Capitalism on the Spectrum

Prospects for the new administration.

Political economics can be seen as a spectrum from anarchic gangsterism (Haiti) to total top down control such as in communism (Cuba, North Korea). Neither works well. Each end of this spectrum ends up in a state of terror, because each is unworkable on its own terms. Capitalism, in its modern form, is a compromise between these extremes, where free initiative, competition, and hierarchical relations (such within corporations) are allowed, while regulation (via the state and unions) makes humane what would otherwise a cutthroat system of gangsterism and corruption. The organization and stability allowed by state-sponsored legal systems raises system productivity far above that of the primeval free-for-all, while the regulatory rules also make it bearable to its participants- principally the workers. The magic comes from a dynamic balance between competition and guardrails to keep that competition focused on productive ends (that is, economic/business competition), rather than unproductive ones (war, assassination, corruption, capture of the state, etc.)

The new Trump administration promises to tear up this compromise, slash regulations, and cut government. That means that the workers that voted for this administration, and who are the primary beneficiaries of the regulatory state, will be hurt in countless ways. The grifting nature of so many in this incoming administration is a blazing alarm to anyone who pays attention. Whether it is stiffing workers, bloviating on FOX, hawking gold sneakers, making a buck off of anti-vax gullibility, defrauding the government of taxes, promoting crypto, or frankly asking for money in return for political favors like petroleum deregulation, the stench of corruption and bad faith is overwhelming. Many of them, starting from the top, see capitalism as a string of scams and frauds, not exactly Milton Friedman's vision of capitalism. An administration of grifty billionaires is unlikely to rebuild US manufacturing, help workers afford housing, or fulfill any of the other dreams of their voters. Indeed, a massive economic collapse, on the heels of bad policy such as crypto deregulation, or a world-spanning trade war, is more likely, and degraded conditions for workers all but certain.

Freedom for capitalists means permission for companies to abuse workers, customers, the environment, the law, and whatever else stands in the way of profit. We have been through this many times, especially in the gilded age. It can spiral into anarchy and violence when business owners are sufficiently "free" from the fetters of norms and laws. When the most powerful entities in the economy have only one purpose- to make money- all other values are trampled. That is, unless a stronger entity makes some rules. That entity can only be the government. It has been the role of governments from time immemorial to look to the long term interests of the collective, and organize the inherent competition within society into benign and productive pursuits.

OK, more than a little ironic, but you get the idea.

On the other hand, there is a problem even at the golden mean of governmental rule-making over the capitalistic free-for-all, which is that the quality of the rule makers and their rules, their attention to real conditions, and their prompt decision making, all can decline into bureaucratic inertia. While this may not be a Stalinist system of top-down planning and terror, it still can sap the productive energies of the system. And that is what we have been facing over the last few decades. For instance, there is the housing crisis, where home construction has not kept up with demand, mostly due to zoning stasis in most desirable places in the US, in addition to lagging construction after the 2008 financial and real estate crisis. Another example is public infrastructure, which has become increasingly difficult to build due to ever-mounting bureaucratic complexity and numbers of stakeholders. The California high speed rail system faces mountainous costs and a bogged-down legal environment, and is on the edge of complete inviability.

Putting rich, corrupt, and occasionally criminal capitalists at the head of this system is not, one must say, the most obvious way to fix it. Ideally, the Democrats would have put forward more innovative candidates in better touch with the problems voters were evidently concerned with. Then we could have forged ahead with policies oriented to the public good, (such as planetary sustainability and worker rights), as has been the practice through the Biden administration. But the election came up with a different solution, one that we will be paying for for decades. And possibly far worse, since there are worse fates than being at a well-meaning, if sclerotic, golden mean of governmental regulation over a largely free capitalist system. Hungary and Russia show the way to "managed democracy" and eventual autocracy. Our own history, and that of Dickensian Britain, show the way of uncontrolled capitalism, which took decades of progressivism, and a great depression, to finally tame. It would be nice to not have to repeat that history.

• Daniel P. Moynihan was for the job guarantee.
• Housing in New Zealand.
• Nature's key scientists of 2024.
• A grumpy Krugman signs off.
• Notes on crypto and its grifting community.
• Who is for workers?
• MAGA to kill off the greatest public health advance, ever.

Things Shouldn't be This Difficult in Retirement

Social Security is engineered to cheat a lot of people. Why?

Social Security was one of the great and enduring accomplishments of the New Deal. It followed European models of progressive policy, insuring old age income for what was at the time a very low cost- a 2% tax on wages. It is fundamentally a semi-progressive program, with payouts indexed to what you earned (and paid in as taxes) while working, but using a formula of sharply diminishing returns at higher income levels. As we live longer and have fewer children, the finances of Social Security have had to be shored up a few times, with higher taxes, longer waits till retirement, and other revisions. One of the most devious of these has been the offer to get early benefits for a lower payout.

Basic Social Security rules: The monthly benefit payment is constructed out of a set of tiered rates, by income level, to define the "primary insurance amount", or PIA. The income level is based on the highest ten years of earnings. The lowest level of income (here up to $774 monthly) is paid back at 90%, for example.

A recent opinion column (with followup) noted that while 90% of people would be better off waiting to take their benefits, only 10% do, missing out on a large amount of lifetime income. The deal is that full retirement age is (now) pegged at 67 years of age. If you take benefits at the earliest time, age 62, you will get 70% of the full payout, forever. On the other hand, if you wait till age 70, you will get 124% of the full payout, (plus some extra based on inflation and other factors), which works out to almost double the lowest payout, each month. The life-time payout is of course highly dependent on when one dies, and the break-even point ends up at about age 77, after which everyone would do better waiting than taking the early payout. For example, if you make it to age 85, you would be 30% ahead in lifetime benefits having waited to take payments till age 70.

This is, as the columnist notes, a fraught policy. Psychologically, it resembles some of the most classic marshmallow experiments, testing self control in children. Just as most children don't have the self-control to wait for the two marshmallows, most retirees apparently do not have the foresight to maximize their ultimate income. And this is quite understandable. Principally, the future holds a great deal of uncertainty. Who knows (or wants to know) when one will die? Even if the average life expectancy, upon reaching age 62 is ~83, well past the breakpoint noted above, it is easy to rationalize taking the money while one can. Poorer people tend to have worse jobs, that they really want or need to retire from as soon as possible. The poorer one is, the less savings one is likely to have to tide one through from 62 to 70. And the poorer one is, the poorer health one is likely to be in, with a shorter prospect of collection. All in all, it can be an attractive, even compelling, deal.

But statistically, this ends up being a regressive policy, cancelling much of the otherwise progressively engineered system. Poorer retirees are in this way snookered out of possible income, on top of getting lower payouts to begin with (due to their lower incomes and contributions), and typically having shorter lives. It seems akin to the ever-loosening restrictions on gambling, sports betting, sub-prime lending, and the like, one more way to separate the poor from their money, via financial chicanery, aka engineering. It was a policy gradually developed over several Social Security reforms, from 1961 onward, and may have seemed a fair way to offer the option of earlier benefits to workers, to meet what can be rather urgent needs. But the psychology of it is very problematic and has produced what is described above- bad decisions by most people.

Some alternative models, accentuating their progressivity. Current Social Security is shown in red. A simple pay-in/payout plan is show in dashed lines, with no progressive aspect at all. And the solid line shows a flat payout scheme, where everyone is paid the same benefit. This was done by the Social Security administration in 2009, and notes that "... the program's progressivity has declined in recent decades."

How could all this be improved? There are innumerable ways to cut this cake, but the one I see as most promising is to go back to basics. Make the retirement age 65, and make the payout the same for everyone, across the board, at whatever level retains system viability. Then perhaps a special request board could be set up to offer earlier retirement, in cases of hardship or disability, related to the SSDI system already in place. This would be a way to reduce the complexity of the existing system, reduce the bad incentives, and make it more progressive at the same time. It would also strongly increase the incentive, at the lower end of the income distribution, to attain the needed work credits to participate in the system, which amounts to ten years of work that pays Social Security taxes. Death makes us all equal in the end anyhow, so a retirement system that brings that fundamental equality forward by a few years seems not just reasonable, but even a little poetic.

• Morality is a battle.
• Liz Trussification?
• Who's a democracy?
• Jesus is Black.

Hubris, Terror, and Disaster in Afghanistan

Review of "The American War in Afghanistan", by Carter Malkasian.

This book is a nightmare to read. It records one bad decision after the next, through two decades of a slow-moving debacle. Should we have invaded at all? Should we have set up a puppet government? Should we have let the mission expand to incredible society-changing scope? Should we have built a sustainable Afghan military? Could any government have stood up to the Taliban? A million questions and pointed fingers follow such a comprehensive loss. Each of the four Presidents who presided over the war made grievous errors, and tried to muddle through the resulting quagmire, until Biden finally threw in the towel.

In the end, even Mullah Omar reportedly considered whether it had been wise to refuse the US demand to turn over or turn against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. It is a poignant coda to a national tragedy. But what could we have done differently? I will divide this question into several areas, including mission creep, Islam and the Taliban, the Afghan army, and the Afghan government. At the very outset there was sad narcissistic paradox, in the "war on terror". War is terrorism, pure and simple. The idea that others are terrorists, and that we are not when we drop bombs on them, is a curious, but typical bit of American exceptionalism. Our whole adventure in Afghanistan was colored by the vast gulf in how we saw ourselves (righteous, moral, good), and how Afghans saw us (depraved infidels who violated every norm of civilized behavior).

Mission Creep

It is startling to look back at the progression of our goals in Afghanistan. First, we asked them to give up Al Qaeda. Then we overthrew the Taliban government and installed a new one. Then we sought to establish a democracy. Then we sought to hunt down not just Al Qaeda, but also the Taliban- the former government and a significant cultural and Islamic movement. Then we sought to advance women's rights, fight corruption, and set up a competent government and army. All these things were desirable, but replicated what we could not accomplish in either Vietnam or in Iraq, working with similarly bad partners. Contrast this with our occupations of Germany and Japan, where we put a few of the former leaders on trial, policed with a pretty light touch, kept political development local at first, and concentrated on economic reconstruction. While the cultural alignments were obviously much closer, that should have moderated our ambitions in Afghanistan, not, as it happened, stimulated them progressively to "civilize" the Afghans. This is especially true when the national will and funding to deal with Afghanistan was so impaired by the Bush administration's adventure in Iraq, and later by the tortured path of Afghanistan itself. It is somewhat reminiscent of the defeat the Democrats experienced in the recent elections- a party that got a little overextended in its missions to affirm every virtue, identity and interest group, far beyond the core issues.

Islam

That Afghanistan is an Islamic country is and was no mystery, but that did not seem to get through to those setting up our progressively more invasive policies, or the new government. Poll after poll found that the Taliban had continuing support, and if not support, at least respect, because they were seen as truly Islamic, while the government we installed was not. Malkasian points out that as religious scholars, the Taliban tended to not be infected by the fissiparous tribal conflicts of Afghanistan, which Hamid Karzai, in contrast, tended to encourage. This also led the Taliban to nurture a very strong hierarchical structure, (patterned on madrassa practices), also unusual elsewhere in Afghan society. These three properties gave them incredible morale and sway with the population, even as they were terrorizing them with night letters, assassinations, suicide bombings, and other mayhem. As long as the government represented the infidel, and however well-intentioned that infidel was, the population, including the police and army, would be reluctant supporters.

The only way around all this would have been to allow one of the Northern Alliance leaders to take control of the country after they helped defeat the Taliban, and then get the hell out. But this would have invited another civil war, continuing the awful civil war Afghanistan suffered through before the Taliban rose to power. The deep conflict between the Pashtuns and the northern Tajiks, Uzbeks and other groups would never have allowed a stable government to be established under these fluid conditions, not under the Tajiks. So we came up with the magic solution, to appoint a Pashtun as president, over a nominally democratic system, but with US support that, instead of tapering off over time, rose and rose, until we got to the surge, a decade into our occupation, with over a 100,000 US soldiers.

That was never going to win any popularity contests, even if it did put the Taliban on the back foot militarily. Why was the government never seen as truly Islamic? Malkasian does not explain this in detail, but in Afghan eyes, more tuned to the US as foreign infidels than to the formal conditions of Islamic jurisprudence, the question answers itself. Democracy is not inherently un-Islamic. Consultative bodies that advise the leadership are explicitly provided. Whether they promote women's rights, or accept foreign soldiers, night raids, and legal immunity of foreigners is quite a different matter, however. Whatever the form of the government, its obvious dependence on the US, as painfully illustrated by Karzai's incessant and futile complaints about US military transgressions, was the only evidence needed that the Afghan government was, in popular terms, un-Islamic. It was the same conundrum we experienced in Vietnam- how to be a dominant military partner to a government that had at best a tenuous hold on the affections of the populace, which were in turn poisoned by that very dependence? It is an impossible dilemma, unless the occupying power is ruthless enough to terrorize everyone into submission- not our style, at least not after our dalliance in the Philippines.

The Armed Forces

Because the government never managed to get true popular support, its armed forces were hobbled by low morale and corruption. Armies and police forces are only expressions of the political landscape. Afghans are, as the Taliban shows, perfectly capable of fighting, of organizing themselves, and of knowing which way the wind blows. The army dissolved when faced with its true test. The most powerful solution would clearly have been to have a more effective and popular government that either included or sidelined the Taliban. But could there have technical solutions as well?

The air force was emblematic. The US experience in Afghanistan from start to finish showed the immense power of air attacks, when combined with ground forces. So we planned for an Afghan air force. But we seem to have planned for a force that could not maintain its own equipment, relying in perpetuity on Western contractors. Nor was the selection of assets well-organized. The Afghans mostly needed close air support craft, like attack helicopters and A10 gunships. They should have focused on a very few models that they could fully sustain, with financial and parts support from the US. But that assumes that the US, and the Afghan government, had more thoughtful long-range planning than actually existed.

Always a difficult relationship

The Government

Apart from being seen as a puppet and un-Islamic, the government was riven with tribal and regional conflicts. Karzai spent most of his time managing and trying to win tribal contests. Malkasian repeatedly shows how major decisions and mental energy went into these issues, to the exclusion of attention to the armed forces, or the resurgent Taliban, or resolving corruption, among much else. 

Overall, however, the main issue was that the US installed a top-down quasi-democracy without giving the people true power. Unlike the local political reconstruction in the post-WW2 occupations, let alone our own system, the new Afghan government was explicitly centralized, with provincial and district heads appointed by Karzai. Karzai was really the new king of Afghanistan, more or less foisted on the country, though he had a significant amount of national credibility. There was a great deal of effort to sell this to the people as democracy, and foster "communication" and collaboration, and buy-in, but the people were never allowed into a true federal system with full electoral control of their local districts. Perhaps this was done for good reason, both from the monarchical Afghan tradition, and in light of the strong tribal tensions frequently at work. But it sapped the mutual support / accountability between the people and their government.

Karzai himself broached the idea of bringing Taliban into the system early on, but was rebuffed by the US. We went on to lump the Taliban in with the other "terrorists", and they, like Ho Chi Minh, used their natural legitimacy (with enormous helpings of terror, suicide bombings, and other guerilla tactics .. yes, terrorism again!) to eventually get the upper hand. How much better it would have been to have drawn a relatively generous line against allowing the former Taliban top echelon into official capacities, suppress militias and all forms of political violence, and let the rest re-integrate and participate in a truly ground-up federal system? It was those excluded from the system who holed up in Pakistan, seethed with resentment, and organized the return to power that started in earnest in 2005/2006. The Taliban may have been a bad government and in bed with Al Qaeda and the rest of it. They were not particularly popular with people in many areas of the country. But they were also very nationalistic, highly Islamic, and made up a fair slice of Afghanistan's educated demographic. 

A common theme through all these issues is American hubris, and lack of listening / empathy / respect for / understanding of local conditions. We insisted on making the Taliban the enemy, then insisted on rooting them out through night raids, Guantanamo imprisonment, exile to Pakistan, and other degradations. And were frequently getting fraudulent intelligence to base it all on. We thought that more military power, and more money, would get what we wanted. But what we wanted was Afghans to want to work on behalf of their own country in a free, stable, and prosperous system. How could that system be built on our money and blood? It couldn't. I had to be built by the Afghans, in their own way.

• Global leadership is in play.
• Private jets are abominable. Gas taxes, anyone?
• The planet simply can not take it.
• Meritocracy... good or bad? I would offer that is a lot better than the alternative. But can it be improved?
• Drilling for the climate: geothermal power is coming along, at large scale.

Who Needs the Fed?

Project 2025 promotes "free" banking, which is to say, no pesky regulations or backstopping from the Federal Reserve. What could go wrong?

Policy wonks can't help themselves- they need to write down their plans so that all the world can see how brilliant they are, and how real they could be, if only others recognized their brilliance. In that way, the project 2025 plans from the Heritage Foundation have been a gold mine, at least for Democrats. And since the Republican Party couldn't be bothered to write down a platform, other than "anything Trump wants", this project serves as the functional platform of the current Republican campaign, written as it was by scores of officials from the first Trump administration, plus many others itching to be appointed to a second. And it is crazy- more like a project 1825 than anything we would want to look forward to.

One of its less publicized planks is its approach to banking. It heaps criticism on the Federal Reserve, and recommends, as the most effective solution, its abolition and a return to "free banking". Which means a world where no regulator controls the banks, and no federal reserve backs it up against panics and crises. And just to complete the return to barbarism, it recommends a return to the gold standard as well.

"In free banking, neither interest rates nor the supply of money is controlled by the government. The Federal Reserve is effectively abolished, and the Department of the Treasury largely limits itself to handling the government’s money. Regions of the U.S. actually had a similar system, known as the “Suffolk System,” from 1824 until the 1850s, and it minimized both inflation and economic disruption while allowing lending to flourish." - From Chapter 4

Needless to say, US history is littered with banking panics, runs, and depressions, usually due to the unregulated nature of this "free" banking and to monetary gold backing. It is hard to express just how absurd and damaging it would be to return to such a world. The Federal Reserve was conjured up after a long history of the establishment of the first national bank, then its destruction by Andrew Jackson, a century of economic instability with particularly damaging panics in 1893 and 1907. By 1913, the US finally had had enough, and set up an updated national bank in the form of the Federal Reserve, to regulate and backstop the banking system. 

Illustration from 1873, portraying "Panic" on Wall Street.

Unfortunately, until the advent of Keynesian economics, it didn't really know what it was doing, and was particularly ineffective during the Great Depression, making things worse instead of better. Even now, it amounts to a cabal of bankers who are more interested in jacking up interest rates than in national prosperity. MMT economists tend to think that interest rates should be kept low, and the functions of the Federal Reserve folded into the Treasury Department, with greater political oversight. The use of interest rates- which are such a blunt tool of economic policy- could then be de-emphasized, in favor of more dynamic fiscal policy to manage inflation and monetary conditions. It is worth noting that over the last eighty years, the Fed has routinely over-shot its mark in raising interest rates, ending up with recessions, and rapid, belated retreats to lower rates. It is only with the current cycle that it has achieved, at least so far, the dream of a soft landing, taming inflation while avoiding recession.

Recessions (gray) have regularly followed interest raising campaigns by the Fed, and not always intentionally.

But note that the word "depression" is no longer in our lexicon. For all its faults, the Fed has kept the economy on a much more even keel than was possible under the wild-west free banking era, when monetary conditions were hostage to whatever Yosemite Sam dug up in the Yukon, or how wildly bankers over-extended their issuance of notes. Banks built impressive buildings to foster the illusion of stability in an environment where stability was impossible, lacking the infinite backstop that the Federal Reserve can now bring to bear during a crisis. Both individual depositors and the population as a whole benefit. It is a classic example of the people of the US coming together to create an institution that makes our lives better, so that we can worry about other things than the next banking panic. 

This economic craziness is just one small example of the fevered imaginations of the right wing in current US politics, which seems to have crawled out from the former fringes of Lyndon Larouche and the Birchers to take over an entire half of our political system. And this is fundamentally thanks to the air given them by an appalling right wing media that cares nothing for truth or civility, rather making its money from button pushing, whining grievance, and reflexive anti-state propaganda. And people complain about social media! Just how long ostensibly reasonable and decent (even Christian(!)) people will wallow in this environment is anyone's guess, but our common, rational, and beneficial institutions will in the mean time be in constant danger.

• Luddites of today.
• We need to win this war.
• Profile in courage.

Correction- The Republican convention did actually come up with a platform.

Wherever Did the Pandemic Go?

Covid has attenuated. But is that from its own evolution, or from our immune reactions to it?

Looking at recent gatherings such as the political conventions and the Olympics, it is evident that the pandemic is over. A graph from the CDC says that mortality from Covid-19 is now similar to influenza- not great, but not catastrophic either, running at roughly a thousand deaths a week, and this with negligible public precautions.

Overall mortality of Covid-19 in the US.

A fundamental scientific and policy question about this is why: did the virus evolve to a less virulent state, or have we evolved (or engineered) enough immunity to fend off the worst? Even after the intense focus on this virus and all the research that has been done, this is a difficult question to answer. There has been a parade of variants, one supposedly more virulent and dangerous than the last, except that we are less affected and increasingly able to ignore them. The scientific community is evidently divided on this causal question, with no good ways to test these basic hypotheses.

I am personally very much in the viral evolution camp, believing that this virus has on its own evolved to be less virulent, even as it gained in transmissibility and ability to evade our immune systems. Surveillance of the virus shows quite high levels this summer, even while its effects are minor, overall. The logic is that this kind of virus does not gain from people shutting themselves up at home and being miserable, let alone dying. Much better for us to be surreptitiously infected and infectious, and able to go about our business, at work and play. We recall that Covid was markedly more lethal at the very outset of the pandemic, before the first set of variants developed. Other cold-type viruses seem to have followed a similar path, and the many zoonotic infections we have picked up (including this one) come from other organisms which carry these pathogens without much difficulty, doubtless after a long evolutionary standoff.

But the graph above makes a different argument, since the vaccines came online around the spring of 2021, reached about fifty percent of the population in late 2021, which is followed by the dramatic drop in covid mortality in spring of 2022. Some researchers point to the lack of attenuation of other pathogens, like HIV, tuberculosis, and smallpox, to say that the evolutionary argument does not hold water. After a pathogen has replicated and spread, (in the case of Covid, in the first week of infection, roughly), it doesn't care what happens to the host- literally whether it lives or dies. They would say that it was the immunization campaign that saved us, and continued infection leading to herd immunity that has created a population increasingly resistant to Covid mortality.

Testing these hypotheses would require Covid-naive populations, which would be ideally split into two study sets, one with vaccination followed by infection, and the other infected directly. This kind of thing may happen as a natural experiment somewhere, and perhaps the closest we can come is the release of Covid restrictions in China. In late 2022/early 2023, China switched abruptly from a zero-tolerance policy of social contact and infection, to a zero-tolerance policy towards bad publicity and accurate mortality reporting, while relaxing anti-Covid restrictions. The result was a surge in death rates, to levels estimated to be higher than those elsewhere, including in the US. This argues that during the restrictive period, the virus had not significantly attenuated via its natural evolution, though then the subsequent mass infection and inoculation did eventually lead in China, as it has elsewhere, to the lower mortality rates seen around the world. 

So, despite the rapidity of viral evolution, one has to conclude that over the short term, the immune hypothesis appears superior to the viral evolution hypothesis, as an explanation of general attenuation of Covid mortality. (Robert Kennedy may disagree, of course!) The evolution of virulence is closely related to the whole lifecycle of a pathogen, especially the way it spreads, making comparisons with other pathogens hazardous. Respiratory pathogens have the opportunity to spread without damaging the host too much, and that seems, in principle, like an advantageous evolutionary path. So I would still hypothesize that over the long term, Covid will settle into a less virulent form that triggers less immune activation (the most lethal aspect of Covid infection), in favor of high transmission and co-existence with our immune systems. Other viruses seem to have followed a similar path. How it interacts with further naive populations would be dispositive, though there may not be any left at this point.

• Updated vaccines are out.
• The race to fusion.
• But solar is the real fusion power.

Hungary for Power

Hungary has become a one-party, authoritarian state, not a democracy.

Victor Orban recently paid a visit to Donald Trump in Florida, with glowing photos and pledges of goodwill. Republicans in the US have nurtured a deep fascination and alliance with Orban and his government, holding several CPAC conventions in Hungary, and hosting Orban and his lieutenants at US events. It is clear that they view Hungary as a shining example and template of where they could take the US. Not the shining city on a hill of Reagan's democratic and anti-authoritarian dreams, but a whole other kind of city, one that never will fall into Democratic hands again.

So it is worth looking in detail at what has happened in Hungary, to observe the ideals of our current Republicans and what is in store for the rest of us from a second Trump term. I was, incidentally, beaten to the punch of this analysis by a recent story in the Atlantic. Orban's party, Fidesz, is very similar to the GOP in its mix of business right-wingery and rural values. Its strength is handing out the red meat of traditional, anti-cosmopolitan values to the rural base, along with helpful economic subsidies. In the pivotal 2018 election, it won all the rural districts, even though the opposition bowed to the logic of re-written (winner-take-all) electoral system and tried to join into a unified party. 

Fidesz came to power originally on an anti-socialist platform, vowing to get rid of the remnant bits of the prior communist system, which had settled into the same kind of semi-kleptocratic mode as in most of the former Soviet states and its satellites. That they did, but not to bring an end to corruption, let alone authoritarianism, but rather to partake themselves instead. After coming into power, Fidesz rewrote the constitution, in ways large and small to entrench their own power, and has since continued a campaign of extremely effective, gradual, and often surreptitious legislation to cement its advantages. Gerrymandering is now standard procedure, which when combined with the winner-take-all districts creates the opportunity to win overwhelming majorities in parliament founded on very thin electoral pluralities. Small parties can not win any more, but are also prohibited from combining with other small parties into election list coalitions.

The courts were remade by putting them under the control of a political appointee- the president of the National Judicial Office. This president is appointed by parliament, and in turn appoints, promotes, and runs the operations and budget of the whole judicial system. Needless to say, it is heavily influenced by the now Fidesz-controlled parliament and executive.

The media has been remade by gradual pressure on independent media owners to sell to Fidesz-friendly interests, which now control 90% of the country's media. Government advertising buys were strategically placed with friendly outlets, and government run media was put under direct political control. A Russian inspired "security" law was passed to outlaw ill-defined criticism of the state, public morality, or "imbalance" of coverage, answerable naturally to a parliamentary-appointed body, rather than the courts. Imagine if in the second Trump administration, PBS and NPR were put under political control and given a "FOX" makeover. 

Hungary is now effectively a one-party authoritarian state with managed elections. We are not far off. To see the battle of titanic interests and billionaires now openly showering money on favored candidates, and extending their tentacles down to the school board level, is sickening. The Republican party has partnered with Heritage foundation to offer an openly Orbanist plan for the second Trump administration. The court system has already re-written our constitution in extensive ways over the last four years, without an amendment being passed, or even proposed. The antics of Judge Eileen Cannon show that very little may remain of the rule of law if it is left in the hands of partisan extremists.

And our media is in even more perilous condition, with the relentless lying of FOX, Sinclair, and their ecosystem. The Republican convention just past was a pageant of lies and grift, betokening the criminal enterprise that party has turned into. Headed by their adored, and now divine, leader who is not just a felon and business fraud, but rapist and insurrectionist as well. But no matter. With enough money, and enough shamelessness, anything is possible.

• Everything is fine!
• Scandals erupt out of a corrupted system.
• The new GOP.
• Which is a blue collar party, right?
• Tom Tomorrow, on last week.
• Historical note on the great California land grab, and the fate of "free" land generally.
• Notes from the early days of life.

Imperialism for Thee, but Not for Me

Realism, idealism, and false realism in the Ukraine war.

The Ukraine war has been a disaster. That much is certain. But who caused it, and could it have been averted with better policy from us? And what would the costs of such a policy have been? There is a large school of foreign policy "realists" (exemplified by John Mearsheimer) who think that Russia was driven to this war by the inexorable encroachment of NATO towards the Russian borders. Thus we are at fault, just as much as Russia, which is actually dropping bombs on Ukraine and cutting a blood-soaked swath through its eastern and southern regions. The imperialism of Russia over its neighbors is perfectly understandable, realistic, and OK. By this argument, Russia has been crystal clear that offering Ukraine the distant prospect of NATO membership, as we did in 2008, was a declaration of war (by us!). Russia has tried to negotiate in good faith all through this time, and kept working for peace, even as it could see its interests eroded, and the necessity of war increasing. Till at last, it was forced by our policy to take over Crimea, and ultimately, in the face of increasing infiltration by Western interests in Ukraine, launch the full scale war we see today.

While this is one perspective on the level of grand strategy and traditional balance of power views, it leaves out one of the actors in the drama, and is a curious way to apportion blame for manifest evil. The actor it leaves out is Ukraine, which might want to have some say in its own destiny. And the evil is the way in which this realist school casually consigns countries to "spheres of influence", fated to be sat upon by their neighboring bullies. Perhaps world history is one long story of bullies fighting it out over riches and territory. But does it have to be? It does not, and therein lies the difference between war and peace, blame and praise.

Realists point to America's own empire, perhaps most explicitly outlined in the Monroe Doctrine. This statement by John Quincy Adams claimed the entire Western Hemisphere to be a special zone where European meddling was unwelcome, and defended by the nascent power of the United States. This was largely aspirational at the time, and European imperialist powers continued meddling in the hemisphere nevertheless, even invading the US itself in the war of 1812. And of course, the Monroe doctrine was not intended to set up a US empire at all, but was rather an anti-imperialist document, promoting the self-determination of the countries of South and Central America. We have since certainly done our share of meddling, taking several large portions of Mexico for our own territory, corrupting various Central American countries in commercial and anti-communist quasi-empires. But on the other hand, for the most part we have had friendly and peaceful relations, even (the shambolic Bay of Pigs invasion aside) keeping our hands off of Soviet-allied Cuba.

Evolution of the Russian empire, over the centuries. Whether the areas under Russian occupation ever wanted to be there, or now wish to stay there, remains a live question.

It is clear that our view of empire is not, currently, a traditional one. We have lots of friends, lots of allies, and lots of power, of soft and hard kinds. But we have not set up a barrier of involuntary client states against regional threats. NATO is emblematic as a voluntary alliance. It was and remains a collective (if US-dominated) alliance of countries trying to deter a third world war. Such a war was first contemplated to arise from the European antagonists who had just fought the two preceding wars - Germany, France, and the UK. But as they rebuilt their societies on both an economic and moral basis, it quickly became clear that the real threat was going to come from the new Soviet Empire, which had quickly swallowed up all of Eastern Europe. 

Each of these Eastern European countries had their dreams of freedom crushed in the wake of Germany's defeat, and each was correspondingly eager to leave the Soviet Empire when the cold war, at long last, came to an end. Vladimir Putin blames Mikhail Gorbachev for loosening the reins and thoughtlessly letting the empire crumble. The current Russian state celebrates its greatest holidays around the high water mark of another leader, more the Putin's taste- Joseph Stalin, when Russian power was at its (relative) peak. Putin's idea of power is expressed in his relation with Belarus- a thoroughly cowed and pliant frontier, from which Russian conveniently launched a large portion of its invasion of Ukraine. It is typical of this curdled and "realist" perspective that the wishes of the people involved count for nothing. Their aspirations and well-being are irrelevant, the imperial state and its power are what matter. 

As an aside, Michael Kimmage has recently written a book-length analysis of Ukraine. It is a quite balanced history of the whole run-up to the war, laying out the moves, thoughtless or not, taken by both sides. Here, one gets a sense that Putin was sensing weakness in the West, in the wake of our Iraqi and Afghan debacles. But where this book really shines is in its epilogue, which is a pean to the power of history itself.

"Countries invariably conceive their foreign policies in reaction to earlier conflicts. They are led by their sense of who was wrong and who was right, of what the core problem was and what the solution to that problem was, fighting the last war until it is no longer the last war. The preoccupation with the past can be the path to wisdom, of learning from history, or it can leave countries trapped in their interpretations of the past. To investigate the origins of an ongoing war, then, is not just to chart the present moment. It is to peer, however uncertainly, into the future."

Kimmage recounts how Germany turned historical analysis on its head after World War 1 to claim that others had started it, and others were responsible for Germany's defeat, thus setting the table for a second round. Similarly, it is Putin's potted analysis of the cold war and its appalling aftermath for Russia that forms the motivation for his current war. Just like realism, this theory of the power of historical narrative serves to explain motivations and actions, and by understanding absolve the actors, to some degree, of culpabilty, making the current conflict seem inevitable. In this case, the West was doltishly uninformed and sleepwalked into an unnecessary war. 

But history is not a given. It is, in places like Russia, a product of the propaganda organs, not the science organs. It is narrated with a grievence and a point in mind, and can be, in the right hands, tailored to lead to practically anything the leader wishes to happen. The idea that we should be beholden to the historical analysis of another country or its leader, and thus be on the hook for appeasing their "legitimate" demands, feelings, etc. is absurd. However much such understanding helps us analyze what other actors have in mind, it should not bind our analysis of the same history, or of the broader functioning of the international system.

Returning to the realist perspective, it recognizes the lowest common denominator in an anarchic environment- raw power. It is the mafia approach to foreign relations. Well, we have an answer to that, which is a modern perspective, modeled in a modern state that has and uses overwhelming policing power against aggressors. It is enlightenment values that have suffused Europe, providing the peace seen on the continent among the members of NATO and the EU. We have gotten so used to living amidst civilized values that a Russian invasion of Ukraine seemed unthinkable, despite a long train of preliminary invasions, explicit policy statements from Russia, and propaganda preparation. Europe should have used its power to immediately push Russia back out of Ukraine. That would have been the ideal scenario to safeguard the values that Ukraine was aspiring to, and that the West embodies.

So, what about nuclear weapons and World War 3? Russia has been rattling its nuclear saber, resorting to any threat it can to keep Ukraine weak and friendless. Needless to say, it would not be wise of Russia to use nuclear bombs in Ukraine. Whatever grievances / justification Russia has for its invasion, even internally, would collapse immediately. I think everyone recognizes that nuclear weapons exist for mutual and existential deterrence, notionally protecting Russia (in this case) from invasion by other countries. Fine. Helping Ukraine rid itself of a cruel bully, restoring its independent and original borders, is, conversely, fully justified and is the kind of aim that lends itself to a limited war. At very least at this point, we should provide Ukraine with the wherewithal for air superiority over its own territory.

Russia exemplifies old thinking from the anarchic world order. It (and China as well) want to drag the world back into that world, recreating the glory days of Stalin's empire. Or even Catherine the Great's. It is in the power of the West, as a growing collective of democratic and prosperous countries, to deny these aims, rather than appeasing them. And the expeditious and effective use of police power in Ukraine would yield dividends into the future, strengthening the collective power of the West to foster the freedom and self-determination of other nations. Could this protective concept allow movement the other way? Sure- Hungary, for instance, might want to join the Russian orbit and leave the EU. And good riddence! They would be welcome to do so. These alignments should not be determined by war, (nor, hopefully propaganda and corruption), but by national sentiment and interest.

The primitive mafia mindset is also one that afflicts certain precincts of US politics, notably the Republican presidential candidate, who can't see beyond "strength" and machismo, and seems more likely to support Putin than NATO or Ukraine. It is another case of cavalier disregard not only of decades of collective work by the West to sustain a civilized international order, but of elementary concepts of justice and self-determination. Maintaining a just peace takes steadfastness, work and sacrifice. If we do nothing, then sure, the bullies will win and the world will go right back to one where bullies have only other bullies to be afraid of. If last week's Memorial day means anything, however, it is that collective sacrifice over the long arc of US history has always served, at least in principle, more freedom and less tyranny- for others, not just ourselves.

• Incredibly, Voyager 1 is back on track and transmitting. From 162 astronomical units (0.94 light day) from earth.
• The reason why our country is in this perilous position is ... lying liars.
• The state of corruption today.
• Alito throws wife under the bus.

The Lucky Country

The story of California, the story of the US, and optimism about free frontiers.

I am reading "California, the great exception". This classic from 1949 by Cary McWilliams is stoutly jingoistic and pro-California. But it also provides a deeper analysis of the many things that made California such an optimistic and happy place. Mainly, it boils down to free land and rapid settlement by ambitious working people. The Native Californians were so weak, and so ruthlessly extirpated, that they did not present the irritating conflict that happened elsewhere in the US. California's gold was so widely and thinly distributed (as placer in streams) that mining was a matter of small partnerships, not huge businesses, as it became elsewhere in the West, in the deep hard rock silver and later copper mines of Nevada (Carson city and the Comstock lode) and Montana (Butte). The immigrants were of working age and enthusiastic to work, dismissing slavery and corporatism in favor of a rapacious entrepreneurialism. 

California never had a paternal territorial government, but transitioned directly from self-rule to statehood, its riches speaking volumes to the national government in Washington. And the national government was anxious lest secessionist sentiment spread to the still far-distant west, so it funded the building of a transcontinental railway, during the civil war when money must have been extremely tight. That feared secession was not to join the South, but rather to found a new and prosperous nation on the West Coast. San Francisco went on to serve as the financial capital of the West, particularly of western mining, creating almost overnight a collusus to rival the centers of the East. In due time, gushers of oil also appeared on the California landscape. It is no wonder that Californians became fundamentally optimistic, ready to take on huge challenges such as water management, building a great education system, and the entertainment of the world.

California was also blessed by weak neighbors on all sides. There were no foreign policy predicaments or military threats. It could nurse its riches in peace. It was, in concentrated form, the story of America- of a new continent limited more by its ability to attract and grow its population than by its land and the riches that land held. An isolated continent that wrote its society almost on a blank slate- a new government and a melting pot of people from many places. 

Bound for California, around 1850.

How stark is the contrast to a country like Ukraine, neighbor of imperialist Russia and before that host to the Scythians, Goths, and Huns. A flat land exposed on all sides, that has been overrun countless times. A fertile land, but always contested. The idea that history would stop, that Ukraine could join the West, and enjoy its riches in peace and security- that turns out to have been a dream that bullies in the neighborhood have a different view on. Better to beat up on the little "brother" than to build up both nations and economies through beneficial exchange and prosperity. Better for both to go down in flames than that the little "brother" escapes the bully's clutches into a more humane world.

But the happy place of the US and Calfornia has hit some rough patches too. It turns out that our resource riches are not endless after all. The foundation of material wealth- the agricultural land, the mines, the lumber- underwrote social and technological innovation. No wonder the US was first in flight, and led the way in electricity, automobiles, the internet, the cell phone. Now we have an innovation economy, and get much of our materials and lower-grade goods from far-off places. The people we have attracted and continue to attract are the new wealth, but therein lies a conflict. Places like California have huge homeless populations because we have ceased to grow, ceased to embody the hope and optimism of our lucky past. Conflict has raised its head. There is no more free land, or gold in the streams. Now, with the land all parcelled up and the forests mowed down, everyone wants to hold on to what they have, and damn those who come after. Prop 13 was the perfect expression of this sour and conservative mood- let the newcomers pay for public services, not us.

California is transitioning from a visionary frontier into a cramped, normal, and not especially lucky place. The fabulous climate is suffering under fire and drought. The population is growing significantly older, while next generation is educated less well then their parents. The app innovation economy has fostered a nightmare of surveillance and social dysfunction. The pull of a new frontier is so strong, however, that some of our richest people now imagine it on other planets. The irony of sending rockets, fueled by vast amounts of fossil carbon and compressed oxygen, to other worlds where there isn't even air to breathe, let alone plants to cut down, begs belief. It is the final gasp of a dream that somewhere, out there, is another lucky country.

• We are a front in the authoritarian war for the world.
• Truth will out, eventually.
• Aging is in the crosshairs.
• The sad fate of Russia's Silicon Valley.
• Do we vote for merely corrupt, or fully bought and paid for politicians?
• New advances in low power, low cost, low fright MRI.

The Shadow War

We are in a new world-wide cold war. And ironically, the many new technologies from the West have given autocratic states extraordinary new powers. 

Paul Theroux had a remarkable passage in one of his travel books, as he was passing through Myanmar, a military dictatorship then and now, that illuminated attitudes towards China and from China. 

"I heard lots of praise for the United States in distancing itself from the regime, and lots of blame for China and Russia and Singapore in supporting it- China especially. But China's prosperity, its need for oil and wood and food, had created a new dynamic. China had no interest in any country's developing democratic institutions; on the contrary, it was a natural ally of repressive regimes. When the World Bank withheld funds from an African country because it was corrupt and tyrranous, demanding that it hold an election before it could qualify for aid, China would appear with money- 'rogue aid,' with no strings attached, and got the teak, the food, and the drugs." - Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, 2008

The world seems headed into another cold war, definitely rhyming with the last cold war. It is highly unfortunate, and testament to some defects in US management of the post-cold war era, to the surprising durability, even attractiveness, of authoritarian systems, and to the many weaknesses of democratic systems. This new cold war, which I will call the shadow war, features Russia and China as the main poles of opposition to democratic and developed countries, mostly in the West, but including many others. This time around, China is the stronger power by far, and both Russia and especially China are quite advanced in their development, so that the West no longer has a monopoly in any particular technology or kind of organization. China has adopted all the magic of capitalist market mechanisms to grow its wealth, and stolen (or forced the transfer of) huge amounts technology and knowledge to make itself a leader in all sorts of industries.

The West has lately begun to wake up to the problem. Our hope that capitalism was somehow related to, or a leading wedge for, democracy has been dashed several times over. Instead of China turning into Hong Kong, it is Hong Kong that is turning into China. Not only is capitalism, as has been tirelessly pointed out from the left, amoral and indifferent to human rights, (as we already knew from slavery in the US), but democracy is also far more fragile than we had hoped, requiring a wide range of civic understandings, media practices, and forms of education that are far from universal, or natural. We had, in the windup to the cold war, seen many countries make slow and fraught transitions to democracy (Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and Eastern Europe), but have more recently seen countries backtrack into autocracy (Russia, Hungary).

Naturally, the war in Ukraine has put the most urgent point on this conflict, where Russia, which is to say its autocratic leader, felt that the existence of an independent and democratic Ukraine next door was too much to bear. Now, China also tells us that it loves its brothers in Taiwan so much that re-unification will come, no matter what the Taiwanese themselves might want. Love certainly takes some strange forms!

But it is a much broader issue, spanning the globe, and the depths of human psychology. On one list of countries ranked by democratic governance, the median country is Armenia, with a "hybrid regime" and scores of roughly five out of ten. This is not a great situation, where half the world, in rough terms, lives in various states of miserable, oppressive government. And as the quote above suggests, the authoritarians have in some ways the stronger hand. What happened?

We in the West had thought that democracy was the natural harbor of all peoples- the end of history, indeed. But in the first place, people power is a very limited power, if whoever has power is authoritarian enough to use tanks against it. And in the second place, democracy is not natural in many cultures. The Muslim culture, for instance, for all its virtues, has a fundamentally patriarchal and tribal governance model, with little room for democracy, though there are, traditionally, various forms of freedom, for men at least. So however attractive democracy is in theoretical terms, and as a model in the West that people from authoritarian countries like to vacation to... as a cultural pattern, it is not universal. And authoritarian patterns are hardly foreign to the West either. The Catholic church is an example of the preserved archetypes of patriarchy and authoritarian strong-man rule.

The Chinese dream is highly militaristic, and rather threatening.

But more deeply, the archetypes we have of leadership and politics are authoritarian.. the king, the hero. Jungian psychology, aside from its focus on archetypes, deals in the shadow, which is our real needs and instincts, insofar as they run counter to our surface goodness and conscious ego construction. A person like Donald Trump exemplifies all these trends. Why on earth are we still saddled with this sociopath after a decade of drama-queenity? He clearly touches a lot of people's archetypal conceptions of strength and heroism. His powers of psychological projection, reflectively rejecting his own shadow, are immense. He is rubber, others are glue. And his fundamental bond with the followers, by licensing their shadow sides of hate and violence, makes his every pronouncement right no matter what. We in the US are facing a cataclysmic political season, trying to repress the shadow of humanity, which is so amply expressed around the world in political / power systems that follow the logic of strength, ending up in states of terror.

Modern technology hasn't helped, either. After a brief flush of excitement about the ability of social media to amplify people power, especially across the Muslim world, it all went to pot as the shallow-ness and disorganization of such movements became apparent. The powers of databases, personal identification, surveillance, and media manipulation have been much more useful to authoritarian governments than to their antagonists, making state terror more effective than ever. Authoritarian countries now control their internet and media environments with great precision, increasingly project their twisted narratives abroad, and even hunt down dissidents outside their borders using the new information tools. So while information may want to be free, it doesn't really have a say in the matter- those with power do.

What to do about it? We in the West have lost control of our media environments. While we are waking up to some extent the the malevalent media from abroad, domestic media is controlled by money, which in the current environment of yawning wealth inequality, political fissiparation, and clickbait "business models" is just as crazy and corrupt. So there should be two approaches to this. One is to strengthen quality media, like PBS and its cohorts, with more offerings and deeper reporting. The other is to restrict how corporations can control media. The right to individual free speech can be preserved while making corporations more sensitive to social goods. The Dominion case against FOX was a small example of the powers available. Liability for lying should be a broader effort in the law, specifically against corporations, which are creatures of the state, not natural persons. We need to recognize the deep psychological powers we are up against in preserving enlightened, respectful civil government and discourse.

Obviously getting our own house in order, against the atavistic forces of political authoritarianism, is the first order of business. Abroad, paradoxically, we need to project strength as a democratic and developed community, holding the line in Ukraine and Taiwan, and against all sorts of authoritarian encroachments, until temperatures are lowered, and the current nationalist fevers abate. For what China has right now is an imperialist fever. It has been weak for so long and surrounded by so many unfriendly countries, that one can understand that it sees its recent economic prosperity as a special opportunity to recover a leading position in its neighborhood, militarily and politically as well as economically. That would be fine if it were not also trying to subvert free political systems and prop up tyrannical ones. There are good reasons why its neighbors are fearful of China.

Like in the last cold war, I think time plays a key role. We have to believe that democracies, for all their weaknesses, are better, and are seen as better, by people around the world. While today's authoritarian powers may have greater durability than those of the communist era due to their embrace of, rather than flouting of, market principles and modern technologies, they are ultimately fragile and subject to the opinions of their own people. Putin will not last forever. Xi will not last for ever. (The Kim regime of North Korea may, however, last forever!) Change is the achilles heal of authoritarian conservatism. So we are in for a very long haul, to keep spreading people power and peace internationally.

• Trade theft and IP warfare.
• Myanmar is a typical case of China's influence and values.
• Religion and war.
• Food oligopoly.
• Ghost roads and the end of nature.
• What, exactly, is the problem?

Renewable Power in Africa

Prospects for growth in electricity access and in clean energy.

Africa is an enormous continent, notoriously larger than China, the US, and Europe combined. Its population is also large- as large as that of India, at about 1.4 billion people. This population is growing rapidly, while its social and economic systems are developing more slowly. But as we know, the main ingredient of an advanced economy is power, which as traditionally been drawn from fossil fuels. Advanced economies are in the painful and reluctant process of transitioning away from fossil fuels. We can do a lot to help Africa to leapfrog this history by front-loading renewable energy.

There was a recent paper about the hydropower prospects in Africa. It notes that there are many projects on the drawing board, with many undammed rivers on the continent. But as we have learned in the US, the implications of river damming are quite destructive and wide-spread. For example fish ladders simply do not work- not at the scale needed to keep fish populations (and fisheries) healthy. Then there are problems of siltation, water temperature, erratic flows, and population displacement. There is a movement in the US to remove dams wherever possible, to free ecosystems back to a functional state. 

"More than 300 hydropower plants, corresponding to an additional 100-GW power capacity, are under consideration across the continent."

The article made the basic point that, given the state of other renewable power sources, and the prospect of lower water levels and droughts due to climate change, that roughly half of the planned hydropower projects they know of are economically inviable, even putting aside environmental considerations. 

This leads to the question of what to do instead? Maybe the answer is microgrids. In the developed world, it is increasingly common for people to take control of their own electricity production through the use of solar power. But at a single house level, power inputs and consumption are both erratic and require a lot of storage capacity to furnish a reliable system. The typical system is highly reliant on the larger grid to manage this intermittency. Microgrids occupy a middle range between grid-scale power, which is subject to problems of centralized political and social development, and the individual house, where the expense of managing fully independent electrical supply is highest.

The current grid in Africa, colored for >66 kV (dark blue) and the rest light blue. Note the patchy regional distribution, with lots of underserved areas. The US has a much denser grid. 

A map that suggests likely locations for smaller microgrids in Africa.

These maps note that there are many underserved areas in Africa- some concentrated urban areas, and a great spread of rural areas. Electrification is well-advanced in South Africa and the heart of West Africa. But there are many rural areas that would be better served by microgrids of various scales. Microgrids can be altered over time and integrated into larger systems. Their production and storage capacities are both beneficial for larger grid stability and scalability. Africa is, naturally, positioned ideally for solar power, and the Sahara is a natural location for massive power installations, to serve both Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

A proposal to run a super-grid around much of Africa, to harness supplies from the Sahara, among other sources.

One of the main characteristics of renewable power is that it has high up-front costs. The fuel is free, and clean. But the mechanisms to capture and store it are expensive. Thus if we want to encourage a more rapid transition to sustainable power systems in Africa, we would help pay for the up front costs, sharing capital investment in the interests of everyone, both here and there. Africa is currently a big exporter of oil and gas. As other regions transition away from those fuels, it is imperative that this production not be redirected and propped up by further Western investment, but rather replaced with better energy sources.

• Advanced nuclear power is not going to cut it.
• The heat pump song.
• Treason, again.
• On silence and isolation.
• Housing prices should not always go up.
• Medicare disadvantage.

Ideologies of Work

Review of Elizabeth Anderson: "Hijacked: How neoliberalism turned the work ethic against workers, and how workers can take it back."

We live by the sweat of our brow, though work. At least that has been the story after we were thrown out of the garden of Eden, where we had previously foraged without effort. By the time of Puritans, work had been re-valued as being next to godliness, in what became known as the Puritan work ethic. Elizabeth Anderson takes this as her point of departure in a fascinating historical study of the winding (and mostly descending) road that attitudes toward work took down the centuries, in the perennial battle between workers and parasites who have found ways to avoid sweating, yet eat just the same ... or better.

Anderson trots through all the classical economists and philosophers, down to John Stuart Mill and Marx, showing two main threads of thought. First is the progressive thread, in which the Puritans can (curiously) be classed, as can Adam Smith. They value work as both a cultural and meaningful activity, not just a means of sustenance. They think everyone should work, and criticize anyone, high or low, who shirks this responsibility. Genteel landowners who spend their time hunting rather than improving their estates are just as culpable as drunkards and other able-bodied peasants who fail to do their share. Learning and innovation are highly valued, as not just ameliorating the lot of those making improvements, but at the same time raising the wealth of, and standard of living for, all.

In contrast is the conservative thread. Anderson herself describes it trenchantly:

"From the conservative perspective, however, poverty reflected an individual's failure to filfill the demands of the work ethic. Society is at fault solely in establishing institutions that violate natural law in promoting vice through provisions such as the Poor Law. Conservatives agreed that the Poor Law must therefore be abolished or radically reformed. If poverty is caused by the vice of the poor, the remedy for poverty must be to force the poor to practice virtue, to live up to the demands of the work ethic. Conservatives differed somewhat on which virtue was most necessary for the poor to practice. Priestly focused on frugality, Bentham on industry, Malthus on chastity, Paley on contentment (understood as the opposite of covetous envy of the rich). Thus, Priestly hoped to convert poor workers into virtuous bourgeios citizens through a legally mandated individual savings plan. Bentham favored a workfare system that turned the working poor into imprisoned debt peons of capitalist entrepreneurs. Malthus advocated leaving the poor to starvation, disease and destitution, but offered them the hope that they could rescue themselves by postponing marriage and children. Burke and Wately agreed with Malthus, but attempted to put a liberal-tory paternalist veneer on their view. ...

"The moral accounting that assigns responsibilities to individuals without regard- and even in inverse proportion- to the means they have to fulfill them remains a touchstone of conservative thought to the present day. ...

"The ideology of the conservative work ethic is distinguished by a harsh orientation toward ordinary workers and the poor, and an indulgent one toward the 'industrious' rich- those who occupy themselves with making money, either through work or investment of their assets, regardless of whether their activities actually contribute to social welfare. in practice, this orientation tends to slide into indulgence toward the rich, whether or not they are industrious even in this morally attenuated sense. ...

"Here lies a central contradiction of the conservative work ethic. All the conservatives claimed that the key to overcoming poverty was to make the poor bourgeois in attitude. All they needed to do was adopt the work ethic, or be forced to adopt it, along with the spirit of competitive emulation, the desire to better others in the race for riches and ensure that one's children not fall beneath the standard of living in which they were raised. Poverty was proof that they hadn't adopted bourgeois virtues and aspirations. This presupposed that the poor suffered from no deficit in opportunities. The path to prosperity was open; the poor were simply failing to take it. Yet we have seen that, Priestly partially excepted, conservative policies knowingly reduced the opportunities of the poor to acquire or retain property, work for themselves, or escape precarity."

My major critique of Anderson's analysis is that putting all this conflict and history into the frame of the work ethic is inappropriate and gives the work ethic far more weight than it merits. Firstly, everyone thinks of themselves as working. The most sedentary rentier doubtless thinks of his or her choosing among investments as of critical importance to the health and future of the nation. Even his or her shopping choices express taste and support a "better" sort of business, in that way performing work towards a better community. The English royals probably see themselves as doing essential cultural work, in their choice of hats and their preservation of cherished traditions. Parenting, community associations, and political agitation can all, to an expansive mind, be construed as "work". And indeed some of our greater artistic and other accomplisments come from the labors of wealthy people who were entirely self-directed rather than grubbily employed. All this implies that a work ethic can be accommodated in all sorts of ways if markets are not going to be the standard, as they hardly can be in any philosophical or moral system of a work ethic. This makes work ethics rather subjective and flexible, as Anderson implicitly demonstrates through the centuries.

However a more serious problem with Anderson's analysis is that it leaves out the ethic of power. Her presentation laments the sad misuse that the work ethic has been subjected to over the years, (by conservatives), without focusing on the reason why, which is that a whole other ethic was at work, in opposition to the work ethic. And that is the power ethic, which values domination of others and abhors work as commonly understood. Or, at best, it construes the organization of society for the benefit of a leisured upper crust as work of momentous, even civilizational, significance. Nietzsche had a field day calling us to recognize and embrace the power ethic, and not hide it under sweeter-smelling mores like the Christian or work ethics.

Anderson does helpfully discuss in passing the feudal background to the Puritan work ethic, where the Norman grandees and their progeny parcelled out the land among themselves, spent their time warring against each other (in England or in France), and lived high off the labors of their serfs/peasants. No thought was given to improvement, efficiency, or better ways to organize the system. Conservatism meant that nothing (god-willing) would change, ever. Even so, the work of politics, of war, and of religious ideology was never done, and the wealthy could easily see themselves as crucial to the maintenance of a finely-balanced cultural and economic system.

Anderson also notes that the original rationale of the gentry, if one must put it in an economic frame, was that they were responsible for military support of the king and country, and thus needed to have large estates with enough surplus in people, livestock, horses, and food to field small armies. When this rationale disappeared with the ascendence of parliament and general (at least internal) peace, they became pure rentiers, and uncomfortably subject to the critique of the Puritan work ethic, which they naturally countered with one of their own devising. And that was essentially a restatement of the power ethic, that the rich can do as they please and the poor should be driven as sheep to work for the rich. And particularly that wealth is a signifier of virtue, implying application of the work ethic, (maybe among one's forebears, and perhaps more by plunder than sweat, but ... ), or transcending it via some other virtues of nobility or class. 

But in Locke and Adam Smith's day, as today, the sharpest and most vexing point of the work ethic is not the role of the rich, but that of the poor. By this time, enclosure of lands was erasing the original version of the job guarantee- that is, access to common lands- and driving peasants to work for wages, either for landowners or industrialists. How to solve extreme poverty, which was an ever more severe corollary of capitalism and inequality? Is it acceptable to have homeless people sleeping on the streets? Should they be given work? money? social services? education? Do the poor need to be driven to work by desperation and starvation? Or is the lash of work not needed at all, and lack of wealth the only problem? Malthus was doggedly pessimistic, positing that population growth will always eat up any gains in efficiency or innovation. Thus it requires the predatory power of the gentry to enable society to accumulate anything in the way of capital or cultural goods, by squelching the poor in sufficient misery that they will not over-reproduce.

The progressive view of work and the poor took a much more sanguine view. And here one can note that much of this discussion revolves around "natural" laws. Is the population law of Malthus true? Or is the natural communitarian tendency of humans also a natural law, leading to mutual help, spontaneous community formation, and self-regulation? Are some people "naturally" superior to others? Is a hierarchical and domineering social system "natural" and necessary? Adam Smith, in Anderson's reading, took a consistently pro-worker attitude, inveighing against oppressive practices of employers, collusion of capital, and cruel goverment policies. Smith had faith that, given a fair deal and decent education, all workers would strive to the best of their abilities to better their own condition, work diligently, and thereby benefit the community as well as themselves.

For the story of Eden is fundamentally wrong. Humans have always worked, and indeed valued work. Looking outside the window at a squirrel trying to get into the bird feeder ... is to see someone working with enthusiasm and diligence. That is our natural state. The only problem was that, as human civilization progressed, power relations, and then even more- industrialization- generated work that was not only cruel and oppressive, but meaningless. The worker, forced to work for others instead of him- or herself, and routinized into a factory cog, became fully alienated from it. How to get workers to do it, nevertheless? Obviously, having a work ethic is not a full solution, unless it is of a particularly astringent and dogmatic (or tyrannical) sort. Thus the dilemma of capitalist economies. For all their trumpeting of the "natural laws" of competition and "freedom" for employers to exploit and workers to be fired, capitalism violates our true natures in fundamental ways.

So the question should be, as Anderson eventually alludes to, do we have a life ethic that includes work, rather than just a work ethic? She states plainly that the most important product of the whole economic system is ... people. Their reproduction, raising, education, and flourishing. It is not consumption products that should be the measure of economic policy, but human happiness. And a major form of human happiness is doing meaningful work, including the domestic work of the family. The world of Star Trek is even alluded to in Anderson's last chapter- one where no one works for subsistance, but rather, people work for fulfillment. And they do so with zeal.

Anderson sees great potential in the more progressive forms of the work ethic, and in the social democratic political systems that implemented them after World War 2. She argues that this is the true legacy of Marxism (and of Thomas Paine, interestingly enough) and expresses the most durable compromise between market and capital-driven corporate structures and a restored work ethic. Some amount of worker participation in corporate governance, for instance, is a fundamental reform that would, in the US, make corporations more responsive to their cultural stakeholders, and work more meaningful to workers. Tighter regulation is needed throughout the private economy to make work more humane for the very low-paid, giving workers better pay and more autonomy- real freedom. More public goods, such as free education to university levels, and better provision for the poor, especially in the form of a job guarantee, would make life bearable for many more people. For my part, inheritance seems a key area where the ethics of the dignified work and equal opportunity run up against completely unjust and artificial barriers. In America, no one should be born rich, and everyone should grow and express themselves by finding a place in the world of work.

• Annals of capitalist control.
• Corporations and the royal we.
• More equal societies are better societies.
• The Stepford wife.
• The Supreme Court is dangerously wrong.