Building the Middle Class

Why are poor people in the US enslaved to tyrannical, immiserating institutions?

Santa Claus brought an interesting gift this Christmas, Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickle and Dimed". This is a memoir of her experiment as a low wage worker. Ehrenreich is a well-educated scientist, feminist, journalist, and successful writer, so this was a dive from very comfortable upper middle class circumstances into the depths both of the low-end housing market and the minimum wage economy. While she brings a great deal of humor to the story, it is fundamentally appalling, an affront to basic decency. Our treatment of the poor should be a civil rights issue.

The first question is why we have a minimum wage at all. What is the lowest wage that natural economic conditions would bear, and what economic and social principles bear on this bottom economic rung? In ancient times, slavery was common, which meant a wage of zero. This was replicated in the ante-bellum American South- minimum wage of zero. So as far as natural capitalism is concerned, there is no minimum wage needed and people can rather easily be coerced by various social and violent means to work for the barest subsistence. The minimum wage is entirely a political and social concept, designed to express a society's ideas of minimal economic, civic, and social decency. Maybe that is why, as with so many other things, the US reached a high point in its real minimum wage in the late 1960's, 66% higher than what it is now.

Real minimum wage in the US, vs nominal.

The whole economy of low wage work is very unusual. One would think that supply and demand would operate here, and that difficult work would be rewarded by higher pay. But it is precisely the most difficult work- the most grinding, alienating, dispiriting work that is paid least. There is certainly an education effect on pay, but the social structure of low end work is mostly one of power relations, where desperate people are faced with endlessly greedy employers, who know that the less they pay, the more desperate their workers will be to get even that little amount. It is remarkable what we have allowed this sector to do in the name of "free" capitalism- the drug tests, the uniforms, the life-destroying scheduling chaos, the wage theft, the self-serving corporate propaganda, the surveillance.

Is it a population issue, that there is always an excess of low-wage workers? I think it is really the other way around, that there is a highly flexible supply of low-wage work, thanks to the petty-tyrannical spirit of "entrepreneurs". No one needs the eighth fast food restaurant, the fifteenth nail salon, or the third maid cleaning service. We use and abuse low wage labor because it is there, not because these are essential jobs. If a shortage of low-wage workers really starts to crimp an important industry, it has recourse to far more effective avenues of redress, such as importing workers from abroad, outsourcing the work, or if all else fails, automating it. What people are paid is largely a social construct in the minds of us, the society of employers who couldn't imagine paying decently for the work / servitude of others. To show an exception that illustrates the rule, nurses during the pandemic did in some cases, if they were willing to travel and negotiate, make out like bandits. But nurses who stayed put, played by the rules, and truly cared for those around them, were routinely abused, forced into extra work and bad conditions by employers who did not care about them and had .. no choices. In exceptional cases where true need exists, supply and demand can move the needle. But social power plays a very large role.

Some states have raised their minimum wage, such as California, to $15. This is a more realistic wage, though the state has astronomic housing and other costs as well. Has our economy collapsed here? No. It has had zero discernable effect on the provision of local services, and the low wage economy sails on at a new, and presumably more humane, level. When I first envisioned this essay, I thought that a much more substantial increase in the minimum wage would be the proper answer. But then I found that $15 per hour provides an annual income that is almost at the US level of median income, 34k annually for an individual. The average income in the US is only 53k. So there is not a lot of wiggle room there. We are a nation of the poorly paid, on average living practically hand-to-mouth. On the household level, things may look better if one has the luck to have two or more solid incomes.

My own individual incomes analysis, drawn from reported Social Security data.

Any any rate, a livable wage is not much different from the median wage, and even that is too low in many economically hot areas where real estate is unbearably expensive. This is, incidentally, another large dimension of US poverty, that the stand-pat, NIMBY, no-growth zoning practices of what is now a majority of the country have sentenced the poor and the young to an even lower standard of living than what the income statistics would indicate, as they fork over their precious earnings to the older, richer, and socially settled landlords among us.

So what is the answer? I would advocate for a mix of deep policy change. First is a minimum wage that is livable, which means $15 nationwide, indexed for inflation, and higher as needed in more high-cost states. It should be a basic contract with the citizenry and workers of all types that working should pay decently, and not send you to a food pantry. All those jobs and businesses that can not survive without poorly paid workers... we don't need them. Second would be a government employer of last resort system that would offer a job to anyone who wants one. This would be paid at the minimum wage, and put people to work doing projects of public significance- cleaning up roadways, building schools, offering medical care, checkups, crossing guards, etc. We can, as a society and as civil governments, do a better job employing the poor in a useful way than can the much-vaunted entrepreneurs. Instead of endless strip malls of bottom-feeding commerce, let local governments sweep up available labor for cleaning the environment, instead of fouling it. Welfare should be, instead of a demeaning odyssey through DMV- like bureaucracies, a straight payment to anyone not employed, at half the minimum wage.

Third, we need more public services. Transit should be totally free. Medical care should be completely free. Education should be free. And incidentally, secondary education should be all public, with private schools up to 12th grade banned. When we wonder why our country and politics have become so polarized, a big reason is the physical and spiritual separation between the rich and poor. While the speaker in the video linked below advocates for free housing as well, that would be perhaps a bridge too far, though housing needs to be addressed urgently by forcing governments to zone for their actual population and taking homelessness as a policy-directing index of the need to zone and build more housing.

Fourth, the rich need to be taxed more. The corrosion of  our social system is not only evident at the bottom where misery and quasi-slavery is the rule, but at the top, where the rich contribute less and less to positive social values. The recent Twitter drama showed in an almost mythical way the incredible narcisism and callous ethics that pervade the upper echelons (... if the last administration hadn't shown this already). The profusion of philanthropies are mere performative narcissism and white-washing, while the real damage is being done by the flood of money that flows from the rich into anti-democratic and anti-government projects across the land.

And what is all this social division accomplishing? It is not having any positive eugenic effect, if one takes that view of things. Reproduction is not noticeably affected, despite the richness at the top or the abject poverty at the bottom. It is not having positive social effects, as the rich wall themselves off with increasingly hermetic locations and technologies. They thought, apparently, that cryptocurrencies would be the next step of unshackling the Galtian entrepreneurs of the world from the oppression of national governments. Sadly, that did not work out very well. The rich can not be rich without a society to sponge off. The very idea of saving money presupposes an ongoing social and economic system from which that money can be redeemed by a future self. Making that future society (not to mention the future environment) healthy and cohesive should be our most fervent goal.

• How about universal basic services, like housing and transit?
• But not in this congress.
• Bernie is still on the case.
• Meanwhile, how does a soak-the-poor tax system sound?
• Mint that coin!
• Economic regression.

The Politics of Resentment

Ann Applebaum has seen where all this Trumpism is going ... in Eastern Europe.

Liberals in America are baffled. How could anyone vote for Republican candidates at this point? How could anyone, let alone half the electorate, vote for Trump? We are befuddled and anxious for the future of America, which, far from becoming great again, is turning into a banana republic before our eyes, if, hopefully, not worse. We in California are particularly dissociated, as Democrats run the whole state, and Republican voter registration continues to decline year after year and is now under one quarter of the electorate. What does the rest of the country see that we do not? Or vice versa?

Ann Applebaum has written a trenchant book on the matter, "Twilight of Democracy". She lives in Poland, so has had a front-row seat to the illiberalization of a political system, both in Poland and in nearby Hungary, which seems farther advanced. Eastern Europe has more reason than most, perhaps to be disillusioned with the capitalist orthodoxy, after their rather rough transition from Communism. But this is a world-wide phenomenon, sweeping fringe rightists into power from Brazil to Sweden. What is going on? Applebaum posits that the whole structure of meritocratic representative democracy, with its open competition for (good) public policy, and use of educated expertise over vast areas of state interests from foreign affairs to monetary regulation and education policy, have come under fundamental critique. And this critique comes partly from those who have been shut out of that system: the not-well-educated, not-bicoastal, not-rich, not-acronymed-minority, not-hopeful about the American future. It is, in short, a politics of resentment.

How have the elites done over the post-world war 2 period? They won the cold war, but lost virtually every battle in it, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. They let the lower classes of the US sink into relative poverty and powerlessness vs business and the well-educated classes, in a rather brutal system of collegiate competition, de-unionization, off-shoring and worker suppression. They have let the economy fester through several crushing recessions, particularly the malaise of the 70's and the real estate meltdown of 2008. While the US has done pretty well overall, the lower middle and poor classes have not done well, and live increasingly precarious lives that stare homelessness in the face daily. In the heartland, parents at best saw their children fly off to coastal schools and cultures, becoming different people who would not dream of coming home again to live.

America is heavily red, geographically.

And the elite-run state has become increasingly sclerotic, continually self-criticizing and regulating its way to inaction. A thousand well-meaning regulations have paved the way to a bloated government that can not build a high-speed rail line in California, or solve the homelessness crisis. Everyone is a critic, including yours truly- it is always easier to raise objections, cover one's ass, and not get anything done. So one can sympathize with evident, if inchoate, desires for strength- for someone to break the barriers, bring the system to heel, and build that wall. Or get Brexit done. Or whatever the baying right wing media want at the moment.

The elite party in this sense is the Democratic party - capturing the coastal and well-educated, plus public employee unions. The Republican party, the party of money and the rich, (not the elite at all!), has conversely become the party of the downtrodden, feeding them anti-immigrant, anti-elite, anti-state red meat. It was a remarkably easy transformation, that required only shamelessness and lying to make hay out of the vast reserves of resentment seething in middle America. 

But Applebaum's point is not that the elites have messed things up and it may be time to do things differently. No, she suggests that the new protofascists have reframed the situation fundamentally. The elites in power have, through the hard work of meritocratic institutions, set up pipelines and cultures that reproduce their position in power almost as hermetically as the ancien régime of France and its nobility. That anyone can (theoretically) enter this elite and that it is at least somewhat vetted for competence and rationality is disregarded, or actively spat upon as "old" thinking- definitely not team thinking. The path to power now is to stoke resentment, overturn the old patterns of respect for competence and empathy, discard this meritocratic system in favor of one based on loyalty and fealty, and so bring about a new authoritarianism that brooks no "softness", exercises no self-criticism, has no respect for the enemy or for compromise, and has no room for intellectuals. 

But Hungary is way ahead of us, in the one-party rule department.

A second angle on all this is that conservatives feel resentful for another good reason- that they have lost the culture war. Despite all their formal power, winning the presidency easily half the time, and regularly running legislative branches and judicial branches in the US, their larger cultural project to keep progress at bay, fight moral "decadence" and all the other hobby horses, have gone nowhere. The US is increasingly woke, diverse, and cosmopolitan, and the "blood and soil" types (including especially conservative Catholics and Evangelicals), are despondent about it. Or apoplectic, or rabid, etc., depending on temperament. Their triumph in overturning Roe may allow some backwater states to turn back the clock, but on the whole, it looks like a rearguard action.

This is what feeds disgust with the system, and with democracy itself. Republicans who used to sing the praises of the US government, the flag, and democracy now seem to feel the opposite, that the US is a degenerate wasteland, no better than other countries, not exceptional, not dedicated to serious ideals that others should also aspire to. Democracy has failed, for them. And Applebaum points out how this feeling licenses the loss of civility, the lying, the anything-goes demagoguery which characterizes our new right-wing politics. Naturally the internet and its extremism-feeding algorithms have a lot to do with it as well. Applebaum is conservative herself. She spent a career working in the Tory media in Britain, but is outraged at what Tory-ism, and conservatism internationally, has become. She sees a dramatic split in conservatism, between those that still buy into the democratic, liberal system, and those who have become its opponents, in their revolutionary, Trumpy fervor. In the US, the fever may possibly have broken, after a very close brush with losing our institutions during the last administration, as election after election has made losers of the far right.

Over the long haul, Applebaum sees this as a cyclical process, with ample precedent from ancient Egyptian times through today, with a particularly interesting stop in the viciously polarized Drefussard period in France. But I see one extra element, which is our planetary and population crisis. We had very good times over the last few centuries building the human population and its comforts on the back of colonization, fossil fuels, and new technologies. The US of the mid to late-20th century exemplified the good times of such growth. Now the ecological bells are ringing, and the party is coming to an end. Denial has obviously been the first resort of the change-averse, and conservatives have distinguished themselves in their capabilities in that department. But as reality gradually sets in, something more sinister and competitive may be in the offing, as exemplified by the slogan "America First". Not first as in a leader of international institutions, liberal democracies and enlightenment values, but first as in looking out for number one, and devil take the rest. 

Combined with a rejuvinated blood and soil nationalism, which we see flourishing in so many places, these attitudes threaten to send us back into a world resembling that before world war 1 or 2, (and, frankly, all the rest of history), when nationalism was the coin of international relations, and national competition knew no boundaries- mercantile or military. We are getting a small foretaste of this in Russia's war on Ukraine, which is a product of precisely this Russia-first, make Russia great again mind-set. Thankfully, it is accompanied by large helpings of stupidity and mismanagement, which may save us yet. 

• It can be done.
• Another view of the fascism process.
• Corporate values and power are at all time highs.
• The penguins are in peril.
• "Intelligent" design is still about.
• Go Fetterman, and others with disabilities.

Magellan, the Movie

The story of Magellan's voyage is positively cinematic.

It has now been five hundred years since the first circumnavigation of the world, by Ferdinand Magellan. This feat doesn't generally get as much fame as Columbus's discovery of the Caribbean, even though Columbus didn't know what he was doing, and kept not understanding what he had done long after he returned. By the time, thirty years later, that some more of the new world had been explored, and the Portuguese had also entered the Indian ocean around the bottom of Africa, the overall geography of the earth had not advanced a great deal, still being based on Ptolemy's significantly (about 30%) too-small estimate. But the lure remained- how to get to the all-important spice islands in a more convenient way. 

And it was a very commercial lure. Magellan had little scientific interest in all this, per se. He was a mariner through and through, and had done extensive research with his colleagues, mapmakers, and astronomers. But most of all he was desperate to make some money after a wide-ranging, but not very well-paid, career with the official Portuguese fleet. He had visited India and what is now Malaysia, and had heard from a friend who had finally found the spice islands, and had decided to stay there. So when Magellan went to the King of Portugal to propose his westward voyage around the tip of South America, it was a strictly commercial venture, hopefully easier and shorter than the trip around Africa and through the Indian ocean. But the king was uninterested, as the Portuguese already were using the eastern route, and didn't seem much point in trying another, unknown one. Columbus had already tried that gambit and had not gotten much for it. Not much in the way of spices, at any rate.

So Magellan stormed off in a huff, renounced his allegiance to the Portuguese crown, and made his proposal to the Spanish king instead. Now that logic made more sense. The Spanish and Portuguese had come up with a colonial demacation line, the treaty of Tordesillas, that split the Atlantic, which is what gave Brazil to the Portuguese. But this line in imaginary fashion extended around the globe to the other side, and depending how big that globe was, might award the spice islands (the southern islands of the Indonesian archapelago) to Spain, not Portugal. Devising a route from the other side might get Spain there faster, and also avoid unpleasant conflict with sea lanes that were now busy with Portuguese shipping. So the expedition was approved and launched in 1519.

It is a fascinating story, and gets more and more interesting as it goes on, with exotic locations, spectacular discoveries, first contact with far-flung natives, mutiny, hangings, and maroonings. It is very well-told by Tim Joyner, in his definitive and meticulous 1992 book. One aspect that did not come up, however, was that Magellan and colleagues could have come up with a much more accurate estimate of the circumference of the globe by their thorough knowledge of latitude. Longitude- that was difficult to calculate, though his voyage made amazing advances in this respect as well. But if they were imaginative enough to consider that the globe was round in all directions, then the circumference around the poles, which was well within their ability to calculate with precision, would have told them that Ptolemy was way off, and that scurvy was going to be their lot in traversing the Pacific ocean (which Magellan named, incidentally).

A top-secret 1502 map of the known world, from Portugal. The coast of Africa is well-detailed, while farther areas are quite a bit murkier. Crucially, nothing is known of the southern extent of South America.

The last ship, of the five that embarked on the expedition, limped back into San Lucar, near Seville, Spain, three years later, bedraggled and desperately bailing out their bilge. But it brought back a treasure of cloves, as well as a treasure of information. The expedition had poisoned relations with numerious natives, not to mention the Portuguese, who quickly overtook and imprisoned the small contingent left at Ternate, one of the spice islands. In fact, Magellan himself died in a reckless attack on a thousand natives in what is now the Philippines. 

So the mini-series version would have to be told by someone else. And that should be Antonio Pigafetta, the self-appointed anthropologist of the expedition. A worldly fellow from Lombardy who had been employed at the Vatican, he was part of its ambassadorial delegation to Spain when he heard about Magellan's plans. He appears to have jumped at the chance for adventure, and kept detailed dairies of the events of the voyage, to which all subsequent authors are hugely indebted. He even kept a day log which he was surprised to see finally came up a day short- precisely the day that one loses when following the setting sun around the world. He seems to have been quite a character, who had high respect for Magellan, and whose adventurousness also saved him from scurvy, which tended to afflict the more squeamish eaters, who were put off by eating rats and whatever else came to hand. 

So there you have it, perhaps a twelve part miniseries spanning the globe, rich with drama, suffering, scenery, deceit, greed, blind ambition, valor, and victory, telling of one of the great adventures of mankind.

• What are we doing in Africa? And what is China doing there?
• Jared Huffman represents me.

For the Love of Money

The social magic of wealth ... and Trump's travel down the wealth / status escalator.

I have been reading the archly sarcastic "The Theory of the Leisure Class", by Thorstein Veblen. It introduced the concept of "conspicuous consumption" by way of arguing that social class is marked by work, specifically by the total lack of work that occupies the upper, or leisure class, and more and more mundane forms of work as one sinks down the social scale. This is a natural consequence of what he calls our predatory lifestyle, which, at least in times of yore, reserved to men, especially those of the upper class, the heroic roles of hunter and warrior, contrasted with the roles of women, who were assigned all non-heroic forms of work, i.e. drudgery. This developed over time into a pervasive horror of menial work and a scramble to evince whatever evidence one can of being above it, such as wearing clean, uncomfortable and fashionable clothes, doing useless things like charity drives, golf, and bridge. And having one's wife do the same, to show how financially successful one is.

Veblen changed our culture even as he satarized and skewered it, launching a million disgruntled teenage rebellions, cynical movies, songs, and other analyses. But his rules can not be broken. Hollywood still showcases the rich, and silicon valley, for all its putative nerdiness, is just another venue for social signaling by way of useless toys, displays of leisure (at work, no less, with the omnipresent foosball and other games), and ever more subtle fashion statements.

Conversely, the poor are disparaged, if not hated. We step over homeless people, holding our noses. The Dalit of India are perhaps the clearest expression of this instinct. But our whole economic system is structured in this way, paying the hardest and most menial jobs the worst, while paying some of the most social destructive professions, like corporate law, the best, and placing them by attire, titles, and other means, high on the social hierarchy.

As Reagan said, nothing succeeds like success. We are fascinated, indeed mesmerized, by wealth. It seems perfectly reasonable to give wealthy areas of town better public services. It seems perfectly reasonable to have wealthy people own all our sports teams, run all our companies, and run for most political offices. We are after all Darwinian through and through. But what if a person's wealth comes from their parents? Does the status still rub off? Should it? Or what if it came from criminal activities? Russia is run by a cabal of oligarchs, more or less- is their status high or low?

All this used to make more sense, in small groups where reputations were built over a lifetime of toil in support of the family, group, and tribe. Worth was assessed by personal interaction, not by the proxy of money. And this status was difficult to bequeath to others. The fairy tale generally has the prince proving himself through arduous tasks, to validate the genetic and social inheritance that the rest of the world may or may not be aware of. 

But with the advent of money, and even more so with the advent of inherited nobility and kingship, status became transferable, inheritable, and generally untethered from the values it supposedly exemplifies. Indeed, in our society it is well-known that wealth correlates with a decline in ethical and social values. Who exemplifies this most clearly? Obviously our former president, whose entire public persona is based on wealth. It was evidently inherited, and he parlayed it into publicity, notariety, scandal, and then the presidency. He was adulated, first by tabloids and TV, which loved brashness (and wealth), then by Republican voters, who appear to love cruelty, mean-ness, low taste and intellect, ... and wealth. 

But now the tide is slowly turning, as Trump's many perfidies and illegal practices catch up with him. It is leaking out, despite every effort of half the media, that he may not be as wealthy as he fraudulently portrayed. And with that, the artificial status conferred by being "a successful businessman" is deflating, and his national profile is withering. One might say that he is taking an downward ride on the escalator of social status that is in our society conferred largely by wealth.

All that is shiny ... mines coal.

Being aware of this social instinct is naturally the first step to addressing it. A century ago and more, the communists and socialists provided a thoroughgoing critique of the plutocratic class as being not worthy of social adulation, as the Carnegies and Horatio Algers of the world would have it. But once in power, the ensuing communist governments covered themselves in the ignominy of personality cults that facilitated (and still do in some cases) even worse political tyrannies and economic disasters. 

The succeeding model of "managed capitalism" is not quite as catastrophic and has rehabilitated the rich in their societies, but one wouldn't want to live there either. So we have to make do with the liberal state and its frustratingly modest regulatory powers, aiming to make the wealthy do virtuous things instead of destructive things. Bitcoin is but one example of a waste of societal (and ecological) resources, which engenders social adulation of the riches to be mined, but should instead be regulated out of existence. Taking back the media is a critical step. We need to reel back the legal equation of money with speech and political power that has spread corruption, and tirelessly tooted its own ideology of status and celebrity through wealth.

• California police could use some supervision too.
• Marin- a cruel gerontocracy?

Desperately Seeking Cessation of Desire

Some paradoxes, and good points, of Buddhism.

I have been reading "In the Buddha's Words", by Bhikkhu Bodhi, which is a well-organized collection / selection of translations of what we have as the core teachings of Buddhism. It comes from the Pali canon, from Sri Lanka, where Buddhism found refuge after its final destruction in India after the Arab invasions, and offers as clear an exposition of the Buddhist system as one can probably find in English. A bit like the scriptures of Christianity, the earliest canons of Buddhism originate from oral traditions only recorded a hundred or so years after Buddha's death, but as they are slightly less besotted with miraculous stories, the collection has more of a feeling of actual teaching, than of gnomic riddles and wonder stories, not to mention Odyssean mis-adventures.

Both prophets make audacious claims, one to be god, or its son, the other to have attained a perfectly enlightened state with similar implications for everlasting life (or lack of rebirth, at any rate). Each extends to his followers the tempting prospect of a similarly exalted state after death. Each teaches simple morals, each attracts followers both lay and career-ist, the latter of whom tend to be rather dense. Each launched an international sensation that bifurcated into a monastic/ascetic branch of professional clerics and a more popular branch that attained a leading role in some societies.

But Buddhism has attained a special status in the West as something a bit more advanced than the absurd theology of Christianity. A theology that could even be deemed atheist, along with a practice that focuses more relentlessly on peace and harmony than does what Christianity has become, particularly in the US. It is congenial to seekers, an exotic and edgy way to be spiritual, but not religious.

But how much sense does it really make? For starters, much of the Buddhist mythology and theology is simply taken from its ambient Hindu environment. The cycle of rebirth, the karma that influences one's level of rebirth, the heavens and hells, all come from the common understandings of the time, so are not very particular to Buddhism. Buddhists did away with lots of the gods, in favor of their own heros (Buddha, and the Bodhisattvas), and developed a simplified philosphy of desire, suffering, and the relief of suffering by controlling desire, optimally through advanced meditation practices. Much of this was also ambient or at least implicit, as Buddha himself began as a normal Indian ascetic, trying to purify himself of all taints and mundane aspects. For his Buddhist Sanga, he dialed things back a bit, so that the community could function as a social system, not a disconnected constellation of hermits.

Bodhisattvas floating in heaven. These are Buddhists who have attained enlightenment but not entered permanent heaven, choosing rather to have compassion on humanity in its benighted state.

As a philosophical system, it seems paradoxical to spend so much effort and desire in seeking nirvanna and the benefits of lack of desire. To sit in meditation for years on end demands enormous discipline. To submit to a life of begging and poverty takes great will and desire for whatever is promised on the other side. This is not evidence of lack of desire, much less the kind of wisdom and knowledge that would license its practitioners to advise lay people in their mundane affairs (or politicians in affairs of state). And the ethical system that Buddha promulgated was simple in the extreme- merely to be and do good, rather than being and doing bad, all staked on the age-old promise that just deserts would be coming after death.

No, Buddha was clearly a charismatic person, and his insight was social, not philosphical. Remember that he was a prince by birth and education. I would suggest that his core message was one of nobility- of idealism about the human condition. In his system, nobility is not conferred by birth, but by action. All can be noble, and all can be ignoble, regardless of wealth or birth. For the mass of society, it is control over desire that allows virtue and prosperity- i.e. nobility. Those who are addicts, whether to power, to drugs, to bitterness, to sex, or innumerable other black holes of desire or habit, are slaves, not nobles. This is incidentally what makes Buddhism so amenable to the West- it is very enlightenment-friendly kind of social philosophy.

The monks and Sanga of Buddhism were to be the shock troops of emotional discipline, burning off their normal social desires in fires of meditation and renunciation, even as they were on the hook for a whole other set of desires. Which are, in my estimation, wholly illusory in their aim, despite the various beneficial effects of meditation, in this world. They provide the inspiration and template for the society at large, modeling a form of behavioral nobility that any and all can at least appreciate, if not aspire to, and model in their own circumscribed lives and ethical concerns. I think that is the real strength of the Buddhist system. The monks may be misled in philosophical terms, but they fulfill a critical social role which governs and moderates the society at large. 

The monks provide another benefit, which is population control. One of the greatest pressures on any society is overpopulation, which immiserates the poor, empowers the rich, and can ultimately destroy its resource base. While the monastic institutions are a great burden on their societies, they also help keep them sustainable by taking in excess males who might otherwise become brigands and parents. This is particularly evident in traditional Tibet, despite the corruption of the monastic system by clan rivalries and even occasional warfare.

The fact of the matter is that desire is the staff, even essence, of life. Those who lack desire are dead, and Buddhist monks sitting in endless renunciation are enacting a sort of living death. Nevertheless, they have an important function in their societies, which is one we see replicated in the priests of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity (most of the time) and other ascetics and clerics around the world. Buddha was right that the management of desire is absolutely critical to individual and communal social life. Compare his system, however, with the philosophy of the Greeks, which arose at roughly the same (axial) time. The Greek philosophers focused on moderation in all things- another way, and I would offer, a healthier way, to state the need for discipline over the desires. They additionally fostered desires for knowledge and as complex ethical investigations, which I would posit far outstripped the efforts of the Buddhists, and gave rise, though the Greeks' continuing influence over the Roman and ensuing Christian epochs in Western Europe, to a more advanced culture, at least in philosophical, legal, and scientific terms, if not in terms of social and political peace.

• Meanwhile, a Christian court makes us a Christian nation, like it or not.
•  Length of Covid infection and viral shedding is unaffected by strain or vaccination status.

Love Beauty Truth

Book review of "Finding your Feet after Fundamentalism", By Darrell Lackey. With apologies to the other book.

An old friend has published a book. We had an epistolary relationship, fretting about creationism, intelligent design, and related topics back when those were livelier issues than today (and it directly inspired the birth of this blog). He was on his way out of Christian fundamentalism, and into something more liberal, even post-modern. His new book is a somewhat autobiographical account of the problems of fundamentalism, and of leaving fundamentalism as one's tradition. Naturally, evangelism dies hard, and takes this new form of broadcasting the good news of a more moderate and decent Christianity.

The book hits hardest on the issue of Donald Trump. No scandal has so thoroughly demonstrated the ultimate hypocrisy of fundamentalism than its allegiance to Trump. The transaction has given religious conservatives control of the Supreme Court, (though perhaps that owed more to Mitch McConnell), but in return, they showed their support for the most morally vile and incompetent person ever to hold the job. Lackey relates how he was fully in the FOX news orbit in the 90's, happily imbibing its bile. But then something snapped, and by the time of the Trump election, he had fully left fundamentalism and its communities behind. Living in California might have something to do with it, since liberalism, at least of a lip-service sort, is the dominant way of life here. Something that Republicans have learned the hard way. 

Yet the interesting part is how strenuously Lackey hews to Christianity, proclaiming that liberal versions are not gateway drugs to atheism. Quite the contrary- close attention to the actual New Testament provides ample justification for things like supporting marginalized communities, helping the poor, afflicting the rich, and viewing one's enemies as possibly reasonable human beings, if not friends in the making. He mentions how false it is for evangelicals to be so eager to spread the good word, but at the same time so deaf to the words of others that actual relationship is impossible- an evangelism of a closed-off community. 

For what are the fundamental values? Lackey cites love and beauty. Love is clear enough, (and damning enough regarding the FOX- driven culture of conservative Christianity), but the role of beauty needs a little more explaining. Religious thinkers have spared no effort in extolling the beauty of the world, but in the current world, serious artists are rarely Christian, let alone make Christian art. Why is that? Perhaps it is just intellectual fashion, but perhaps there is a deeper problem, that art, at least in our epoch, is adventurous and probing, seeking to interrogate narratives and power structures rather than celebrate them. Perhaps it is a problem of overpopulation, or of democracy, or of living in late imperial times, or of modernism. But whatever the framework, contemporary Christian communities have become the opposite of all this- anti-intellectual, tone-deaf, and art-hostile (not to mention power-mad). It must be exasperating to someone with even the least appreciation for finer things and for art that is "interesting".

Jean-Michel Basquiat- too messy for insensitive temperaments.

Beauty has deep Christian connotations. The world is god-made, good, and thus beautiful, as indeed we all feel it to be. But life is also messy, competitive, and dark. Death and suffering are part of it as well. If we refuse to own those aspects of the world, and of ourselves, we become blinded to the true nature of things, and expose ourselves to unintended and invisible expressions of the dark side, as we see in the deep hypocrisy on the subject of Trump, on sexual morals, and countless other areas within fundamentalism / evangelicalism. Lackey ticks off a lengthy list of subjects where conservative Christians have become blind to the obvious teachings of Jesus while fixated on relatively minor cultural flashpoints and red meat- symptoms of a general moral blindness borne of, arguably, flaccid aesthetic and intellectual habits.

So I would like to offer another value, which is truth. As a scientist, it is a natural place for me to start, but I think it is both illuminating of, and interrelated with, the other virtues above. What modern artists seek is to express truths about the human condition, not just ring out positive affirmations and hallelujas. Truths about suffering as well as truths about beauty. What scientists seek to do is to find how this world we find ourselves in works, from the cosmos down to the gluon. And they do so because they find it beautiful, and, like addicts, would like to unlock more of that beauty. Beauty inspires love, and love ... can only survive on truth, not lies. So I think these values live in a reinforcing cycle.

All that implies that there is another step to take for someone who has left fundamentalism. That is, to re-evaluate Christianity as a whole. While the achievement of decency (and better taste) by the renunciation of FOX and its religious satellite communities is an enormous step, indeed a momentous one for the preservation of our country's sanity, grappling seriously with the value of truth would suggest an extra leg to the trip. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Christianity as a whole is a questionable proposition, philosophically. As a narrative and moral system, it clearly has positive as well as negative potentials. But as a "truth"- with its miracles, resurrections, triune deity, and salvation at the end of the line, (whether for the elect, the saved, the good, or for all)- well, it is impossible to take seriously without heavy doses of tradition and indoctrination.

For his part, Lackey has headed in another direction, into the Eastern Orthodox church, finding a place that richly satisfies the fundamentalist urge to return to one of the most traditional and historically continuous churches in existence, and also one that does not tie itself into intellectual knots about literal truth, living biblically, and the like. Orthodoxy accepts mystery, and cherishes its ancient rites and structures as sufficient theology. It is not modernist, or goaded by the enlightenment to make a rational system of something that so obviously resists reason. 

For there is a fine line between lies, illusions, and truths. As anyone who is married will understand (or a citizen of a country, or part of a corporation, or part of any social structure), truth is not the only or necessarily best virtue. A bit of illusion and constructive understanding can make a world of difference. Narrative, ideology, framing, etc. are essential social glues, and even glues of internal psychology. So, given that illusions are integral, the work to identity them, bring them into consciousness, and make positive choices about them is what matters, especially when it comes to social leadership. Do we choose narratives that are reasonably honest, and look forward with hope and love, or ones that go down the easy road of demonization and projection? And what role should the most traditional narratives in existence- those of the ancient religions- have in guiding us?

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E. O. Wilson, Atheist

Notes on the controversies of E. O. Wilson.

E. O. Wilson was one of our leading biologists and intellectuals, combining a scholarly career of love for the natural world (particularly ants) with a cultural voice of concern about what we as a species are doing to it. He was also a dedicated atheist, perched in his ivory tower at Harvard and tilting at various professional and cultural windmills. I feature below a long quote from one of his several magnum opuses, Sociobiology (1975). This was putatively a textbook by which he wanted to establish a new field within biology- the study of social structures and evolution. This was a time when molecular biology was ascendent, in his department and in biology broadly, and he wanted to push back and assert that truly important and relevant science was waiting to be done at higher levels of biology, indeed the highest level- that of whole societies. It is a vast tome, where he attempted to synthesize everything known in the field. But it met with significant resistance across the board, even though most of its propositions are now taken as a matter of course ... that our social instincts and structures are heavily biological, and have evolved just as our physical features have.

DNA Mambo in the Nucleus

Some organizational principles for nuclear DNA to organize genes for local regulation.

There has been a long and productive line of research on the mechanisms of transcription from DNA to RNA- the process that reads the genome and translates its code into a running stream of instructions going out to the cell through development and all through life. This search has generally gone from the core of the process outwards to its regulatory apparatus. The opening of DNA by simple RNA polymerases was one of the first topics of study, followed by how the polymerase is positioned at the start site by "promoter" DNA sequences, with ever more ornate and distant surrounding machinery coming under scrutiny over time, as researchers climbed the evolutionary trajectory of life, from viruses and bacteria to mammals. 

But how this process fits into the larger structure of the nucleus, and how it is globally organized eukaryotes has long been an intriguing question, and tools are finally available to bring this level of organization into focus. For example, genes are known to be activated by direct contact with "enhancer" elements located thousands, even many tens of thousands, of basepairs away on the DNA- so why can't those enhancers activate other genes elsewhere in the nucleus, rather than the genes they are nearest to on the one-dimensional DNA? The nucleus is a small place with a lot of DNA. Roughly 1/100 of its physical space is taken up by DNA, and it is highly likely that such enhancers could be closer in 3-D space to other genes than the ones they are supposed to regulate, if everything were arranged randomly. Similarly, how do such enhancer elements find their proper targets, amid the welter of other DNA and proteins? A hundred thousand base pairs is long enough to traverse the entire nucleus.

So there has to be some organization, and new techniques have come along to illuminate it. These are crosslinking methods where the cells are treated with a chemical to crosslink / freeze a fraction of protein and DNA interactions in place, then enzymes are introduced to chop everything up, to various degrees of completeness. What is left are little clumps of DNA and protein that hopefully include distant cross-links, between enhancers and promoters, between key organizational sites and the genes they interact with, etc. Then comes the sequencing magic. These clumped stray DNAs are diluted and ligated together (only to local ends), amplified and sequenced, generating a slew of DNA sequences. Those hybrid sequences can be interpreted, (given the known sequence of the reference genome), to say whether some genomic location X got tangled up with some other location Y, reflecting their 3-D interaction in the cell when it was originally treated.

A recent paper pushed this method forward a bit, with finer-grained enzymatic digestion and deeper sequencing, to come up with the most detailed look ever at a drosophila genome, and at some particular genes that have long held interest as key regulators of development. This refined detail, plus some experiments mutating some of the key DNA sites involved, allowed them to come up with a new class of organizing elements and a theory of how the nuclear tangle works.

Long range contacts in the Antennapedia locus of flies. Micro-C refers to the crosslinking and sequencing method that maps long-range DNA contacts mediated by proteins. Pyramids in the top diagram map binary location-to-location contacts. Local contacts generally predominate over distant ones, but a few distant connections are visible, such as between the ends of the ftz gene. TAD stands for topologically associating domain, mapping out the connections seen above between pink sites. This line also lists the genes residing in each zone (Deformed, micro RNA 10, Sex combs reduced, fushi terazu, and Antennapedia promoters P1 and P2). The contacts track shows where the authors map specific sites where organizing factors (including Trl (trithorax-like) and CP190 (centrosomal protein of 190 kDa)) bind. The overall idea is that there are two kinds of contacts, boundaries and tethers. Boundaries insulate one region from the next, preventing regulatory spill-over to the wrong gene. Tethers serve as pro-regulatory staging points, helping enhancers contact their proper promoter targets, even though the tether complex does not itself promote RNA transcription.

Insulator elements have been recognized for some time. These are locations that seem to block regulatory interactions across them, thus defining, between two such sites, a topologically associated domain, (TAD). How they work is not entirely clear, but they may stitch themselves to the nuclear membrane. They are thought to interact with a DNA pump called cohesin to extrude a loop of DNA between two insulator sites, thereby keeping that DNA clear of other interactions, at least temporarily, and locally clumped. The authors claim to find a new element called a distal tethering element (DTE), which works like an enhancer in promoting interaction between distant activating regulatory sites and genes, but doesn't actually activate. They just structure the region so that when a signal comes, the gene is ready to be activated efficiently. 

One theory of how insulator elements work. The insulator sites "CTCF motif" are marked on the DNA with dark blue arrow heads. They control the boundaries of action by the protein complex cohesin, which forms dimeric doughnuts around DNA and can pump DNA. Cohesins are central to the mechanisms of meiosis and mitosis. The net effect is to produce a segregated region of DNA as portrayed at the bottom, which should have a much higher rate of local interactions (as seen in the Micro-C method) than distant interactions.

At the largest scale, these authors claim that there are, in the whole fly genome and at this particular (early) point in development, 2034 insulator locations (TADs) and 620 tethering elements (TEs or DTEs). They show that DTEs in the locus they study closely play an active role in turning the nearby genes on at early times in development, and in directing activation from enhancers near the DTE, rather than ones farther away. What binds to the DTEs? So-called "pioneer" regulatory factors(such as Zelda) that have the power to make way through nucleosomes and other chromatin proteins to bind their target DNA. The authors say that these tether sites, once set up, are then stable on a permanent basis, through all developmental stages, even though the genes they assist may only be active transiently. 

The "poised" nature of some genes had been observed long ago, so it is not entirely surprising to see this mechanism get fleshed out a little, as a structural connection that is made between genes and their regulatory sites in advance of the actual activator proteins arriving at the associated enhancers and turning them on.

 

Final model: the normal case around the Antennapedia locus is shown at top, with insulator sites shown in pink, and tethering sites shown in teal. If one of the tethering elements is removed (middle), then the enhancer EE has less effect on the gene Scr, whose expression is reduced. If an insulator is removed (bottom), the re-organized domain allows the ftz gene's regulators, including the enhancer AE1, to affect Scr expression, altering its timing and location of expression.

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Origins in the Other: Moses the Egyptian

Stray notes on what Judaism owes to Egypt.

It is a bitter historical irony that Jesus was a Jew, (as were all the founding Christians), yet his religion was taken up by non-Jewish communities who turned its stories against its originators, casting Jews as the betrayers, stubborn heretics, and generally the other, with disastrous consequences. Well, something similar may have happened at the origin of Judaism, as there is a fascinating thread of historical scholarship and speculation that suggests that Moses was Egyptian, and that much of the religion of Judaism was generated as a mixture of inheritances from, or inversions of, the religion and cults of Egypt.

While the Bible is full of Moses stories, no other historical, let alone archeological, attestation exists. Thus the many authors who have striven to unearth the truth of what happened have had to be creative. The whole thing may be an out and out myth, or unrecognizably reworked. Freud wrote "Moses and Monotheism" as an exercise in retro-psychoanalysis, cutting his totemic father figure down in an imagined Oedipal paroxysm of murder, followed by remorse. Jan Assmann more recently, in "Moses the Egyptian", wrote an eliptical tale of cultural hints and suppressed memories and trauma continually expressed and re-interpreted over time in the "othering", adoption, and inversion of cultural patterns. Manetho, a third century BCE Egyptian priest, wrote a history that puts Moses, originally an Egyptian priest named Osarseph, at the head of a renegade (and leper, for good measure) army which terrorized Egypt sometime in the 1300-1500 BCE period, ending in their expulsion and exile. 

The Hyksos, a semitic people, had a distinctive look, in Egypt of ~1900 BC.

Ever since the reign of Akhenaten was unearthed in the late 1800's, it has been tempting to tie his monotheistic revolution (1353-1336 BCE) to that of Judaism, which was putatively founded in the same general time period, when Egypt was at its height of power and regional influence. In both cases, monotheism was a tough sell, and created antagonism that characterized both episodes. The Amarna period ended with complete reversal- Akhanaten being erased from his monuments and records, and Egypt returning to its traditional ways. Judaism, according to its own documents, and despite Moses's teaching, endured a lengthy period of conflict and consolidation before the monotheistic faction gained ascendence in the post-Babylonian exile period. It also generated the enduring enmity of neighboring polytheists, ultimately resulting in the military defeat and dispersal of the Jewish nation.

So what is the evidence? Moses is an Egyptian name. Like Tutmosis, Ahmose, Ramses, and many others, it means "is born", or "is child of". While there are both Hebrew and Egyptian etymologies possible, Moses is also described as practiced in all the arts of Egypt, including various forms of magic and the secret symbols, i.e. hieroglyphs. Egyptians practiced circumcision, which Judaism obviously adopted with gusto. Egyptians worshipped the ram (representing the leading god, Amun) and the bull (Osiris), which the Jews turned around and sacrificed in their rituals. Cooking meat in milk was an Egyptian practice, which may have been the source of the contrary interdiction in Kosher law. Judaism was anti-iconic, completely contrary to the abundant icons of, frankly, all the other polytheistic religions, though new icons have been snuck in, in the form of the ark of the covenant, the Torah scrolls, wailing wall, etc. The Thummim is a judicial badge and device for divination, taken from the Egyptians. It is indeed likely that originators of Judaism were assimilated Egyptians who left, whether by choice or not. The historian Tacitus noted the inverted character of Judaism vs the Egyptian religion. And Maimonides argued that the laws were a form of treatment for withdrawal from idol-addiction, in his case against the "Sabians", which in reality were the Egyptians, if they were any actual culture at all. But it served other purposes as well, such as cultural glue, which continues to be functional even when all other reasons have become irrelevant and many of the less convenient laws have been cast aside.

Whichever pharoh was the one described in Exodus, its Egyptological details, though accurate, come from a substantially later time, the 600's BC, when it was written, not from the time of the events. And Assmann argues that Manetho, for one, conflated several historical episodes to come up with his account. One was a Hyksos colony of semitic peoples that occupied northern (lower) Egypt through the second intermediate period (~1800 BC) to their defeat, about 1540 BC, by Kamose and his successor Ahmose, who were based in the south. There may have, however, been other incursions of semitic peoples from time to time, especially as records through the less organized periods of Egyptian history are sparse. A second episode was the Amarna period, which was officially suppressed, but which Assmann argues remained vivid as a traumatic memory of religious and existential revolution, informing an Egyptian official's view of "pollution" of the Egyptian culture by outsiders. 

Similarly, one can imagine that the idea of monotheism, so suddenly sprung upon the Egyptians, is something that was knocking around for longer periods of time, both before and since. Assmann goes through a long argument by Ralph Cudworth (who wrote long before the hieroglyphs were deciphered) about a possible "esoteric" theology of the Egyptians, which was monotheistic, while the cult for public consumption was polytheistic. That makes little sense, as all royal tombs and decorations hew (religiously!) to the standard story, and so clearly embody a full cast of characters, and their belief in the Osiris story and hope of continued life in the land of the un-dead. Nevertheless, even without such an esoteric/demotic split, it is natural to wonder about origins, such as where this family of gods arose from, which in turn would send thoughts in the direction of possible monotheism. Perhaps the incredible conservatism of Egyptian culture caused such thoughts to be ruthlessly stamped out, but also prone to occasional eruption in incovenient forms. We in our own time are experiencing the thrill of normative inversion, when a subculture decides that black is white, that all norms should be trampled, and a new god worshipped. 

Even if the Amarna period did not directly foster Moses and the Jewish form of monotheism, the latter owes a great deal to Egyptian culture, likely including some glimmer of the monotheistic idea. Within Judaism, it took a second (and certainly real) exile, in Babylon, to bring the monotheistic idea to fuller fruition, as the last set of prophets called for purification and repentance, the Torah was written down, and the second temple built.

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Myth and Science

Stories we tell about how things work.

I am reading an ancient book about ancient myths, covering some of what was known of the ancient world's stories circa the mid-20th century (that is, the "developed" ancient world of Egypt, the Near East, China, India, etc.). The authors occasionally seem exasperated that their colleagues- the ancient authors of these stories and myths- do not always take their stories as seriously as scholars themselves do, after having so painstakingly learned the relevant languages, unearthed the precious tablets, papyri, inscriptions, and other sources, compared different versions, and interpreted them in light of the historical setting. No, ancient myths can be playful affairs, evolving in dramatic complexity, freely mutating to serve the needs of the moment in their mutable oral traditions. This is especially true the farther back you go into ethnographic history, such as into the stories of the Inuit and other First Peoples of North America. It is evident that ancient societies varied widely in their theological and mythological sophistication, and particularly how closely entwined these were with the centers of power.

Inuit mythologies and their custodian, the shaman.

The scholarly apparatus around myth studies has a very earnest and modernist cast, which derives from two sources. First is Christianity, which as an extreme political and social elaboration of ancient religions has progressively reified and codified its myths. Inheriting a grab-bag of disparate ancient myths and stories, Christianity shored up its social position and theological bona fides by insisting that it was all true. The more sclerotic and far-reaching its bureaucratic structure, the more tightly it held to the absolute truth of its dogmas. A second aspect was the enlightenment and the rise of scientific modernity. That world view was not interested in playful myths of psychodrama, but in hard truths of how the world really works, stripped of the colorful trappings. Competition with this world view helped to further push religious dogmas in an absolutist direction, to that point where today, both Christian Evangelicals and fundamentalist Islamists insist that their scriptures are literally true, handed down from an all-powerful god who really exists and is not fictive construct meant as a playful expression of our scientific ignorance on one hand, and our love of social drama on the other. Anthropologists took their cues from all this, assuming that the precious myths they were studying had to be expressions of a society's absolute truths, organizing principles, and deepest motivations. But perhaps they were originally ways to pass the time and enchant a few youngsters.

Science is telling stories, too. Are they really so different? On the one hand, our need to orient ourselves in the world remains unchanged from ancient times, so the core purpose of explaining reality and society through complicated tales of causes and effects remains. And to a lay person, the explanations of quantum mechanics or cosmic inflation are no less impenetrable than myths about gods and dragons. Thus the scientists who are the custodians of these stories find themselves in the ironic position of a new priesthood, cultivating the cultural narrative around origins, natural phenomena, biology, and the like, while extending these stories in systematic ways that the priests (and alchemists, and shamans, and druids) of yore could only dream about, if they could even conceive of such reliable beliefs untethered from social drama and social control. But today's scientists can't and won't inject ancillary drama into these stories, so they will remain split off from their traditional roles and uses.

So the telling of dramatic stories and the consequent management of society through the narratives of origins, myths, and meaning- if ancient myths really did fulfill these functions, which is perhaps an anachronistic construction on our part, or at least varied widely with the nature of ancient societies- are skills having nothing, really, to do with the scientific enterprise of today, and thus nothing to do with this new priesthood. Who takes these roles?

Theology would seem the natural place for the living and socially relevant myth. But theology has split definitively from science, from history, and indeed from reality, nurturing narratives that are absurd while claiming they are true, and which in their antiquity and provincialism are impossibly remote from our current concerns, morals, and social ability to relate even allegorically. Theology has thus become lost in a sterile wilderness, doomed to be cut off from its mythical and social power. Even the more liberal and elastic precincts, if they do not insist on absolute literal truth, adhere to the crusty old stories of the Bible, which while occasionally artistic, are mostly a maddening hodgpodge and, frankly, boring. What was riveting in antiquity about lengthy ancestor lists, angry gods, virgin births, and ascending into the clouds is ridiculous today. 

The story-telling mantle has obviously been taken over by Hollywood- by the Marvel series, Star Treks, Star Wars, Potter series, and similar epics of modern fantasy. They bend reality in classically mythical ways, make up their own theology as they go along, (and throw it away as casually with the next installment), and communicate constantly updated social mores. The graphics are otherworldly, the stories and morals are updated, but the fundamental sophistication of these stories can't really be said to have advanced much. They are speaking to human nature, after all- a conversation between our inborn archetypes and the social and technological conditions we find ourselves in.

The key point is that Hollywood myths are taken as intended- as fertile and mind-expanding fantasies with social and moral lessons that are (hopefully) beneficial and relevant for our times. They are not trying to claim their myths as true- that would be absurd. Thus they do not collide with either scientific or theological claims, and use myth as it was originally and truly intended- as the dreamlike realm of symbolic human drama, full of lessons, yes, but not scientific ones, or even pseudoscientific ones.

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American Occupations and Preoccupations

Douglass North on the role of institutions in our society, part 2. "Understanding the process of economic change". Also, "Violence and Social Orders". American occupations of Germany, Japan, and Afghanistan and Iraq are case studies of institutions at work. 

In part 1, I discussed the role of ideology and thought patterns in the context of institutional economics, which is the topic of North's book. This post will look at the implications for developmental economics. In this modern age, especially with the internet, information has never been more free. All countries have access to advanced technological information as well as the vast corpus of economics literature on how to harness it for economic development and the good of their societies. Yet everywhere we look, developing economies are in chains. What is the problem? Another way to put it that we have always had competition among relatively free and intelligent people, but have not always had civilization, and have had the modern civilization we know today, characterized by democracy and relatively free economic diversity, for only a couple of centuries, in a minority of countries. This is not the normal state of affairs, despite being a very good state of affairs.

The problem is clearly not that of knowledge, per se, but of its diffusion (human capital), and far more critically, the social institutions that put it to work. The social sciences, including economics, are evidently still in their infancy when it comes to understanding the deep structure of societies and how to make them work better. North poses the basic problem of the transition between primitive ("natural") economies, which are personal and small-scale, to advanced economies that grew first in the West after the Renaissance, and are characterized by impersonal, rule-based exchange, with a flourishing of independent organizations. Humans naturally operate on the first level, and it requires the production of a "new man" to suit him and her to the impersonal system of modern political economies. 

This model of human takes refuge in the state as the guarantor of property, contracts, money, security, law, political fairness, and many other institutions foundational to the security and prosperity of life as we know it. This model of human is comfortable interacting with complete strangers for all sorts of transactions from mundane products using the price system to complex and personal products like loans and health care using other institutions, all regulated by norms of behavior as well as by the state, where needed. This model of human develops intense specialization after a long education in very narrow productive skills, in order to live in a society of astonishing diversity of work. There is an organized and rule-based competition to develop such skills to the most detailed and extensive manner. This model of human relies on other social institutions such as the legal system, consumer review services, and standards of practice in each field to ensure that the vast asymmetry of information between the specialized sellers of other goods and services that she needs is not used against her, in fraud and other breaches of implicit faith. 

All this is rather unlike the original model, who took refuge in his or her clan, relying on the social and physical power of that group to access economic power. That is, one has to know someone to use land or get a job, to deal with other groups, to make successful trades, and for basic security. North characterizes this society as "limited access", since it is run by and for coalitions of the powerful, like the lords and nobility of medieval Europe or the warlords of Afghanistan today. For such non-modern states, the overwhelming problem is not that of economic efficiency, but of avoiding disintegration and civil war. They are made up of elite coalitions that limit violence by allocating economic rewards according to political / military power. If done accurately on that basis, each lord gets a stable share, and has little incentive to start a civil war, since his (or her) power is already reflected in his or her economic share, and a war would necessarily reduce the whole economic pie, and additionally risks reducing the lord to nothing at all. This is a highly personalized, and dynamic system, where the central state's job is mostly to make sure that each of the coalition members is getting their proper share, with changes reflecting power shifts through time.

Norman castles locations in Britain. The powers distributed through the country were a coalition that required constant maintenance and care from the center to keep privileges and benefits balanced and shared out according to the power of each local lord.

For example, the Norman invasion of Britain installed a new set of landlords, who cared nothing for the English peasants, but carried on an elite society full of jealousies and warfare amongst themselves to grab more of the wealth of the country. Most of the time, however, there was a stable balance of power, thus of land allotments, and thus of economic shares, making for a reasonably peaceful realm. All power flowed through the state, (the land allotments were all ultimately granted by the king, and in the early days were routinely taken away again if the king was displeased by the lord's loyalty or status), which is to say through this coalition of the nobles, and they had little thought for economic efficiency, innovation, legal niceties, or perpetual non-political institutions to support trade, scholarship, and innovation. (With the exception of the church, which was an intimate partner of the state.)

Notice that in the US and other modern political systems, the political system is almost slavishly devoted to "the economy", whereas in non-modern societies, the economy is a slave to the political system, which cavalierly assigns shares to the powerful and nothing to anyone else, infeudating them to the lords of the coalition. The economy is assumed to be static in its productivity and role, thus a sheer source of plunder and social power, rather than a subject of nurture and growth. And the state is composed of the elite whose political power translates immediately into shares of a static economic pie. No notion of democracy here!

This all comes to mind when considering the rather disparate fates of US military occupations that have occurred over the last century, where we have come directly up against societies that we briefly controlled and tried to steer in economically as well as socially positive directions. The occupations of Germany, Japan, Afghanistan, and Iraq came to dramatically different ends, principally due to the differing levels of ingrained beliefs and institutional development of each culture (one could add a quasi-occupation of Vietnam here as well). While Germany and Japan were each devastated by World War 2, and took decades to recover, their people had long been educated into an advanced instutional framework of economic and civic activity. Some of the devastation was indeed political and social, since the Nazis (as well as the imperial Japanese system) had set up an almost medieval (i.e. fascist) system of economic control, putting the state in charge of directing production in a cabal with leading industrialists. Yet despite all that, the elements were still in place for both nations to put their economies back together and in short order rejoin the fully developed world, in political and economic terms. How much of that was due to the individual human capital of each nation, (i.e. education in both technical and civic aspects), and how much was due to the residual organizational and institutional structures, such as impersonal legal and trade expectations, and how much due to the instructive activities of the occupying administration?

One would have to conclude that very little was due to the latter, for try as we might in Iraq and Afghanistan, their culture was not ready for full-blown modernity (elections, democracy, capitalism, rule of law, etc.) in the political-economic sense. Many of their people were ready, and the models abroad were and remain ready for application. Vast amounts of information and good will is at their disposal to build a modern state. But, alas, their real power structures were not receptive. Indeed, in Afghanistan, each warlord continued to maintain his own army, and civil war was a constant danger, until today, when a civil war is in full swing, conducted by the Taliban against a withering central state. The Taliban has historically been the only group with the wide-spread cultural support (at least in rural areas), and the ruthlessness to bring order to (most of) Afghanistan. Its coalition with the other elites is based partly on doctrinaire Islam (which all parties across the spectrum pay lip service to) and brutal / effective authoritarianism. When the US invaded, we took advantage of the few portions outside the existing power coalition, (in the north), arming them to defeat the Taliban. That was an instance of working with the existing power structures.

But replacing or reforming them was an entirely different project. The fact is that the development of modern economies took Western countries centuries, and takes even the most avid students (Taiwan, South Korea, China to a partial degree) several decades of work to retrace. North emphasizes that development from primitive to modern political-economic systems is not a given, and progress is as likely to go backward as forward, depending at each moment on the incentives of those in power. To progress, they need to see more benefit in stability and durable institutions, as opposed to their own freedom of action to threaten the other members of the coalition, keep armies, extort economic rents, etc. Only as chaos recedes, stability starts being taken for granted, and the cost of keeping armies exceeds their utility, does the calculus gradually shift. That process is fundamentally psychological- it reflects the observations and beliefs of the actors, and takes a long time, especially in a country such as Afghanistan with such a durable tradition of militarized independence and plunder.

So what should we have done, instead of dreaming that we could build, out of the existing culture and distribution of power, a women-friendly capitalist modern democracy in Afghanistan? First, we should have seen clearly at the outset that we had only two choices. First was to take over the culture root and branch, with a million soldiers. The other was to work within the culture on a practical program of reform, whose goal would have been to take them a few steps down the road from a "fragile" limited access state- where civil war is a constant threat- to a "basic" limited access state, where the elites are starting to accept some rules, and the state is stable, but still exists mostly to share out the economic pie to current power holders. Indeed the "basic" state is the only substantial social organization- all other organizations have to be created by it or affiliated with it, because any privilege worth having is jealously guarded by the state, in very personal terms.

Incidentally, the next step in North's taxonomy of states would be the mature limited access order, where laws begin to be made in a non-personal way, non-state organizations are allowed to exist more broadly, like commercial guilds, but the concepts of complete equality before the law and free access to standardized organization types has not yet been achieved. That latter would be an "open access order", which modern states occupy. There, the military is entirely under the democratic and lawful control of a central state, and the power centers that are left in the society have become more diffuse, and all willing to compete within an open, egalitarian legal framework in economic as well as political matters. It was this overall bargain that was being tested with the last administration's flirtation with an armed coup at the Capital earlier this year.

In the case of Afghanistan, there is a wild card in the form of the Taliban, which is not really a localized warlord kind of power, which can be fairly dealt out a share of the local and national economic pie. They are an amalgam of local powers from many parts of the country, plus an ideological movement, plus a pawn of Pakistan, the Gulf states, and the many other funders of fundamentalist Islam. Whatever they are, they are a power the central government has to reckon with, both via recognition and acceptance, as well as competition and strategies to blunt their power.

Above all, peace and security has always been the main goal. It is peace that moderates the need for every warlord to maintain his own army, and which nudges all the actors toward a more rule-based, regular way to harvest economic rents from the rest of the economy, and helps that economy grow. The lack of security is also the biggest calling card for the Taliban, as an organization that terrorizes the countryside and foments insecurity as its principal policy (an odd theology, one might think!). How did we do on that front? Well, not very well at all. The presence of the US and allies was in the first place an irritant. Second, our profusion of policies of reform, from poppy eradication, to women's education, to showpiece elections, to relentless, and often aimless, bombing, took our eyes off the ball, and generated ill will virtually across the spectrum. One gets the sense that Hamid Karzai was trying very hard to keep it all together in the classic pattern of a fragile state, by dealing out favors to each of the big powers across the country in a reasonably effective way, and calling out the US occasionally for its excesses. But from a modern perspective, that all looks like hopeless corruption, and we installed the next government under Ashraf Ghani which tried to step up modernist reforms without the necessary conditions of even having progressed from a fragile to a basic state, let alone to a mature state or any hint of the "doorstep conditions" of modernity that North emphasizes. This is not even to mention that we seem to have set up the central state military on an unsustainable basis, dependent on modern (foreign) hardware, expertise, and funding that were always destined to dry up eventually.

So, nation-building? Yes, absolutely. But smarter nation-building that doesn't ask too much of the society being put through the wringer. Nation-building happens in gradual steps, not all at once, not by fiat, and certainly not by imposition by outsiders (Unless we have a couple of centuries to spare, as the Normans did). Our experience with the post-world war 2 reconstructions was deeply misleading if we came away with the idea that those countries did nothing but learn at the American's knee and copy the American template, and were not themselves abundantly prepared for institutional and economic reconstruction.

• Tax evasion: our solemn duty and right.
• Defending our precious bodily fluids.
• Signs of isolation and loneliness.