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This new ability of individuals to make a living directly from their audiences isn’t just transforming journalism. It’s also been the case for adult performers on OnlyFans, musicians on Patreon, B-list celebrities on Cameo. In Hollywood, too, power has migrated toward talent, whether it’s marquee showrunners or actors. This power shift is a major headache for big institutions, from The New York Times to record labels.

Substack’s thesis is, in part, that media companies underpay their most prominent writers. So far, that seems to be bearing out.

many of the writers who took advances now regret doing so: They would have made more money by simply collecting subscription revenue, and paying Substack 10 percent, than making the more complex deals with money up front.

The former Vox writer Matthew Yglesias calculated that taking the advance wound up costing him nearly $400,000 in subscription revenue paid to Substack

One of the writers who left Substack over transgender issues, Jude Doyle, argued that its system of advances amounted to a kind of editorial policy. But the analogy to a media company isn’t clear.

Grace Lavery said she wanted Substack to be more aggressive about stopping harassment, but said she didn’t think threats to boycott the email service over writers she disagrees with made political sense.

it’s easy to leave. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, Substack writers can simply take their email lists and direct connections to their readers with them.

The real threat is competing platforms with a different model. The most technically powerful of those is probably Ghost, which allows writers to send and charge for newsletters, with monthly fees starting at $9.

While Substack is backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ghost has Wikipedia vibes: It is open-source software developed by a nonprofit.

“Boycotting Substack because of Jesse Singal would be like boycotting a paper company” over a writer who has books printed on their paper, she said.

Ghost represents an even purer departure from legacy media. More than half of the sites on the platform simply run the software off their own servers.

Mr. Sullivan, who said he saw Substack as his tech platform, not his publisher, has begun deliberately promoting smaller writers in an “In the Stacks” section and said he was interested in figuring out how to bundle subscriptions.

This week, eight writers who cover tech, media and culture — Mr. Warzel, Mr. Newton, Anne Helen Petersen, Nick Quah, Eric Newcomer, Delia Cai, Ryan Broderick and Kim Zetter — are starting a “virtual newsroom” called Sidechannel on Discord, a platform for text and voice conversations

“We’re coming out of this era where platforms own people, and moving into this era where people own platforms,” he said. “We have to prove to the writers we’re delivering enough value to them to keep them happy and help them succeed.”

my informal survey of Substack writers found that most are fond of the company and plan to stick around for now — but not out of the sense of loyalty, shared mission or deep identification that used to run through media companies.

“Taking V.C. money does not create in me a sense of obligation,”

She built a huge and devoted following on Facebook, which is widely and often accurately viewed in media circles as a home of misinformation, and where most journalists don’t see their personal pages as meaningful channels for their work.

She also contradicts the stereotype of Substack, which has become synonymous with offering new opportunities for individual writers to turn their social media followings into careers outside big media, and at times appears to be where purged ideological factions go to regroup

it’s true of left-leaning writers who have broken bitterly with elements of the mainstream liberal consensus, whether around race or national security, from the Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald to the Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias to the firebrand Matt Taibbi,

When readers on Facebook started suggesting she write a newsletter, she realized she didn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars a month for a commercial platform, and jumped at Substack because it would allow her to send out her emails without charge to her or her readers

Substack makes its money by taking a percentage of writers’ subscription revenue, and she said she felt guilty that the company’s support team wasn’t getting paid for fixing her recurring problem: that her extensive footnotes set off her readers’ spam filters.

She thinks of her politics as Lincoln-era Republican, but she is in today’s terms a fairly conventional liberal, disturbed by President Trump and his attacks on America’s institutions.

she published her sixth book, “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America,” an extended assault on the kind of nostalgia that animates Mr. Trump’s fight to preserve Confederate symbols

The face of the South in Dr. Richardson’s book is a bitterly racist and sexually abusive South Carolina planter and senator, James Henry Hammond, who called Jefferson’s notion that all men are created equal “ridiculously absurd.”

Dr. Richardson’s “readers are people who have been orphaned by the changes in media and the sensationalism and the meanness of so much of Twitter and Facebook, and they were surprised to find her there and pleased and spread the word,” said Bill Moyers

“You live in a world of thunderstorms,” he said, “and she watches the waves come in.”

But sometimes Wal-Mart’s demands are catastrophic for suppliers.

Why did these suppliers go along with Wal-Mart’s demands? Because Wal-Mart was such a large portion of their sales that they had no choice. Once your product is being sold in Wal-Mart, you cannot afford for it not to be sold in Wal-Mart. If you walk away from Wal-Mart, there is no alternate retail pathway on which to unload the excess volume you now make.

As one CEO told Fishman for his book, the experience of agreeing to let Wal-Mart sell his company’s product was like getting in bed with the mafia. He got squeezed and squeezed until his business died.

As an economic matter, Wal-Mart and Facebook are the same. Both are aggregators. Wal-Mart of retail products; Facebook of content

They need suppliers in the aggregate—they need goods on the shelves and articles in the feed. But if any specific supplier (your pickle company, BuzzFeed News) goes out of business—that doesn’t matter to them. Because there are a million others waiting to take their place.

And that is the story of the social media age of news.

One of the things these media outlets learned over the last decade is that while they evolved so that they needed Facebook in order to survive, Facebook didn’t need them. At all.

The fundamental problem with aggregators in the news business is that the publications themselves are supposed to be the aggregator.

What is the New York Times, or the Atlantic, or The Bulwark, but an aggregation of news content? Once you, as a publication, disaggregate your content so that other platforms can aggregate it along with content from everywhere else, then you have begun to give away your economic power.

The goal for media companies is to titrate the optimal point where your institution allows enough disaggregation of content to seed wider interest in the whole—but not so much that it gives away the greatest part of its economic power.

The key concept is that every media organization should see itself as a platform. Which means prioritizing a direct relationship with the audience over everything else.

That’s the future of the media business. Period.

That’s what podcasts are.3 People tend to think about podcasting as an alternate form of radio, but that's not right. A podcast is a direct feed from creator to listener that prevents the station manager or the network executive from aggregating the creator's work with others'.

That’s what the New York Times and the Atlantic have done by prioritizing their subscription audiences and getting away from Facebook.

And that’s what Substack and the newsletter revolution is.4

One of the reasons I like Substack is that the company has positioned itself as a utility and not an aggregator. This choice explains why Substack is good for publishers, but has never really been a darling of the VC world. It’s hard to be a unicorn as a utility. (Though it can be done; see Stripe.)

That doesn’t mean that we don’t want the boldest, fastest action we can get.

The true measure of the seriousness of the planetary crisis is not destruction but discontinuity.

This is not the kind of language you hear in public radio policy debates, at high-ticket ideas conferences

No, the buzz in those circles is that the challenge of climate action is balancing progress with continuity. Trade-offs, and how to make the smartest ones.

one of the grimmest aspects of this crisis is its transapocalyptic nature. That is, just how much of the world can thrive relatively well while enormous numbers of people suffer

the perception is that if we can’t hold on to continuity, all is lost. The end of the world is nigh. Discontinuity can only mean apocalypse.

When we center the planetary crisis in our thinking about the world, one central fact becomes clear: our ideas about the pace of change—how fast we can create change, the costs and benefits of more rapid action, the politics of speed and delay—are the most out-of-date part of the climate/sustainability debate. Our sense of tempo is broken, and few of us are ready for how fast things are beginning to move… or that most of humanity benefits more the faster we move.

Tens of millions of Americans are living in the crosshairs of disaster, in a degree of economic precarity we haven’t seen since the Great Depression, a missed paycheck away from a foreclosed home, surrounded by culture wars, violence and pandemic grief.

We have never needed new thinking more. The demand for clear advocacy, for fresh foresight, and for strategic acumen is effectively unlimited. The supply, however, is not

Seen through 20th century eyes, everything is about to get really weird, really fast.

The human world is also discontinuous along multiple trajectories.

WE ARE IN DISCONTINUITY

Barriers to action that have stood half a century are falling now. As they fall, a vast demand is revealing itself: a demand for the new models of sustainable prosperity. Billions of people need better ways of providing for themselves—better both in the sense of more sustainable, and more accessible.

Even if climate change and ecological collapse mysteriously ceased to be problems tomorrow, we’d still be awash in tidal forces—technological acceleration, economic inequality, the breakdown of the nation state, deepening globalization, and so on—that together add up to an ongoing discontinuity in their own right

Some doomers like to take their new fluency with the ecological end times as evidence of their intellectual superiority over the sheeple who cling to say, seeking a survivable future for their kids. These “first time climate dudes” are big on casting themselves as the only ones with the guts to call it like it is.

These days, even former anti-environmentalists and climate denialists claim to want action on climate and sustainability

Those defeats have altered all our human systems, already. Not only is the Earth’s entire biosphere being transformed at a speed greater than anything humans have lived through before, but the human world has become something no human has ever experienced before.

Focusing a major share of public resources on meeting the planetary crisis—which is what is demanded to head off the worsening of the crisis—itself shatters the illusion that value will persist in assets and expertise that cannot endure. It forces a reckoning with reality. To go big is to burst bubbles.

Now, we humans have an innate desire for continuity. That desire is not the problem. Denial is. We are deeply in denial about the reality of living in discontinuity.

It remains a bedrock assumption, often buried too deeply to be noticed, much less questioned, that the purpose of climate action and sustainability is to prevent changes in the human world, to keep hold of what we have.

Above all, this means building. It means hundreds of millions of new homes; wind farms and solar fields by the tens of thousands, factories churning out batteries and electric cars and induction stoves and geothermal systems; new shipping infrastructure; the rebuilding of coastal cities everywhere; massive investments in ecosystem services, fire protections, water and soil conservation; a reinvention of huge industries like chemicals and concrete and consumer plastics; a landscape in upheaval. A giant building boom is what successful action looks like.

The demand for continuity, especially in America, is held is place with panic, precarity and populism.

My most succinct working definition of a “discontinuity” is a watershed moment, one where past experience loses its value as a guide to decision-making about the future.

whether we conjure up a zombie apocalypse or a future of deep adaption on the dark mountain, it is clearly far easier and less scary for most people to imagine the end of everything than a time of uncontrolled change

The local forecast for some may be ecological collapse with choking air and a side of failed state—but elsewhere, times are good, the skies are clear and the markets are up.

That doesn’t mean we won’t see almost inconceivable tragedy and mind-bogglingly stupid losses—and that we don’t want to fight like hell to minimize them—but they’re not the end of the human story. Failures are not doom.

“You don’t have to give up a quality of life to achieve some of the things that we know we have to achieve,” US climate envoy John Kerry said last week

The planetary crisis is a discontinuity. This is the most important thing about it. Failing to understand the climate/ecological emergency as an all-encompassing discontinuity in human societies is failing to understand it, full stop.

The consensus vision of success is one in which we solve climate change, and the human world remains pretty much as it is now, especially for those in the wealthy parts of the worl

Well, we all need to make some sacrifices to avoid the ecopocalypse. But our lifestyle shall endure. The consensus about success is that we must meet the planetary crisis precisely so that we can avoid changing anything important.

But discontinuity is not just danger. Discontinuity means change in our selves and our societies. Transformation is not just a matter of loss. The losses are profoundly tragic. They are not, however, the whole story, or even its most important plot line

on a wide variety of fronts, the defeats we’ve already dealt ourselves over decades of inaction are growing unignorable. Many more are coming into focus now

The urgency of this crisis has fused with the scale of those opportunities. Seen clearly, they are the same phenomenon, and they stand to drive both the speed of change and the rate of human progress at a pace we’re not used to imagining. The coming boom will collide with the worsening of the planetary crisis. Then things will become truly, deeply discontinuous.

We are surrounded by ubiquitous mismatches between the value of systems, enterprises and places given their suitability to the world we now live in, and the way those things are priced by markets. We are surrounded, in short, by bubbles

We are not now capable of designing a future that works in continuity with our existing systems and practices while producing emissions reductions and sustainability gains fast enough to avoid truly dire ecological harm.

The insistence that the point of action be the restoration of continuity leads to the belief that only massively-scaled collective action can save us

The planetary crisis is a crisis because it has unleashed discontinuity throughout human systems, and because only a few of us can see it yet.

Here in the U.S., the rhetoric of the mid-Twentieth century features prominently. We must, we are told, rise to meet the planetary emergency on a sort of wartime footing, like the industrial mobilizations of World War Two. A Green New Deal is demanded to save us. We need a climate tech Moonshot.

use the unexpected boon of seriousness is awakening to possibility, to the capacities we gain amidst disruption and acceleration.

It’s a forlorn hope that we can tackle the crisis while avoiding the very conflicts over the speed of change that created this fucking crisis in the first place.

These bubbles are kept inflated by denial. One of the reasons even massive programs of government spending can’t restore continuity is that to engage in spending at that scale is to reveal the fragility of the unsustainable, brittle and outdated.

In this untrustworthy calculus, the only costs that count are the lost profits and jobs in unsustainable industries, the only fairness is that those who don’t want to change shouldn’t have to

We can talk about them as separate challenges, but in reality they are all one crisis. And it is getting worse, fast.

president Biden’s climate proposals and actions—despite being the boldest this nation has ever seen—are not even sufficient to meet this crisis, much less to run the meter backwards into a past world that could avoid discontinuity.

We need thousands upon thousands of committed people learning how to lead in the real world of unprecedented and uncontrolled change, and finding ways to leverage opportunity and impact together. We need a snap forward.

Doomerism's "courage,” of course, is largely being fearless about profitably declaring defeat, while sacrificing young people's lives and dreams. "I am intellectually brave enough to decide you don't have a future" is pretty crap as an iconoclastic stance.

Belief in continuity serves a profitable purpose: it is a precondition for predatory delay.

The supposed imminence of apocalypse gives selfish people a reason to begin acting as if the shit has already hit the fan.

“When we can imagine no future we want, something far more dangerous takes its place in our minds: the future we fear. Without visions of progress worth coming together to fight for, crisis tears people apart.

It’s difficult to overstate the scale of the demand for sustainable prosperity and rugged systems, and how fast we need them. That demand by itself exerts a sort of strange gravity that’s hard to gauge as long as we’re focused on the loss of continuity

it is absolutely not too late to limit our losses to those we’ve already set in motion, and to seize our opportunities to build a better human world—indeed, quite possibly a better world than the one we have now.

Worse is coming. A sense of doom is a powerful force in the landscape, especially in the U.S. We ignore it at our peril.

he emphasis has to land on the “trade-offs” between the needs of the status quo (and those best served by it) and the speed of action demanded by real world conditions.

In order for good people to accept the moral implications of predatory delay—the massive losses, harms, and further discontinuity brought on by unchecked ecological mayhem—they must be convinced that the systems they're defending will still have value in the future

There’s more. If continuity is valid, then change is a choice, and those choosing change should compensate those being forced to change.

There are scores of reasons why we can’t spend our way back to continuity, beginning with the most powerful one, which is that the damage we’ve done to our climate and biosphere is not reversible in human time scales. This is a one-way trip. The ticket we’ve already bought means taking a ride that is going to land us on a different planet.

For predatory delay to seem reasonable, the unsustainable must be described as systems of great inherent worth, ones that can be reliably and gradually modified into new versions of themselves. They must believe in an orderly transition between their legacy and a positive future

The deserving are coal miners, not construction workers sent home during heat waves; gas station owners, but not shellfish farmers; auto dealership and gas stove manufacturers, but not the mountain towns whose whole economies depend on skiers showing up in the winter

A dark unknowable future becomes raw power in the hands of a fear-monger. All over the world, we see demagogues lashing audiences into frenzies by putting old faces of hate on people’s new fears for the world ahead of us. Combining the anxiety of crisis with political scapegoating has birthed some of the greatest evil humanity has ever seen. Make no mistake: That evil is again on the march in the world, with talk of walls and camps, wars for living space and the battle for the last remaining resources.”

Many responsible people, though, ignore the refusal. Or, they see it as even more reason to restore an orderly transition, to hold on to the lives we’ve built, to keep everyone feeling like we’re all in it together.

the most important point: We can create a better future even in a context of discontinuity.

Doomerism excuses reckless disregard for others and the worsening of manageable problems as unavoidable parts of the process of an unfolding apocalypse.

when discussing the planetary crisis, we don’t foreground these bubbles, and the extent to which a massive and widespread repricing is on its way.) We pretend a stability in our economy that doesn’t exist.

Some called the world system of the 2000s and early 2010s “Chimerica”. During these years, the hope that global trade would lead to a cessation of great-power conflict, even without ideological alignment, seemed justified. And although China’s politics didn’t liberalize, under Jiang and Hu the country became more open to foreign travelers, foreign workers, and foreign ideas. This might not have been the End of History, but it was a compromise most people could live with for a while.

In the mid-2010s, this compromise began to break down. On the U.S. side, there was increasing anger over the long-term decline of good manufacturing jobs, and an increasing feeling of the U.S. in second place. China, and the Chimerica system, became the target of some of this anger — not without good reason

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, apparently felt that these events validated his pre-existing plan for “great changes unseen in a century” — i.e. China’s displacement of the U.S. as the global hegemon. Though this was Xi’s ambition from the start, it was the Chimerica system that had made his dream feasible, by making China the biggest manufacturing and trading nation on Earth.

Now, Xi seemed to feel that China had extracted all it could from the Chimerica system, and that the benefits no longer outweighed the costs. His industrial crackdowns in 2021 included measures to limit Western, Japanese, and South Korean cultural influences. Under his Zero Covid system, China became much more closed to the world, with inflows of people from abroad basically halted.

But these were only the first of a number of ways in which Xi, who just cemented his absolute power over his country at the 20th Party Congress, has made it clear that China’s era of “reform and opening up” is over

Markets, for their part, seem to realize that this time is different. China’s stocks cratered after the party congress — so much so that they’re now trading below the value of their assets on paper.

The key thing to understand about this decoupling, I think, and the reason it’s for real, is that this is something the leaders of both the U.S. and China want.

The U.S. is acting not out of concern for its industries — indeed, its chip industry will take a huge hit from export controls — but because of how it perceives its own national security. And China’s leaders want to shift to indigenous industry, regulated industry, and even nationalized industry, even if that shift makes China grow more slowly.

The decoupling between China and the developed democracies, so long a topic of conversation and speculation, now appears to be a reality. A critical point has been reached. The old world-economic system of Chimerica is being swept away, and something new will take its place.

It will take a while for the new world-economic system to be born (and as Gramsci says, this will be a “time of monsters”)

A lot will be contingent on events, such as whether there is another world war.

already I think we can make some educated guesses and ask some key questions.

I expect the Biden administration and/or its successor to get tripped up for a while by the mirage of a self-sufficient U.S., and to implement “Buy American” policies that hurt our allies and trading partners and slow the formation of a bloc that can match China. But if Americans can finally pull their heads out of their rear ends and recognize that their country doesn’t dominate the world the way it used to, there’s a chance to create a non-China economic bloc that preserves lots of the efficiencies of the old Chimerica system while also serving U.S. national security needs.

In fact, whether the non-China blog coordinates on policy is really the big question regarding the new world-economic order. Together, the U.S., Europe, and the rich democracies of East Asia comprise a manufacturing bloc that can match China’s output and a technological bloc that can exceed China’s capabilities. With the vast populations of India and other friendly developing countries on their side, they can create a trading and production bloc that will be almost as efficient as the old Chimerica system. But this will take coordination and trust on economic policy that has been notably absent so far. The U.S. will have to put aside its worries about competition with Japan, Korea, Germany or Taiwan — and vice versa.

this vision — a largely but not completely bifurcated global system of production and trade, with two technologically advanced high-output blocs competing head to head — seems like the most likely replacement for the Chimerica system that dominated the global economy over the past two decades

But it’s only a loose guess. What’s not really in doubt here is that we’ve reached a watershed moment in the history of the global economy; the system we came to know and rely on over the past two decades is crumbling, and our leaders and thinkers need to be scrambling to plan what comes next.

On this episode of “Sway,” Kara Swisher speaks to Chris Best, the chief executive and a co-founder of Substack, about content moderation on his platform and asks whether Substack is going to destroy media gatekeepers or just turn into one of them.

In other words, AOC can win in NY-14 but AOC-type candidates are no solution at all to the Democrats’ working class problems in most areas of the country. The grim fact is that as education polarization has played out geographically, Democratic votes are now distributed so inefficiently that the translation of these votes into political power has been severely undercut

As a result, Democrats’ hold on political power is ever on a knife’s edge even when their last election was a good one (as it is today).

Consistent with other recent research, the study finds that:

Working-class voters prefer progressive candidates who focus primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, and who frame those issues in universal terms.

Candidates whose campaigns focused primarily on universalist policy issues such as jobs, health care, and the economy performed better than those who focused on group-specific policies, such as racial justice or immigration.

In addition, woke messaging decreased the appeal of other candidate characteristics. For example, candidates employing woke messaging who championed either centrist or progressive economic, health care, or civil rights policy priorities were viewed less favorably than their counterparts who championed the same priorities but opted for universalist messaging.

easier said than done given Democrats’ recent evolution away from universalist messaging and toward foregrounding the equity effects of unambiguously universal programs and deferring to group specific concerns around race, gender and sexuality, even where they are clearly unpopular and dubious as policy. The result has a been a shift in the Democratic party “brand” that has created barriers to Democratic party voting among broad swathes of the working class.

The grim prospects for the Democrats in 2022 and the gut-wrenching prospect of losing the White House to Donald Trump (again) in 2024 make clear the stakes.

A Democratic brand reset is clearly in order to stop the bleeding among working class voters, along the lines suggested by the Jacobin study. A good way to start would be to embrace widely-held American views and values that are particularly strong among the multiracial working class.

Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.America is not perfect but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country.

Discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society.No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair.

America benefits from the presence of immigrants and no immigrant, even if illegal, should be mistreated. But border security is still important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country.Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. But crime is a real problem so more and better policing is needed for public safety. That cannot be provided by “defunding the police”.

There are underlying differences between men and women but discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong.There are basically two genders but people who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right and not be discriminated against. However, there are issues around child consent to transitioning and participation in women’s sports that are complicated and not settled.

Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Good faith should be assumed, not bad faith.

Besides positively embracing these views it is necessary for major Democratic officeholders and candidates to actively dissociate themselves and their party from the woke stances that contradict these views and tarnish their brand among working class voters. That entails not just saying that one does not endorse now-familiar strands of cultural leftism but in some well-chosen places directly criticizing by name some who hold extreme views that are associated with the Democrats. That will be of great assistance in getting the message through to average working class voters.

these views are entirely consistent with a very progressive Democratic program in the areas of health care, education, social programs, jobs and the economy that would disproportionately benefit the poor and working class, and therefore blacks and Hispanics.

In that sense, one might respond to the inevitable accusation that a universalist, mainstream approach is tantamount to throwing loyal Democratic constituencies in need of help “under the bus”: who is throwing whom under the bus? Perhaps it is those who stand in the way of a Democratic approach that could plausibly generate the widest possible support that are throwing those who need help the most under the bus.

And this approach, unlike the Democrats’ current default setting, has the potential to make the Democrats and their progressive policies consistent winners

CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but also in society’s social structures and systems.

second, that bias embedded in systems is frequently invisible to the dominant class but perfectly perceptible to its victims

we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices

Both of these observations are true at least some of the time

The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.

In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”

This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks

black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.

Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.

This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.

The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools

But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.

it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.

First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking

Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.

When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”

Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.

Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.

There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.

This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.

Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.

Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight

Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”

one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.

Third, marginalized communities are diverse.

To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.

“The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”

It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:

Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.

Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.

Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.

If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.

Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.

Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend

Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California

The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.

In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”

We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.

Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”

A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”

Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”

Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?

Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.

So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease

Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”

We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation

We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.

Both of these observations are true at least some of the time

The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.

In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”

Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.

There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.

it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.

First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking

Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.

We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.

But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.

Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight

Third, marginalized communities are diverse.

“The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”

Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.

Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.

Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.

If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.

Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend

Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.

The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.

In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”

Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”

This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks

black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.

we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices

This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.

When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”

Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.

Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.

This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.

The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools

one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.

To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.

It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:

Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”

In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”

The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.

Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California

Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”

A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”

Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.

Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?

Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.

So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease

Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”

We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation

We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.

I had other doubts, too. It seemed hubristic, or worse, to make multitrillion-dollar policy bets based on computer models trying to forecast climate patterns decades into the future. Climate activists kept promoting policies based on technologies that were either far from mature (solar energy) or sometimes actively harmful (biofuels).

Expensive efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions in Europe and North America seemed particularly fruitless when China, India and other developing countries weren’t about to curb their own appetite for fossil fuels

just how fast is Greenland’s ice melting right now? Is this an emergency for our time, or is it a problem for the future?

His pitch was simple: The coastline we have taken for granted for thousands of years of human history changed rapidly in the past on account of natural forces — and would soon be changing rapidly and disastrously by man-made ones. A trip to Greenland, which holds one-eighth of the world’s ice on land (most of the rest is in Antarctica) would show me just how drastic those changes have been. Would I join him?

Greenland is about the size of Alaska and California combined and, except at its coasts, is covered by ice that in places is nearly two miles thick. Even that’s only a fraction of the ice in Antarctica, which is more than six times as large

Greenland’s ice also poses a nearer-term risk because it is melting faster. If all its ice were to melt, global sea levels would rise by some 24 feet. That would be more than enough to inundate hundreds of coastal cities in scores of nations, from Jakarta and Bangkok to Copenhagen and Amsterdam to Miami and New Orleans.

There was also a millenarian fervor that bothered me about climate activism, with its apocalyptic imagery (the Statue of Liberty underwater) and threats of doom unless we were willing to live far more frugally.

“We haven’t had a good positive mass balance year since the late 1990s,” he told me in a follow-on email when I asked him to explain the data for me. The losses can vary sharply by year. The annualized average over the past 30 years, he added, is 170 gigatons per year. That’s the equivalent of about 5,400 tons of ice loss per second. That “suggests that Greenland ice loss has been tracking the I.P.P.C. worse-case, highest-carbon-emission scenario.

The data shows unmistakably that Greenland’s ice is not in balance. It is losing far more than it is gaining.

scientists have been drilling ice-core samples from Greenland for decades, giving them a very good idea of climatic changes stretching back thousands of years. Better yet, a pair of satellites that detect anomalies in Earth’s gravity fields have been taking measurements of the sheet regularly for nearly 20 years, giving scientists a much more precise idea of what is happening.

it’s hard to forecast with any precision what that means. “Anyone who says they know what the sea level is going to be in 2100 is giving you an educated guess,” said NASA’s Willis. “The fact is, we’re seeing these big ice sheets melt for the first time in history, and we don’t really know how fast they can go.”

His own educated guess: “By 2100, we are probably looking at more than a foot or two and hopefully less than seven or eight feet. But we are struggling to figure out just how fast the ice sheets can melt. So the upper end of range is still not well known.”

On the face of it, that sounds manageable. Even if sea levels rise by eight feet, won’t the world have nearly 80 years to come to grips with the problem, during which technologies that help us mitigate the effects of climate change while adapting to its consequences are likely to make dramatic advances?

Won’t the world — including countries that today are poor — become far richer and thus more capable of weathering the floods, surges and superstorms?

The average rate at which sea level is rising around the world, he estimates, has more than tripled over the past three decades, to five millimeters a year from 1.5 millimeters. That may still seem minute, yet as the world learned during the pandemic, exponential increases have a way of hitting hard.

“When something is on a straight line or a smooth curve, you can plot its trajectory,” Englander said. “But sea level, like earthquakes and mudslides, is something that happens irregularly and can change rather quickly and surprise us. The point is, you can no longer predict the future by the recent past.”

In The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, where I used to work, the theoretical physicist Steven Koonin, a former under secretary for science in the Obama administration’s Energy Department, cast doubt on the threat from Thwaites in a voice that could have once been mine. He also thinks the risks associated with Greenland’s melting are less a product of human-induced global warming than of natural cycles in North Atlantic currents and temperatures, which over time have a way of regressing to the mean.

Even the poorest countries, while still unacceptably vulnerable, are suffering far fewer human and economic losses to climate-related disasters.

Another climate nonalarmist is Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I call Pielke a nonalarmist rather than a skeptic because he readily acknowledges that the challenges associated with climate change, including sea-level rise, are real, serious and probably unstoppable, at least for many decades.

“If we have to have a problem,” he told me when I reached him by phone, “we probably want one with a slow onset that we can see coming. It’s not like an asteroid coming from space.”

“Since the 1940s, the impact of floods as a proportion of U.S. gross domestic product has dropped by 70 percent-plus,” Pielke said. “We see this around the world, across phenomena. The story is that fewer people are dying and we are having less damage proportional to G.D.P.”

“Much climate reporting today highlights short-term changes when they fit the narrative of a broken climate but then ignores or plays down changes when they don’t, often dismissing them as ‘just weather,’” he wrote in February.

Global warming is real and getting worse, Pielke said, yet still it’s possible that humanity will be able to adapt to, and compensate for, its effects.

A few years ago, I would have found voices like Koonin’s and Pielke’s persuasive. Now I’m less sure. What intervened was a pandemic.

That’s what I thought until the spring of 2020, when, along with everyone else, I experienced how swiftly and implacably nature can overwhelm even the richest and most technologically advanced societies. It was a lesson in the sort of intellectual humility I recommended for others

It was also a lesson in thinking about risk, especially those in the category known as high-impact, low-probability events that seem to be hitting us with such regularity in this century: the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; the tsunamis of 2004 and 2011, the mass upheavals in the Arab world

What if the past does nothing to predict the future? What if climate risks do not evolve gradually and relatively predictably but instead suddenly soar uncontrollably? How much lead time is required to deal with something like sea-level rise? How do we weigh the risks of underreacting to climate change against the risks of overreacting to it?

I called Seth Klarman, one of the world’s most successful hedge-fund managers, to think through questions of risk. While he’s not an expert on climate change, he has spent decades thinking deeply about every manner of risk

And we will almost certainly have to do it from sources other than Russia, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other places that pose unacceptable strategic, environmental or humanitarian risks

“If you face something that is potentially existential,” he explained, “existential for nations, even for life as we know it, even if you thought the risk is, say, 5 percent, you’d want to hedge against it.”

“One thing we try to do,” he said, “is we buy protection when it’s really inexpensive, even when we think we may well not need it.” The forces contributing to climate change, he noted, echoing Englander, “might be irreversible sooner than the damage from climate change has become fully apparent. You can’t say it’s far off and wait when, if you had acted sooner, you might have dealt with it better and at less cost. We have to act now.”

In other words, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That’s particularly true if climate change is akin to cancer — manageable or curable in its earlier stages, disastrous in its later ones.

As I’ve always believed, knowing there is grave risk to future generations — and expecting current ones to make immediate sacrifices for it — defies most of what we know about human nature. So I began to think more deeply about that challenge, and others.

For the world to achieve the net-zero goal for carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency, we will have to mine, by 2040, six times the current amounts of critical minerals — nickel, cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, graphite, chromium, rare earths and other minerals and elements — needed for electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels.

The poster child for this kind of magical thinking is Germany, which undertook a historic Energiewende — “energy revolution” — only to come up short. At the turn of the century, Germany got about 85 percent of its primary energy from fossil fuels. Now it gets about 78 percent, a puny reduction, considering that the country has spent massive sums on renewables to increase the share of electricity it generates from them.

As in everything else in life, so too with the environment: There is no such thing as a free lunch. Whether it’s nuclear, biofuels, natural gas, hydroelectric or, yes, wind and solar, there will always be serious environmental downsides to any form of energy when used on a massive scale. A single industrial-size wind turbine, for instance, typically requires about a ton of rare earth metals as well as three metric tons of copper, which is notoriously destructive and dirty to mine.

no “clean energy” solution will easily liberate us from our overwhelming and, for now, inescapable dependence on fossil fuels.

Nobody brings the point home better than Vaclav Smil, the Canadian polymath whose most recent book, “How the World Really Works,” should be required reading for policymakers and anyone else interested in a serious discussion about potential climate solutions.

“I’ve talked to so many experts and seen so much evidence,” he told me over Zoom, “I’m convinced the climate is changing, and addressing climate change has become a philanthropic priority of mine.”

Things could turn a corner once scientists finally figure out a technical solution to the energy storage problem. Or when governments and local actors get over their NIMBYism when it comes to permitting and building a large energy grid to move electricity from Germany’s windy north to its energy-hungry south. Or when thoughtful environmental activists finally come to grips with the necessity of nuclear energy

Till then, even as I’ve come to accept the danger we face, I think it’s worth extending the cancer metaphor a little further: Just as cancer treatments, when they work at all, can have terrible side effects, much the same can be said of climate treatments: The gap between an accurate diagnosis and effective treatment remains dismayingly wide

Only when countries like Vietnam and China turned to a different model, of largely bottom-up, market-driven development, did hundreds of millions of people get lifted out of destitution.

the most important transformation has come in agriculture, which uses about 70 percent of the world’s freshwater supply.

Farmers gradually adopted sprinkler and drip irrigation systems, rather than more wasteful flood irrigation, not to conserve water but because the technology provided higher crop yields and larger profit margins.

Water shortages “will spur a revolutionary, aggressive approach to getting rid of flood irrigation,” said Seth Siegel, the chief sustainability officer of the Israeli AgTech company N-Drip. “Most of this innovation will be driven by free-market capitalism, with important incentives from government and NGOs.

meaningful environmental progress has been made through market forces. In this century, America’s carbon dioxide emissions across fuel types have fallen to well below 5,000 million metric tons per year, from a peak of about 6,000 million in 2007, even as our inflation-adjusted G.D.P. has grown by over 50 percent and total population by about 17 percent.

1) Engagement with critics is vital. Insults and stridency are never good tools of persuasion, and trying to cow or censor climate skeptics into silence rarely works

the biggest single driver in emissions reductions from 2005 to 2017 was the switch from coal to natural gas for power generation, since gas produces roughly half the carbon dioxide as coal. This, in turn, was the result of a fracking revolution in the past decade, fiercely resisted by many environmental activists, that made the United States the world’s largest gas producer.

In the long run, we are likelier to make progress when we adopt partial solutions that work with the grain of human nature, not big ones that work against it

Renewables, particularly wind power, played a role. So did efficiency mandates.

The problem with our civilization isn’t overconfidence. It’s polarization, paralysis and a profound lack of trust in all institutions, including the scientific one

Devising effective climate policies begins with recognizing the reality of the social and political landscape in which all policy operates. Some thoughts on how we might do better:

They may not be directly related to climate change but can nonetheless have a positive impact on it. And they probably won’t come in the form of One Big Idea but in thousands of little ones whose cumulative impacts add up.

2) Separate facts from predictions and predictions from policy. Global warming is a fact. So is the human contribution to it. So are observed increases in temperature and sea levels. So are continued increases if we continue to do more of the same. But the rate of those increases is difficult to predict even with the most sophisticated computer modeling

3) Don’t allow climate to become a mainly left-of-center concern. One reason the topic of climate has become so anathema to many conservatives is that so many of the proposed solutions have the flavor, and often the price tag, of old-fashioned statism

4) Be honest about the nature of the challenge. Talk of an imminent climate catastrophe is probably misleading, at least in the way most people understand “imminent.”

A more accurate description of the challenge might be a “potentially imminent tipping point,” meaning the worst consequences of climate change can still be far off but our ability to reverse them is drawing near. Again, the metaphor of cancer — never safe to ignore and always better to deal with at Stage 2 than at Stage 4 — can be helpful.

5) Be humble about the nature of the solutions. The larger the political and financial investment in a “big fix” response to climate change on the scale of the Energiewende, the greater the loss in time, capital and (crucially) public trust when it doesn’t work as planned

6) Begin solving problems our great-grandchildren will face. Start with sea-level rise

We can also stop providing incentives for building in flood-prone areas by raising the price of federal flood insurance to reflect the increased risk more accurately.

7) Stop viewing economic growth as a problem. Industrialization may be the leading cause of climate change. But we cannot and will not reverse it through some form of deindustrialization, which would send the world into poverty and deprivation

8) Get serious about the environmental trade-offs that come with clean energy. You cannot support wind farms but hinder the transmission lines needed to bring their power to the markets where they are needed.

9) A problem for the future is, by its very nature, a moral one. A conservative movement that claims to care about what we owe the future has the twin responsibility of setting an example for its children and at the same time preparing for that future.

A systemic risk is a threat emerging within one natural, technological, or social system with impacts extending beyond that system to endanger the functionality of one or more other systems

“Polycrisis is a way of capturing the tangled mix of challenges and changes closely interact with one another, bending, blurring and amplifying each other.”

The FT essay was a short piece - originally drafted to run to only 750 words. In that short compass I focused on three aspects

(1) Defining the concept of polycrisis in simple and intuitive terms;

(2) Stressing the diversity of causal factors implied by the term “poly”;

(3) and emphasizing the novelty of our current situation.

There are two aspects to the novelty that I stress in the FT piece, one is our inability to understand our current situation as the result of a single, specific causal factor and secondly the extraordinary scale and breadth of global development, especially in the last 50 years, that makes it seem probable, according to the cognitive schemata and models that we do have at our disposal, that we are about to crash through critical tipping points.

Do we actually know what development or growth are?

As Bruno Latour forced us to recognize, it is not at all obvious that we do understand our own situation. In fact, as he convincingly argued in We Have Never Been Modern, modernity’s account of itself is built around blindspots specifically with regard to the hybrid mobilization of material resources and actors and the working of science itself, which define the grand developmental narrative.

t we have every reason to think that we are at a dramatic threshold point, but also that our need to reach for a term as unspecific as polycrisis indicates our flailing inability to grasp our situation with the confidence and conceptual clarity that we might once have hoped for.

What Beck taught us was that risk is no longer in any simple sense “natural” but a phenomenon of second nature.

A Beckian reading of polycrisis might look a bit like the version produced by Christopher Hobson and Matthew Davies summarized

A polycrisis can be thought of as having the following properties:(1) Multiple, separate crises happening simultaneously. This is the most immediate and comprehensible feature.

(2) Feedback loops, in which individual crises interact in both foreseeable and unexpected ways. This points to the ways that these separate crises relate to each other.

(3) Amplification, whereby these interactions cause crises to magnify or accelerate, generating a sense of lack of control. The way these separate problems relate and connect works to exacerbate and deepen the different crises.

(4) Unboundedness, in which each crisis ceases to be clearly demarcated, both in time and space, as different problems bleed over and merge. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish where one issue ends, and another commences.

(5) Layering, a dynamic Tooze attributes to Yixin’s analysis, whereby the concerns of interest groups related to each distinct crisis overlap ‘to create layered social problems: current problems with historical problems, tangible interest problems with ideological problems, political problems with non-political problems; all intersecting and interfering with one another’ (quoted in Tooze 2021, 18).

(6) The breakdown of shared meaning, stemming from crises being understood differently and from the complex ways in which they interact, and how these interactions are subsequently perceived differently. As each crisis blurs and connects to the other, it becomes more difficult to identify a clear scope and narrative for each distinct crisis, as well as coming to terms with all the interactions between different issues.

(8) Emergent properties, the collection of these dynamics, which all exhibit a high degree of reflexivity, exceeds the sum total of its parts. The polycrisis is ultimately much more than a collection of smaller, separate crises. Instead, it is something like a socio-political version of the ‘Fujiwhara effect,’ a term used to describe when two or more cyclones come together, morph and merge.

(7) Cross purposes, whereby each individual crisis might impede the resolution of another crisis, in terms of demanding attention and resources, and the extent to which they have become tangled together makes it difficult to distinguish and prioritise.

We need to think “big”. Or rather we need to learn how to span the void between the very big and the very particular, the micro and the macro

What all this talk of grand social processes and movements of the mind should not obscure is the extent to which the current crisis is also a matter of identity, choice and action. As much as it is a matter of sociology, social theory and grand historical sweep, it is also a matter of psychology, both at the group and very intimate level, and of politics.

The issue of politics must however be flagged.

The polycrisis affects us at every level. And if you want to take seriously the problem of thinking in medias res you cannot bracket the matter of psychology.

The tension of the current moment is not, after all, simply the result of long-term processes of development, or environmental change. It is massively exacerbated by geopolitical tension resulting from strategic decisions taken by state elites. Some of those are elected. Some not.

What is characteristic of the current moment, and symptomatic of the polycrisis, is that the decisive actors in Russia, China and the United States, the three greatest military powers, are all defining their positions as though their very identities were on the line.

Can one really say that the Biden administration, the Chinese, Putin’s regime are crisis-fighting? Are they not escalating?

It is surely a matter of both, and in interdependence. Each of the major powers will insist that they are acting defensively (crisis-fighting in the extended sense). But what this entails, if you feel fundamental interests are at stake, is escalation, even to the point of engaging in open warfare or risking atomic confrontation.

It is like the classic Cold War but only worse, because everyone feels under truly existential pressure and has a sense of the clock ticking. If no one confidently believes that they have time on their side - and who has that luxury in the age of polycrisis? - it makes for a very dangerous situation indeed.

I found the idea of polycrisis interesting and timely because the prefix “poly” directed attention to the diversity of challenges without specifying a single dominant contradiction or source of tension or dysfunction.

there is no debate. There’s a trade-off. But once you make identity a core qualification, you’re opening up a whole world of racist anti-racism.

Most Americans believe in individual merit, and advancement regardless of identity. Harvard and our new elite believe that our society is so structured as an enduring “white supremacy” that merit can only be considered after you have accounted for the effects of “intersectional oppression.”

each moment of truth puts a crack in the stifling, authoritarian edifice of DEI. We can bring this corruption to light. We can hold them to account. I’m certainly more hopeful about the future of liberal society now than I was a month ago.

the only way to cover it all up, of course, is to abolish testing students entirely (which is what so many elite colleges and universities are now doing) or to give all students an A or an A-, making any distinctions of excellence irrelevant.

When push comes to shove, when there is a finite number of places available, you’re in a zero-sum predicament. You have to pick between a smarter student of the wrong race and a weaker student of the right race. In the end at Harvard, being in the right race — not merit — determines your chances.

The more people see this for the systemic racism it is, the sooner we can throw this neo-Marxist cuckoo out of the liberal nest, and return to the airing of all ideas, regardless of the subject matter or the identity of the students

That’s how you can claim, as Gay does, that “diversity” and “excellence” go hand in hand, when obviously, at some point they can and do conflict.

The response to all this from the CRT crowd has been to insist — ever more strongly — that Gay is simply and only a victim of racism, or, in woke terminology, a victim of misogynoir. The fact that a white female university president at those same hearings lost her job before Gay did — and without any plagiarism questions — doesn’t count.

In the Congressional hearings, moreover, she showed little gravitas, grace, or ability to think on her feet. She has largely hidden from public view since the plagiarism revelations — not a good instinct for a leader of a huge, public-facing institution like Harvard. She is, quite obviously, a run-of-the-mill woke academic, who was promoted at breakneck speed because of her race and sex, and found herself quickly out of her depth.

When you look instead at what she has done as an administrator, which is where she has been focused more recently, you see it has almost all been about hiring on the basis of sex and race, persecuting heretical members of racial minorities, and removing paintings of dead white dudes. She is, at least, consistent.

And let’s be honest: we can all see with our own eyes that subordinating merit to race and sex is how Gay got her position. Her work, beyond the sloppy dime-store plagiarism, would be underwhelming for an average member of any faculty in the country. But for a Harvard president, it’s astonishingly mid

But the legal wrangling to just get the courts to treat crypto as a set of speculative instruments regulated under securities law made the law moot

In May of 2022, a year after Gensler began trying to do something about Terra/Luna, Kwon’s scheme blew up. In a comically-too-late-to-matter gesture, an appeals court then said that the SEC had the right to compel information from Kwon’s now-bankrupt scheme. It is absolute lunacy that well-settled law, like the ability for the SEC to investigate those in the securities business, is now being re-litigated.

many crypto ‘enthusiasts’ watching Gensler discuss regulation with his predecessor “called for their incarceration or worse.”

it wasn’t just the courts who were an impediment. Gensler wasn’t the only cop on the beat. Other regulators, like those at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve, or the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, not only refused to take action, but actively defended their regulatory turf against an attempt from the SEC to stop the scams.

Behind this was the fist of political power. Everyone saw the incentives the Senate laid down when every single Republican, plus a smattering of Democrats, defeated the nomination of crypto-skeptic Saule Omarova in becoming the powerful bank regulator at the Comptroller of the Currency

Instead of strong figures like Omarova, we had a weakling acting Comptroller Michael Hsu at the OCC, put there by the excessively cautious Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Hsu refused to stop bank interactions with crypto or fintech because, as he told Congress in 2021, “These trends cannot be stopped.”

It’s not just these regulators; everyone wanted a piece of the bureaucratic pie. In March of 2022, before it all unraveled, the Biden administration issued an executive order on crypto. In it, Biden said that virtually every single government agency would have a hand in the space.

That’s… insane. If everyone’s in charge, no one is.

And behind all of these fights was the money and political prestige of some most powerful people in Silicon Valley, who were funding a large political fight to write the rules for crypto, with everyone from former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to former SEC Chair Mary Jo White on the payroll.

(Even now, even after it was all revealed as a Ponzi scheme, Congress is still trying to write rules favorable to the industry. It’s like, guys, stop it. There’s no more bribe money!)

Moreover, the institution Gensler took over was deeply weakened. Since the Reagan administration, wave after wave of political leader at the SEC has gutted the place and dumbed down the enforcers. Courts have tied up the commission in knots, and Congress has defanged it

Under Trump crypto exploded, because his SEC chair Jay Clayton had no real policy on crypto (and then immediately went into the industry after leaving.) The SEC was so dormant that when Gensler came into office, some senior lawyers actually revolted over his attempt to make them do work.

In other words, the regulators were tied up in the courts, they were against an immensely powerful set of venture capitalists who have poured money into Congress and D.C., they had feeble legal levers, and they had to deal with ‘crypto enthusiasts' who thought they should be jailed or harmed for trying to impose basic rules around market manipulation.

The bottom line is, Gensler is just one regulator, up against a lot of massed power, money, and bad institutional habits. And we as a society simply made the choice through our elected leaders to have little meaningful law enforcement in financial markets, which first became blindingly obvious in 2008 during the financial crisis, and then became comical ten years later when a sector whose only real use cases were money laundering

, Ponzi scheming or buying drugs on the internet, managed to rack up enough political power to bring Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to a conference held in a tax haven billed as ‘the future.’

It took a few years, but New Dealers finally implemented a workable set of securities rules, with the courts agreeing on basic definitions of what was a security. By the 1950s, SEC investigators could raise an eyebrow and change market behavior, and the amount of cheating in finance had dropped dramatically.

By 1935, the New Dealers had set up a new agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and cleaned out the FTC. Yet there was still immense concern that Roosevelt had not been able to tame Wall Street. The Supreme Court didn’t really ratify the SEC as a constitutional body until 1938, and nearly struck it down in 1935 when a conservative Supreme Court made it harder for the SEC to investigate cases.

Institutional change, in other words, takes time.

It’s a lesson to remember as we watch the crypto space melt down, with ex-billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried

It’s not like perfidy in crypto was some hidden secret. At the top of the market, back in December 2021, I wrote a piece very explicitly saying that crypto was a set of Ponzi schemes. It went viral, and I got a huge amount of hate mail from crypto types

one of the more bizarre aspects of the crypto meltdown is the deep anger not just at those who perpetrated it, but at those who were trying to stop the scam from going on. For instance, here’s crypto exchange Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who just a year ago was fighting regulators vehemently, blaming the cops for allowing gambling in the casino he helps run.

FTX.com was an offshore exchange not regulated by the SEC. The problem is that the SEC failed to create regulatory clarity here in the US, so many American investors (and 95% of trading activity) went offshore. Punishing US companies for this makes no sense.