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I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.

we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side

I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.

I have a feature piece in this month’s prospect using 13 charts to tell the story of 13 years of government failure. Had they wanted to fill the whole magazine I could have used 100 charts. With a handful of exceptions (exam results, use of renewable energy, workplace pension enrolment) every trend graph is going in the wrong direction. The public sector is in a bad way. Hospitals are at breaking point, the police are charging fewer criminals, prisons are full, most schools have to run food banks, care homes can’t find staff. And so on.

But even this bleak picture puts a gloss on reality because of how institutions react in conditions of scarcity. If demand for a service is higher than providers can manage they will start rationing access more aggressively.

The NHS is a great example. The waiting list for elective treatments has risen over the course of the year from 7.2 million to 7.7 million, despite Rishi Sunak’s pledge to bring it down. But there hasn’t been any increase in the numbers joining the list compared to pre-pandemic.

One idea that I often encounter in the world of economic discussion, and which annoys me greatly, is that nations get rich by looting other nations.

This idea is a pillar of “third world” socialism and “decolonial” thinking, but it also exists on the political Right. This is, in a sense, a very natural thing to believe — imperialism is a very real feature of world history, and natural resources sometimes do get looted. So this isn’t a straw man; it’s a common misconception that needs debunkin

it’s important to debunk it, because only when we understand how nations actually do get rich can we Americans make sure we take the necessary steps to make sure our nation stays rich.

Russia’s escalation of its eight-year war against Ukraine presents a choice about what role America would like to play in the world.

should the United States conduct itself as a great power, and, if so, should it be a European power or restrict itself to preserving the order in Asia.

Before the end of World War II, American statesmen began to think about what world order should look like after the war. They designed a global order to mirror four tenets of the American regime at home: commerce, law, liberalism, and guns.

As we confront the crisis in Ukraine, it helps us understand patriotism itself—how a healthy patriotism extends our sphere of concern, and how an unhealthy nationalism restricts us and narrows our focus, leaving us often indifferent to the suffering of others. 

there is also a serious geopolitical challenge unfolding in Europe and a deep moral injury threatening Ukraine. And it demands our attention as well, and not just in strategic terms.

The moral dimension should weigh on us all. Indeed, moral injuries can cut the deepest and leave the most bitter legacies. Moral concern can and should bind us together, out of empathy for profound loss. 

let’s assume that he expects some of those consequences, expects a more isolated future. What might be his reasoning for choosing it?

Here is one speculation: He may believe that the age of American-led globalization is ending no matter what, that after the pandemic certain walls will stay up everywhere, and that the goal for the next 50 years is to consolidate what you can — resources, talent, people, territory — inside your own civilizational walls.

In this vision the future is neither liberal world-empire nor a renewed Cold War between competing universalisms. Rather it’s a world divided into some version of what Bruno Maçães has called “civilization-states,” culturally-cohesive great powers that aspire, not to world domination, but to become universes unto themselves — each, perhaps, under its own nuclear umbrella.

Mearsheimer’s analysis also falls short at the level of explanation. Famously “free choices” resist causal explanation. But we cannot simply waive our hands. Indeed, if we merely waive our hands, or assume an automaticity from structural conditions to action, as Mearsheimer seems to do, we void the domain in which the responsibility of statecraft is actually enacted. We void too the domain in which a sophisticated understanding of realism would have to prove its worth.

Actual realism is not a simple thing. It is not some schema, no more in international relations than in any other dimension of life. It is a challenge.

what I do in the New Statesman essay is to locate Mearsheimer in relation to the history of realism. And my prompt here is Matthew Specter’s excellent new history, The Atlantic Realists.