillion dollars, and if interest rates remain where they are, (given the inflationary pressures from the current administration's bad policies such as tariffs, oil shortages, and tax cuts), there is danger of a growing spiral of higher revenues going to interest, and less money available for government functions, increased monetization by the central bank, and ultimately, loss of faith in the currency. 

A fascinating case is that of Japan, which both Dalio and MMT economists focus on for its unique approach to monetary policy. Since its debt bubble in the 90's, Japan has shifted lots of private debt and public debt to the central bank's balance sheet, which stands at about three times GDP- far beyond what other countries would deem acceptable. This can be sustained because the bank of Japan has kept interest rates very low- in the zero to one percent range. Thus the cost of all this debt is manageable, and will remain so unless and until interest rates go up. But this also means that the bank can not use interest rates to manage the economy and foreign exchange. In consequence, Japan's currency has weakened enormously on the international currency markets, making imports (such as of oil, significantly) much more expensive, while improving the competitive position of Japanese export manufacturers. Additionally, Japanese banks and businesses have been reluctant to unwind bad debts, which leads to the stagnation and lack of overheating that the low interest rates would otherwise foster. Everyone kicks the can down the road, waiting for either a crisis, or a resolution, neither of which seem in the offing. 

But more interesting than the economic drama is the larger cultural cycle which Dalio alludes to as well. For this is not just an economic big cycle, but something deeper. For the US, Dalio starts with the civil war, but I think it is much more instructive to include the cycle before, which started with the Revolutionary War. These wars, plus World War 2, mark the three big cycles that the US has been through. Each started with war, and with currency disruption. The Continental Congress issued reams of Continental currency that had, by the end of the war, become worthless. So, one big objective of the ensuing constitutional order was to put the newly minted dollar on a sound footing, as also the finances of the federal government. This led to decades of growth, prosperity, and (the war of 1812, and various Native American extermination campaigns aside) peace. The middle of this period also saw a progressive cultural flowering, with the transcendentalists, various experimental communes like Brook Farm, and the Great Awakening. All this stability allowed people to envision a better society. However, what happened instead was increased division and conflict, leading to the Civil War. 

Here again, paper money was issued and resulted in significant inflation, as the accumulated hatred tore the country apart. But in its wake, prosperity again reigned, with rapid technological advancement, peace, and, eventually, and progressive movements for women's suffrage, temperance, anti-corruption and anti-monopoly, and the Settlement movement. All this was reset in the Depression and ensuing world war, which then began a new cycle of conflict avoidance enshrined by the US role in the UN, NATO, and a very sedate and conventional media environment. As peace and stability took hold, a new progressive movement rose- the hippies, the anti-war, civil rights, and feminist movements. Did these foster peace and togetherness? Not exactly. One can sense that the culture was eager for truth, for not sugar-coating things anymore, for honesty and, indeed, for conflict. Humor shows became more cutting, movies more biting, tinged with horror and apocalypse. And here we are, in a country where the two parties can't stand each other and are headed towards something that smells distinctly martial.

All this conflict has smothered discussions of actual policy, which anyway has gone to the dogs in the new administration. For example, a high level of federal borrowing is more defensible if it builds US productive capacity, through investments in future-oriented technology and education. But the current adminstration is spending billions to cancel renewable energy contracts that had already been entered into. This is money not just down the drain, but subtracted from future productive capacity. 

Is Dalio sanguine about our prospects? Not particularly. But nor does he view them as terribly dire. In the first place, the gulf between sovereign, fiat-issuing countries and others comes out starkly in his many graphs and analyses. The latter get into much more difficult straits when they borrow too much of someone else's money. Secondly, rather modest adjustments now, to federal spending, to taxation, and to interest rate policy, can change the trajectory we are on, from spiraling to sustainable. I would focus particularly on the tax side, which has so egregiously been attacked by the current administration, in its contempt for making the rich pay anything. Dalio mentions, however, that the most consequential lever is that of interest rates, which, as Japan shows, can, if low enough, make eye-watering debts quite easy to carry. But given a system where we want to retain the interest rate as a lever of macro-economic policy, (and capitalist motivation), it would be best to approach rates not by fiat, as Japan has done, but by good policy on the other fronts, which will naturally lead to lower interest rates, if properly handled. 

• Are we headed into the China century?
• A pathetic spectacle of weakness and decline.

Dreaming Our Way Out of Capitalism

Review of "Understanding Capitalism", by Richard Wolff.

When I picked up this book, I thought it was going to be a sober analysis of capitalism, by a real economist. But what I was met with was something quite different- a Marxist screed with the most flaccid intellectual grounding, disingenuous and dishonest by turns. Wolff apparently has been paid to teach economics at liberal institutions, but this book is evidence that they have little idea what they are buying. 

Not that I am unsympathetic. Capitalism is a highly problematic system. But it hardly helps to make statements like: "Given China's huge influence on poverty measures, one could claim that reduced global poverty in recent decades results from an economic system that insists that it is not capitalist, but socialist." Note the squirrely way this is phrased, not defining the economic system, but noting only the wholly outdated self-description. China is one of the most capitalist countries in the world right now, having harnessed naked capitalism (and a lot of stolen IP) to raise its industries and living standard dramatically. 

Or how about this, in a discussion of why the idea that capitalism is highly innovative is a myth: "Yet the USSR, for example, exhibited much small business formation on its collective farms, in its service sector, and in its black markets, all replete with competition and innovations." If black markets are evidence of the innovative capacity of socialist economies, then the US is surely headed for Marxism forthwith.

It is almost funny how poorly this book is argued, and how formulaic its critiques and nostrums. But it provides a jumping-off point for a discussion that is a bit more grounded. Wolff casually describes capitalism as just another system, like feudalism and mercantilism, having its day and sure to pass on to some other, better system. He ends up promoting worker-owned cooperatives that are democratically run, where every action is voted on. Needless to say, such ideas have not, and will not, go anywhere. They are simply not practical. For we are, at base, dealing with human nature and the imperatives of existence. 

The state of nature (in larger societies) is organized crime- the strong rule the weak, and call themselves noble. Workers are managed by aristocrats (and priests), who make a fetish of not doing any work themselves. The feudal system was an attempt to give some order to this system of relations, by raising the serfs from mere slavery, and mandating some notional reciprocal duties. Capitalism, as even Marx appreciated, was an enormous advance over feudalism, putting the workers and businesses both on firmer legal footing, with a (labor) market intermediating between them. Labor markets have all sorts of problems and biases, but with advances in regulation and labor agitation, it has become for most people a relatively civilized way to exchange labor for money. 

Is capitalism still unfair? Yes, grossly so. But let's look two of its most basic injustices. First is that it takes money to make money. If one is born rich, one can be a capitalist and not work a day on one's life. Capitalism puts a high value on using that money to take risks and create businesses. But most rich people are content to buy bonds and sit on their money. What kind of capitalism is that? On the other hand, there is a large industry of venture capital that exists to lure money from the pockets of dentists and other rich people, promising high returns from risky ventures. This is the kind of essential engine that classical capitalism envisions- a tireless hunt for new business opportunities and technologies that will, in the end, make the economy more efficient and raise the standard of living. 

Wolff offers a telling example of capricious unfairness in management, where a business brings in a machine that replaces half of its workers, who are fired. He decries the loss of jobs, and suggests that the machine be used instead to fund continuing pay for all the workers. But just in the section before, he had decried the much-vaunted efficiency of capitalism as a myth. It does not sound like a myth here, where more work is done by fewer workers, and those fired workers are then freed to go off into other (presumably) productive forms of work.

Maybe China does a better job using state capitalism to deploy large amounts of capital. Maybe the USSR did a reasonable job, for a couple of decades, in deploying capital to build its heavy industry and arm for World War 2. And maybe free capital markets tend to vacillate between over-enthusiasm and credit contraction. But over the long term, it is clear that relatively free capital markets (with lots of government regulation!) do a good job of finding innovative business prospects and driving efficiency increases over the whole economy. So ... we should definitely think about taxing wealth, and finding ways to make the rich use their money in socially beneficial ways. But the idea that voters, or the state, can do a better job of general capital deployment is not realistic.

A second gross unfairness is management and surplus production. Why are workers still treated like slaves, told what to do, and then underpaid? Sadly, the fact is that management is a difficult job too. We had a worker-run bakery down the street in our city, and it only lasted a few years, because of the inherent problems of not having someone in charge of a business organization. The leading methods of worker-owned corporation now are oriented to giving workers ownership (like the Publix supermarket chain), but not management roles. Workers are on the board, but they do not run the day-to-day operations, because there simply has got to be decisiveness, accountability, and responsibility up the chain of a productive organization. Whether these roles have to be paid a lot more is open to question. But they do have to exist. Even in socialism, political commissars were part of management.

It is worth noting here that while management and unemployment are the disciplining factors for workers, competition is the disciplining mechanism for capitalists (in addition to government regulation). Without competition across the gamut, for labor, for markets, and for inputs, capitalists can abuse their workers and their customers. That is why a renewed focus on antitrust enforcement is an essential part of any progressive program of state oversight over the capitalist system.

As the example of black markets shows, market capitalism is a natural way of organizing human activities and satisfying our desires. But capitalism has plenty of problems. Capital and credit markets can not be left to their own devices. Glaring market failures, like in medicine, show that whole sectors of the economy have no business being capitalist businesses. Capitalism is an engine for turning "externalities", like minerals, air, and creativity, into money, heedless of destructive effects. So capitalism needs heavy regulation and continual reform to tame it into something that provides us with a civilized life. But at its core, it merely expresses our desires, needs, and ambitions, and that core engine needs to be preserved as well.

• When your Tesla crashes, it's your fault.
• Cheap e-vehicles are all the rage.. scooters, bikes, trikes.

Jonathan Singer and the Cranky Book

An eminent scientist at the end of his career writes out his thoughts and preoccupations.

Jonathan Singer was a famous scientist at my graduate school. I did not interact with him, but he played a role in attracting me to the program, as I was interested in biological membranes at the time. Singer himself studied with Linus Pauling, and they were the first to identify a human mutation in a specific gene as a cause for a specific disease- sickle cell disease. After further notable work in electron microscopy, he reached a career triumph by developing, in 1972, the fluid mosaic model of biological membranes. This revolutionized and clarified the field, showing that cells are bounded by something incredibly simple- a bilayer of phospholipids that naturally order themselves into a remarkably stable sheet, (a bubble, one might say), all organized by their charged headgroups and hydrophobic fatty tails. This model also showed that proteins would be swimming around freely in this membrane, and could be integrated in various ways, ether lightly attached on one side, or spanning it completely, thereby enabling complex channel and transporter functions. The model implied the typical length of a protein alpha helix that, by virtue of its hydrophobic side chains, would naturally be able to do this spanning function- a prediction that was spot-on. He could have easily won a Nobel for this work.

I was intrigued when I learned recently that Singer had written a book near the end of his career. It is just the kind of thing that a retired professor loves to do in the sunset of his career, sharing the wisdom and staving off the darkness by taking a stab at the book biz. And Singer's is a classic of the form- highly personal, a bit stilted, and ultimately meandering. I will review some of its high points, and then take a stab of my own at knitting together some of the interesting themes he grapples with.

For at base, Singer turns out to be a spiritual compadre of this blog. He claims to be a rationalist, in a world where, as he has it, no more than 9% of people are rational. Definition? It is the poll question of whether one believes that god created man, rather than the other way around. Singer recognizes that the world around him is crazy, and that the communities he has been a part of have been precious oases amid the general indifference and grasping of the world. But changing it? He is rather fatalistic about that, recognizing that reason is up against overwhelming forces.

His specific themes cover a great deal of biology, and then some more mystical reflections on balance and diversity in biology, and later, in capitalism and politics. He points out that the nature/nurture debate has been settled by twin studies. Nature, which is to say, genetics, is the dominant influence on human characteristics, including a wide variety of psychological traits, including intelligence. Environment and nurture is critical for reaching one's highest potential, and for using it in socially constructive ways, but the limits of that potential are largely set by one's genes. Singer does not, however, draw the inevitable conclusion from these observations, which is that some kind of long-term eugenic approach would be beneficial to our collective future, assuming machines do not replace us forthwith. Biologists know that very small selective coefficients can have big effects, so nothing drastic is needed. But what criteria to use- that is the sticky part. Just as success in the capitalist system hardly signals high moral or personal qualities, nor does incarceration by the justice system always show low ones. It is virtually an insoluble problem, so we muddle along, destined probably for continued cycles of Spenglerian civilizational collapse.

Turning to social affairs, Singer settles on "structural chaos" as his description of how the scientific enterprise works, and how capitalism at large works. With a great deal of waste, and misdirected effort, it nevertheless ends up providing good results- better than those that top-down direction can provide. He seems a sigh a little that "scientific" methods of social organization, such as those in Soviet Russia, were so ineffective, and that the best we can do is to muddle along with the spontaneous entrepreneurship and occasional flashes of innovation that push the process along. Not to mention the "monstrous vulgarity" of advertising, etc. Likewise, democracy is a mess, with most people totally incapable of making the reasoned decisions needed to maintain it. Again, the chaos of democracy is sadly the best we can do, and the duty of rational people, in Singer's view, is to keep alive the flame of intellectual freedom while outside pressures constantly threaten.

Art, and science.

What can we do with this? I think that the unifying thread that Singer was groping for was competition. One can frame competition as a universal principle that shapes the physical, biological, and social worlds. Put two children on a teeter-totter, and you can see how physical forces (e.g. gravitation) compete all the time, subtly producing equilibria that characterize the universe. Chemical equilibria are likewise a product of constant competition, even including the perpetual jostling of phospholipids to find their lowest energy configuration amidst the biological membrane bilayer, which has the side-effect of creating such a stable, yet highly flexible, structure. With Darwin, competition reaches its apotheosis- the endless proliferation, diversification, and selection of organisms. Singer marvels at the fragility of individual life, at the same time that life writ large is so incredibly durable and prolific. Well, the mechanism behind that is competition. And naturally, economics of any free kind, including capitalism and grant-making in science, are based on competition as well- the natural principle that selects which products are useful, which employees are productive, and which technologies are helpful. Waste is part of the process, as diversity amidst excess production is the essential ingredient for subsequent selection. 

And yet.. something is missing. The earth's biosphere would still be a mere bacterial soup if competition were the only principle at work. Bacteria (and their viruses) are the most streamlined competition machines- battlebots of the living world. It took cooperation between a bacterial cell and an archaeal cell to make a revolutionary new entity- the eukaryotic cell. It then took some more cooperation for eukaryotic cells to band together into bodies, making plants and animals. And among animals, cooperation in modest amounts provides for reproduction, family structure, flock structures, and even complex insect societies. It is with humans that cooperation and competition reach their most complex heights, for we are able to regulate ourselves, rationally. We make rules. 

Without rules, human society is anarchic mayhem- a trumpian, dystopian and corrupt nightmare. With them, it (ideally) balances competition with cooperation to harness the benefits of each. Our devotion to sports can be seen as a form of rule worship, and explicit management of the competitive landscape. Can there be too many rules? Absolutely, there are dangers on both sides. Take China as an example. In the last half-century, it revamped its system of rules to lower the instability of political competition, harness the power of economic competition, and completely transform its society. 

The most characteristic and powerful human institution may be the legislature, which is our ongoing effort to make rational rules regulating how the incredibly powerful motive force of competition shapes our lives. Our rules, in the US, were authored, at the outset, by the founders, who were- drumroll please- rationalists. To read the Federalist Papers is to see exquisite reasoning drawing on wide historical precedent, and particularly on the inspirations of the rationalist enlightenment, to formulate a new set of rules mediating between cooperation and competition. Not only were they more fair than the old rules, but they were designed for perpetual improvement and adjustment. The founding was, at base, a rationlist moment, when characters like Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson- deists at best and rationalists through and through, led the new country into a hopeful, constitutional future. At the current moment, two hundred and fifty years on, as our institutions are being wantonly destroyed and anything resembling reason, civility, and truth is under particularly vengeful attack, we should appreciate and own that heritage, which informs a true patriotism against the forces of darkness.

• Bill Mitchell on AI.
• How this drives politics.
• And can thought survive against an onslaught of slop?
• Paul Krugman on abasement.
• Is evil lack of religion, or too much religion?

The First Invasion by the US

History pre-peated itself in our 1775 invasion of Canada.

Rick Atkinson's enormous history of the American Revolutionary war is stuffed with fascinating detail. Some may not be entirely documentary in origin, but his color and flair are undeniable. Having but begun this long read, I was struck by an early episode, the invasion of Canada. The colonies had not quite yet declared independence, nor had they resolved the seige of British-occupied Boston. They were undersupplied, short of manpower, and still on shaky ground politically with a large loyalist population. Yet, they got it into their heads to storm Montreal and then Quebec in the middle of winter, 1775 to 1776, expecting to be greeted by adoring natives as liberators. The fact that our 47th president has once again threatened to invade Canada can be taken as evidence that the expedition did not go as expected.

Within the thirteen colonies, the revolution began in a promising landscape. British governors were hated up and down the Atlantic seaboard, many reduced to bobbing offshore on Navy vessels while they begged for reinforcements that might, in their imaginations, turn the population back in their favor. Rebel congresses were formed, including the Continental Congress, which from Lexongton and Concord onwards realized that it was more than a political body- it was also a military body, responsible for fending off British attempts to cow the colonists with superior naval might, well-trained troops, ability to raise mercenaries all over Europe, and reserves of good will with loyalists and Native Americans. 

But the US is nothing if not a land-greedy society, and the Continental Congress cast its eyes northward, imagining that the recently (fifteen years before) captured colony of New France might want to cast its lot with the American rebels rather than its British overlords. However the way they went about this project spoke volumes. Instead of sending diplomats, rabble-rousers, or writers, they sent an army. In all, about three thousand men tramped north to subjugate the province of Quebec. 

Map of the campaign.

A virtually undefended Montreal was successfully besieged, and surrendered in November, 1775. Quebec, to the north, was another matter, however. It was far more stoutly defended, well supplied, and had competent walls and entrenchments. Conversely, the Americans were farther from their bases, camped in miserable conditions in the middle of winter, beset by disease, and could not make headway against even modest resistance. When the first British relief ship sailed into the harbor after breakup on the St Lawrence, the jig was up, and the Americans fled in disarray.

Transport was awful, with a lot of portaging between rivers.

Meanwhile, the American rule over Montreal hardly won the US any friends either. The governor treated the inhabitants like enemies, even closing Catholic churches. Benjamin Franklin was sent North to awe the natives and save the situation in April 1776, but the time for diplomacy was long past. 

Does all this sound familiar? What starts with high hopes and condescension, looking to win hearts and minds with guns, ends up winning nothing at all. The Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.. one wonders whether the invasion of Quebec was ever taught to US military students, or remembered by its politicians.

• 100 years before, same story.
• The Covid vaccine fights cancer!
• Warfare and social growth.
• Voting systems literally owned by Republicans?
• Crypto, crime, corruption.

Gold Standard

The politics and aesthetics of resentment. Warning: this post contains thought crime.

I can not entirely fathom thinking on the right these days. It used to be that policy disputes occured, intelligent people weighed in from across a reasonable spectrum of politics, and legislation was hammered out to push some policy modestly forward (or backward). This was true for civil rights, environmental protection, deregulation, welfare reform, even gay marriage. That seems to be gone now. Whether it is the atomization of attention and thought brought on by social media, or the mercenary propaganda of organs like FOX news, the new mode of politics appears to be destructive, vindictive spite. A spiral of extremism.

It also has a definite air of resentment, as though policy is not the point, nor is power, entirely, but owning the libtards is the real point- doing anything that would be destructive of liberal accomplishments and ideals. We know that the president is a seething mass of resentments, but how did that transform alchemically into a political movement?

I was reading a book (Deep South) by Paul Theroux that provides some insight. It is generally a sour and dismissive, full of a Yankee's distain for the backwardness of the South. And it portrays the region as more or less third world. Time and again, towns are shadowed by factories closed due to off-shoring.  What little industry the South had prior to NAFTA was eviscerated, leaving agriculture, which is increasingly automated and corporatized. It is an awful story of regression and loss of faith. And the author of this process was, ironically, a Southerner- Bill Clinton. Clinton went off to be a smarty-pants, learned the most advanced economic theories, and concluded that NAFTA was a good deal for the US, as it was for the other countries involved, and for our soft power in the post-world war 2 world. The South, however, and a good deal of the Rust Belt, became sacrifice zones for the cheaper goods coming in from off-shore.

What seemed so hopeful in the post-war era, that America would turn itself into a smart country, leading the world in science, technology, as well as in political and military affairs, has soured into the realization that all the smart kids moved to the coasts, leaving a big hole in the middle of the country. The meritocracy accomplished what it was supposed to, establishing a peerless educational system that raised over half the population into the ranks of college graduates. But it opened eyes in other ways as well, freeing women from the patterns of patriarchy, freeing minorities from reflexive submission, and opening our history to quite contentious re-interpretation. And don't get me started on religion!

So there has been a grand conjunction of resentment, between a population sick of the dividends of the educational meritocracy over a couple of generations, and a man instinctively able to mirror and goad those resentments into a destructive political movement. His aesthetic communicates volumes- garish makeup, obscene ties, and sharing with Vladimir Putin a love of gold-gilded surfaces. To the lower class, it may read expensive and successful, but to the well educated, it reeks of cheapness, focusing on surface over substance, a bullying, mob aesthetic, loudly anti-democratic.

Reading the project 2025 plans for this administration, I had thought we would be looking at a return to the monetary gold standard. But no, gold has come up in many other guises, not that one. Gold crypto coins, Gold immigration card, Oval office gold, golden hair. But most insulting of all was the ordering up of gold standard science. The idea that the current administration is interested in, or capable of, sponsoring high quality personnel, information or policy of any kind has been thoroughly refuted by its first months in office. The resentment it channels is directed against, first and foremost, those with moral integrity. Whether civil servants, diplomats, or scientists, all who fail to bend the knee are enemies of this administration. This may not be what the voters had in mind, but it follows from the deeper currents of frustration with liberal dominance of the meritocracy and culture.

But what is moral integrity? I am naturally, as a scientist, talking about truth. A morality of truth, where people are honest, communicate in truthful fashion, and care about reality, including the reality of other people and their rights / feelings. As the quote has it, reality has a well-known liberal bias. But it quickly becomes apparent that there are other moralities. What we are facing politically could be called a morality of authority. However alien to my view of things, this is not an invalid system, and it is central to the human condition, modeled on the family. Few social systems are viable without some hierarchy and relation of submission and authority. How would a military work without natural respect for authority? And just to make this philosophical and temperamental system complete, one can posit a morality of nurture as well, modeled on mothering, unconditional love, and encouragement.

This triad of moralities is essential to human culture, each component in continual dynamic tension. Our political moment shows how hypertrophy of the morality of authority manifests. Lies and ideology are a major tool, insisting that people take their reality from the leader, not their own thoughts or from experts who hew to a morality of truth. Unity of the culture is valued over free analysis. As one can imagine, over the long run of human history, the moralities of nurture and authority have been dominant by far. They are the poles of the family system. It was the Enlightenment that raised the morality of truth as an independent pole in this system for the culture at large, not just for a few scholars and clerics. Not that truth has not always been an issue in people's lives, with honesty a bedrock principle, and people naturally caring whether predicted events really happen, whether rain really falls, the sun re-appears, etc. But as an organizing cultural principle that powers technological and thus social and cultural progress, it is a somewhat recent phenomenon.

It is notable that scientists, abiding by a morality of truth, tend to have very peaceful cultures. They habitually set up specialized organizations, mentor students, and collaborate nationally and internationally. Scientists may work for the military, but within their own cultures, have little interest in starting wars. It is however a highly competitive culture, with critical reviewing, publishing races, and relentless experimentation designed to prove or disprove models of reality. Authority has its place, as recognized experts get special privileges, and established facts tend to be hard to move. At risk of sounding presumptuous, the morality of truth represents an enormous advance in human culture, not to be lightly dismissed. And the recent decades of science in the US have been a golden age that have produced a steady stream of technological advance and international power, not to mention Nobel prizes and revelations of the beauty of nature. That is a gold standard. 

• The theme does strike a nerve.
• In the name of free speech, thought crime will be punished.
• The war against propaganda.
• How fun it is in a culture of cruelty.
• A great drying is taking place.
• Is there no limit to the corruption?
• 200 years of trains.

Restraint in Foreign Policy

The restraint school of foreign policy wants the US to do less, and spend less, in foreign affairs.

A significant minority of the foreign policy establishment is trying to turn the tables on half a century of global expansion. Calling for restraint and retrenchment, (though shying away from "retreat"), they argue that we are spending too much and are overextended. What made sense in the hot and cold wars of the last century make less sense now, and indeed generates resentment and antagonism. A recent book by Peter Harris tries to make this case, though it has several defects. First, it uses a lot of loaded language like garrison and occupation, where our overseas bases do not function this way at all. Second, he does not really spend much time actually making the case for restraint, but assumes its logic and spends most of the book whining about why no one- not the foreign policy establishment, not the military-industrial complex, not the US congress, and not even the voters(!) are on board with this new and exciting movement in foreign policy. In despair, Harris veers off into domestic policy, the virtues of ranked choice voting, women's empowerment, and multi-party democracy as the golden keys enabling restraint in foreign policy to finally, some day in the future, to get a proper hearing.

The weird thing is how this community has chosen to frame its movement. Doing less, letting China run things for a change... it is not at all clear why retreat, restraint, and retrenchment would be either attractive or wise policy. We need to take a big step back and consider why we have foreign policy at all. Any nation tries to gain and keep as much power as it can. It tries to shape the international landscape in its interests, hopefully in the most far-seeing way possible. Those are the touchstones of any foreign policy. Claiming to want less power and less reach in the world is simply an intuitive non-starter. The US ended World War 2 as the most powerful nation and remains that at least up to the current administration, in all significant metrics- soft power, military power, and economic power. We need to nurture and preserve these powers for our own sake, and also for that of the system which we are the general sponsors of. As Harris points out, the international institutions that we founded after World War 2 were wonderful, but not very powerful. They were not up to the task of serious policing, and the US took on that role, as the global policeman. With a highly intermittent, sometimes irresponsible, and generally very light touch, we have been the only ones who can knock heads with anyone, any time, while also promoting stability, trade, and the expansion of democratic systems. This environment that we have shaped has been beneficial, for us and for many others around the world. The axis arrayed against us today is significant, but not very large, composed mostly of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, plus a few others like Afghanistan, maybe some of the central Asian nations.

An important additional principle of foreign relations is that there are many audiences involved. Other leaders are far from our only target when we show who we are by how we speak and use our power abroad. We seek to promote human rights and democracy to all people, everywhere. We seek to deter aggression from any number of entities, including terrorist organizations of all sizes up to states. The landscape is very complex, so we need to have many tools, and balance those tools carefully. This leads to a totally different framing of the restraint theme in foreign policy.

Take a look at the following diagram. This is a map of the military bases that we have all over the world. Better than all the platitudes those in favor of restraint put out, this one image speaks volumes about how distended one aspect of our foreign policy has become.

This begs belief. At a time when we have technological reach to anywhere and at any time, we have carved out little islands of America in eighty countries. We have over a hundred bases each in Germany and Japan. Maybe in the decade after World War 2 this might have made a little sense. But now, I cannot imagine the point of this gargantuan footprint. There are about 24 bases in sub-Saharan Africa. It is, frankly, unbelievable. None of these are zones of occupation, in the sense that we rule the country they are in. None of them, outside of perhaps South Korea, are garrisons, in the classic sense of guarding that location from harm, particularly from the natives. Our bases are all established on a cooperative basis, in what appears to be a mania for military relations with other countries, to facilitate training, arms sales, a forward footprint for ourselves, and resupply depots. They constitute a sort of international embassy system of the US military.

This is the real problem that the restraint crowd is getting at. They suggest also that another function of these foreign bases is as tripwires, to show our seriousness about each alliance and drag us into any war that the host country experiences. This may be true of our core NATO and East Asian bases, but most others are of a much less momentous, and more transactional nature. At any rate, this vast archipelago, as well as the ~500 bases within the US, is much more fertile ground for policy change in the military-industrial complex than efforts to dis-empower our foreign policy more broadly.

The crux is whether we would be more effective with a smaller footprint. While each of these foreign bases is desired at some level by its host country, (with some arm-twisting from the US), the audience is probably quite narrow- the local military, the local support staff and suppliers, some of the political class. It is hard to imagine that most people in most countries are happy to have foreign military in their backyards. Thus, looking at the larger picture of US influence abroad, it is pretty easy to make the case that the benefits of most foreign bases are outweighed by their costs, regardless of their direct price tag. This is where more humility and wisdom are needed. Retrenchment needs to be evaluated, not in the frame of why we should be retreating from the world at large and letting other great powers run their neighborhoods more freely. No, it should be evaluated on how it would benefit our soft power position, beneficially shaping the international environment and attracting more friends to our side.

All these considerations are redoubled when an actual war looms. Has our world policing and forward basing been effective? One would have to give it middling marks at best when it comes to military interventions. We saved South Korea from communism/Juche, and Kuwait from Iraq. but we failed in Vietnam, then in Afghanistan, and should not have even started the war on Iraq. Given the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, it is not a great record of using military means for foreign policy ends. The question is whether we have turned to military tools too frequently, when other options were available. The answer is definitely yes, in the cases of both Vietnam and the second Iraq war. It isn't just hindsight, but foresight at the time could have counseled the US to pass on these misbegotten wars. The Iraq war in particular was a failure on every conceivable level- strategic, humanitarian, political, and tactical. There could not be a starker lesson in how not to use military means to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Looking to the future, the Ukraine war suggests that a fair portion of our military power is also technically obsolete. Our military ability to project power rests in large part on last-century technology like aircraft carriers, tanks, and logistics (those bases!). But the new cyber and drone warfare landscape is starkly different, and may require a significant re-vamping of our overall conception of military power. The restraint school naturally fears that the normal course of the military industrial complex would be to add spending for added capabilities, while keeping all our old machinery and programs as well. The budget is not really the big question, however. Rather, do all capabilities of the government (diplomatic, economic, and military) work productively and in concert to maximize our long-term power and security? Given that better diplomacy and smarter options and thinking at the top could save so many lives and forestall such wide-ranging tragedies as the Iraq war, it makes sense to beef up those areas of the government that provide those goods. Maybe something like a formalized adversarial process of policy development, where red teams and blue teams have independent resources, and develop policy plans, historical interpretations, and forward predictions, which are then evaluated after five and ten-year time periods to gauge who is giving better advice. Maybe a history department, to go with our military, intelligence, and diplomatic departments. One can guess from such exercises that we could use less military, and more policy and cultural expertise, on the whole, in a movement that might be termed rebalancing. And this, in the end, is surely the real point of the restraint caucus.

• What the hell is it with ivermectin?
• Christian is as Christian does.
• Code red on vaccines.
• A good time had by all.
• Movie of the week: Captains Courageous. I have never seen a movie deal with male culture and male role models as directly and insistently as this (if also melodramatically). It is very topical with all the current talk about men, manosphere, and the problems with boys. Not to mention the evident lack of constructive role models in the life of our current president and his circle. I am extremely fortunate to have had several great role models in my own life.

An Uneasy Relationship With the Air

Review of Airborne, by Carl Zimmer. 

The pandemic was tough on everyone. But it had especially damaging effects on the political system, and on its relationship to the scientific community. Now the wingnuts are in charge, blowing up the health and research system, which obviously is not going to end well, whatever its defects and whatever their motivations.

While the scientific community had some astounding wins in this pandemic, in virus testing and vaccine production, there were also appalling misses. The US's first attempt at creating a test failed, at the most critical time. We were asleep at the wheel of public health, again at the earliest time, in controlling travel and quarantining travelers. But worst of all was the groupthink that resisted, tooth and nail, the aerosol nature of viral transmission of Covid. That is, at the core, what Zimmer's book is about, and it is a harrowing story.

He spends most of the book strolling through the long history of "aerobiology", which is to say, the study of microbes in the air. There are the fungal spores, the plant pests, the pollen, the vast amount of oceanic debris. But of most interest to us are the diseases, like tuberculosis, and anthrax. The field took a detour into biowarfare in the mid-20th century, from which it never really recovered, since so much of that science was secret, and in its shadow, the sporadic earlier public studies that looked carefully into disease transmission by aerosols were, sadly, forgotten. 

So it became a commonplace at the CDC and other public health entities, among all the so-called infectious disease specialists, that respiratory viruses like influenza, colds, and coronaviruses spread not by aerosols, but by contact, surfaces, and large droplets. This made infection control easy, (at least in principle), in that keeping a few feet away from sick people would be sufficient for safety, perhaps plus surgical masks in extreme situations. There was a curious disinterest in the older studies that had refuted this concept, and little interest in doing new ones, because "everyone knows" what the virus behavior is.

It is hard to explain all this in purely scientific terms. I think everyone knew at some level that the true nature of respiratory virus transmission was not well-understood, because we clearly had not managed to control it, either in residential or in hospital settings. It is hard to grapple with invisible things, and easy to settle into conventional, even mythical, trains of thought. First there were miasmas, then there were Koch's postulates and contact by fluids. It was hard to come full circle and realize that, yes, miasmas were sort of a thing after all, in the form of aerosols of infectious particles. It was also all too easy to say that little evidence supported aerosol spread, since the work that had been done had been forgotten, and the area was unfashionable for new work, given the conventional wisdom.

Even more significantly, the implications of aerosol spread of viruses are highly unpleasant, even frightening. The air we need every minute of our lives is suspect. It is a bit like the relationship we have with food- deeply conflicted and fraught, with fears, excesses, and rituals. One has to eat, but our food is full of psychological valences, possible poisons, cultural baggage, judgement, libraries full of advice. No one really wanted to go there for air as well. So I think scientists, even those calling themselves infectious disease specialists, (of all things), settled into a comfortable conventional wisdom, that droplets were the only game in town.

But what did this say about the larger research enterprise? What did it mean that, even while medical/bio research community was sequencing genomes and penetrating into obscure and complex regions of molecular biology, we had not done, or at least not appreciated and implemented, the most basic research of public health- how infectious diseases really spread, and how to protect people from them? It constituted gross negligence by the medical research community- no two ways about it. And that appears to have caused the public at large to question what on earth they were funding. A glorious enterprise of discovery, perhaps, but one that was not very focused on actual human health.

A timeline of research/policy

• Sprawling work on airborne infection in 1955. 

• Earliest glimmer in latest pandemic, May 2020. 

• Deeper followup, October 2020.

• Even deeper followup, August 2021. Later, 2023.

• Critics still can not believe aerosol spread, November, 2022.

• Hospital HVAC requirements currently go to MERV 8, not enough.

• Current CDC guidance mentions aerosols only from "procedures", not from people, though masks are recommended.

Aerosol spread of disease requires two things- that aerosols are produced, and that the infectious microbes remain infectious while in those aerosols. The former is clear enough. We sneeze, after all. Even normal breathing creates fine aerosols. The latter is where scientific doubt has been more common, since many viruses are not armored, but have loose coats and membranes derived from our own, delicate cells. Viruses like HIV don't survive in aerosols, and don't spread that way. But it turns out that Covid viruses have a half life of about two hours in aerosols. 

The implications of that are quite stunning. It means that viruses can hang around in the air for many hours. Indoor spaces with poor ventilation- which means practically all indoor spaces- can fill up with infectious particles from one or a few infected people, and be an invisible epidemic cloud. No wonder everyone eventually got Covid. 

What to do about it? Well, the earliest aerobiology experiments on infectious disease went directly to UV light disinfection, which is highly effective, and remains so today. But UV light is dangerous to us as well as microbes, so needs to be well-shielded. As part of an air handling system, though, UV light is an excellent solution. Additional research has found that far-UV, at 222 nm, is both effective against airborne microbes and safe for human eyes and skin, creating an outstanding way to clear the air. Another approach is HEPA filtration of air, either as part of an air handling / exchange system, or as stand-alone appliances. Another is better ventilation overall, bringing in more outside air, though that has high energy costs. Lastly, there are masks, which are only partially effective, and the place no one really wants to go. But given a lack of responsibility by those in charge of our built environment, masks are the lowest common denominator- the one thing we can all do to protect ourselves and others. And not just any mask, but the N95 high-quality filtration mask or respirator.

The pandemic threw some sharp light into our public institutions. We sequenced these viruses in a hurry, but couldn't figure out how they spread. We created vaccines in record time, but wasted untold effort and expense on cleaning surfaces, erecting plexiglass shields, and demanding masking, rather than taking responsibility for guarding and cleaning public air spaces in a more holistic way. It is a disconcerting record, and there remains quite a bit yet to do.

• Poor (and personalized) policy means poor science and poor vaccines.
• Department of injustice and thought crime.
• Who needs new music?
• Putin and money.
• Another argument for public schools.
• Another biological thing that didn't exist, until it did- lymph drainage in the brain.
• No wonder no one wants to become a primary care physician.
• The Japanese ice age.

Donald Trump is no Andrew Jackson

A few notes about the Jacksonian era.

One common historical touchpoint for our current epoch is the Jacksonian era, when a populist president presided over a significant increase in presidential power, carried into the White House by a ragtag rabble. Andrew Jackson stood against the elite power centers of the time, having been denied the presidency earlier by a shady deal that gave John Quincy Adams the office. Nor did he have much more love for the aristocrats of Virginia. He came from the backwoods of Tennessee, and a long career of fighting Indians as well as the English. Once in office, Jackson cleaned house and installed a patronage system that led to decades of increasing corruption, till the civil service was instituted. He also used the veto power, and made his cabinet secretaries subservient, to an unprecedented degree.

Jackson strengthened the party system and cultivated friendly media in a way that people at the time decried as divisive and dangerous. And, perhaps most strikingly, he oversaw the mass expulsion of Native Americans from the South. Jackson was a slaveowner and had no issue with the white supremacy of his day, whether against African Americans or Native Americans. Ironically, when France decided to not honor a treaty with the US, Jackson spared no effort to defend the nation's honor and rights. But when it came to the many treaties the US had signed with indigenous nations, many expressly meant for perpetuity, they were waved away like so much smoke.

On the other hand, Jackson was a successful general and businessman and won all the major battles of his presidency. And he was successful enough to anoint a successor, Martin van Buren. He was surprisingly eloquent and well-written and had a core set of principles that guided him and the nation. One principle was the importance of the constitution and the union. While previous presidents had thought the veto power should be confined to extreme legislative acts they regarded as unconstitutional, Jackson saw nothing in the constitution against using the veto on a policy basis, to weigh in on substantive issues as a popularly elected co-equal branch of government.

More importantly, he guided the nation through a nullification crisis with South Carolina with a sure hand. Always a hotbed of resistance and secession, South Carolina took particular issue with federal tariffs, which were set quite high to favor domestic industry. Industry generally located in the North. Jackson laid the groundwork for federal military intervention, promoted a tariff reduction, and issued a forceful and closely argued denunciation of "nullification" and secession that, in combination, squelched the movement of southern states against federal supremacy. This put off for a generation the crisis that Lincoln was fated to deal with.

One of Jackson's most interesting fights was against the Second Bank of the United States. Congress had chartered, from the Washington administration onwards, a national bank that was the sole interstate financial institution of the US. It was charged with facilitating the finances of the federal government, and with providing credit for internal improvements crossing state lines. But it was in essence a private bank that had only a fraction of its board appointed by the government and otherwise ran its business on a private basis as a commercial bank. In its opening years, it was generally undersized and not well run, and by the time of the second bank, had caused a couple of recessions due to its mismanagement. 

Finally, by the Jackson administration, it had come under competent management and was both expanding in all directions and doing a reasonable job of controlling the money supply and credit in the US, by limiting expansion of the state banks, (a significant source of opposition). It had, indeed, become the largest single financial institution in the world. But to Jackson, these were hardly points in its favor. He viewed it as a dangerous center of power, as though in our day JP Morgan were the only commercial bank allowed to do nation-wide business, with no competitors. The whole idea of a publicly-run central bank had not yet arisen at this time, and the national bank was more or less modeled on the Bank of England, which was a similar hybrid private entity. Unfortunately, instead of seeking reform of the national bank into a more modern and public-interest institution, Jackson pulled the only levers he had, which were to veto the rechartering of the Second National Bank, and then to follow that up with removing all federal deposits and putting them into state banks, effectively killing it. This had the unfortunate effect of dooming the US to almost a century of financial instability and poorly regulated banking. But on the whole, I am quite sympathetic to Jackson's position in killing the bank. It was a nascent form of anti-monopoly policy, which should have been taken up more systematically later in the century.

So, Jackson was very much of his time, not a visionary who could prepare the government for the vast growth in population, social institutions, and technology that were coming. But at the same time, he was not trying to drag the US backwards in time either. He did not cruelly run rampant through federal agencies, or foster international trade wars in search of a happier dream time of mediocre jobs and pay. The economic crisis that happened during his administration was not a tantrum he threw, but rather was caused by the national bank, as it consciously fostered a recession by withdrawing credit in an attempt to turn the people against Jackson. An attempt that failed because everyone knew what was going on, and which indeed showed the kind of power that Jackson was fighting against. Andrew Jackson did not view the federal government as an extortion racket or a throne from which bootlickers could be alternately fawned over and kicked in the teeth. He was thus, despite a few parallels, quite unlike the current occupant.

I am taking most of this material from an enjoyable biography by Jon Meacham. It is based mostly on correspondence, thus is quite chatty and focused on Jackson's domestic affairs. It is, conversely, frustratingly weak on the larger historical and policy issues of his day, particularly when it comes to the bank fight, which was so important for the country's future. 

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