History Readings

And if institutions are “extractive” — if they ignore human input, waste human potential, and just try to grab resources like free labor or minerals — then a country will stay poor.

In fact, I love this theory. It resonates strongly on an emotional level, because it agrees strongly with my values. I believe in regular people

we confirm a reversal of fortune for colonized countries as territories, but find persistence of fortune for people and their descendants. Persistence results are at least as strong for three alternative measures of early development, for which reversal for territories, however, fails to hold. Additional exercises lend support to Glaeser et al.'s (2004) view that human capital is a more fundamental channel of influence of precolonial conditions on modern development than is quality of institutions.

Having said all that, though, I don’t think this is the kind of theory you can easily evaluate with evidence. And I don’t find the evidence that Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson have produced to test the institutional theory of development to be extremely persuasive.

AJR’s argument here is that because the rich and poor places flipped places between 1500 and 1995 — as demonstrated by that downward-sloping line — it must mean that geography can’t explain wealth and poverty. Instead it must be institutions.

t Chanda, Cook, and Putterman (2014) did this exercise rigorously, and found that, lo and behold, once you account for population relocations, AJR’s “reversal of fortune” gets reversed:

Also, intuitively speaking, I sort of think this theory is right

I really like the answers AJR came up with, and I think there’s a decent chance they’re actually true.

It’s just inherently very very hard to look at the history of countries 500 years ago and draw strong empirical conclusions about the deep fundamental causes of economic development. That is, inherently, an incredibly difficult exercise.

those are only the two most famous papers in a long series of papers in which AJR (or sometimes just AR, or sometimes just Acemoglu) attempt to theorize how institutions affect growth — basically, political science theories about the relationship between elites and the masses.

without solid empirical confirmation that institutions really do affect growth in the way that AJR hypothesize — confirmation that may simply be impossible to get — there’s always the chance that those theories are “explaining” a phenomenon that doesn’t actually exist.

The same issue crops up regarding Acemoglu and Robinson’s recent work with Suresh Naidu and Pascual Restrepo on the impact of democracy on growth. The paper is entitled “Democracy Does Cause Growth”, but as Alex Tabarrok notes, the effect they find is actually pretty small:

In other words, if the average nondemocracy in their sample had transitioned to a democracy its GDP per capita would have increased from $2074 to $2489 in 25 years (i.e. this is the causal effect of democracy, ignoring other factors changing over time). Twenty percent is better than nothing and better than dictatorship but it’s weak tea.

If Park is right, then the economic benefits of democracy are simply an accident of the last few decades of history, in which the U.S. and its allies happened to be very powerful and used their power to put their thumb on the economic scales a bit.

the point is that the entire literature is filled with things like this. Cross-country regressions are inherently limited tools for explaining the wealth and poverty of nations. The kind of questions AJR purport to answer may never really be answerable,

Once again, “Europeans implementing good institutions” is just impossible to distinguish empirically from “Europeans moving in.”

But I also don’t think every interesting line of research needs a Nobel Prize. I was happy to see the Econ Nobel move toward rewarding research that was more scientific and less philosophical than in the past. It was part of econ’s general trend toward being a more humble, grounded, reliable, applicable science. This year’s award moves in the opposite direction, back toward philosophical big-think.

“I don’t accept being called a rapist,” one defendant protested in court. “I’m not a rapist. It’s too much for me to bear,” he said. He went on to explain how much he’s learned about consent since his arrest: “The magistrate told me: Even if you’re married, a woman doesn’t fully belong to you.” “Maybe not at all,” the judge corrected, perfecting the defendant’s sexual education in court. “Yes, women don’t belong to men,” he replied. “I hope they’ll teach that in schools. It took me 54 years.”

One defendant said that he was “destroyed” when he learned what had happened. “I will never get over it,” he told Ms. Pelicot in court, as if she had been raped without the knowledge of either the perpetrator or the victim. Pressed, he described it as an “involuntary rape.”

Mr. Pelicot kept meticulous video evidence of most of the assaults, so the defendants cannot dispute the material facts. The only defense they have available is to say that they did not know that what they were doing was rape because they did not know that they did not have the consent of Ms. Pelicot

Some have argued that they went to the couple’s home to have filmed sex on the assumption that Ms. Pelicot was pretending to be asleep but thought she was participating or that they understood that Mr. Pelicot could consent on her behalf as her husband. (“She’s his wife. He can do whatever he wants with her,” one defendant said.)

One argued that he did not know what “consent” meant.

France still defines rape as a sexual act committed through “violence, coercion, threat or surprise.” This trial has reopened the debate about whether the definition should be changed

Without a requirement of affirmative consent, an accused person can argue — as one of the defense lawyers in this trial did — that “without intention to commit it, there is no rape.”

one-fifth of French people still said they do not view forcing their partner to have intercourse as rape, and nearly 10 percent said that forcing sex on someone who is drunk or asleep or incapable of expressing consent is not rape.

mong men ages 18 to 24, it’s closer to 30 percent. (“To me, rape is grabbing someone in the street,” one of the defendants is reported to have said.)

It appears to have been easy for Mr. Pelicot to find men who were willing to participate in the abuse of his unconscious wife; many of the accused men lived within about 40 miles of his home. If their number makes them monstrous, taken one by one, they’re sadly normal. Men with families and jobs — a journalist, a firefighter, a nurse, a civil servant. One apparently missed the birth of his daughter while he was at the Pelicot home. According to reporting by Le Monde, 72 of the 83 men Mr. Pelicot approached on the internet forum À Son Insu (Without Her Knowledge) or on Skype said yes. Of the minority who declined, it doesn’t seem that any of them bothered to call the police. Presumably they also did not want to know.

Breeding in American zoos has done little to improve genetic diversity, experts say, because China typically sends abroad animals whose genes are already well represented in the population.

Yet American zoos clamor for pandas, and China eagerly provides them. Zoos get attention and attendance. Chinese breeders get cash bonuses for every cub, records show. At the turn of the century, 126 pandas lived in captivity. Today there are more than 700.

Kati Loeffler, a veterinarian, worked at a panda breeding center in Chengdu, China, during the program’s early years. “I remember standing there with the cicadas screaming in the bamboo,” she said. “I realized, ‘Oh my God, my job here is to turn the well-being and conservation of pandas into financial gain.’”

Kimberly Terrell, who was director of conservation at the Memphis Zoo until 2017, said, “There was always pressure and the implication that cubs would bring money.” She noted that zoo administrators insisted on inseminating its aging female panda every year, despite concerns among zookeepers that it was unlikely to succeed. It never did.

“The people who actually worked day to day with these animals, who understand them best, were pretty opposed to these procedures,” she said. The zoo said its breeding efforts followed all program requirements.

The Times collected key documents and audiovisual materials from the Smithsonian archives and supplemented them with materials obtained through open-records requests. The trove, which spans four decades, includes medical records, scientists’ field notes and photographs and videos that offer crucial evidence of breeding procedures, side effects and the conditions in which pandas were held.

They show that the riskiest techniques happened in the program’s infancy, but that aggressive breeding continued at the National Zoo and at other institutions for years. A panda in Japan died during sperm collection in 2010. Chinese breeding centers, until recently, separated cubs from their mothers to make the females go back into heat.

This panda proliferation has prompted debates among zoo workers and scientists over whether it is ethical to subject animals to intensive breeding when they have no real prospect of being released into the wild. But those discussions have largely played out privately because researchers and zookeepers said that criticizing the program could hurt their ability to work in the field.

when a species is on the verge of extinction, conservationists sometimes make a last-ditch effort to save it.

with pandas, zoo administrators take chances again and again simply to make more cubs, while keeping the grimmest details from the public.

If she loses, a whole lot of excuses we’ve been making for America are going to dry up, right quick.

Over the last 10 years we have all, at one point or another, manufactured excuses for why Donald Trump happened.

If Donald Trump happened because a significant percentage of our fellow citizens wanted him, and all his works, and all his empty promises, then there was nothing to be done. If 47 percent of the country wants fascism, then eventually it will get fascism. You can’t simply dissolve the people and elect another.

So we looked for rationalizations to explain why so many Americans were voting for Trump in the hopes that, if we addressed these excuses, they would stop choosing him.

Let’s take a tour through our history of rationalization.

Bob Woodward, who is as jaded and cynical as anyone in Washington, had this to say about Biden in the epilogue to his new book, War:

Joe Biden passed bipartisan gun reform. The CHIPS Act. The Inflation Reduction Act. He passed as much major, bipartisan legislation as any president in a generation.

People hate partisanship and just want a president who gets things done.

War, this book on Biden, however, gave me what was often a real-time, inside-the-room look at genuine good faith efforts by the president and his core national security team to wield the levers of executive power responsibly and in the national interest. At the center of good governance, as evidenced by this book, is teamwork.

The legacy of the Biden presidency will be the core national security team that he built and kept in place for nearly four years. They brought decades of experience as well as basic human decency.

As this book shows, there were failures and mistakes. The full story is, of course, not yet known. But based on the evidence available now, I believe President Biden and this team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership.

And yet Biden gets approximately zero credit from voters for any of this.

Voters just thought Biden was too old to do the job. They had genuine concerns about his age and mental ability.

And yet suddenly age is . . . not a concern for voters.

Meanwhile, Trump is now the oldest person to ever run for president. He is manifestly in bad physical shape—just look at his pallor. Mentally he is so unbalanced that he does stuff like this and talks like this.

Democrats took these concerns so seriously that the president stepped aside and blessed someone else to run in his stead. This action was without precedent.The president’s replacement was youthful, but with deep experience in elected office and the executive branch.

Voters don’t want a California-style progressive elitist.

This was a worry when Harris first took the mantle. But she positioned herself from the start as a center-left moderate: a self-professed capitalist who loves small businesses, is a champion of law and order, and a proponent of American military might.

Her running mate is a blue-collar guy from a populist Midwestern political tradition. They’re both gun owners.And for some reason, none of this seems to be resonating with the people who worried that she was too “progressive.”

nflation. Everything is about inflation. Why can’t you understand that?Inflation is down to 2.4 percent, has been falling for five straight months, and inflation-adjusted wages are up 4.3 percent over the last two years.I’m sorry, but those are just the facts. Science.

People don’t care about fancy economic indicators. They judge the economy on what they see in their real lives. They judge the economy based on the price of gas.

Gas is currently at near its lowest price since 2021. It is roughly the same price it was in 2018. (During the Greatest Economy in History.) And because these are nominal prices—meaning, not adjusted for inflation—the real-dollar cost of gas right now is quite cheap.

Sorry, the price of gas doesn’t matter. It’s the price of eggs that tells people how the economy is doing.

Hold on. In January 2023, egg prices skyrocketed to $4.82 a dozen. That’s when everyone said the price of eggs drove voter sentiment. But six months later the price of eggs was down to $2.09 a dozen and everyone said the price of eggs didn’t matter any more.

Well, egg prices are back up—they’re $3.82 a dozen today. So eggs are how people evaluate macroeconomic conditions again.The USDA publishes a list of consumer prices for various grocery items. Here’s a tidbit from the September 2024 report:From July to August 2024, prices increased for seven food-at-home categories, declined for six categories, and remained steady for two categories.It would be helpful to know which prices will determine how voters feel about the economy?

In 2016, voters didn’t want to vote for Hillary Clinton because she had too much baggage. She’d been a despised figure in American politics for 20 years. Voters wanted a fresh face with high favorables.

I didn’t realize we were going to relitigate 2016, but fine. Kamala Harris is a fresh face who is also completely vetted—she’s been an attorney general, a senator, and vice president. And her favorable rating is net positive! The general public likes her!So she should win this election, right?

Today, there aren’t any excuses left. Something like 47 percent of American voters have seen Trump, understood what he was, and wanted it.

Win or lose, that’s the fundamental reality this race has laid bare. The next era in American politics will be defined by how we grapple with the implications of this reality for civic life and self-governance.

Respect for law lay behind its immediate action in July to scrap the Rwanda deportation plan. It was again the basis of the more recent agreement reached with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands. The review of arms licensing to Israel, he added, came from the same approach. It was a decision based on “law, not politics”. International law, Hermer said, was seamlessly part of the rule of law, too. It was “not simply some kind of optional add-on, with which states can pick or choose whether to comply”.

as Hermer pointed out, it is emphatically not the same as rule by law, which says little more than laws must be obeyed, however they have been made.

Tom Bingham’s definition, developed at length in his 2010 book The Rule of Law, is: “That all persons and authorities within the state, whether public or private, should be bound by and entitled to the benefit of laws publicly made, taking effect (generally) in the future and publicly administered in the courts.”

No one gets an entirely free pass from the rule of law, especially not governments.

The second takeaway is that Hermer’s lecture may mark a new chapter of British governmental deference to this interpretation. In effect, Britain has undergone a quiet constitutional revolution in the past quarter of a century. It has been marked by the passing of the Human Rights Act 1998, the separation of the judiciary from the legislature in 2005 and, not least, by Bingham’s thinking and continuing influence.

In sections of the Tory party and press, the legacy is populist opposition to the European convention, hostility to international law more generally and criticism of judges as part of a liberal elite.

Whether that endures will depend on whether Labour and the judges can promote respect for the courts. But it will also depend on Conservative party politics. For now, though, the attorney’s role will not be to fight the judges, as it was when Suella Braverman was the worst attorney general of modern times, but to support them.

Critics sometimes question what Starmer actually believes in. Some claim that he believes in very little. Like it or not, though, this lecture suggests that is wrong.

Starmer believes in the rule of law. It is his red line. He absolutely does not wish to cross it if he can avoid doing so. Moreover, the evidence so far is that he will not

The instinct showed in the way he scrapped the Rwanda scheme, which the courts had ruled against and on which the Tories had offered a law-denying alternative. It showed in the Chagos deal, where the government had just lost in the courts before the transfer was agreed. And it showed in his biggest domestic crisis so far, when he pushed the police and the courts to use their full legal powers to end the far-right disorder this summer, rather than turning to crowd control or the military.

Then the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, wrote a blog post stating that “it is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days,” which would in turn make such dreams as “fixing the climate” and “establishing a space colony” reality

All of this infrastructure will be extraordinarily expensive, requiring perhaps trillions of dollars of investment in the next few years. Over the summer, The Information reported that Anthropic expects to lose nearly $3 billion this year. And last month, the same outlet reported that OpenAI projects that its losses could nearly triple to $14 billion in 2026 and that it will lose money until 2029, when, it claims, revenue will reach $100 billion

Microsoft and Google are spending more than $10 billion every few months on data centers and AI infrastructure.

Amodei’s and Hassabis’s visions that omniscient computer programs will soon end all disease is worth any amount of spending today. With such tight competition among the top AI firms, if a rival executive makes a grand claim, there is pressure to reciprocate.

All of this financial and technological speculation has, however, created something a bit more solid: self-imposed deadlines. In 2026, 2030, or a few thousand days, it will be time to check in with all the AI messiahs. Generative AI—boom or bubble—finally has an expiration date.

In impotence politics, nothing is true except our emotions, and so we cannot see the sources of problems, and do not really expect to solve them.

Once we accept that government is useless, we respond to crisis by turning against one another.  Politics then begins not from improving life together but by choosing an enemy within. 

This is very comfortable for the impotence politicians, who rule not by addressing problems but by defining enemies. 

When there is a real problem, they will define enemies.

When there is not a real problem, as with the domestic animals of Springfield, Ohio, they will also define enemies.  From the pinnacle of politics they use their talents to turn us against one another

In a Trump-Vance impotence regime, America shifts then to fascism, in which it is no longer the law that matters, but the people, but only the people who are "the real people," the Volk

Politics is no longer government acting for them, but rather them acting for their rulers, following a script of us-and-them.  The political energy that was once resolved as policy as now spread as enmity.

The politics of impotence favors fascism in another way.  When we no longer believe in law and democracy, we still want to get things done, at least for ourselves.  And so we will have to find some way to appeal to the Leader personally: by paying a bribe to someone, by doing a special favor. 

Trump and Vance will suppress the science and blame the scientists.  The plan to fire all the meteorologists is already there. Project 2025 will eliminate the National Weather Service and make climate change a taboo subject inside the federal government.  This direct courting of death is itself quite fascist.

as climate change worsens, the fascism will worsen too.  This is the politics of catastrophe, which is where we are heading next.  When we face a truly existential problem, and when our politics is not about policy but about enmity, we will blame the victims. 

This has already started.  Climate change affects people to the south of the United States first

Our choice to warm the climate guarantees more attempted migration.  And when it comes, the politicians of impotence will just blame the migrants.  Their answer to everything will be deportation. 

And the attempt to deport millions of people will of course turn Americans against one another

The only way to organize such a mass deportation will be to to call on citizens to denounce their neighbors, and to deputize tens of thousands of local authorities for the manhunt.  And so we move from the storm to the stormtroopers.

None of this is speculative.  It is the plain reading of the Trump-Vance campaign

And none of this is new.  Hitler too denied the science that would have solved the basic problems of survival; Hitler too promoted ecological crisis as a reason for race war; Hitler too started from mass deportations of migrants (largely carried out by a non-governmental actor deputized for the purpose, the SS). 

The logic of fascism is known to us from history.  And if we don't avert our eyes, we see how that logic can play out in the future.

History can help us to see, but history will not do the work for us. We need to make history ourselves, in the name of a better future

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.

Both Payne and Morris emphasize how much meaning and comfort we derive from our group identities, whether we consciously think in such terms or not.

Payne cites a famous experiment by Henri Tajfel, a pioneering figure in social psychology, who found that his students heaped exorbitant significance onto a distinction as meaningless as whether they overestimated or underestimated the number of dots in a picture. The students started favoring the members of their “in group” and disparaging the members of the “out group.”

Payne says that he has repeatedly replicated the effect in his own classes: “Underestimators quickly assume that they are the realistic and cautious group, and hence smarter and better than the overestimators. Overestimators, on the other hand, assume that they are optimistic and positive people, and hence better than the dreary underestimators.”

Early in his book he recounts the surreal experience of asking his brother Brad if he believed that Trump had won the 2020 election. To Payne’s surprise, Brad admitted that Biden had won — but only, Brad specified, “by the letter of the law,” adding that “there was some malfeasance,” even if “it can’t be proven.” Payne could see how this conclusion allowed his brother “to come to terms with the evidence” while also letting him “hold on to the larger feeling that Biden’s win was, deep down, illegitimate.”

most of us identify as the “good reasonable people” of his title. Our “psychological immune systems” kick in to discount or reject any information that would make us think otherwise. We want to believe that we seek the cold, hard truth while they wallow in self-serving lies

We also live at a time when ostensible validation for any belief is only a click away. “People are not passive dupes,” Payne explains, “but rather they seek out the stories they want to be told. If one channel shuts down, they just find another.”

Morris, for his part, uses the term “epistemic tribalism” to describe the tendency of people to reach conclusions through “peer-instinct conformist learning” — a fancy way of saying that we’re susceptible to the influence of peers

Morris says that rationality isn’t our “strong suit,” but rationalizing is. He offers the example of students who were given a fake newspaper article about a congressional vote. The policy details made no difference to their evaluations of the plan. If their party voted for it, they liked it; if the other party voted for it, they didn’t — and they denied that party loyalty had anything to do with their views.

our “tribal instincts” are what enabled early humans to collaborate, generating the kind of “coordinated activity” and “common knowledge” that allowed our species to flourish

If we can find a way to “harness tribal impulses,” Morris writes, we could “heal a nation.”

Morris argues that such discrimination persists because of “ethical tribalism,” which “involves no anger, malice or ill regard” toward others, but which bends the rules in favor of one’s own “clan” — people who pass the “culture fit” test because they come from the same group

Undoubtedly the people who do the discriminating would like to see themselves this way — not as hostile and mean (toward others), but as kind and generous (toward their own).

seems eager to reassure readers that, whatever their political allegiances, their motives are not just understandable but good; they are not acting on ugly prejudices from “a century or half a century ago.”

“Bringing about political change is separate from debating politics,” writes Payne, who goes on to explain that genuine persuasion requires trust and connection — both of which seem to be in diminishing supply these days

He says that change is slow, and connecting mostly requires interacting one on one

But people have to want to build that trust in the first place

Many residents had adapted, more or less, to living with the threat of shelling, but the drones have injected new fear into daily life. Each time people leave home, they know they could be individually stalked by killers.

“Drones are much worse than artillery, you can hear the launch and where its flying,” Olifirenko said. “With a drone, it’s [suddenly] there, it sees you, and you are done.”

The drone attacks intensified over the summer after Ukrainian forces withdrew from precarious footholds on the other side of the river, where estuary banks were too damp to dig trenches and troops were extremely exposed, Kuzan said. After they left, Russian drone operators could move forward into reed beds and woody areas. They have cover to set up a position, fly a drone into Kherson, then pack up and move on before Ukrainian troops can locate and target them.

“This is a systematic, well-planned operation to destroy civilian life in Kherson,” said Serhii Kuzan, the chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center thinktank

“The tactic in this hybrid warfare isn’t to win on the battlefield, it is to destroy the civilian population so the central government will negotiate or surrender.”

The range of the drones, up to 15km or about nine miles, allows them to dart across the river and back. They are small and cheap enough for Russia to deploy large numbers, and although they might struggle to find military targets on well-camouflaged frontlines, it is easy to find and hit civilians going about daily life.

He described a city the Russian soldiers had divided into three zones, with areas near the river a declared a red zone where they consider anything that moves a legitimate target. Ustenko, Olifirenko and thousands of other civilians have their homes there.

“He’s a shyster, but I’d take him over her,” Marvin Cegielski, 84, the retired stone mason, told me. “He’ll block off the border.”

“I detest him as a person,” said Natalie Wriker, 37, who works at the Lutheran church in town, “but he’s the lesser of two evils.” She said she believes that politicians are “easily bought” but that Mr. Trump has less motivation to do things for money because of his wealth.

Among the Harris voters I talked with was Jaycee Venini, 23, who grew up in Riegelsville and works as a landscaper. “She is actually a human being,” he said. “I feel like that’s a minimum requirement. And she’s not full of greed or a convicted felon.”

I asked Tracy Russell, 58, if she had thoughts about the election. “Do I think about much else?” she replied. Ms. Russell, a writer for the stage and screen, also planned to vote for Ms. Harris. The issues most important to her, she said, were reproductive rights, the environment, fairness for disenfranchised communities and “having a president who can help turn things around in terms of our brotherhood to each other, and sisterhood.”

Mr. Boenzli is a naturalized citizen from Switzerland and a private pilot. Ms. Boenzli is a former school nurse and the author of a lifestyle blog called Maplewood Road, the name of their street. Both support Ms. Harris. “What matters to me is decency — the humanity of a person who is going to be president,” Mr. Boenzli said. “It’s obvious to me that he’s not a decent person, and I don’t understand the people who want to vote for him.”

The Trump supporters had a more complicated story to tell. They did not express fears that Ms. Harris would take away their guns — or, for that matter, even mention if they owned guns. None of them were QAnon-level conspiracy theorists who claimed that Democrats were pedophiles. In other words, they did not seem insane.

But in their defense of Mr. Trump — of his serial lying, his misogyny, his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection — they offered a range of explanations and rationalizations that did not align with any knowable reality.

“I think it was a crowd that just got out of hand,” Gary Chase, 72, said when I asked him about Jan. 6. “Some of it was set up. There were feds in the crowd who whipped it all into a frenzy.”

He viewed Jan. 6 not as a national tragedy but as a partisan event. “It was a political show, a distraction from the whole Hunter Biden scandal,” he said.

Those sentiments were echoed by others. Jon Libasci, 62, an architect, said, “How was it different from the police headquarters burned down during the B.L.M. protests?”

Mr. Libasci commutes by car to his office in Manhattan, a drive of about an hour and 15 minutes. “Gas was $2.25 a gallon when Trump left office,” he said. “I just paid $4 for mid-grade. You hear what Trump says: ‘Drill, baby, drill.’ I’m OK with that.”

I asked her about Mr. Trump’s long history of using language that denigrates women. “I have no concerns about his rhetoric,” she said. “I’m a big believer in you get the treatment you allow people to give you. I won’t let you cross that line with me. But I’m not a fool. I know that when men get together, they speak like men.”

I asked Trump supporters about his performance in the debate with Ms. Harris. None argued that the result for him had been anything other than a sound defeat. Several, though, observed that Ms. Harris had clearly spent more time rehearsing — as if preparing for an important event were not a quality you’d want in a president.

What if what his supporters really want, and do not express, is the Trump vibe? All the name-calling, coarseness and bullying? The hypermasculine, authoritarian rhetoric?

I asked them about Mr. Trump’s business history, which includes six bankruptcies, numerous instances of cheating his vendors and years of paying minimal or no federal taxes. Their responses were similar to what I heard from other Trump supporters: They accept that the rich play by different rules. Rather than resentment, they expressed admiration. “Every rich businessman goes bankrupt,” Mr. Shoemaker said.

A retired car dealer at the table, who asked that his name not be used, said he believed that Mr. Trump, as president, “took care of big business, and that’s smart because it’s good for all of us.”

In Riegelsville, several Trump supporters brought up former President Bill Clinton’s sexual encounters with a 21-year-old intern in the Oval Office, which may have caused more damage to the institution of the presidency than many Democrats are willing to acknowledge.

I ended up talking to a pretty good chunk of the town’s voters. As I made my way around, what struck me was the difference in expectations. Ms. Harris’s supporters expressed a sense of hope that she might lead us into an era that feels sunnier. It wasn’t quite blind optimism, but they were willing to let her fill in the details.

Mr. Trump has activated darker impulses. His followers were unbothered by his constant denigration of women, of immigrants, of political opponents and even, if he loses, of Jews he says will be at fault for not having proper gratitude for how much he’s done for them.

A president is called on to lead, especially in times of crisis. But if Mr. Trump’s supporters remembered that his response to the Covid epidemic was an exercise in chaos, disinformation and divisiveness, that did not bother them, either

They were not looking to be led or inspired. They said they want him to lower gas and food prices and close the southern border.

The relationship seemed purely transactional — even if the specific things they expect him to deliver would be largely beyond Mr. Trump’s control.

Presidents don’t set food and gas prices, and to truly solve the problems at the border would require an act from Congress — like the one Mr. Trump quashed in the spring for his own political benefit.

Character flaws in a national leader are not just about an individual — they speak to the character of a nation, its aspirations and ideals, and the type of government we want.

Mr. Trump often isn’t campaigning on a recognizable version of recent Republican policies. He is not bound by any party-coalition give-and-take. He is the party, and whatever he says, those are its positions. His product, solely, is himself.

“John can take a piece of metal and make anything out of it,” Michael Schaffer, 74, the lone Harris supporter at the table, said. “These guys I meet up with every morning, they’re brilliant, each of them in their own way. That’s why I just don’t understand their attraction to Trump.”

Mr. Trump is peddling that poison like political crack, and half the nation is hooked, the other half repulsed. If it works and he is elected, it promises four more years of national political warfare.

As I walked its pleasant residential streets, Riegelsville really did, at times, feel like a Hallmark town. I figured that if there was a place that former Trump supporters might have grown sick of him — weary enough of all the ugliness and constant sense of grievance to cast him aside — this might be it.

I was wrong. One of my last conversations was with a construction worker at the general store who asked that his name not be used. He brought up the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in western Pennsylvania. “It was Biden’s fault,” the man said. How so? I asked. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “The deep state tried to take him down. You have to be an idiot not to be able to see that.”

I also heard Riegelsville described as “quintessential Americana” — and in a slightly altered way, that also felt apt. It is America in 2024. It’s defenseless, like everywhere else, from the ever-rising tide of division and madness in the civic life of our nation.

Nobody ever asks if maybe school can’t do the things we’re demanding it do. I’m not asking for a sympathetic hearing for those ideas; I’m asking for any hearing of those ideas. But the New York Times isn’t going to run any pieces about eduskepticism, even though that domain desperately needs new ideas and radical rethinking.

The trouble remains, though - and this is the hell I live in - that it’s still really hard to spark big conversations across the discourse from a newsletter.

I can’t force a topic into people’s brains. That is a privilege that traditional media still hoards.

I can tell you that, in general, when a high-falutin publication throws out an automated form as their submission system, it’s a way to tell prospective freelancers to fuck off. Which is still, somehow, less insulting than what’s going on at Harper’s these days, where the directive is to send your submissions in a paper letter. In 2024. It’s not just that this is obviously far more tedious for the writer, it can only be more work for the editors and the publication as well. But apparently the need to signal that they don’t want submissions, while maintaining the pretense of not being entirely closed off to the rest of us, is sufficient that they’ll pretend that email does not exist. New York’s contact page, which once had submission instructions, no longer does. (But if you want to “pitch a store opening,” you’re in luck.) Never fear, though - they too have somewhere you can send a physical letter.

I had a pitch for Harper’s, a good one. They have an attractive magazine-out-of-time quality, a remove from the hustle that I quite like. It happens that they published maybe my favorite piece among all I’ve ever published. But I couldn’t figure out how to pitch without buying a printer, and anyway I’m confident that sending the physical letter to the listed address would have had precisely the same effect as leaving it at Lewis Lapham’s grave. So I gave up. When someone says “fuck off” as clearly they’re saying it, it’s best to take them seriously.

What is the advantage? It’s like an NFL coach with a shitty team telling the beat reporters he thinks the solutions are already on the roster, I can’t decide if they really believe it or not. Does it not occur to them, to any of them, that all the money flowing into the hands of grubby little outsiders like me is a symbol of a broad discontent within the audience? Does it not occur to them, to any of them, that if nothing else this is useful market information, all of this steady drip drip drip of Lorenzians and Yglesiaii and Nates Silver, Bronze, and Gold? Tina Brown! When Tina Brown feels comfortable sitting at the freakazoid table at the high school cafeteria, perhaps it’s time to ask if maybe there’s some reason why, that maybe the business has grown myopic and scared, that it’s responded to financial difficulties by crawling into a defensive crouch. At exactly the time when the public’s appetite for outsider voices has been proven, quantitatively and with dollars attached, the usual suspects have built the walls higher around their pages, making freelance contribution even harder. Why? For who?

In this case, I think we can agree—again—that these objections would be insufficient and that Catholic Charities would be right to exclude such a person even just based on his words. And even if 47 percent of the country supported him.

But what about free speech?! And after all, those are just words. It’s not like the Republican had actually jailed priests. Maybe this was just campaign rhetoric. Maybe it was just his unorthodox manner of speaking. Maybe Catholics should take him seriously, but not literally.

How about actions? Are there actions a presidential candidate could take that would merit exclusion?

Again: I think so. If a presidential candidate had physically assaulted a priest, or been convicted of rape, or sexual abuse of a minor, then I can’t see Catholic Charities inviting him to the Al Smith dinner, just because he won a nominating contest.

Now maybe you think that convictions on felony fraud and being found liable for sexual assault and being under indictment for dozens of other crimes don’t rise to the same level.

Point being: Civic institutions that support democracy in normal times can be used to undermine it in abnormal times.

What the elites who put together events like the Al Smith dinner do not seem to understand is that this—[gestures broadly]—is not normal.

There’s a storm coming. And the liberal order will be lucky to survive it.

I’m sure the Germans had some version of an Al Smith dinner in 1932. Should they have invited members of both the Social Democrats and the Nationalist Socialist German Worker's Party to the event to gently roast one another?1

Can we agree that there are some scenarios in which a society should be willing to suspend traditional graces to political actors? Let me give you a couple of examples, just to illustrate the idea that lines can be drawn.

Which means that we agree in principle that when it comes to these kabuki events, lines should be drawn.

The only question, then, is whether or not Donald Trump rises to the level of exclusion. Does he clear the threshold for malignancy at which society should refuse to participate in normalizing him?

I understand that reasonable people can differ on this question. But I want to underscore that it simply isn’t enough to say, “Trump must be included because he is the nominee of a major party and 47 percent of the country will vote for him.”

If 47 percent of the country was going to vote for secession from the Union, we wouldn’t get into tuxes and rub elbows with them while making jokes.

The people running the dinner thought they were using Trump to raise money for Catholic Charities. The reality is that he was using them to normalize his authoritarian project.

Donald Trump has inverted this proposition. His presence at the Al Smith dinner last night turned the event itself into kabuki theater, in which everyone participating pretended that the man who attempted a coup, says he wants to be a dictator, calls his opponents “vermin” and “the enemy within,” and has raised the possibility of using the military against American citizens is normal.

The message of the Al Smith dinner was that politics is kabuki theater and our differences are actually quite small.

Trump has spent the past nine years not even trying to expand his base but just playing to the same MAGA grievances over and over again

Both parties “treat narrow victories like landslides and wave away narrow defeats, somehow seeing both as confirmation of their existing strategies.”

The parties, they write, “have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters — who would never vote for the other party — over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way.”

The problem is that where you find their weaknesses, there you find the priesthood. The public conversation on the Democratic side of things is dominated by highly educated urban progressives who work in academia, the media, the activist groups and so on

In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel.

These folks have a highly developed and self-confident worldview — a comprehensive critique of American society. The only problem is that this worldview is rejected by most Americans, who don’t share the critique.

On these, as on so many other issues, the position that is held by a vast majority of Americans is unsayable in highly educated progressive circles. The priesthood has established official doctrine, and woe to anyone who contradicts it.

For example, the progressive priesthood, quite admirably, is committed to fighting racial oppression. Its members believe that the way to do that is to be hyperaware of racial categories — in the diversity, equity and inclusion way — in order to rearrange preferences to support historically oppressed groups.

Most Americans also seek to fight racism, but they seek to do it in a different way. Their goal is to reduce the salience of racial categories so that people’s talents and initiative determine their life outcomes.

Or take energy. Most members of the Democratic clerisy are properly alarmed by climate change and believe we should rapidly shift from fossil fuels. Liberal white college graduates favor eliminating fossil fuels by two to one. It’s no skin off their teeth; they work on laptops.

But if you live in Oklahoma or work in an industry that runs on oil, coal or natural gas, this idea seems like an assault on your way of life, which, of course, it is.

An overwhelming 72 percent of Americans favor an all-of-the-above approach, relying on both renewables and traditional energy sources.

Or take immigration. Highly educated white progressives tend to see the immigration and asylum issue through the lens of oppressor and oppressed: The people coming across our border are fleeing horror in their home countrie

most Americans see immigration through a law-and-order lens: We need to control our boundaries, preserve social order and take care of our own. In a June CBS survey 62 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Hispanics, said they supported a program to deport undocumented immigrants — the most extreme version of this approach.

I think the reason for all this is that political parties no longer serve the function they used to

But in just the few months she has had to campaign, Harris can’t turn around the Democratic Party’s entire identity. Plus, her gestures have all been stylistic; she hasn’t challenged Democratic orthodoxy on any substantive issue

The result is that each party has its own metaphysics. Each party is no longer just a political organism; it is a political-cultural-religious-class entity that organizes the social, moral and psychological lives of its believers.

The political problem for Harris is that there are a lot more Americans without a college degree than with one. Class is growing more salient in American life, with Hispanic and Black working-class voters shifting steadily over to the working-class party, the G.O.P.