Are Private Universities Corporate Proxies?

Dating back to the 1960's, I've always had difficulty understanding campus protest. I mean that not in the sense of not understanding the concerns of the protesters, which are usually readily apparent, but in the sense of the logic of campus protest itself. My cognitive dissonance usually occurs more with private colleges and universities than with public ones. In the U.S., public universities are readily funded by state governments, and most of their students are residents of those particular states, so there is a discernible connection between the protestors and the local political process. Since this is supposed to be a democratic country, it makes more sense that protesters would express political views at a government-administered institution than at a private one. Of course, not all protests are political in nature, and I suppose that non-political protests can make sense anywhere.

The strange thing to me is that, for example, if a student at a private university disagrees with U.S. funding of the Israeli military that results in the killing and displacement of thousands of innocent Gaza civilians, there is an established process for addressing that concern: they could contact their congressional representative or senator or protest outside Congress. Their university has little or no connection to the relevant government proceedings, and its students do not necessarily have any say in university policies. Moreover, private universities are not funded by taxpayers, and the processes by which they fund themselves are not necessarily democratic. One might argue that private colleges and universities are "communities" that can build their own consensus through internal discussion or protest, but that view doesn't have legal footing: students are not true stakeholders and ultimately have no authority in how their private college or university is administered.

The situation with the Vietnam War was quite different from the Hamas-Israel War, because the U.S. itself was the aggressor. In that instance, general political objection to the war seemed reasonable. These days, college and university protests often call for the ending of purchase of stocks of the companies that are located in the country of the principal offenders. For example, colleges and universities were discouraged from buying South African stocks during apartheid and, more recently, the stocks of large oil companies that contribute to global warming. Now the protesters are calling for the divestment of Israeli stocks. While, theoretically, that can be construed as a suitable disincentive for Israel to continue the war, I don't consider that methodology appropriate for a couple of reasons. 

First, in the case of private colleges and universities, investment choices are beyond the purview of their students. The students are essentially customers. Their college or university may be around for hundreds of years, and its administrators have to figure out how to fund it well after the current students have departed. The protesting students can be seen as behaving like the customers of a traditional delicatessen who collectively march in and demand that the owners immediately change the menu to include only vegan and gluten-free items. The fact is that the customers don't own the store, and if they dislike the menu, no one is forcing them to buy food there. Also, more subtly, private colleges and universities in the U.S. are actually participating in the capitalist ecosystem of the country. In order to ensure the health of their institution, it is in their interest to produce graduates who go on to become wealthy and leave them bequests in their wills. The small colleges that didn't follow that model are dropping like flies now. I find it hard to take seriously the "values" of most private colleges and universities. Even when there are stated educational goals, their importance is purely symbolic when you consider the actual tasks required to sustain a private college or university over time. Most of them are devoted to the development of future donors purely as a matter of survival. That is why they coddle their alumni. The richer their alumni, the better.

Second, as a personal matter, I dislike the divestment argument because it trivializes the underlying conceptual framework of what is actually occurring. In this instance, I would rather hear a discussion of the errors made by Netanyahu and the long-term consequences of his behavior. The news media are missing in action as usual and aren't advocating a specific actionable plan. The protestors also seem to be sleepwalking through history and are unable to provide a coherent description of the situation. What, exactly, is the explanatory value of the word "hate"? With better journalism and more effective protest, the Gaza conflict might already have ended. Moreover, the current crisis has been brewing for decades, with the underlying problems festering for many years.

One of my corollaries here is that student protestors seem to be in denial of the fact that they and their universities inhabit a corporation-dominated world.

The Political Scene

Politics isn't exactly one of my favorite topics, but the current situation in the U.S. seems extraordinary, so I'll continue to comment on it occasionally. The scene here in Vermont isn't dramatic and can even be amusing at times: in the Democratic primary for governor, a transgender woman just defeated a fourteen-year-old boy and two others to win the nomination. However, the conditions in Washington, D.C. aren't as sanguine. The recent death of TV personality Robin Leach reminded me of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," which I used to watch years ago. Adnan Khashoggi, the billionaire Saudi arms dealer, was a quintessential subject for the program; his grotesque lifestyle was said to cost $250 thousand per day. Khashoggi was no doubt a role model for Donald Trump, who also appeared on the program. Subsequent to a reduction in Khashoggi's wealth, Trump bought his yacht, and, of course, renamed it after himself. Looking back, you can also see how Trump had an affinity for the Gambino crime family, with which he had business connections. Although Trump seems to have been a shameless social climber, he never graduated from the ranks of con artists and crooks, and his self-professed business acumen doesn't stand up to close examination.

I don't have any special insights or information about Trump's probable fate, but it seems unlikely that his presidency will end well for him. He has the looming Mueller investigation, possible criminal charges in New York, potential impeachment after the 2018 midterm elections, and, if he survives long enough, the 2020 presidential election, which I doubt he would win. Before it's all over, we may learn that the Trump Organization is propped up by money laundering for Russian oligarchs. Trump held the illusory belief that he would somehow escape the close scrutiny that all presidents face, and that his indiscretions could be suppressed indefinitely. In most respects, Donald Trump is demonstrably stupid. On the whole, Trump merely seems like an anomaly to me, a sign of dysfunctional times. He is fundamentally less interesting than the conditions that allowed him to be elected. How, one asks, did voters elect to the presidency a candidate who lies constantly, surrounds himself with criminals, has little understanding of foreign or domestic policy, economics or law, and has never shown any interest in public service?

This plays into my narrative about the inadequacy of traditional democratic governmental structures in a capitalist society. The two critical parts that cause failure are the stupidity of voters and the amorality and greed of private interests. At the most basic level, what has happened is that corporate media companies such as Fox News have become proficient at convincing disgruntled white males that Donald Trump can improve their economic status. In a classic case of voter misattribution of cause and effect, Trump has been given credit for the strong economy in the U.S., which would have occurred anyway without him. The reality is that Trump's ideas are obsolete or discredited ones from the 1970's and 1980's, and that his advisers are amateurs and opportunists who lack both the ideas and the skills to produce the results that his supporters expect. Trump's tax cut mainly benefits the rich and will lead to larger deficits in the future, which will restrain economic growth. Trump's tariff strategy is reducing prices of agricultural commodities and hurting farmers, while raising costs in some industries and disrupting international commerce in a manner that is unlikely to benefit anyone. His support of the coal industry, which is economically doomed regardless, may increase global carbon emissions. Trump's supporters fall into two main groups: a majority who are ignorant and a minority who seek immediate financial or political gain from his policies. This is not to say that voters who dislike Trump and vote against him are making better decisions, but that voters in general are ill-equipped to deal with complex national and international issues.

For these reasons I return to the idea that self-governance ought to be replaced by an algorithmic form of government. A sophisticated algorithmic constitution based on principles of equality, fairness and protection of the individual could replace the current U.S. constitution, leaving no room for interpretation or manipulation. The current system of government permits a continuous assault by special interests, both domestic and foreign. Because human status or rank is always relative, people compete to own larger houses and properties, and there is no theoretical upper limit that would prevent them from owning, say, larger planets, if it were possible. If capitalism has in fact played a role in human progress, one can now almost safely say that it has outlived its usefulness. The current trajectory, with an incompetent American president like Donald Trump, is moving us toward a needlessly overcrowded world characterized by pointless competition, which in the long run may benefit no one.

Collapse VI

The last section of the book, "Practical Lessons" covers a mishmash of ideas. Chapter 14 lists some of the psychological failings of the people in the collapsed societies discussed earlier, including failure to anticipate, failure to perceive, rational bad behavior (of a subset of the population) and disastrous values. This chapter had a lot of potential, but I found it disappointing, because it stuck to the obvious. Chapter 15 describes in detail how some businesses have been able to behave like responsible citizens, though that usually occurs only when actual events have shown that the cost of irresponsible exploitation of resources outweighs the cost of additional safety measures and precautions, for instance, when a large oil spill occurs. In the case of hardrock mining, there is usually so little profit in the business to begin with that it is cheaper for businesses to lobby for lax regulations than it is to operate in an environmentally responsible fashion, in which case they would simply lose money. Diamond emphasizes how consumers play a role in this, because, even though they may not understand the economics of the oil or mining industries, they are more cognizant of oil because they buy it at the retail level, whereas the end use of most mining products remains a mystery to them. They are willing to pay for oil because they are aware of how they use it, whereas mining products often become invisible components of consumer products. Responsible stewardship of the environment comes at a cost, and ultimately it is consumers who decide by buying or not buying certain products; they usually aren't willing to pay any premium for consumer products, because, according to Diamond, they don't often understand the environmental costs. Where hardrock mining is concerned, the costs of environmental responsibility are considerably higher than those of most other natural resources. Diamond also notes that self-regulation within some industries, such as forest products, has been comparatively successful.

The final chapter, 16, includes a somewhat redundant list of what Diamond thinks are the twelve most serious trouble spots related to sustaining the environment. Here are the first sentences or so that he has written for each item on the list:

1. At an accelerating rate, we are destroying the natural habitats or else converting them to human-made habitats, such as cities and villages, farmlands and pastures, roads and golf courses.

2. Wild foods, especially fish and to a lesser extent shellfish, contribute a large fraction of the protein consumed by humans.... [T]he great majority of valuable fisheries either have collapsed or are in steep decline. 

3. A significant fraction of wild species, populations, and genetic diversity has already been lost, and at present rates a large fraction of what remains will be lost within the next half-century.

4. Soils and farmland used for growing crops are being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10 and 40 times the rates of soil formation, and between 500 and 10,000 times soil erosion rates on forested land.

5. The world's major energy sources, especially for industrial societies, are fossil fuels: oil, natural gas, and coal. While there has been much discussion about how many big oil and gas fields remain to be discovered, and while coal reserves are believed to be large, the prevalent view is that known and likely reserves of readily accessible oil and gas will last for a few more decades.

6. Most of the world's freshwater in rivers and lakes is already being utilized for irrigation, domestic and industrial water, and in situ uses such as boat transportation corridors, fisheries, and recreation.

7. It might at first seem that the supply of sunlight is infinite, so one might reason that the Earth's capacity to grow crops and wild plants is also infinite. Within the last 20 years, it has been appreciated that this is not the case....

8. The chemical industry and many other industries manufacture or release into the air, soil, oceans, lakes and rivers many toxic chemicals....

9. The term "alien species" refers to species that we transfer, intentionally or inadvertently, from a place where they are native to a place where they are not native. Some alien species are obviously valuable to us as crops, domestic animals, and landscaping. But others devastate populations of native species with which they come into contact....

10. Human activities produce gases that escape into the atmosphere, where they either damage the protective ozone layer (as do formerly widespread refrigerator coolants) or else act as greenhouse gases that absorb sunlight and thereby lead to global warming.

11. The world's human population is growing. More people require more food, space, water, energy and other resources. 

12. What really counts is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment.... [O]ur numbers pose problems insofar as we consume resources and generate wastes.... But low-impact people are becoming high-impact people....

Following this list, Diamond refutes, effectively I think, some of the common criticisms that have been brought against the arguments that he makes. He then attempts to finish on a positive note by mentioning that some societies of the past, such as the success stories described in the book, were able to overcome similar problems when they confronted them, and that we may be able to as well.

Because of its scope and completeness, this is by far the best book I've read on environmental issues. In books by E.O. Wilson, such as The Diversity of Life and Half-Earth, the perspective is that of a naturalist more than that of one specifically concerned with the future of mankind. Similarly, in The Sixth Extinction Elizabeth Kolbert looks at the environmental consequences of human activities without paying as much attention to the specific causes. Al Gore's popular documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which came out the year following Collapse, covers only one aspect of the twelve mentioned by Diamond. Global warming is an important issue, but in itself is probably survivable, and though the film played an important role in raising environmental awareness, compared to Collapse it barely scratches the surface. Diamond makes it clear that if we don't deal effectively with the issues that he raises we may all die, as did those in some of his historical examples.

Although it seems that somewhere in Collapse one is likely to find at least a passing comment on every issue relevant to human survival vis-à-vis environmental damage, Diamond, disappointingly to me, does not present specific strategies for solving the problems, and he more or less leaves it up to mankind to solve them on their own. For example, he recognizes that corporations may or may not behave responsibly but are driven primarily by financial motives, and that the public can pressure them in the right direction, but he also notes that some of the environmental issues are not understood by the public: how could corporate malfeasance be corrected in those instances? As I have argued in previous posts, many of the problems that we are currently facing are the result of the combination of economic competition under capitalism with inferior governance under existing democratic political models. It would be difficult to deal with environmental problems at that level, but, since that is where the problems actually originate, it may be the appropriate place to look.

I think that economic competition tends to cause a vicious cycle from which it becomes increasingly difficult to escape. For example, for someone like me, who prefers a rural environment with a low population density and doesn't care about money, how can I realistically expect to live that way in the current world? If you live in an unspoiled environment with its natural resources more or less intact, in order to retain those resources you need defense measures of one kind or another. Under current global conditions, in the absence of a suitable defense, sooner or later corporations, other nations or perhaps refugees would arrive on the scene and alter the environment for the worse. In other words, in order to protect my sustainable environment, I would need an economic base large enough to support an army or some other deterrent, which contradicts the very idea of the society that I envision. Similarly, economically weak countries may be forced by external economic pressures to modernize their economies, if only for their own protection. Even developed countries with declining populations face pressure to increase their fertility rates in order to ensure that they have sufficient workers to keep their economies strong in the future. Capitalism in the absence of an effective world government forces regions of the world into defensive postures, with economic forces driving events in a way that roughly mimics warfare.

The other problematic component underlying environmental risk, incompetent governance, has hardly diminished since Diamond wrote the book. The collapse in Syria is flooding Europe with refugees, conditions in South Sudan have deteriorated and ISIL is at large. These kinds of situations are predictable within Diamond's framework, because political instability is often associated with environmental destruction. However, one may also question how well the developed nations are dealing with increasing environmental pressures. It may be a little too early to assess the populist movements in Europe and the U.S., but at first glance they may be related to the sustainability of economic growth, which is at least partly related to environmental health. The high standard of living in the developed world comes at a high environmental cost, and the lower end of the income spectrum has been experiencing a reduced standard of living in recent years. Although a collapse does not seem imminent in the developed world, some of the early patterns of political instability may be falling into place. Recently, the two most striking examples have been the victories of Brexit and Donald Trump, which, to me, are clear indications of the inherent incompetence of democratic electorates. Both votes were for isolationism and protection from foreigners and demonstrate a poor understanding of global economics.

The election of Donald Trump is a good example of the incompetence of a democratic electorate. From his few weeks in office it has become apparent that, not only does he not understand any of the serious issues facing the U.S., including those raised by Diamond, but he isn't even interested in them and is unlikely to do anything about them. This encourages me to withdraw into my futuristic mode of thinking, in which complex issues such as those raised in Collapse become the province of AI or AI-assisted humans rather than the poor decision-making process of the voting public or the incompetent people whom they elect.

Diamond is correct that all of the problems brought up in his book can be solved, but he isn't exactly creating a new paradigm. I am a much stronger proponent of population control than he is, but that may be because I am not affected by the pressures of political correctness. Looking into the future, I wonder whether there is any advantage to a world population of seven billion people, in which the majority lead imperiled lives, compared to a world population of one billion or fewer people, in which all lead unimperiled lives. There are painless ways to make that transition without producing inequality or diminishing the richness of human experience. This obvious option is not receiving any public discussion.

The Wrecking Ball of Innovation

I have a copy of When Facts Change, a collection of Tony Judt's essays assembled by his widow and published in 2015. I'm not reading it straight through and will probably read only a few of them. I've just finished an essay that first appeared in the New York Review of Books in 2007. It is a review of Robert Reich's book, Supercapitalism of that year. This essay, besides serving as a reminder of how powerful a writer Judt was, is still relevant to the current political situation in the U.S., as it specifically examines the economic myopia of Reich, who was the first secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, and, by association, represents the prevailing Democratic economic viewpoint that continues up to the present in the policies of Barack Obama.

Judt isn't critical of Reich's description of the wealth gap, which has since then received far greater publicity, thanks to Thomas Piketty, but finds his complacent acquiescence to economic forces unacceptable. Reich takes it as given that we live in an economically competitive world, that the super-rich are not at fault and that the primary national goal is productivity growth. In Judt's view, the sweeping economic model adopted by Clinton distorted an earlier model in which the state was seen as responsible for all of its citizens regardless of economic factors. Under Clinton, privatization picked up steam and the existing welfare system was replaced with one that treated the poor as economic entities and accordingly made their benefits contingent upon their attempt to become gainfully employed. On these changes, Judt says:

The real impact of privatization, like welfare reform, deregulation, the technological revolution, and indeed globalization itself, has been to reduce the role of the state in the affairs of its citizens: to get the state "off our backs" and "out of our lives" – a common objective of economic "reformers" everywhere – and make public policy, in Robert Reich's approving words, "business friendly." 

He goes on to say:

If modern democracies are to survive the shock of Reich's "supercapitalism," they need to be bound by something more than the pursuit of private economic advantage, particularly when the latter accrues to ever fewer beneficiaries: the idea of a society held together by pecuniary interests alone is, in Mill's words, "essentially repugnant." A civilized society requires more than self-interest, whether deluded or enlightened, for its shared narrative of purpose....

In the early years of the French Revolution the Marquis de Condorcet was dismayed at the prospect of commercial society that was opening before him (as it is opening before us): the idea that "liberty will be no more, in the eyes of an avid nation, than a necessary condition for the security of financial operations." We ought to share his revulsion.

Judt describes the negative consequences of Reich's policy views that were already evident in 2007, before the Great Recession, before Brexit and before the election of Donald Trump:

Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one's daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.

The essay concludes as follows:

We may find that a healthy democracy, far from being threatened by the regulatory state, actually depends upon it: that in a world increasingly polarized between insecure individuals and unregulated global forces, the legitimate authority of the democratic state may be the best kind of intermediate institution we can devise. What, after all, is the alternative? Our contemporary cult of untrammeled economic freedom, combined with a heightened sense of fear and insecurity, is leading to reduced social provision and minimal economic regulation; but these are accompanied by ever-extending governmental oversight of communication, movement and opinion. "Chinese" capitalism, as it were, Western-style. Is this what we want?

Because the essay predates Obama's election in 2008, it is easy to see that not much has changed under eight years of a Democratic administration; thus my criticisms of Obama hold. As an observer, I am not aware of any significant move that Obama may have made to distance himself from Reich's policy views, which currently seem embedded in the party and would have continued under Hillary Clinton had she been elected. Judt's views are far closer to those of Bernie Sanders, whom I supported in the Democratic primary.

While I completely agree with Judt that the modification of political thought to accommodate economic thought over the last few decades has set the world on a dangerous path, he has hardly provided a blueprint for change. He writes of democracy in the abstract when it ultimately depends on the votes, not only of educated, informed voters, but of the less-educated and uninformed who have recently brought us Brexit and Donald Trump. In a way it is unfortunate that Judt chose history over economics, because there is no one that I know of who might have made a better economic case, had he the appropriate credentials. The economists with whom I'm familiar, including Thomas Piketty, do not seem to grasp the urgent conditions described by Judt, perhaps because their training has been narrow and they have too much faith in their profession.

If calling for greater regulation, etc., isn't feasible and even then doesn't fully encapsulate the issues at hand, the limiting factor may be human cognition. Thus, I am skeptical of the ability of a Tony Judt or a Bernie Sanders to work out an actual detailed solution to the problems caused by global economic competition. Although Judt's heart was in the right place, his view of social democracy seems outdated and sentimental to me. The best hope is that we will end up with a highly regulated society wherein AI plays a larger role than it does at present, at the exclusion of mere mortals, who tend to be incompetent, corrupt or both when faced with such daunting tasks. That is hardly what Tony Judt or Bernie Sanders had in mind, but I find it a little more realistic and perhaps less ominous than they would have you believe.

Work

I have thought a lot about the nature of work, perhaps because I never fully adapted to the workforce. It is difficult to say exactly why that was the case, and my theory is that I have an innate preference for natural relations with others, i.e. the same kinds of relationships that our distant ancestors used to have, perhaps as far back as the hunter-gatherers. Whenever I had a job, I distinctly felt that my relationships with my supervisor and coworkers were contrived. After observing forced collegiality for over thirty years, I still think that my work relationships were based on false behavior. That partially had to do with my immediate recognition that I was not the same as the others, that we were not really a cohesive group, and that I didn't care in the slightest about career or organizational goals. Beyond the income provided, I didn't think it would matter in the least if any of the companies for which I worked ceased to exist. Actually, most of them have since shut down, and I doubt that anyone is mourning their loss. The crux of the matter probably relates to the fact that my work environments existed exclusively within the context of free markets and that the primary objective of the companies for which I worked was to make a profit. From my point of view it seemed as if other important factors such as whether the employees liked working there or whether the goods and services provided by the companies were desirable beyond narrow economic parameters were never examined or discussed at all, making the enterprises seem mindless and potentially foolhardy to me.

If you are critiquing this post as you read it, you may be thinking at this point that I just happen to have worked in a commercial environment that didn't suit me, and that perhaps I would have been happier doing something else. I've thought about that too, but haven't been able to come up with a solution, because the free-market economy directly or indirectly affects how nearly everyone makes a living. For example, I liked science in high school, so perhaps I ought to have had a scientific job. If you look closely at that, the jobs of most scientifically-trained workers are little different from those of others: they work at for-profit companies. If they are doing research they may have to jump through hoops to get funding; much of that funding comes from corporations or corporate-influenced government agencies. Engineers and medical doctors also work in environments with economic constraints and competitive infrastructures.

What if I had been an artist or writer? We recently watched a documentary on the painter David Hockney. For a modern painter, he isn't bad in my opinion. He worked hard for many years, was competitive and persistent, and he prevailed. However, to succeed at his level, you also have to be an entrepreneur, which instantly associates you with ordinary capitalists. Although I like some of his paintings, he is no Vermeer or Bruegel, and with comparable effort I could probably paint just as well as he does. Or perhaps I could have been a writer. As a writer I would never have been able to produce work fast enough, would not have fit in well in a writing program, would immediately have detested the literary establishment, and, with no entrepreneurial spirit, may well have ended up writing for pleasure without remuneration.

When I look back on my working years, I can't honestly say that I found them enjoyable, but they provided me with enough wear and tear to know something of the world. If I had to do it over again, rather than take the approach of finding a field that would be satisfying or in which I would be more likely to make important contributions, I would most likely take a vocational approach and try to find a path in which the least amount of stress and annoyance would result in the earliest possible retirement.

As an independent thinker I am immune to most of the mythologizing that accompanies those who have successful careers in any field. I know enough not to get carried away with hero-worship, and it is even difficult for me to identify people whom I might count as role models. Different people have different drives, over which they have little control, and admirers who seek to emulate the successful may not realize that success may require compromises that they would be unwilling or unable to make. Moreover, success often has unintended consequences for both individuals and society. I'll use Henry Ford as an example. Though he is revered as one of the greatest industrialists in history, his relationship with his only son, Edsel, was irreparably damaged by his drive for success, and he did not foresee the destructive effects that automobile manufacturing would have on the agrarian Michigan that he cherished; global warming is also in part his legacy. Regarding successful artists and writers, many have led uninteresting lives that wouldn't warrant a biography, and some have had psychiatric conditions with which I'd prefer not to be afflicted. In my experience, whenever I have looked closely at any highly successful person there is usually a prominent caveat that others seem to overlook. Finally, another aspect of work is its relationship to social status; in this society, one's job almost defines one's social standing. As I've said, social climbing is not in my blood.

Don't construe my views on work to be entirely negative. I think we all need to work at something, but whenever possible that work is best separated from the models imposed on us by the economic structure that we happen to inhabit and the pressures that we encounter daily from prevailing social norms. The psychological needs met by work can be satisfied by something as simple as painting a shed, installing a new mailbox or posting on your personal blog. Working without compensation has been a liberating experience for me.

Basic Income

On several posts I've made allusions to the likelihood that technology will eventually make earning a living extremely difficult, but I haven't said much about how this problem could be resolved. Fortunately, there have been people thinking about this for quite some time, and I suspect that some form of basic income may eventually come to be used in all developed countries, because there may be no better alternatives. At present, basic income is being discussed seriously in Europe, where Switzerland is holding a referendum on it this June. Worldwide, there is discussion of the topic, with supporters and opponents ranging from serious thinkers to cranks. In the U.S., basic income is occasionally presented as a potential replacement for the current welfare system. As you might expect, most American economists have a highly blinkered view of the subject and can scarcely think beyond traditional labor economics. I stopped paying attention to economists such as Paul Krugman several years ago, because like most mainstream economists he appears to be unable to envision a future in which capitalism implodes. In my view, capitalism will inevitably end simply because economic competition entails a powerful incentive to decrease labor costs, and that trend has been unmistakable over the last fifty years.

One of the main causes of the current insurgencies in both American political parties is the prolonged state of low income growth. Real incomes for the middle class have remained stagnant for decades, and there is nothing on the horizon indicating a change in that status. The topic is usually discussed in terms of income inequality, and economists such as Thomas Piketty advocate higher taxation on the wealthy in order to rebalance equality. As an economist, Piketty is far from radical, and, like Krugman, he doesn't seem to find economic competition inherently problematic. In my view there is in principle no reason for economic entities to discontinue the driving down of wages. If you are running a for-profit corporation, it is your fiduciary responsibility to move jobs overseas when labor costs are lower there and to install computers, software and robots whenever they reduce operating costs compared to hiring people. Although this inevitably leads to a scarcity of jobs and lower wages, this manner of operating a business is fundamental to the capitalist model, and it can't be changed without degrading the very idea of economic competition, which carries almost religious status in the U.S.

The principal irony I find in capitalist mythology is that here, precisely while we are witnessing the success of large corporations, these same corporations are toying with their future demise by creating a large underclass which one day may be unable to afford their products. That hasn't happened yet, but you can see signs of it in the falling quality of many consumer products. Because most consumer products are designed to be sold to the middle class, there is an upper limit on their price, and with falling incomes the middle class can only afford cheaper products. We already seem to be in a race to the bottom in product quality. What we now call food deserts in inner cities may expand to suburbs, and deprivation of other goods and services will increase when businesses have no economic incentives to locate in poor neighborhoods. I see no hope for places like Ferguson, Missouri.

The primary drawback to the concept of basic income is that its time may not have come. For now it could work well in a wealthy developed country with a large population of unemployable citizens. For me, its real interest lies further out, when technology has made it almost impossible to find a job, when an economy becomes so automated that there is no need for economic competition and little demand for human labor of any kind. Barring an unforeseen disaster between now and then, from that point onward capitalism may be viewed as a driver of technological change that outlived its usefulness.

Automated Art

A new economics book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by Robert Gordon, analyzes productivity growth in the U.S. Economists associate productivity growth closely with the long-term standard of living in a country, and Gordon finds that U.S. productivity growth peaked in the 1950's and is unlikely ever to reach that level again or even come close. Gordon believes that there will be almost no growth in household incomes through 2040. This flies in the face of rhetoric in the media and politics proclaiming that with the right political leaders and policies in place the U.S. could return to1950's-like conditions in which nearly everyone lives well. I don't think I'll read the book, because its thesis seems rather obvious to me, but I thought I'd mention it because it relates to my thoughts about technology's effects on how people earn their livings. There doesn't seem to be much research underway on what people are likely to be doing for work in fifty years, and it seems that the work environment, if it still exists then, will be radically different due to advances in technology.

The technology-related changes during my career in printing were enormous. As of the late 1970's, most print preparation involved pasting set type onto a board in the correct position and then photographing it. Black and white photographs were manually converted into halftones by placing a screen over the negative and photographing it again. Color photographs were once manually separated into four colors with filters on a large camera, and later a color transparency was electronically separated using a scanner, which was quite expensive in the 1980's. Once all of the image components were in negative form, a stripper would place them in the correct positions and manually align all four color negatives. These "flats" were then placed in step-and-repeat machines to make lithographic printing plates. Stripping and platemaking departments used to employ a relatively large number of people, but now, with the electronic processing of images, stripping is obsolete, and a sizeable plant can operate with just one platemaker per shift. Similarly, improved electronic controls on printing presses have made it possible to operate them with smaller crews, and newer presses run much faster than earlier presses, reducing the amount of labor per sheet. On top of this, Internet advertising has been cutting into print sales. The net result of new technology is the disappearance of thousands of jobs in a once thriving industry.

I bring this up because the same phenomenon has occurred in all manufacturing industries and has been spreading to white-collar jobs for some time. With advances in AI it is easy to imagine a state in which one doctor, lawyer or engineer will do the work that twenty once did. Some manual labor and customer service jobs may survive for a few more years, because low wages obviate the need for expensive technology, but if the cost of technology falls low enough, those jobs could go too. I like thought experiments and speculate that some of the last vocations to fall may be in the arts. This will come about because technology will be able to mimic human behavior and skills even if we never arrive at a singularity. Though I think something resembling a singularity will probably occur, that would not be necessary for reconfiguring art as we know it; it could happen before then if machines began to pass the Turing test with the art they produced. All this means is that people would be unable to distinguish a painting, sculpture, novel, poem, film, musical composition, etc., created by a machine from one created by a human.

You can see the early beginnings of this transition in the algorithms currently used to determine what films a Netflix subscriber would enjoy. Despite the fact that Netflix's recommendations for me are almost always wrong, they seem to have identified some of the characteristics that I like in a film. For instance, they know that I like suspenseful psychological movies, foreign movies, thrillers, understated movies and cerebral movies. That isn't much, but it's a start. Why couldn't a sophisticated computer analyze a large body of art, identify the characteristics that appeal to people and then formulate new works based on human preferences?  Several kinds of fiction-writing software already exist, and there is no reason to assume that a completely automated novel that satisfies most readers couldn't be produced in the future. With the right software, a computer could sift through a large database to identify themes and subplots that appeal to people and generate writing styles that would be agreeable to specific groups. The result would not necessarily be robotic, because the program could be calibrated to insert random events that simulate events in novels written by humans. As a matter of fact, it is soothing, repetitive qualities that draw many readers to fiction, and repetitive qualities are the ones that would be easiest to detect through analysis.

One art that would be particularly amenable to automated creation would be painting. Ever since Warhol, the critical standards for what constitutes a good painting have fallen frighteningly low. There is little reason to suppose that an extraordinary number of mediocre paintings couldn't be deemed brilliant and fetch large sums if promoted in the right way by the right people. Capitalism has infiltrated the art world to such a degree that aesthetic values are often predefined by the financial interests of members of the relevant art community and never subjected to the judgment of independent experts who have no conflicting interests. For example, it might be possible to create what looks like a Warhol painting and sell it for a million dollars if it were marketed properly by insiders of the art world. We usually think of artistic value as a private experience, often in terms of the beauty of an object, but art's commodification in recent decades seems to have redefined it so as to place an emphasis on market value as the dominant factor.

Perhaps the fundamental question here is whether creativity, vision and skill can be automated. Certainly skill can be, as machines are already capable of performing with greater physical precision than humans are capable in some areas. With the current state of technology, creativity and vision can be simulated, perhaps convincingly enough to fool some people as to their authenticity, but without escaping the notice of more sophisticated observers. However, if you believe, as I do, that humans are not the ne plus ultra of the universe, an allowance must be made for the possibility that our best art could one day be matched or surpassed by superintelligence.

Belonging

Among the people whom I know best, one of their greatest concerns is that they don't feel that they belong to any particular group. I think the need to belong is hard-wired into us and is a manifestation of our eusocial nature, as discussed earlier. We have evolved to live in cooperative groups, and if we're not integrated into one we are likely to feel uneasy, because it was once impossible to survive alone. A genetic predisposition for a solitary life is weak in our gene pool, because over hundreds of thousands of years it tended to result in early death.

Even though I am a relatively solitary person myself, I also have a need to belong, and it used to affect my decisions more than it does now. In my early years I thought that I might fit in well in a college environment, but I eventually determined that I am too independent and unscholarly for academia. I moved to Oregon in 1975 with the hope that the local culture would agree with me better than it had in the Midwest or the East Coast. It didn't. By the time I moved to Vermont in 2011, my view was that I was unlikely to fit in anywhere, and the decision to move here did not assume that I would find friends or like-minded people, and in fact I haven't and don't expect to.

You could also describe some aspects of my recent forays into the Internet as efforts to connect with specific groups of people. In that sense the efforts were of no avail. I eventually discovered that Internet communities are transient and often illusory. Besides that, they can be downright unpleasant, because it is a place where people can behave uncivilly with little or no consequence. As discussed, the New York Review of Books left me with the impression that it serves the needs of a small number of people who aren't necessarily cohesive themselves, and there is no evidence that they care about anything beyond their individual needs. Incongruously, the NYRB, which supposedly promotes ideas, has no apparent interest in the discussion of ideas or the public who wish to participate in it. From the standpoint of belonging, the Internet has been no different from my previous life experience. In effect, I have withdrawn to my own blog with no expectation of group participation, except perhaps on a minuscule level with a small number of readers. If the readership ever went up, the blog could easily be ruined.

Since we live in a capitalistic society, I should also mention that the widespread need to belong creates economic opportunities. A fairly large percentage of TV programming amounts to nothing more than a substitute for an actual social life. It took a while for TV executives to figure it out, but by the 1960's sitcoms and talk shows had become staples. Talk shows have changed little since then, but sitcoms have expanded broadly into the miniseries and reality TV formats. Network news is now far less devoted to actual news than to infotainment and feel-good moments. Most of this programming places an emphasis on providing an artificial sense of community. Its very existence can be attributed to profit motives that have nothing to do with artistic value, as I often complain. Because families and friends are often geographically separated and fragmented by contemporary living conditions, the media cater to them by providing substitute products to satisfy that basic human need.

The exploitation doesn't end there. Professional and amateur sports could never exist as dominantly in American society as they do without someone promoting their expansion. Team sports are quintessentially about group affiliation, and by association they become monopolies over large geographic areas. For example, I'm supposed to be a Boston Red Sox fan even though I live in a different state, about 200 miles away, and don't care about baseball. Likewise, colleges and universities have figured out how to use sports to generate funding directly through sporting events and indirectly through alumni giving stimulated by sports. They have also recently expanded their marketing to alumni by encouraging them to retire in or near their campuses, providing an even more concrete sense of community.

With advances in technology, it is beginning to become a little frightening to think about what might happen if current trends in the creation and marketing of artificial communities continue. It is easy to imagine younger people who have grown up in a digital environment inhabiting virtual communities tailored to fit their personalities and interests. Prima facie, given the plasticity of the human mind, I see no reason why people couldn't learn to live in the complete absence of actual human contact if suitable artificial substitutes were provided. As for myself, I am satisfied to inhabit the more traditional world in which I have created an imaginary relationship with the mostly invisible readers of this blog.

Kakutani on Houellebecq

Though I no longer make a habit of reading book reviews of popular fiction after years of finding them unsatisfactory, I looked at Michiko Kakutani's review of Submission out of curiosity to see what she thought. She has a reputation for being an honest, if quirky, reviewer who doesn't shy away from going into attack mode when she dislikes a well-received work of fiction. Unsurprisingly, she hates Michel Houellebecq and Submission, and I thought I would comment on the strengths and weaknesses of her review and on the whole reviewing system that readers have to put up with.

In the first paragraph of her review she links Houellebecq to "hate-mongering." In the second paragraph she refers to the novel as "ugly." In the third paragraph she says that for Houellebecq "controversy has proved to be a very rewarding career move," and remarks that one of his earlier novels is "filled with misogynistic put-downs, putrid sex scenes and nihilistic pronouncements on the depravity of the human species." In the fifth paragraph she says that "Mr. Houellebecq's writing tends to be highly derivative of earlier writers," and that "his protagonists are simply variations of one odious type–self-pitying, self-absorbed and misanthropic men who have a hard time feeling any emotion other than lust." Referring to the book in the eleventh paragraph, she says that Houellebecq's "mockery of French academics...and an arthritic political system" is "all done with an extremely heavy hand." In the twelfth and final paragraph she concludes that the protagonist, François, "gets a new start in life by remaining true to his egocentric, opportunistic self." While her summary of the plot and her description of some of Houellebecq's techniques are reasonably accurate, she seems to me to intensely dislike the book for reasons that cannot be considered objective.

Where I think Kakutani goes astray is in her understanding of what constitutes art. Certainly it is easy to see that Submission does not fit the model of conventional popular American fiction, but she makes no effort to identify how anyone who is not a deranged pervert or something of the sort might find it worthwhile. I agree with her that it is written in a specific French tradition, but think she is being lazy about examining how that tradition works and the ways in which Houellebecq falls short in that regard. She negatively compares him to Camus, whom I now think is rather overrated myself, but doesn't try to determine what Houellebecq might be trying to say or how he might have said it better.

My view is that Houellebecq is not first and foremost a good writer in the sense of producing beautiful writing or the clear exposition of ideas, but that those are not really the essence of the novel as a form of art. Kakutani's position is not unlike that of art critics in the late nineteenth century who might have said that van Gogh's crude brushstrokes are proof of an imbecilic lack of talent. It is a little difficult for me to evaluate just how badly Houellebecq reads in French, but it isn't hard to see that his sentences generally lack elegance. I also believe that the ideas underlying his novels could be expressed better even in novelistic form, but to a serious reader that is not a sufficient reason to dismiss an entire work. Houellebecq appeals to me in Submission and some of his other novels because I believe that there are aspects of his worldview that are legitimate and stand in contrast to conventional optimistic views of mankind, and he offers a needed corrective. Reviewers like Kakutani seem blind to the fact that a negative or pessimistic outlook on mankind may be just as plausible as their optimistic view, and that their critiques of Houellebecq are based more on dislike of a competing worldview than on substantive reasoning.

I concede that there is a somewhat cartoonish element to the way that Houellebecq writes, but must point out that even comic books are now accepted as a legitimate form of art. If you have read my previous posts you will have seen that I prefer to view the limitations of mankind more calmly, in a somewhat detached manner. I think Houellebecq is just a little more hysterical and uninformed than he might be. From my point of view it would be preferable to express Houellebecq's ideas in a clear and accurate essay, but the fact is that no one reads that kind of thing, and most people respond more to a Houellebecqian tirade. When you take objectivity seriously it becomes apparent that Americans are far more optimistic than they ought to be–delusionally so–and Houellebecq, though excessive in the opposite direction, is constantly drowned out by a majority that is optimistic to the point of obtuseness. Regarding the accusation that Houellebecq is a misanthrope, misogynist, nihilist, narcissist, bigot, etc., I think that these are primarily name-calling labels that people use without bothering to understand his work; he must take some blame for being less articulate than he might have been, but I think that being completely articulate is not necessarily the responsibility of an artist, because incomprehensible complexity is something that art, particularly the novel, seeks to address. For me it is more appropriate to see Houellebecq as an enfant terrible who presents a particular worldview in a forceful and expressive manner.

Kakutani's review looks like a barely civil hatchet job. Beneath the "Mr." this and so on of the stilted New York Times writing style that she employs, one gets the sense that there may lie a simmering rage against all things French. This could place her in same camp as Jeb Bush, who, during a recent Republican debate, said that Marco Rubio's poor attendance record in the U.S. Senate looked like "a French work week." Of course, that was a continuation of the long-running hate affair that the Republicans have held with France since they changed the name of french fries to "freedom fries" because France, showing great prescience, refused to support George W. Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. In this case I would only point out to Kakutani that French literary and intellectual history, whether one likes them or not, were once and perhaps still are the apex of Western civilization, and that beyond the fact that French writers and thinkers produced many of the ideas that made the very existence of the U.S. possible, throughout most of its history America has looked like a long-running episode of "The Beverly Hillbillies" compared to life in France. Whether you like Houellebecq or not, he descends from a literary tradition that dwarfs American literature.

For me, reviews like Kakutani's are but another symptom of the cultural oligarchy that is headquartered in New York City. To figure out what's going on here you need only know that New York City is a center for publishing, and that major newspapers hire columnists who, in the course of producing columns, inevitably become hacks, regardless of their level of talent. The New York Times is in the business of making money, and to do that they need a constant flow of new content. One proven method for generating it is maintaining a fixed group of columnists with whom their readers come to identify. A few years ago it dawned on me that even the best columnists fail eventually if you hold them up to any real standards. If you look at what Michiko Kakutani has to do, there is no mystery to this. She speed-reads fifty-plus books each year that have been identified as being of potential interest to her readers, and then she quickly writes a short essay on each one. If she happens to come across a complex, puzzling or highly specialized book, she may not have the time or knowledge to do it justice, and usually no one will know the difference, because her columns are not combed religiously by scholars from all fields. To use Submission as an example, whether or not it is as lofty a work as I may have made it seem, it may simply be a matter of expedience for her to trash it. Her readers won't be any the wiser, her reputation won't be affected, and her company doesn't care whether the novel sells well or not. My point here is that the constraints under which reviewers like Kakutani work place an upper limit on the quality of their reviews. Besides the fact that it would be nearly impossible for one reviewer to produce fifty high-quality reviews per year, she would have no incentive to do so, because that would entail writing over the heads of her readers, contradicting the purpose of her employment.

Equality

It occurred to me that the word "equality," which I occasionally use on this blog, is far more ambiguous than it may seem at first, so I thought that I'd take a brief look at what it means in the context in which I generally apply it. In common usage, when it refers to people, it carries the political connotation that, particularly in a democratic form of government, all citizens are to be treated the same with respect to the law. This means that if one type of adult is generally allowed to do something, every other type of adult should generally be allowed to do it too, and the same applies regarding various government protections and benefits. Since the concept has been phased in through steps in a legal context, the emphasis has shifted over many years from racial equality to women's rights to gay rights, in each instance legally guaranteeing certain rights to a specific group that had previously been treated unfairly. Under the Constitution, the general concept needs to be spelled out specifically for each group covered, which confuses the question by perpetuating the segmentation of society and never producing a blanket law that would, in one fell swoop, cover all citizens in all groups. In a way this legal process encourages people to continue thinking in the unacceptable terms that previously divided society, and it is certainly not the most efficient method for addressing the perceived ills. "Equality" is also used in the sense of economic equality, which focuses more on financial status than on legal status, and since that is more straightforward I won't specifically address it here. Economic inequality, for my purposes, is a special case of inequality that stems directly from capitalism and could theoretically cease to exist in an ideal post-capitalist society.

Perhaps the greatest confusion over "equality" has to do with its misinterpretation as "sameness." This may be because in ordinary usage "equality" means that people are entitled to the same treatment under law, but it does not mean that they are the same in any sense independent of this. Probably some of the thinking underlying the extreme political correctness that I find absurd is a result of this fallacy. I get the impression that on some college campuses, if a Maa-speaking Masai tribesman entered a room accompanied by a mute Inuit who communicated in Greenlandic Sign Language, the American students would make every effort to see them as identical and avoid all references to their obvious differences. The problem here may be the taking of the concept "person" and inappropriately applying it so rigidly and abstractly to all humans that any differences between people noted may be construed as a form of discrimination, since all people are the same according to their definition. Thus, if the Masai and the Inuit were asked "Do either of you speak English?'' there might be someone in the room who would interpret that as an unacceptable racial slur or as an insult to handicapped people, since the statement might give priority to spoken English over other languages and suggest that those who are unable to speak it are inferior, or that spoken language is superior to sign language. A pathological politically correct person such as this would be attempting to see people as equal in a sense that makes any public recognition of differences unacceptable.

When I write about equality, I am thinking of it mainly in a legal sense. I believe that all people should be treated equally under the law and base this not on legal theory or democratic principles, but on my acceptance of the idea that we are a eusocial species and, as such, we unconsciously tend to favor a legal framework that supports equality. It is a little tricky to pursue this argument from a biological standpoint, because biologically there is also evidence supporting the idea of the inevitability of war, genocide, murder, etc., but in this case I simply call upon science to adjudicate whether we as a species are essentially altruistic, cooperative and eusocial. I am willing to leave it at that, because in the long run I believe that humans do, by both reason and instinct, favor cooperation over conflict. Conflict has often been a last resort when cooperation hasn't worked, and there is no reason in principle why the rule of law could not one day eliminate any need for it. Thus, for me, equality is part of a legal superstructure that is necessary to impart order and cooperation on mankind by reducing the need for any subgroup or individual to do harm to or take advantage of others.

Where I depart from liberalism is in my skepticism about leaving the responsibility for reaching and maintaining a state of equality up to a democratic political system. In my view, the political system in the U.S. barely works and is still permissive regarding inequality. Here I think some history may be relevant. Democracies, rather than promoting the kind of universal equality that Western liberalism now seems to favor, have tended to promote equality only within elite groups. The authors of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution included slave owners, for example. An altered but similar system exists today which only disguises the actual control by what might be construed as a ruling class. Today the U.S. cannot honestly be called a democracy, in which each voter has equal say, because moneyed interests manipulate government policies by controlling who gets elected. There may be some elements of a true populist democracy in the mix, but it would be more accurate to describe the current U.S. government as a plutocracy, with little sign of an emerging increase in equality.

One of the central confusions of liberalism today is that is has adopted the market thinking, hence the capitalistic theology, of previous conservative governments. For example, the rhetoric that emanates from Barack Obama's mouth is a reworking of the rhetoric that emanated from Bill Clinton's mouth, which was a reworking of the rhetoric that emanated from Ronald Reagan's mouth. In all three instances, the gist is that free-market capitalism is a panacea; as Obama likes to say, if poor, unemployed people could just get better educations, everything would be fine. It won't be fine, because as, Thomas Piketty has shown, the current economic system promotes inequality. I oppose free-market capitalism because, among other reasons, it is unlikely to solve the problem of inequality on its own, and there is currently little to prevent its adherents from continuing to manipulate democratic governments in the pursuit of plutocratic interests.

Future Art

The archaeological record indicates that humans have always created what we now call art. From a qualitative standpoint, I don't think there has been any substantial improvement since the Chauvet cave paintings, the epic poems of Homer or the plays of Euripides. The aspects that change over time are the social function, the media, the style, the materials and the subject matter, but not the quality, though some periods do inevitably produce better art than others. As I wrote earlier, I don't think that the contemporary arts, or at least the ones that are widely known and with which I have some familiarity, are particularly good by historical standards, and I attribute this to commercialization, which is not to say that there isn't some better contemporary art that is presently inaccessible to the public for one reason or another.

Extrapolating into the future, if you assume that we won't become extinct and that we won't be replaced by an evolutionary successor to ourselves, I think art will become more important than ever as a pastime, because we simply may have nothing better to do. This scenario assumes that we will remain more or less the same as we are now, automation will obviate the need for most human labor, the political systems globally will maintain a higher level of equality than at present, and human conflict will fall to significantly lower levels. It is a rosy picture that may end up depending on dumb luck to materialize, but I think it is worth discussing if one takes an optimistic view on human destiny. The principal alternatives are gloomy if not unsettling.

Speculating this way, what is interesting to me is how good art would be if you took money out of the equation. In the current art world, the flow of money is a stand-in for quality measurement, with the art that draws the most money often becoming the de facto important art as far as the public is concerned. I don't think Damien Hirst, Stephen King, Steven Spielberg or Madonna are likely to make it into any future lists of great artists, and it would be an improvement for humanity if its members somehow managed to become more discerning. If money were removed from the calculation of quality, it seems plausible that a more meaningful form of measurement might replace it.

In a world in which people had no financial pressures and an abundance of free time, everyone could become an artist of one kind or another if they so chose, and this would change the rules of the game entirely. Idle people like me might, for example, write a blog as a form of art, take up painting or write poems. Systems might even be devised to provide recognition to those who felt that what they produced was important despite the absence of monetary ramifications. No doubt social status would somehow work its way into any reward scheme, but it most likely would be far less pernicious than what we experience under the current system of financial recompense.

Let this be a word of advice to those who produce art now under circumstances which they find unfavorable. Produce your art as you see fit, forget the present and think about a less philistine future, even if that means that you must earn a living doing something else.

Politics I

Politics is a topic that I'd rather not think about, but we're entering the in-your-face phase of the 2016 U.S. elections and I would like to summarize some of my ideas in order to help clear them from my brain. The way the media handles this is something like nonstop Super Bowl coverage, and I may soon have to refrain from following the news.

In my view, the American political system is a hopeless attempt to simulate democratic participation that could only work on a much smaller scale with culturally homogeneous people and no class distinctions, including wealth differentiation. Not only does the U.S. encompass a large, culturally varied population, but corporations have long played a role in elections and are now de facto people themselves, with significantly greater political influence than any individuals. During my life I've lived in a variety of states, and the influence of businesses on the state governments has been obvious. Wealthy, industrialized states such as New York and Illinois tend to have business-dominated legislatures and high levels of corruption, whereas smaller, non-industrialized states such as Vermont and Oregon have legislatures that more closely represent the population and are generally less corrupt. On the whole, I find the Vermont government satisfactory, and I attribute this to the state's unindustrialized status and its well-educated population. There is no basis for thinking that the political environment in Vermont could easily be replicated in most other states.

As it is, I find the American presidential elections embarrassingly stupid. No matter who wins, the next president will be indebted to corporate contributors and other special interests. Whatever ideas any candidate may have, all presidents are constricted by the explicit or implicit commitments that they made to contributors. This partially explains why Barack Obama has not been much different from George W. Bush and why even the likable Bill Clinton was pro-business and anti-populist. There is little reason to expect that Hillary Clinton would represent any change in thinking from what has been going on in politics here for the last fifty years.

Although I don't think this is a popular opinion among my readers, the goal ought to be to automate government as much as possible, and this would be much easier to do if the capitalist economy were either modified or eliminated. An example of my thesis that humans are ignorant animals is that it is currently difficult for Americans to imagine a life in which they are not chasing paychecks, even when humans throughout most of their existence were not chasing paychecks. There were no employers or currencies before the last ice age, and about ninety percent of our time as a species was spent during that period. If you took business interests out of the equation, I think it would be relatively simple to organize society according to rational rules that could be made into algorithms. We may not yet be at a technological level where capitalism could be drawn to a close, but that may be closer than you think.

What I find annoying about political debate is that technology as I am describing it never seems to be considered. In the U.S., you are supposed to be either a Democrat, implying acceptance of capitalism but with attention paid to the less fortunate, or a Republican, implying acceptance of capitalism with no attention paid to the less fortunate. The only other positions Americans seem to recognize are communism, which they think results in collapsed economies and autocratic leaders, or theocracies, in which the women have no rights and are, for example, required to wear burkas. When you leave technology out of the discussion, you neglect the important fact that human labor is gradually becoming obsolete, with inexpensive technology permanently replacing people at an accelerating pace. I certainly have no difficulty imagining machines doing a better job at governing than the elected officials I've observed throughout my life.

There are too many variables in play to predict exactly how humanity will evolve over the next fifty to one hundred years. Among those are political instability, war, global warming, economic shocks and unmanaged population growth. A fairly probable scenario is that, at least among the developed countries, the need for human labor will decline significantly, even without radical changes such as the development of super-intelligence. Super-intelligence is in a class by itself, because it could result in technological change far in excess of what we currently anticipate. But even short of that, it is clear that social changes will have to occur if people no longer work or corporations as we know them cease to exist. It is quite possible that, as paid human labor declines, taxation will have to be increased sufficiently to prevent social collapse. If people can't find a living wage and the government doesn't support them, how else will they survive? The main alternative is the two-class system that you see in dystopian futuristic films, with a cruel ruling elite and impoverished masses at their mercy. It is plausible that the governments of developed countries will be forced to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to such a high level that the incentive to work primarily for money will evaporate. If that occurs, all of the economic competition and exploitation that we currently see as normal could end.

From my point of view, the national politics that we witness in the U.S. is primarily about wealth redistribution, and the wealthy are winning. To be sure, many other issues are addressed in Washington, but that is barely audible chatter and is drowned out by the roaring torrents of money awash there.

The False Allure of Commercial Writing

Almost everything that you read was produced in a commercial environment. Even if the intentions of an author are purely personal, artistic or altruistic, chances are there is someone in the infrastructure between the author's keyboard and your eyes who is attempting to make money. This situation dates back to the earliest days of publishing, and now, with technological developments, extends more broadly to "content." At this moment, thousands of companies are scrambling to fill the pages not only of printed publications but of online websites. The demand for all kinds of media has grown dramatically in the last decade, and streaming videos, for example, can hardly be produced fast enough to keep up. This creates challenges for discerning consumers of print and other media.

If I were less self-confident, I might be inclined to confess that many of the complaints that I have about writing amount to excessive pickiness. However, I am not making it up when I say that something that I just read seems like regurgitated filler that some editor squeezed out of a hack writer for a price. As I said in an earlier post, over a period of years I gradually became disgusted with The New Yorker, then The New York Times and then The New York Review of Books. Occasionally one might find something in one of these publications that strikes an intellectual or aesthetic chord, but increasingly that became a rarity for me. On the contrary, clickbait is used everywhere on the Internet and is simply a technological update of former sensational headlines in newspapers. What has been disappointing to me is that even the so-called reputable organizations engage in the same tactics, if only with greater subtlety.

The pattern toward disillusionment that I experience with printed or online publications usually goes something like this: initially the title of an article looks promising; the first paragraph or so looks good; as I delve further into it, a lot of extraneous information begins to emerge, often in the form superfluous name-dropping; and finally there is a vague conclusion that seems to leave you back where you started. The New York Times is ostensibly just a news source, but basic news actually takes up only a small fraction of its space. The rest is really filler designed to bring in additional advertising revenue. I don't think I've ever found any of their long articles satisfactory. The New Yorker attempts more thoughtful, in-depth articles and occasionally succeeds, but I find there such a strong emphasis on fashion, whether in ideas, clothes or writing, that it is difficult to take the magazine seriously on any level.

It took me the longest time to figure out The New York Review of Books, probably because it is less mainstream and its editorial policies are opaque. The NYRB is managed so privately that I have had to make guesses and seek outside sources to get a rough idea of what is going on there, and even then it is still hard to know with much certainty. My current theory is that most of the problems there reside in its editor, Robert Silvers. Although Silvers is highly intelligent, extremely well-read and quite discerning, he has specific expectations of what the publication should be and wields dictatorial control over everything that it encompasses. He is said to be the quintessential micro-manager. The impression I have is that his true vocation is editing the articles of writers and thinkers so as to improve upon them in a manner that suits his aesthetic tastes, even when they are better writers or thinkers than he is. What you end up with is a hodgepodge of academics, literary writers and journalists who are willing to put their writing through the Silvers sieve. The result, I find, is that their articles tend to be blander than they might otherwise be. The long essay format of the NYRB is impressive when you first see it, but it rarely produces ruffled feathers or changed minds. The articles leave one feeling that one has encountered a reasonably wide-ranging account of whatever the topic may be, that it is written competently, but that it serves little purpose beyond providing an overview of what the so-called cognoscenti happen to think about a topic at that given moment. Possibly the problem is that Silvers is too entwined with the status quo to rebel much. Thus, at a time when American literary culture is promoting one mediocre writer after another and holding them to the low standards of academia and the publishing industry, Silvers has advanced the careers of Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Marilynne Robinson, and Francine Prose. To be sure, there may be some entertainment value to be found in the works of these authors and others featured by Silvers, but I have never found any of their articles in the NYRB useful, insightful, provocative or thoughtful. In the end, Silvers is an accomplice to literary mediocrity. Part of Silvers' limitation as an editor must reside in his style, but perhaps a part also resides in his age: he's eighty-five.

The NYRB is not the best example of the point I'm making here, because most of its production seems to follow old-fashioned methods. They produce very few articles per month, and the only change in recent years has been their addition of the NYRblog. That is now looking like an afterthought: they wanted to go trendy to avoid looking like the fuddy-duddies that they are, and then decided that it was too much of a hassle to have a real, interactive blog and accordingly stopped accepting comments. So the NYRB is not as commercial as it might be and its true limitations may relate more to the fact that it is saddled to the preferences of one editor who has vested interests in a network of people and a bygone era that I just don't care about. My guess is that the typical NYRB subscriber is an eighty-year-old retired academic in the humanities.

An alternative to commercial writing is the writing in diaries and blogs. At least there you don't have to worry about the corrosive effects of money even when it remains hard to fathom the motives of the writer. Diaries can't usually be read in real-time, so they are comparatively inaccessible. In theory there could be lots of good blogs, but it might be difficult to find them, given their number. The Internet is already full of dead blogs that people gave up on. The advantage of a blog, like this one, is that the writer has no pressure to fit a specific format or please a wide audience. In my case I am writing about things that interest me and I can tell the truth without worrying about any financial ramifications. No one can fire me. If I get my facts all wrong, I would be delighted to have someone straighten me out, but that hasn't happened so far.

No doubt there are plenty of good books to read that are available, but they are increasingly difficult to find because of all the background noise. The commercial connections of the publications mentioned above make the books reviewed in them somewhat suspect. My conclusion is that nearly everything they have to say about American fiction is an obfuscation, a lie or a manifestation of poor literary judgment. In any case, the bright spot for me is nonfiction. I am less likely to become disgruntled about biographies or science books, because in their case it is easier to determine in advance whether a book is good or not, inasmuch as that depends less on subjective opinion than is the case with fiction. To me it is more than a little ironic that some of today's best science writers are better writers than those who are supposedly the best fiction writers. I actually enjoy reading E.O. Wilson, Freeman Dyson, Steven Weinberg and even Richard Dawkins, because they write well. It is an unsupported myth that fiction writers have a monopoly on good writing. For this reason, the next book on my reading list is To Explain the World, by Steven Weinberg. Science writers and biographers may still have commercial motives - their publishers certainly do - but more often their love for their subject takes precedence over the venality one finds in commercial fiction.

News as Entertainment

One of the most noticeable cultural changes during my lifetime has been in the area of news consumption. When I was growing up people tended to read The Daily News, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal when commuting to or from work. Some subscribed to the local newspaper, The Standard-Star, for which I had a paper route, and most people watched the evening news on weekdays. Today some people still read physical newspapers and watch the evening news, but in reduced numbers. I haven't seen any recent statistics, but I suspect that most people now get their news somewhat haphazardly in various digital formats.

I was never a big newspaper reader and got into the habit of watching the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite until he retired in 1981. When Eric Sevareid appeared on the program, he added incisive commentary of a kind that has completely vanished today. Occasionally I would read the Sunday New York Times. Journalists like Cronkite and Sevareid got their start during World War II and gave serious presentations in which they attempted to bring up all the hard news. The contrast between Cronkite and, say, Diane Sawyer, who recently retired from ABC World News, is astounding. Network news now consists of a series of feel-good moments designed to hold the attention of a geriatric audience just long enough to brainwash them with pharmaceutical ads. I doubt that many people under the age of sixty regularly watch the evening news anymore.

The purveyors of news and the media in general are now obsessed with content, and the role of news in the important sense of keeping the public informed enough to make sound voting choices within the democratic system is largely nonexistent. Part of the decline in interest in real news can be ascribed to commercial competition from businessmen like Rupert Murdoch who have long catered to the lowest common denominator in order to attract more readers and viewers. However, there are other reasons for the public to be less interested in the news now than they were in the 1960's. First there was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, then there was the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Racial unrest hasn't gone away, but there is currently nothing like the Watts riots of 1965 or those following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The protests against the Vietnam War, which claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans, were far more significant than any in recent years. In those days large numbers of people watched the news, and the CBS Evening News had a correspondingly enormous budget. Without any immediate excitement, competition for viewers and readers has devolved to providing light entertainment for the largest audience possible.

In recent years I have stepped up my reading and have become aghast even about the quality in higher levels of journalism in the U.S. After following editorials at The New York Times for several years, I finally decided that they rarely are insightful or thoughtful, and it is difficult not to see them as page filler for an uncritical and gullible readership. The same goes for The New Yorker, which isn't really of much interest beyond fashion, whether it's fashionable plays, movies, fiction or ideas: this is the last place to look for interesting perspectives. Most recently I had a complete falling out with The New York Review of Books, which markets itself to quasi-intellectuals and bon vivants. The editor, Robert Silvers, seems to have developed his own formula: recruit writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Charles Simic, Martin Filler, Pico Ayer and Lorrie Moore after they have already made names for themselves, milk them for a few years to perpetuate the myth of high quality at the publication, and then, as they sail off into obscurity, replace them with people from the ranks of the latest falling stars. Editorially, the NYRB is a niche player that concentrates on pabulum for intellectual poseurs.

As bleak as this may sound, there are bright spots now because of Internet publishing. On any given day there are bound to be several new and interesting articles to be found there, and the problem is mainly in finding them. In this frontier, I think 3 Quarks Daily is doing a reasonably good job, and it seems likely that there will eventually be competitors in the field of gathering interesting articles from across the web.

My news and journalism consumption habits have changed a lot over the past few years. For the most part I don't pay much attention to the news anymore. In the morning I look at the headlines on The Wall Street Journal and check up on the investing scene. I then scan 3 Quarks Daily to see if there is anything that I would want to read. In the evening we usually watch PBS NewsHour, which is mainly a ritual associated with our cocktail hour. The reporting is better than what you find on the networks, but the reporters rarely ask hard questions, and, like most journalists, aren't that bright. We like Mark Shields as a foil to David Brooks, but I'm sick of both of them and wish they'd retire. David Brooks is the kind of professional journalist who knows exactly how to enhance his career but whose opinions are essentially worthless. In any case, I don't care about domestic politics, and that is usually their main topic. Often it is too painful to watch the entire program, and we prefer the shorter version on the weekends with Hari Sreenivasan. Lately I have become interested in local news and very much enjoy reading the Addison County Independent, which I think is an amazing publication for a county with a population of only 36,000.

Despite my general indifference to the news, technically its low quality and limited influence on public life are problematic for a country whose existence is predicated on the presence of an informed public. However, in keeping with my views on capitalism and democracy, I do not expect this situation to improve. Rather, as I have said, the capitalism plus democracy formula is unsustainable and will end one way or another at some point in the future. Capitalism, democracy or both will sooner or later change from their current forms.

Economic Development in Vermont

One of the very few people who have responded to my poll requested that I write about a topic that often comes up in local discussion: the shortage of well-paying jobs in Vermont. It is difficult to find them here because the state has relatively little industry compared to the surrounding states. There is a large IBM plant in Essex Junction, but the primary state industry is tourism. Some counties are agricultural; Addison County, where I live, has significant dairy and beef farming, and apples and maple syrup are produced in several counties. Wood and mining industries still flourish, and in recent years craft breweries and whiskey distilleries have been growing, but none of these employ many workers. Most of the jobs are tourism-related and don't pay well.

There are historical reasons for the current state of economic affairs in Vermont. Few came early on compared to other states, as the remote, landlocked location was not optimal for industrialization. Many of the early settlers were farmers from nearby states; they soon found out that the soil and climate are not optimal for most crops and joined the migration to the Midwest. Not many industries thrived here, and the rate of population growth significantly lagged behind that of the surrounding states. The population here has multiplied 4.1 times since 1800, compared to 33.1 times for New York, 15.5 times for Massachusetts and 7.2 times for New Hampshire.  As the economy boomed along the coast, Vermont became a vacation retreat. In the 1960's, Vermont gained a counterculture image, and wealthy people from other states began to move here, shifting state politics from conservative to liberal. As in other parts of the country, liberals emphasize protection of the environment and quality-of-life issues, while conservatives emphasize economic growth and wealth creation. To be sure, few Vermont political conservatives resemble Tea Partiers, and they don't correspond closely to the contemporary Republicans in Washington, D.C. A liberal political environment makes it harder to attract new businesses here than to pro-business states.

As a retiree transplant, I oppose wholesale economic development in Vermont. First, speaking as an individual, I came here for the low population density, the pleasant physical environment and the like-mindedness of the people. Having seen firsthand what happened when economic development hit areas such as Indianapolis, Indiana and Schaumburg, Illinois, I would definitely move somewhere else if that were to happen here. I would vote against strong economic growth purely out of self-interest. As far as the status of the unemployed or underemployed is concerned, it has been a fact of life for centuries that people go to where there are jobs, not vice versa. The breadwinners in my family, including me, have done that for generations, so I don't think of it as a punishment to impose it on others. Those who insist on living in a place without jobs are behaving like narcissists if they think they have a right to both a good job and the living situation of their choice. That privilege has been a rarity for most of recorded history.

Second, on a more fundamental level, this topic touches on what I perceive to be serious flaws in our economic and political systems. Neither democracy nor capitalism deals with the consequences of economic development on a long-term basis. Because of economic growth and population increases, the U.S. is not the same country that it was in 1776. Economic growth has historically damaged the environment and contributed to overpopulation across the globe, and the warnings of Thomas Malthus have generally been ignored only because the human race has thus far managed to survive in spite of them. Few seem willing to admit that the country and the world might be better places if they more closely resembled Vermont than New Jersey. It is certainly no coincidence that many of the retirees here moved from that state.

Most of my childhood was spent in a suburb of New York City, and though I didn't understand it at the time, I felt that I was not getting enough exposure to the outdoors. After leaving for college, I developed a sense of relief at being able to live in uncongested places with woods and fields, which, it now seems to me, more closely approximate the kind of environment to which we are adapted. I think the same is true for most people, whether they realize it or not. This takes on significance when you consider that it is a fact that has been almost ignored since the country's inception. Most of the population now lives in or near cities.

Policymakers and economists chuckle to themselves whenever someone suggests that less economic growth would be beneficial. However, economic growth is usually accompanied by population growth. Currently, the world population is projected to reach about 9 billion by 2050, almost ten times the estimated world population of 1800. Ten thousand years ago, a blink of an eye in geological terms, it is estimated that our ancestors inhabited a world with a population of only 4 million. The fact that we have survived this growth does not imply that it is desirable. Rather it has contributed to an illusion of normalcy where none should exist.

I view the world as our deteriorating habitat, with diminishing pockets of habitability. Though I feel fortunate to be able to live in a desirable state within a major economic and military power, I see no reason to support American ideology, which I have never believed. Directly or indirectly, many of the world's woes are connected to conflicting groups that have been forced into contact with each other by overcrowding. Small groups can't wage wars with people whom they don't know exist, neither can they seriously deplete world resources or create global warming. When people aren't forced to live and work in cramped quarters, they can have environments in which they feel comfortable and never encounter conflicting ideologies.

Finally, I am not opposed to all economic development. Here in Middlebury a process is in place to create a small number of jobs that do not impinge upon the existing nature of the town, which still operates much as it did in 1800.

Entrepreneurs

My Missouri friend, Greg, and his wife, Frances, just visited us for three days. They arrived in a gigantic pickup truck pulling an Airstream trailer that is as large as some people's houses. We showed them around the area, and one of the activities was a tour of the Maple Landmark plant, which makes wooden toys and is a leader in the U.S. wooden toy market. It is a small family-owned business, and Frances saw parallels with the spa business that she and Greg own in Missouri. Entrepreneurs occupy an important role in American society, and I thought I'd take this opportunity to say something about them.

Frances began her spa business in Jefferson City, Missouri several years ago, and when Greg retired from his job managing the Missouri Medicaid program he joined in. The business grew gradually, and they opened a second spa in Columbia, Missouri. The company has been successful and now employs about 50 people, including Frances's daughter from a previous marriage, Kim, and Greg and Frances's daughter, Ariel, who is now a Vice President. They have been engrossed in running the business since its inception, and are now trying to wind down somewhat and prepare for a generational transition. This is proving to be problematic, partly because Kim is dysfunctional and married to an irresponsible, unreliable, unemployed husband while incompetently raising three children, ensuring the continuation of the white trash tradition in the next generation of the family. Frances and Kim have ongoing feuds and confrontations, with Frances usually on the losing end. She would like to help her grandchildren and see them often, and provides Kim with a job, but Kim routinely threatens to deny her access to the grandchildren. As I said to Greg, if it were me, Kim would be history, but this isn't my family. Ariel seems competent enough as an employee, but does not seem particularly interested in taking full responsibility at the company. Her husband has a well-paying job, so they don't need the money. During their visit, Greg and Frances were frequently interrupted by issues that were arising at the spa in their absence.

Despite some of the negatives associated with the spa, Greg and Frances seem to derive a great deal of satisfaction from it. Although they were well off without it, they are now becoming quite wealthy and are spending their money according to predictable nouveau riche patterns. In their case, that has involved extensive home renovations and the purchase of the Airstream, the truck, a tractor with attachments and two BMW's. Most of their drive to conspicuous consumption seems to have originated in Frances, who grew up poor, while Greg did not.

Frances enjoyed seeing the toy factory partly because it operated like one big family. It was started in the late 1970's by a local Vermont man who had taken up woodworking when he was a boy. The business continued to grow, and his mother and his grandmother, who is 95, still work there. We met them on our tour, since they have only 40 employees. Some of the jobs looked boring and highly repetitive, but many of the employees multitasked, which would reduce the tedium. Overall, they seemed happy. Their products are far more specialized than you might expect, and they are beating the competition, including China. From the outside, it looked like a pleasant place to work. Part of the appeal to Frances was the communal feeling and having three generations working together. She took a picture of the grandmother and sent it to Ariel to show her how fulfilling working in a family business can be.

My take on entrepreneurship isn't as sanguine. Americans tend to look at it at the individual level, in which it is possible to develop products and services in order to better the economic circumstances of themselves and their families. That in itself isn't necessarily bad, but when an entire economy is operated on that basis, many of the long-term consequences are, in my opinion, undesirable. Unnecessary goods and services come into existence, and successful small businesses tend to grow and merge, ending up as large, impersonal corporations. Most small businesses fail, and in the process become a waste of labor and materials. To use the examples here, I don't think it would make much difference to the country or the world if there were two less spas in Missouri and one less toy maker in Vermont. At the macro level, it seems risky and arbitrary to allow individuals to "grow their businesses" in order to meet their personal economic goals when the benefits to society are so marginal. Admittedly, an entrepreneur-friendly economy does lead to a certain amount of innovation which might not occur otherwise, but most of that innovation is of questionable value, and the end result seems to be large corporations which, unlike the cheerful family operations mentioned, take little or no responsibility toward people and systematically fire employees in order to reduce costs. The logical outcome of this kind of arrangement is the wealth inequality documented by Thomas Piketty in Capital. The fact is that the cumulative effects of the American Dream fantasy have been global pollution, national overpopulation, corporate manipulation of governance, high unemployment, and an emerging society of rich and poor. Furthermore, the capitalist model followed by the Western powers is associated with ideological conflicts and wars throughout the world.

On a personal level, I have always found entrepreneurial people somewhat offensive, if only because they tend to be aesthetically retarded. Although I like and appreciate Greg and Frances in certain respects, it is impossible for me to relate to many of their interests. Greg barely made it through college and reads low-grade science fiction for entertainment. He is still interested in UFO's, which is something I outgrew in high school. On vacation, Frances seems to have no interests beyond sightseeing and tourist trinkets. She is indifferent to the arts, which have strengths here, and local history. Neither of them ever does serious reading, and they show little interest in anyone outside their immediate families. To me, the scope of their thinking would feel like imprisonment.