Prospects for Hydrogen

What are the prospects for hydrogen as part of a sustainable, green economy?

Hydrogen is perennially spoken of as a fuel of the future- clean, renewable, light. It is particularly appealing in an environment (like that of California) where solar energy is having a huge impact on the grid and causing rising portions of solar production to be "curtailed". That is, turned off. But even in California, solar power has hardly scratched the surface. Only few roofs have solar and the potential for more power production is prodigious. Over time, as more renewable sources of energy come on line, the availability of excess power at peak times will rise dramatically, prompting a huge need for storage, or other ancillary uses for excess power. Many storage schemes exist or are under development, from traditional water pumping to batteries, flywheels, gravitational weights, etc. Hydrogen is one of them, spoken of as a versatile storage and fuel medium, which can be burned, or even more efficiently put through fuel cells, to return electrical power.

A typical day on California's electrical grid. The top teal line is total demand, and the purple zone is power not supplied by renewables like wind, hydropower, and solar. During the mid-day, most power now comes from solar, an amazing accomplishment. Roughly 2 GW are even turned off at the highest peak time, due to oversupply, either locally or regionally. How could that energy be put to use?

Unfortunately, as a fuel, hydrogen leaves much to be desired. We have flirted with hydrogen-powered cars over the last couple of decades, and they have been a disaster. Hydrogen is such an awkward fuel to store that battery-powered electric vehicles have completely taken over the green vehicle market, despite their slowness in refueling. The difficulties begin with hydrogen's ultra-low density. The Sun has the gravitational wherewithal to compress hydrogen to useful proportions, at the equivalent of 100,000 earth atmospheres and up. But we on Earth do not, and struggle with getting hydrogen in small enough packages to be useful for applications such as transport. The prospect of Hinden-cars is also unappealing. Lastly, hydrogen is corrosive, working its way into metals and weakening them. Transforming our natural gas system to use green hydrogen would require replacing it, essentially.

The awkwardness, yet usefulness, of (reduced) hydrogen as an energy currency in an oxygenated atmosphere is incidentally what led life during its early evolution to devise more compact storage forms, i.e. hydro-carbons like fats, starches and sugars. And these are what we dug up again from the earth to fuel our industrial, technological, and population revolutions.

But how useful is hydrogen for strictly in-place storage applications, like load balancing and temporary grid storage? Unfortunately, the news there is not good either. Physical storage remains an enormous problem, so unless you have a handy sealed underground cavern, storage at large scales is impractical. Second, the round-trip efficiency of making hydrogen from water by electrolysis and then getting electricity back by fuel cell (both rather expensive technologies) is roughly 35 to 40%. This compares unfavorably to the ~95% efficiency of electrical batteries like Li ion, and the 80% efficiency of pumped water/gravity systems. Hydrogen here is simply not a leading option.

Does that mean we are out of luck? Not quite. It turns out that there already is a hydrogen economy, as feedstock for key chemical processes, especially ammonia and fertilizer production, and fossil fuel cracking, among much else. Global demand is 80 million tons per year, which in electrical terms is 3-4 tera watt hours. That is a lot of energy, on the order of total demand on the US electric grid, and could easily keep excess power generator's hands full for the foreseeable future. Virtually all current hydrogen is made from natural gas or coal, so the green implications of reforming this sector are obvious. It already has storage and pipeline systems in place, though not necessarily at locations where green energy is available. So that seems to be the true future of hydrogen, not as a practical fuel for the economy in general, but as a central green commodity for a more sustainable chemical industry.

• Unions
• Afghanistan, inexorably going back to the Taliban.

Competition

Balancing collaboration and competition for a healthy society.

The ongoing discussions about race and caste in America are plumbing the depths of who we want to be as a society, and of the human psychology of hierarchy and competition. As Darwin taught, competition is inherent to life. Winners don't just feel good, they live to fight another day and reproduce another generation. Competition is naturally at the core of human psychology and development as well. We only learn to know our selves against a backdrop of challenges overcome, and people to compare ourselves with. We celebrate the winners in art, music, politics, sports, business. Excellence only exists in comparison.

America was conceived from the first as a winners versus losers project. White Europeans, already sailing all parts of the known world in search of treasure and plunder in competition with each other and the other great Asian cultures, found a virgin land. At least virgin in that it hardly offered any competition, with peoples who were summarily exterminated or enslaved. That this domination was transferred to Africa as a convenient source of losers to be utterly dominated, and ultimately branded as an inferior caste in perpetuity, is at once spiritually shameful and also a natural consequence of the competive drive that inheres in all people.

Idealists then came up with a competing dream of socialism and communism, which was to be a sweeping antidote to all these racial, economic, and social injustices. But competition inexorably reared its ugly head, moving the field of play from its traditional moorings to the political and existential levels, even to the very nature of reality and truth, as seen in the Stalinist systems, and the numerous appalling dictatorial systems that copied it. There was no getting around the need to prove that some are more equal than others.

However we run our formal systems of government and economics, we live in countless competitive settings- socially, economically, sexually, in families and outside. No one loves unconditionally, or serves without reward. So the genius of civilization has been to tame and channel competitive structures and impulses to positive ends. Fairly rewarding work, or setting a standard of one sexual partner in marriage, are examples of rough attempts to forge stable, just, and positive social outcomes out of competitive instincts that if given freer license would destroy us. 

Slavery was a system that, while mostly stable and marginally productive, was also profoundly unjust. One tribe simply declared itself dominant, and used every insidious tool of indoctrination, oppression, and violence to maintain that position. Over time, the original source of the competitive superiority, (whether that was just or not), became irrelevant, and the disparity became as unearned by the oppressors as it was undeserved by the oppressed. It served in no way to expose the natural talents of either in a fair environment of self-expression and actualization through competitive effort. 

So over the history of our country, we have fitfully been waking up to this injustice and expression of erstwhile competitive success, and fighting over how to forge a new social contract. That is perhaps the main reason our political system is so bitterly divided right now. "Freedom" rings from the mouths of both sides. But for one it is typically the freedom to continue enforcing their inherited inequities and privileges. For the other, it is the quest to escape exactly those inequities, which have reified, (as they have similarly in India's caste system, over centuries), into a vast network of debilities, social dysfunctions, ingrained or instinctive attitudes, artistic modes and motifs, economic and geographic patterns.

The new social contract is obviously modeled on modern meritocracy, where all are educated as far as possible, all participate freely in the many markets that pervade our lives, from mating to consuming to job-finding and politics, and all benefit in proportion to their contributions as regulated by those markets. Historical inequities would have little influence in this world, while individual talent and character count for all. This assumes that such a meritocracy is a fair ideal, which many dispute, as the fate of the losers remains uncertain, and in our current version, unbelievably harsh.

But there is no ridding ourselves of competition, however blessed we are with countervailing instincts of empathy and cooperation. It is a rock of human nature, and of our personal development. The best we can do is to regulate it to be fair and moderate. That is, expressing the competitive success of the individual, not her forebears or tribe. And allowing enough benefits to winning to provide motivation towards excellence and success, without destroying the portion of society that necessarily will be losers in various markets. This is the perennial conflict (and competition) between right and left, Republican vs Democrat.

• What happens when the poor are concentrated on one place- East Lake Meadows.
• How long Taiwan?
• Fond memories of the Trumpers.
• What will become of our empire?
• Ten days of quarantine is plenty. Even eight would be OK.
• FOX- another reason to cut the cable cord.

Domineering Freeloader Decides Communism is the Answer

General, executioner, economic development czar, and head of the national bank of the Cuban revolution: the biography of Che Guevara, by John Lee Anderson.

Ernesto Guevara began life as a reckless, adventurous, and very intelligent kid. His first inspiration was medicine, indeed medical research on leprosy and other diseases common in South America, and he got a medical degree. But toiling away on small problems in the lab didn't fit his temperament, and he decided to bum around South America instead, living off the generosity of others, running up debts, fast-talking his way out of jams, and building up an implacable hatred of the US. A common thread through his travels from Argentina through Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and points north was the overwhelming influence of the US, usually corrupting the local political system for the benefit of mining interests in the south, and for the benefit of agricultural interests in Central America. Eventually he got caught up in the liberal quasi-socialist reforms of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, later fleeing to Mexico after a US-supported right wing coup.

It was there that he fell under the spell of Fidel Castro, eventually becoming, despite his evident non-Cuban origins, Castro's right-hand man at the head of the communist revolution in Cuba. Not that it started as communist. No, Fidel was a master politician, and started as an anti-communist, currying favor with the Cuban population and the US. But both his brother Raul and Che were dedicated communists by that point, in thrall to Stalin and Mao, and their influence, combined with the logic of perpetual, one-party / one-person power, brought Fidel around to a gradual process of revealing, after the revolution had already gained power and Che had executed resistent elements of the army and police, their new (red) colors. Then came feelers to Moscow and the rest of the eastern bloc, the Cuban missile crisis, and that is pretty much where things stand still today.

Che and Fidel, when times were good.

Anderson's biography is definitive- fully researched, well written, and judiciously argued. He portrays Che as a seeker- a youth on the prowl for good times, but also for a purpose, which he ultimately found in full-on socialism. He found himself most fully during the early fight in the hills of Cuba- a trial by privation, exhaustion, and blood- where he put revolutionary principles to work organizing his men, making alliances with the local peasants, and executing deserters and traitors. Che's socialism was a pan Latin-American Bolivaran ideal, where all the countries of Central and South America would band together- possibly even unite- under state socialism as inspired by the peasant revolutions of Russia and especially China. It was both austere and visionary- a whole continent escaping from under the yoke of the great oppressor- the US.

It is clearly a religious conversion- the epiphany of a wholly captivating ideal. Che became Castro's second in command by his great intellectual and leadership talents, but even more by his absolute dedication to the cause- the cause of liberation from oppression. Unfortunately, after cleansing the army and securing Fidel's rule, Che was assigned to make the economy run, and here he came up against the immovable obstacle- reality. Socialism is healthy in small doses, but communism has not, in Cuba as elsewhere, been able to run an economy. Motivation to work needs to be supplied somehow, and if it is not by the lash of money and its lack, then terror will have to do the job, and poorly at that. Che did what he could, but the system he had fought so hard to establish was impossible to operate, and his thoughts turned back to his first love- revolution.

It is here that we see mostly clearly the religious nature of Che's motivations and of communism generally. If he were a rational researcher in the template of medical or other research, he would have sat back and realized that communism was not working in economic and social terms, let alone in terms of personal individual liberation. And then he would have adapted intellectually and tried to figure out a middle way to preserve Cuba's independence while running a realistic economic system. Possibly even elections. Unfortunately, by this time, Cuba had settled into a dependent relationship with Russia, which bought its sugar and gave aid, preventing either economic or political independence. Cuba is today still relatively poor, in the middle to lower ranks of GDP. Not as poor as Haiti, however, (or North Korea), and therein lies a message, which is that the Cuban revolution remains relatively humane, despite its many debilities and lack of political, social, and economic freedom. The collapse of the Soviet Union shocked the communist government into slight openings for private business and a heavy dose of tourism from Europe, which sustain it today.

But instead of recognizing the errors and failures of his dream, Che fomented more revolutionary cells all over Latin America and Africa, paying special attention to one sent to infiltrate Argentina, one that he was to join himself and die serving in 1965. One can not fault his dedication or consistency, but one can question the intellect that took him and so many other idealistic freedom fighters over the twentieth century into communism only to author monumental disasters of political and economic mismanagement. To think that dictatorship would resolve the class struggle, and produce washing machines and military might ... it had to be a religious movement, which unfortunately, once in power, became incredibly difficult to dislodge.

The motive force obviously was the US. We, through our callous and greedy treatment of our backyard over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and our betrayal of the paternalistic impulse of the Monroe Doctrine, not to mention similar failures of principle in the Middle East and Vietnam, motivated the intense anti-Yankee hatred of idealistic men such as Che Guevara, and the peasant resistance that, at least in Cuba, gave him and Castro support. It is a fascinating history of what the US has wrought, and how our failure to hold to our own ideals has come back to haunt us over and over again.

• It has been abusive, unnecessary, toxic, and we will need some time to work it out of our system.

Rise and Fall of the US

What happened to our 20th century solidarity?

A recent issue of The New Republic carried an article by its publisher that discussed Robert Putnam's diagnosis of the decline of American civic community and solidarity. In the generational arcs of US history, we have had high solidarity, and consequent productive and progressive political eras, only a few times- the colonial era, the Republican interlude while the South had seceded, the progressive era around the turn of the 20th century, and the post-WW2 boom. Perhaps much of the 20th century could be classified that way, up to the 1970s. At any rate, we are obviously not in such an era now. We are, in contrast, floundering in an era of incredible political and social divisiveness, of unproductive public institutions, and of social atomization.

"Just as Putman and Garrett identify an upswing, they also trace a decline beginning in the 1970s. For this, too, they offer an explanation that departs from the standard historical narrative, suggesting that it was not Ronald Reagan who brought the long period of liberal rule to an abrupt halt, but rather the baby boomer of the 1960s who, turning from the communitarian idealism of the early part of the decade toward a more self-oriented direction, set off a chain reaction that ended up blowing the whole Progressive-liberal order to smithereens."

But the article does not really articulate what happened, other than to cite the many dramas of that time, and propose that the US had a bit of a "nervous breakdown", in a transition from a conformist 50's, through the wide-open and tumultuous 60's, to the me-centered 70's. Perhaps this dates me, but I did live through some of those times, and I think can offer a more specific analysis. I'd suggest that the principal elements of the downturn arose from fundamental violations of trust by the state. The US had conducted WW2 with great moral and logistical authority. The grunts always grumbled, and there were plenty of fiascos along the way, but overall, there was a consensus that the elites and people in charge knew what they were doing. They not just won the war, but fostered unprecedented prosperity in its wake. 

All this turned around in the late 60's. I am also reading a history of the CIA, by Tim Weiner, "Legacy of Ashes". This is a deeply biased book, focusing on every failure of the CIA, pronouncing it as an institution utterly and irredeemably incompetent. What is noticeable, however, is that the CIA's successes are generally far more costly than its failures. The coups it sponsored in Iran and Guatemala, et al. came back to haunt us down to the present day. Eisenhower founded this pandora's box of disastrous meddling, (i.e. covert action) and Kennedy accelerated its use. One of its signature accomplishments was the slow process of getting us enmeshed in the Vietnam war. This was the single most influential disaster that discredited the US government to its own citizens. While in principle, we were doing a great thing- saving South Vietnam from communism and totalitarianism- in practice, we had no idea what we were doing, did not understand the nature of the civil war, or the impossible corruption of our allied government, and conducted the war in a fog of lies and delusions. The daily body counts were a visceral expression of revulsion against the state.

But this kind of incompetence became a pattern in major events like Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, and the Iran hostage crisis. Each one showed that our leaders did not know what they were doing- the best and brightest turned out unequal to the crises we faced. A succession of presidents fell victim to fundamental breaches of trust with the country. Inflation, for example, made us feel helpless- that the money itself was being eaten away by processes that were virtually occult in their mystery and darkness. Gerald Ford urged a kind of vodoo economics- that perhaps a public relations campaign urging personal savings and voluntary spending reductions could heal "the economy". But the solidarity he was counting on was evaporating, and the rationale was transparently absurd and unequal to the crisis, which had been brought on by the oil shock and by profligate government spending and interest policy through the Vietnam era. It would not be until the advent of Paul Volcker that we would get a public servant with the courage and intellect to slay this beast, through an extremely costly campaign of squelching private investment.

So it was not Ronald Reagan who started the process of me-ism over patriotic solidarity. He was only expressing the sad consequence of a long series of failures and breaches of faith when he claimed that government is not the solution, government is the problem. So what was the alternative? The other major institutions of common action were and remain the corporation, and this era saw the valorization of capitalism as the system that works. It had the Darwinian structure and motivations that enforced effectiveness, even excellence. It was the environment that unleashed entrepreneurial freedom, then harnessed it for the common good. We know now that all this was vastly oversold, and ignored all the reasons why we have states to start with. But the pendulum had swung decisively from the public sphere to the private.

An unfortunate consequence of such a swing is that the party and ideology of privatization has little interest in fostering effective governance. So the competence of the state erodes further with time, becoming increasingly unable to do basic functions, and becoming corrupt as private interests gain relative power. Our current administration, were it not in power, would be a parody of self-serving corruption and incompetence. It is the pinacle of the Reagan revolution, and it is degrading, day by day, our ability to govern ourselves. This seems to be why these generational shifts take so long to correct. It is not only that we need to recognize the hole we have fallen into on an intellectual and scholarly level, but that enough voters (and enough extra to overcome the entrenched powers of capital in propaganda, lobbying, campaign finance, and other forms of corruption) have to have felt this in their bones to give an alternative ideology a chance to retake charge of the state and rebuild its capacity for effective action. 

• Where are the vaccines? What are the vaccines?
• Not everyone likes Barrett.
• Make the Apocalypse great again.

An American Economic History, Through Farming

From plantations to free soil, and back to plantations.

Today, farming is a small part of our economy. But it remains existentially important, and politically and culturally significant far beyond its share of GDP. The family farm evokes the heartland, the honest toiler, the communal and salt-of-the-earth values of rural life. The United States was founded on the promise of land- ever more land taken from Native Americans for ever more white people to till. Land was the original job guarantee. Anyone disgruntled with their current condition could go West. Some created vast plantations or ranches, while most founded family farms. When some of the last arable land on the frontier became available in Oklahoma, it resulted in the notorious land rush of 1889, typified by "Sooners" who jumped the gun into this so-called unassigned territory. A generation or two on, they authored the dust bowl by their enthusiasm and negligence.

The late 1800's were a pivotal period. The frontier was closing, industrialization was changing the workforce and mechanizing farming. It was perhaps the high point of the family farm, as so movingly portrayed in its perils, pride, and community, in the film version of The Wizard of Oz. One underappreciated cause and purpose of the Civil War was to preserve free soil and free labor as the guiding principle in new territories and states. The plantation system of labor was the alternative, just as firmly rooted in American soil as the small family farm, and just as greedy for new frontiers. Plantations were the original corporate agriculture, driving an army of employees (i.e. slaves) over vast acreages of market-crop monocultures, typically cotton, tobacco, and, in the Carribean, sugar cane.

But, despite winning the Civil War for free labor, and adapting to progressively greater levels of mechanization, the family farm is dying, and has been dying for decades. A recent piece in the New Yorker describes the situation in Wisconsin, which has seen a steep decline in family dairy farms, driven out of business by the inexorable efficiencies and amorality of corporate farming. Capitalism is the remorseless agent, setting up new plantations on rebooted principles of cheap labor and enormous scale. Instead of slaves, the labor is now an unending flood of poor and undocumented hispanics, ready to work for less, and under poorer conditions, than "free" labor.

Is this the kind of capitalism we want more of? Is the kind of rural America we look forward to? It is more than a little ironic that rural America voted overwhelmingly for the Republicans, who offered nostalgic nostrums while being the foremost purveyors of capitalist fundamentalism, cheap oppressed labor, and rural decline. Thus some might say, they deserve what they are reaping. But that is merely spite speaking, not policy. It is clear that government policy has had a great deal to do with this evolution of farming, from lax labor policy to trade policy and growing regulatory and bureaucratic complexities, and explicit farm support systems that support corporate farms foremost.

So, we have been divided from the outset, between a corporate, plantation model of farming, and a small-holder, family model of farming. The memorialized plantations of Mount Vernon and Monticello are fascinating examples of the former, each originally worked by an army of slaves to create in this new land a rich, even refined existence for the lords of the manor. It was Jefferson's dream that America would be overspread by small family farms, even as he himself ran a brutalizing corporate operation. It was just one more of his romantic dreams, along with a discomfort with slavery that did not extend to emancipating his own slaves. But the US did indeed make his dream real across the Midwest by eradicating slavery and accepting floods of immigrants to run their own farms and found rural communities. 

The silo-inspired Emerald City. Was it a storage and processing cooperative?

It is clear that it will take deep changes in policy to preserve family farming, and humane and ecologically sound farming. Not just cash payments to farmers, as the current administration is attempting to save its political position, but a much more thorough rethinking of how rural America should operate. We need far stiffer rules for labor and ecological practices on large farms, so that the playing field is leveled. We need better support for cooperative processors, buyers, bankers, equipment supply, transporters, and extension systems so that small farms have the long-term support they need to survive. We need to edge away from stark capitalism towards a mixed model, for instance maintaining some price supports with intelligent government planning, so that farmers are not whipsawed by lethal market forces. And making those price supports graduated against farm size, to recognize the unique value, and unique challenges, of the small farm.

• "There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States."- from the inaugural address of James Garfield, 1881.
• The biosphere is going downhill.
• Everyone has hope.
• Toadies in the swamp.
• A lack of innovative thinking in the medical community.
• The Taliban will soon be running things.

The Silicon Age

This magical element brings us the modern age- in computation, and in power.

In geologic terms many regard the current epoch as the Anthropocene, based on our various far-reaching (and often obscene) effects on earth's biosphere and geology. But where are we in the sequence of cultural epochs, starting from the stone age, and continuing through the bronze and iron ages? This somewhat antiquated system of material culture-based divisions seems to have petered out with the iron age, about 500 BC. What came after? There was certainly a technological hiatus in the West (and perhaps elsewhere) around the dark ages, where iron remained the most advanced material, though one might make a case for concrete (a Roman invention, with extensive use in antiquity), glass, or porcelain as competitor, though the latter never had the broad impact of iron.  The industrial age was perhaps founded on steel- the new material that brought us well into the twentieth century, until we hit the atomic age, an age that did not age well, sadly, and seems to be headed for the scap heap- one that will be radioactive for eons.

Now we are clearly indebted to a new element- silicon. That it is the magic ingredient in computers goes without saying. But now it is also providing the power for all those computers, in its incarnation as solar cells, as well as light for our lives, as efficient LEDs. It is incidentally intriguing that silicon resides just one row down, and in the same column, from the central element of life- carbon. They have the same valence properties, and each have unusual electronic properties. For silicon, its magic comes from being a semiconductor- able to be manipulated, and in switchable fashion, from conducting to insulating, and back again. A magic that is conjured by doping- the peppering-in of elements that have either too many valence electrons (phosphorous; n for negative) or too few (boron; p for positive). Too many, and there are extra electons that can conduct. Too few, and there are positive charges (holes) that can conduct similarly.

Charge and electrochemistry across the p-n junction.

At the interface between n and p doped zones something amazing happens- a trapped electrical charge that forms the heart of both transisters and solar cells. The difference in composition between the two sides sets up conflicting forces of diffusion versus charge. Electrons try to diffuse over to the p doped side, but once they do, they set up an excess of electrons there that pushes them away again, by their negative charge. Holes from the p doped side likewise want to migrate over to the n doped side, but set up a similar zone of positive charge. This zone has a built-in electric field, but is also insulating, until a voltage going from p to n, which squeezes this zone to smaller and smaller size, making it so narrow that charge can flow freely- the diode effect. The reverse does not work the same way. Voltage going from n to p makes this boundary zone larger, and increases its insulating power. This, and related properties, gives rise to the incredibly wide variety of uses of silicon in electronics, so amplified by the ability to do all this chemistry on precisely designed, microscopic scales.

Solar cells also use a p-n doping regime, where the bulk of the silicon exposed to the sun is p-doped, and a small surface layer is n-doped. When a photon from the sun hits the bulk silicon, the photoelectric effect lets loose an electron, which wanders about and meets one of two fates. Either it recombines with a local atom and releases its photon energy as infrared radiation and heat. Or it finds the p-n junction zone, where it is quickly whisked off by the local electric field towards the positive pole, which is all the little wires on the surface of solar panels, taking electrons from the n-doped surface layer. The p-n interface has a natural field of about 0.6 volt, which, when ganged together and scaled up, is the foundation for all the photovoltaic installations which are taking over the electric grid, as a cheaper and cleaner source of electricity than any other. Silicon even plays a role in some battery technologies, helping make silicon-based solar power into a full grid power system.

Solar power is scaling to provide clean energy.

Silicon gives us so much that is essential to, and characteristic of, the modern world. Like carbon, it is very abundant, not generally regarded as rare or precious. But that doesn't mean it lacks interest, let alone importance.

• Green hydrogen- a way to use all that excess solar.
• Generic drugs from India and China: rampant fraud.
• Meanwhile, an outstanding article describes the slow destruction of US pharmaceutical and public health capabilities.

De-carbonize it

... Sung to the tune of Peter Tosh's "Legalize it". How are we doing on greenhouse gas emissions? Not very well, if the goal is zero.

Climate heating has, over the last few decades, changed from a theoretical spectre to a universal reality. The seasons have shifted. The weather is more extreme. The fires have ravaged whole regions. The arctic is melting, the corals are dying, and the wildlife is thinning out and winking out. But our emissions of CO2, far from declining, keep reaching yearly highs. Humanity is not facing up to this crisis.

Global CO2 emissions keep going up, while the climate has already gone out of bounds.

The goal needs to be zero. Zero emissions, not in 30 years, but as soon as humanly possible. Here in California, we pride ourselves in a progressive and leading-edge approach to climate policy. So how are we doing? A graph of CO2 emissions shows that California emissions have been going down since a peak in 2004, and now are roughly at 85% of that peak, despite increases in population and GDP. That is laudable of course. But we are still emitting hundreds of millions of metric tons of CO2 per year. Millions of tons that will be extremely difficult to recapture, as we inevitably will have to if we want to restore the Earth's climate to a semblance of the form it had for the last few million years of evolution across the biosphere.

California CO2 emissions. Going in the right direction, but far from zero. Note the Y axis cut off at 400 million metric tons CO2 per year.

Breakdown of California emissions. Note how refinery emissions alone are higher than all household emissions (principally heating).

Can we get to zero? Yes, we can if we are serious enough. There are two ingredients to get there. One is policy to drive the change, and the other is the technical means to get there. One optimal policy is a stiff carbon tax. California already has a sort-of carbon cap/pricing system, covering a fraction of emitters and using a market-based mechanism that has sent prices under $20 per metric ton. This is not enough to make a difference, being the equivalent of about 15 cents per gallon of gasoline. To be serious, we would wish to triple the cost of gasoline, which would get users off of fossil fuels in a hurry. Such a tax would come to about $700 per metric ton of CO2 emissions- an unprecedented level when you look at carbon pricing schemes around the world, but if we want results we need to think about serious policy to get there. In order to insulate such tax systems from cost-shifting to other countries, they would need a complex system of boundary taxes to make sure that imported goods and forms of energy are all subject to the same effective carbon taxation, so that in-state sources are not penalized. This is an important goal for international agreements like the Paris accords, to make such boundary taxation normal and systematic, preventing races to the bottom of emissions regulation. It is the only way that any jurisdiction can set up a strong carbon taxing/pricing system.

Can we get to zero? The technical means are not all in place, but given enough motive force from policy, we can get there very soon. The key is storage. Fossil fuels not only hold huge amounts of solar energy, but they have stably locked them up for tens of millions of years, just waiting for humanity to mine them out and burn them up. Their storability turns out to be as significant as their energy density. Solar and wind energy do not have that property, and we are just beginning to devise the means to store their energy at scale, whether by chemical means (batteries, hydrolysis of water to hydrogen) or mechanical (pumping hydro stations, spinning rotors). Whether nuclear energy enters the mix is another and very appropriate question as well, as new, safer reactor designs become common, and a strong carbon tax makes them economically viable again.
 
Natural gas is not a transitional fuel- it is another fossil fuel, only slightly less bad than coal. Another fix for an addicted economy, like switching from heroine to oxycontin. We need to break this addiction, and as fast as possible, with strong policy that takes the problem seriously. Elizabeth Warren aims her policy at decarbonization by 2030. Bernie Sanders aims at 2050. Donald Trump says to hell with us all.

• January sets another heat record.
• Bumble bees are dying.
• Quote of the week: "Here, then, is a discovery of new evils, I said, against which the guardians will have to watch, or they will creep into the city unobserved. What evils? Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent." - Plato's Republic

Redistribution is Not Optional, it is Essential

Physics-inspired economic models of inequality.

Thomas Piketty marveled at the way wealth concentrates under normal capitalist conditions, as if by magic. He chalked it up to the maddening persistence of positive interest rates, even under conditions where capital is in vast excess. Once you have a certain amount of wealth, and given even modest interest, money just breeds on its own, certainly without labor, and almost without thinking.

A recent Scientific American article offered a different explanation, cast in a more physics-style framework. It recounts what is called a "yard sale" model of a perfectly free economic exchange, where each transaction is voluntary and transfers net wealth in a random direction. Even under such conditions, wealth concentrates inexorably, till one agent owns everything. Why? The treatment is a bit like statistical mechanics of gasses, that follow random walks of individual particles. But where gasses are subject to constant balancing force of pressure that strongly discourages undue concentrations, the economic system contains the opposite- ratchets by which each agent greedily holds on to what it has. At the same time, poorer agents can only transact from what little they have, but stand to lose more (relatively) when they do. They thus have a stricter limit on how often they can play the game, and are driven to penury long before wealthier players. Even a small wealth advantage insulates that player against random adversity. Put that through a lengthy random walk, and the inevitable result is that all the wealth ends up in one place.

"In the absence of any kind of wealth redistribution, Boghosian et al. proved that all of the wealth in the system is eventually held by a single agent. This is due to a subtle but inexorable bias in favor of the wealthy in the rules of the YSM [yard sale model]: Because a fraction of the poorer agent’s wealth is traded, the wealthy do not stake as large a fraction of their wealth in any given transaction, and therefore can lose more frequently without risking their status. This is ultimately due to the multiplicative nature of the transactions on the agents’ wealth, as pointed out by Moukarzel." - Boghosian, Devitt-Lee, Wang, 2016

"If we begin at the point 1/2, the initial step size is 1/4. Suppose the first move is to the right, reaching the point 3/4. Now the step size is 1/8. If we turn back to the left, we do not return to our starting point but instead stop at 5/8. Where will we wind up after n steps? The probability distribution for this process has an intricate fractal structure, so there is no simple answer, but the likeliest landing places get steadily closer to the end points of the interval as n increases. This skewed probability distribution is the ratchetlike mechanism that drives the yard-sale model to states of extreme imbalance." ... "If some mechanism like that of the yard-sale model is truly at work, then markets might very well be free and fair, and the playing field perfectly level, and yet the outcome would almost surely be that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer." - Hayes, 2002

It is important to emphasize that the yard sale model is a libertarian's dream. It models perfect freedom and voluntary economic activity, if on a very simplistic level. But its implications are profound. It describes why most people in a free economic system own little more than their labor. The authors supplement this model with three more parameters, to align it better with reality. First is a wealth advantage factor. Our free economic system is not free or fair as a matter of fact, and the wealthy have many economic advantages, from lower interest rates (on loans), better returns on investments, to better education and more political power. Obviously, this is hardly conducive to greater equality, but rather to sharper and faster inequality. Second is a redistribution factor, in recognition that taxes and other costs have a redistributing effect, however small. And third is an allowance for negative wealth, which characterizes a fair portion of most societies, given our addiction to debt. Using these extra factors, these researchers can easily model wealth distributions that match reality very closely.

Lorenz curves showing income inequality in the US, and its growth in recent decades. Higher income families are on the right bottom, and their cumulative share of income are dramatically higher than those of lower income families. This graph gives rise to the Gini coefficient. Since this graph is binned in quintiles, it hides even more dramatic acceleration of income at the highest 10%, 1% and 0.1% levels.

An example of a model curve. The teal area (C) represents negative wealth, a fact of life for much of the population. The intersection of curve B with the right axis represents a result where one person or family is has 40% of all wealth. We are not quite there in reality, but it is not an unrealistic outcome considering current trends. Gini coefficients are generally defined as the areas A/(A+B).

The article, and other work from this group, finds that the redistrubution factor is absolutely critical to the fate of society. Sufficiently high, it can perpetually forestall collapse to total inequality, or even oligarchy, which is the common human condition. But if left below that threshold, it may delay, but can not forestall the inevitable.

What is that threshold? Obviously, it depends quite a bit on the nature of the society- on its settings of wealth advantage and redistribution. But rather small amounts of redistribution, on the order of 1 or 2 %, prevent complete concentration in one person's or oligarchy's hands. To make a just society, however, one that mitigates all this accidental unfairness of distribution, would take a great deal more.

There have traditionally been several social solutions to gross inequality, after humanity gained the capacity to account and accumulate wealth. One is public works and the dole, which the Romans were partial to. In their heyday, the rich vied to attain high offices and fund great works which benefitted Roman society. Another is a debt jubilee, where debts were forgiven at some interval or on special occasions. Another, of course, is revolution and forcible reforms of land and other forms of wealth. Karl Marx, along with many others, clearly sensed that something was deeply wrong with the capitalist system when allowed to run unfettered. And despite all the ameliorating regulations and corrective programs since, we are back in a gilded age today, with all time highs of gross unequality. To make matters worse, we have been backsliding on the principle of inheritance taxes, which should prevent the transgenerational and wholly undeserved accumulation of wealth and power.

Redistribution turns out, on this analysis, to be essential to a sustainable and just society. It is not a pipe dream or violation of the natural order, or of "rights". Rather, it is the right of every member of a society to expect that society to function in a fair and sustainable way to provide the foundation for a flourishing life by building each member's talents and building the social and material structures that put them to effective use. Capitalism and free exchange is only one ingredient in this social system, not its purpose or its overriding mechanism. That is why the weath tax that has been proposed by Elizabeth Warren is so significant and has generated such interest and support. It speaks directly and effectively to one of the central problems of our time- how to make a sustainable system out of capitalism.

• Ah, the memories ...
• When a stroke takes away your hearing.
• An extra paper on gene duplicates.

Power

And lack of power.

The recent power shutdowns in California were maddening and disruptive. They also showed how utterly dependent we are on the oceans of fossil fuels we burn. With every convenience, gadget, trip, comfort, appliance, and delivery we get more enmeshed in this dependence, and become zombies when the juice is suddenly cut off. Not only is our society manifestly not robust, but every drop of fuel burned makes the problem still worse: the biosphere's decline to miserable uninhabitability. The children are right be be pissed off.

Do we have the power to kick this habit? This addiction makes opioids look like amateurs.  It won't be a matter of checking into rehab and going through a few weeks of detox. No, it is going to take decades, maybe centuries, of global detox to kick this problem from hell. Living without our fix of CO2 is impossible on any level- personal, social, political, economic, military. And the pushers have been doing their part to lull us even further into complacency, peddling lies about the risks and hazards they deal with as an industry, their own research into climate change and what our future looks like, not to mention our complicity in it.

Do we have the moral and political power to get off fossil fuels? Not when half of our political community is in denial, unwilling to take even one step along the 12 step path. I am studying the Civil War on the side, which exhibits a similar dynamic of one half of the US political system mired in, even reveling in, its moral turpitude. It took decades for the many compromises and denials to play themselves out, for the full horror to come clear enough that decent people had had enough, and were ready to stamp out the instution of slavery. Which was, somewhat like the fossil fuels of today, the muscular force behind the South's economy and wealth.

Do we have the technical and intellectual power to kick this habit? Absolutely. Solar and wind are already competitive with coal. The last remaining frontier is the storage problem- transforming intermittant and distributed forms of power into concentrated, dispatchable power. And that is largely a cost problem, with many possible solutions available, each at its price. So given a high enough price on fossil carbon, we could rapidly transition to other sources of power, for the majority of uses.

A 300 MW solar power plant in the Mojave.

Does the US have the power to affect climate change policy around the world? We don't have all the power, but have a great deal. If we were to switch from a regressive laggard to a leader in decarbonization, we would have a strong effect globally, both by our example and influence, and by the technical means and standards we would propagate. We could amplify those powers by making some of our trade policy and other relations more integrated with decarbonization policy.

Do individuals have the power to address these issues? The simple answer is no- all the virtuous recycling, biking, and light-bulb changing has little effect, and mostly liberates the unused fossil fuels for someone else to use at the currently criminally low prices. Individuals also have little power over the carbon intensity of the many products, services, and infrastructure they use. Maybe it is possible to eat less meat, and avoid fruit from Chile. But we can not unplug fully from this system- we need to rewire the system. It is fundamental economics that dictates this situation, which is why a stiff carbon tax and related regulation, with the associated political and moral will are so important.

Finally, does the State of California have the power to take responsibility for the PG&E mess? Absolutely, but probably not the will. The power shutdowns led to a common observation that the state should just buy PG&E at its bankrupt price and run it in the public interest. But keen observers have noted that the state's politicians would much rather have someone else to blame, than be saddled with a no-win institution that puts the blame on them. Power lines are going to cause fires in any case, unless we cough up the billions needed to put them underground. Customers will always complain about the price of utilities, so it is hard to see the state stepping up to this mess, or even reforming the public utilities commission, which has been so negligent as well.

• Why did the GOP nominate, and the American people elect, a Russian asset to the White House?
• Battle lines on health care.
• Point to Bernie.
• The church and psycho-social evolution.

Meritocracy

Is meritocracy intrinsically bad, or good for some things, not so good for others?

A recent book review in the New Yorker ruminated on the progress and defects of the meritocracy, a word born in sarcasm, now become an ideology and platitude. I am not sure that the review really touched on the deeper issues involved, so am motivated to offer a followup. The term was coined by a British sociologist, which is significant, as it describes a fundamental shift from the preceding system, the class system, as a way of allocating educational opportunity, professional work, military grades, and social status in general. It would be natural for someone of the British upper class to decry such a change, though the coiner, Michael Young, was generally a socialist and egalitarian, though eventually made into a Baron for his services ... ironically.

The book review focused mostly on the educational establishment, where the greatest sea change has occurred. Where elite schools used to lazily accept their students from elite prep academies, from certain rich families and class backgrounds, now they make a science of student selection, searching far and wide, high and low, for the most meritorious candidates. Are SAT scores useful? Not very, the new consensus has it, especially as such tests unconsciously reproduce various cultural biases, instead of rendering the true grail- a score of merit, whatever that really might be. But anyhow the slicing is done, higher education is now an intense, mostly meritocratic sorting process, granting opportunities and education on the basis of qualifications, intent on funneling the most capable people into the higher rungs of the ladder of professional activities and status.

One question is whether all this laborious sorting of students has been a good thing, overall. Do we get better staffed hospitals, better filled jobs throughout the economic system by virtue of this exquisitely and remorselessly selective weeding system? Yes we do, perhaps at the cost of some social serendipity, of finding CEO material in the mailroom, and the like.

But the deeper question is whether all this selection has been good for our society at large. There is answer has to be more guarded. If economic efficiency is the only goal, then sure. But it isn't, and some of our social atomization, and creeping class-ism and despair in the lower rungs of society comes from the intensification of meritocratic selection, which spills over to many other areas of society, directly through income and wealth, and indirectly through many other mechanisms of status, particularly politics. Much of Trump's support comes from people sick of the "elites"- those selected by SAT scores, course grades, and the like to rule over the working class. It is not clear that grubbing for grades and mastering standardized exams have done such a good job at selecting a ruling political class. That class has not done a very good job, and that poor performance has sapped our social solidarity. The crisis is most glaring in the stark cost of losing out- homelessness and destitution- the appalling conditions that are the mirror of billionaires also produced by this Darwinian system.

The problem is that we need areas of our lives that are not plugged into the rat race, for both psychological and sociological reasons. Such areas are increasingly scarce as this new gilded age gobbles up all our social relations under the rubric of the market, paticularly with its newly internet-extended capabilities. Religion has traditionally been a social locus where every one is worth the same- many classes come together to share some profound feelings, and occasionally explicit anti-establishment messages, (though also often a message of exalted status vs some other sect, faith, or unbelievers). But religion is dying, for good reason.

A town meeting

Civic associations and volunteer life have in the US been a frequent antidote to class-ism, with people of all classes coming together to make each others' lives better. But modern transportation has enabled the definitive sorting of classes by socioeconomic level, rendering civic activity, even when it occurs, poor at social mixing. No longer does a geographic community have to include those of all professions and walks of life to be viable. We can have lilly-white suburbs and gated communities, and have any tradespeople and retail employees commute in from far away. That is a problem, one caused ultimately by fossil fuels and the freedom that they bring. The civic sector has also been invaded by an army of vanity foundations sponsored by the rich- a patronizing and typically futile approach to social betterment. Volunteerism has also been sapped by lack of time and money, as employees throughout the economic system are lashed ever more tightly to their jobs, stores kept open at all hours, and wages for most stagnate. Unions are another form of civic association that have withered.

All this has frayed the local civic and social connections, which are the ultimate safety net and source of civic solidarity. While Republicans bray about how terrible government is at replacing these services with top-down programs, (with some justification), they have at the same time carried out a decades-long battle to weaken both government and civic life, leaving a smoldering ruin in the name of a new feudal overlordship of the "job-creators"- the business class. That is the ultimate problem with meritocracy, and while appreciating its role in spreading social justice in the distribution of educational and professional opportunity, (a promise that is far from fully realized), we need to realize its cost in other areas of our national culture, and work to restore community diversity, community institutions, and community solidarity.

• Are corporations amoral and evil?
• Is market manipulation part of the story?
• Don't go to the hospital.
• Japan vs MMT.
• Amazing Chopin.
• Quote of the week:

Where love rules, there is no will to power; where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. – Carl Jung

Investing in the Future

People's Capitalism- the economics of James Albus.

A curious thing happened on the way to a recent post about the cerebellum. One of its primary theorists was not a neurobiologist, but an engineer, roboticist, and control system designer. It turned out that James Albus, mild-mannered government employee all of his career, had several side projects, another one of which was an odd blend of libertarian and communist economics, which he called peoples' capitalism. It incorporates some unconventional monetary theory, and throws in a proposal for oceanic algae harvesting as a bonus. All in all, Albus is clearly a fellow crank.

This book "Path to a Better World" is not easy to find, probably for good reason. Putting aside its lengthy self-encomiums and visions for a peaceful and problem-free future, the basic proposition is that the government should issue credit to everyone for the purpose of setting up a personal investment fund, which over time would then generate on everyone's behalf a steady and growing stream of income that will replace that lost from the automation revolution to come (and pay back the original loan). He estimates that if the annual increment is $5,000, the portfolio would be worth $1.5 million after 50 years, generating $55,000 of income. This would all be invested in government-approved vehicles like mutual funds, thereby increasing total capital investment. And lastly, to offset inflation, he proposes a payroll deduction-style system whereby some proportion of each person's income could be forcibly diverted to savings when inflation threatens.

One of the core justifications of these schemes is gaining a higher rate of overall capital investment. Albus recounts some of the interesting literature in economics that shows that productivity growth, overall growth, and an increased living standard all come mostly from capital investment. It is capital (as opposed to straight consumption of short-lived items like food and services) that funds the machinery, education, and training that continues to give back, year after year, productive services like roads, new inventions, manufacturing plants, and housing. We all know that the US has had a low rate of capital investment, which Albus contrasts with China's extraordinarily high rate, and thus high growth which is overtaking us.

Albus shows fanciful graphs going far into the future of the US maintaining a 9% economic growth rate, which would enable us to stay ahead of the Chinese indefinitely. The problem is that not all investment is productive. We learned from Japan that the dizzying rates of capital formation and investment in a developing economy that is committed to catching up with the first world do not last forever. As long as one is behind the technological frontier, productive investments are easy to find- just steal them from more advanced cultures. But once one reaches the technological frontier, the search is far more difficult. Much more investment is wasted in exploratory research, and it is less attractive to rip out current sunk investments to keep up with every tiny increment on the slowly advancing frontier. This explains why China's growth will inevitably slow, as did Japan's and ours.

This is not to say that we should not raise our capital investment rate, but that we need to be more judicious than simply shovelling more money into mutual funds. Since the value of the stock market is based on a relatively coherent estimation of future income flows to corporations, pouring in more money on behalf of passive small investors will mostly just nudge out other, more liquid, investors, keeping the overall level of investment stable (with the caveat that price/earnings ratios have indeed risen (perhaps doubled) over the last few decades as a larger pool of investors has flooded the market). This would be a good thing from an economic justice standpoint. One of the points of Albus's plans is to distribute capital ownership more widely, in preparation for the time when none have jobs, but all need income. But it is unlikely to raise net capital investment much or raise economic growth rates.

The ironic thing (given Albus's government career in the highest levels of its research enterprise) is that he is so focused, perhaps due to libertarian leanings, on pumping money into the private capital markets, that he neglects the real capital shortfall- that of public investment. It is now a common mantra that our infrastructure is crumbling, and that education is too expensive. Both are areas where government investment is the most productive way we have to build for future economic and social returns.

Otherwise, there are some positive aspects to these ideas. What goes unmentioned is that the personal investment scheme will have to be heavily controlled by the government, since most people getting that kind of money are going to spend it. That is why so many poor people exist, after all, and so few capitalists. And the inflation control scheme is also rather heavy-handed, if effective, though one has to ask where this savings would go so as to not be inflationary. Putting it into mutual funds would put it into the markets again, and thus be ultimately inflationary. It would probably have to go into newly issued government bonds, which is to say, into a money black hole.

But the idea of spreading around capital and its income stream is very interesting. It is a far better idea than a simple UBI, which is structured as a sort of pittance handed out to keep the jobless from gathering into mobs with pitchforks. As we enter an economic era where capital is ever more dominant, through its comprehensive ability to generate economic value with ever fewer workers, the whole economic system needs to be rethought, with an eye to the middle class, not just the homeless and jobless. We already have vast pension funds and mutual funds, which have spread around the income flows from capital, if not taken effective control of the system from capitalists of the traditional variety. We already tax income and capital gains and inheritances to divert some of those gains to the common good. More of that kind of redistribution, of both capital and its proceeds, needs to happen in order to achieve the economic justice and stable future that Albus seeks.

• A criminologist takes a look at our president ... the dark triad.
• Who are the oligarchs?
• MAGA movie.
• Steps to fascism.
• Oligarchy in business isn't so good either.
• What does a financial risk manager say about climate change? $120 per ton of carbon.
• Economic democracy.

Awash in Authoritarian Atavism

Most institutions in the US are authoritarian, not democratic. 

How far we have come from the independent, agrarian ideal of Thomas Jefferson! Through the first century of the Republic, most citizens were self-employed, principally as farmers and shopkeepers. This bred an ethic of independence, self-reliance, and self-motivated political and civic participation, as noted by de Tocqueville. Then we all started working for corporations, and were sucked into a political system of work that was anything but democratic. Unions were an attempt to re-inject democratic principles into this workplace, at least in opposition to the main actor, management. But they have withered as well in our current age, as the corporation has become ascendent, and state regulation has largely taken the place of unions to remediate the worst problems of corporate amorality.

It all starts with the family, which, at least from the child's perspective, is very much an authoritarian institution. Care is exchanged for obedience. Hopefully love is exchanged as well. Viewing powerful people is known to be psychologically valent- we are to some extent inherently authoritarian. Churches generally replicate this structure, most explicitly in the Catholic system, with El Papa at the top, giving stern, loving, and infallible leadership. One of our most characteristic home-grown churches, the Mormon church, has an equally top-down authoritarian and patriarchal hierarchy. It was with the most extreme reluctance that its leaders gave up polygamy which had served as an extra reward and evidence of divine / patriarchal favor, to be followed by an eternity of connubial bliss.

The current LDS leadership of prophets, seers, and revelators.

These templates pervade our society, with even small towns that should be run by town councils giving up their executive functions to town managers. One of our political parties is dedicated to the proposition that authoritarianism is better than democracy, and pursues every possible means to make that transition. But it is really the corporation that takes up most of our waking lives and exemplifies the pervasiveness of authoritarianism today. In a typical corporation, there is an oligarchical board that is supposedly in charge of corporate strategy. But its members are typically chosen by management and are managers of other corporations, so fully entrenched in the authoritarian power structure. There are shareholders who supposedly own the corporation, elect the board, and supposedly vote about critical strategic issues. But nothing could be further from a democracy. It is management that proposes all the candidates, issues, and conducts all communications, and it is extremely rare for any contrary perspective or action to come to light. And the recent movement back to private corporate ownership has moved the dial even further away from any semblance of democracy.

The effects of this are clear, in the amorality and growing destructiveness of American corporations. For all the talk of "stakeholders", they steer all spare money to management and shareholders, and think nothing of destroying communities and workers, to be replaced with offshored supply chains or automated machinery as feasible. Our main streets have been eviscerated, our media prostituted, our environment abused, our government corrupted. The public good, which is what democracy exists to safeguard and nurture, means nothing to authoritarian institutions whose only purpose is the capture money by any means fair or foul and whose governance gives no place to greater considerations. Corporations have also invaded our democratic processes by way of the modern intermediaries of political participation- political consultancies, mass advertising, and PACs, not to mention old-fashioned funding / corruption of individual politicians, parties and institutions, and capture of regulatory agencies.

No wonder that our fellow citizens, after marinating their lives away in undemocratic social institutions, have little experience or taste for the rigors of democracy, and fall to the mean morality, domineering presumptions, and infantile ideas of demagogues. This will require some grass-roots psychotherapy to correct. One such corrective might be the work council system, as practiced in Germany. Every work place of any size has a democratically elected council of workers, which discuss and agitate for worker interests. They also elect worker representatives to the corporate board, up to half its members, depending on company size. This system gives workers real power in the workplace and a practice of participatory democracy, both of which are sorely lacking in the US.

• The eggs are OK.
• Explicit... tiny desk by Lizzo.

En Garde, Libtard!

Review of "Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason", by William Davies

Davies' book offers a deep historical analysis of our current predicament- a post-truth culture of all-out political warfare. Unfortunately, it turns out to be rather disorganized and digressive, despite offering many interesting ideas and pithy mottos. So the reviewer's job becomes one of reconstructing what the argument should have been were it better-edited and organized. A brief outline is that Davies believes that the enlightenment (exemplified by the philosophies of Hobbes and Descartes- no mention of Locke, oddly) generated the idea that a peaceful civic space was possible if the state does two things- monopolizes all violent power, and generates institutions of fact-finding to put policy and political debate on a rational footing, thus founding what we know today as expert/elite-driven technocracy.

Fast-forward to today, and our political space has degenerated back into a semblence of warfare, where information is weaponized, our new internet media is more hospitable to trolls than thought, and political debates revolve around put-downs and insults. The authority of the technocrats has been seeping away for decades, and the natives are restless.

On the whole, I think the philosophical superstructure of this argument is largely trash. Technocracy was hardly heard of till the 50's, when the post-war status of physicists and scientists in general was at a high tide. Civility has waxed and waned dramatically over the decades and centuries, and seems to have more to do with the tides of war and national cohesion than with anyone's philosophy, however influential such ideas can be in the long term in a background way. And Davies' prescription at the end is for the elites to enter the culture and political war at full throttle, since no one cares about their facts, objectivity, or authority any more. That hardly seems to be a philosophically grounded, coherent, or long-term answer to the problem. One can say, however, that the composition of the governing elites has changed over time, from the theologians and aristocrats who are fossilized in the British House of Lords, to the more democratic-minded aristocrats of the enlightenment and American/French revolutions, to the scholarly products of the École normale supérieure, Harvard, etc. who tend to rule the roost, and especially the civil service, today.

"It is scarcely any surprise that politicians, businesses, and civil society actors would want to exploit some of the rhetorical magic of numbers for their own purposes, playing consultants to produce statistics to suit thier interests. ... So much trust has been placed in numbers tht anyone wishing to be trusted (for good reasons or ill inevitably cloaks themselves in a veneer of mathematical reason."

Anyhow, what are some other facets that Davies brings out? One is the varying nature of knowledge as seen by business people, military people, and scholars. While the latter laboriously pile factlet on factlet to create an enduring, public edifice of explicit knowledge, the former operate by the seat of their pants to integrate partial knowledge of the moment for effective action. The former value secrecy and intuition and feelings (especially the anlysis of the feelings of others, competitors, and audiences), while the latter try their best to block feelings from their scholarship, keeping it clean of partisanship and bias.

These are fundamentally different approaches to the world, yet our elite government institutions are largely modeled on scholarship- the painstaking assembly of facts and stakeholders, etc. to come up with well-vetted policy. Again, this is hardly a new distinction however. Davies makes a case that romanticism / nationalism / military thinking crept into the European political systems after the French Revolution, which so dramatically mobilized the populace of France to generate an unprecedented military machine. What were once two distinct things- civil life and military life, gradually became merged into the total war and military-industrial complexes of the current century. And this led to the information-as-warfare situation that we find ourselves in today, courtesy of that DARPA project.. the internet. All I can say is ... no- there is something else going on. We have had a partisan, even warring, press since the founding, and a yellow press, scandals, bickering, and many other media problems.

"As for so many other insurgents, the objective of the troll is not to gain power but to inflict pain. Rather than as a means of representation or reason, words become instruments of violence, which seek out human weakness then exploit it. Libertarians might argue that emotional harm is not 'violence', but this is contradicted by the behavior of trolls, who pursure emotional harm with a militaristic and sadistic relish."

"An alternative perspective on financial securitization and Facebook is that they are further cases of 'weaponization' of everyday institutions and promises. They exploit and weaken norms of trust, without building adequate replacements. Debt, housing, friendship and democracy have been around for thousands of years; the contribution of the financial sector or Silicon Valley over the past thirty years has been to find ways of manipulating and destabilizing them, so that society no longer feels secure. Nothing permanent is constructed by the invention of mortgage-backed securities or Facebook, but a great deal is damaged."

Where Davies gets a little warmer is in a direct indictment of the US and European elites. The most topical and telling example is of US illegal immigration. For decades, the two parties have been happy to encourage immigration, though for different reasons. The Republicans, beholden to business, want cheap workers. So they work to keep illegal immigrants illegal, which empowers businesses against them and makes possible a high-class life for the top end of town, staffed by gardeners, cooks, nannies, ethnic restaurants, and so forth, at bargain prices. Elite Democrats share in these benefits, and additionally get the votes (generally) of those immigrants who manage to become citizens, by way of being marginally more sympathetic to them. Who loses? Workers do. Illegal immigration has held down wages for decades, and enabled whole industries, particularly agriculture, to operate at well below a decent wage scale. Or more to the point, a wage scale that accurately reflects the domestic legal labor market.

".. the conflict between metropolitan and rural values was heightened, adding economic inequality to a set of existing moral controversies. Another way in which this split appears is in terms of graduates vs nongraduates. This conflict has been a feature of American politics since the 1960's, and now more or less determines the shape of the electoral map, with Democrats winning coastal regions, big cities, and university towns, and Republicans winning more or less everywhere else."

In this case the Democratic elites in particular have adopted an agenda that directly hurts its original constituents- working class citizens. The same can be said of NAFTA and of globalization in general. The benefits have flowed up to the top, while the lower classes have been sold down the river. All this is understandable from a theoretical economic perspective, which is a comfort zone for the elites, as total economic growth inarguably goes up with most forms of free trade. China has paticularly decimated working class communities across the country, taking whole industries and supply chains abroad. Davies argues at length that the abstract statistics typically provided and consumed by the elites, such as GDP and unemployment, have, perhaps by design, failed to accurately portray the conditions of much of the population, which is increasingly ignored, flown-over, under-employed, in economic decline, and despondent. And these are the conditions that lead to a sleazy, clownish demagogue, especially when the other candidate in the election exemplifies almost precisely the over-educated and entitled elitism that has lost so much credibility, mostly by being slowly coopted by the rotten values of their purported adversaries.

Another issue is general bureaucratic sclerosis. Nothing can be done or built at any reasonable cost, because between the unionization of public workers, their corrupt participation in elections, and the general growth of legal, environmental, and other liabilities, the capacity of public management to operate has been cut to pieces. Exhibit A is the California high speed train, which is an utter managment fiasco. Each of these developments has been well-intentioned, but together, they result in a system where infrastructure to accommodate all the immigration that Democrats in particular are sympathetic to never gets built, we end up with gridlock, and citizens revolt against mandates to alter zoning to pack more people into the existing, crumbing, infrastructure.

And yet another issue is the romanticisation of nature. Where farmers and the agricultural industry grapple with and against nature on a daily basis, the educated elites take increasingly moralistic and strident stands- against climate change, against habitat loss, against species loss, against cruelty, against meat, etc. Again, all these movements are extremely well-intentioned, even momentously important. But the disconnect between rural and coastal could not be more stark, leading to the kind of resentment politics that we are living through.

In the wake of World War 2, the elites had demonstrated they could not only resolve a depression, manage and win a vast global war, but create the unimaginable ... the atomic bomb. They had maximum credibility, which has been eroding ever since. It was these elites that Trump and the Republicans ran against, apparently unaware that they were in the elite as well, only with the difference that while Democrats seek generally to make our state and civic institutions work better and more fairly, Republicans want to make them work less fairly, or failing that, destroy them entirely.

There are natural cycles, perhaps, of war and peace, of corruption and reform, of division and civility. But over our long history, this administration is surely the lowest point of administrative competence and moral stature. We won't get out of it by hoping for more civility, or that someone would turn off the internet. This book does offer some glimmers of a solution, not in its last chapters, but in its indictment of the Democratic elites in particular. Voters yearn for truth. Trump gave them a breakthrough of sorts, identifying immigration as a (partially valid) source of resentment, and identifying de-industrialization as another one. Both those horses are mostly out of the barn, as is surely / hopefully the fate of the coal industry as well. Trump's policies on all these fronts have been anachronistic, if not cruel, farces.

Real policy and truthful communication on these fronts is what the Democrats are groping for. They need to take workers seriously, not only as a token thread in the rainbow tapestry, but as a core and directing constituency. Warmed-over apparachiks like Joe Biden hearken back to when Democrats were slightly less elitist, thereby generating some support from older cohorts, when compared to the technocratic darlings Elizabeth Warren or Pete Buttigeig. But the point is.. who will articulate and serve the interests of the working class with serious and effective policy solutions? Who will lay aside the identity politics, the various liberal hobbyhorses, and focus on the demographics that will win the next election, not just through demagoguery, but by facing facts with future-directed and constituent-directed policy? The energy is rightly in the progressive end of the party, with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, whose policies and passion speak to righting the tide of inequality with a far-reaching program of reform and reversal of decades of right wing policies, instead of being coopted by them or compromising with them.

"War provides recognition, explanation, and commemoration of pain, of the sort that policy experts and professional politicians seem unable to provide. One of the curiosities of nationalism is that, despite appeals to famous battles and heroes, it is most often kindled by moments of defeat and suffering, which shape identity more forcefully than victories. For romantic patriots, Britain was never more truly British than when fleeing Dunkirk or enduring the Blitz. The common identity of the American South is forged out of the experience, then memory, of defeat in civil war, as mourned by the Lost Cause movement of thinkers and writers. ... The major achievement of scientific expertise and modern government, dating back to the mid-seventeenth century, was to establish a basis for civic interaction, from which violence was eliminated. The boundary between war and peace was unambiguous, and a public respect for facts reinforced this. There are various forces at large in the twenty-first century that test this boundary, including technologies and military strategies that blur the distinction between war and peace. But there are also emotional reasons why that line is becoming blurred. Part of the appeal of war, at least as an idea, is that- unlike civil society designed by the liked of Hobbes, it represents a form of politics where feelings really matter."

Davies points out that the most salient emotion in politics is loss of control. Such losses are destabilizing and can lead to the resentments that can be stoked by demagogues, and result in war, political or military. The Republican Southern strategy was and is built around revanchism against civil rights, among much else. In personal terms, such loss can lead to drug abuse, which gives at least the illusion of control and comfort. Workers have been dramatically disempowered over the last several decades, mostly through the far-reaching ideology of the Republican party. Yet when asked to vote, they voted for a Republican to fix it, apparently because he effectively touched an emotional feeling of hope and resentment, and then offered a pack of lies as solutions. Democrats are surely better, but they have to fess up to their failings, and dedicate themselves to a thorough-going program of reform, reversing decades of their own corruption and anti-worker policies. Will all this be twisted by the right wing media into pretzels of illogic and hate? Yes. But no one can argue that the campaign we are going through right now does not give Democrats the opportunity to make their own case on a virtually infinite number of channels and platforms. It is up to us.

• The search for social peace has infinitely deep roots.
• Why do women do it?
• And now for something different.. a pro-Trump view.
• Labor should be getting far more money.
• Better automatic stabilizers are an obvious way to take a load off the central bank.
• Threats don't work if you are a clown.
• Impeachment can't come soon enough.
• The Taliban is doing very well in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, every time we meet with the Taliban, we degrade the capacity and legitimacy of the Afghan government.
• Arctic ice loss is going to flip the switch.
• China is the worst.