Eco-Economics

Adrienne Buller on greenwashing, high finance, and the failures of capitalism viz the environment, in "The Value of a Whale".

This is a very earnest book by what seems to be an environmental activist about the mistaken notion that capitalism gives a fig about climate change. Buller goes through the painstaking economic rationales by which economists attempt to value or really, discount the value of, future generations. And how poorly carbon taxes have performed. And how feckless corporations are about their climate pledges, carbon offsets, and general greenwashing. And how unlikely it is that "socially conscious" investing will change anything. It is a frustrated, head-banging exercise in deflating illusions of economic theory and corporate responsibility. Skimming through it is perhaps the best approach. Here is a sample quote from Buller's conclusion:

Given this entrenched perspective, it is unsurprising that resistance to the kinds of bold change we need to secure a habitable planetary future for all and a safe present for many tend to focus on what we stand to lose. Undeniably, available evidence suggests that 'addressing environmental breakdown may require direct downscaling of economic production and consumption in wealthier countries'. This is an uncomfortable idea to grapple with, but as philosopher Kate Soper writes: 'If we have cosmopolitan care for the well-being of the poor of the world, and a concern about the quality of life for future generations, then we have to campaign for a change of attitudes to work, consumption, pleasure, and self-realization in affluent communities.' There is a sense that this future is necessarily austerian, anti-progress, and defined by lack. Indeed, the same media study cited above found discussion of economies defined by the absence of growth to focus on bleakness and stagnation. Comparatively little attention is directed at what we stand to gain - but there is much to be gained. Understanding what requires us to ask what the existing system currently fails to provide, from universal access to health case and education, to basic material security, to free time. It certainly does not offer a secure planetary future, let alone one in which all life can thrive. And it does not offer genuine democracy, justice or freedom for most. Absent these, what purpose is 'the economy' meant to serve?

Unfortunately, the book is not very economically literate either, making its illusions something of a village of straw men. Who ever thought that Royal Dutch Shell was going to solve climate change? Who ever thought that a $5 dollar per ton tax on CO2 emissions was going to accomplish anything? And who ever thought that the only reason to address climate heating was to save ourselves a dollar in 2098? All these premises and ideas are absurd, hardly the stuff of serious economic or social analysis. 

But then, nothing about our approach to climate heating is serious. It is a psychodrama of capitalism in denial, composed of cossetted capitalist people in the five stages of grief over our glorious carbon-hogging culture. Trucks, guns, and drive-through hamburgers, please! Outright denial is only slowly ebbing away, as we sidle into the anger phase. The conservative Right, which mixes an apocalyptically destructive anti-conservative environmental attitude with a futile cultural conservatism, is angry now about everything. The idea that the environment itself is changing, and requires fundamental cultural and economic change, is an affront. The eco-conscious left is happy to peddle nostrums that nothing really has to change, if we just put up enough solar panels and fund enough green jobs. 

Objectively, given the heating we are already experiencing and the much worse heating that lies ahead, we are not facing up to this challenge. It is understandable to not want to face change, especially limits to our wealth, freedoms, and profligacy. But we shouldn't blame corporations for it. The capitalist system exists to reflect our desires and fulfill them. If we want to binge-watch horror TV, it gives us that. If we want to gamble in Las Vegas, it gives us that. If we want to drive all around the country, it makes that possible. Capitalism transmutes whatever resources are lying around (immigrant labor, publically funded research, buried minerals and carbon, etc.) to furnish things we want. We can't blame that system for fouling up the environment when we knew exactly what was going on and wanted those things it gave us, every step of the way.

No, there is another mechanism to address big problems like climate heating, and that is government. That is where we can express far-sighted desires. Not the desire for faster internet or more entertaining TV, but deep and far-reaching desires for a livable future world, filled with at least some of the animals that we grew up with, and maybe not filled with plastic. It is through our enlightened government that we make the rules that run the capitalist system. Which system is totally dependent on, and subservient to, our collective wisdom as expressed through government. 

So the problem is not that capitalism is maliciously ruining our climate, but that our government, representative as it is of our desires, has not fully faced up to the climate issue either. Because we, as a culture, are, despite the blaring warnings coming from the weather, and from scientists, don't want to hear it. There is also the problem that we have allowed the capitalists of our culture far too much say in the media and in government- a nexus that is fundamentally corrupt and distorts the proper hierarchy of powers we deserve as citizens.

The US games out in 2012 how various carbon taxes will affect emissions, given by electricity production. These are modest levels of taxation, and have modest effects. To actually address the climate crisis, a whole other magnitude of taxation and other tools need to be brought to bear. The actual trajectory came out to more renewables, no growth for nuclear power, and we are still burning coal.

Let me touch on just one topic from the book- carbon taxes. This is classic case of squeemish policy-making. While it is not always obvious that carbon pricing would be a more fair or effective approach than direct regulation of the most offensive industries and practices, it is obvious that putting a price on carbon emissions can be an effective policy tool for reducing overall emissions. The question is- how high should that price be to have the effect we want? Well, due to the universal economic consensus that carbon pricing would be a good thing, many jurisdictions have set up such pricing or capping schemes. But very few are effective, because, lo and behold, they did not want to actually have a strong effect. That is, they did not want to disrupt the current way of doing things, but only make themselves (and ourselves) feel good, with a slight inducement to moderate future change. Thus they typically exempt the most polluting industries outright, and set the caps high and the prices low, so as not to upset anyone. And then Adrienne Buller wonders why these schemes are so universally ineffective.

Carbon prices in California are currently around $30 per ton CO2, and this has, according to those studying the system, motivated one third of the state's overall carbon reductions over the current decade. That is not terrible, but clearly insufficient, even for a forward-thinking state, since we need to wring carbon out of our systems at a faster pace. Raising that price would be the most direct way for us as a society to do that. But do we want to? At that point, we need to look in the mirror and ask whether the point of our policies should be addressing climate heating in the most effective way possible, or to avoid pain and change to our current systems. Right now, we are on a sort of optimal trajectory to avoid most of the economic and social pain of truly addressing climate change, (by using gradualist and incremental policies), but at the cost of not getting there soon enough and thus incurring increasing levels of pain from climate heating itself- now, and in a future that is measured, not in years, but in centuries. 

The second big point to make about this book and similar discussions is that it largely frames the problem as an economic one for humanity. How much cost do we bear in 2100 and 2200, compared with the cost we are willing to pay today? Well, that really ignores a great deal, for there are other species on the planet than ourselves. And there are other values we have as humans, than economic ones. This means that any cost accounting that gets translated into a carbon price needs to be amplified several fold to truly address the vast array of harms we are foisting on the biosphere. Coral reefs are breaking down, tropical forests are losing their regenerative capability, and the arctic is rapidly turning temperate. These are huge changes and harms, which no accounting from an economic perspective "internalizes". 

So, we need to psychologically progress, skipping a few steps to the facing-it part of the process, which then will naturally lead us towards truly effective solutions to get to carbon neutrality rapidly. Will it cost a lot? Absolutely. Will we suffer imbalances and loss of comforts? Absolutely. But once America faces up to a problem, we tend to do a good job accepting those tradeoffs and figuring out how to get the results we want. 

• An earth systems perspective.
• I hope you are appreciating this free-range, hand-made, artisanal prose.
• Loneliness.
• Plastic is a thing too.
• Natural gas and the future of Europe.
• Maybe having cars parked everywhere isn't the best idea.
• Thoughts on the drug war.

On the Spectrum

Autism, broader autism phenotype, temperament, and families. It turns out that everyone is on the spectrum.

The advent of genomic sequencing and the hunt for disease-causing mutations has been notably unhelpful for most mental diseases. Possible or proven disease-causing mutations pile up, but they do little to illuminate the biology of what is going on, and even less towards treatment. Autism is a prime example, with hundreds of genes now identified as carrying occasional variants with causal roles. The strongest of these variants affect synapse formation among neurons, and a second class affects long-term regulation of transcription, such as turning genes durably on or off during developmental transitions. Very well- that all makes a great deal of sense, but what have we gained?

Clinically, we have gained very little. What is affected are neural developmental processes that can't be undone, or switched off in later life with a drug. So while some degree of understanding slowly emerges from these studies, translating that to treatment remains a distant dream. One aspect of the genetics of autism, however, is highly informative, which is the sheer number of low-effect and common mutations. Autism can be thought of as coming in two types, genetically- those due to a high effect, typically spontaneous or rare mutation, and those due to a confluence of common variants. The former tends to be severe and singular- an affected child in a family that is otherwise unaffected. The latter might be thought of as familial, where traits that have appeared (mildly) elsewhere in the family have been concentrated in one child, to a degree that it is now diagnosable.

This pattern has given rise to the very interesting concept of the "Broader Autism Phenotype", or BAP. This stems from the observation that families of autistic children have higher rates where ... "the parents, grandparents, and collaterals are persons strongly preoccupied with abstractions of a scientific, literary, or artistic nature, and limited in genuine interest in people." Thus there is not just a wide spectrum of autism proper, based on the particular confluence of genetic and other factors that lead to a diagnosis and its severity, but there is also, outside of the medical spectrum, quite another spectrum of traits or temperaments which tend toward autism and comprise various eccentricities, but have not, at least to date, been medicalized.

The common nature of these variants leads to another question- why are they persistent in the population? It is hard to believe that such a variety and number of variations are exclusively deleterious, especially when the BAP seems to have, well, rather positive aspects. No, I would suggest that an alternative way to describe BAP is "an enhanced ability to focus", and develop interests in salient topics. Ever meet people who are technically useless, but warm-hearted? They are way off on the non-autistic part of the spectrum, while the more technically inclined, the fixers of the world and scholars of obscure topics, are more towards the "ability to focus" part of the spectrum. Only when such variants are unusually concentrated by the genetic lottery do children appear with frank autistic characteristics, totally unable to deal with social interactions, and given to obsessive focus and intense sensitivities.

Thus autism looks like a more general lens on human temperament and evolution, being the tip of a very interesting iceberg. As societies, we need the politicians, backslappers, networkers, and con men, but we also need, indeed increasingly as our societies and technologies developed over the centuries, people with the ability and desire to deal with reality- with technical and obscure issues- without social inflection, but with highly focused attention. Militaries are a prime example, fusing critical needs of managing and motivating people, with a modern technical base of vast scope, reliant on an army of specialists devoted to making all the machinery work. Why does there have to be this tradeoff? Why can't everyone be James Bond, both technically adept and socially debonaire? That isn't really clear, at least to me, but one might speculate that in the first place, dealing with people takes a great deal of specialized intelligence, and there may not be room for everything in one brain. Secondly, the enhanced ability to focus on technical or artistic topics may actively require, as is implicit in doing science and as was exemplified by Mr. Spock, an intentional disregard of social niceties and motivations, if one is to fully explore the logic of some other, non-human, world.

• Autistic comedy?
• What happened to the war on poverty?
• How to think about cancer treatments.
• 95 year old judges, really? 

Founders, Schmounders

Elie Mystal rakes constitutional originalism over the coals, in "A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution".

I was raised to revere the founders and the elegant, almost scriptural document they constructed to rule our society. But suppose I was a black person, knowing that these founders were the rich white guys of their time, owners and abusers of slaves? I might think that while their aspirations were rhetorically high, their constitution was rather more utilitarian in its denial of true democracy to most people living in the colonies, its indirect and unjust approach to the democracy it did allow, and its euphemistically stated, but absolute, denial of freedom to "other persons". I would have experienced the US legal and cultural system as one of systematic oppression, dedicated to the proposition that while white, rich, men might be equal in some way and enjoy a rules-based system, the larger point of the system was to maintain power in their hands, and deny it to all others.

At least that is the sense one gets from Mystal's book, which, along with a lot of colorful language and wry jokes, assembles a trenchant rebuke of the American constitution, of conservatives, of Republicans, and especially of the originalist ideology of jurisprudence. Every hot button topic gets its due, and every amendment its contrarian interpretation. The second amendment is easy- it is about a regulated militia, after all, not about some commandment handed down from Charlton Heston to the ammosexuals of the nation to stock up on AR-15s and have a mass shooting if they are feeling a little antsy. 

Police brutality, prejudice, impunity, and immunity from accountabiliy is another easy, if painful, target. Mystal describes how he has been profiled and roughed up, for no other reason than being black. The legal system seems to have driven a semi through the fourth amendment against unreasonable searches when it comes to vehicles owned by black people, for one thing. And the fifth amendment comes into play as well- why do we allow police to play cat and mouse with suspects, trying to trip them up and get them to confess, cutting corners and playing games with their Miranda rights? Mystal makes a strong case for doing away with this whole theater of intimidation, with its slippery slope to fraud and torture, by barring police from eliciting or transmitting confessions at all, period. He notes that anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with the legal profession has learned to say nothing to police without a lawyer by her side.

Mystal's approach to abortion, however, is where this book really shines. Was Roe "wrongly decided"? Hardly. In the first place, Mystal provides an interesting discussion of "substantive" due process, (fifth amendment, and fourteenth), meaning that the rights and protections of the constitution are not to be taken merely literally or trifled with by twisting their meanings. They must be afforded by realistic means and set in a legal / civil system that supports their spirit. And that means that the right to privacy is a thing. While its poetic origin may be in the "penumbras" of the constitution, it is integral to the very idea of much of it- the concept unreasonable searches, of rights against self-incrimination, of any sort of rights of the individual vs the state. This is not to mention the ninth amendment, which asserts that just because the constitution and bill of rights mentions some rights explicitly, that others by their ommission are not covered. Privacy would, in general terms, clearly fall in this category.

But where else could a right to abortion be found? Plenty of places. One is the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. Mystal, and many others, note that this should be taken as applying to women, making the whole equal rights amendment (ERA) unnecessary, given a modicum of enlightened interpretation. It could also be taken to afford men and women equal protections regarding reproduction, meaning that the penalty for a roll in the hay should not be grossly unequal, as it is when abortion is banned. Mystal goes on to suggest that the eighth amendment against cruel and unusual punishment could be invoked as well. If men were faced, as a penalty for sex, months of mental and physical torment, and then the excruciating labor of birth, one could be sure that no court would consider banning abortion for a nanosecond. And how much more cruel and vindictive is it be if that pregnancy arose from rape? There is also, after all, the thirteen amendment against involuntary servitude/labor.

Originalists brazenly throw their so-called principles out the window when it comes to abortion. Unenumerated rights? Never heard of them. Keeping the state out of the most sacred precincts of our private lives? No comment. Colonial attitudes towards abortion were very loose, nothing like the personhood-at-conception garbage we get today from the right/Catholic wing. It just goes to show that a little knowledge (here, of biology) can be a dangerous thing.

It is really originalism and conservatism, however, that is the overarching and corrosive topic Mystal takes on. The founders were people of their time, and that was a white supremacy kind of time. They wrote a constitution with hopeful ideals and judicious language which insulated it somewhat (though hardly enough!) from the prejudices of their day. To say that our current interpretation of their words should be confined to whatever psychoanalysis we can make of their meanings at the time would lock our whole political and legal system into those same prejudices that they were trying to overcome. To take the second amendment, Mystal argues (I am not sure how successfully) that its "militias" were most keenly understood to mean bands of Southern planters gathering together to prevent or put down slave revolts. Southerners did not want to be dependent on Federal sympathy and arms, and thus insisted that a right to raise their own militias for their own peculiar needs should be enshrined in the constitution. Well, if we were to restrict outselves to such an interpretation, that would have significant effects on our practice of the second amendment. Gun control would be allowed in the North, just not in the South, allowing guns to white males with certain property qualifications, perhaps, and certain mental proclivities.

Even the civil war amendments would be infected with originalism, since very few people at that time envisioned the full social equality of black citizens. It is remarkable to consider the flurry of anti-miscegenation laws passed during the Jim Crow era, after the Southern slave owners had spent a century or two conducting forced miscegenation. Whence the squeemishness? Anyhow, consistent originalism would never have struck down such laws, or abetted the civil rights movement for blacks, let alone gays. Mystal imagines the nettlesome questioning of a prospective conservative justice going like: "Do you believe that Loving v. Virgina was rightly decided?" This case was about the social system of the South, which Mystal tries to separate from the legal and political aspects, and clearly on originalist principles could not be decided as it was. And much more so on Obergefell, which draws on the fourteenth amendment's due process concept to free personal choices (of gay people) from government intrusion, again doubtless totally in contradiction to the social vision and intention of any of its authors.

Instead of fixating on the past so much, in constitutional interpretation, we might think about the future more.

So originalism, for all its rhetorical seductiveness, (after one has been properly indoctrinated in the divine virtues of the founding fathers), is an absurdity for a country with even the tiniest ambition towards social progress, or change of any kind. It amounts to extreme conservatism, pure and simple. Mystal is relentlessly dismissive of the conservative mindset, tied as it is (ever more explicitly in our polarized moment) to regressive, even violent, racial anti-minority politics. 

What is the deal with conservatives? I think there is another unenumerated right that undergirds all these tensions, which is the right to win, and win by inheriting what our forebears wrought- physically, monetarily, politically, socially. America is a highly competitive country- we compete in making money, in politics, in sports, in war. In any society there is an inherent tension between the cohesiveness required to build common structures, like a constitution, or a military, and the the competitiveness that, if channeled properly, can also build great things, but if let loose, can tear down everything. The right to succeed in business, and to bequeath those gains to one's children- that is a widely shared dream. Our founders saw that there had to be limits to this dream, however. The creaky aristocracies of Europe fed on centuries of priviledge and inheritance. America was fundamentally opposed to noble privileges, but in their slaveholding and other businesses, the founders were far from averse to hereditary privileges in general.

It was the whites who won all this- won the American continent from its native inhabitants, won the slaves from their native hearths, invented the technologies like the cotton gin, devised the capitalist system, etc., etc. Who has a right to inherit all these winnings? Conservatives subscribe to a fundamentally competitive system. That is why Trump won the hearts of a rabid base. Lying isn't a bug, it is a feature, an intrinsic part of winning in a duplicitous cultural competition- and winning is everything. To conservatives, social justice is a fundamental affront. Who said the world was fair? Not us! Constitutional originalism is way of expressing this denial of social progress and justice in concrete, and superficially palatable, terms. For as Mystal reiterates, the justices are not calling balls and strikes- constitutional interpretation runs rather freely, as we can see from second amendment jurisprudence. That is why capture of the supreme court has been such a existential project of the right for decades.

Counterpoised to the conservative conception of (lack of) justice in America is that of the left, perhaps best exemplified by the California Reparations task force. If one looks back and considers the losses of enslaved and oppressed Americans, one quickly reaches astronomical levels of reparations that would be required in a just world. How to make up for death and torture? How to make up for the bulldozing of entire communities? How to make up for centuries of economic, social, political, and legal disadvantage? There is simply no way to make up what has been lost, and to do so would open up many other claims, especially by Native Americans, all inhabitants of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, not to mention countless other victims of historical processes going back centuries and ranging world-wide. Justice is a massive can of worms, if looking back in time. But how about something simple, like affirmative action, giving formerly oppressed people a small leg up in the current system? Conservatives can't stand that either, and cry anti-white racism. 

It frankly boggles the mind, how greedy some people can be. But I think the problem of inheritance remains a central touchstone. In each generation, does everyone share equally in the inheritances from the past, or does one race inherit more, do children of the rich inherit more, do the well-connected send their children into the halls of power? The only way to insure a fresh and fair start for each generation is to, not only demolish the idea of inherited nobility as our founders did, (and which we are edging back toward with extreme economic inequality), but go a little beyond that to end other forms of inheritance ... of money and power. The meritocratic systems of higher education did a great deal in the twentieth century to advance this ideal, allowing students from all backgrounds to aspire to, and achieve, all kinds of success. This made the US incredibly powerful and the envy of the world. Liberals should continue this tradition by attacking all forms of entrenched and inherited power, from private schools to the shameful lack of inheritance taxation. The better way to make reparations is to pay it forward, with more just future world.

• Entering blackness.
• "Private jets are on average 10 times more carbon intensive than commercial flights"
• The perils of ransomware.
• The incredible and thoughtless craven-ness of Republicans.
• Our problem with futile medicine.
• Wow- lots of papers (in bad science journals) are duplicated, plagiarized, or fake ... the paper mills.

War is Politics by Other Means

What happened in the American war in Vietnam?

I am watching the lengthy PBS series on Vietnam, which facilitates a great deal of sober reflection. This dates me, but I recall (barely) the nightly body counts on TV, and the arguments with family about what was going on, both abroad and in the US in reaction to the war. I was too young to be particularly anti-war or pro-war, but I was very perplexed. The US was the greatest nation ever, had nuclear bombs and aircraft carriers, and had sent people to the moon. What power did this tiny country so far away have that we did not have?

The salve of time helps to clarify that we had lost this war long before it ended. Because, in the Clausewitzian dictum, war is politics by other means. The North Vietnamese had something that we didn't, which was an unassailable political position and ideology. They were in effective charge of much of the South, especially rural areas, for most of the war. The North Vietnamese had the double political distinction of military victory against the French, and of effective land reform against the landlords. In comparison, the South Vietnamese government was a bumbling, corrupt holdover from the French, which spent its time alienating the majority religion of the country, Buddhism, and keeping the landlords in power over the peasants of the countryside. Who was going to win this battle for hearts and minds?

Yes, North Vietnam was run by communists, and is still. But their propaganda and policies were effective to the mass of the population, in selling themselves as nationalists first and foremost- victors over the Japanese, the French, and later on the Americans too. Who would mess with that kind of record? Unfortunately, to put it in LBJ terms, we got into a pissing match with the North Vietnamese. No one wanted to "lose" South Vietnam, or let communism snatch one more country, or be the first president to lose a war. So it was our pride vs the North Vietnamese pride. Sadly, this did not translate into political support or governing competence in South Vietnam. Its government crumbled in our hands, and no amount of napalm was going to fix that.

We should at this point (that is to say, roughly 1963) have reframed the whole effort in Vietnam as one strictly in support of the South Vietnamese government. The US military is never going to win hearts and minds in foreign countries, not unless, as in World War 2, we have utterly destroyed those countries first and brought all their civilians to their knees in thankfullness for ridding them of their demented fascist government. Not conditions that come around very often, thankfully. The more time we spend somewhere, (say, Afghanistan, or Iraq), the worse it gets. The fact that the US had previously propped up the French position in Vietnam didn't help either. So all we can realistically do is support the native government (and even that may bring taints of colonialism and racism, rendering that support rather poisonous). And in this case, the government of South Vietnam was a mess, and should have been left to die on its own. That is what the politics dictated at the time, and the PBS series makes it clear that this was apparent to those who knew what was going on. They showed a great passage by an ex-soldier from the North, to the effect that, were it not for the US, the North would have taken Saigon by 1966.

It is instructive to compare our effort in Korea. North Korea tried to set up a Viet Cong-style insurgency in the South as well, but it was crushed by our client there, Syngman Rhee. North Korea tried to drape itself in the banner of anti-Japanese militancy, but that didn't play particularly, since the overwhelming US role in defeating Japan was so clear. South Korea instituted effective land reform in 1948 as well, which was key to dampening enthusiasm for communism. One might wonder why communism excites enthusiasm at all, but to landless peasants whose rent is half their crop, and who suffer countless other humiliations, it is a pretty easy sell, at least before the collectivization drive begins(!) So the political position of South Korea, destitute as it was, was far better than that of South Vietnam vs their respective northern antagonists. One might also add ancient cultural patterns, whereby modern Vietnam was created over the preceeding millenium by the gradual southward military expansion of the North Vietnamese, after they had successfully defended themselves against the Mongol and Chinese empires. 

Ho Chi Minh city, present day. Is this communism?

So, communism. Vietnam suffered terribly upon reunification due to a decade of doctrinaire communism, as if the aftermath of our brutal war hadn't been bad enough. After the wonderous dispensation of market-Leninism (!), begun in 1986, it is now a moderately prosperous but still one-party state with a miserable human rights record. Vietnam is reaping rewards from the US-China trade tensions as it becomes a top destination for low cost manufacturing. The US is its top export market. Its citizens have 1.4 cell phone subscriptions per capita, and its Gini coefficient is now similar to that of the US. Buddhism remains the leading religion, which, while confined to a state-run Sangha and political impotence, is relatively free otherwise. 

The US was right to be against communism. States like North Korea, Cuba, China and Vietnam show that communism, even after all the reforms and backtracking on Marxist theory, is antithetical to fundamental human freedoms, due to its Leninist / Stalinist greed for single party political control, which implies vast intrusion into all aspects of civic, social, and personal life. Russia is backsliding into that mindset, and we are right to stand once again with a friend in need, this time Ukraine, against its onslaught. But the new war just goes to show the critical importance of having a friend able to stand on its own feet, politically. Our military help would be pointless if Ukraine were a rotten state, with Russian insurgents and sympathizers, say, running 70% of the rural communities, and the central government pursuing vendettas against the Orthodox church instead of shoring up its support on all fronts.

Integral to the politics of warfare are economic factors like land reform and inequality. It was the corruption and steadfast lack of recognition of the peasant's plight that destroyed South Vietnam. The Viet Cong would not have been able to mount an insurgency were the peasants not desperate and open to well-honed propaganda based on economic equality / opportunity. Ruthless terrorism played a role, as it did for the Taliban. But the basic position of hopelessness versus an uncaring state and economic system was fatal. We are facing similar issues ourselves, as people in rural areas feel left behind and neglected, despite being the beneficiaries of such various and generous handouts from the state that would make welfare recipients blush. No matter- the US has become incredibly unequal and economically/socially stagnent, which is a recipe for populism and revolt, of which we recently had a taste. As inequality rises in China and Vietnam, will they face class-based revolt, driven by some new ideology of equality, fraternity, and liberty?

• Krugman on inequality.
• Photos of Vietnam.
• A green transition.
• A plague of bad plates.

Prisons as Social Prisms, Mirrors, and Shadows

From deTocqueville to BLM by way of Solzhenitsyn.

Carl Jung promoted the concept of the psychological shadow- that part of ourselves that is dark, bad, and repressed. It tends to be what we project on others, leading to the kind of political and cultural polarization we see so much of today. For individuals, integrating the shadow, (that is, at least perceiving it, if not valuing it), is difficult but an important path to a more mature and integrated self. Societies have similar psychological characteristics, and have shadows that they project on others, both other cultures and unfortunate classes in their own system. Unlike shadow elements in individual psychology, which are all too easily hidden and ignored, people are harder to keep out of sight, so societies do a lot of explicit work to heap opprobrium on the lower classes- minorities and the poor, in a social process that keeps the social hierarchy stable, and keeps the majority self-satisfied.

A big product of the shadow work of society has appeared in prisons. In primitive times, no one had prisons, and criminals were tortured, killed or ostracized. Now, the world is too small, ethical standards have risen somewhat, and we have turned to prisons as a general purpose punishment- a modern form of ostracism. Prisons express (and contain) our attitudes and definitions of antisocial activity and contagion. Alexis de Toqueville came to the early US to investigate our prisons, as a way of gaining insight into our society, before being waylaid into a much more general tour of this vibrant country. But his instincts were sound. France had been through its revolution only forty years prior, with its gruesome imprisonments and executions, which mirrored the tumultuous reversals of the social order. In the US, de Toqueville found a relatively unsophisticated and small carceral system, as money was short and there was plenty of room for criminals to disappear out west. It did not turn out to be an interesting prism on American life.

Today things are vastly different. The gangster era of the 20's and 30's led to a new focus on crime, noir, and high-profile prisoners like Al Capone. The crime and drug era of the 80's and 90's led to an almost four-fold increase in the prison population, so that now the US leads the world with a prison population of roughly 0.5% of the population behind bars. The BLM movement and defund the police movements were in part about recognizing that something had gone serious astray here. Whether it originated from environmental lead poisoning, or social breakdown, or drug cartels, the result was a huge population of ostracized, mostly male, and disproportionately minority people locked away. On top of that, the society had lost interest in rehabilitation amidst its turn to more conservative attitudes that valorize the rich and powerful and disparage the poor and disadvantaged. 

Our prisons today say alot about us as a society. Not that prisons are not needed, and that there aren't true criminals and insidious criminal organizations that prey on the rest of society; but our lack of empathy and lack of a wider social vision is palpable. Particularly, our attachment to property, its "rights", its local and parochial control, and particularly its inheritance, has gotten a little extreme. It is the perpetuation of privileges through property and wealth that explain a lot of the persistent lack of social mobility, the vast industries of greed/tax avoidance, easily politicized fears. Capitalism is at its heart competitive, and having winners of billions implies also having losers- those who sleep on the street, and those locked up, not to mention the hordes of low-wage workers who make everything go.

All this came to mind as I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. It is a vast tome, befitting the vast archipelago it describes, its huge population, its protracted duration, its unimaginable suffering, and what it says about its society. While unexpectedly enjoyable to read, as Solzhenitsyn is joking the whole time in various sarcastic and dark modes, it is an indictment of Soviet Russia on a comprehensive basis. One particularly striking theme that he weaves through is comparison with the Tsarist period that came before. Solzhenitsyn meets prisoners, often dedicated socialist revolutionaries, who had done time under the Tsar, and regarded that experience as heaven compared to what they were faced with now, under Stalin. To put it very bluntly, Russia used to be a civilized country. Now, under the Bolsheviks, torture of the most vile kinds is practiced, less vile kinds are routine, execution is carried out on a whim, and law and justice are a mockery. The Gulag is loaded up with many orders of magnitude more political prisoners than the Tsar had ever contemplated and works them mercilessly to early graves.

Breaking rocks in the gulag.

While this all mostly reflected the paranoia and totalitarian genius of Stalin, he was only following his model, Lenin, as Solzhenitsyn lays out in particularly damning detail. The larger Russian society clearly had, and still has, an ambivilent nature, as close students and subjects of the Mongols, but also as eager to engage with and learn from Western Europe. Who knew that the most left-tinged and idealistic ideology to be imported from the West would so quickly curdle into a second coming of Ivan the terrible? But so it did, and Solzhenitsyn describes what that really meant in human suffering, in this book that may have done more than any other to delegitimize and ultimately destroy that system.

• The neighborhood to prison pipeline in the US.
• The questionable science of ice cream.
  

Drought Causes Cultural Breakdown

What happened to the Hittites, and the late Bronze Age?

Climate change is already causing wars and migration, misery on a vast scale. The global South takes the heat, while the global North keeps making it, pumping out the CO2. Can we adapt, or is the human population going to decrease, either gently or not so gently, as conditions deteriorate? The answer is not at all clear. The adaptation measures taken by the rich world involve highly contentious politics, and uncertain technology that, at best, requires a great deal more resource extraction. The poor, on the other hand, are left to either try developing (if they can maintain good political and economic governance) to join the rich in their extractive ways, (China, India), or migrate en masse to rich countries (Africa, Central America). All this is going to get worse, not better, since we are still at peak CO2 emissions and only beginning the process of global heating.

Our emissions of CO2 are still going up, not down. Therefore climate change will be getting worse, faster. Conflict is one likely outcome.

Well, migrations and dislocation have happened before. Over the last millennium, it was cold temperatures, not hot, that have correlated with conflict. Epic migrations occurred in the declining days of the Roman Empire, when the Huns drove a domino series of migrations of Germanic tribes that fought their way throughout Europe. What prompted the Huns out of the Asian steppe is unknown, however. Jared Diamond wrote of several other cultures that met their end after exhausing their resources and technologies. A recent paper added one more such case- the Hittites of late Bronze Age.

The Hittites were a big deal in their time (1700 to 1200 BCE, very roughly), running what is now Eastern and Southern Turkey, and occasionally Syria and points South. They were an early offshoot of the Indo-European migrations, and had a convulsive (though not very well understood) history of rises and falls, mostly due to their political dynamics. At the height of Hittite power, they fought Egypt directy at the battle of Kadesh, (1274 BCE), which occured just a little north of current-day Lebanon. This was the complex frontier between Assyria / Babylon, the Hittites, and Egypt. Egyptian history is full of expeditions- military, economic, and diplomatic- through the Levant.

The Hittites were artists as well as warriors.

The Hittites were also one of several communities around the Mediterranean that shared in the late Bronze Age collapse. This is the epic time that saw the Greek siege of Troy, (~1200 BCE), and the "Sea People's" invasion of Egypt. Its causes and details remain a long-standing historical mystery. But its scale was vast. Greece entered its dark age that lasted from 1200 to the 800's BCE. North Africa, the Balkans, Turkey, Levant, and the Caucaus all declined. Assyria and Egypt were weakened, but did not collapse. The latest paper uses tree-ring data from junipers from around the former Hittite capital in what is now central Turkey to more precisely date a severe drought that may have caused this collapse. Drought is just the kind of cause that would have been wide-spread enough and foundational enough to destroy the regional economies and prompt migrations and wars. Wars.. there are always wars, but no single war would have caused the collapse of cultures on such a wide scale, including a weakening of Egypt. Plagues are also not a great candidate, since they do not harm a society's resource base, but only its population. Such population reductions typically benefit the survivors, who rebuild in short order.

Moisture levels inferred from tree ring data, with lower values dryer. There are three consecutive catastrophic years dated to 1198-1196 BCE in this region, which is around the ancient Hittite capital. The ensuing decade was also unusually dry and likely poor for agriculture. The 20% and 6.25% levels of drought are by comparison to wider sampling, including modern data.

The drought these authors identified and located with precision was extraordinary. They note that, using modern data for indexing, the 20% level (representing about 30 cm of annual rain) is the minimum viable threshold for growing wheat. The 6.25% level is far below that and represents widespread crop failure. They developed two types of data from the tree rings, drawn from 18 individual trees whose rings spanned about a thousand years across the second millenium BCE. First is the size of the rings themselves, whose data are shown above. Second is the carbon 13 isotope ratio, which is a separate index of dryness, based on the isotopic discrimination that plants exercise over CO2 respiration under different climatic conditions. 

The same tree rings that provided the inferences above from their geometry (width) also here provided carbon 13 isotope data that lead to a similar conclusion, though with much less precision. High proportions of C13 indicate drier climate, here continuous around 1200 BCE.

The paper shows three consecutive years at the 6.25% level of rainfall, starting at 1198 BC. The ensuing decade was also harshly dry. All this correlates with cuneiform texts found in the Levant that were letters from the Hittites, bemoaning their drought and begging for assistance. But everyone in the region was in a similar position. The Hittite culture never recovered. 

So drought is now a leading hypothesis for the ultimate cause of the late Bronze Age collapse around many parts of the Mediterranean, with Greece and Anatolia particularly affected. While it is reasonable to imagine that such conditions would lead to desperation, migration, and war, there is no direct link yet. The nature and origin of the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt remain unknown, for instance. The reasons for the seige of Troy are lost to myth. The Illiad never mentions drought, nor would Troy have been in a much better position than Mycenaean Greece, climatically speaking. But the consequences of geopolitical shifts in alignment can be unpredictable, as we continue to experience today. It is exciting (as well as sobering) to get a glimpse into this cloudy history- into a vast swath of human experience that built great cultures and suffered epic defeats.

• The planet can just go to hell.
• And so can our political system and media.
• The next Mein Kampf.
• Maybe governments should really do things themselves.

Everything is Alive, but the Gods are all Dead

Barbara Ehrenreich's memoir and theological ruminations in "Living with a Wild God".

It turns out that everyone is a seeker. Somewhere there must be something or someone to tell us the meaning of life- something we don't have to manufacture with our own hands, but rather can go into a store and buy. Atheists are just as much seekers as anyone else, only they never find anything worth buying. The late writer Barbara Ehrenreich was such an atheist, as well as a remarkable writer and intellectual who wrote a memoir of her formation. Unusually and fruitfully, it focuses on those intense early and teen years when we are reaching out with both hands to seize the world- a world that is maddeningly just beyond our grasp, full of secrets and codes it takes a lifetime and more to understand. Religion is the ultimate hidden secret, the greatest mystery which has been solved in countless ways, each of them conflicting and confounding.

Ehrenreich's tale is more memoir than theology, taking us on a tour through a dysfunctional childhood with alcoholic parents and tough love. A story of growth, striking out into the world, and sad coming-to-terms with the parents who each die tragically. But it also turns on a pattern of mystical experiences that she keeps having, throughout her adult life, which she ultimately diagnoses as dissociative states where she zones out and has a sort of psychedelic communion with the world.

"Something peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels, and words. I was looking at a tree, and if anyone had asked, that's what I would have said I was doing, but the word "tree" was gone, along with all the notions of tree-ness that had accumulated in the last dozen years or so since I had acquired language. Was it a place that was suddenly revealed to me? Or was it a substance- the indivisible, elemental material out of which the entire known and agreed-upon world arises as a fantastic elaboration? I don't know, because this substance, this residue, was stolidly, imperturbably mute. The interesting thing, some might say alarming, was that when you take away all the human attributions- the words, the names of species, the wisps of remembered tree-related poetry, the fables of photosynthesis and capillary action- that when you take all this this away, there is still something left."

This is not very hard to understand as a neurological phenomenon of some kind of transient disconnection of just the kind of brain areas she mentions- those that do all the labeling, name-calling, and boxing-in. In schizophrenia, it runs to the pathological, but in Ehrenreich's case, she does not regard it as pathological at all, as it is always quite brief. But obviously, the emotional impact and weirdness of the experience- that is something else altogether, and something that humans have been inducing with drugs, and puzzling over, forever. 

Source

As a memoir, the book is very engaging. As a theological quest, however, it doesn't work as well, because the mystical experience is, as noted above, resolutely meaningless. It neither compels Ehrenreich to take up Christianity, as after a Pauline conversion, nor any other faith or belief system. It offers a peek behind the curtain, but, stripped of meaning as this view is, Ehrenreich is perhaps too skeptical or bereft of imagination to give it another, whether of her own or one available from the conventional array of sects and religions. So while the experiences are doubtless mystical, one can not call them religious, let alone god-given, because Ehrenreich hasn't interpreted them that away. This hearkens back to the writings of William James, who declined to assign general significance to mystical experiences, while freely admitting their momentous and convincing nature to those who experienced them.

Only in one brief section (which had clearly been originally destined for an entirely different book) does she offer a more interesting and insightful analysis. There, Ehrenreich notes that the history of religion can be understood as a progressive bloodbath of deicide. At first, everything is alive and sacred, to an animist mind. Every leaf and grain of sand holds wonders. Every stream and cloud is divine. This is probably our natural state, which a great deal of culture has been required to stamp out of us. Next is a hunting kind of religion, where deities are concentrated in the economic objects (and social patterns) of the tribe- the prey animals, the great plants that are eaten, and perhaps the more striking natural phenomena and powerful beasts. But by the time of paganism, the pantheon is cut down still more and tamed into a domestic household, with its soap-opera dramas and an increasingly tight focus on the major gods- the head of the family, as it were. 

Monotheism comes next, doing away with all the dedicated gods of the ocean, of medicine, of amor and war, etc., cutting the cast down to one. One, which is inflated to absurd proportions with all-goodness, all-power, all-knowledge, etc. A final and terrifying authoritarianism, probably patterned on the primitive royal state. This is the phase when the natural world is left in the lurch, as an undeified and unprotected zone where human economic greed can run rampant, safe in the belief that the one god is focused entirely on man's doings, whether for good or for ill, not on that of any other creature or feature of the natural world. A phase when even animals, who are so patently conscious, can, through the narcissism of primitive science and egoistic religion, be deemed mere mechanisms without feeling. This process doesn't even touch on the intercultural deicide committed by colonialism and conquest.

This in turn invites the last deicide- that by rational people who toss aside this now-cartoonish super-god, and return to a simpler reverence for the world as we naturally respond to it, without carting in a lot of social power-and-drama baggage. It is the cultural phase we are in right now, but the transition is painfully slow, uneven, and drawn-out. For Ehrenreich, there are plenty of signs- in the non-linear chemical phenomena of her undergraduate research, in the liveliness of quantum physics even into the non-empty vacuum, in the animals who populate our world and are perhaps the alien consciousnesses that we should be seeking in place of the hunt through outer space, and in our natural delight in, and dreams about, nature at large. So she ends the book as atheist as ever, but hinting that perhaps the liveliness of the universe around us holds some message that we are not the only thinking and sentient beings.

"Ah, you say, this is all in your mind. And you are right to be skeptical; I expect no less. It is in my mind, which I have acknowledged from the beginning is a less than perfect instrument. but this is what appears to be the purpose of my mind, and no doubt yours as well, its designed function beyond all the mundane calculations: to condense all the chaos and mystery of the world into a palpable Other or Others, not necessarily because we love it, and certainly not out of any intention to "worship" it. But because ultimately we may have no choice in the matter. I have the impression, growing out of the experiences chronicled here, that it may be seeking us out." 

Thus the book ends, and I find it a rather poor ending. It feels ripped from an X-Files episode, highly suggestive and playing into all the Deepak and similar mystical tropes of cosmic consciousness. That is, if this passage really means much at all. Anyhow, the rest of the trip is well worth it, and it is appropriate to return to the issue of the mystical experience, which is here handled with such judicious care and restraint. Where imagination could have run rampant, the cooly scientific view (Ehrenreich had a doctorate in biology) is that the experiences she had, while fascinating and possibly book-proposal-worthy, did not force a religious interpretation. This is radically unlike the treatment of such matters in countless other hands, needless to say. Perhaps our normal consciousness should not be automatically valued less than more rare and esoteric states, just because it is common, or because it is even-tempered.

• God would like us to use "they".
• If you are interested in early Christianity, Gnosticism is a good place to start.
• Green is still an uphill battle.

A Gene is Born

Yes, genes do develop out of nothing.

The "intelligent" design movement has long made a fetish of information. As science has found, life relies on encoded information for its genetic inheritance and the reliable expression of its physical manifestations. The ID proposition is, quite simply, that all this information could not have developed out of a mindless process, but only through "design" by a conscious being. Evidently, Darwinian natural selection still sticks on some people's craw. Michael Behe even developed a pseudo-mathematical theory about how, yes, genes could be copied mindlessly, but new genes could never be conjured out of nothing, due to ... information.

My understanding of information science equates information to loss of entropy, and expresses a minimal cost of the energy needed to create, compute or transmit information- that is, the Shannon limits. A quite different concept comes from physics, in the form of information conservation in places like black holes. This form of information is really the implicit information of the wave functions and states of physical matter, not anything encoded or transmitted in the sense of biology or communication. Physical state information may be indestructable (and un-create-able) on this principle, but coded information is an entirely different matter.

In a parody of scientific discussion, intelligent design proponents are hosted by the once-respectable Hoover Institution for a discussion about, well, god.

So the fecundity that life shows in creating new genes out of existing genes, (duplications), and even making whole-chromosome or whole-genome duplications, has long been a problem for creationists. Energetically, it is easy to explain as a mere side-effect of having plenty of energy to work with, combined with error-prone methods of replication. But creationistically, god must come into play somewhere, right? Perhaps it comes into play in the creation of really new genes, like those that arise from nothing, such as at the origin of life?

A recent paper discussed genes in humans that have over our recent evolutionary history arisen from essentially nothing. It drew on prior work in yeast that elegantly laid out a spectrum or life cycle of genes, from birth to death. It turns out that there is an active literature on the birth of genes, which shows that, just like duplication processes, it is entirely natural for genes to develop out of humble, junky precursors. And no information theory needs to be wheeled in to show that this is possible.

Yeast provides the tools to study novel genes in some detail, with rich genetics and lots of sequenced relatives, near and far. Here is portrayed a general life cycle of a gene, from birth out of non-gene DNA sequences (left) into the key step of translation, and on to a subject of normal natural selection ("Exposed") for some function. But if that function decays or is replaced, the gene may also die, by mutation, becoming a pseudogene, and eventually just some more genomic junk.

The death of genes is quite well understood. The databases are full of "pseudogenes" that are very similar to active genes, but are disabled for some reason, such as a truncation somewhere or loss of reading frame due to a point mutation or splicing mutation. Their annotation status is dynamic, as they are sometimes later found to be active after all, under obscure conditions or to some low level. Our genomes are also full of transposons and retroviruses that have died in this fashion, by mutation.

Duplications are also well-understood, some of which have over evolutionary time given rise to huge families of related proteins, such as kinases, odorant receptors, or zinc-finger transcription factors. But the hunt for genes that have developed out of non-gene materials is a relatively new area, due to its technical difficulty. Genome annotators were originally content to pay attention to genes that coded for a hundred amino acids or more, and ignore everything else. That became untenable when a huge variety of non-coding RNAs came on the scene. Also, occasional cases of very small genes that encoded proteins came up from work that found them by their functional effects.

As genome annotation progressed, it became apparent that, while a huge proportion of genes are conserved between species, (or members of families of related proteins), other genes had no relatives at all, and would never provide information by this highly convenient route of computer analysis. They are orphans, and must have either been so heavily mutated since divergence that their relationships have become unrecognizable, or have arisen recently (that is, since their evolutionary divergence from related species that are used for sequence comparison) from novel sources that provide no clue about their function. Finer analysis of ever more closely related species is often informative in these cases.

The recent paper on human novel genes makes the finer point that splicing and export from the nucleus constitute the major threshold between junk genes and "real" genes. Once an RNA gets out of the nucleus, any reading frame it may have will be translated and exposed to selection. So the acquisition of splicing signals is a key step, in their argument, to get a randomly expressed bit of RNA over the threshold.

A recent paper provided a remarkable example of novel gene origination. It uncovered a series of 74 human genes that are not shared with macaque, (which they took as their reference), have a clear path of origin from non-coding precursors, and some of which have significant biological effects on human development. They point to a gradual process whereby promiscuous transcription from the genome gave rise by chance to RNAs that acquired splice sites, which piped them into the nuclear export machinery and out to the cytoplasm. Once there, they could be translated, over whatever small coding region they might possess, after which selection could operate on their small protein products. A few appear to have gained enough function to encourage expansion of the coding region, resulting in growth of the gene and entrenchment as part of the developmental program.

Brain "organoids" grown from genetically manipulated human stem cells. On left is the control, in middle is where ENSG00000205704 was deleted, and on the right is where ENSG00000205704 is over-expressed. The result is very striking, as an evolutionarily momentous effect of a tiny and novel gene.

One gene, "ENSG00000205704" is shown as an example. Where in macaque, the genomic region corresponding to this gene encodes at best a non-coding RNA that is not exported from the nucleus, in humans it encodes a spliced and exported mRNA that encodes a protein of 107 amino acids. In humans it is also highly expressed in the brain, and when the researchers deleted it in embryonic stem cells and used those cells to grow "organoids", or clumps of brain-like tissue, the growth was significantly reduced by the knockout, and increased by the over-expression of this gene. What this gene does is completely unknown. Its sequence, not being related to anything else in human or other species, gives no clue. But it is a classic example of gene that arose from nothing to have what looks like a significant effect on human evolution. Does that somehow violate physics or math? Nothing could be farther from the truth.

• Will nuclear power get there?
• What the heck happened to Amazon shopping?

Building the Middle Class

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

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

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

Real minimum wage in the US, vs nominal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Politics of Resentment

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

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

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

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

America is heavily red, geographically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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