How to Capture Solar Energy

Charge separation is handled totally differently by silicon solar cells and by photosynthetic organisms.

Everyone comes around sooner or later to the most abundant and renewable form of energy, which is the sun. The current administration may try to block the future, but solar power is the best power right now and will continue to gain on other sources. Likewise, life started by using some sort of geological energy, or pre-existing carbon compounds, but inevitably found that tapping the vast powers streaming in from the sun was the way to really take over the earth. But how does one tap solar energy? It is harder than it looks, since it so easily turns into heat and lost energy. Some kind of separation and control are required, to isolate the power (that is to say, the electron that was excited by the photon of light), and harness it to do useful work.

Silicon solar cells and photosynthesis represent two ways of doing this, and are fundamentally, even diametrically, different solutions to this problem. So I thought it would be interesting to compare them in detail. Silicon is a semiconductor, torn between trapping its valence electrons in silicon atoms, or distributing them around in a conduction band, as in metals. With elemental doping, silicon can be manipulated to bias these properties, and that is the basis of the solar cell.

Schematic of a silicon solar cell. A static voltage exists across the N-type to P-type boundary, sweeping electrons freed by the photoelectric effect (light) up to the conducting electrode layer.

Solar cells have one side doped to N status, and the bulk set to P doping status. While the bulk material is neutral on both sides, at the boundary, a static charge scheme is set up where electrons are attracted into the P-side, and removed from the N-side. This static voltage has very important effects on electrons that are excited by incoming light and freed from their silicon atoms. These high energy electrons enter the conduction band of the material, and can migrate. Due to the prevailing field, they get swept towards the N side, and thus are separated and can be siphoned off with wires. The current thus set up can exert a pressure of about 0.6 volt. That is not much, nor is it equivalent to the 2 to 3 electron volts received from each visible photon. So a great deal of energy is lost as heat.

Solar cells do not care about capturing each energized electron in detail. Their purpose is to harvest a bulk electrical voltage + current with which to do some work in our electrical grids. Photosynthesis takes an entirely different approach, however. This may be mostly for historical and technical reasons, but also because part of its purpose is to do chemical work with the captured electrons. Biology tends to take a highly controlling approach to chemistry, using precise shapes, functional groups, and electrical environments to guide reactions to exact ends. While some of the power of photosynthesis goes toward pumping protons out of the membrane, setting up a gradient later used to make ATP, about half is used for other things like splitting water to replace lost electrons, and making reducing chemicals like NADPH.

A portion of a poster about the core processes of photosynthesis. It provides a highly accurate portrayal of the two photosystems and their transactions with electrons and protons.

In plants, photosynthesis is a chain of processes focused around two main complexes, photosystems I and II, and all occurring within membranes- the thylakoid membranes of the chloroplast. Confusingly, photosystem II comes first, accepting light, splitting water, pumping some protons, and sending out a pair of electrons on mobile plastoquinones, which eventually find their way to photosystem I, which jacks up their energy again using another quantum of light, to produce NADPH. 

Photosystem II is full of chlorophyll pigments, which are what get excited by visible photons. But most of them are "antenna" chlorophylls, passing the excitation along to a pair of centrally located chlorophylls. Note that the light energy is at this point passed as a molecular excitation, not as a free electron. This passage may happen by Förster resonance energy transfer, but is so fast and efficient that stronger Redfield coupling may be involved as well. Charge separation only happens at the reaction center, where an excited electron is popped out to a chain of recipients. The chlorophylls are organized so that the pair at the reaction center have a slightly lower energy of excitation, thus serve as a funnel for excitation energy from the antenna system. These transfers are extremely rapid, on the picosecond time scale.

It is interesting to note tangentially that only red light energy is used. Chlorophylls have two excitation states, excited by red light (680 nm = 1.82 eV) and blue light (400-450 nm, 2.76 eV) (note the absence of green absorbance). The significant extra energy from blue light is wasted, radiated away to let it (the excited electron) relax to the lower excitation state, which is then passed though the antenna complex as though it had come from red light. 

Charge separation is managed precisely at the photosystem II reaction center through a series of pigments of graded energy capacity, sending the excited electron first to a neighboring chlorophyll, then to a pheophytin, then to a pair of iron-coordinated quinones, which then pass two electrons to a plastoquinone that is released to the local membrane, to float off to the cytochrome b6f complex. In photosystem II, another two photons of light are separately used to power the splitting of one water molecule, (giving two electrons and pumping two protons). So the whole process, just within photosystem II, yields, per four light quanta, four protons pumped from one side of the membrane to the other. Since the ATP sythetase uses about three protons per ATP, this nets just over one ATP per four photons. 

Some of the energetics of photosystem II. The orientations and structures of the reaction center paired chlorophylls (Pd1, Pd2), the neighboring chlorophyll (Chl), and then the pheophytin (Ph) and quinones (Qa, Qb) are shown in the inset. Energy of the excited electron is sacrifice gradually to accomplish the charge separation and channeling, down to the final quinone pairing, after which the electrons are released to a plastoquinone and send to another complex in the chain.

So the principles of silicon and biological solar cells are totally different in detail, though each gives rise to a delocalized field, one of electrons flowing with a low potential, and the other of protons used later for ATP generation. Each energy system must have a way to pop off an excited electron in a controlled, useful way that prevents it from recombining with the positive ion it came from. That is why there is such an ornate conduction pathway in photosystem II to carry that electron away. Overall, points go to the silicon cell for elegance and simplicity, and we in our climate crisis are the beneficiaries, if we care to use it. 

But the photosynthetic enzymes are far, far older. A recent paper pointed out that no only are photosystems II and I clearly cousins of each other, but it is likely that, contrary to the consensus heretofore, photosystem II is the original version, at least of the various photosystems that currently exist. All the other photosystems (including those in bacteria that lack oxygen stripping ability) carry traces of the oxygen evolving center. It makes sense that getting electrons is a fundamental part of the whole process, even though that chemistry is quite challenging. 

That in turn raises a big question- if oxygen evolving photosystems are primitive (originating very roughly with the last common ancestor of all life, about four billion years ago) then why was earth's atmosphere oxygenated only from two billion years ago onward? It had been assumed that this turn in Earth history marked the evolution of photosystem II. The authors point out additionally that there is also evidence for the respiratory use of oxygen from these extremely early times as well, despite the lack of free oxygen. Quite perplexing, (and the authors decline to speculate), but one gets the distinct sense that possibly life, while surprisingly complex and advanced from early times, was not operating at the scale it does today. For example, colonization of land had to await the buildup of sufficient oxygen in the atmosphere to provide a protective ozone layer against UV light. It may have taken the advent of eukaryotes, including cyanobacterial-harnessing plants, to raise overall biological productivity sufficiently to overcome the vast reductive capacity of the early earth. On the other hand, speculation about the evolution of early life based on sequence comparisons (as these authors do) is notoriously prone to artifacts, since what evolves at vanishingly slow rates today (such as the photosystem core proteins) must have originally evolved at quite a rapid clip to attain the functions now so well conserved. We simply can not project ancient ages (at the four billion year time scales) from current rates of change.

• Light can do other wonderful things for us.
• Congressional acts, Official acts, and criminal acts.

The Problem of Desire, Part 2

What is the future of capitalism?

Last week, I discussed how capitalism is a natural way for many of our desires to organize economic activities, though leaving important other desires out in the cold. The philosophical work to come up with alternatives to capitalism appeared, in the end, to be a practical dead end, however appealing to idealists. But what comes next? Once we have settled on the mixed political / economic system that is the rule over most of the modern world, how can we envision it serving humanity into the future? Is it sustainable?

The answer to that is: obviously not. We have far higher population, and use far more resources than the earth can supply sustainably. We might blame capitalism, but that is just the ugly packaging covering our own desires. There was a nice article in the NYRB recently about "degrowth communism", promoting the ideas of Kohei Saito, another provocative self-labeled Marxist. It makes of Marx some kind of prophet of green, which frankly could hardly be farther from the truth. Marx wanted workers to own the means of production so that they could all share in the fruits of modern technology, not to make them return to the idiocy of rural life. So, while degrowth is an important idea, its connection with Marxism is specious, other than the catastrophic degrowth unintentionally induced by the various implementations of Marxism through the last century.

If we excercised our wisdom, we would desire, first and foremost, a sustainable form of life. Unfortunately, our technologies and forms of pillaging the earth have ranged so widely by this point that we hardly have any idea of the harms we are causing and the shortages that are building up. Who would have predicted that plastics and forever chemicals would turn into a growing plague? Who has the answer to climate change? The key thing to realize, however, is that we have the power. We do not need a revolution overturning capitalism, because we have the state. The state can regulate, it can nationalize, it can utility-ize, it can crush companies or create them. It can make the rules and change the rules. It is through the state that we can express our larger desires for sustainable and decent living. 

For example, states can (and have) set up a carbon tax to move the transition away from fossil fuels. California has done so, as have many other countries. Just because we in the US are at a corrupt and mean political moment where short-term (at best) thinking rules the roost does not mean that people's deeper and longer-term interests will forever remain submerged. Indeed, this moment has provided an instructive (if appalling) window into how powerful the state can be. 

The article cited above also maintains that growth is inherently tied to capitalism, and that degrowth requires a revolution of some kind. Again, I beg to differ. Capitalism simply is a way to satisfy our desires. If we want to live simply, it will still serve us. Whether growing or contracting, capitalism marches on doing its best to satisfy our desires. Companies compete for business and growth, but there are plenty who have stable business models, such as, to take one example, the toothpaste business. 

More interesting is the popular revolt against growth that is expressed in declining birth rates. All over the modern economies, people are having fewer children, and causing a great deal of head-scratching and alarm. Is this due to the death of patriarchy? A fear of the future? The death of boredom? I think it has a lot to do with the fundamental contraction of our frontiers and a sense of limits. After a couple of centuries of breakneck growth, when large families were common and there were always new territories to occupy, we in the US hit the ceiling in the 1970s. Cities stopped growing, housing construction slowed, zoning enforced stasis. The expense and complexity of raising children in this environment grew as well, becoming subtly more competitive than cooperative. 

So, growth is slowing already, but not enough to save us from extreme ecological harms. We do need a more conscious degrowth strategy, encompassing accommodation of lower population, slowing down of lifestyles in some regards, strong movement through the sustainable energy transition, expanding natural habitats instead of degrading them. In all these issues, capitalism is not the problem. The problem is figuring out what we really want. In Europe over the centuries, there was a gradual transition from building with wood to building with stone. Which is to say, the value of sustainability gradually won out over wasteful short-term solutions. We need to start building in stone, metaphorically, thinking of the next hundred and thousand years, not just our own brief lifetimes.

• Bearing witness to the unconstitutional court.
• Krugman points out that Brazil is way ahead in crypto... specifically their central bank coin, Pix. In the US, banks, crypto, and Republicans are ideoidiotically opposed.
• Continuously unconstitutional.
• Is nothing sacred?

The Problem of Desire

We got what we want... are we happy now?

I have been enjoying a podcast on philosophy, which as is typical for the field, dances around big questions and then pats itself on the back for thinking clearly. What really got to me was a discussion of why Zizek, who calls himself a communist, couldn't be bothered to frame a positive system for how the world should be run. No, he is merely the philosopher and critic of the screwed up system we are in. Plenty of hard work there! Asking for a way forward, well, that would be like making the visionary have to build the rockets and recruit the astronauts to build the new world. That is someone else's work ... grubby details!

Whoa! The thinker who is just a critic is leaving the job almost wholly undone. Everyone is a critic, after all. The paying work should be in thinking up better worlds and solutions, and standing behind them in the face of the inevitable, yes, criticism. A major obsession of the show and these philosophers (around the 200 episode mark) is capitalism- why it is so terrible, the many critiques and complaints about it, and throwing some love at the anarchists, communists, and other outré comrades ... on the highest philosophical plane, of course. 

But what it all boils down to for me is the problem of desire. The capitalist system is one natural and highly refined way to get what we want. We pay into the system with our toil, and get back the products of everyone else's toil. Fair and square, right? The system is wholly shaped by desire. What the consumer wants out of the system, what the worker knows they need to do in order to be that consumer, and what the capitalist and managerial classes need to do to put the two together, and make a killing for themselves in the bargain. This system is a wonder of labor allocation, providing the most varied and productive forms of work, and of products, ever known.

A still from Chaplin's Modern Times.

And yet... and yet, this system doesn't really give us everything we want, because, well, there are other desires that aren't met in the capitalist market. Desires for love, for community, for a virtuous and just political system, for a wholesome environment. There are a lot of other desires, and letting capitalism gobble everything up and sell itself as the end-all of social organizing principles is obviously not a healthy way to go. Though we have surely tried! Not to mention the warped psychology of pitting everyone against each other in the many competitive planes of capitalism- the labor market, the exploitation by capitalists, assaults of marketing and advertising, and the resulting inequality of income and wealth. There is plenty to complain about here.

The problem is that we have many desires, of which many conflict with the desires of others, and many conflict with each other. Even for the individual person, prioritizing one's own many desires is an excruciating exercise of tradeoffs and negotiation. Imagine what that is like for a whole society. That is why figuring out what is "good" is such a chestnut in philosophy. We all know what is good at some very abstract level, but the variety and relationship of goods is what does us in. 

So it is easy enough to say that the capitalist system is evil, and we would like a new and better system, please. Much more difficult to frame a replacement. Following our desires makes it clear that capitalism is an element of the good life, but far from the only element. Even something as simple as providing toothpaste can not be left entirely to the capitalist system. Our desire for effective toothpaste can easily conjure up fraudulent business "models", where the fluoride is left out, or lead contamination gets in. The government has a role in this most humdrum of capitalist goods, to provide a legal framework for liability, perhaps direct regulation of medical / food products, not to mention guarding against monopolies other forms of business regulation. 

We end up, as we have in practice, with a mixed system where natural capitalist motivations are fostered to provide as much organization as they can, but our many other, often much more lofty and significant, desires lead us to regulate that system extensively. To put a larger frame around this, consider what the good life is in general terms. It is a life where each person is educated to the extent they wish, and contributes in turn to society in some useful way, building a life of mutual respect with others in their community. It aligns very strongly with the American dream of work, striving, and self-reliance, at least once the genocidal clearance of the original inhabitants was taken care of. The Civil war was premised on the abhorrence of slavery, not only on behalf of the abused Blacks, but also as a philosophical system of life where people thought it their right to live parasitically by the sweat of other people's brows. 

This has strong implications for our current moment, where inequality is higher than ever. A well-organized society would reward work with the kind of pay that supports a respectable life. It would not tolerate immiseration and abuse in the labor market. At the same time, it would not allow the incredible concentration of wealth we see today. And especially, it would not allow the intergenerational transfer of that wealth, nor the complexity and laxity of a tax system that provides the majority of work that the rich appear to engage in- that of avoiding taxes. In order for everyone to live a good life, children should neither be born to so much money that they fritter their lives away, nor to so little that their whole futures are immediately wiped away. All this requires a strong and moral state, working in collaboration with a strongly regulated capitalist system.

It has been abundantly proven that neither anarchism, nor communism, nor libertarianism provide the basis for practical societies. No amount of reframing, or consciousness raising, or struggle sessions, will bring such systems to pass. Only theocracies and autocracies have shown a comparably durable basis, though of a distinctly unpleasant kind. Therefore, philosophies that dabble in such utopianism should recognize that they are dealing in abstractions that can be instructive as extreme ends of a spectrum, as well as object lessons in failure. It is simply malpractice to tease people with glimmering alternatives to our communal realities, rather than doing the gritty work of reform within them.

• Case in point... jeans in the DDR.
• Bill Mitchell on the commodification of leisure.
• The Supreme court continues abetting clearly illegal activities.
• Science, schmientz
• Gullible prove resistant to further gulling.
• Yes, this gullible.

The Climate is Changing

Fires in LA, and a puff of smoke in DC.

An ill wind has blown into Washington, a government of whim and spite, eager to send out the winged monkeys to spread fear and kidnap the unfortunate. The order of the day is anything that dismays the little people. The wicked witch will probably have melted away by the time his most grievous actions come to their inevitable fruition, of besmirching and belittling our country, and impoverishing the world. Much may pass without too much harm, but the climate catastrophe is already here, burning many out of their homes, as though they were made of straw. Immoral and spiteful contrariness on this front will reap the judgement and hatred of future generations.

But hasn't the biosphere and the climate always been in flux? Such is the awful refrain from the right, in a heartless conservatism that parrots greedy, mindless propaganda. In truth, Earth has been blessed with slowness. The tectonic plates make glaciers look like race cars, and the slow dance of Earth's geology has ruled the evolution of life over the eons, allowing precious time for incredible biological diversification that covers the globe with its lush results.

A stretch of relatively unbroken rain forest, in the Amazon.

Past crises on earth have been instructive. Two of the worst were the end-Permian extinction event, about 252 million years ago (mya), and the end-Cretaceous extinction event, about 66 mya. The latter was caused by a meteor, so was a very sudden event- a shock to the whole biosphere. Following the initial impact and global fire, it is thought to have raised sun-shielding dust and sulfur, with possible acidification, lasting for years. However, it did not have very large effects on CO2, the main climate-influencing gas.

On the other hand, the end-Permian extinction event, which was significantly more severe than the end-Cretaceous event, was a more gradual affair, caused by intense volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia. Recent findings show that this was a huge CO2 event, turning the climate of Earth upside down. CO2 went from about 400 ppm, roughly what we are at currently, to 2500 ppm. The only habitable regions were the poles, while the tropics were all desert. But the kicker is that this happened over the surprisingly short (geologically speaking) time of about 80,000 years. CO2 then stayed high for the next roughly 400,00 years, before returning slowly to its former equilibrium. This rate of rise was roughly 2.7 ppm per 100 years, yet that change killed off 90% of all life on Earth. 

The momentous analysis of the end-Permian extinction event, in terms of CO2, species, and other geological markers, including sea surface temperature (SST). This paper was when the geological brevity of the event was first revealed.

Compare this to our current trajectory, where atmospheric CO2 has risen from about 280 ppm at the dawn of the industrial age to 420 ppm now. That is rate of maybe 100 ppm per 100 years, and rising steeply. It is a rate far too high for many species, and certainly the process of evolution itself, to keep up with, tuned as it is to geologic time. As yet, this Anthropocene extinction event is not quite at the level of either the end-Permian or end-Cretaceous events. But we are getting there, going way faster than the former, and creating a more CO2-based long-term climate mess than the latter. While we may hope to forestall nuclear war and thus a closer approximation to the end-Cretaceous event, it is not looking good for the biosphere, purely from a CO2 and warming perspective, putting aside the many other plagues we have unleashed including invasive species, pervasive pollution by fertilizers, plastics and other forever chemicals, and the commandeering of all the best land for farming, urbanization, and other unnatural uses. 

CO2 concentrations, along with emissions, over recent time.

We are truly out of Eden now, and the only question is whether we have the social, spiritual, and political capacity to face up to it. For the moment, obviously not. Something disturbed about our media landscape, and perhaps our culture generally, has sent us for succor, not to the Wizard who makes things better, but to the Wicked Witch of the East, who delights in lies, cruelty and destruction.

• The oligarchy is upon us. Oh, and they will help the working class!
• The attention economy.
• Which distorts our public understandings.
• Good coverage will never win in the attention economy.
• Keep Greenland white!

Eeking Out a Living on Ammonia

Some archaeal microorganisms have developed sophisticated nano-structures to capture their food: ammonia.

The earth's nitrogen cycle is a bit unheralded, but critical to life nonetheless. Gaseous nitrogen (N2) is all around us, but inert, given its extraordinary chemical stability. It can be broken down by lightning, but little else. It must have been very early in the history of life that the nascent chemical-biological life forms tapped out the geologically available forms of nitrogen, despite being dependent on nitrogen for countless critical aspects of organic chemistry, particularly of nucleic acids, proteins, and nucleotide cofactors. The race was then on to establish a way to capture it from the abundant, if tenaciously bound, dinitrogen of the air. It was thus very early bacteria that developed a way (heavily dependent, unsurprisingly, on catalytic metals like molybdenum and iron) to fix nitrogen, meaning breaking up the triple N≡N bond, and making ammonia, NH3 (or ammonium, NH4+). From there, the geochemical cycle of nitrogen is all down-hill, with organic nitrogen being oxidized to nitric oxide (NO), nitrite (NO2-), nitrate (NO3), and finally denitrification back to N2. Microorganisms obtain energy from all of these steps, some living exclusively on either nitrite or nitrate, oxidizing them as we oxidize carbon with oxygen to make CO2. 

Nitrosopumilus, as imaged by the authors, showing its corrugated exterior, a layer entirely composed of ammonia collecting elements (can be hexameric or pentameric). Insets show an individual hexagonal complex, in face-on and transverse views. Note also the amazing resolution of other molecules, such as the ribosomes floating about.

A recent paper looked at one of these denizens beneath our feet, an archaeal species that lives on ammonia, converting it to nitrite, NO2. It is a dominant microbe in its field, in the oceans, in soils, and in sewage treatment plants. The irony is that after we spend prodigious amounts of fossil fuels fixing huge amounts of nitrogen for fertilizer, most of which is wasted, and which today exceeds the entire global budget of naturally fixed nitrogen, we are faced with excess and damaging amounts of nitrogen in our effluent, which is then processed in complex treatment plants by our friends the microbes down the chain of oxidized states, back to gaseous N2.

Calculated structure of the ammonia-attracting pore. At right are various close-up views including the negatively charged amino acids (D, E) concentrated at the grooves of the structure, and the pores where ammonium can transit to the cell surface. 

The Nitrosopumilus genus is so successful because it has a remarkable way to capture ammonia from the environment, a way that is roughly two hundred times more efficient than that of its bacterial competitors. Its surface is covered by a curious array of hexagons, which turn out to be ammonia capture sites. In effect, its skin is an (relatively) enormous chemical antenna for ammonia, which is naturally at low concentration in sea water. These authors do a structural study, using the new methods of particle electron microscopy, to show that these hexagons have intensely negatively charged grooves and pores, to which positively charged ammonium ions are attracted. Within this outer shell, but still outside the cell membrane, enzymes at the cell surface transform the captured ammonium to other species such as hydroxylamine, which enforces the ammonium concentration gradient towards the cell surface, and which are then pumped inside.

Cartoon model of the ammonium attraction and transit mechanisms of this cell wall. 

It is a clever nano-material and micro-energetic system for concentrating a specific chemical- a method that might inspire human applications for other chemicals that we might need- chemicals whose isolation demands excessive energy, or whose geologic abundance may not last forever.

• Is reality getting through?
• Insurrection or not insurrection?
• The fluoride is OK.
• Cigarettes and ... wow!
• Bad judgement, ill discipline, and low morals. How did we get here?

A Housing Guarantee

A proposal for an updated poor house.

I agree with MMT economists who propose a job guarantee. That would put a floor on the labor market with an offer to anyone who wants to work for a low, but living wage, probably set below the minimum wage mandated for the private sector. State and local governments would run cleanups, environmental restoration, and care operations as needed, requiring basic discipline and effort, but no further skills. But they could use higher skilled workers as they come along for more beneficial, complex tasks.

Similarly, I think we could offer a housing guarantee, putting a floor on homelessness and misery. In the state of California, homelessness is out of control, and we have not found solutions, despite a great deal of money spent. Housing in the private market is extremely expensive, far out of reach of those with even median incomes. The next level down is housing vouchers and public housing, of which there are not enough to go around, and which is extremely expensive. And below that are shelters, which are heavily adverse settings. They are not private, chaotic, unpleasant, meant to be temporary, can be closed much of the time. And they also do not have enough space. 

A local encampment, temporarily approved during the pandemic under the freeway.

As uncompassionate as it sounds, it is unacceptable, and should be illegal, for public spaces to be commandeered by the homeless for their private needs. Public spaces have many purposes, specifically not including squatting and vagrancy. It is a problem in urban areas, because that is where people are, and where many services exist at the intersection of public and private spaces- food, bathrooms, opportunities to beg, get drugs, etc. Just because we have been, as governments and citizens, neglectful of our public spaces, does not mean we should give them over to anyone who wants to camp on them. I was recently at San Francisco city hall and the beautiful park surrounding it. But at lunch time, I realized that there was nowhere to sit. The plague of homelessness had rendered park benches untenable. We deserve to keep these public spaces functional, and that means outlawing the use of public spaces by the homeless. At the same time, provision must be made for the homeless, who by this policy would have nowhere to go in fully zoned areas. Putting them on busses to the next town, as some jurisdictions do, is also not a solution. As a rich country, we can do more for the homeless even while we preserve public spaces.

I think we need to rethink the whole lower end of housing / shelter to make it a more regular, accessible, and acceptable way to catch those who need housing at a very basic level. The model would be a sort of cross between a hostel, an SRO (single room occupancy hotels) and army barracks. It would be publicly funded, and provide a private room as well as food, all for free. It would not throw people out, or lock them in.

This poor house would not demand work, though it would offer centralized services for finding jobs and other places to live. It would be open to anyone, including runaway teens, battered women, tourists, etc. It would be a refuge for anyone for any reason, on an unlimited basis. The space and the food would be very basic, motivating clients to seek better accommodation. It would be well-policed and its clients would have to behave themselves. The next step down in the ladder of indigent care would not be homelessness, which would be outlawed in areas offering this kind of poorhouse, but would be institutionalization, in increasingly stringent settings for either criminal or mental issues. 

Such a poor house might become a community center, at least for the indigent. It would be quite expensive, but given the level of inequality and lack of care for people in various desperate straits, we need to furnish a humane level of existence between the market housing system and institutionalization. Why not give everyone a house? That is neither financially practical, nor would that co-exist well with the market housing system. Certainly, more housing needs to be built and everything done to bring prices down. But to address the current issues, stronger housing policy is needed.

Why not go back to a public housing model? It turned out that public housing was somewhat unrealistic, promising far more than it could deliver. It promised fully functional neighborhoods and housing, pretty much the equivalent of market housing, but without the ongoing discipline from the market via private financial responsibility by the residents or from the programs via their bureaucratic structures and funding, to follow through on the long term. The public authorities generally took a hands-off approach to residents and their environment, in line with the (respectful) illusion that this was the equivalent of market housing. And the long-term is what counts in housing, since it is ever in need of repair and renovation, not to mention careful use and protection by its residents. Building is one thing, but maintaining is something quite different, and requires carefully though-out incentives. 

With a public poorhouse model, the premises and residents are extensively policed. Individual rooms may descend to squalor, but the whole is built, run and maintained by the public authorities with intensive surveillance and intervention, keeping the institution as a whole functioning and growing as needed for its mission. There is going to be a sliding scale of freedom vs public involvement via financing and policing. The less functional a person is, the more control they will have to accept. We can not wash our hands of the homeless by granting them "freedom" to thrash about in squalor and make dumps of public spaces.

• Or you could join the squid game.
• Economic policy should not be about efficiency alone, let alone rewarding capital and management, but about long-term cultural and environmental sustainability.
• Could AI do biology?
• Carter was an evangelical. But that was a different time.

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.

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.

The Tragedy of Daniel Boone

Pathfinding and hunting his way through the paradise the Indians had built.

Daniel Boone is (or used to be) one of the most iconic / archetypal figures in US history and popular consciousness. His remains have been fought over, his life mythologized and serialized, and his legacy cherished as heroic and exemplary. It all began with his trusty rifle, with which he was the surest shot. He was a pathfinder, never lost in the vast wilderness he explored and helped settle. And he was a steadfast leader of men, rescuer of damsels in distress, and killer of Indians. What's not to admire? His definitive biography, by John Faragher, paints a more ambivalent picture, however.

Boone loved the woods- loved hunting, loved nature, and loved solitude. Given those talents and tendencies, he naturally strayed from the borderlands of North Carolina into the mountains, becoming a full time hunter and trapper. In a couple of early forays into what we now know as Kentucky, he hunted on a commercial basis, wasting the animals to pile up hundreds of pelts, which his employees / colleagues processed in camp. 

The biography emphasizes that what Boone found in Kentucky was a paradise- lush and full of game. The region, believe it or not, was full of not just deer and beaver, but bear and buffalo. It is the kind of eden that had been encountered by Europeans many times over in the "New World". Fisheries of unimaginable richness, skies full of birds, forests as far as the eye could see. Kentucky was not an uninhabited eden, however- it was the cherished hunting ground of native Cherokee and Shawnee, among others, who saw exactly what Boone saw, but responded to it differently. Not with plunder and destruction, but with care and stewardship.

Boone blindly shot away, and then followed his cultural programming further by leading his family and many others across the mountains to found Boonesborough, building a fort and defending it against numerous Indian attacks. The biography notes that Boone's parents had ten children, and he had ten children, and his children had similar sized families. One can imagine where that kind of reproduction leads, to desperate expansion and heedless use of resources. While acknowledged as the pioneer of Kentucky settlement, Boone was no businessman, and all his grasping for land in the speculative rush that developed in his wake came to naught. He was sloppy in his paperwork and was outlawyered and out-cheated at every turn. One may see the personality type of his adversary in the current senior senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell. Boone was all too honest and simple, having been raised a Quaker.

Portrayal of the siege of a stockade, not unlike that of Boonesborough, as Native Americans try to drive off the cloud of locusts denuding their land.

The game had been hunted out, the people had become unfriendly and dense underfoot, and Boone's property and business schemes had all fallen apart. In despair over what he had wrought in Kentucky, Boone pulled up stakes and moved out to the next frontier, near St. Louis. An extremely late hunting trip has him heading through what is now Yellowstone park, reliving for the last time the kind of eden that Native Americans had nurtured with their respect for the value and cycles of nature, and even more, with their light footprint as small populations.

European culture and immigrants have accomplished wonderful things in America. But decimating its natural wonders, resources, and native peoples is not one of them. Daniel Boone was caught up in the economics of inexorable population growth and the need to make a "business model" out of hunting and trapping. Well, what comes of that is not pretty, and not at all sustainable of what had brought him into the woods to start with.

• Networked businesses are a free-market nightmare.
• White Jesus.
• Earworm of the week: a lovely rendition of Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now.

Truth and the Silo

Living in a silo, and wondering what is outside.

The first season of Apple's Silo series was beautifully produced and thought-provoking. Working from a book series of the same name which I have not read, it is set in a devastated world where about 10,000 people live in a huge underground silo. As the show progresses, it is clear that the society got a little totalitarian along the way. We are introduced to a "pact", which is the rules set up ~150 years ago, when a revolution of some undescribed sort happened. Now there is a "judicial" department that sends out goons to keep everyone in line, and there are the rules of the pact, which seem to outlaw fun and inquiry into anything from the past or the outside. It also outlaws elevators.

On the other hand, the population has a window to the outside, which shows an extremely drab world. A hellscape, really. But due to the murky nature of political power and information control within the silo, it is hard to know how real that view is. I won't give away any spoilers because I am interested in exploring the metaphors and themes the show brings up. For we are all working in, living in, and raised in, silos of some sort. Every family is a world more or less closed, with its own mood and rules, generally (hopefully) unwritten. The Silo portrays this involution in an incredibly vivid way.

(Third) Sheriff Nichols meets with the (second) mayor in a lovingly retro-decorated set.

It is fundamentally a drama about truth. One could say that most drama is about seeking truths, whether in a literal form like detective and legal dramas, or in more personal forms like romance, coming of age, and quest-for-power dramas. The point is to find out something, like how attractive the characters are, who will betray whom, who has lined up the better alliances, what a person's character is really like. Why read a story unless you learn something new? Here, the truths being sought are in bold face and out front. What is outside? Who really runs this place? What built this place? Why are we here? Why is everyone wearing hand-knit woolens? And the lead character, Juliet Nichols, is the inveterate truth-seeker. A mechanic by inclination and training, she really, really, wants to know how things work, is proud of mastering some of that knowledge, and is dedicated to dealing with reality and making it work. This quest leads her into rebellion against a system that is typical for our time ... at least in China, North Korea, and Russia. A surveillance and control state that watches everyone, pumps out propaganda, outlaws contrary thought, symbols, and objects, imprisons those who disagree, and ultimately sends inveterate truth seekers outside ... to die.

The nature of truth is of course a deep philosophical question. A major problem is that we can never get there. But even worse, we don't necessarily want to get there either. We automatically form a narrative world around ourselves that generally suffices for day-to-day use. This world is borne largely of habit, authority, instinct, and archetypes. All sorts of sources other than a systematic search for truth. For example, the easiest truth in the world is that we and our group are good, and the other group is bad. This is totally instinctive, and quite obvious to everyone. Religions are full of such truths, narratives, and feelings, developed in the least rigorous way imaginable, ending up with systems fired in the crucible of personal intution, and the imperatives of group dynamics and power. But truth? 

Lighting tends to be a little dark in the Silo, as are the politics.

The Orwellian society is curious, in a way. How can people's natural thirst for truth be so dangerous, so anti-social, and so brutally suppressed? Due to the processes mentioned above, each person's truth is somewhat distinct and personal, each person's quest goes in a different direction. But a society needs some coherence in its narrative, and some people (say, our immediate former president) have an intense yearning for power and need to dominate others, thus to bend them to their own version of truth. Reality distortion fields do not occur only in the tech industry, but are intrinsic to social interaction. The Silo, with its literally closed society, is a natural hothouse for a social fight for dominance and control of reality. Oh, and it has a eugenic program going on as well, though that is not a big focus in the first season.

One can almost sympathise with the fascists of the world, who see truth as functional, not philosophical. Whatever glorifies the state and its leader, whatever keeps the society unchanging and sheltered from uncomfortable truths and surprises. Who needs those pesky and divergent people, who just want to make trouble? And the more baroque and unhinged the official narrative has become, the more dangerous and easy the work of the social sabateur becomes. If the emperor has no clothes, it only takes a child to ask one question. In the Silo, there are various underground actors and uneasy officials who are losing faith in the official line, but where can they go? Is their doubt and desire for the facts more important than the continuation of this very tenuous and smothered society? Could a free-er society work? But why risk it?

In our contemporary world, the right wing is busy making up a parallel universe of obvious and button-pushing untruths. The left, on the other hand, is pursuing a rather righteous investigation into all the mainstream truths we grew up with, and finding them lies. Is the US founded on genocide, slavery, and imperialism? Or on democracy and opportunity? Is capitalism salveagable in light of its dreadful record of environmental, animal, and human abuses? It is not a comfortable time, as the truths of our society are shifting underfoot. But is the left unearthing the true truth, or just making up a new and self-serving narrative that will in time be succeeded by others with other emphasis and other interests? 

History is a funny kind of discipline, which can not simply find something true and enshrine it forever, like the laws of gravity. There is some of that in its facts, but history needs to be continually re-written, since it is more about us than about them- more about how our society thinks about itself and what stories it selects from the past, than it is about "what happened". There are an infinite number of things that happened, as well as opinions about them. What makes it into books and documentaries is a matter of selection, and it is always the present that selects. It is a massive front in the formation / evolution of culture- i.e. the culture war. Are we a culture that allows free inquiry and diverse viewpoints on our history, and welcomes observations that undercut comfortable narratives? Or are we a more Orwellian culture that enforces one narrative and erases whatever of its history conflicts with it?

The top level dining room has a viewport to the outside.

The Silo is definitely a culture of the latter type, and its history is brutally truncated. Yet interestingly, character after character nurtures some object that violates the pact, representing a bond with the forbidden, hazy past - the forebears and former world that must necessarily have existed, even as nothing is officially known about them. The urge to know more, especially about our origins, is deeply human, as is the urge to keep one's society on an even keel with a unified and self-satisfied narrative. This tension is built up unceasingly in the Silo, which is as far as we know a unique and precious remnant of humanity. It asks the question whether its stability is worth so much oppression and ignorance.

Parenthetically, one might ask how all this connects to the dystopia outside. The Silo is only painting in extreme colors trends that are happening right now in our world. As the climate gets weirder, we spend more time inside, increasingly isolated from others, entertaining ourselves with streaming offerings like the Silo. Its apocalypse appears more nuclear than climatological, but for us, right now, a dystopia is unfolding. After decades of denial and greed, the truth of climate heating is no longer at issue. So what if the truth is known- has gotten out of the bag- but no one wants to act on it? Another form of courage is needed, not any more to uncover the truth, but to meet that truth with action- action that may require significant sacrifice and a fundamental re-design of our Silo-like system of capitalism.

• Leave your silo, please.
• How many lies can one person believe?
• How one Confederate resolved to move on in Reconstruction.
• Want to turn off your brain for a little while? How about some stutter house?

Credit where Faith is Due

The enormous, and sometimes underrated, value of faith and credit in the US financial instruments and institutions.

To hear the chaos caucus in congress put it, the country can go to hell, because their pet peeves- abortion, culture war, gay rights, gun rights ... have already gone to hell, so how much worse can it really get? Well, it could get a lot worse. We are a rich country for many reasons, but an important one is good management at the federal level of our financial and monetary affairs. It is this stability that undergirds not only the currency, but also economic expectations of the future, as expressed in inflation, and markets such as the commodities, bond, and stock markets, not to mention political stability, such as it is.

Every dollar is a credit instrument, staked on the faith and credit of the United States. Without that faith, it is worthless. Even with that faith, it is a debt of the government, counted under the vast rubric of "the federal debt". The more money we have (or that is out in the wild somewhere), the more that debt is. And that money has proliferated remarkably. Quite a few small countries have formally dollarized their economies, such as Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Palau, and Panama. Many more countries use dollars as a defacto currency or black market currency, including much of the criminal world. Most countries hold large reserves of dollars to anchor their international trade and financial stability. So we should not be surprised that our federal debt is very large. Does anyone (maybe our children!?) have to "pay it back"? Not really, since all those dollars can keep floating around forever. That is, until some other country's currency becomes the reserve currency of the world, and those dollars become either worth less, or we buy them back with that new currency. Forestalling that day should be one of our major foreign policy and economic goals.

Another dimension of the credit of the US is the formal debt, in bonds that the Treasury department issues to account for spending that was not matched by incoming taxes. The Federal Reserve accumulates Treasury bonds as it issues new dollars, but these bonds come with the obligation to keep paying interest. While this makes it convenient and profitable for other countries and rich people to hold bonds instead of dollar bills, (and earns the Fed itself plenty of notional money), it puts us on the hook for endless payments (of newly minted dollars) to support those interest payments. This is a rather dangerous situation, since the level of interest is not always under tight control. Depending on your view of financial affairs, the interest rate is dictated by the market, or by the Fed, or by the general level of inflation, which in turn influences the actions of both the market and the Fed. In any case, the interest on thirty trillion dollars is a heck of a lot more at higher rates than at low ones. This strongly motivates the Fed to use all its tools to curtail inflation and keep long term interest rates under control.

A graph of the price/earnings ratio of the SP500 collection of stocks, over the long term. This ratio indicates the length of time holders of stock are willing to wait for their returns to come in, in years. Notice how in the last few decades, the P/E ratio has persisted at significantly higher-than-historical levels, indicating, despite ups and downs, increased faith in the long-term stability of the economic and financial system. There may be other reasons- better regulation, technological innovation, 401K rules, lowered taxes, etc. But financial markets like the stock market are sensitive indicators of the credit given to our institutions.

All this comes back to the sound management of our financial affairs. We have a lot of room to maneuver due to economic expansion, both at home and abroad, which makes ongoing federal debts a built-in necessity. But we do not have endless room, and taxation plays an important role in making up the difference between money we can freely spend/issue to satisfy growth without inflation, and the rest of the money needed for government operations. What that gap is, is difficult to say, in the same way that the causes and time course of inflation are hard to pin down, but there is a gap, which taxes cover. Incidentally, in the MMT view of things, taxes reduce the level of private spending and consumption to make room for government spending, vs actually "funding" the government, which issues the money in the first place. But either way, taxes are an essential part of the financial cycle, and haphazardly forgiving tax obligations (or hobbling enforcement) is just as bad management as profligate spending or lax control of interest rates and inflation.

All these factors are part of the credit of the United States, and have been under fire from the right wing for several decades. When they are not cutting taxes of the rich or spending mindlessly on the military, they are shutting the government down or muttering about the deep state, the evils of the civil service, and how we should get back on the gold standard. Meanwhile the whole stability of our position as a rich economy and leader among nations hangs in the balance when thoughtless policy and extreme politics encroach from the fringes. Can the US run things better? Absolutely. Are there tradeoffs between humane and cultural virtues and financial / economic success? Absolutely. But from our founding era, when the Treasury Department under Alexander Hamilton established the US debt as a powerful instrument of union and stability, the credit of the US has been an underappreciated pillar of our position both domestically and internationally. Toying with it, via artificial crises and bad policy, is correspondingly an under-appreciated danger to our way of life.

• Business needs more regulation.
• Misogyny has a new hero.
• Hospitals are becoming scarcer and poorer. In part due to medicare "advantage".
• My congressperson is on the job.
• The state of solar.

Are we all the Same, or all Different?

Refining diversity.

There has been some confusion and convenient logic around diversity. Are we all the same? Conventional wisdom makes us legally the same, and the same in terms of rights, in an ever-expanding program of level playing fields- race, gender, gender preference, neurodiversity, etc. At the same time, conventional wisdom treasures diversity, inclusion, and difference. Educational conventional wisdom assumes all children are the same, and deserve the same investments and education, until some magic point when diversity flowers, and children pursue their individual dreams, applying to higher educational institutions, or not. But here again, selectiveness and merit are highly contested- should all ethnic groups be equally represented at universities, or are we diverse on that plane as well?

It is quite confusing, on the new political correctness program, to tell who is supposed to be the same and who different, and in what ways, and for what ends. Some acute social radar is called for to navigate this woke world and one can sympathize, though not too much, with those who are sick of it and want to go back to simpler times of shameless competition; black and white. 

The fundamental tension is that a society needs some degree of solidarity and cohesion to satisfy our social natures and to get anything complex done. At the same time, Darwinian and economic imperatives have us competing with each other at all levels- among nations, ethnicities, states, genders, families, work groups, individuals. We are wonderfully sensitive to infinitesimal differences, which form the soul of Darwinian selection. Woke efforts clearly try to separate differences that are essential and involuntary, (which should in principle be excluded from competition), from those that are not fixed, such as personal virtue and work ethic, thus forming the proper field of education and competition.

But that is awfully abstract. Reducing that vague principle to practice is highly fraught. Race, insofar as it can be defined at all, is clearly an essential trait. So race should not be a criterion for any competitive aspect of the society- job hunting, education, customer service. But what about "diversity" and what about affirmative action? Should the competition be weighted a little to make up for past wrongs? How about intelligence? Intelligence is heritable, but we can't call it essential, lest virtually every form of competition in our society be brought to a halt. Higher education and business, and the general business of life, is extremely competitive on the field of intelligence- who can con whom, who can come up with great ideas, write books, do the work, and manage others.

These impulses towards solidarity and competition define our fundamental political divides, with Republicans glorying in the unfairness of life, and the success of the rich. Democrats want everyone to get along, with care for unfortunate and oppressed. Our social schizophrenia over identity and empathy is expressed in the crazy politics of today. And Republicans reflect contemporary identity politics as well, just in their twisted, white-centric way. We are coming apart socially, and losing key cooperative capacity that puts our national project in jeopardy. We can grant that the narratives and archetypes that have glued the civic culture have been fantasies- that everyone is equal, or that the founding fathers were geniuses that selflessly wrought the perfect union. But at the same time, the new mantras of diversity have dangerous aspects as well.

Each side, in archetypal terms, is right and each is an essential element in making society work. Neither side's utopia is either practical or desirable. The Democratic dream is for everyone to get plenty of public services and equal treatment at every possible nexus of life, with morally-informed regulation of every social and economic harm, and unions helping to run every workplace. In the end, there would be little room for economic activity at all- for the competition that undergirds innovation and productivity, and we would find ourselves poverty-stricken, which was what led other socialist/communist states to drastic solutions that were not socially progressive at all.

On the other hand is a capitalist utopia where the winners take not just hundreds of billions of dollars, but everything else, such as the freedom of workers to organize or resist, and political power as well. The US would turn into a moneyed class system, just like the old "nobility" of Europe, with serfs. It is the Nietzschian, Randian ideal of total competition, enabling winners to oppress everyone else in perpetuity, and, into the bargain, write themselves into the history books as gods.

These are not (and were not, historically) appetizing prospects, and we need the tension of mature and civil political debate between them to find a middle ground that is both fertile and humane. Nature is, as in so many other things, an excellent guide. Cooperation is a big theme in evolution, from the assembly of the eukaryotic cell from prokaryotic precusors, to its wonderous elaboration into multicellular bodies and later into societies such as our own and those of the insects. Cooperation is the way to great accomplishments. Yet competition is the baseline that is equally essential. Diversity, yes, but it is competition and selection among that diversity and cooperative enterprise that turns the downward trajectory of entropy and decay (as dictated by physics and time) into flourishing progress.

• Identity, essentialism, and postmodernism.
• Family structure, ... or diversity?
• Earth in the far future.
• Electric or not, cars are still bad.
• Our non-political and totally not corrupt supreme court.
• The nightmare of building in California.