The Shadow War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Chinese dream is highly militaristic, and rather threatening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renewable Power in Africa

Prospects for growth in electricity access and in clean energy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideologies of Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the Supreme Court Should Rule in the Colorado Ballot Case

There is one path forward that can salvage the court's standing.

The US Supreme Court is sinking to unusual depths of corruption and illegitimacy. Bush v. Gore was a step down in its ability to manage the rules of our political and legal system, where it made a hasty and, it claimed, one-time-only carve-out for its favored candidate, leading to almost a decade of tragically bad policy and poor government. Then came Citizens United, another step downward, opening firehoses of secret money from the wealthy, using the fig leaf of "free speech" to cover the corruption of politics with money. Then came the overturning of Roe, deeming women unworthy of rights that are far more basic and intimate than those enumerated in the Bill of Rights. And most recently have come the drumbeat of reports of corruption among the right-wing justices, who appear to regard themselves as too dignified to abide by the laws and norms they hold others to.

Now it is faced with a case that tests the very core of the court's abitlity to do its job. What does the constitution mean? Does the fourteenth amendment mean what it says, and if so, should it be enforced? A great deal of commentary suggests, probably correctly, that this court is desperately looking for a way out of this legal conundrum that allows it to do nothing and avoid overturning any apple carts. That would not, however, be a wise course. 

To recap, the Colorado case was brought by voters who sought to bar Donald Trump from the Colorado primary and general election ballots, due to his participation in the insurrection of January 6, 2021. The fourteenth amendment to the federal constitution bars such participants from federal and state offices. The Colorado Supreme Court ultimately agreed, sending the case to the US Supreme Court. The congressional report on the January 6 events makes the record of those events quite clear. It uses the word "insurrection" several times, as do many of its sources, and it is crystal clear about the participation by and culpability of Donald Trump in those events. 

The question is really about how the Constitutional provision should be brought into execution, being worded without a lot of explicit legal structure. One thing it does say is that congress can relieve its prohibition in individual cases by two-thirds votes of each house. But it leaves unsaid who should adjudicate the question of fitness for office, as is also the case for the more basic qualifications such as age and citizenship. Trump had previously, and ironically, dabbled in these same legal waters by casting doubt on the citizenship of Barack Obama. But since no one with half a brain took him seriously, the issue never entered the legal sphere.

Well, the worst course would be to let the clear language of the constitution lay inert and find some technicality by which to do nothing. What I would suggest instead is that the court recognize that there needs to be a national adjudicating power to decide this question in the case of candidates for national office (and indeed for any office whose qualifications are mentioned in the constitution). And that power should be itself, the US Supreme Court. The court might invite the legislative branch to provide more regular methods of fact-finding, (or even a clarifying amendment to the constitution), but given the constitutional clear intent, history, and logic, (not to mention the general Article III clauses putting all questions arising from the constitution in its hands), the court should take upon itself the power to say that the buck stops at its door. And naturally, in consequence, that Trump merits disqualification, on the facts of the January 6 events as found by the lower courts, and on his position as an officer, indeed the paramount officer, of the United States.

This solution would neatly take over from the states the responsibility of saying that any national candidate meets or does not meet the various qualifications set forth in the constitution. Such cases could begin in state courts, as this one did, but would need to go to the US Supreme Court for final decision. This solution would hold Trump to account for his actions, a principle that Republicans have, at least  traditionally, cherished. This solution would also go some way to removing the stain of the Bush v Gore decision, and establish a new and clear element of constitutional jurisprudence, in setting forth who adjudicates the qualifications of national political candidates. In fact, this function can be tied to the practice of having the chief justice of the United States administer the oath of office to the incoming president. It would be proper for the court to be the institution that decides on the basic fitness tests, and thus who in general may take the oath, while the people decide the political outcome of the election, among fit candidates.

I am no legal scholar, but the merits of this solution seem pretty clear. On an earlier occasion, the court summarily took on the task of determining the constitutionality of laws. This role was not explicitly set out in the text, but was a logical consequence of the structure that the constitution set up. Here likewise, the logic of the constitution indicates strongly that the final word on the fitness of candidates for national office must rest with, not the voters, not the states, and not the legislative or, heaven forbid, the executive branch, but with the federal judicial branch, of which the US Supreme Court is the head.

An alternative, and perhaps more likely, solution, is for this court to state all the principles above, but then hold that in its judgement, Donald Trump is fit for office after all. Maybe it will deem the insurrection just a little insurrection, and not the kind of big insurrection that would turn a jurist's head (despite the over thousand charges filed, and hundreds of federal convictions so far). Or maybe it will deem Trump insufficiently involved in the insurrection to merit disqualification. What it can not do is deem him not an officer of the federal government- that would be beyond belief. The pusilanimous, partisan sophistry of this alternative would not go over well, needless to say. Many would ask whether Clarence Thomas, himself virtually a participant in the insurrection at one remove, should have recused himself. Minds would be blown, but few would be surprised, since for this court, expectations could hardly be lower. Going against its partisan grain would, on the other hand, be a signal and heartening achievement.

This second approach would at least resolve the legal questions, but at the cost of further erosion of the court's legitimacy, given that the events of January 6 are so well documented, and the constitutional peril that Trump poses so obvious. For the whole point of having a Supreme Court which takes on tough issues and plugs logical holes in our constitution is that it also takes some care to plug them well, and preserve our democracy in the process.

• What happens when the Supreme Court gives in to politics?
• One state, one system.
• A solar energy insurrection in Puerto Rico.
• Democratic inequality is related to wealth inequality.
• More on the court case- ballots vs office holding.

Spiritual Resources for the Religiously Abstemious

Nones are now a plurality in the US. What are we supposed to do?

The Pew research institute recently came out with polling that shows a significantly changed religious landscape in the US. Over the last couple of decades, while the religious right has been climbing the greasy pole of political power, gaining seats on the Supreme Court, and agitating for a return to patriarchy, their pews have been emptying. The religiously unaffiliated, or "nones", comprise 28% of the US population now, almost double the level two decades ago.

One has only to see the rabid support evangelicals give their orange-haired messiah to understand what has been turning people off. Or glance over the appalling chronicle of sexual abuse unearthed in the Catholic church. Maybe the horsemen of the Atheist apocalypse have had something to do with it. Russia under Putin is strenuously demonstrating that the same system can be just as cruel with or without religion. But these patterns of gross institutional, moral, and intellectual failure, and their ensuing critiques, are hardly new. Luther made a bit of hay out of the abuses of the Catholic church, Voltaire, among many other thinkers, ridiculed the whole religious enterprise, and Hitler was a forerunner of Trump in leaning on religion, at least early in his career, despite being a rather token Christian himself (other than in the antisemitism, of course). What is new now?

A dramatic rise in numbers of people with no religious affiliation and little interest, from Pew polling.

I am not sure, frankly. Europe has certainly been leading the way, showing that declining religion is quite compatible with prosperous and humane culture. But perhaps this phenomenon is part of the general isolation and atomization of US culture, and thus not such a good thing. It used to be that a community was unthinkable without a church (or several) to serve as the central hub. Churches served to validate the good and preach to the bad. They sponsored scout troops, weddings, charitable events and dinners, and committees and therapeutic encounters of all sorts. They were socially essential, whether one believed or not. That leaders of society also led the churches knit the whole circle together, making it easy to believe that something there was indeed worth believing, whether it made sense or not.

Now, the leadership of society has moved on. We are mesmerized by technology, by entertainment, and sports, perhaps to a degree that is new. The capitalist system has found ways to provide many of the services we used to go to churches for, to network, to get psychotherapy, to gossip, and most of all, to be entertained. Community itself is less significant in the modern, suburban, cocooned world. Successful churches meet this new world by emphasizing their social offerings in a mega-church community, with a dash of charismatic, but not overly intellectually taxing, preaching. Unfortunately, megachurches regularly go through their own crises of hypocrisy and leadership, showing that the caliber of religious leaders, whatever their marketing skills, has been declining steadily.

The "nones" are more apathetic than atheistic, but either way, they are not great material for making churches or tightly knit communities. Skeptical, critical, or uninterested, they are some of the least likely social "glues". Because, frankly, it takes some gullibility and attraction to the core human archetypes and drama to make a church, and it takes a lot of positive thinking to foster a community. I would promote libraries, arts institutions, non-profits, and universities as core cultural hubs that can do some of this work, fostering a learning and empathetic culture. But we need more.

As AI takes over work of every sort, and more people have more time on their hands, we are facing a fundamental reshaping of society. One future is that a few rich people rake off all the money, and the bulk of the population descends into poverty and joblessness, unneeded in a society where capitalism has become terminally capital-intensive, with little labor required. Another future is where new forms of redistribution are developed, either by bringing true competition to bear on AI-intensive industries so that they can not take excess profits, or by thorough regulation for the public good, including basic income schemes, public goods, and other ways to spread wealth broadly. 

Such a latter system would free resources for wider use, so that a continuing middle class economy could thrive, based on exchanges that are now only luxuries, like music, personal services, teaching, sports, counseling. The destruction of the music recording industry by collusion of music labels and Spotify stands as a stark lesson in how new technology and short-sighted capitalism can damage our collective culture, and the livelihood of a profession that is perhaps the avatar of what an ideal future would look like, culturally and economically.

All this is to say that we face a future where we should, hopefully, have more resources and time, which would in principle be conducive to community formation and a life-long culture of learning, arts, and personal enrichment, without the incessant driver of work. The new AI-driven world will have opportunities for very high level work and management, but the regular hamburger flippers, baristas, cabbies, and truck drivers will be a thing of the past. This is going to put a premium on community hubs and new forms of social interaction. The "nones" are likely to favor (if not build) a wide range of such institutions, while leaving the church behind. It is a mixed prospect, really, since we will still be lacking a core institution that engages with the whole person in an archetypal, dream-like fantasy of hope and affirmation. Can opera do that work? I doubt it. Can Hollywood? I doubt that as well, at least as it applies to a local community level that weaves such attractions together with service and personal connection.

• Those very highly moral religious people.
• Molecular medicine is here.
• Why do women have far more autoimmune syndromes?
• What to do about Iran.
• "As we’ll see, good old-fashioned immortality has advantages that digital immorality cannot hope to rival." ... I am not making this up!

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.

Preliminary Pieces of AI

We already live in an AI world, and really, it isn't so bad.

It is odd to hear about all the hyperventilating about artificial intelligence of late. One would think it is a new thing, or some science-fiction-y entity. Then there are fears about the singularity and loss of control by humans. Count me a skeptic on all fronts. Man is, and remains, wolf to man. To take one example, we are contemplating the election of perhaps the dummbest person ever to hold the office of president. For the second time. How an intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is supposed to worm its way into power over us is not easy to understand, looking at nature of humans and of power. 

So let's take a step back and figure out what is going on, and where it is likely to take us. AI has become a catch-all for a diversity of computer methods, mostly characterized by being slightly better at doing things we have long wanted computers to do, like interpreting text, speech, and images. But I would offer that it should include much more- all the things we have computers do to manage information. In that sense, we have been living among shards of artificial intelligence for a very long time. We have become utterly dependent on databases, for instance, for our memory functions. Imagine having to chase down a bank balance or a news story, without access to the searchable memories that modern databases provide. They are breathtakingly superior to our own intelligence when it comes to the amount of things they can remember, the accuracy they can remember them, and the speed with which they can find them. The same goes for calculations of all sorts, and more recently, complex scientific math like solving atomic structures, creating wonderful CGI graphics, or predicting the weather. 

We should view AI as a cabinet filled with many different tools, just as our own bodies and minds are filled with many kinds of intelligence. The integration of our minds into a single consciousness tends to blind us to the diversity of what happens under the hood. While we may want gross measurements like "general intelligence", we also know increasingly that it (whatever "it" is, and whatever it fails to encompass of our many facets and talents) is composed of many functions that several decades of work in AI, computer science, and neuroscience have shown are far more complicated and difficult to replicate than the early AI pioneers imagined, once they got hold of their Turing machine with its infinite potential. 

Originally, we tended to imagine artificial intelligence as a robot- humanoid, slightly odd looking, but just like us in form and abilities. That was a natural consequence of our archetypes and narcissism. But AI is nothing like that, because full-on humanoid consciousness is an impossibly high bar, at least for the foreseeable future, and requires innumerable capabilities and forms of intelligence to be developed first. 

The autonomous car drama is a good example of this. It has taken every ounce of ingenuity and high tech to get to a reasonably passable vehicle, which is able to "understand" key components of the world around it. That a blob in front is a person, instead of a motorcycle, or that a light is a traffic light instead of a reflection of the sun. Just as our brain has a stepwise hierarchy of visual processing, we have recapitulated that evolution here by harnessing cameras in these cars (and lasers, etc.) to not just take in a flat visual scene, which by itself is meaningless, but to parse it into understandable units like ... other cars, crosswalks, buildings, bicylists, etc.. Visual scenes are very rich, and figuring out what is in them is a huge accomplishment. 

But is it intelligence? Yes, it certainly is a fragment of intelligence, but it isn't consciousness. Imagine how effortless this process is for us, and how effortful and constricted it is for an autonomous vehicle. We understand everything in a scene within a much wider model of the world, where everything relates to everything else. We evaluate and understand innumerable levels of our environment, from its chemical makeup to its social and political implications. Traffic cones do not freak us out. The bare obstacle course of getting around, such as in a vehicle, is a minor aspect, really, of this consciousness, and of our intelligence. Autonomous cars are barely up to the level of cockroaches, on balance, in overall intelligence.

The AI of text and language handling is similarly primitive. Despite the vast improvements in text translation and interpretation, the underlying models these mechanisms draw on are limited. Translation can be done without understanding text at all, merely by matching patterns from pre-digested pools of pre-translated text, regurgitated as cued by the input text. Siri-like spoken responses, on the other hand, do require some parsing of meaning out of the input, to decide what the topic and the question are. But the scope of these tools tend to be very limited, and the wider scope they are allowed, the more embarrassing their performance, since they are essentially scraping web sites and text pools for question-response patterns, instead of truly understanding the user's request or any field of knowledge.

Lastly, there are the generative ChatGPT style engines, which also regurgitate text patterns reformatted from public sources in response to topical requests. The ability to re-write a Wikipedia entry through a Shakespeare filter is amazing, but it is really the search / input functions that are most impressive- being able, like the Siri system, to parse through the user's request for all its key points. This betokens some degree of understanding, in the sense that the world of the machine (i.e. its database) is parceled up into topics that can be separately gathered and reshuffled into a response. This requires a pretty broad and structured ontological / classification system, which is one important part of intelligence.

Not only is there a diversity of forms of intelligence to be considered, but there is a vast diversity of expertise and knowledge to be learned. There are millions of jobs and professions, each with their own forms of knowledge. Back the early days of AI, we thought that expert systems could be instructed by experts, formalizing their expertise. But that turned out to be not just impractical, but impossible, since much of that expertise, formed out of years of study and experience, is implicit and unconscious. That is why apprenticeship among humans is so powerful, offering a combination of learning by watching and learning by doing. Can AI do that? Only if it gains several more kinds of intelligence including an ability to learn in very un-computer-ish ways.

This analysis has emphasized the diverse nature of intelligences, and the uneven, evolutionary development they have undergone. How close are we to a social intelligence that could understand people's motivations and empathise with them? Not very close at all. How close are we to a scientific intelligence that could find holes in the scholarly literature and manage a research enterprise to fill them? Not very close at all. So it is very early days in terms of anything that could properly be called artificial intelligence, even while bits and pieces have been with us for a long time. We may be in for fifty to a hundred more years of hearing every advance in computer science being billed as artificial intelligence.

Uneven development is going to continue to be the pattern, as we seize upon topics that seem interesting or economically rewarding, and do whatever the current technological frontier allows. Memory and calculation were the first to fall, being easily formalizable. Communication network management is similarly positioned. Game learning was next, followed by the Siri / Watson systems for question answering. Then came a frontal assault on language understanding, using the neural network systems, which discard the former expert system's obsession with grammar and rules, for much simpler statistical learning from large pools of text. This is where we are, far from fully understanding language, but highly capable in restricted areas. And the need for better AI is acute. There are great frontiers to realize in medical diagnosis and in the modeling of biological systems, to only name two fields close at hand that could benefit from a thoroughly systematic and capable artificial intelligence.

The problem is that world modeling, which is what languages implicitly stand for, is very complicated. We do not even know how to do this properly in principle, let alone having the mechanisms and scale to implement it. What we have in terms of expert systems and databases do not have the kind of richness or accessibility needed for a fluid and wide-ranging consciousness. Will neural nets get us there? Or ontological systems / databases? Or some combination? However it is done, full world modeling with the ability to learn continuously into those models are key capabilities needed for significant artificial intelligence.

After world modeling come other forms of intelligence like social / emotional intelligence and agency / management intelligence with motivation. I have no doubt that we will get to full machine consciousness at some point. The mechanisms of biological brains are just not sufficiently mysterious to think that they can not be replicated or improved upon. But we are nowhere near that yet, despite bandying about the word artificial intelligence. When we get there, we will have to pay special attention to the forms of motivation we implant, to mitigate the dangers of making beings who are even more malevolent than those that already exist... us.

Would that constitute some kind of "singularity"? I doubt it. Among humans there are already plenty of smart people and diversity, which result in niches for everyone having something useful to do. Technology has been replacing human labor forever, and will continue moving up the chain of capability. And when machines exceed the level of human intelligence, in some general sense, they will get all the difficult jobs. But the job of president? That will still go to a dolt, I have no doubt. Selection for some jobs is by criteria that artificial intelligence, no matter how astute, is not going to fulfill.

Risks? In the current environment, there are a plenty of risks, which are typically cases where technology has outrun our will to regulate its social harm. Fake information, thanks to the chatbots and image makers, can now flood the zone. But this is hardly a new phenomenon, and perhaps we need to get back to a position where we do not believe everything we read, in the National Enquirer or on the internet. The quality of our sources may become once again an important consideration, as they always should have been.

Another current risk is that the automation risks chaos. For example in the financial markets, the new technologies seem to calm the markets most of the time, arbitraging with relentless precision. But when things go out of bounds, flash breakdowns can happen, very destructively. The SEC has sifted through some past events of this kind and set up regulatory guard rails. But they will probably be perpetually behind the curve. Militaries are itching to use robots instead of pilots and soldiers, and to automate killing from afar. But ultimately, control of the military comes down to social power, which comes down to people of not necessarily great intelligence. 

The biggest risk from these machines is that of security. If we have our financial markets run by machine, or our medical system run by super-knowledgeable artificial intelligences, or our military by some panopticon neural net, or even just our electrical grid run by super-computers, the problem is not that they will turn against us of their own volition, but that some hacker somewhere will turn them against us. Countless hospitals have already faced ransomware attacks. This is a real problem, growing as machines become more capable and indispensable. If and when we make artificial people, we will need the same kind of surveillance and social control mechanisms over them that we do over everyone else, but with the added option of changing their programming. Again, powerful intelligences made for military purposes to kill our enemies are, by the reflexive property of all technology, prime targets for being turned against us. So just as we have locked up our nuclear weapons and managed to not have them fall into enemy hands (so far), similar safeguards would need to be put on similar powers arising from these newer technologies.

We may have been misled by the many AI and super-beings of science fiction, Nietzsche's Übermensch, and similar archetypes. The point of Nietzsche's construction is moral, not intellectual or physical- a person who has thrown off all the moral boundaries of civilization, expecially Christian civilization. But that is a phantasm. The point of most societies is to allow the weak to band together to control the strong and malevolent. A society where the strong band together to enslave the weak.. well, that is surely a nightmare, and more unrealistic the more concentrated the power. We must simply hope that, given the ample time we have before truly comprehensive and superior artificial intelligent beings exist, we have exercised sufficient care in their construction, and in the health of our political institutions, to control them as we have many other potentially malevolent agents.

• AI in chemistry.
• AI to recognize cells in images.
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali becomes Christian. "I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable."
• The racism runs very deep.
• An appreciation of Stephen J. Gould.
• Forced arbitration against customers and employees is OK, but fines against frauds... not so much?
• Oil production still going up.

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.

America as Hegemon

The imperial track record is not good, but the hegemonic track record isn't all that bad.

I was recently visiting the USS Hornet, a WW2-era aircraft carrier now turned into a museum on San Francisco bay. Soon after, it was Fleet Week, when the US navy pays a visit to the Bay Area in force, capped by a Blue Angels air show. An appalling display of naked militarism, granted. But also an occasion to reflect on our world-wide empire, the nature of American power, the competence of our military, and the state of things internationally.

It was a little weird, seeing decades-old technology swooping up and down the bay, which has been, beneath this benevolent protection, so restlessly advancing the technological frontier in totally different directions- computers, phones, applications, streaming, social media. Which trends are more important for America's place in the world? Which technologies rule? What are we doing with all this military hardware? I tend to have pretty conservative views on all this, that the US is right to stick with the post-WW2 consensus that our military should be as strong as possible, and partner with like-minded countries around the world to advance the vision of that era, of human rights and democracy for all. 

When we have tried to do this task directly, in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, however, it has generally turned out very badly. The Iraq war was misconceived from the start, and went downhill from there. Despite the laudible aim of sparing the Iraqi people from the continued depredations of Saddam Hussein, the lying and the incompetence at all levels made the cure far worse than the disease, with anarchy and hundreds of thousands dead. But let's write that one off as a George Bush-as-decider blunder.

The Afghanistan debacle is more painful to contemplate, in some ways, in what it says about our fundamental incompetence as an imperial power. Its rationale was straightforward, international support wide-spread, and our power there absolute in the opening acts of the takeover. Yet with all those advantages, we ended up, twenty years later, turning tail and watching our hand-built Afghan military melt away even before we left the country. The Russians had, frankly, a better record in their Imperial Afghan turn. 

It is an appalling track record, really. We evidently and thankfully do not have the advantage of ruthlessness that ancient Rome enjoyed, or modern day spoilers like Russia and Iran. But nor, apparently, do we have the advantage of friendly relations, favorable hearts & minds, and good intelligence. We were constantly led astray by "friends" with all kinds of personal vendettas and agendas. We pride ourselves in our independence from the rest of the world, and thus know little about it, which means that we go into these settings woefully unprepared, besotted by whatever ideological issue du jure is fashionable in the US. Our priorities in Afghanistan seemed to be to hold elections and educate women. But were those the right aims? And even if so, were they carried out with any kind of wisdom and sense of priorities and proper preparation?

Most concretely, our military relationship was a disaster. The US military tried to make the new Afghan military into its own image and graft onto it its own systems and capablities, creating a dependence that caused immediate failure when Afghans caught wind that we were really, actually, going to leave. This was an incredible result, especially after the US military had been responsible for "training" countless militaries all over the world for decades. 

What on earth were we doing? Similarly to the intelligence failures, the military failures came from some fundamental inability to understand the problem at hand, and work with the society as it existed. Instead of creating a sustainable, right-sized, and politically viable force, we just assumed we were the good guys and anything we did was good. There was an intrinsic tension between leaving the society as it was, thereby just funding a reboot of a Taliban-like (or northern alliance-like) force to keep the country pacified, and forcing some change, on social, political, economic, and technological levels, by changing the form of government and associated institutions. The US clearly did not invade Afghanistan to keep everything the same. But by overreaching, we essentially achieved nothing, allowing precisely the group we dethroned to come back into power, and casting the country back into its pre-invasion economic and social abyss. At least, thanks to other technological bequests of the US and the West, the Afghans now have cell phones.

So our military and other institutions do not come off well in any of their recent engagements. It is a case of losing every battle, while winning the war. For we still enjoy a hegemonic position, not thanks to our incompetent and technology-bedazzled military, but thanks to our friends, with whom we still lead the world. The core groups of the anglophone countries, NATO, and the East Asian alliances with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan remain the core of the developed world, enjoying peaceful relations, democracy, and prosperous economies. China is advancing mightily to displace that grouping, but can not do so alone, and has little hope of doing so with streadfast friends like Russia and North Korea by its side.

Tiers of development. Blue is the developed world, yellow the middle-tier (developing), and red, the lower tiers of development (desperately developing, one might say).

The advantages of joining this developed core are so evident, that one wonders why it is under threat, both from the spoiler countries like Russia, and from endogenous authoritarians in the US, Poland, Hungary, India, and elsewhere. Two decades ago, we were looking at the end of history, when a futuristic society of peace and contentment would inherit the post-cold war earth, Russia would join NATO, and we would live happily ever after. But democracy is a cultural pattern that not everyone can easily understand, especially people who run (or want to run) undemocratic countries. As our framers understood so well, sovereign power is dangerous, and needs to be diluted among publicly competing branches, candidates, officers, and voters for it to be durably controlled, a bit like an atomic chain reaction. It takes wisdom and humility to figure that out and abide by such fundamental (constitutional) rules. 

It is tempting to take that power directly in hand, to satisfy a burning desire to "do something". In the US, a Republican minority has progressively lost its commitment to popular rule and the viability of contemporary governmental institutions. This is, incidentally, only possible because of their special relationship with sources of money and of media influence, without which they would have little popular purchase. In China, the communist party figured that, despite its own history of ravaging its country, it had developed a stable enough system of governance, and had obtained implicit popular support ... reflecting either brainwashing or acquiescence ... that it did not need actual elections or Western-style divided government. And in Russia, the bitterness of its descent into kleptocracy, under the poisoned banner of "capitalism", combined with various snubs from the West and general historical and cultural distance, rendered the idea of becoming a Western country too much to bear.

Each authoritarian system has, like an unhappy family, its own reasons, while the happy families of the West seem to, think along similar lines almost involuntarily, at least until some authoritarian mountebank comes along to solve all our problems by doing away with our safeguards. We are in a grand race to find out which systems are more stable. Those that rely on one person, such as the aging Vladimir Putin, for their decisions, or those that rely on popular will and a controlling set of institutions. The lessons of history could not be more stark, telling us that the former is the bigger crapshoot. Sometimes it turns out well, but more often not. That is why liberalism and deliberative democracy developed in the first place.

There remains a great deal of middle ground around the world. The muslim countries, for example, form a middle tier of populous and developing countries comprising, between Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf states and others, well over a billion people. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't help our relations there, but on the other hand, China is hardly making itself loved either, with its extermination campaign in Xinjiang. The cultural patterns of the Islamic world make it a particularly hard sell for Western democracy vs authoritariansim. Thus the brief Arab Spring came to a painful and inglorious end, mostly in whimpers, sometimes in horror. The liberatlization process took a long time in the West as well, measured perhaps from the French revolution, through the revolutions of 1848, culminating the aftermath of World War 2, with developmental delays in the Eastern European deep freeze. Ideas and new social patterns take a long time to take root, even when the templates (Switzerland, the US, ancient Greece) are at hand.

The American hegemony is little more than an agreement among like-minded and friendly nations to maintain their democratic systems, their prosperous (if environmentally rapacious and unsustainable) economies, and to largely offload their military responsibilities on the US. Whether those responsibilities have been well-stewarded is certainly doubtful. But up to this point, the agreement has been highly successful, mostly because the US has been a willing, stable, and vigorous anchor. Can the EU take our place? It is conceivable, but the EU is structurally less decisive. Bodies like the UN or the G20 are even less capable, in any executive sense. So, until we come up with something better, with a hot war against Russia and a cold one developing against China, and while other cultures are slowly chewing over their various problems with authoritarianism, it is critical that the US remain that anchor for the democratic developed world.

• What are the rules, anyhow?
• Bad intelligence.
• History is important to authoritarians, at least.
• Argentina is in the throes of inflation.
• The totalitarian speakership is bad for democracy, as well as being unworkable with thin majorities.