A decade ago, I joined a small mélange of folks trying to revive interest in Adam Smith the enlightenment thinker and fierce opponent of feudalism and aristocratism, whose best-known work in 1776 accompanied the US Revolution. This should not have been necessary, as Smith made repeatedly clear that the truest enemies of fair markets were always cheaters at the top, always (across 6000 years and all continents) conniving to rob hardworking competitors in the middle, in order to favor their own inheritance-brat sons.
(Soviet nomenklatura ‘commissars’ and their unmasked Putin versions were no exceptions.)
By that light – as even F. Hayek said – maximizing the number of skilled, confident competitors absolutely requires mass education/health/nutrition and rights for poor children, lest their diverse talent be wasted, instead of surging happily into creative markets. In other words, today Smith would be a 'liberal' in both the old and the new senses of the label.
Lately, Smith has won a bit of a revival, as seen here: The Betrayal of Adam Smith by K. Phillips-Fein:
“Smith had a deep and abiding dislike for nobility, aristocracy, and the leisured rich. In his view, these groups influenced state policy in ways that betrayed the larger interest. As historian Robert Heilbroner has proposed, material productivity was important to Smith because it could occasion “that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.” For Smith, the “butcher, the brewer” and “the baker” were the people who mattered.”
Well worth reading! Though my own insights into Smith still have some freshness. ‘Adam Smith - Liberals, you must reclaim him!’
== Roots of autocratic lying ==
Let me start this section with some paragraphs from 'Arresting Our ‘Flight From Reality’ by Bard College Prof. Roger Berkowitz. “Because an ideology “looks upon all factuality as fabricated, it no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood.”
“In 1949, when Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) went to Germany as part of the New York-based Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, she was struck by the way the Germans showed an “at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.” This “escape from reality,” as Arendt named it, meant that the reality of the Holocaust and the death factories was spoken of as a hypothetical. And when the truth of the Holocaust was admitted, it was diminished: “The Germans did only what others are capable of doing.”
“The Germans, at times, simply denied the facts of what had happened. One woman told Arendt that the “Russians had begun the war with an attack on Danzig.” What Arendt encountered was a “kind of gentleman’s agreement by which everyone has a right to his ignorance under the pretext that everyone has a right to his opinion.” The underlying assumption for such a right is the “tacit assumption that opinions really do not matter.” Opinions are just that, mere opinions. And facts, once they are reduced to opinions, also don’t matter. Taken together, this led to a “flight from reality.”
“The focus of Arendt’s lifelong engagement with the human flight from reality was her encounter with ideologies, specifically Nazism and Bolshevism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism and other texts (especially her essay, On the Nature of Totalitarianism), Arendt defines an ideology as a system that seeks to explain “all the mysteries of life and the world” according to one idea.”
Of course these passages are redolent today, as some on the far-left and nearly the entire American right strenuously denounce any recourse to factual validation or falsification. Their narratives - or ideologies - are paramount, over-ruling mere objective reality. Indeed, to that fringe left and entirely-mad right, the most-hated common foe are the nerds of fact professions, especially science.
The first half of this article is so perfectly on target and diagnostic of the same flaw in human nature that I often point-to - our propensity for self-satisfying delusion, (a flaw that is also a taproot to our greatest gifts, like art and love). Ideologies, especially, can be ecstatically masturbatory, simplifying all of those who disagree into mistakes, to be corrected with erasure.
I concur, while adding that another (or overlapping) common element is romanticism. Nazism, Stalinism, the American Confederacy (in all of its manifestations) were all romantic movements (Mark Twain blamed the Civil War on the novels of Sir Walter Scott.) We see many common features in the works of Tolkien and George Lucas, as innately superior beings are elegantly admirable (and pretty) while opposing orcs or robots or clone soldiers or masked storm troopers can be mowed down without qualm, as none of them have faces or mothers.
== We are experimental exceptions to the rule ==
I go into this in Vivid Tomorrows. And oh sure, I have earned most of my income by penning tales that have strong romantic elements! I write such passages mostly at night, when the wind rustles tree branches and I feel thrumming echoes of the caves.
Still, I know what kind of civilization made me and gave me everything I have. I have always tried to push the notion that romanticism has no business - after 6000 years of calamities - getting involved in the daytime pursuits of politics, policy, science, justice and negotiation based on pragmatically verifiable facts.
Alas, the second half of Berkowitz's essay dives into Arendt’s dyspeptic growl at modernity and science accusing them of the same ideology-driven delusion as Marxism! An assertion that I deem easily refuted. If any of you do read the Arendt essay - it was not ‘reconciliation’ that defeated Nazis or Leninist romantics or the many phases of confederatism. It was a spirit of courage to face the ‘loneliness’ that she describes as the cost of escaping romanticism. Courage in alliance with different and varied others, whose very differences contribute to a healthy and wholesome tribe/nation/humanity.
A courage that westerners don't like to gather, unless hard-pressed! But that they showed at Cowpens and Kings Mountain and Gettysburg and Midway and in alliances that stabilized the recent 80 years of the American pax into the least violent and most prosperous of the last 60 centuries. A courage and unity - in the face of blatant resurgence by neo-feudalist neo-Nazis attacking Ukraine and the entire Enlightenment Experiment, as we speak.
So no, Hannah. We are not all so terrified, all the time, that we must clutch demonizing ideologies. There are other emotions, like courage, patience and humor. And curiosity, God's second greatest gift, just after love.
And yes, an appreciation of facts and willingness to change our contingent models of the world (despite Plato’s yammers about the hopelessness of that wondrous pursuit.)
Putting aside the fact that - despite my respect for Hannah Arendt - I feel no need to heed desperately nasty and insane "insights" by either Nietzsche or Hegel - where I chiefly disagree with Arendt is over her outright dismissal of human provability.
Sure, I do not take seriously today's pathetic immortality fetishists... or nutters who think they can promote themselves - via miraculous technology - to godhood. On the other hand, I do recognize that we stand on the shoulders of generations who struggled to make us better than them…
… and we are! Better than them. Each generation of Americans - for example - has struggled over demands that we expand our horizons of inclusion. And slowly - (far too grindingly slowly) - we have done so, in too-small increments, but still ratcheting forward, each generation. And science, disproving ten thousand folk assumptions, played a major role in that.
== Guy who gets it ==
Swinging to another article you might want to look at...
In Defense of Democratic Capitalism: From the Financial Times (possible paywall), Martin Wolf offered a cogent essay that makes my own point - that our struggles today are not about ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ per se, but about rediscovering the careful navigation achieved by the Rooseveltean Compact, which led to the greatest era of hope and progress and (relative) peace in all of human history. A compact whose spectacular successes – greater than ALL feudal or Marxist regimes put together, put an onus - a burden of proof - on all those now raging against it, whether ‘left’ or ‘right.’
In “Defence of democratic capitalism,” Wolf’s interesting "thesis is that it is impossible to sustain a universal suffrage democracy with a market economy if the former does not appear open to the influence — and the latter does not serve the interests — of the people at large. This, in turn, demands a political response rooted not in the destructive politics of identity, but of welfare for all citizens — that is, a commitment to economic opportunity and basic security for all."
Or as I put it - paraphrasing Adam Smith and even Hayek - we need our competitive institutions of democracy, markets and so-on to be positive-sum across an effectively level playing field.
Martin Wolf continues: "Building on FDR himself, domestic policy goals should be rising, widely shared and sustainable standards of living, good jobs for those who can work, equality of opportunity, security for those who need it and ending “special privileges” for the few."
Amen, Though it's hard to achieve, given that so much power has, the last few decades, flowed into the hands of a world oligarchy of what the author calls "rentier" lords (after Adam Smith). Especially since that caste has proved - relentlessly and consistently - to be far less intelligent - or even sapient - than their sycophant flatterers keep telling them they are.
(Inability to perceive the dangerous poison of sycophancy is clear in fools who yowl stuff like: "I no longer believe democracy is compatible with freedom." Whatever, Gilgamesh.)
Even a scintilla of understanding would awaken them to the savvy shown in the 1930s by old Joe Kennedy, who backed the Rooseveltean reforms, saying that he'd rather half his wealth were taken to uplift a contented middle class, 'than lose it all to revolution.'
"Growth remains essential. So does the welfare state, which makes economic as well as social sense. It can insure risks the private sector will not insure. Properly designed, it can offer everybody a leg up and so promote equality of opportunity."
What the author doesn't mention is that the most fundamental ethos and logic of market competition - as propounded by Smith and even by conservative doyens like Friedrich Hayek - is that markets work best with the largest number of skilled, knowledgeable, empowered and confident competitors. And hence, any liberal 'program' that helps convert poor children into skilled, knowledgeable, empowered and confident competitors is utterly justified and even required, in purely Smithian market terms.
Those who oppose even that kind of social intervention are not pushing for creative markets.
They are reaching desperately for the same tired pattern of 6000 years. Good luck with those harems, guys. Only get to know the word "tumbrel."
== More on (not moron) Karl Marx ==
Final essay to appraise here, I promise.
My earlier riff comparing Isaac Asimov’s Hari Seldon to Isaac’s influences – Gibbon, Toynbee, Marx, Spengler and so on, led to a lot of discussion. See “Isaac Asimov, Karl Marx & the Hari Seldon Paradox.”
And as always happens nowadays, folks popped up some of the most-wrongheaded and just plain wrong popular notions. Especially about Marx. Let me therefor try to encapsulate a hugely simplified distillation re Marx:
1) First, any citing of Hegelian 'dialectic' automatically knocks anyone down five pegs. Hegel was a flaming horror, detestable and disprovable on any level. Fortunately for Marx, his lip service to Hegel was just a sop to German philosophy-mystics. It was aside from his chief focus on the historic evolution of power and capital.
2) Marx was a Historiographer. And by far his greatest contributions regarded advancing from Smith and Ricardo the notions of capital formation that he saw going on the the previous 300 years.
At some level his description of human advancement through phases dependent upon technological level and society's capital (roads, factories, etc) was simply and obviously true. From tribal societies to feudal to monarchy allied with tradesmen, to bourgeois revolution, to industrial capitalism, it was clear to even his opponents that Karl was onto something with his models of past development.
As was his notion that capitalists played an important role by retaining much of what workers created, in order to invest it into new capital. Hence the word capitalist.
And so the first surprise. True Marxists believe capitalists have a big historical role to play and are not inherently evil! That is, until their final phase, when wealth hierarchy peaks under a narrow clade of uber lords, á la Ayn Rand. Marx and his fans thought they saw that phase rapidly approaching, just ahead, in the giant steel mills and smoking railroads of the last 19th Century. But - like predictions of the Second Coming - that forecast proved to be a mug's game! It turned out a lot more 'capital' needed to be built... or 'formed'... than just steel mills and railroads.
3) Alas, Marx also tried to systematize that insight (capitalists steal some from workers in order to use profits to make capital) with an insanely dumb notion called the Labor Theory of Value. Still, in the most general sense, his appraisals of historical patterns were pretty on-target...
... that is, up until his actual present.
At which point...
4) ...at which point we see (for the millionth time) that explaining the past does not make you a prophet of things to come. In fact, there were almost zero Marxian predictions that came true! Leaving Lenin, Mao and others utterly puzzled. Till they concocted rationalizations to make themselves czars /emperors, with Marx serving as their validating prophet.
No, Marx's greatest effects were in the WEST! Where he was read as a gifted Science Fiction author spinning plausible tales of a near future that terrified enough powerful men that they decided to try staving it off with reform. And that was where, by being canceled by reform, Marx actually changed the world.
And I will eat a bug if more than a couple of you knew any of that. I say that with no rancor or smugness. No one seems to know shit, nowadays.
Anyway, if you actually read all the way here, maybe you actually are an exception. Sorry about that. Tired from a recent airplane trip....
And finally...
"It's easy to be right about what's wrong, while being wrong about what would be right." - attributed (aprocyphally?) to Karl Popper.
Popper was talking specifically about Marx, but also more generally about those who denounce bad things (e.g. repression or prejudice or poverty), only to loudly prescribe tactics and methods that are at-best futile or counterproductive ...
...and all-too often replicate the denounced crimes! It's one of Santayana's 'repeated mistakes of history' ...
...only, again alas, hardly anyone knows any history, anymore.
140 comments:
Dr. Brin,
Your description of Marx is actually very similar to what I got from a class on the history of the 20th Century, way back in 1990 or '91, if I remember correctly I can't even remember the professor's name after all these years). It was a pretty eye-opening class, but even then I could see how the culture and times in which the otherwise very intelligent professor was enculturated into limited his ways of thinking. Still, great stuff.
The point being: put the barbecue sauce away. There are more people out there who think the way you do than you might guess. They aren't getting any attention in the press, the Internet, or anywhere else. Until we find a way to call them in and put them into decision-making roles, you're not likely to encounter them. The Educated Are Out There Somewhere.
PSB
Dr Brin quotes:
… "As ideologies, both Nazism and Bolshevism insist on explaining the events of the world according to theories “without further concurrence with actual experience.” The result, Arendt argues, is that such ideologies bring about an “arrogant emancipation from reality.” …
Sounds like exactly what locumranch argues for.
As to whether Popper said that, I do not know.
However, there are at least 2 documented occasions on which GK Chesterton said something quite similar, both of which I put on the quotes page for my blog. Both are from his column in the Illustrated London News in 1922 (June 3 and Oct 28):
"I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid."
"The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right."
One of my high school sociology teachers was an Iowa Socialist*, and described his days back on the farm with his Iowa Socialist father thusly...
"So, dad, what do you think of religion as an opiate of the masses?"
father and son continue shoveling manure.
"Well, son..."
Apparently the primacy of labor over capital is more apparent with a pitchfork in one's hands. Also, arguments over ideology are not confined to Paris coffee houses.
*the other had been a forward observer for artillery (MOS 13F) in Viet Nam, and held some similar views
Pappenheimer
P.S. I do agree that ideology can blind one to reality. I spent a college class arguing with a professor over whether the conflict in South Africa (this was 1982) was economic or racial in nature. I agreed that nearly all the capital was one one side, but argued that the reason that was so was racial and that racism could not be overlooked as the primary cause. Was I blind or was he?
Addendum:
I only recently realized that Steven Brust's Dragaera corpus of fantasy works is, in some part, a Trotskyist treatise on social revolution. With magic and cool swordplay.
Pappenheimer
This is a reality of burgeoning totalism today:
https://www.newsweek.com/ron-desantis-fascist-ruth-ben-ghiat-1784017?amp=1
Arendt would agree with,
“Fascism comes on cats paws”
(With an apology to felines.)
I also hold the collected works of Hannah Arendt in high esteem but, unlike our fine host, I do not reject what our host describes as Arendt’s 'dyspeptic growl' at modernity and science's own ideology-driven delusions.
Most specifically, I accept the far-reaching implications of Arendt's deconstruction of the Nazi social principle of 'Gleichschaltung' (aka, 'coordination') as it is the logical extension of what the West glowingly describes as 'Scientific Management' and/or Taylorism.
Scientific Management (aka Taylorism) is the basis of the West's Industrial Age Economic Miracle. It describes a so-called 'scientific approach' to human labor which incorporates 4 principles & 5 key elements:
It's 4 principles include 'Science, not rule of thumb. Harmony, not discord. Cooperation, not individualism' and it's 5 key elements include 'Work Study, Standardisation of tools and equipment, Scientific selection, placement and training, Development of functional foremanship, Mental revolution & the Introduction of the costing system'.
Henry Ford based his own revolutionary assembly-line manufacturing process on Taylorism (above), so it should come as no surprise to anyone that Henry Ford self-identified as both a Nazi & Anti-Semite.
It therefore follows that the Nazi principle of 'Gleichschaltung' (aka 'cooperation') is the mere banal application of American Scientific Management techniques to the German political process, giving rise to the Nazi abomination, rather than some sort of fictional, inhuman or unique social perversion that a delusional West prefers to believe.
Other than that minor quibble, I agree with most of what Dr. Brin has to say this week, although I do take exception to his attempt to 'white-wash' Joe Kennedy (who was both a Nazi & Anti-Semite) as a progressive supporter of Rooseveltean reforms.
Best
locumranch:
It therefore follows that the Nazi principle of 'Gleichschaltung' (aka 'cooperation') is the mere banal application of American Scientific Management techniques to the German political process, giving rise to the Nazi abomination,
Your recent post is not entirely off base, but I note this part in particular. When the Nazis apply the principles of assembly line production to the genocide of populations, that doesn't demonstrate the evil of assembly line production principles. The evil is the genocide, not in which particular methods are employed in that endeavor.
@Alfred Differ,
Just want you to know that your discussions of claims and recognition have fundamentally changed the way I think about political arguments. I see that when I assert a thing like "All men are created equal," I am making a claim. If I want that claim to be recognized, let alone enforced, I have to persuade others of the rightness of the claim.
When someone else asserts "Abortion is murder," he is making a claim as well. When I assert counter-claims, such as "A human only acquires civil rights upon birth," or "To the extent that abortion is homicide, it is more akin to self-defense than murder," we are asserting competing claims which have to be adjudicated by society. Our respective roles are similar to that of attorneys in a courtroom--again, we have to persuade.
An interesting note on the relationship between Ford and the Mustached Maniac: Hitler admired Ford so much that he kept a picture of Ford framed on his office wall. He also borrowed Ford's tactic of sending hired thugs out to mercilessly beat labor leaders. So much for the claim that Hitler was a socialist. Hitler got a lot of ideas from American conservatives. As soon as "The Passing of the Great Race" by Madison Grant was translated into German, Hitler got his own copy and called it his Bible. Hitler was quite impressed with the idea of Eugenics, but to him the Nordic "race" was the second best after his own, not the best as Grant contended. With a name like that, you can bet it's all about the so-called Great Replacement "Theory." Hitler and his legal team got a whole lot out of the former Confederate States, though he thought that their miscegenation laws were too extreme (too extreme for Hitler ... contemplate that one). Hitler passed the most restrictive abortion law in Europe, which remained on the books until just last year. But the influence did not only go one way. The Hitler Regime created the first "right to work" law, to sap the power of labor unions. The first of these laws - so popular in red states - in America was passed in Mississippi the very next year. Just before he swallowed a bullet, Hitler told his aids that he never wanted a war with England and the US. He admired American capitalism and wanted to emulate it in his country. His intention all along had been to go after the Godless Communists of the Soviet Union, which is why he started out by invading Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Even if they don't flock together, birds of a feather all have the same ideas. It was scapegoating supposed Communists that brought Mussolini and Franco to power, and Hitler even claimed that the Jews were a bunch of Marxists. Not the impression you get from watching old American movies about the Holocaust. The similarities between the GOP and the Hitler Regime are pretty striking.
PSB
If you want to understand Fascism, here are a few books that will increase your understanding of the Republican Party a thousandfold.
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley
This one is where I would recommend starting. It’s a very good overview, discussing both historical regimes and current trends in Fascism.
American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy by Brynn Tanehill
If you want to focus specifically on the Fascist behavior of the Trump Administration, this one is quite good. One especially good thing about it is that it works like an academic paper, with a very extensive set of footnotes, so you can look up and verify everything the author says.
Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben Ghiat
This one goes for some of the gory details that really tell you what the stakes are.
Fascism: A Warning by Madeline Albright
The author grew up in Czechoslovakia and had to leave the country when the Nazis came, then again when the Soviets came, so she’s pretty familiar with totalitarian regimes. It goes into detail about Fascist regimes around the world from the ‘90s up to the Trump Administration.
On Fascism: 12 Lessons in American History by Matthew MacWilliams
This one details the currents of Fascism that have rooted themselves deep in American culture from very early in our history, even before the word was coined.
How to Spot a Fascist by Umberto Eco
Because you have to have Umberto Eco, one of the best writers of our time, and one who grew up during the regime of Benito Mussolini.
Other books that Republicans hate, because they tell the truth:
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
This one has been banned in a number of Red states because it tells people something they don’t want to hear.
The Queen: The Forgotten Life of an American Myth by Josh Levine
The reality behind Reagan’s constant lies about so-called “welfare queens.”
The Myth of Laziness by Mel Levine
A major reality check for those who think that everyone can be blamed for their own misfortunes.
Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
This one chronicles the relationship between caveman gender ideals and the Religious Right.
American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed its People by Jarad Sexton
This one interweaves a lot of themes in terms of where this country has been going for more than a century.
The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making by Jarad Sexton
Not as good as American Rule, but a good look at America’s cave man problem from a man’s perspective.
PSB
PSB,
Your last recommendation is interesting. It has long seemed to me that fascism, dictatorship, strongman regimes of any flavor, are a result of machoism run free of restraint to an extreme.
Larry,
Cool. Be aware that individualists don't like the part where adjudication occurs, but without that step there is no clear path to a negotiated ethic.
When I assert "Taxation is Theft" I'm laying out a similar claim... that I don't fully support... but I can see some merit to it. Persuading others of the merit is an entirely different game.
------
Last note about adjudication. Sometimes it isn't possible or necessary. There are claims you can make where it really shouldn't matter to me whether I accept or reject them. In those cases, I'm inclined to ignore them which lets them stand unchallenged. In those cases, it is a mistake to treat them as supported, but some of us like to live in a black and white world.
For example, I can claim to own an acre in the caldera of Olympus Mons. I don't want the US to back my claim as that would invalidate a particular treaty I think is partially useful, but I also don't want them to say my claim is illegal or intervene in a sale of my claim. Do you care? Does it matter? If I sell my claim to someone and then pay taxes on my gains, is that okay?
In a black and white world, claims relate to adjudications in a one-to-one fashion. I don't think they should.
Darrell,
That's exactly why I think the world would be a happier place without men. Women could reproduce by parthenogenesis, like the whiptails, and there would be no more unwanted children. But then, toxic femininity isn't a whole lot better. Perhaps without a world full of "manly" men, women would feel less pressure to be so "womanly"?
PSB
PSB,
Yeah, doing away with men is probably a tad to extreme :). I doubt there is any quick or sure remedy. We, humans generally, have improved, slowly, over the eons. More rapidly in recent centuries. But still a long way to go.
"too" even.
Here's an interesting (although not peer reviewed) survey: 1 in 8 graduating seniors in Florida won't attend college in Florida because they disagree with DeSantis' educational policies.
https://www.intelligent.com/1-in-8-incoming-freshman-wont-attend-florida-state-school-due-to-desantis-policies/
The Brain Drain may have gone to the state level.
Re: doing away with men
Would a woman have created Tesla and SpaceX and made them work?
Jordan Peterson talks a lot about the Pareto distribution and gender.
I'm a fanboy of neither Musk nor Peterson, just a fan of diversity.
From what I understand, a woman is making SpaceX work right now, in spite of the Muskox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
Regarding a world without men, this thoughtful comic series gives the concept a good working over
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y:_The_Last_Man
It suggests that even without men in the equation, humans can mess each other up pretty well. Males just add that extra genocidal kick.
Pappenheimer
"Gleichschaltung" was one of the policies and terms that, while on the surface achieving a goal (total control of the institutions by the Nazis) also where designed to put various factions and persons at each others throats. The Party Leadership vs. the SS/Gestapo leadership vs. the Military and so on. Thus, Hitler himself was relatively safe from a coup, even with the pathetic 20th of July.
(Putin seems to have copied this strategy - It's Prighozin vs. Shoigu vs. Kadyrow vs. Medvediev.)
“Yeah, doing away with men is probably a tad to extreme…”
In Glory Season they are 1/8th of the population and the feminist founders figured that just right. Enough to be entertaining and supply some liveliness and upper body work… (and emergency backup)… but never to dominate.
While Alice Sheldon (Tiptree) was great, the best contrast of “world without me/women” Was Wylie’s early THE DISAPPEARANCE.
Locum was erudite enough to get me to skim a little, this time. And yet, almost every assertion that he hurls at us is false, in several cases to an utterly psychotic degree. There is almost no overlap between our actions/effects and those he attributes to us, and hence, there is nothing to grapple with or argue about. I truly would! If he were remotely non-hallucinatory.
Der Oger,
My go to book on this subject, Overy's "Why the Allies Won", points out that the chaos caused by divided responsibilities and dueling ministries are a good part of why the 3rd Reich had a limited shelf life. Even if it had managed to survive a bit longer, it's doubtful that Hitler would have designated a successor for fear of sparking more plots and assassination attempts. (Even Alexander managed to leave an heir.) Hoping it pans out just as well for Putin and whatever (insert plural noun here) of sycophantic thugs* he leaves behind.
I do wonder how men who are obviously unmacho manage to get to the tops of these fascist piles. Mass hypnosis?
*no disrespect to the actual Thuggee, of course...who may not have ever existed in the form contemporary British chroniclers portrayed
Pappenheimer
Darrell E:
Yeah, doing away with men is probably a tad to extreme :).
Ya think?
Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Pappenheimer:
Regarding a world without men, this thoughtful comic series gives the concept a good working over
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y:_The_Last_Man
That was one of my favorite comics in the early aught-aughts. Actually, I would recommend anything by that comic's author, Brian K. Vaughan. Including, but not limited to Ex-Machina and Saga.
Pappenheimer:
I do wonder how men who are obviously unmacho manage to get to the tops of these fascist piles. Mass hypnosis?
My go-to explanation is "Mule powers." But a more plausible one might be something along the lines of "The Emperor's New Clothes." That is, everyone begins to see Putin without a shirt as a masculine archetype because who will date to tell him otherwise? And who will dare to tell each other otherwise?
I said:
I would recommend anything by that comic's author, Brian K. Vaughan. Including, but not limited to Ex-Machina and Saga.
I forgot to also mention Runaways, which was perfect for my then-young daughter a decade or so ago. The premise is that a bunch of suburban kids whose families hang out together realize that all of their parents really are evil supervillains. Hard to imagine a better metaphor for teenagerhood.
Oops. When I talked about Taylorism & Scientific Management, I listed only 3 of its 4 principles and I omitted perhaps the most important principle that our fine host Dr. Brin references often & mistakenly attributes to liberalism:
Taylorism's fourth & most important principle is about the 'Development of each and every person to his/her greatest efficiency'.
Said Dr. Brin, I do not need 'liberal thought' to make me favor equality of opportunity (while opposing artificial equalizing of circumstance). All I need is the blatantly obvious fact that we were wasting staggering amounts of human creative potential when people were repressed because of presumptions having to do with race and gender and class. The fantastic success of pragmatic 'liberalism' at spurring us to take on these devils is so overwhelmingly more important than any other event of the last century that the burden of proof is on anyone who disses 'liberals.'
Unfortunately, Taylorism (aka Scientific Management) has more to do with the exploitation of human capital for the benefit of the state than either human liberty or liberalism.
In fact, the whole 'equality of opportunity' and 'the development of everyone to their fullest potential (efficiency)' trope is merely fascism by another name, designed to strengthen the collective at the expense of increased individual sacrifice.
Best
____
Why not a world without women?
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/mar/08/scientists-create-mice-with-two-fathers-after-making-eggs-from-male-cells
Though horrible, A Bertram Chandler's 'Spartan Planet' is only about 10 years away from becoming technically feasible. Plus 'Cherry 2000' is coming soon, too.
Larry,
Shout out to "Paper Girls", too. (Not the TVization, which was a good try but not up to par).
As an aside and a hopeful sign for military intelligence, the US Navy is going to be moving away from issuing "aquacamo" uniforms, which serve no useful military purpose and are actually detrimental to the survival of swabbies overboard (who wants to be disguised as a patch of ocean when what you need is rescue?)
Pappenheimer
Skimmed association of me with this "Taylorism" bullshit is proof enough the guy is jibbering-caper rabid loony.
But seriously, a member of an anti-gay 'manly' cult ALSO fantacizes about a world without women? I mean, I get the trauma-hostility thing. But...
locumranch,
There is a middle ground between chaos and design where order emerges from the collective intentions of everyone but the designs of no one.
Taylor was a designer of efficient order. He assumed the existence of a metric function dependent on a relatively small set of independent variables. Vary one while holding others as constant as possible and measure the fitness metric. Repeat many times and one can learn where the local maxima in the function are.
The Liberal Order makes no assumption about the measurability of the metric, but IS inclined to accept it's existence with one huge qualifier. The set of independent variables is monstrously huge.
From here our community divides on the belief in the existence of useful aggregates that hide the minutia. For example [Pressure, Volume, and Temperature] are aggregates that suffice when combined in thermodynamics to describe a lot of gases and their behaviors without having to deal with the bazillions of atoms and the molecules they form. We wind up with a few different state functions (the root of any good metric) and everyone happily goes about making their predictions... that mostly work. Turns out, though, that's not quite good enough if you want to make predictions about the specific heat of a gas. One winds up with no explanation of why some gases work like others while a bunch of other ones work different.
------
What our host is doing when he quotes Hayek has nothing to do with designed order. However, what Hayek and his followers have noticed is that certain attempts to design are obvious limitations whether or not one uses aggregates. A community that intentionally avoids educating girls has half the human capital of one that does educate them. Pretty obvious, no? So removal of rules that create inefficiencies is reasonable, no?
In trying for that, though, are we designing society? No. We are trying to undo a design. Taylor never enters the picture because we don't have a metric function and often have no good predictions to make except the obvious one which goes... "Surely this would be better!" One can argue that we are wrong about that, but in trying one is defending a designed order for our communities. It CAN be done, but one has to reach back into history and explain why a rule is in place. What's its function?
"a rule is in place. What's its function?"
For stone and bronze age societies, the function of a lot of rules seemed to be "maximize the number of belligerent armed males"
For iron age societies onwards, it gets a little more complex. Even back in the Bronze age, there were oddities like the Sarmatians, who definitely buried some of their women with full warrior kit. It's also quite possible for a rule to have more than one function, or to be a balance between two competing functions - you may wind up reducing meaning too far. (Sorry, history guy talking who's talked to too many sociologists). Sometimes rules can be vestigial and kept simply because the society is successful and, being like most nonmodern societies conservative, is wary of changing itself for no perceived reward.
My 2 sestertii.
Pappenheimer
@Pappenheimer:
I do wonder how men who are obviously unmacho manage to get to the tops of these fascist piles. Mass hypnosis?
I am quite fond of the Toxic Triangle Model, though IIRC, the prime example for toxic leadership was Cuba under Fidel Castro, not Hitler & Germany. I found it easily applicable to other institutions, like companies, hospitals and even schools.
ADD: So, yes, it helps to have Mule powers, but those toxic, destructive leaders seldom rise without a fertile grounds of susceptible followers and conductive environments.
Pappenheimer,
My suspicion is that most of the rules we live by (unwritten ones vastly outnumber written one) derive from some pre-history cause that we've either forgotten or never understood in the first place.
For example, one doesn't need germ theory to realize there is danger in drinking water downstream from a latrine. The rule that enables us to avoid cholera, though, can take many forms. Only the part about not drinking the water is truly necessary, but adding a dash of divine punishment helps enforce it.
------
For conservatives, I'm willing to entertain the notion that a rule has a purpose even when I don't know it. I do that because I don't know it for an awful lot of the rules by which I live.
For progressives, I'm willing to entertain bending and breaking a few rules for which I cannot fathom why they exist. I ask only that we not break too many of them at once let alone all of them. Our ancestors were ignorant of many things, but they found ways to survive by trial and error. I'd rather not relive all their horrors at the same time, but I'll tolerate a risk of reliving a couple at a time because we might find a way to beat them. They weren't stupid, but we know a whole lot more now than they could imagine being possible short of being divine.
Alfred Differ said...
"Our ancestors were ignorant of many things, but they found ways to survive by trial and error. I'd rather not relive all their horrors at the same time, but I'll tolerate a risk of reliving a couple at a time because we might find a way to beat them. They weren't stupid, but we know a whole lot more now than they could imagine being possible short of being divine."
I agree, caution is warranted. But not too much. Old rules based on ignorance are often a cause of all sorts of knock on damages. In any case it seems me that the real problem isn't our abilities to figure out how to change things for the better. The real problem is that politics is necessary to do these sorts of things and in politics there are always many that are primarily motivated by opportunities to increase personal power and wealth and could not care less about doing things to improve their society for all.
Not to be That Chesterton Guy, but he's got a great bit about rules we don't understand. He thinks, as a 19th - early 20th century somewhat conservative guy (though not in all ways), that we shouldn't change rules until we understand them:
"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
-- GK Chesterton, The Thing, London: Sheed & Ward, 1929-Jan-01. The relevant portion here is the opening paragraphs of Chapter 4, “The Drift from Domesticity”.
Weekend Editor:
Not to be That Chesterton Guy,...
Why not? We've already got That Asmiov Guy, That Hayek Guy, and That Dave Sim Guy. Join the club. :)
If we don't change them until we understand them, we won't understand them. At best we will rationalize them.
Darrel E,
The real problem is that politics is necessary to do these sorts of things...
There is a wonderful little line in Evita as the Peron's climb to power that discusses the inconvenience of politics. Wonderfully chilling line.
Ask yourself what other way would you have it done that can tolerate occasionally having people you strongly dislike running it now and then. Absent some form of power sharing, we tend to pull knives on each other.
Larry Hart: That Asmiov Guy
If you're looking at me, the dyslexic spelling is very appropriate.
scidata:
If you're looking at me, the dyslexic spelling is very appropriate.
AAAUGH! I blame Windows. Seriously. I used to be a much better typist, but lately it seems like the keystrokes don't necessarily get to the page in the same order that I'm typing them.
Darrell,
You think doing away with the male half of the human species is a tad too extreme? Yep, so do I. In my own defense I can only say that this winter has been very hard on my endocrine condition (malfunctioning pineal gland), and that if I had the ability to do it, it would not be a pogrom. Just tailor a retrovirus to permanently deactivate human spermatogonia. Most guys only have kids by accident anyway, so most kids only really have one attentive parent to begin with.
Progress by the eon is not going to save the species from extinction once it hits a time of extremely rapid change. The rule is adapt or die (which is why conservatism is a suicide pact), but if change happens faster than the species can adapt, they're history, like 99% of all species that have ever lived on this planet. The one hope is that humans have been able to come up with technological solutions, although every solution causes other problems. In Elizabeth Bear's recent novels "Ancestral Night" and "Machine" she has a future when people are capable of "tuning" their own neurochemistry. That would be a huge improvement, reminiscent of what Dr. Brin did in "Existence," but there are several problems with it. For one you have to consider the forces that influence people to tune themselves in the first place, and especially how propaganda can affect them. Then there's the biochemical problem of the interconnections between neurotransmitters. Not much of anything happens in the brain that involves only one neurotransmitter, but the science isn't up to working out these relationships just yet. That's why treatments for mental disorders are pretty haphazard. You tweak one neurotransmitter, and it will have cascade effects elsewhere in the brain (and the rest of the body, since a whole lot of neurotransmitters double as blood-bourn hormones). As usual, the better option is the harder option. In the meantime, all we really have is training, but that only really encourages people who are decent human beings instinctively to stay on the path. People who are naturally inclined to be evil go to church and join the Republican Party. Instead of behaving like decent human beings, they just redefine decency to mean whatever they do, and indecency to mean whatever anyone else does.
"Glory Season" was a wonderful yarn, and I still say it needs a sequel. Most of what makes storytelling a joy for people is the characters. You naturally want to keep hearing about them after the last page is turned, but Dr. Brin doesn't seem to have pygmalioned out on this one, so it's just a pipe dream of mine. Check it out if you haven't already. It's great fun.
PSB
Larry,
"Seriously. I used to be a much better typist, but lately it seems like the keystrokes don't necessarily get to the page in the same order that I'm typing them."
- Linguists have been studying this phenomenon for decades. It's quite common as we age, so don't think it's your own failing. It's just one of the many things that makes getting old suck.
PSB
Ack, getting old doesn't really suck.
It's when you stop getting old, now that sucks! :D
PSB:
It's just one of the many things that makes getting old suck.
I used to blame my wife for my age-related failings. After all, I was never as old as I am now before I met her, and I was never as young as I used to be since I met her. The fault is obvious.
Last week I visited a bookstore I hadn't before. After complaining about the shameful lack of Brin books (as usual), I browsed Peter Watts' "Blindsight". Canadian authors are easier for me, not sure why, it's not simple patriotism. The intro is by Elizabeth Bear. Really nice style. I will definitely add her to my reading (listening) list once I catch up on OGH's stuff.
I had a summer job in the late 1970s schlepping 'dragonriders' novels around at Doubleday - drudgery. I much prefer hard SF. "Blindsight" describes an antimatter drive, reminiscent of Star Trek's Enterprise.
A.F. Rey,
When you stop getting old, it stops sucking permanently, except for the people you leave behind, for whom the suckage gets worse (presuming you don't end up caught in the Ghost of Christmas Future's narrative).
PSB
Alfred,
Why would you assume I am suggesting that politics be bypassed?
PSB,
I understood you were not serious. I was laughing with you.
" Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
Going away and 'thinking' is not the key... it is ARGUING with those who still want the fence, actually heeding their real and imagined interests and revising your argument that the fence must come down, so that your point of view has won over either a consensus or a large majority.
But it does bring up one of the fundamentals of the Western Enlightenment and especially the American wing... that too few ever discuss openly... that unless there is a specific law against an action, the act is automatically allowed. In contrast to what was standard in most societies: Unless there is specific permission granted, acts are assumed to be disallowed.
---
Sigh another brief skim. It's a pity he is utterly insane, because locum has been yammering in a very artiuculate way! Alas, it is all based upon delusional fantasies of what we believe, bearing no resemblance to anything that any of us here (certainly not me) actually believe. His masturbation to hallucinatory strawmen might be amusing, if it weren't disgusting.
A sapient person might attempt to paraphrase or ask "IS this what you believe?" And then adapt to the answer. Alas, like GPT, there is a polysyllabic voice there... but no mind.
Darrell,
I kind of figured that. One of the consequences of my endocrine disorder is a tendency to be terrified of being misunderstood, though, so I have a real problem with over-explaining. Supposedly my pineal gland went off-line about the time I was nine, but they only diagnosed it when I was 48, so I'm sure the condition pretty well shaped my personality permanently. Nothing to do but live with it, and not wish it on anyone else.
On that cheery thought ...
PSB
Dr. Brin,
With your publishing history, couldn't you write a non-fiction along the lines of a Complete Idiot's Guide to Marxism to counter the propaganda on both sides of the political fence? I think that would be a great service to the current century. Marx needs to be buried for good.
PSB
scidata:
Canadian authors are easier for me, not sure why, it's not simple patriotism.
Our American spelling probably throws you. :)
Larry Hart: Our American spelling probably throws you.
From what I've seen, most Canadian novels use American spelling (10X bigger market). We blend in quite well. Many of us can even describe and navigate highways in SoCal and the Rust Belt. Although the toll booths still trip us up. The reverse is often true too. I had to laugh when JB said to parliament last week, "I like your sports teams. Except the Leafs."
Since most progressives seem unable to grasp the implications of Taylor's 4th principle, aka 'the development of everyone to their fullest potential and efficiency', I'll offer up a personal example about how the trainee doctor was once expected to achieve 'maximum efficiency'.
The average work week of a trainee doctor in my cohort was 130 hours/week -- the typical 7-day week only lasts 168 hours -- and we were expected to start our shifts early, stay late, and remain alert, attentive & well groomed for the duration of our shifts.
We initially accepted these conditions because we were young, idealistic & eager to please but, soon enough, we all ran into our all-too-human limitations. Some of us complained, bent or broke, but we were all told to 'buck up' and 'try harder'.
Our marginally older peers told us how 'good we had it' as they had been given amphetamine prescriptions in order to maximize their efficiency during their less humane & more rigorous 150+ hour trainee work weeks (which was a technique pioneered by the Nazis, btw, for which the amphetamine user pays a terrible price).
Luckily, our older peers meant well & saved us from that particular 'efficiency trap', and they're mostly dead now.
Yet, even without the use of toxic stimulants & a mere 130 hour work week, my medical cohort still suffered disrupted sleep patterns, major health issues & a 10 year decrease in life expectancy when compared to the norm.
And, that's why my mind goes to a dark place when I hear someone talk about OPTIMIZING human efficiency and creative potential through the use of chemical, genetic or technical enhancements.
Best
_____
@Pappenheimer:
Drugs have always played a huge role in armed conflict. The Persians used hashish; the Nazis invented amphetamines; the US armed forces exploit modafinil, steroids & opiates; and the Ukrainians now consume large amounts of cocaine (per UN report).
25% of US females are on prescribed head meds and, most likely, the majority of CB participants now consume daily mood altering substances just to face the day. What chemicals do you use?
"Going away and 'thinking' is not the key... it is ARGUING with those who still want the fence, actually heeding their real and imagined interests and revising your argument that the fence must come down, so that your point of view has won over either a consensus or a large majority."
Fair enough, I guess.
You have to keep in mind Chesterton was a centrist in 19th century Britain, which codes as conservative and kind of authoritarian today. That's why the "I may allow you to destroy it" always gets my goat: he assumes he is the gatekeeper who gets to decide. A modern person would put it differently, perhaps along the lines of: "The world is really complicated, so it's best to understand how things interact and not make changes without thought." Or: "Listen to your opponents, so long as the make sense."
Primo Levi had some similar thoughts, expressing almost the opposite point of view (and in other ways the same). When working as a chemist for a varnish manufacturer, he saw them inexplicably throw an onion into the tank of varnish mix. After long hard work, he established that in the old days, this was a thermometer: if the onion fried, the varnish was hot enough. So nowadays, they should just use a thermometer and skip the onion.
On the other hand, when he suggested a modification to deal with a bad batch of feedstock, they KEPT DOING that modification even after the bad batch was gone.
Tradition is sometimes useful, and sometimes a trap.
I wrote a little essay comparing them: "Mysterious Fences and Varnished Onions".
WHICH Marx should be buried? Not the younger one who (with sometimes excess zeal) extended our awareness of historical trends in class and capital formation.
The older guru? Whose predictions never once came true but who scared the West into Rooseveltean reforms that used social justice to mobilize and spur the Enlightenment in ways KM never imagined possible? (In other words the sci fi author?) That was an ironic service, but a very real one. And perhaps we might use him yet again to frighten some of the moguls into backing a restoration of the FDR-ian social compact.
---
This time I just glanced at one sentence: "And, that's why my mind goes to a dark place when I hear someone talk about OPTIMIZING human efficiency and creative potential through the use of chemical, genetic or technical enhancements."
Oh, you ARE in a dark place. And I imagine you can't help that. What you CHOOSE NOT to help is your execrable dishonesty attributing to us beliefs that are only in your own sick mind and that do not overlap with our own in any way. And your disgusting public masturbation to those strawman fantasies.
I've said it too many times. So I'll stop even skimming, now. The fellow has completely veered around the bend into lunacy and his aim is only to hurl polysyllabic poo-poo.
Where does locum get the idea that Gleichschaltung means co-operation? It means synchronization.
reason:
Where does locum get the idea that Gleichschaltung means co-operation? It means synchronization.
Probably an over-literal reading of "co operating" could be construed as "synchronizing.
* * *
locumranch:
and, most likely, the majority of CB participants now consume daily mood altering substances just to face the day. What chemicals do you use?
Heh. I suspect this group in particular needs less chemical mood-altering than the average population. At least the average American population.
But since you asked, no, despite being on some meds for diabetes, I require no mood-altering drugs to face the day. It helps to be living the dream that you believe to be illusory, which involves an actually-loving wife and an enjoyably-tolerable job. But ever since teen-age, comic books have served as my drug of choice. They give me everything that drugs give others without wrecking the body. And when I'm done reading it, the comic book is still there.
Tea and chocolate are my binge choices. (I'm tempted to add ether, but that would be fibbing ;-)
Ukrainians on coke? What are the Ruskies on? The zombie hordes of the Wagner forces, in particular.*
Bury Marx? Seems to me a plot should be prepared for supply-side Strauss first.
* The Ukrainians have been seriously wondering but there seems to be nothing involved with the perpetual suicidal storming tactics, beyond sheer bloody mindedness (inspired by...?)
Weekend Editor, 6:29 PM:
The way I put it is that "they're better diagnosticians than therapists".
If Loc was asking me directly, I consumed large amounts of caffeine during my Air Force days due to a rotating shift schedule - I still have the habit. Diet coke was and is the delivery system of choice. Most weatherfolk, military or civilian, develop a serious coffee habit - much like medical personnel, I suspect. our jobs' subjects do not coincide with a 9-5 schedule.
I did not have a combat MOS, though.
Pappenheimer
Pappenheimer:
I consumed large amounts of caffeine during my Air Force days due to a rotating shift schedule - I still have the habit.
But that's to keep awake for long hours, not for escape from reality.
Diet coke was and is the delivery system of choice.
I worked evening shift for a small software start-up in the mid 1980s. That was when Jolt Cola was a thing, and oh boy did we ever binge on that stuff. Fond memories.
I love coffee and tea. Unfortunately caffeine isn't good for me so I have to stick to decaf now (which limits my options).
A full glass of wine has me somewhere between tiddly and asleep, so I rarely drink. Haven't found a dealcoholized wine I like.
Mood-altering substances? Do dogs and grandniblings count?
I never even got into drinking coffee. When I was a kid I saw all the media portrayals of people who couldn't function without their morning cup of coffee and it horrified me. I figured if I never started drinking it, I wouldn't ever need it. Haven't had a soda since around 2000 either- I pretty much just drink water.
The only medications I'm on are a small dose to compensate for mild thyroid issues and birth control pills (can't wait till I can be sure it's safe to stop those). I do take a small amount of melatonin before bed to make sure I can face the night a bit more reliably, but can't say I need anything to face the day.
Interesting to note that nobody's listed the demon Nic Baccy, which used to be the most ubiquitous of all.
Dr. Brin,
I would agree that Marx in his delusional senescence is something we can afford to leave behind. But given the extent of fascist propaganda, few outside of academia are willing to accept that any version of Marx is good. Ignorance, to course, but fighting it can be quite futile, especially when it serves someone's political and/or economic purposes.
I've been doing okay ignoring our erstwhile faux rancher, but when the MGTOW shit started casting aspersions on 50% of the species, I'm compelled to toss out some facts to clarify the matter (hopefully without over-explaining). 25% of American women are being treated for a mood disorder at any given time. CBD is not a prescription medication. They are mostly prescribed SSRIs. Not coincidentally, that is the same percentage of American women who have been sexually assaulted at least once in their lives, usually repeatedly, when they were minors, by a member of their own family. On the other side of the coin, around 12% of men are sexually assaulted, a little under the 15% figure for having mood disorders. Another pertinent fact here, which I found in a book that you recommended, is that rates of mood disorders are significantly lower in countries that are more socialized, Europe in particular. Less stress not only means fewer people get mental disorders, but fewer people commit rape in the first place.
I take back what I wrote earlier about not wishing my condition on anyone else. I can think of one person. It might teach him a little humility.
PSB
P.S. So how about the writing projects?
Cari,
I could never stand coffee, and there are a lot of things that have motivated me to avoid because they were both typical and stupid. As to medications, I take gallons each day. Melatonin isn't one of them, though. That's the main product of the pineal gland, an organ which is still very poorly understood. Since replacement doesn't work, I suspect the problem may be in the receptors rather than production of the melatonin. Sucks. Be glad your body responds to it. Sleep-related disorders jack up everything, especially memory.
PSB
Tony,
I am in complete agreement. Supply-side is why America doesn't have a middle class anymore.
PSB
PSB America still has a middle class. Imbecilic inheritance brats and foreign despots all think that a dominant middle class is a bad thing.
Just returned from DC meetings of NIAC - my last year. Gosh DC is beautiful this time of year. Saw Cherry Blossoms! Have plum blossoms now in back yard...
Dr. Brin,
A wee bit hyperbolic, but the middle class has shrunk dramatically since the Reagan Administration, and continues to shrink. On top of that, the life expectancy here keeps going down, while going up in the rest of the modernized nations of the world.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/25/1164819944/live-free-and-die-the-sad-state-of-u-s-life-expectancy
A new book on the subject that looks interesting;
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/28/1166404485/weathering-arline-geronimus-poverty-racism-stress-health
Of course the nepobabies hate the middle class, even though they get so much money by squeezing them. They aren't smart enough to get that if they drive everyone into poverty, no one will have money to buy the trash they're selling. J.P. Morgan seems to have gotten it. He bailed out the S&L crisis in his time so his piles of cash would still be worth something.
I used to have a plum tree in my back yard, but none of us ever got to eat a plum. The birds got them all, long before they were ripe. Here's hoping you can keep the avians away.
PSB
PSB,
Don't know about Dr. Brin, but I could email you a PDF of the first story I every finished that's over 1000 words. Short fantasy, 64 pages, last chapter done a month ago. I suspect you need to have played D&D to fully grok it, though.
*I can't say it's professional quality, but my wife likes it, and Kipling Girl suggested I try to publish**. Looking at Amazon.
**quote, "I've read worse"
Pappenheimer
P.S. The concept "middle class" is a little warped now. A few years back I heard someone on NPR who made minimum wage refer to himself as middle class, and was upset when the interviewed corrected him.
Lena wrote:
Melatonin isn't one of them, though. That's the main product of the pineal gland, an organ which is still very poorly understood. Since replacement doesn't work, I suspect the problem may be in the receptors rather than production of the melatonin. Sucks. Be glad your body responds to it. Sleep-related disorders jack up everything, especially memory.
Honestly I suspect it's mostly a placebo for me. I take a small amount (1mg) just in case it helps, but it's hard to be sure. I used to have so much trouble falling asleep, but these days that usually isn't too hard as long as I read before bed until I can't keep my eyes open. My brain gets way too active if I don't read to that level and end up having trouble sleeping, and the melatonin just gives me peace of mind that I'm helping it along. I get so little sun exposure and I spend a lot of time in front of computer screens late at night, so it seemed worth a try to reduce potential sleep issues.
What I'd really like to find is some way to keep myself from waking up in the middle of the night- sometimes I can't fall back asleep if my brain manages to kick too far in before I get back to bed. It's just old person's bladder though. When I was young I couldn't fall asleep but once I was asleep I slept like a log. Now I fall asleep but can't usually make it more than 4 or 5 hours before my bladder wakes me.
Re - Middle Class
My definition of "Middle Class" would involve security
When you are "Middle Class" you are secure - short of a major act of God you and your family are going to remain "comfortable"
Which is relatively easy to achieve here (NZ) or in the UK - or I suspect in Europe
But to be "secure" in the USA you need assets in the several million dollar range
If you don't have that that then a single major illness in your family can overturn your life
If a single illness does not then a couple of illnesses will
Which is why IMHO the American "Middle Class" is actually very very small
Supply side has contributed to that but the American "Health System" is the major cause
@Pappenheimer Neil Gaiman recently did a spiel on mediocre literature, saying it encourages budding authors like you to try publishing. After all, if *that* rubbish can get published, surely you've got a chance?
(Thinking of a certain YA fantasy author who really could have used an editor, but don't tell my daughter that!)
You're operating under the naïve belief that the other side consists of decent people who can be reasoned with.
Sorry, but you don't know what you are up against.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-rep-tim-burchett-shrugs-off-nashville-shooting-we-homeschool-our-daughter
GOP Rep Shrugs Off Nashville Shooting: ‘We Homeschool’ Our Daughter'
Besides giving a tone-deaf response on what he’d do to protect young children, Burchett also said Congress had “no real role” in preventing mass shootings.
Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) reacted to the horrific Nashville school shooting on Monday by essentially saying there’s nothing that can be done.
At the same time, he also offered up a perplexing and tone-deaf response when asked what he would do to protect young children, simply noting that he homeschools his daughter.
Speaking to reporters hours after a 28-year-old former student shot and killed six people at a private Christian school, Burchett contended that there were no solutions to the ongoing—and uniquely American—plague of mass shootings.
“Three precious little kids lost their lives, and I believe three adults, I believe, and the shooter of course, lost their life too,” he declared. “So, it’s a horrible, horrible situation. And, we’re not gonna fix it.”
The Tennessee lawmaker was then asked if Congress had any responsibility in the wake of this latest school shooting, prompting Burchett to claim that he and his fellow representatives would only make things worse.
“I don’t see any real role that we could do other than mess things up, honestly, because of the situation,” he replied. “Like I said, I don’t think a criminal is going to stop from guns, you know, you can print them out on the computer now, 3-D printing, and, there’s really, I don’t think you’re going to stop the gun violence.”
Rather than pass any gun regulations or restrictions, Burchett suggested that a better solution may be to pray the murders away.
“I think you got to change people’s hearts,” the congressman said. “You know, as a Christian, as we talk about in the church, and I’ve said this many times, I think we really need a revival in this country.”
Cari Burstein:
birth control pills (can't wait till I can be sure it's safe to stop those).
A word of warning. When she was in grade school, my daughter had at least two friends who were ten to fifteen years younger than their respective older siblings. Just sayin'.
I could never stand coffee
That was me until I got a job as an agricultural tech. Hated the taste, didn't need the boost (being young and all that). But the senior tech I was tasked to assist knew that if you showed up at a farm around coffee time you would get invited in, and I quickly learned that declining coffee meant that the host assumed you also didn't want a slice of that lovely fresh-baked apple pie… and I loved apple pie, so I learned to drink coffee (with lots of cream) so I could eat pie.
Later, when I had proper coffee I realized that the range of flavours can be lovely.
Mind you, I also like bitter melon, which is apparently unusual for a laowai.
Supply-side is why America doesn't have a middle class anymore.
Among other zombies, yes. You might find this book enlightening (if not amusing, in a bleak kind of way).
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691154541/zombie-economics
Tony,
Spider Robinson described that phenomenon in the foreword of one of his books - forget the actual quote, but something like: "One day I was sitting there reading some SF, and muttered, 'I could write better than this trash'. And lo, a million-watt light bulb went on over my head."
I am not he. But I probably have 10-20 years left. I'll give it a shot.
Pappenheimer
DP:
The Tennessee lawmaker was then asked if Congress had any responsibility in the wake of this latest school shooting, prompting Burchett to claim that he and his fellow representatives would only make things worse.
"Make things worse? How could they get any worse? Jehovah! Jehovah!"
“I don’t see any real role that we could do other than mess things up, honestly, because of the situation,” he replied. “Like I said, I don’t think a criminal is going to stop from guns, you know, you can print them out on the computer now, 3-D printing, and, there’s really, I don’t think you’re going to stop the gun violence.”
Well, I don't think you're going to stop abortions from happening either, so how about not doing anything about that as well? "There, I've run rings around ya logic'ly."
Hey, how about treating gun rights the same way we treat the right to a woman's bodily integrity? A constitutional amendment declaring that post-born children are human beings deserving of the right to life. Treat gun owners the way red states now treat pregnant women--as presumed potential murderers of children. Make people watch videos of school shootings in progress before allowing them to buy a gun. Outlaw sale and possession of 3D printers because they could be used to make guns which kill children.
Rather than pass any gun regulations or restrictions, Burchett suggested that a better solution may be to pray the murders away.
Trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Yeah, that might work. God isn't apparently as "pro-life" as these people believe, since He isn't doing much to stop post-born children from being aborted. In fact, according to these same hypo-Christians, the schoolkids' deaths must be God's will.
#ThereAreNoGoodRepublicansAlthoughImSureSusanCollinsIsVeryConcerned
Robert:
so I learned to drink coffee (with lots of cream) so I could eat pie.
That could be a metaphor for...well, any number of things.
Cari,
It's likely that little melatonin gets past the blood-brain barrier. Some proteins can make it through, but blood serum levels and cerebrospinal-spinal fluid levels rarely match.
Be glad it's your bladder and not your brain. My bladder has its own issues, and my doctor prescribed Myrbetriq. You might benefit from this if you take it before bed. See if your doctor will give it a try, and good luck. Insufficient sleep is a killer.
PSB
Robert,
Thanks for the ref. I'll add it to my mounting list of imminent readings (or listenings, if I can find it as an mp3). It sounds like Quiggin is smart enough to get that both sides are making a mess of it - my kind of author.
PSB
DP,
It's not in the political/economic interests of the other side to negotiate, compromise, or even think. They are doing quite well with the old "four legs good, two legs baaaad" routine. The trick is to expose them and undercut their propaganda. That's why I'm always bringing up fascism. Even their base thinks fascism is bad, but they don't actually know what it is and believe the lie that the other team are the fascists.
PSB
The concept "middle class" is a little warped now.
Say rather that it's evolved. And is also different from what it means in Britain. In America it seems to depend only on income, while in Britain it depending on how you earned your money (and not how much you earned).
Pappenheimer,
I would volunteer to read your story, but I probably wouldn't be much good for critique. I gave up on Fantasy as a genre back in high school, when I couldn't find anyone else who wrote it as well as Tolkien. I was unaware of LeGuin at the time, though, but my distaste for a genre that generally substitutes reasoning skills for magic is pretty well set. I'm much more of a sci-fi guy. Sorry.
PSB
“So, it’s a horrible, horrible situation. And, we’re not gonna fix it.”
True on both counts. It's a horrible situation. And he and his party are not going to fix it.
The Tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of children. Or something like that.
Duncan,
I like your idea of middle class better than the standard, supposedly objective, definition. However, I wouldn't put the blame entirely at the feet of health care. There are lots of people who are deeply impoverished without being crippled by capitalist medical bills. Socializing health care would likely be huge step in the right direction, if we can trust our leadership to administer it intelligently. I wouldn't bet on that.
PSB
Tony,
Keep Sturgeon's Law in mind: 94% of everything is crap. My drivel might be included in that...
PSB
Larry,
Ever since Sunday School, I have always had a problem with the idea that God is good. Think about the concept of Hell, where "sinners" (which really just means people who disobey the authorities) are tortured for all eternity. Does that sound like something a good god would do? It sounds like something a sick, vengeful bastard would do. If someone is truly incapable of being good, a good god would simply make them cease to exist. If God can't do that, It's not omnipotent. If God can, then It's evil. The very concept of Hell is proof that our holy books were written by narcissistic, power-hungry men. They have normalized this evil over the centuries, to the point that otherwise decent human beings can't put two and two together without coming up with some irrational number.
PSB
PSB,
's OK re: my story. About SF vs. fantasy, I'm not sure whether I would put Star Wars in the fantasy column
Not being in a sensible country that deals with health care as a citizen's right rather than a privilege of wealth would be easier if I were oblivious to the alternatives, as most USAians seem to be.
Theodicy was easily explained by Twain - "we are in the hands of an omnipotent deity, and he is a malign thug."
Also, from what I understand, the medieval to modern version of Hell didn't exist in the source books for the Bible and had to be invented. At least Niven and Pournelle posited an escape hatch in their novel on the subject...
Pappenheimer
Pappenheimer,
I haven't read Niven/Pournelle in ages. Which book are you referring to? On Star Wars, it looks to me like a self-righteous, generic good vs generic evil story dressed up as sci-fi - exactly the kind of thing that promotes arrogance and really shallow thinking.
They say ignorance is bliss, but ignore the fact that ignorant people get taken to the cleaners all the time.
PSB
Pappenheimer:
About SF vs. fantasy, I'm not sure whether I would put Star Wars in the fantasy column
The Star Wars extended universe has become fantasy, but the original Star Wars was something else, though not science-fiction. More like a western or a pirate movie in sci-fi trappings. In fact, when I first saw Star Wars in 1977, I had just recently seen a pirate flick called Swashbuckler, and at the time I noticed how closely the plots followed each other, beginning with the expository opening titles.
PSB,
"Inferno". SF writer lands in Dante's Hell. And just like Dante did, they populated Hell with their favorite political enemies
Pappenheimer
Pappenheimer:
Also, from what I understand, the medieval to modern version of Hell didn't exist in the source books for the Bible and had to be invented.
There's no Hell that I'm aware of in Judaism. And when Satan appears in the Old Testament, he's more like a Loki-eqseue trickster and goad. Nothing like the "God's dark reflection" of more modern vintage.
And he wasn't in the Garden of Eden either. That was just a snake.
Larry,
The original Star Wars was a retelling of Akira Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress." It had a lot fewer characters, but so did Lucas's original draft.
PSB
That was just a snake. Crawley!
Pappenheimer:
There's also Niven/Pournelle's sequel to "Inferno": "Escape from Hell". In an email to Pournelle, I called the second book "Escape from Christianity". I disliked their use of Sagan as a whipping boy, but I very much liked their depiction of Camus, rejecting the climb to Heaven on the grounds that Heaven was bound to be as absurd as Hell. But he was cheerful nonetheless. Il faut imaginez Camus heureux.
About pseudo-conservative passivity and despair in the face of preventable recurrent massacres: thoughts and prayers to whom? Satan? Thanos? Cthulhu?
Paradoctor:
thoughts and prayers to whom?
In all seriousness, I think they purposely use those words to sound as if they mean something useful like "Ask God to intervene," to the general public. What they really mean within their own cult is that the families and loved ones of the dead are in their thoughts and prayers to help them through their bereavement. The dead themselves are with Jesus, so no harm has been done to them.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Mar29-3.html
Speaking of [Marjorie Taylor] Greene, she switched into tinfoil hat mode on Twitter, firing off a series of tweets that were a mixture of hateful and crazy. The final one read:
In the wake of a transgender shooter targeting a Christian school and murdering kids, every American should know the threat of Antifa driven trans-terrorism.
Twitter should not whitewash the incitement of politically motivated violence.
That was the final tweet in the sequence because that was enough to get Greene's account locked by Twitter. It's not so easy to do that in the Elon Musk era, but somehow the Representative found a way.
Larry Hart:
So if the innocent dead all go to Jesus, then why don't the cultists commit massacres daily, as a form of evangelical outreach? They'd be doing their targets a favor! Any why don't they do each other such favors?
Because they themselves would go to Hell? But the end justifies the means!
Paradoctor,
I think one of the commandments comes into play here - the one about not killing - although there enough loopholes already driven into it that it's more of a guideline these days.
Pappenheimer
Robert:
And is also different from what it means in Britain.
Thom Hartmann likes to point out that the Dickens character Ebenezer Scrooge represents the middle class of mid-nineteenth century London. He is not an aristocrat, but rather a small business owner. He is only "rich" compared to the huge percentage of the population who more resemble Bob Cratchit's station in life.
PSB:
Ever since Sunday School, I have always had a problem with the idea that God is good.
Although I am a religious skeptic--if you call me an atheist, I won't argue--I can actually accept the notion of God being good. I just don't think He resembles the interpretation that the evangelical hypo-Christians believe they've got a direct line into.
CS bank notoriously pleaded guilty in 2014 to criminal charges for “knowingly and willfully” helping U.S. clients hide offshore assets and income from the IRS. 'The now-troubled bank appears to have violated that agreement. ' What's really needed: records from DeutscheBank of Russian oligarch $laundering into the Republican Party. It is the blow that'd change the world and could help us avoid the "Helvetian War" I portrayed in EARTH.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/29/credit-suisse-whistleblowers-say-bank-has-been-helping-americans-dodge-us-taxes.html
LH even Bob Cratchit was officially 'middle class' and likely had a much poorer servant.
Hi PSB
Re- fantasy
Niven wrote some interesting fantasy - "What good is a glass dagger" - based around the idea that the force behind magic (mana) could be used up
But the best logical fantasy IMHO is Lois McMaster Bujold and her "Five Gods" series
Bujold also wrote the standalone fantasy novel "The Spirit Ring", which owes much of its plot to perfectly mundane mining and metallurgy - she notes that one of her sourcebooks was De Re Metallica, a 16th C handbook on those subjects translated from the Latin by Herbert Hoover (yeah, that Hoover). One the main characters is Benvenuto Cellini with his serial numbers filed off. I'd recommend it for another "logical fantasy".
Pappenheimer
Larry wrote:
A word of warning. When she was in grade school, my daughter had at least two friends who were ten to fifteen years younger than their respective older siblings. Just sayin'.
Oh I know. My baby brother is 10 years younger than me. In my mom's case, birth control apparently never worked well for her, she says she got pregnant with all 3 of us on various forms of birth control. After him my dad got snipped.
The annoying thing apparently is that if you're on birth control pills, it's rather difficult to tell if you are actually entering menopause because the pills can mask it. There also doesn't seem to be any easy way to check short of just going off the pill for awhile, which isn't exactly a great option, since you still need to use another form of birth control. I've got 3 years until I reach the average age of menopause, but could still be later, there's no way to be sure.
It's frustrating, because in theory my fertility is probably close to nil at my age, but would rather not find out the hard way, and the pill has its own issues so I can't wait to stop taking it.
Darrel E,
Cool. Good to hear that i misunderstood you. 😏
Defining middle class by security is problematic. Do it if you want but every change to law has the potential to move people who did nothing else to be moved across a bracket line.
Minimum wage workers in the US are middle class. Low end of it for sure, but there are strata below them occupied by fixed income folks and the homelesss.
We've analyzed their attack, and there is a danger.
1,000 AI leaders and experts have urged an immediate 6 month pause on AI research. ChatGPT is only a glitzy showroom. The real engine is GPT-4, -5, and -6 (presumably). These critters don't just mimic us and enable scholastic hokery-pokery. They know how to find, acquire, learn, and use tools. A trivial example is that they can assimilate a calculator, eliminating their here-to-fore weakness at number crunching - automatically. They also seem to understand the concept of Theory of Mind, although I'm a bit foggy on that aspect.
As usual, it isn't the path that's crucial, but the trajectory. First and second derivatives are beginning to flash red according to the experts. Above my pay scale, but, "well, there it is" as Malcolm would say to Hammond and friends.
"1,000 AI leaders and experts have urged an immediate 6 month pause on AI research. ChatGPT is only a glitzy showroom."
Also, "ChatGPT" is hilarious in French, for irrelevant-but-silly reasons.
@Weekend Editor
Interesting read. BTW LISP is a frilly affectation of FORTH. The day may come when the few remaining FORTHers left become the last, best hope for man against the machine.
"Tech leaders, including Elon Musk, called for a pause on the development of advanced A.I. until there are stronger measures to protect society from its risks." t's hard to imagine anything more reflexively dumb being shouted by so many very bright folks - like Jaron Lanier and Yuval Harari. Sure, give yet more advantages to the secret labs in despotic nations and to the very worst site of AI/Skynet research - Wall Street - whose '5 Laws of Robotics' are to make systems predatory, parasitical, amoral, insatiable and secretive. Yep, give THEM a 6 month head start. Riiight. There IS a path to a soft landing with these chat/etc ('chatect') systems. Ironically, it is the same solution we found for dealing with other hyper-smart, predatory systems, like lawyers...
...and yet, despite our 200 years getting better at the method, it is utterly ignored by almost all mavens, moguls and pundaits of AI. And guys, this method is NOT about top-down control or moronic 'moratoria.'
(Carumba! You actually think that 6 more months of handwringing 'AI ethics conferences' will be any more productive than the last 16 years?)
A Black Hole about 33 billion times the size of the Sun. Or is it merely another Black Hole?
Interesting - "The middle class, once the economic stratum of a clear majority of American adults, has steadily contracted in the past five decades. The share of adults who live in middle-class households fell from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021."
Private union membership fell over the same period, bottoming out at @12% in 2007.
Not sure when the inflection point turned downwards but I suspect the word "Reagan" is in the area.
Pappenheimer
Automation and shipping jobs overseas are part of both trends, but other nations have handled the transition better. The side effect in this country appears to be a growth of fascism.
Pappenheimer
On the current AI issue, it seems to me that the problem is not so much how capable GPT4 and similar are as how stupid the humans managing it have been. Giving it full access to the internet along with its own money to use. What could go wrong?
To me this really highlights Dr. Brin's point. It's not so much AI capabilities that we need to guard against, it's a relative few humans using a new and powerful technological tool recklessly or for selfish / nefarious purposes. Trying to stop AI from being developed isn't going to work.
It's a mistake to compare GPT with human intelligence and conclude there's little threat (either from AGI or nefarious actors). The big threat is more like Covid - an unforeseen, alien monster wandering in from left field. The point about telling others to desist whilst continuing to work away in back rooms is bang on. Computer peeps are selfish, greedy, arrogant, and corrupt. Except for yours truly of course.
Have a look at IMPROMPTU: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI, by Reid Hoffman (co-founder of Linked-In). This new book contains conversations Reid had with GPT-4 before it was publicly released, along with incisive appraisals. His impudently optimistic take is that all of this could – possibly - go right. That we might see a future when AI is not a threat, but a partner. https://www.impromptubook.com/
We don’t agree on every interpretation – e.g. I see no sign, yet, of what might be called ‘sapience.’ Sorry, the notion that GPT 5 – scheduled for December release - will be “true AGI” is pretty absurd. As Stephen Wolfram points out, massively-trained, probability-based word layering has more fundamentally in common with the lookup tables of 1960s Eliza than with, say, the deep thoughts of Carl Sagan or Sarah Hrdy or Melvin Konner.
What such programs will do is render extinct all talk of "Turing Tests." They will trigger another phase in what I called (6 years ago) the “robotic empathy crisis,” as millions of our neighbors jump aboard that misconception and start demanding rights for simulated beings. (A frequent topic in SF, including my own.)
Still, IMPROMPTU offers a perspective that’s far more realistic than recent, panicky cries issued by Jaron Lanier, Yuval Harari and others, calling for a futile, counterproductive moratorium – an unenforceable “training pause” that would only give a boost-advantage to secret labs, all over the globe (especially the most grotesquely dangerous: Wall Street’s feral predatory HFT-AIs.)
Alas, there is just one way to get a soft-landing out of the resulting maelstrom… a method that I see no mavens or pundits even remotely discussing, even though it is the same method we used, with increasing effectiveness, to end 6000 years of predation by organic human parasites, like kings, nobles, priests… and those hyper-smart predators called lawyers.
But do look at IMPROMPTU! It explores this vital topic using the very human trait these programs were created to display – conversation.
IMPROMPTU looks great, unfortunately I don't see an audiobook (yet). BTW I do think the opportunities for AI in cognitive and physical disability are endlessly exciting. Shades of Captain Pike and the Star Trek pilot.
Since Sagan was mentioned, his first wife had a caveat about (biological) complexity.
"The idea that we are consciously care-taking such a large and mysterious system is ludicrous." - Lynn Margulis
Some, including myself, have posited that the Great Replacement will not be about race or creed, but in fact AI. I think Asimov's FOUNDATION would have been even greater if it had bravely taken this tack. Kinda like FOUNDATION'S TRIUMPH.
Among Foundation, Lost Horizon, and Forbin Project types, there is an esoteric and crazy little group at collapseOS.org
I'm just a very minor lurker there - too old and crusty to be a contributor.
A pocket edition of Harari's "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" would go great alongside my early edition of H.G. Wells' "A Short History of the World". Just a wee bit of gradeschool study of deep time would do wonders for civility and decency. Asimov thought so.
Scidata: " opportunities for AI in cognitive and physical disability are endlessly exciting..."
As I depicted the world of 2040 being vastly empowering for sutistic spectrumists.
In Saimov, Daneel Olivaw'a lifelong aim was to PREVENT Ai replacing humans... ironically by keeping humans too ignorant to re-invent AI... until he could turn humanity into a unity god he could worship.
Pappenheimer,
Check out the graph in this article:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/nov/13/us-wealth-inequality-top-01-worth-as-much-as-the-bottom-90
The downward spiral for America is a direct consequence of Reaganomics, which, in spite of the name, the Repugnant Party did way back in the Age of the Robber Barrons, beginning with the "election" of Rutherford B. Hayes, and it had just as disastrous consequences then, too.
PSB
PSB:
The downward spiral for America is a direct consequence of Reaganomics, which, in spite of the name, the Repugnant Party did way back in the Age of the Robber Barrons...
IIRC, the word "Reaganomics" was coined not just as an indication a particular economic philosophy, but as a backhanded recognition that that president's economy overturned the stodgy rules of economics themselves. The point was "Regular economics have been overturned. It's the age of Reaganomics instead." Supporters celebrated this, while detractors made fun of the absurdity, so the name caught on across the board.
Larry,
"Reaganomics....Supporters celebrated this, while detractors made fun of the absurdity...."
Thus the aptly named "Laffer Curve"?
Pappenheimer
Re the "Laffer Curve"
YES there is a tax rate that is the rate that will produce the maximum return in taxes
But taxes are not JUST to get money
Taxes are also used to drive behavior
When the top tax rate was over 90% it had the effect of making companies decide NOT to pay huge salaries but instead to plough money back into their operations
Its possible that the 90% tax rates did reduce the amount of money taken in tax - but the high tax rate DID drive innovation and improvement - which in the long term results in more tax being payed
Perhaps one of the topics Musk wishes to discuss in China is the proposed six month pausing of advanced AI training:
https://www.reuters.com/business/teslas-musk-planning-visit-china-seeking-meeting-with-premier-sources-2023-03-31/
duncan cairncross:
Re the "Laffer Curve"
YES there is a tax rate that is the rate that will produce the maximum return in taxes
But taxes are not JUST to get money
Even if they were just to get money, the optimum rate is not as "Laffably" low as the Supply-Siders claim. They insist that any tax cut increases revenue.
LH, once upon a time it worked*, but under circumstances quite different than those in the early eighties. The continued enthusiasm for off-shoring largely eliminates the possibility of a tax cut increasing revenue, for that to happen again would require a resurgence of union labor in this Nation that likely can't happen unless World trade unravels, or new liberal economics is discredited beyond redemption.
*AIUI, during the Kennedy administration.
Expletive! "Neo liberal". Never trust auto correct.
Re effect of tax rates, I do not understand why people don't get that company taxes make investment cheaper. Because depreciation then has an after tax cash value so that investment (so long as it is profitable) comes at a discount.
Tim H:
LH, once upon a time it worked*...
*AIUI, during the Kennedy administration.
Yes, but when the rate already is 90%, there's room to go lower and optimize return.
When the rate is 15%, not so much.
Never trust auto correct.
I never do. :)
reason:
I do not understand why people don't get that company taxes make investment cheaper.
They don't care about investment. They want to make profit-taking cheaper.
If you want investment by the rich in productive ("supply") capital then incentivize THAT. It works. Giving massive tax grifts to oligarchy gets it poured into 'rentier' activities that are passive and parasitical - exactly as Adam Smith described - e.g. buying up a third of the available US housing stock, driving young families out of the market. Almost none of the SS cuts (trillions) went into plants and production capacity... as is happening NOW under the Dem incentives.
And dems are too stoopid to make the case clearly, alas
"I am not a member of any organized political party...I am a Democrat"
Will Rogers
We Democrats are definitely a compromise party and have more than one message. Makes it hard to hammer a single message. We couldn't even agree on a coordinated message about prosecuting the malefactors of great wealth in 2008.
Pappenheimer
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/31/1090083542/the-growing-overlap-between-the-far-right-and-environmentalism
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/01/1089990539/climate-change-politics
Having learned from NPR today that Conservationism, Environmentalism & Climate Change Science are the irredeemably racist products of White Supremacy & Nazi Ideology, I'm in something of an ideological pickle:
(1) Do I reject the inherently evil origins of the Climate Change Agenda, Environmental Science & the Biden Administration's Green New Deal in order to repudiate Racism, White Supremacy & Nazi Ideology? (or)
(2) Do I embrace Racism, White Supremacy & Nazi Ideology in order to support the inherently evil origins of the Climate Change Agenda, Environmental Science & the Biden Administration's Green New Deal? (or)
(3) Do I recognize that NPR (and, by extension, the US government) has become the purveyor of both raving madness & blithering idiocy?
As it appears impossible to reconcile either Climate Change Acceptance with Racial Equity or White Supremacy with Climate Change Denial, I'm leaning heavily towards Option (3).
Best
zzzzzzz
onward
onward
Locum,
Thanks for sharing the link! As a Fox News editor your job would be to underscore this line: "in the 20th century, the group (Sierra Club) embraced racist ideas that overpopulation was the root of environmental harm/"
Perhaps the All Things Considered editors might have been a bit over-generous in assuming the audience had the attention span to connect the latter with "Environmental leaders are very, very at fault for setting up this narrative around, you know, untouched spaces. And to preserve them, Native people must be removed, the lands taken from them and put under federal or state protection ... so this is where the language of preservation really crosses over into this narrative of exclusion."
Is the idea of overpopulation being the root of environmental harm "racist" or "Eurocentrically myopic?" What is the root of environmental harm if your an ingenious person? I think it's a bit more complicated than your three bullet points.
Dr. B
Am slowly progressing through Existence (because I'm limiting it to 20 min a day to properly digest.) The interludes structurally remind me of what PF did in Gateway. My only dumb question so far that I don't think will get explained is what happens when the rail tug pulling the transcontinental dirigibles encounters a place where a current train tunnels :)
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