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Javier E

Opinion | The Covid-19 Pandemic Ends With Exponential Decay - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-exponential-decay.html

pandemic math exponent decay

shared by Javier E on 29 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Reaching herd immunity is a key goal. It drives cases toward zero by slowing the spread of the virus through a combination of vaccination and infection-acquired immunity to maintain exponential decay — even as society resumes normal activities.
  • But contrary to popular belief, reaching herd immunity doesn’t prevent all outbreaks, at least not initially. It simply means so few people are susceptible to infections that any outbreaks that do happen tend to be snuffed out and case counts decline. Over time, outbreaks themselves become less and less common.
  • It is possible to bring Covid-19 case numbers down quickly via exponential decay even before vaccination rates reach herd immunity. We just need to keep transmission rates below the tipping point between exponential growth and exponential decay: where every person with Covid-19 infects fewer than one other person, on average
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  • Every single thing people can do to slow transmission helps — including wearing masks, getting tested and avoiding crowded indoor spaces — especially given concerns about current and future variants, since it could be what gets us past the threshold into exponential decay.
  • As more and more people get vaccinated, people can gradually ease precautions while cases continue to decline. Keeping cases down gets easier over time until — and this is the beauty of vaccine-driven herd immunity — it’s almost effortless, once enough people are vaccinated, to keep cases sustainably low. That’s the power of exponential decay.
lmunch

Opinion | The Covid-19 Pandemic Ends With Exponential Decay - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-exponential-decay.html

vaccine herd immunity US

shared by lmunch on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The United States has vaccinated more than half of its adults against Covid-19
  • Exponential growth means case numbers can double in just a few days. Exponential decay is its opposite. Exponential decay means case numbers can halve in the same amount of time
  • Reaching herd immunity is a key goal. It drives cases toward zero by slowing the spread of the virus through a combination of vaccination and infection-acquired immunity to maintain exponential decay — even as society resumes normal activities.
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  • Fortunately, the exponential dynamics that lead to wild swings in case numbers when cases are high lead to far less dramatic swings when cases are low.
  • The United States is still a long way from reaching herd immunity, but things could improve a lot before then. The worst of the pandemic may be over sooner than you think.
Javier E

Opinion | Democrats Repent for Bill Clinton - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...democrats-bill-clinton.html

clinton presidency legacy failure history politics

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • I view the crime bill as disastrous. It flooded the streets with police officers and contributed to the rise of mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts Black men and their families. It helped to drain Black communities of fathers, uncles, husbands, partners and sons.
  • A 2015 New York Times Upshot analysis of 2010 census data found that there were 1.5 million “missing” Black men between the ages of 25 and 54, comparing the totals of Black men and women who were not incarcerated. According to the report: “Using census data, we estimated that about 625,000 prime-age Black men were imprisoned, compared with 45,000 Black women. This gap — of 580,000 — accounts for more than one-third of the overall gap.”
  • It continued: “It is the result of sharply different incarceration rates for Black men and any other group. The rate for prime-age Black men is 8.2 percent, compared with 1.6 percent for nonblack men, 0.5 percent for Black women and 0.2 percent for nonblack women.”
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  • But in the last decade, the party and Clinton himself have been forced to admit the failures of the bill and to work to rectify it. As Clinton told the N.A.A.C.P. in 2015, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse, and I want to admit it.”
  • Part of the goal of the bill was to blunt Republican criticisms that Democrats were soft on crime, so the bill gave permission for Democrats across the country to engage in a sort of criminal justice policy and punishment arms race with Republicans, each group attempting to be more draconian than the other.
  • Then there was the welfare reform bill, which Clinton promised would “end welfare as we know it.” One of its central provisions was block-grant assistance to the states.
  • As Clinton said when the bill was passed:“Today the Congress will vote on legislation that gives us a chance to live up to that promise, to transform a broken system that traps too many people in a cycle of dependence to one that emphasizes work and independence, to give people on welfare a chance to draw a paycheck, not a welfare check.”
  • On the day Clinton signed the bill, Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and Hillary Clinton’s longtime mentor, released a statement that read, “President Clinton’s signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.”
  • As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out in 2020, the block grant to states “has been set at $16.5 billion each year since 1996; as a result, its real value has fallen by almost 40 percent due to inflation.”
  • Furthermore, only a fraction of the money goes to income assistance, and state-set benefit levels are low and “do not enable families to meet their basic needs,” the report outlines. It continues:
  • “The wide variation in benefit levels across states exacerbates national racial disparities because many of the states with the lowest benefits have larger Black populations. Fifty-five percent of Black children live in states with benefits below 20 percent of the poverty line, compared to 40 percent of white children.”
aleija

Opinion | How to Actually Make America Great - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tually-make-america-great.html

shared by aleija on 17 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • This pivotal moment isn’t just the result of four years of Donald Trump. It’s the culmination of 50 years of social decay.
  • “The Upswing,” a remarkable new book by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garret
  • A careful work of social science, the book looks at American life from about 1870 to today across a range of sectors that are usually analyzed in separate academic silos.
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  • The first important finding is that between the 1870s and the late 1960s a broad range of American social trends improved: Community activism surged, cross party collaboration increased, income inequality fell, social mobility rose, church attendance rose, union membership rose, federal income taxes became more progressive and social spending on the poor rose.
  • Black school attendance, income gains, homeownership rates, voter registration rates started rapidly improving in the 1940s and then started slowing in the 1970s and 1980s.
  • The American century was built during these decades of social progress. And then, around the late 1960s, it all turned south.
  • Over the past 50 years, the positive trends have reversed: membership in civic organizations has collapsed, political polarization has worsened, income inequality has widened, social trust has cratered, religious attendance is down, social mobility has decreased, deaths of despair have skyrocketed and on and on.
  • Until the late 1960s, American life was improving across a range of measures. Since then, it’s a story of decay.
  • Maybe economic change drove everything? But no, the timing is off. Economic inequality widened a bit later than most of the other trends. Maybe it was political dysfunction? Nope. That, too, happened a bit later.
  • Muckrakers exposed social evils. The survival of the fittest mentality was rejected. Then it was a civic renaissance. Between 1870 and 1920 Americans created civic organizations at a rate that’s never been equaled. Then it was a political movement. By 1912 all three major presidential candidates ran as progressives: William Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.
  • The frequency of the word “I” in American books, according to Putnam and Garrett, doubled between 1965 and 2008.
  • starting in the late 1960s, there was left wing self-centeredness in the social and lifestyle sphere and right wing self-centeredness in the economic sphere, with a lack of support for common-good public policies
  • It was based on a fallacy: If we all do our own thing, everything will work out well for everybody.
  • many were operating at the wrong level. They were trying to build programs that would “scale,” but they were swimming against the tide of culture, the pervasive individualistic mentality, and all its social and political effects.
  • I helped found an organization called Weave: The Social Fabric Project that was designed precisely to focus on cultural change. We illuminate, support and connect community builders
  • I’ve found that about a third of the people I encounter in this work get the power of culture and the importance of culture change, and two thirds don’t really see culture. They focus exclusively on what can be quantified.
  • Putnam and Garrett hold up the Progressive Movement, not as something we could go back to, but as a storehouse of lessons for us to adapt. Progressivism was “first and foremost, a moral awakening.”
  • “The story of the American experiment in the twentieth century is one of a long upswing toward increasing solidarity, followed by a steep downturn into increasing individualism. From ‘I’ to ‘we’ and back again to ‘I’.”
  • the great missing pieces are in the civic and cultural spheres: a moral vision that inspires the rising generation, a new national narrative that unites a diverse people, actual organizations where people work on local problems.
  • This pivotal moment isn’t just the result of four years of Donald Trump. It’s the culmination of 50 years of social decay.
  • The first important finding is that between the 1870s and the late 1960s a broad range of American social trends improved
  • Many of us think that the gains for African-Americans only happened after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but Putnam and Garrett show that the fastest improvements actually happened in the decades before.
  • Black school attendance, income gains, homeownership rates, voter registration rates started rapidly improving in the 1940s and then started slowing in the 1970s and 1980s.
  • Over the past 50 years, the positive trends have reversed: membership in civic organizations has collapsed, political polarization has worsened, income inequality has widened, social trust has cratered, religious attendance is down, social mobility has decreased, deaths of despair have skyrocketed and on and on.
  • Until the late 1960s, American life was improving across a range of measures. Since then, it’s a story of decay.
Javier E

Fox Settled a Lawsuit Over Its Lies. But It Insisted on One Unusual Condition. - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...news-seth-rich-settlement.html

fox news lawsuit responsibility lies propaganda

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • There’s only one multibillion-dollar media corporation that deliberately and aggressively propagated these untruths. That’s the Fox Corporation, and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch; his feckless son Lachlan, who is nominally C.E.O.; and the chief legal officer Viet Dinh, a kind of regent who mostly runs the company day-to-day.
  • These are the people ultimately responsible for helping to ensure that one particular and pernicious lie about a 27-year-old man’s death circulated for years. The elder Mr. Murdoch has long led Fox, to the extent anyone actually leads it, through a kind of malign negligence, and letting that lie persist seems just his final, lavish gift to Mr. Trump.
  • That’s why the story was so appealing to Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, who kept hyping it for days after it collapsed under the faintest scrutiny. There has never been a shred of credible evidence that Seth Rich had contact with WikiLeaks, and a series of bipartisan investigations found that the D.N.C. had been breached by Russian hackers.
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  • The Murdoch organization didn’t originate the lie, but it embraced it, and it served an obvious political purpose: deflecting suspicions of Russian involvement in helping the Trump campaign
  • It was like “throwing gasoline on a small fire,” Mr. Rich’s brother recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Denver. “Fox blew it out of everyone’s little echo chamber and put it into the mainstream.”
  • The story collapsed immediately, and in spectacular fashion. The former Washington, D.C., police detective whom Fox used as its on-the-record source, Rod Wheeler, repudiated his own quotes claiming ties between Mr. Rich and WikiLeaks and a cover-up, and said in a deposition this fall that the Fox News article had been “prewritten before I even got involved.”
  • “He never got back to me to say, sorry for ruining your family’s life and pushing something there’s no basis to,” he said. “Apparently, ‘sorry’ is a hard five-letter word for him.”
Javier E

Opinion | How the Republican Party Went Feral - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-republican-party.html

gop decline causes politics trump Culture history

shared by Javier E on 05 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Way back in 2003 I wrote that Republicans had become a radical force hostile to America as it is, potentially aiming for a one-party state in which “elections are only a formality.” In 2012 Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein warned that the G.O.P. was “unmoved by conventional understanding of facts” and “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
  • The past two months have, however, been an object lesson in the extent to which “grass roots” anger is actually being orchestrated from the top. If a large part of the Republican base believes, groundlessly, that the election was stolen, it’s because that’s what leading figures in the party have been saying
  • Now politicians are citing widespread skepticism about the election results as a reason to reject the outcome — but they themselves conjured that skepticism out of thin air.
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  • we’re looking at a party that has gone feral — that has been cut off from the rest of society.
  • People have compared the modern G.O.P. to organized crime or a cult, but to me, Republicans look more like the lost boys in “Lord of the Flies.” They don’t get news from the outside world, because they get their information from partisan sources that simply don’t report inconvenient facts. They don’t face adult supervision, because in a polarized political environment there are few competitive races.
  • So they’re increasingly inward-looking, engaged in ever more outlandish efforts to demonstrate their loyalty to the tribe. Their partisanship isn’t about issues, although the party remains committed to cutting taxes on the rich and punishing the poor; it’s about asserting the dominance of the in-group and punishing outsiders.
Javier E

Parler Pitched Itself as Twitter Without Rules. Not Anymore, Apple and Google Said. - T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...parler-apple-google.html

Culture politics trump policy apple google app distribution censorship

shared by Javier E on 09 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Parler is one of the hottest apps in the world, a social network that has attracted millions of far-right conservatives over the past year with its hands-off approach to policing users’ posts. And with the news that President Trump had been kicked off Twitter and Facebook, Parler was the odds-on bet to be his next soapbox.
  • A day earlier, John Matze, Parler’s chief executive, had said in an interview with The Times about Wednesday’s melee that he didn’t “feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.”
  • The edicts from Apple and Google were a stark illustration of the power of the largest tech companies to influence what is allowed on the internet, even on sites and apps that are not their own
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  • But it is now clear that Parler will not be able to maintain its free-for-all status if it wants to be able to keep its wide reach. Apple and Google make the operating systems that back nearly every smartphone in the world, and they roughly split the market in the United States.
  • Google’s suspension is problematic for Parler, but people with Android devices will still be able to get the app, just with a bit more work. Google allows other app marketplaces on Android, and its decision applies only to its flagship Play Store.And people will also still be able to use Parler via web browsers on their phones or computers.
  • Parler’s app has been downloaded more than 10 million times on iPhones and Android devices, with more than 80 percent of the downloads in the United States, according to Sensor Tower, an app data firm. On Thursday, the day after the riot in Washington, people downloaded Parler 39,000 times, more than twice as much as the day prior.
  • Parler had a major advantage: money. Rebekah Mercer, one of Mr. Trump's largest donors and an investor in Breitbart, said on Parler in November that she had started the company with Mr. Matze, a self-described libertarian, “to provide a neutral platform for free speech, as our founders intended.”
  • After Twitter announced it had banned Mr. Trump on Friday, he posted a message under the official Twitter account for the U.S. president that said his team had been “negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future.” He added, “We will not be SILENCED!”
  • While explaining their decisions on Friday, Apple and Google shared images of posts on Parler that they said had crossed the line. They included a post from Lin Wood, the defamation lawyer who sued to overturn Mr. Trump’s election loss, that said Vice President Mike Pence should be executed for not helping the fight to overturn the election results. The post was shared thousands of times.
  • Another post they cited said 20 coordinated assassinations were all that would be needed to “take back our country.” It had been shared nearly 200 times and stayed up for at least two days.
  • “If people are breaking the law, violating our terms of service, or doing anything illegal, we would definitely get involved,” Mr. Matze told The Times this week. “But, you know, for the most part, I haven’t seen a whole lot of illegal activity.”
Javier E

Now That Grandma Has Been Vaccinated, May I Visit Her? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ovid-nursinghomes-vaccine.html

pandemic vaccine recommendation

shared by Javier E on 28 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Some medical experts have said that those guidelines are too lax and that visits should be severely restricted, even banned. However, some of these experts are now saying that the vaccine changes the equation, somewhat.
  • “Once all residents are vaccinated, it opens the door for loosening of restrictions,” said Dr. Michael Wasserman, the immediate past president of the California Association of Long Term Care Medicine, a geriatrician and former executive at nursing home chains.
  • To allow visits, Dr. Wasserman recommends all residents of a nursing home should be vaccinated (unless they have some condition or allergy that would discourage vaccination on medical grounds); all staff members should be vaccinated; and the nursing home should have the ability to ensure that visitors test negative for the coronavirus and have been disciplined about wearing a mask in public settings.
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  • If restrictions are eased, should I visit right away?
  • Dr. von Preyss-Friedman recommends waiting at least two weeks after the second shot to have a visit.
  • ideally, the visitor would also be vaccinated as well. Since shots won’t be widely available for a few months, it may be best to wait until you get your vaccine. Until then, she believes nursing homes should consider visits on a case-by-case basis.
  • Would visitors still need to wear a mask?Absolutely, medical experts said. This is particularly true if they are not vaccinated, but even after they are vaccinated “until rates in the community go down,”
cartergramiak

Opinion | Why Are Republicans Still This Loyal to a Mar-a-Lago Exile? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...achment-trial-republicans.html

history gop trump Politics

shared by cartergramiak on 15 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump famously said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” What no one knew at the time, but what the just-concluded impeachment trial showed in vivid and at times sickening detail, is that Mr. Trump was foreshadowing something worse.
  • Yet in the aftermath of that, the vast majority of Republican lawmakers stood where they always have for the last four years: shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump. And precisely because they have done so, time and time again, we became inured to how troubling the alliance between Mr. Trump and the Republican Party turned out to be, with Mr. Trump’s senatorial defenders (or should I say praetorian guard) — Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson and others — not only shameless and remorseless, but belligerent.
  • So why did Republicans, with seven honorable exceptions — Senators Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Pat Toomey, Bill Cassidy, Richard Burr and Ben Sasse — profess their loyalty to a sociopath who has been exiled to Mar-a-Lago? Why do they continue to defend a man who lost the popular vote by more than seven million votes, whose recklessness after the election cost Republicans control of the Senate, and who is causing a flight from the Republican Party?
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  • So for conservatives who are longing for a responsible political home and for those who believe healthy conservative parties are vital to the survival of democracy, what can be done to salvage the Republican Party?
  • To begin with, it needs leaders who are willing to say that something has gone very, very wrong. They don’t have to dwell on it, or make it the focus of their efforts every minute, but the next generation of Republican leaders cannot pretend that the last few years were politics as they ought to be. They need to acknowledge that a sickness set in and take steps to cure it.
  • Right now all this may seem aspirational or even unachievable, but this is what has to happen if there is going to be a responsible conservative alternative to the Democratic Party. A new, post-Trump Republican Party should put in place a political infrastructure that supports conservatives in primary races who are responsible, intellectually serious and interested in governing rather than theatrics.
  • I am not sure what to think, but I know what to hope.
Javier E

Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Stree... - 2 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/74ec4c99e72deda4a64da10692a15bf6

economics history literature good evil theory philosophy philosophers Bible Gilgamesh Adam Smith

shared by Javier E on 15 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?
  • The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.
  • most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.
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  • He tries to break free of narrow specialization and cross the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Expeditions beyond economics’ borders and its connection to history, philosophy, psychology, and ancient myths are not only refreshing, but necessary for understanding the world of the twenty-first century.
  • Reality is spun from stories, not from material. Zdeněk Neubauer
  • “The separation between the history of a science, its philosophy, and the science itself dissolves into thin air, and so does the separation between science and non-science; differences between the scientific and unscientific are vanishing.”
  • Outside of our history, we have nothing more.
  • The study of the history of a certain field is not, as is commonly held, a useless display of its blind alleys or a collection of the field’s trials and errors (until we got it right), but history is the fullest possible scope of study of a menu that the given field can offer.
  • History of thought helps us to get rid of the intellectual brainwashing of the age, to see through the intellectual fashion of the day, and to take a couple of steps back.
  • Almost all of the key concepts by which economics operates, both consciously and unconsciously, have a long history, and their roots extend predominantly outside the range of economics, and often completely beyond that of science.
  • That is the reason for this book: to look for economic thought in ancient myths and, vice versa, to look for myths in today’s economics.
  • stories; Adam Smith believed. As he puts it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, “the desire of being believed, or the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires.”
  • “The human mind is built to think in terms of narratives … in turn, much of human motivation comes from living through a story of our lives, a story that we tell to ourselves and that creates a framework of our motivation. Life could be just ‘one damn thing after another’ if it weren’t for such stories. The same is true for confidence in a nation, a company, or an institution. Great leaders are foremost creators of stories.”
  • contrary to what our textbooks say, economics is predominantly a normative field. Economics not only describes the world but is frequently about how the world should be (it should be effective, we have an ideal of perfect competition, an ideal of high-GDP growth in low inflation, the effort to achieve high competitiveness …). To this end, we create models, modern parables,
  • I will try to show that mathematics, models, equations, and statistics are just the tip of the iceberg of economics; that the biggest part of the iceberg of economic knowledge consists of everything else; and that disputes in economics are rather a battle of stories and various metanarratives than anything else.
  • Before it was emancipated as a field, economics lived happily within subsets of philosophy—ethics, for example—miles away from today’s concept of economics as a mathematical-allocative science that views “soft sciences” with a scorn born from positivistic arrogance. But our thousand-year “education” is built on a deeper, broader, and oftentimes more solid base. It is worth knowing about.
  • is a paradox that a field that primarily studies values wants to be value-free. One more paradox is this: A field that believes in the invisible hand of the market wants to be without mysteries.
  • mathematics at the core of economics, or is it just the icing of the cake, the tip of the iceberg of our field’s inquiry?
  • we seek to chart the development of the economic ethos. We ask questions that come before any economic thinking can begin—both philosophically and, to a degree, historically. The area here lies at the very borders of economics—and often beyond. We may refer to this as protoeconomics (to borrow a term from protosociology) or, perhaps more fittingly, metaeconomics (to borrow a term from metaphysics).
  • In this sense, “the study of economics is too narrow and too fragmentary to lead to valid insight, unless complemented and completed by a study of metaeconomics.”17
  • The more important elements of a culture or field of inquiry such as economics are found in fundamental assumptions that adherents of all the various systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming, because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them, as the philosopher Alfred Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas.
  • I argue that economic questions were with mankind long before Adam Smith. I argue that the search for values in economics did not start with Adam Smith but culminated with him.
  • We should go beyond economics and study what beliefs are “behind the scenes,” ideas that have often become the dominant yet unspoken assumptions in our theories. Economics is surprisingly full of tautologies that economists are predominantly unaware of. I
  • argue that economics should seek, discover, and talk about its own values, although we have been taught that economics is a value-free science. I argue that none of this is true and that there is more religion, myth, and archetype in economics than there is mathematics.
  • In a way, this is a study of the evolution of both homo economicus and, more importantly, the history of the animal spirits within him. This book tries to study the evolution of the rational as well as the emotional and irrational side of human beings.
  • I argue that his most influential contribution to economics was ethical. His other thoughts had been clearly expressed long before him, whether on specialization, or on the principle of the invisible hand of the market. I try to show that the principle of the invisible hand of the market is much more ancient and developed long before Adam Smith. Traces of it appear even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Hebrew thought, and in Christianity, and it is expressly stated by Aristophanes and Thomas Aquinas.
  • This is not a book on the thorough history of economic thought. The author aims instead to supplement certain chapters on the history of economic thought with a broader perspective and analysis of the influences that often escape the notice of economists and the wider public.
  • Progress (Naturalness and Civilization)
  • The Economy of Good and Evil
  • from his beginnings, man has been marked as a naturally unnatural creature, who for unique reasons surrounds himself with external possessions. Insatiability, both material and spiritual, are basic human metacharacteristics, which appear as early as the oldest myths and stories.
  • the Hebrews, with linear time, and later the Christians gave us the ideal (or amplified the Hebrew ideal) we now embrace. Then the classical economists secularized progress. How did we come to today’s progression of progress, and growth for growth’s sake?
  • The Need for Greed: The History of Consumption and Labor
  • Metamathematics From where did economics get the concept of numbers as the very foundation of the world?
  • All of economics is, in the end, economics of good and evil. It is the telling of stories by people of people to people. Even the most sophisticated mathematical model is, de facto, a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world around us.
  • idea that we can manage to utilize our natural egoism, and that this evil is good for something, is an ancient philosophical and mythical concept. We will also look into the development of the ethos of homo economicus, the birth of “economic man.”
  • The History of Animal Spirits: Dreams Never Sleep
  • Masters of the Truth
  • Originally, truth was a domain of poems and stories, but today we perceive truth as something much more scientific, mathematical. Where does one go (to shop) for the truth? And who “has the truth” in our epoch?
  • Our animal spirits (something of a counterpart to rationality) are influenced by the archetype of the hero and our concept of what is good.
  • The entire history of ethics has been ruled by an effort to create a formula for the ethical rules of behavior. In the final chapter we will show the tautology of Max Utility, and we will discuss the concept of Max Good.
  • The History of the Invisible Hand of the Market and Homo Economicus
  • We understand “economics” to mean a broader field than just the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. We consider economics to be the study of human relations that are sometimes expressible in numbers, a study that deals with tradables, but one that also deals with nontradables (friendship, freedom, efficiency, growth).
  • When we mention economics in this book, we mean the mainstream perception of it, perhaps as best represented by Paul Samuelson.
  • By the term homo economicus, we mean the primary concept of economic anthropology. It comes from the concept of a rational individual, who, led by narrowly egotistical motives, sets out to maximize his benefit.
  • the Epic of Gilgamesh bears witness to the opposite—despite the fact that the first written clay fragments (such as notes and bookkeeping) of our ancestors may have been about business and war, the first written story is mainly about great friendship and adventure.
  • there is no mention of either money or war; for example, not once does anyone in the whole epic sell or purchase something.5 No nation conquers another, and we do not encounter a mention even of the threat of violence.
  • Gilgamesh becomes a hero not only due to his strength, but also due to discoveries and deeds whose importance were in large part economic—direct gaining of construction materials in the case of felling the cedar forest, stopping Enkidu from devastating Uruk’s economy, and discovering new desert routes during his expeditions.
  • Even today we live in Gilgamesh’s vision that human relations—and therefore humanity itself—are a disturbance to work and efficiency; that people would perform better if they did not “waste” their time and energy on nonproductive things.
  • is a story of nature and civilization, of heroism, defiance, and the battle against the gods, and evil; an epic about wisdom, immortality, and also futility.
  • But labour is unlike any other commodity. The work environment is of no concern for steel; we do not care about steel’s well-being.16
  • But it is in friendship where—often by-the-way, as a side product, an externality—ideas and deeds are frequently performed or created that together can altogether change the face of society.19 Friendship can go against an ingrained system in places where an individual does not have the courage to do so himself or herself.
  • As Joseph Stiglitz says, One of the great “tricks” (some say “insights”) of neoclassical economics is to treat labour like any other factor of production. Output is written as a function of inputs—steel, machines, and labour. The mathematics treats labour like any other commodity, lulling one into thinking of labour like an ordinary commodity, such as steel or plastic.
  • Even the earliest cultures were aware of the value of cooperation on the working level—today we call this collegiality, fellowship, or, if you want to use a desecrated term, comradeship. These “lesser relationships” are useful and necessary for society and for companies because work can be done much faster and more effectively if people get along with each other on a human level
  • But true friendship, which becomes one of the central themes of the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from completely different material than teamwork. Friendship, as C. S. Lewis accurately describes it, is completely uneconomical, unbiological, unnecessary for civilization, and an unneeded relationship
  • Here we have a beautiful example of the power of friendship, one that knows how to transform (or break down) a system and change a person. Enkidu, sent to Gilgamesh as a punishment from the gods, in the end becomes his faithful friend, and together they set out against the gods. Gilgamesh would never have gathered the courage to do something like that on his own—nor would Enkidu.
  • Due to their friendship, Gilgamesh and Enkidu then intend to stand up to the gods themselves and turn a holy tree into mere (construction) material they can handle almost freely, thereby making it a part of the city-construct, part of the building material of civilization, thus “enslaving” that which originally was part of wild nature. This is a beautiful proto-example of the shifting of the borders between the sacred and profane (secular)—and to a certain extent also an early illustration of the idea that nature is there to provide cities and people with raw material and production resources.
  • started with Babylonians—rural nature becomes just a supplier of raw materials, resources (and humans the source of human resources). Nature is not the garden in which humans were created and placed, which they should care for and which they should reside in, but becomes a mere reservoir for natural (re)sources.
  • Even today, we often consider the domain of humanity (human relations, love, friendship, beauty, art, etc.) to be unproductive;
  • Both heroes change—each from opposite poles—into humans. In this context, a psychological dimension to the story may be useful: “Enkidu (…) is Gilgamesh’s alter ego, the dark, animal side of his soul, the complement to his restless heart. When Gilgamesh found Enkidu, he changed from a hated tyrant into the protector of his city. (…)
  • To be human seems to be somewhere in between, or both of these two. We
  • this moment of rebirth from an animal to a human state, the world’s oldest preserved epic implicitly hints at something highly important. Here we see what early cultures considered the beginning of civilization. Here is depicted the difference between people and animals or, better, savages. Here the epic quietly describes birth, the awakening of a conscious, civilized human. We are witnesses to the emancipation of humanity from animals,
  • The entire history of culture is dominated by an effort to become as independent as possible from the whims of nature.39 The more developed a civilization is, the more an individual is protected from nature and natural influences and knows how to create around him a constant or controllable environment to his liking.
  • The price we pay for independence from the whims of nature is dependence on our societies and civilizations. The more sophisticated a given society is as a whole, the less its members are able to survive on their own as individuals, without society.
  • The epic captures one of the greatest leaps in the development of the division of labor. Uruk itself is one of the oldest cities of all, and in the epic it reflects a historic step forward in specialization—in the direction of a new social city arrangement. Because of the city wall, people in the city can devote themselves to things other than worrying about their own safety, and they can continue to specialize more deeply.
  • Human life in the city gains a new dimension and suddenly it seems more natural to take up issues going beyond the life span of an individual. “The city wall symbolizes as well as founds the permanence of the city as an institution which will remain forever and give its inhabitants the certainty of unlimited safety, allowing them to start investing with an outlook reaching far beyond the borders of individual life.
  • The wall around the city of Uruk is, among other things, a symbol of an internal distancing from nature, a symbol of revolts against submission to laws that do not come under the control of man and that man can at most discover and use to his benefit.
  • “The chief thing which the common-sense individual wants is not satisfactions for the wants he had, but more, and better wants.”47
  • If a consumer buys something, theoretically it should rid him of one of his needs—and the aggregate of things they need should be decreased by one item. In reality, though, the aggregate of “I want to have” expands together with the growing aggregate of “I have.”
  • can be said that Enkidu was therefore happy in his natural state, because all of his needs were satiated. On the other hand, with people, it appears that the more a person has, the more developed and richer, the greater the number of his needs (including the unsaturated ones).
  • the Old Testament, this relationship is perceived completely differently. Man (humanity) is created in nature, in a garden. Man was supposed to care for the Garden of Eden and live in harmony with nature and the animals. Soon after creation, man walks naked and is not ashamed, de facto the same as the animals. What is characteristic is that man dresses (the natural state of creation itself is not enough for him), and he (literally and figuratively) covers52 himself—in shame after the fall.53
  • Nature is where one goes to hunt, collect crops, or gather the harvest. It is perceived as the saturator of our needs and nothing more. One goes back to the city to sleep and be “human.” On the contrary, evil resides in nature. Humbaba lives in the cedar forest, which also happens to be the reason to completely eradicate it.
  • Symbolically, then, we can view the entire issue from the standpoint of the epic in the following way: Our nature is insufficient, bad, evil, and good (humane) occurs only after emancipation from nature (from naturalness), through culturing and education. Humanity is considered as being in civilization.
  • The city was frequently (at least in older Jewish writings) a symbol of sin, degeneration, and decadence—nonhumanity. The Hebrews were originally a nomadic nation, one that avoided cities. It is no accident that the first important city57 mentioned in the Bible is proud Babylon,58 which God later turns to dust.
  • is enough, for example, to read the Book of Revelation to see how the vision of paradise developed from the deep Old Testament period, when paradise was a garden. John describes his vision of heaven as a city—paradise is in New Jerusalem, a city where the dimensions of the walls(!) are described in detail, as are the golden streets and gates of pearl.
  • Hebrews later also chose a king (despite the unanimous opposition of God’s prophets) and settled in cities, where they eventually founded the Lord’s Tabernacle and built a temple for Him. The city of Jerusalem later gained an illustrious position in all of religion.
  • this time Christianity (as well as the influence of the Greeks) does not consider human naturalness to be an unambiguous good, and it does not have such an idyllic relationship to nature as the Old Testament prophets.
  • If a tendency toward good is not naturally endowed in people, it must be imputed from above through violence or at least the threat of violence.
  • If we were to look at human naturalness as a good, then collective social actions need a much weaker ruling hand. If people themselves have a natural tendency (propensity) toward good, this role does not have to be supplied by the state, ruler, or, if you wish, Leviathan.
  • How does this affect economics?
  • us return for the last time to the humanization of the wild Enkidu, which is a process we can perceive with a bit of imagination as the first seed of the principle of the market’s invisible hand, and therefore the parallels with one of the central schematics of economic thinking.
  • Sometimes it is better to “harness the devil to the plow” than to fight with him. Instead of summoning up enormous energy in the fight against evil, it is better to use its own energy to reach a goal we desire; setting up a mill on the turbulent river instead of futile efforts to remove the current. This is also how Saint Prokop approached it in one of the oldest Czech legends.
  • Enkidu caused damage and it was impossible to fight against him. But with the help of a trap, trick, this evil was transformed into something that greatly benefited civilization.
  • By culturing and “domesticating” Enkidu, humanity tamed the uncontrollable wild and chaotic evil
  • Enkidu devastated the doings (the external, outside-the-walls) of the city. But he was later harnessed and fights at the side of civilization against nature, naturalness, the natural state of things.
  • A similar motif appears a thousand years after the reversal, which is well known even to noneconomists as the central idea of economics: the invisible hand of the market.
  • A similar story (reforming something animally wild and uncultivated in civilizational achievement) is used by Thomas Aquinas in his teachings. Several centuries later, this idea is fully emancipated in the hands of Bernard Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits. The economic and political aspects of this idea are—often incorrectly—ascribed to Adam Smith.
  • Here the individual does not try anymore to maximize his goods or profits, but what is important is writing his name in human memory in the form of heroic acts or deeds.
  • immortality, one connected with letters and the cult of the word: A name and especially a written name survives the body.”77
  • After this disappointment, he comes to the edge of the sea, where the innkeeper Siduri lives. As tonic for his sorrow, she offers him the garden of bliss, a sort of hedonistic fortress of carpe diem, where a person comes to terms with his mortality and at least in the course of the end of his life maximizes earthly pleasures, or earthly utility.
  • In the second stage, after finding his friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh abandons the wall and sets out beyond the city to maximalize heroism. “In his (…) search of immortal life, Gilgamesh
  • The hero refuses hedonism in the sense of maximizing terrestrial pleasure and throws himself into things that will exceed his life. In the blink of an eye, the epic turns on its head the entire utility maximization role that mainstream economics has tirelessly tried to sew on people as a part of their nature.81
  • It is simpler to observe the main features of our civilization at a time when the picture was more readable—at a time when our civilization was just being born and was still “half-naked.” In other words, we have tried to dig down to the bedrock of our written civilization;
  • today remember Gilgamesh for his story of heroic friendship with Enkidu, not for his wall, which no longer reaches monumental heights.
  • the eleventh and final tablet, Gilgamesh again loses what he sought. Like Sisyphus, he misses his goal just before the climax
  • is there something from it that is valid today? Have we found in Gilgamesh certain archetypes that are in us to this day?
  • The very existence of questions similar to today’s economic ones can be considered as the first observation. The first written considerations of the people of that time were not so different from those today. In other words: The epic is understandable for us, and we can identify with it.
  • We have also been witnesses to the very beginnings of man’s culturing—a great drama based on a liberation and then a distancing from the natural state.
  • Let us take this as a memento in the direction of our restlessness, our inherited dissatisfaction and the volatility connected to it. Considering that they have lasted five thousand years and to this day we find ourselves in harmony with a certain feeling of futility, perhaps these characteristics are inherent in man.
  • Gilgamesh had a wall built that divided the city from wild nature and created a space for the first human culture. Nevertheless, “not even far-reaching works of civilization could satisfy human desire.”
  • Friendship shows us new, unsuspected adventures, gives us the opportunity to leave the wall and to become neither its builder nor its part—to not be another brick in the wall.
  • with the phenomenon of the creation of the city, we have seen how specialization and the accumulation of wealth was born, how holy nature was transformed into a secular supplier of resources, and also how humans’ individualistic ego was emancipated.
  • to change the system, to break down that which is standing and go on an expedition against the gods (to awaken, from naïveté to awakening) requires friendship.
  • For small acts (hunting together, work in a factory), small love is enough: Camaraderie. For great acts, however, great love is necessary, real love: Friendship. Friendship that eludes the economic understanding of quid pro quo. Friendship gives. One friend gives (fully) for the other. That is friendship for life and death,
  • The thought that humanity comes at the expense of efficiency is just as old as humanity itself—as we have shown, subjects without emotion are the ideal of many tyrants.
  • The epic later crashes this idea through the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Friendship—the biologically least essential love, which at first sight appears to be unnecessary
  • less a civilized, city person is dependent on nature, the more he or she is dependent on the rest of society. Like Enkidu, we have exchanged nature for society; harmony with (incalculable) nature for harmony with (incalculable) man.
  • human nature good or evil? To this day these questions are key for economic policy: If we believe that man is evil in his nature, therefore that a person himself is dog eat dog (animal), then the hard hand of a ruler is called for. If we believe that people in and of themselves, in their nature, gravitate toward good, then it is possible to loosen up the reins and live in a society that is more laissez-faire.
  • For a concept of historical progress, for the undeification of heroes, rulers, and nature, mankind had to wait for the Hebrews.
  • Because nature is not undeified, it is beyond consideration to explore it, let alone intervene in it (unless a person was a two-thirds god like Gilgamesh). It
  • They practiced money lending, traded in many assets (…) and especially were engaged in the trading of shares on capital markets, worked in currency exchange and frequently figured as mediators in financial transactions (…), they functioned as bankers and participated in emissions of all possible forms.
  • As regards modern capitalism (as opposed to the ancient and medieval periods) … there are activities in it which are, in certain forms, inherently (and completely necessarily) present—both from an economic and legal standpoint.7
  • As early as the “dark” ages, the Jews commonly used economic tools that were in many ways ahead of their time and that later became key elements of the modern economy:
  • Gilgamesh’s story ends where it began. There is a consistency in this with Greek myths and fables: At the end of the story, no progress occurs, no essential historic change; the story is set in indefinite time, something of a temporal limbo.
  • Jews believe in historical progress, and that progress is in this world.
  • For a nation originally based on nomadism, where did this Jewish business ethos come from? And can the Hebrews truly be considered as the architects of the values that set the direction of our civilization’s economic thought?
  • Hebrew religiosity is therefore strongly connected with this world, not with any abstract world, and those who take pleasure in worldly possessions are not a priori doing anything wrong.
  • PROGRESS: A SECULARIZED RELIGION One of the things the writers of the Old Testament gave to mankind is the idea and notion of progress. The Old Testament stories have their development; they change the history of the Jewish nation and tie in to each other. The Jewish understanding of time is linear—it has a beginning and an end.
  • The observance of God’s Commandments in Judaism leads not to some ethereal other world, but to an abundance of material goods (Genesis 49:25–26, Leviticus 26:3–13, Deuteronomy 28:1–13) (…) There are no accusing fingers pointed at
  • There are no echoes of asceticism nor for the cleansing and spiritual effect of poverty. It is fitting therefore, that the founders of Judaism, the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were all wealthy men.12
  • about due to a linear understanding of history. If history has a beginning as well as an end, and they are not the same point, then exploration suddenly makes sense in areas where the fruits are borne only in the next generation.
  • What’s more, economic progress has almost become an assumption of modern functional societies. We expect growth. We take it automatically. Today, if nothing “new” happens, if GDP does not grow (we say it stagnates) for several quarters, we consider it an anomaly.
  • however, the idea of progress itself underwent major changes, and today we perceive it very differently. As opposed to the original spiritual conceptions, today we perceive progress almost exclusively in an economic or scientific-technological sense.
  • Because care for the soul has today been replaced by care for external things,
  • This is why we must constantly grow, because we (deep down and often implicitly) believe that we are headed toward an (economic) paradise on Earth.
  • Only since the period of scientific-technological revolution (and at a time when economics was born as an independent field) is material progress automatically assumed.
  • Jewish thought is the most grounded, most realistic school of thought of all those that have influenced our culture.17 An abstract world of ideas was unknown to the Jews. To this day it is still forbidden to even depict God, people, and animals in symbols, paintings, statues, and drawings.
  • economists have become key figures of great importance in our time (Kacířské eseje o filosofii dějin [Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History]). They are expected to perform interpretations of reality, give prophetic services (macroeconomic forecasts), reshape reality (mitigate the impacts of the crisis, speed up growth), and, in the long run, provide leadership on the way to the Promised Land—paradise on Earth.
  • REALISM AND ANTIASCETICISM Aside from ideas of progress, the Hebrews brought another very fundamental contribution to our culture: The desacralization of heroes, nature, and rulers.
  • Voltaire writes: “It certain fact is, that in his public laws he [Moses] never so much as once made mention of a life to come, limiting all punishments and all rewards to the present life.”21
  • As opposed to Christianity, the concept of an extraterrestrial paradise or heaven was not developed much in Hebrew thought.19 The paradise of the Israelites—Eden—was originally placed on Earth at a given place in Mesopotamia20 and at a given time,
  • The Hebrews consider the world to be real—not just a shadow reflection of a better world somewhere in the cloud of ideas, something the usual interpretation of history ascribes to Plato. The soul does not struggle against the body and is not its prisoner, as Augustine would write later.
  • The land, the world, the body, and material reality are for Jews the paramount setting for divine history, the pinnacle of creation. This idea is the conditio sine qua non of the development of economics, something of an utterly earthly making,
  • The mythology of the hero-king was strongly developed in that period, which Claire Lalouette summarizes into these basic characteristics: Beauty (a perfect face, on which it is “pleasant to look upon,” but also “beauty,” expressed in the Egyptian word nefer, not only means aesthetics, but contains moral qualities as well),
  • THE HERO AND HIS UNDEIFICATION: THE DREAM NEVER SLEEPS The concept of the hero is more important than it might appear. It may be the remote origin of Keynes’s animal spirits, or the desire to follow a kind of internal archetype that a given individual accepts as his own and that society values.
  • This internal animator of ours, our internal mover, this dream, never sleeps and it influences our behavior—including economic behavior—more than we want to realize.
  • manliness and strength,28 knowledge and intelligence,29 wisdom and understanding, vigilance and performance, fame and renown (fame which overcomes enemies because “a thousand men would not be able to stand firmly in his presence”);30 the hero is a good shepherd (who takes care of his subordinates), is a copper-clad rampart, the shield of the land, and the defender of heroes.
  • Each of us probably has a sort of “hero within”—a kind of internal role-model, template, an example that we (knowingly or not) follow. It is very important what kind of archetype it is, because its role is dominantly irrational and changes depending on time and the given civilization.
  • The oldest was the so-called Trickster—a fraudster; then the culture bearer—Rabbit; the musclebound hero called Redhorn; and finally the most developed form of hero: the Twins.
  • the Egyptian ruler, just as the Sumerian, was partly a god, or the son of a god.31
  • Jacob defrauds his father Isaac and steals his brother Esau’s blessing of the firstborn. Moses murders an Egyptian. King David seduces the wife of his military commander and then has him killed. In his old age, King Solomon turns to pagan idols, and so on.
  • Anthropology knows several archetypes of heroes. The Polish-born American anthropologist Paul Radin examined the myths of North American Indians and, for example, in his most influential book, The Trickster, he describes their four basic archetypes of heroes.
  • The Torah’s heroes (if that term can be used at all) frequently make mistakes and their mistakes are carefully recorded in the Bible—maybe precisely so that none of them could be deified.32
  • We do not have to go far for examples. Noah gets so drunk he becomes a disgrace; Lot lets his own daughters seduce him in a similar state of drunkenness. Abraham lies and (repeatedly) tries to sell his wife as a concubine.
  • the Hebrew heroes correspond most to the Tricksters, the Culture Bearers, and the Twins. The divine muscleman, that dominant symbol we think of when we say hero, is absent here.
  • To a certain extent it can be said that the Hebrews—and later Christianity—added another archetype, the archetype of the heroic Sufferer.35 Job
  • Undeification, however, does not mean a call to pillage or desecration; man was put here to take care of nature (see the story of the Garden of Eden or the symbolism of the naming of the animals). This protection and care of nature is also related to the idea of progress
  • For the heroes who moved our civilization to where it is today, the heroic archetypes of the cunning trickster, culture bearer, and sufferer are rather more appropriate.
  • the Old Testament strongly emphasizes the undeification of nature.37 Nature is God’s creation, which speaks of divinity but is not the domain of moody gods
  • This is very important for democratic capitalism, because the Jewish heroic archetype lays the groundwork much better for the development of the later phenomenon of the hero, which better suits life as we know it today. “The heroes laid down their arms and set about trading to become wealthy.”
  • in an Old Testament context, the pharaoh was a mere man (whom one could disagree with, and who could be resisted!).
  • RULERS ARE MERE MEN In a similar historical context, the Old Testament teachings carried out a similar desacralization of rulers, the so-called bearers of economic policy.
  • Ultimately the entire idea of a political ruler stood against the Lord’s will, which is explicitly presented in the Torah. The Lord unequivocally preferred the judge as the highest form of rule—an
  • The needs of future generations will have to be considered; after all humankind are the guardians of God’s world. Waste of natural resources, whether privately owned or nationally owned is forbidden.”39
  • Politics lost its character of divine infallibility, and political issues were subject to questioning. Economic policy could become a subject of examination.
  • 44 God first creates with the word and then on individual days He divides light from darkness, water from dry land, day from night, and so forth—and He gives order to things.45 The world is created orderly— it is wisely, reasonably put together. The way of the world is put together at least partially46 decipherably by any other wise and reasonable being who honors rational rules.
  • which for the methodology of science and economics is very important because disorder and chaos are difficult to examine scientifically.43 Faith in some kind of rational and logical order in a system (society, the economy) is a silent assumption of any (economic) examination.
  • THE PRAISE OF ORDER AND WISDOM: MAN AS A PERFECTER OF CREATION The created world has an order of sorts, an order recognizable by us as people,
  • From the very beginning, when God distances Himself from the entire idea, there is an anticipation that there is nothing holy, let alone divine, in politics. Rulers make mistakes, and it is possible to subject them to tough criticism—which frequently occurs indiscriminately through the prophets in the Old Testament.
  • Hebrew culture laid the foundations for the scientific examination of the world.
  • Examining the world is therefore an absolutely legitimate activity, and one that is even requested by God—it is a kind of participation in the Creator’s work.51 Man is called on to understand himself and his surroundings and to use his knowledge for good.
  • I was there when he set heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep (…) Then I was the craftsman at his side.47
  • There are more urgings to gain wisdom in the Old Testament. “Wisdom calls aloud in the street (…): ‘How long will you simple ones love your simple ways?’”49 Or several chapters later: “Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding.”50
  • examination is not forbidden. The fact that order can be grasped by human reason is another unspoken assumption that serves as a cornerstone of any scientific examination.
  • then, my sons, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways (…) Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my doors, waiting at my doorway. For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the Lord.
  • the rational examination of nature has its roots, surprisingly, in religion.
  • The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old. I was appointed from eternity, from the beginning, before the world began. When there were no oceans, I was given birth, when there were no springs abounding with water, before the mountains were settled in place,
  • The Book of Proverbs emphasizes specifically several times that it was wisdom that was present at the creation of the world. Wisdom personified calls out:
  • The last act, final stroke of the brush of creation, naming of the animals—this act is given to a human, it is not done by God, as one would expect. Man was given the task of completing the act of creation that the Lord began:
  • MAN AS A FINISHER OF CREATION The creation of the world, as it is explained in Jewish teachings, is described in the Book of Genesis. Here God (i) creates, (ii) separates, and (iii) names [my emphasis]:
  • Naming is a symbolic expression. In Jewish culture (and also in our culture to this day), the right to name meant sovereign rights and belonged, for example, to explorers (new places), inventors (new principles), or parents (children)—that is, to those who were there at the genesis, at the origin. This right was handed over by God to mankind.
  • The Naming itself (the capital N is appropriate) traditionally belongs to the crowning act of the Creator and represents a kind of grand finale of creation, the last move of the brush to complete the picture—a signature of the master.
  • Without naming, reality does not exist; it is created together with language. Wittgenstein tightly names this in his tractatus—the limits of our language are the limits of our world.53
  • He invented (fictitiously and completely abstractly!) a framework that was generally accepted and soon “made into” reality. Marx invented similarly; he created the notion of class exploitation. Through his idea, the perception of history and reality was changed for a large part of the world for nearly an entire century.
  • Reality is not a given; it is not passive. Perceiving reality and “facts” requires man’s active participation. It is man who must take the last step, an act (and we
  • How does this relate to economics? Reality itself, our “objective” world, is cocreated, man himself participates in the creation; creation, which is somewhat constantly being re-created.
  • Our scientific models put the finishing touches on reality, because (1) they interpret, (2) they give phenomena a name, (3) they enable us to classify the world and phenomena according to logical forms, and (4) through these models we de facto perceive reality.
  • When man finds a new linguistic framework or analytical model, or stops using the old one, he molds or remolds reality. Models are only in our heads; they are not “in objective reality.” In this sense, Newton invented (not merely discovered!) gravity.
  • A real-ization act on our part represents the creation of a construct, the imputation of sense and order (which is beautifully expressed by the biblical act of naming, or categorization, sorting, ordering).
  • Keynes enters into the history of economic thought from the same intellectual cadence; his greatest contribution to economics was precisely the resurrection of the imperceptible—for example in the form of animal spirits or uncertainty. The economist Piero Mini even ascribes Keynes’s doubting and rebellious approach to his almost Talmudic education.63
  • God connects man with the task of guarding and protecting the Garden of Eden, and thus man actually cocreates the cultural landscape. The Czech philosopher Zdeněk Neubauer also describes this: “Such is reality, and it is so deep that it willingly crystallizes into worlds. Therefore I profess that reality is a creation and not a place of occurrence for objectively given phenomena.”61
  • in this viewpoint it is possible to see how Jewish thought is mystical—it admits the role of the incomprehensible. Therefore, through its groundedness, Jewish thought indulges mystery and defends itself against a mechanistic-causal explanation of the world: “The Jewish way of thinking, according to Veblen, emphasizes the spiritual, the miraculous, the intangible.
  • The Jews believed the exact opposite. The world is created by a good God, and evil appears in it as a result of immoral human acts. Evil, therefore, is induced by man.66 History unwinds according to the morality of human acts.
  • What’s more, history seems to be based on morals; morals seem to be the key determining factors of history. For the Hebrews, history proceeds according to how morally its actors behave.
  • The Sumerians believed in dualism—good and evil deities exist, and the earth of people becomes their passive battlefield.
  • GOOD AND EVIL IN US: A MORAL EXPLANATION OF WELL-BEING We have seen that in the Epic of Gilgamesh, good and evil are not yet addressed systematically on a moral level.
  • This was not about moral-human evil, but rather a kind of natural evil. It is as if good and evil were not touched by morality at all. Evil simply occurred. Period.
  • the epic, good and evil are not envisaged morally—they are not the result of an (a)moral act. Evil was not associated with free moral action or individual will.
  • Hebrew thought, on the other hand, deals intensively with moral good and evil. A moral dimension touches the core of its stories.65
  • discrepancy between savings and investment, and others are convinced of the monetary essence
  • The entire history of the Jewish nation is interpreted and perceived in terms of morality. Morality has become, so to speak, a mover and shaker of Hebrew history.
  • sunspots. The Hebrews came up with the idea that morals were behind good and bad years, behind the economic cycle. But we would be getting ahead of ourselves. Pharaoh’s Dream: Joseph and the First Business Cycle To
  • It is the Pharaoh’s well-known dream of seven fat and seven lean cows, which he told to Joseph, the son of Jacob. Joseph interpreted the dream as a macroeconomic prediction of sorts: Seven years of abundance were to be followed by seven years of poverty, famine, and misery.
  • Self-Contradicting Prophecy Here, let’s make several observations on this: Through taxation74 on the level of one-fifth of a crop75 in good years to save the crop and then open granaries in bad years, the prophecy was de facto prevented (prosperous years were limited and hunger averted—through a predecessor of fiscal stabilization).
  • The Old Testament prophesies therefore were not any deterministic look into the future, but warnings and strategic variations of the possible, which demanded some kind of reaction. If the reaction was adequate, what was prophesied would frequently not occur at all.
  • This principle stands directly against the self-fulfilling prophecy,80 the well-known concept of social science. Certain prophecies become self-fulfilling when expressed (and believed) while others become self-contradicting prophecies when pronounced (and believed).
  • If the threat is anticipated, it is possible to totally or at least partially avoid it. Neither Joseph nor the pharaoh had the power to avoid bounty or crop failure (in this the dream interpretation was true and the appearance of the future mystical), but they avoided the impacts and implications of the prophecy (in this the interpretation of the dream was “false”)—famine did not ultimately occur in Egypt, and this was due to the application of reasonable and very intuitive economic policy.
  • Let us further note that the first “macroeconomic forecast” appears in a dream.
  • back to Torah: Later in this story we will notice that there is no reason offered as to why the cycle occurs (that will come later). Fat years will simply come, and then lean years after them.
  • Moral Explanation of a Business Cycle That is fundamentally different from later Hebrew interpretations, when the Jewish nation tries to offer reasons why the nation fared well or poorly. And those reasons are moral.
  • If you pay attention to these laws and are careful to follow them, then the Lord your God will keep his covenant of love with you, as he swore to your forefathers. He will love you and bless you and increase your numbers.
  • Only in recent times have some currents of economics again become aware of the importance of morals and trust in the form of measuring the quality of institutions, the level of justice, business ethics, corruption, and so forth, and examining their influence on the economy,
  • From today’s perspective, we can state that the moral dimension entirely disappeared from economic thought for a long time, especially due to the implementation of Mandeville’s concept of private vices that contrarily support the public welfare
  • Without being timid, we can say this is the first documented attempt to explain the economic cycle. The economic cycle, the explanation of which is to this day a mystery to economists, is explained morally in the Old Testament.
  • But how do we consolidate these two conflicting interpretations of the economic cycle: Can ethics be responsible for it or not? Can we influence reality around us through our acts?
  • it is not within the scope of this book to answer that question; justice has been done to the question if it manages to sketch out the main contours of possible searches for answers.
  • THE ECONOMICS OF GOOD AND EVIL: DOES GOOD PAY OFF? This is probably the most difficult moral problem we could ask.
  • Kant, the most important modern thinker in the area of ethics, answers on the contrary that if we carry out a “moral” act on the basis of economic calculus (therefore we carry out an hedonistic consideration; see below) in the expectation of later recompense, its morality is lost. Recompense, according to the strict Kant, annuls ethics.
  • Inquiring about the economics of good and evil, however, is not that easy. Where would Kant’s “moral dimension of ethics” go if ethics paid? If we do good for profit, the question of ethics becomes a mere question of rationality.
  • Job’s friends try to show that he must have sinned in some way and, in doing so, deserved God’s punishment. They are absolutely unable to imagine a situation in which Job, as a righteous man, would suffer without (moral) cause. Nevertheless, Job insists that he deserves no punishment because he has committed no offense: “God has wronged me and drawn his net around me.”94
  • But Job remains righteous, even though it does not pay to do so: Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.95 And till I die, I will not deny my integrity I will maintain my righteousness and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.96
  • He remains righteous, even if his only reward is death. What economic advantage could he have from that?
  • morals cannot be considered in the economic dimension of productivity and calculus. The role of the Hebrews was to do good, whether it paid off or not. If good (outgoing) is rewarded by incoming goodness, it is a bonus,99 not a reason to do outgoing good. Good and reward do not correlate to each other.
  • This reasoning takes on a dimension of its own in the Old Testament. Good (incoming) has already happened to us. We must do good (outgoing) out of gratitude for the good (incoming) shown to us in the past.
  • So why do good? After all, suffering is the fate of many biblical figures. The answer can only be: For good itself. Good has the power to be its own reward. In this sense, goodness gets its reward, which may or may not take on a material dimension.
  • the Hebrews offered an interesting compromise between the teachings of the Stoics and Epicureans. We will go into it in detail later, so only briefly
  • constraint. It calls for bounded optimalization (with limits). A kind of symbiosis existed between the legitimate search for one’s own utility (or enjoyment of life) and maintaining rules, which are not negotiable and which are not subject to optimalization.
  • In other words, clear (exogenously given) rules exist that must be observed and cannot be contravened. But within these borders it is absolutely possible, and even recommended, to increase utility.
  • the mining of enjoyment must not come at the expense of exogenously given rules. “Judaism comes therefore to train or educate the unbounded desire … for wealth, so that market activities and patterns of consumption operate within a God-given morality.”102
  • The Epicureans acted with the goal of maximizing utility without regard for rules (rules developed endogenously, from within the system, computed from that which increased utility—this was one of the main trumps of the Epicurean school; they did not need exogenously given norms, and argued that they could “calculate” ethics (what to do) for every given situation from the situation itself).
  • The Stoics could not seek their enjoyment—or, by another name, utility. They could not in any way look back on it, and in no way could they count on it. They could only live according to rules (the greatest weakness of this school was to defend where exogenously the given rules came from and whether they are universal) and take a indifferent stand to the results of their actions.
  • To Love the Law The Jews not only had to observe the law (perhaps the word covenant would be more appropriate), but they were to love it because it was good.
  • Their relationship to the law was not supposed to be one of duty,105 but one of gratitude, love. Hebrews were to do good (outgoing), because goodness (incoming) has already been done to them.
  • This is in stark contrast with today’s legal system, where, naturally, no mention of love or gratefulness exists. But God expects a full internalization of the commandments and their fulfillment with love, not as much duty. By no means was this on the basis of the cost-benefit analyses so widespread in economics today, which determines when it pays to break the law and when not to (calculated on the basis of probability of being caught and the amount of punishment vis-à-vis the possible gain).
  • And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good? To the Lord your God belong the heavens, even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. Yet the Lord set his affection on your forefathers and loved them….
  • the principle of doing good (outgoing) on the basis of a priori demonstrated good (incoming) was also taken over by the New Testament. Atonement itself is based on an a priori principle; all our acts are preceded by good.
  • The Hebrews, originally a nomadic tribe, preferred to be unrestrained and grew up in constant freedom of motion.
  • Human laws, if they are in conflict with the responsibilities given by God, are subordinate to personal responsibility, and a Jew cannot simply join the majority, even if it is legally allowed. Ethics, the concept of good, is therefore always superior to all local laws, rules, and customs:
  • THE SHACKLES OF THE CITY Owing to the Hebrew’s liberation from Egyptian slavery, freedom and responsibility become the key values of Jewish thought.
  • Laws given by God are binding for Jews, and God is the absolute source of all values,
  • The Hebrew ideal is represented by the paradise of the Garden of Eden, not a city.116 The despised city civilization or the tendency to see in it a sinful and shackling way of life appears in glimpses and allusions in many places in the Old Testament.
  • The nomadic Jewish ethos is frequently derived from Abraham, who left the Chaldean city of Ur on the basis of a command:
  • In addition, they were aware of a thin two-way line between owner and owned. We own material assets, but—to a certain extent—they own us and tie us down. Once we become used to a certain material
  • This way of life had understandably immense economic impacts. First, such a society lived in much more connected relationships, where there was no doubt that everyone mutually depended on each other. Second, their frequent wanderings meant the inability to own more than they could carry; the gathering up of material assets did not have great weight—precisely because the physical weight (mass) of things was tied to one place.
  • One of Moses’s greatest deeds was that he managed to explain to his nation once and for all that it is better to remain hungry and liberated than to be a slave with food “at no cost.”
  • SOCIAL WELFARE: NOT TO ACT IN THE MANNER OF SODOM
  • regulations is developed in the Old Testament, one we hardly find in any other nation of the time. In Hebrew teachings, aside from individual utility, indications of the concept of maximalizing utility societywide appear for the first time as embodied in the Talmudic principle of Kofin al midat S´dom, which can be translated as “one is compelled not to act in the manner of Sodom” and to take care of the weaker members of society.
  • In a jubilee year, debts were to be forgiven,125 and Israelites who fell into slavery due to their indebtedness were to be set free.126
  • Such provisions can be seen as the antimonopoly and social measures of the time. The economic system even then had a clear tendency to converge toward asset concentration, and therefore power as well. It would appear that these provisions were supposed to prevent this process
  • Land at the time could be “sold,” and it was not sale, but rent. The price (rent) of real estate depended on how long there was until a forgiveness year. It was about the awareness that we may work the land, but in the last instance we are merely “aliens and strangers,” who have the land only rented to us for a fixed time. All land and riches came from the Lord.
  • These provisions express a conviction that freedom and inheritance should not be permanently taken away from any Israelite. Last but not least, this system reminds us that no ownership lasts forever and that the fields we plow are not ours but the Lord’s.
  • Glean Another social provision was the right to glean, which in Old Testament times ensured at least basic sustenance for the poorest. Anyone who owned a field had the responsibility not to harvest it to the last grain but to leave the remains in the field for the poor.
  • Tithes and Early Social Net Every Israelite also had the responsibility of levying a tithe from their entire crop. They had to be aware from whom all ownership comes and, by doing so, express their thanks.
  • “Since the community has an obligation to provide food, shelter, and basic economic goods for the needy, it has a moral right and duty to tax its members for this purpose. In line with this duty, it may have to regulate markets, prices and competition, to protect the interests of its weakest members.”135
  • In Judaism, charity is not perceived as a sign of goodness; it is more of a responsibility. Such a society then has the right to regulate its economy in such a way that the responsibility of charity is carried out to its satisfaction.
  • With a number of responsibilities, however, comes the difficulty of getting them into practice. Their fulfillment, then, in cases when it can be done, takes place gradually “in layers.” Charitable activities are classified in the Talmud according to several target groups with various priorities, classified according to, it could be said, rules of subsidiarity.
  • Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.140 As one can see, aside from widows and orphans, the Old Testament also includes immigrants in its area of social protection.141 The Israelites had to have the same rules apply for them as for themselves—they could not discriminate on the basis of their origin.
  • ABSTRACT MONEY, FORBIDDEN INTEREST, AND OUR DEBT AGE If it appears to us that today’s era is based on money and debt, and our time will be written into history as the “Debt age,” then it will certainly be interesting to follow how this development occurred.
  • Money is a social abstractum. It is a social agreement, an unwritten contract.
  • The first money came in the form of clay tablets from Mesopotamia, on which debts were written. These debts were transferable, so the debts became currency. In the end, “It is no coincidence that in English the root of ‘credit’ is ‘credo,’ the Latin for ‘I believe.’”
  • To a certain extent it could be said that credit, or trust, was the first currency. It can materialize, it can be embodied in coins, but what is certain is that “money is not metal,” even the rarest metal, “it is trust inscribed,”
  • Inseparably, with the original credit (money) goes interest. For the Hebrews, the problem of interest was a social issue: “If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest.”
  • there were also clearly set rules setting how far one could go in setting guarantees and the nonpayment of debts. No one should become indebted to the extent that they could lose the source of their livelihood:
  • In the end, the term “bank” comes from the Italian banci, or the benches that Jewish lenders sat on.157
  • Money is playing not only its classical roles (as a means of exchange, a holder of value, etc.) but also a much greater, stronger role: It can stimulate, drive (or slow down) the whole economy. Money plays a national economic role.
  • In the course of history, however, the role of loans changed, and the rich borrowed especially for investment purposes,
  • Today the position and significance of money and debt has gone so far and reached such a dominant position in society that operating with debts (fiscal policy) or interest or money supply (monetary policy) means that these can, to a certain extent, direct (or at least strongly influence) the whole economy and society.
  • In such a case a ban on interest did not have great ethical significance. Thomas Aquinas, a medieval scholar (1225-1274), also considers similarly; in his time, the strict ban on lending with usurious interest was loosened, possibly due to him.
  • As a form of energy, money can travel in three dimensions, vertically (those who have capital lend to those who do not) and horizontally (speed and freedom in horizontal or geographic motion has become the by-product—or driving force?—of globalization). But money (as opposed to people) can also travel through time.
  • money is something like energy that can travel through time. And it is a very useful energy, but at the same time very dangerous as well. Wherever
  • Aristotle condemned interest162 not only from a moral standpoint, but also for metaphysical reasons. Thomas Aquinas shared the same fear of interest and he too argued that time does not belong to us, and that is why we must not require interest.
  • MONEY AS ENERGY: TIME TRAVEL AND GROSS DEBT PRODUCT (GDP)
  • Due to this characteristic, we can energy-strip the future to the benefit of the present. Debt can transfer energy from the future to the present.163 On the other hand, saving can accumulate energy from the past and send it to the present.
  • labor was not considered degrading in the Old Testament. On the contrary, the subjugation of nature is even a mission from God that originally belonged to man’s very first blessings.
  • LABOR AND REST: THE SABBATH ECONOMY
  • The Jews as well as Aristotle behaved very guardedly toward loans. The issue of interest/usury became one of the first economic debates. Without having an inkling of the future role of economic policy (fiscal and monetary), the ancient Hebrews may have unwittingly felt that they were discovering in interest a very powerful weapon, one that can be a good servant, but (literally) an enslaving master as well.
  • It’s something like a dam. When we build one, we are preventing periods of drought and flooding in the valley; we are limiting nature’s whims and, to a large extent, avoiding its incalculable cycles. Using dams, we can regulate the flow of water to nearly a constant. With it we tame the river (and we can also gain
  • But if we do not regulate the water wisely, it may happen that we would overfill the dam and it would break. For the cities lying in the valley, their end would be worse than if a dam were never there.
  • If man lived in harmony with nature before, now, after the fall, he must fight; nature stands against him and he against it and the animals. From the Garden we have moved unto a (battle)field.
  • Only after man’s fall does labor turn into a curse.168 It could even be said that this is actually the only curse, the curse of the unpleasantness of labor, that the Lord places on Adam.
  • Both Plato and Aristotle consider labor to be necessary for survival, but that only the lower classes should devote themselves to it so that the elites would not have to be bothered with it and so that they could devote themselves to “purely spiritual matters—art, philosophy, and politics.”
  • Work is also not only a source of pleasure but a social standing; It is considered an honor. “Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will serve before kings.”170 None of the surrounding cultures appreciate work as much. The idea of the dignity of labor is unique in the Hebrew tradition.
  • Hebrew thinking is characterized by a strict separation of the sacred from the profane. In life, there are simply areas that are holy, and in which it is not allowed to economize, rationalize, or maximize efficiency.
  • good example is the commandment on the Sabbath. No one at all could work on this day, not even the ones who were subordinate to an observant Jew:
  • the message of the commandment on Saturday communicated that people were not primarily created for labor.
  • Paradoxically, it is precisely this commandment out of all ten that is probably the most violated today.
  • Aristotle even considers labor to be “a corrupted waste of time which only burdens people’s path to true honour.”
  • we have days when we must not toil connected (at least lexically) with the word meaning emptiness: the English term “vacation” (or emptying), as with the French term, les vacances, or German die Freizeit, meaning open time, free time, but also…
  • Translated into economic language: The meaning of utility is not to increase it permanently but to rest among existing gains. Why do we learn how to constantly increase gains but not how to…
  • This dimension has disappeared from today’s economics. Economic effort has no goal at which it would be possible to rest. Today we only know growth for growth’s sake, and if our company or country prospers, that does not…
  • Six-sevenths of time either be dissatisfied and reshape the world into your own image, man, but one-seventh you will rest and not change the creation. On the seventh day, enjoy creation and enjoy the work of your hands.
  • the purpose of creation was not just creating but that it had an end, a goal. The process was just a process, not a purpose. The whole of Being was created so…
  • Saturday was not established to increase efficiency. It was a real ontological break that followed the example of the Lord’s seventh day of creation. Just as the Lord did not rest due to tiredness or to regenerate strength; but because He was done. He was done with His work, so that He could enjoy it, to cherish in His creation.
  • If we believe in rest at all today, it is for different reasons. It is the rest of the exhausted machine, the rest of the weak, and the rest of those who can’t handle the tempo. It’s no wonder that the word “rest…
  • Related to this, we have studied the first mention of a business cycle with the pharaoh’s dream as well as seen a first attempt (that we may call…
  • We have tried to show that the quest for a heaven on Earth (similar to the Jewish one) has, in its desacralized form, actually also been the same quest for many of the…
  • We have also seen that the Hebrews tried to explain the business cycle with morality and ethics. For the Hebrews,…
  • ancient Greek economic ethos, we will examine two extreme approaches to laws and rules. While the Stoics considered laws to be absolutely valid, and utility had infinitesimal meaning in their philosophy, the Epicureans, at least in the usual historical explanation, placed utility and pleasure in first place—rules were to be made based on the principle of utility.
  • CONCLUSION: BETWEEN UTILITY AND PRINCIPLE The influence of Jewish thought on the development of market democracy cannot be overestimated. The key heritage for us was the lack of ascetic perception of the world, respect to law and private…
  • We have tried to show how the Torah desacralized three important areas in our lives: the earthly ruler, nature,…
  • What is the relationship between the good and evil that we do (outgoing) and the utility of disutility that we (expect to) get as a reward (incoming)? We have seen…
  • The Hebrews never despised material wealth; on contrary, the Jewish faith puts great responsibility on property management. Also the idea of progress and the linear perception of time gives our (economic)…
  • the Hebrews managed to find something of a happy compromise between both of these principles.
  • will not be able to completely understand the development of the modern notion of economics without understanding the disputes between the Epicureans and the Stoics;
  • poets actually went even further, and with their speech they shaped and established reality and truth. Honor, adventure, great deeds, and the acclaim connected with them played an important role in the establishment of the true, the real.
  • those who are famous will be remembered by people. They become more real, part of the story, and they start to be “realized,” “made real” in the lives of other people. That which is stored in memory is real; that which is forgotten is as if it never existed.
  • Today’s scientific truth is founded on the notion of exact and objective facts, but poetic truth stands on an interior (emotional) consonance with the story or poem. “It is not addressed first to the brain … [myth] talks directly to the feeling system.”
  • “epic and tragic poets were widely assumed to be the central ethical thinkers and teachers of Greece; nobody thought of their work as less serious, less aimed at truth, than the speculative prose treatises of historians and philosophers.”5 Truth and reality were hidden in speech, stories, and narration.
  • Ancient philosophy, just as science would later, tries to find constancy, constants, quantities, inalterabilities. Science seeks (creates?) order and neglects everything else as much as it can. In their own experiences, everyone knows that life is not like that,
  • Just as scientists do today, artists drew images of the world that were representative, and therefore symbolic, picturelike, and simplifying (but thus also misleading), just like scientific models, which often do not strive to be “realistic.”
  • general? In the end, poetry could be more sensitive to the truth than the philosophical method or, later, the scientific method. “Tragic poems, in virtue of their subject matter and their social function, are likely to confront and explore problems about human beings and luck that a philosophical text might be able to omit or avoid.”8
Javier E

Madison's nightmare - Political theorists have been worrying about mob rule for 2,000 y... - 0 views

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democracy mob Plato aristotle political theory history revolution

shared by Javier E on 02 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • It is naive to assume that mobs will be confined to the “nice” side of the political spectrum; the left-wing kind by their nature generate the right-wing sort. It is doubly naive to expect that mobs will set limits; it is in their nature to run out of control
  • Political philosophers have been making these points for more than 2,000 years.
  • Even liberal thinkers worried that democracy might give rise to “mobocracy”. They argued that the will of the people needed to be restrained by a combination of constitutional intricacy (individual rights, and checks and balances) and civic culture. The wiser among them added that the decay of such restraints could transform democracy into mob rule.
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  • The first great work of political philosophy, Plato’s “Republic”, was, in part, a meditation on the evils of mob rule. Plato regarded democracy as little more than mob rule by another name—perhaps without the violence, at least at first, but with the same lack of impulse control.
  • He noted that democracies are hard-wired to test boundaries.
  • Plato also argued that democracies inevitably degenerate into anarchy, as the poor plunder the rich and profligacy produces bankruptcy.
  • Anarchy leads to the rule of tyrants: a bully can appeal to the mob’s worst instincts precisely because he is ruled by his own worst instincts
  • this changed with the French and American revolutions, which were based on contrasting approaches to mob rule.
  • Aristotle, Plato’s great pupil, distinguished between three legitimate forms of government: kingship, aristocracy and democracy. He argued that they each have their dark shadows: tyranny, oligarchy and mob rule
  • He then outlined the ways in which these virtuous forms of government evolve into their opposites: democracy becomes mob rule when the rich hog the society’s wealth
  • A more practical thinker than Plato, Aristotle argued that there were two ways of preventing democracy from degenerating into mobocracy: mix in elements of kingship and aristocracy to restrain the will of the people; and create a large middle class with a stake in stability.
  • Machiavelli speculated that clever princes might be able to profit from chaos if they could forge the mob into a battering-ram against a decaying regime
  • Mostly elites were content with demonisation
  • He is, as it were, the mob in the form of a single person
  • The French Revolution also produced a robust conservative critique of mob rule—first in Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France
  • Samuel Huntington warned that “democratic overload”, with too many interest groups demanding too much from the state, would lead to democratic disillusionment as the state failed to live up to its ever-escalating promises.
  • Burke recognised that the mob has a collective psychology that makes it uniquely dangerous. It is a “monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations”. It relishes wild abandon—“horrid yells”, “shrilling screams” and the “unutterable abominations of the furies of hell”. It gets so carried away with its own righteous bloodlust that even normally decent people can be transformed into monsters.
  • He predicted that the revolution would end in the massacre of thousands (including the king, queen and priests) and the rise of a dictator who could restore law and order.
  • The cycle of mass protest followed by violence followed by dictatorship set a pattern for subsequent revolutions in Russia (1917), Cuba (1958) and elsewhere.
  • The American revolution succeeded where the French revolution and its progeny failed because it was based on a considered fear of “the confusion and intemperance of a multitude”.
  • “Federalist No. 55”, written by either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton, is particularly sharp on the way that ill-designed institutions can turn even sensible citizens into a baying crowd: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob”.
  • The Founding Fathers argued that democracy could avoid becoming mobocracy only if it was hedged with a series of restraints to control the power of the people.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville added his own worries about mob rule in “Democracy in America”. For him the constitution alone is not strong enough to save democracy from the mob. A vigorous civic culture rooted in self-governing communities (he was particularly keen on New England’s townships) and a self-reliant and educated population are also necessary
  • So too is a responsible elite that recognises that its first duty is to “educate democracy”
  • The 19th century saw the world’s ruling elites reconciling themselves to the fact that democracy was the wave of the future. How you dealt with this wave depended largely on your attitude to the mob.
  • Pessimists held that delay was the best way to avert the mob.
  • This sort of pessimism has been out of fashion for a long time. The second world war and the defeat of Nazism led to an era of democratic self-confidence, and the fall of the Berlin Wall to one of democratic euphoria.
  • But a few pessimists continued to warn that democracies might well degenerate into mob rule if they neglected the health of their political institutions and civic culture. Seymour Martin Lipset, an American sociologist, echoed Aristotle’s view that a healthy democracy requires broad-based prosperity.
  • Harvey Mansfield, a political philosopher, reiterated Tocqueville’s worry that civic decay might corrupt democracy
  • many changed their minds when they discovered that, far from unleashing man’s natural goodness, the revolution had set free his inner demons. Those who stuck with the revolution despite the guillotine and the Terror did so on two grounds: that the old regime was responsible for the violence because it created so much pent-up hatred; and that you cannot improve the world without bloodshed.
  • In recent years the pessimists have grown in number
  • The election of Mr Trump, a reality-TV star, raised profound questions about the health of America’s political regime. Can democracy survive if television channels make billions of dollars by peddling misinformation and partisanship?
  • Or if wealthy people can invest vast sums of money in the political process?
  • Or if society is polarised into a superclass and a demoralised proletariat? Recent events suggest that the answer is “no”.
  • The age of democratic naivety died on January 6th. It is time for an age of democratic sophistication
  • Democracies may well be the best safeguard against mob rule, as liberal democrats have been preaching for centuries. But they can be successful only if countries put the necessary effort into nurturing democratic institutions: guarding against too much inequality, ensuring that voters have access to objective information, taming money in politics and reinforcing checks and balances.
  • Otherwise the rule of the people will indeed become the rule of the mob, and the stable democratic order that flourished from the second world war onwards will look like a brief historical curiosity.
Javier E

Opinion | Putin Can't Escape History - The New York Times - 0 views

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history crisis policy putin russia authoritarian

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • Yegor Gaidar, the wunderkind who shaped the first post-Communist reforms in Russia, mulled on this cyclical pattern in an article in the newspaper Izvestia in 1994, wondering — as did many in Russia and in the West at the time — whether the pattern would repeat itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Russia’s race for a place in the civilized world recalls Achilles’ chase after the tortoise,” Gaidar wrote. “Through superhuman effort, Russia would manage to catch up and overtake, especially in military technology. Yet the world would unnoticeably but steadily move on, and again after disgraceful and tortuous setbacks the country would regroup for a leap and make another lurch, and everything would be repeated.”
  • Nearly 30 years later, Vladimir Putin’s ruthless efforts to reconstitute a Great Russia by brute force, in the process mauling Ukraine with shocking cruelty and weakening his own country for decades to come, appear to be falling into Gaidar’s pattern
  • Mr. Putin’s strongest pitch, that “losing” Ukraine represents a humiliating demotion of Russia the superpower, still resonates among people who were raised on the Soviet ethos, in which empire was a far stronger bond than nationalism.
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  • Before the announcement of the recent mass conscription, which was followed by the declaration of martial law in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, about 30 percent of Russians who were asked by a pro-Kremlin pollster to describe the predominant mood of people around them said they were anxious. Since the decree, that number has risen to 69 percent.
  • as the invasion has dragged on, Mr. Putin has had to shout “Wolf!” ever more stridently.
  • With little experience of democracy, Russians have traditionally been content to entrust their government to a strong “khoziayin,” or master, so long as he provides stability and seems to know what he’s doing. But if that contract is violated, as Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, warned in a quote every Russia knows by heart, “God save us from seeing a Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.”
  • He has drawn liberally on his rewriting of Russian history and culture — as he did again in the Valdai speech, citing, among others, Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky — to claim a spiritual superiority over a West he sees as decadent and decaying. Never mind that these two writers were both repressed by the state, Soviet and czarist, and that Russia is widely perceived as a kleptocracy.
  • There is no soft power in this equation, no appreciation of reasons Ukraine might be more attracted to Europe than to Russia, but only spheres of control parceled out according to rules of conquest and control that the West rejected after World War II. The longings of the Ukrainians have no part in this; Russia’s — Mr. Putin’s — mission is to return to Russia what is Russia’s by right of might
  • it is becoming evident that Mr. Putin, increasingly isolated during the Covid pandemic, was led to believe by his sycophantic lieutenants that a quick invasion would promptly topple the Kyiv government and herd Ukraine back into the fold, and that the West was too far gone to do anything about it.
Javier E

All Signs Point to Higgs Boson, but Still Waiting for Scientific Certainty - NYTimes.com - 1 views

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higgs boson universe physics prediction

shared by Javier E on 10 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • physicists admit that it will take more work and analysis before they will have the cold numbers that clinch the case that the new particle announced on July 4 last year is in fact the exact boson first predicted by Peter Higgs and others in 1964 to be the arbiter of mass and cosmic diversity
  • What happened in the first instant of the Big Bang? What happens at the middle of a black hole where matter and time blink in or out of existence? What is the dark matter whose gravitational influence, astronomers say, shapes the structures of galaxies, or the dark energy that is forcing the universe apart? Why is the universe full of matter but not antimatter? And what, finally, is the fate of the universe? These are all questions that the Standard Model, the vanilla-sounding set of equations that ruled physics for the last half century, does not answer
  • Some of them could be answered by the unproven theory called supersymmetry, which among other things is needed to explain why whatever mass the Higgs has is low enough to be discovered in the first place and not almost infinite. It predicts a whole new population of elementary particles — called superpartners to the particles physicists already know about — one of which could be the dark matter that pervades the universe. If such particles exist, they would affect the rate at which Higgs bosons decay into other particles, but the CERN teams have yet to record what they consider a convincing deviation from the Standard Model predictions for those decays. Supersymmetry is still at best a beautiful idea.
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  • One thing that has hampered progress is that physicists still do not agree on how much the new particle weighs.
  • What does it matter how much a Higgs boson weighs? It could determine the fate of the universe.
  • his colleagues ran the numbers and concluded that the universe was in a precarious condition and could be prone to collapse in the far, far future. The reason lies in the Higgs field, the medium of which the Higgs boson is the messenger and which determines the structure of empty space, i.e., the vacuum.
  • It works like this. The Higgs field, like everything else in nature, is lazy, and, like water running downhill, always seeks to be in the state of lowest energy. Physicists assume that the Higgs field today is in the lowest state possible, but Dr. Giudice found that was not the case. What counts as rock bottom in today’s universe could turn out to be just a plateau. Our universe is like a rock perched precariously on a mountaintop, he explained, in what physicists call a metastable state. The Higgs field could drop to a lower value by a process known as quantum tunneling, although it is not imminent.
  • If that should happen — tomorrow or billions of years from now — a bubble would sweep out through the universe at the speed of light, obliterating the laws of nature as we know them.
  • The calculations assume that the Standard Model is the final word in physics, good for all times and places and energies — something that no physicist really believes. Theories like supersymmetry or string theory could intercede at higher energies and change the outcome.
  • The calculations also depend crucially on the mass of the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle, as well as the Higgs, neither of which have been weighed precisely enough yet to determine the fate of the universe. If the top quark were just a little lighter or the Higgs a little heavier, 130 billion electron volts, Dr. Giudice said, the vacuum would in fact be stable.
  • , “Why do we happen to live at the edge of collapse?” He went on, “In my view, the message about near-criticality of the universe is the most important thing we have learned from the discovery of the Higgs boson so far.” Guido Tonelli of CERN and the University of Pisa, said, “If true, it is somehow magic.” We wouldn’t be having this discussion, he said, if there hadn’t been enough time already for this universe to produce galaxies, stars, planets and “human beings who are attempting to produce a vision of the world,” he said.
  • “So, in some sense, we are here, because we have been lucky, because for this particular universe the lottery produced a certain set of numbers, which allow the universe to have an evolution, which is very long.”
Javier E

A final plea: The case against Trump's dangerous authoritarianism - in one chart - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-authoritarianism-in-one-chart

trump authoritarian argument politics

shared by Javier E on 08 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • At the heart of Trump’s case for the presidency lies two components. The first is a hyper-exaggerated narrative of national decay and decline — skyrocketing crime, rotting inner cities, decaying factories, a festering terror threat from within, a border that is being breached by dark hordes of invaders. The second is the notion that our elites are both fecklessly responsible for that perilous state of national decline and too corrupted to fix it — they’ve rigged the system against you, undermining American sovereignty to enrich themselves, while allowing American identity to be degraded by immigrants who are at best parasitic and at worst a lethal threat.
  • , the truly pernicious component of Trump’s argument is that our institutions and our democracy have themselves grown so hopelessly corrupted and compromised that they are no longer even capable of arresting and turning around that decline via conventional democratic processes.
  • The only outcome that can change this state of affairs is electing him president. Any other result would only confirm that our system has been so corrupted that it is fundamentally no longer capable of producing legitimate political outcomes.
Javier E

Sixty years and nothing to show: The slow decay of American politics since Eisenhower, ... - 0 views

www.salon.com/...e-eisenhower-stevenson_partner

politics decline democracy US 2016 election 1956

shared by Javier E on 08 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • According to Boorstin, more than five decades ago the American people were already living in a “thicket of unreality.” By relentlessly indulging in ever more “extravagant expectations,” they were forfeiting their capacity to distinguish between what was real and what was illusory. Indeed, Boorstin wrote, “We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.”
  • “The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare to face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”
  • “The making of the illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America,” wrote Boorstin. It’s also become the essence of American politics, long since transformed into theater, or rather into some sort of (un)reality show.
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  • Presidential campaigns today are themselves, to use Boorstin’s famous term, “pseudo-events” that stretch from months into years. By now, most Americans know better than to take at face value anything candidates say or promise along the way. We’re in on the joke — or at least we think we are.  Reinforcing that perception on a daily basis are media outlets that have abandoned mere reporting in favor of enhancing the spectacle of the moment. This is especially true of the cable news networks, where talking heads serve up a snide and cynical complement to the smarmy fakery that is the office-seeker’s stock in trade. And we lap it up. It matters little that we know it’s all staged and contrived, as long as — a preening Megyn Kelly getting under Trump’s skin, Trump himself denouncing “lyin’ Ted” Cruz, etc., etc. — it’s entertaining.
  • The thicket of unreality that is American politics has now become all-enveloping. The problem is not Trump and Clinton, per se. It’s an identifiable set of arrangements — laws, habits, cultural predispositions — that have evolved over time and promoted the rot that now pervades American politics. As a direct consequence, the very concept of self-government is increasingly a fantasy, even if surprisingly few Americans seem to mind.
malonema1

It's not just lead that's poisoning the water. It's also politics. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ng-the-water-its-also-politics

us politics environment

shared by malonema1 on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • It’s not just lead that’s poisoning the water. It’s also politics.
  • Lead poisoning, low water pressure and contamination of water sources are widespread problems in Mexican cities. Aging, decaying infrastructure is the problem — in some cities, water infrastructure is more than 70 years old.
  • 1) Maintaining water infrastructure = high financial cost and high political cost.
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  • Spending millions of dollars repairing infrastructure that a prior politician inaugurated is rarely politically appealing
  • 2) Poor water systems = opportunities for direct political control of services
  • In political science, this is called clientelism, which is the exchange of a material good or resource — food, cash, public services — for the vote.
  • Politicians can exchange services for votes in water systems that are not digitized or updated; low-level workers are able to respond to political bosses quickly, moving water services, by pressing manual levers, to one community and taking it from another.
  • 3) Higher water prices = political suicide.
  • Industries that relied on stable water supplies also engaged in political lobbying.
  • These new political coalitions used print and radio ads to brand “infrastructure maintenance” as a sign of their governing success
  • U.S. cities and neighborhoods can learn something from Mexico’s experience building broad-based political coalitions in the face of decaying infrastructure. Politics can interfere with reliable water access, but when infrastructure is part of a good-governance platform, politics can also be part of the solution.
Javier E

The Decay of Twitter - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...412867

culture oral social media twitter

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Why is Instagram (or Vine, or Pinterest) so much more fun than Twitter?
  • To talk about Stewart’s theory, you have to first tackle the ideas of the 20th-century philosopher of media, Walter J. Ong.  
  • Ong was an English professor and a historian of religion at Saint Louis University. He served as president of the Modern Language Association for a year. He was Marshall McLuhan’s student. And from age 23 to his death in 2003 at 91, he was or was training to be a Jesuit priest.
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  • Ong’s great scholarly focus was the transition of human society from orality to literacy: from sharing stories and ideas through spoken language alone, to sharing them through writing, text, and printed media
  • orality treats words as sound and action, only; that it emphasizes memory and redundancy; that it stays close to the “human lifeworld.”
  • we chat, we type, we text. One of the key attributes of orality is its instantaneousness: There’s no delay between utterances
  • To describe oral communication that was filtered through high technologies like radio and TV—technologies that could not exist without literacy—he coined the term secondary orality. To Ong, secondary orality was one of the great media phenomena of the 20th century.
  • In literate cultures, on the other hand, words are something you look up; language can stray more abstractly from objects; and speech, freed from memorable epithets like “the wine-dark sea,” can become more analytic.
  • How do you describe this odd mix of registers: literate culture that has all the ephemerality of oral culture? During his life, Ong suggested a new term, secondary literacy. I’ve also seen it referred to as a hybrid literacy
  • on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. Because there’s a kind of sensationalistic value in interpreting someone’s chattiness in partisan terms, tweets “are taken up as magnum opi to be leapt upon and eviscerated, not only by ideological opponents or threatened employers but by in-network peers.”
  • Anthropologists who study digital spaces have diagnosed that a common problem of online communication is “context collapse.” This plays with the oral-literate distinction: When you speak face-to-face, you’re always judging what you’re saying by the reaction of the person you’re speaking to. But when you write (or make a video or a podcast) online, what you’re saying can go anywhere, get read by anyone, and suddenly your words are finding audiences you never imagined you were speaking to.
  • It’s not quite context collapse, because what’s collapsing aren’t audiences so much as expectations. Rather, it’s a collapse of speech-based expectations and print-based interpretations. It’s a consequence of the oral-literate hybrid that flourishes online. It’s conversation smoosh.
  • This tension also explains, to me, why the more visual social networks have stayed fun and vibrant even as the text-based ones have not. Vine, Pinterest, and Instagram don’t traffic in words, which can be reduced to identity-based magnum opi, but in images, which are a little harder to smoosh. Visual conversations have stayed chatty, in other words.
  • At some point early last year, the standard knock against Twitter—which had long ceased to be “I don’t want to know what someone’s eating for lunch”—became “I don’t want everyone to see what I have to say.
katyshannon

Periodic table's seventh row finally filled as four new elements are added | Science | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...as-four-new-elements-are-added

IFTTT chemistry new elements periodic table discovery history Education science

shared by katyshannon on 06 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Guardian staff Sunday 3 January 2016 22.28 EST Last modified on Tuesday 5 January 2016 11.48 EST Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on Pinterest Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Share on WhatsApp Shares 104,402 104k Comments 1,300 rounded-icon inline-bookmark inli
  • Four new elements have been added to the periodic table, finally completing the table’s seventh row and rendering science textbooks around the world instantly out of date.
  • The elements, discovered by scientists in Japan, Russia and America, are the first to be added to the table since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were added.
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  • The four were verified on 30 December by the US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the global organisation that governs chemical nomenclature, terminology and measurement.
  • IUPAC announced that a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had produced sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of elements 115, 117 and 118.
  • The body awarded credit for the discovery of element 113, which had also been claimed by the Russians and Americans, to a team of scientists from the Riken institute in Japan.
  • Kosuke Morita, who was leading the research at Riken, said his team now planned to “look to the unchartered territory of element 119 and beyond.” Ryoji Noyori, former Riken president and Nobel laureate in chemistry said: “To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal”.
  • The elements, which currently bear placeholder names, will be officially named by the teams that discovered them in the coming months. Element 113 will be the first element to be named in Asia.
  • “IUPAC has now initiated the process of formalising names and symbols for these elements temporarily named as ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118).”
  • New elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.
  • The four new elements, all of which are synthetic, were discovered by slamming lighter ­nuclei into each other and tracking the following decay of the radioactive superheavy elements.
  • Like other superheavy elements that populate the end of the periodic table, they only exist for fractions of a second before decaying into other elements.
Javier E

'This is the golden age': eastern Europe's extraordinary 30-year revival | World news |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-extraordinary-30-year-revival

europe revival Eastern Europe economic

shared by Javier E on 27 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The “shock therapy” reforms that speedily pushed Poland and other countries in the region into capitalism have come in for criticism, but Leszek Balcerowicz, the architect of Poland’s reforms, still believes they were the best option for the country in the circumstances. “If you move fast from a bad system to a better one, you release new forces for growth,
  • While communism left the region an economic basket case, it did also provide some of the seeds for growth: well-educated societies with low levels of inequality
  • Particularly in Poland, the transition led to a class of entrepreneurs like Grabski, rather than a small group of oligarchs. “We had the Solidarity movement in the factories and they were like a watchdog. So directors couldn’t go into shabby deals like in Russia,”
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  • crucially, unlike in Russia and Ukraine, central European countries largely avoided a situation where a few people walked off with the majority of the prized former state assets.
  • if there is one factory that symbolises both central Europe’s growth over the last three decades and the potential pitfalls going forward, it is not the Gdańsk shipyard but the Audi plant at Győr, in north-west Hungary.
  • In some countries in the region, these institutional frameworks are still under attack from governments, but the situation compared with neighbouring Ukraine, for example, where the courts, police and tax authorities are hopelessly dependent on political and big business interests, is incomparable
  • “Joining the EU was the key moment, not because of subsidies, but because of frameworks: anti-monopoly rules, environmental protection and so on,” says Grabski
  • Things took off when Hungary joined the EU in 2004 and could be integrated fully into the manufacturer’s supply chain. Today, Audi Hungaria is a modern-day capitalist version of a Soviet monogorod, or one-factory town. The vast complex on the outskirts of Győr is a set of nondescript white hangars linked by an internal road system, and the plant has its own restaurants, medical clinic, fire station and postal service.
  • Going forward, the key will be moving away from an economic model of western European countries outsourcing production to the east, and towards one that sees ideas and innovation developed inside the region. Only in this way, analysts say, will the countries of the region be able to fully close the gap in wealth and living standards with the other half of Europe. So far, however, there is little sign of the spending on research and development, or institutional reforms, that would be required for such a long-term shift
  • on average even the poorest parts of society are better off than they were 30 years ago, this is little comfort to those in former industrial areas or rural regions where there is an overwhelming sense of decay; indeed, that decay can feel ever more pressing when compared to the progress experienced in shinier areas
  • In the three decades since independence, the populations of all the region’s countries have shrunk. Latvia has lost more than a quarter of its population, Bulgaria and Romania around a fifth. With higher salaries a short and easy flight away, the process was inevitable. In parts of the region, this has led to chronic shortages of doctors and other skilled workers.
  • it’s worth acknowledging just how fast things have improved. Poland has moved from 25% of German income levels 30 years ago to 60% today. “You can’t expect Poles to completely catch up with Germans within one generation. It’s only natural for people to aspire to a good life as quickly as possible. But it’s just unrealistic for this to happen. The whole region has been the dark periphery of Europe for the last 1,000 years,”
Javier E

Opinion | Liberals Do Not Want to Destroy the Family - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...barr-liberals-family.html

liberalism conservatism despair anomie values crisis culture politics

shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • It is critical to bear in mind that the U.S. has a less generous social safety net than almost all of the other advanced countries to which we compare ourselves: Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. And yet we have higher rates of nonwork among prime-age men and women, and much worse socio-demographic outcomes: family stability, investment in children, educational attainment, life expectancy, rates of violent death, etc. It defies logic to assert that the relatively stingy U.S. social safety net has somehow lured the U.S. public into licentiousness and social decline whereas the much more comprehensive social safety nets in other wealthy democracies has failed to do so.
  • The white working class constituency that would seem to be most immune to the appeal of the cultural left — the very constituency that has moved more decisively than any other to the right — is now succumbing to the centrifugal, even anarchic, forces denounced by Barr and other social conservatives, while more liberal constituencies are moving in the opposite, more socially coherent, rule-following, direction.
  • now we are in a new social paradigm that has normalized nonmarital childbearing and child rearing among certain segments of the population, and it will take more than economic improvement to restore the stable two-parent family in the communities it which that norm has been steadily eroding.
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  • Autor, Kearney and others whose work I will go on to discuss offer analyses and explanations of contemporary social dislocation that serve to reveal the oversimplification and the striking omissions in the work of social conservatives, who often fail, to give one crucial example, to account for the impact of mass incarceration.
  • Many factors have contributed to the income stagnation in the bottom tiers and the overall increasing inequality in the United States. Paramount among these are changes in the economy that have placed a greater premium on college-educated workers, advances in technology and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to lower-wage countries. One can hardly understand the impact of these dynamic contributing structural factors to our rising inequality by focusing almost exclusively on so-called changes in the values of the American population
  • We need to address the underlying premise that there is a rise in social disorder. That claim does not hold up to scrutiny, in both the long and short term. In the United States and many other parts of the world, the last two decades have seen a remarkable decline in many of the most visible signs of social disorder.
  • You can see that many of these improvements in the quality of life have coincided with the creation of the modern liberal welfare state and many of place that enjoy the least social disorder are, in fact, places with leftist political systems that provide for social welfare.
  • Uniquely among major socioeconomic groups, the white working class decreased in absolute numbers and population share in recent decades. At the same time, the five measures of well-being we tracked all deteriorated for the white working class relative to the overall population. The shares of all income earned and wealth owned by the white working class fell even faster than their population share.
  • the white working class — the segment of the population with the weakest ties to, if not outright animosity toward, liberalism, feminism and other liberation movements — has, in recent years, experienced the strongest trends toward social decay.
  • While five decades ago, many on the left denounced the 1965 Moynihan Report, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” for “blaming the victim” because of its description of rising numbers of nonmarital births in the black community, there has been a striking reversal in favor of the report in the academic and liberal policymaking community.
  • “The broad-based decline that is unique to the white working class may be due in part to the group’s loss over time of advantages it once enjoyed relative to those of nonwhite working classes,”
  • These included more years of education and plentiful high-paying jobs available in white working class communities. And, as the explicit discrimination minorities faced in the workplace has diminished, so has the advantage that it had given the white working class.
  • While in absolute terms the white working class — those without college degrees, in pollster shorthand — have higher levels of marriage and cohabitation, homeownership and self-reported health ratings than members of the black working class, the trends are downward for whites and upward for African-Americans.
  • The most telling critique of the claims of social conservatives is that their single-minded focus on the destructive forces of liberalism offers a facile (and erroneous) answer to developments that do not fit simple categories of good and evil
  • Some people believe that humans are born good and are only later corrupted by society. They emphasize the importance of a society that collectively helps each individual achieve their inherent potential. Others believe that individuals are inherently flawed, often ill-disciplined, weak-willed, and capable of evil as well as good. They emphasize the importance of social structures that help people, in the words of Edmund Burke, “to put chains upon their appetites.”
  • Under current conditions of stark political polarization, these two sides are at loggerheads. Sawhill argues that:What a functioning and tolerant politics would permit is a negotiated settlement of this dispute. We would devise institutions and norms but also laws and practices that bring out, in Lincoln’s famous words, the “better angels of our nature.”
  • the willingness to accommodate the opposition — an essential step toward compromise and reconciliation — appears modestly stronger on the left than the right.
  • . In an email, she wrote:My read of the evidence is that the declining economic position of less educated men (both in a relative and absolute sense) has probably been a key driver of the breakdown of the two-parent family among less educated populations for many decades.
  • Similarly, “The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades,” edited by two liberal scholars, Douglas S. Massey and Robert J. Sampson, sociologists at Princeton and Harvard, found that the trends toward family breakdown documented in the report “have only grown worse, not only for blacks, but for whites and Hispanics as well.” The authors were sharply critical of the attacks on Moynihan from the left that had appeared when the report was first published.
  • Patrick Deneen, whose book received near unanimous praise from conservative critics, defines the “culture war” that has characterized recent decades, and which seems to grow more virulent daily, in implacable terms: “Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”
  • Barr, in turn, argues thatin the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people — a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.
  • The secular left, in Barr’s view, is at war with what he views as a decent America:This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.
  • The reality is that Barr is not only selling traditional values to conservative voters, some of whom are genuinely starved for them, he is also marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life.
  • “Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”
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