Monday, July 21, 2025
Gerontocracy is Everywhere
You’ve probably heard it said of American politics: we're stuck in a gerontocracy.
And it’s true. Our political system, especially at the federal level, is largely run by the elderly. The current president is 78. His predecessor, famously, left office at 82. Congress is older than ever, with a quarter of its members over 70. The age of the federal judiciary is a record 69 years old. Senior moments from Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and the late Dianne Feinstein have lodged in the public consciousness and rattled civic trust.
The median age in America is rising, but the percentage of older workers has grown at a faster rate. This is most apparent when you look at positions within elite society, such as tenured academics and corporate executives.
In other words, step outside Washington and you’ll find that gerontocracy is everywhere. (...)
Several years ago, Derek Thompson wrote a piece exploring why our elite workforce is aging. The simplest explanation, applicable across many professions, is that wealthy Americans are living longer, healthier lives. For example, the richest quartile of men has gained 0.2 years of life expectancy annually throughout the 21st century. But Thompson emphasizes that “many positions and institutions are getting older much faster than that.”
One simple explanation that fits across all these fields is that white-collar work just isn’t that physically demanding, which makes it easier for older workers to stick around. But there are also some more specific dynamics at play. For high-status professionals like CEOs, it might be less about physical ability and more about identity. As Derek Thompson puts it, we’re living in an era of “workism,” where the most affluent people have actually cut back on leisure and now report the longest workweeks in the country.
This theory could apply to our aging scientific researchers and academics too, but there’s another compelling explanation worth considering. According to the landmark paper, The Burden of Knowledge, it now takes researchers a much longer time to master the foundational knowledge in their field. For example, Einstein was only 26 when he published the Theory of Relativity, and it’s hard to imagine someone that young making such a seismic contribution to physics today.
There is also a growing body of research that finds a direct link between aging researchers and a slowdown in scientific innovation. Thompson theorizes in his piece that “as academia and funding institutions get older, they develop an implicit ageism against younger researchers, who they assume are too naive to do paradigm-shifting work in established domains.”
And that brings us to the most important question.
How bad is the gerontocracy?
I spoke to labor economists and experts in business management to get some perspective on this question. First, there is strong evidence that older leaders are likely to be less effective decision-makers. Extensive research shows a decline in executive function that begins at age 60. Economists Rosemond Desire and Scott Seavey conducted a survey that looked at CEOs of 17,000 firms between 1992 and 2018. Overall, they found “a strong and consistently negative relationship between CEO age and managerial ability.” Another study by researchers Brandon Cline and Adam Yore found that even after adjusting for the fact that younger CEOs are attracted to faster-growing companies, every additional year in CEO age was associated with a 0.3% decrease in the value of the firm.
This problem isn’t restricted to CEOs. Another study by researchers at Ohio State University analyzed 5.6 million biomedical research publications and concluded that the work of biomedical scientists makes less of an impact in the field as the scientists get older. This is consistent with the finding that we generally become less creatively productive after we leave middle age.
To be clear, this sweeping generalization obviously doesn’t apply to every individual. Warren Buffett is crushing the stock market well into his 90s. Dr. Richard Bond was just awarded the prestigious Shaw Prize at the age of 75 for his research estimating the age and mass of the universe. I’m not asking anyone to quit their job because of their age, nor am I ignoring the fact that ageism is still very real. Gerontocracy might rule at the top, but less senior workers are still regularly pushed out of jobs due to their age. I do think, though, that we need to be cognizant of how an aging elite might handicap our economic and intellectual growth. And how in certain cases, older workers occupying senior positions might deny younger workers the opportunity of career advancement.
Joseph Fuller, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, told me he could see this leading to “a lack of upward mobility for younger academics in certain disciplines.” But also cautioned about making any sweeping statements, because, “It's very occupationally specific and industry specific.”
The U.S. economy is enormous, with millions of workers hired and fired each month, so of course it’s important to avoid over generalizing. But the economist Nicola Bianchi looked at 35 years of income survey data from the US and found that the pay gap between workers over 55 and those under 35 increased by 61 percent between 1979 and 2018. His explanation is intuitive: “Older workers have accrued more promotions and have been occupying those slots for longer, which means younger workers cannot reach those levels anymore.”
Sixty-one percent is a striking number. But even if it’s only directionally correct, it suggests a serious shift in how opportunity is distributed, with younger workers increasingly locked out of the best-paying roles.
The future of the gerontocracy
In each of my conversations about the gerontocracy and the labor market, the topic of generative intelligence came up repeatedly. Whether you’re an AI evangelist or a doubter, it’s impossible to deny that AI will have some impact on the workplace. And I think there’s a strong case to be made that it could either entrench or reduce the power of older workers.
Let’s start with the worst-case scenario.
If AI is at least, as Benedict Evans put it, a collection of infinite interns, then it’s coming for the positions typically held by people one to three years out of college first. But the function of a new associate position at Accenture or a computer programmer at Amazon isn’t just to handle entry-level tasks; it’s also to prepare employees to move towards the middle, and eventually to higher management level positions at the company. Take those away, and you’re not just automating grunt work, you’re cutting off the ability for younger workers to gain a foothold in the workforce.
Guy Berger, a labor market economist and senior advisor at the Burning Glass Institute, doesn’t see this future as inevitable, but he did offer a fairly pessimistic theory: “Organizations find themselves saying this is really good at cutting out young people. We can save resources. And have AI agents run by a bunch of people in their late 30s and early 40s. Then, 20 years later, 70-year-olds are still running things, with no new crop coming in behind them.”
To be clear, there is no evidence that the incorporation of generative AI in the workplace is driving this trend. But there’s been some indication that this future could be around the corner. The accounting firm PwC cut 1,500 jobs and reduced on-campus recruiting after making a billion-dollar investment with OpenAI. Kevin Roose reported that one tech company is no longer hiring for positions below midlevel engineer. The labor market research firm Oxford Economics recently released a report stating, “There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates.” (...)
The comparative adoption rates of AI in the 2020s versus personal computers in the 1980s underscore Fuller’s point. AI is entering the workplace much faster than computers once did. And while this acceleration is driven primarily by younger, more educated workers, a Federal Reserve survey finds adoption is “widespread across gender, age, education, industries, and occupations.” If senior level white-collar workers become quickly fluent in using AI to enhance their productivity, it’s possible to imagine them using it to extend their careers even longer. As a result, the upper-echelon of the labor market becomes increasingly calcified.
And it’s true. Our political system, especially at the federal level, is largely run by the elderly. The current president is 78. His predecessor, famously, left office at 82. Congress is older than ever, with a quarter of its members over 70. The age of the federal judiciary is a record 69 years old. Senior moments from Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and the late Dianne Feinstein have lodged in the public consciousness and rattled civic trust.
The discourse here is well-worn, but it frequently misses a crucial point: Some of the same forces that have created our political gerontocracy — medical advances enabling graceful aging, combined with a generation unwilling to relinquish power — have also allowed the old to tighten their grip on other areas of American life.
In other words, step outside Washington and you’ll find that gerontocracy is everywhere. (...)
Several years ago, Derek Thompson wrote a piece exploring why our elite workforce is aging. The simplest explanation, applicable across many professions, is that wealthy Americans are living longer, healthier lives. For example, the richest quartile of men has gained 0.2 years of life expectancy annually throughout the 21st century. But Thompson emphasizes that “many positions and institutions are getting older much faster than that.”
One simple explanation that fits across all these fields is that white-collar work just isn’t that physically demanding, which makes it easier for older workers to stick around. But there are also some more specific dynamics at play. For high-status professionals like CEOs, it might be less about physical ability and more about identity. As Derek Thompson puts it, we’re living in an era of “workism,” where the most affluent people have actually cut back on leisure and now report the longest workweeks in the country.
This theory could apply to our aging scientific researchers and academics too, but there’s another compelling explanation worth considering. According to the landmark paper, The Burden of Knowledge, it now takes researchers a much longer time to master the foundational knowledge in their field. For example, Einstein was only 26 when he published the Theory of Relativity, and it’s hard to imagine someone that young making such a seismic contribution to physics today.
There is also a growing body of research that finds a direct link between aging researchers and a slowdown in scientific innovation. Thompson theorizes in his piece that “as academia and funding institutions get older, they develop an implicit ageism against younger researchers, who they assume are too naive to do paradigm-shifting work in established domains.”
And that brings us to the most important question.
How bad is the gerontocracy?
I spoke to labor economists and experts in business management to get some perspective on this question. First, there is strong evidence that older leaders are likely to be less effective decision-makers. Extensive research shows a decline in executive function that begins at age 60. Economists Rosemond Desire and Scott Seavey conducted a survey that looked at CEOs of 17,000 firms between 1992 and 2018. Overall, they found “a strong and consistently negative relationship between CEO age and managerial ability.” Another study by researchers Brandon Cline and Adam Yore found that even after adjusting for the fact that younger CEOs are attracted to faster-growing companies, every additional year in CEO age was associated with a 0.3% decrease in the value of the firm.
This problem isn’t restricted to CEOs. Another study by researchers at Ohio State University analyzed 5.6 million biomedical research publications and concluded that the work of biomedical scientists makes less of an impact in the field as the scientists get older. This is consistent with the finding that we generally become less creatively productive after we leave middle age.
To be clear, this sweeping generalization obviously doesn’t apply to every individual. Warren Buffett is crushing the stock market well into his 90s. Dr. Richard Bond was just awarded the prestigious Shaw Prize at the age of 75 for his research estimating the age and mass of the universe. I’m not asking anyone to quit their job because of their age, nor am I ignoring the fact that ageism is still very real. Gerontocracy might rule at the top, but less senior workers are still regularly pushed out of jobs due to their age. I do think, though, that we need to be cognizant of how an aging elite might handicap our economic and intellectual growth. And how in certain cases, older workers occupying senior positions might deny younger workers the opportunity of career advancement.
Joseph Fuller, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, told me he could see this leading to “a lack of upward mobility for younger academics in certain disciplines.” But also cautioned about making any sweeping statements, because, “It's very occupationally specific and industry specific.”
The U.S. economy is enormous, with millions of workers hired and fired each month, so of course it’s important to avoid over generalizing. But the economist Nicola Bianchi looked at 35 years of income survey data from the US and found that the pay gap between workers over 55 and those under 35 increased by 61 percent between 1979 and 2018. His explanation is intuitive: “Older workers have accrued more promotions and have been occupying those slots for longer, which means younger workers cannot reach those levels anymore.”
Sixty-one percent is a striking number. But even if it’s only directionally correct, it suggests a serious shift in how opportunity is distributed, with younger workers increasingly locked out of the best-paying roles.
The future of the gerontocracy
In each of my conversations about the gerontocracy and the labor market, the topic of generative intelligence came up repeatedly. Whether you’re an AI evangelist or a doubter, it’s impossible to deny that AI will have some impact on the workplace. And I think there’s a strong case to be made that it could either entrench or reduce the power of older workers.
Let’s start with the worst-case scenario.
If AI is at least, as Benedict Evans put it, a collection of infinite interns, then it’s coming for the positions typically held by people one to three years out of college first. But the function of a new associate position at Accenture or a computer programmer at Amazon isn’t just to handle entry-level tasks; it’s also to prepare employees to move towards the middle, and eventually to higher management level positions at the company. Take those away, and you’re not just automating grunt work, you’re cutting off the ability for younger workers to gain a foothold in the workforce.
Guy Berger, a labor market economist and senior advisor at the Burning Glass Institute, doesn’t see this future as inevitable, but he did offer a fairly pessimistic theory: “Organizations find themselves saying this is really good at cutting out young people. We can save resources. And have AI agents run by a bunch of people in their late 30s and early 40s. Then, 20 years later, 70-year-olds are still running things, with no new crop coming in behind them.”
To be clear, there is no evidence that the incorporation of generative AI in the workplace is driving this trend. But there’s been some indication that this future could be around the corner. The accounting firm PwC cut 1,500 jobs and reduced on-campus recruiting after making a billion-dollar investment with OpenAI. Kevin Roose reported that one tech company is no longer hiring for positions below midlevel engineer. The labor market research firm Oxford Economics recently released a report stating, “There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates.” (...)
The comparative adoption rates of AI in the 2020s versus personal computers in the 1980s underscore Fuller’s point. AI is entering the workplace much faster than computers once did. And while this acceleration is driven primarily by younger, more educated workers, a Federal Reserve survey finds adoption is “widespread across gender, age, education, industries, and occupations.” If senior level white-collar workers become quickly fluent in using AI to enhance their productivity, it’s possible to imagine them using it to extend their careers even longer. As a result, the upper-echelon of the labor market becomes increasingly calcified.
Addressing the gerontocracy
There is no single fix for gerontocracy, largely because, as Fuller emphasized, aging labor is a sector-specific problem that will require sector-specific solutions.
For example, the gerontocracy narrative doesn't accurately fit the make-up of the employees or executives who steer our world-beating tech companies. Nevertheless, certain sectors remain dominated by older workers, who cling to power because of status, a hefty paycheck, or some combination of the two. This is having a measurable impact on the wages of younger workers and is likely, to an extent, suppressing dynamism in the American economy. (...)
So are there any fixes?
There is no single fix for gerontocracy, largely because, as Fuller emphasized, aging labor is a sector-specific problem that will require sector-specific solutions.
For example, the gerontocracy narrative doesn't accurately fit the make-up of the employees or executives who steer our world-beating tech companies. Nevertheless, certain sectors remain dominated by older workers, who cling to power because of status, a hefty paycheck, or some combination of the two. This is having a measurable impact on the wages of younger workers and is likely, to an extent, suppressing dynamism in the American economy. (...)
So are there any fixes?
by Ben Krauss, Slow Boring | Read more:
Image: New Yorker
sombr
[ed. Given the commercial success of Goyte's Somebody That I Used to Know, you'd think there'd have been more imitators of the formula. Fun facts:]
When Bruce Springsteen was signed to a Columbia Records in the early 1970s, he was among a small group of artists dubbed the “new Dylan.” Decades later, he joked about this nickname while giving the keynote address at South by Southwest:
When Bruce Springsteen was signed to a Columbia Records in the early 1970s, he was among a small group of artists dubbed the “new Dylan.” Decades later, he joked about this nickname while giving the keynote address at South by Southwest:
I was signed as an acoustic singer/songwriter … by John Hammond at Columbia Records, along with Elliott Murphy, John Prine, [and] Loudin Wainwright III. We were all new Dylans. And the old Dylan was only 30. So, I don’t even know why they needed a fucking new Dylan, all right? But those were the times.Dubbing all of these artists the “new Dylan” is especially funny when you realize at this point the real Dylan hadn’t even released Blood on the Tracks, what many people argue is his greatest record. Still, part of me understands why people were in search of a new Dylan. And it’s not because some people criticize his early 1970s work as inferior. It’s because most people make it on the pop music scene when they are quite young.
- Before Paul McCartney turned 28, The Beatles had already broken up.
- Before Stevie Wonder turned 27, he had released 18 albums, including the flawless foursome, Talking Book (1972), Innervisions (1973), Fulfillingness' First Finale (1974), and Songs in the Key of Life (1976).
- Before Billie Eilish could legally drink alcohol, she had sold millions of records, topped the Billboard Hot 100, and won both an Oscar and a Grammy.
Sunday, July 20, 2025
British Open 2025: Inside the Giant Scoreboard on the 18th Hole. Operated by ... Teenagers
PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — A head girl named Gracie wears a headset—over here, "head girl" means something like "class president"—and the information travels the airwaves from Score Control, a hub near the media center. Not long after the new scores crackle in her ear, Gracie and her fellow students from Coleraine Grammar School and Dominican College spring into action, picking up plastic tiles with letters and numbers and sometimes full names from nearby shelves, and placing them backwards—to their eyes—in the giant structure in front of them. Diffuse light comes through that giant yellow wall, but aside from a few cracks, they can't see much on the other side.
But everyone can see them … or last the result of their work. They're the nerve center of a 50-year-old tradition here at the Open Championship that continued this week for the 153rd edition of golf’s oldest major. These are the iconic yellow scoreboards perched above the grandstands on the 18th green, and Gracie's teen-aged gang are inside them, surrounded by wooden planks and scaffolding and a stairway spanning the three floors of the board. (One thing here—you better learn to duck if you don't want a bump or three on the top of your skull.) It's their job to make sure the fans outside, and the TV cameras, and everyone walking the course in the nearby vicinity, are up to date on the drama of the championship.
The twin yellow giants have become a charming icon of this tournament since they were first implemented in the early '70s, and because they're so instantly recognizable they transport you to a specific place, not unlike the white-and-green manual boards used at Augusta National for the Masters. It's true that the boards themselves, and all the students and advisors within them, could be replaced by something digital, and apparently there was recent discussion along those lines, but the R&A fortunately recognized that there's something irreplaceable and delightful about the analog structures on the final hole.
Remarkably, the students only receive a few hours of training. That happens on Tuesday, when teachers from the Cranleigh School in England, who have been doing this for 30 years, give hands-on instruction to the students, schooling them in the finer points of quick, accurate reporting.
It's one of those jobs that's easy to screw up—put a letter in backward and you risk becoming a meme. There's a friendly rivalry between the two scoreboards to see who can operate with greater speed, but they also look out for each other, peering across with binoculars to make sure there are no errors. Along with the direct headset line to Score Control, handheld radios provide another avenue of communication, and despite the quick onboarding process, it had the feel on Friday of a well-oiled machine.
[ed. Looks like Scheffler running away with another win this year. Snore. Update: yep.]
Immigration Comes to Yamhill
A Pro-Trump Community Reckons With Losing a Beloved Immigrant Neighbor
Voters here in Oregon’s rural Yamhill County have backed Donald Trump for three presidential elections in a row, most recently by a six-point margin. His promises to crack down on immigration resonated in these working-class communities.
Then last month ICE detained Moises Sotelo, a beloved but undocumented Mexican immigrant who has lived in the county for 31 years and owns a vineyard management company employing 10 people. Two of his children were born here and are American citizens, and Sotelo was a pillar of his church and won a wine industry award — yet he was detained for five weeks and on Friday was deported to Mexico, his family said.
“Moises’s story just really shook our community,” Elise Yarnell Hollamon, the City Council president in Newberg, Sotelo’s hometown, told me. “Everyone knows him, and he has built a reputation within our community over the last few decades.”
The result has been an outpouring of support for Sotelo, even in this conservative county (which is also my home). More than 2,200 people have donated to a GoFundMe for the family, raising more than $150,000 for legal and other expenses, and neighbors have been dropping off meals and offering vehicles and groceries.
“Oh, my God, it’s been insane,” said Alondra Sotelo Garcia, his adult daughter, who was born in America. “I knew he was well known, but I didn’t know how big it would blow up to be.”
“You see the outpouring of love of people just trying to help,” she added. “Now they’re giving back to him what he gave to the community.”
Bubba King, a county commissioner, put it this way: “We want tighter border security” but also humane treatment of families, he said. (...)
Alondra says her dad wept when she was first able to visit him in detention and told him that community members had contributed $25,000 to his GoFundMe — and on a later visit, she told him, “If you were crying at 25K, you’re really going to be crying now, Dad.”
Sure enough, he cried again.
Judging from what unfolded here in Yamhill County, voters may have wanted a tightening of the border and the deportation of criminals — but not the arrest of a longtime neighbor. They wanted Trump to pursue gangsters, not destroy small businesses. Many people here sought some middle ground on immigration and felt they didn’t get it from Biden, but now they find they’re not getting it from Trump, either.
It’s also worth acknowledging that Trump is in office in part because Democrats lost credibility on immigration issues. American voters last year said immigration was one of the issues they cared about most, and in one poll they said by a 13-point margin that they believed Trump would do better than Harris at managing immigration. (...)
Let’s be pragmatic. We can’t admit all 900 million people around the world who, according to Gallup, would like to move permanently to another country. That includes 37 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa and 28 percent of people in Latin America and the Caribbean. Thank God the United States was hospitable in 1952, when my dad arrived as a refugee from Eastern Europe. Of course we need a secure border. And in the United States and Europe alike, voters repeatedly said they wanted a slowdown in immigration. A rule of thumb is that whenever the foreign-born share of a population surges to somewhere around 15 percent, there is discontent. In the United States, the foreign-born share has tripled since 1970 and is now around 15 percent. The top estimate, 15.8 percent, would constitute the highest level of immigrants in America since at least 1850.
We liberals refused to listen to concerns. Sometimes we even sneered at critics, accusing them of bigotry. So fed-up voters, including immigrants and people of color, turned to nationalists and charlatans who are now trying to engineer a mass deportation that would upend society and the economy.
I reached out to ICE, and a spokesman noted that Sotelo had a conviction for driving under the influence and had already been deported once. That appears to be true: Alondra said her father had been arrested around 1994 for drinking and driving. She also said that he had been deported in 2006 and soon returned to the United States.
No one makes excuses for Sotelo driving drunk. But one offense decades ago should not define his life. “Donald Trump has convictions himself, and my dad has practically a clean slate,” Alondra said. “I’m like, ‘How is my dad in there? And how is this man our leader?’”
Victoria Reader, whom Sotelo mentored as a vineyard manager, said that she would welcome the deportation of actual criminals. “But this guy who is doing amazing things and started a business, he’s the one who has been arrested,” she said, adding, “or, as I say, kidnapped.”
Even for Americans who welcomed more deportations, there’s something chilling about the militarization of the crackdown and the echoes of police state practices: plainclothes officers wearing masks, refusing to give their names, grabbing people off the streets and hustling them into unmarked vehicles. Something like that happened to me once in China — but State Security there treated me far better than ICE treats immigrants here.
Consider also the financial cost of all this. ICE says that “the average cost to arrest, detain and remove an illegal alien is $17,121.” Thus the administration’s goal of one million deportations would cost $17 billion — and presumably be repeated annually. For comparison, that’s more than all 50 states spend together on pre-K.
Trump has more than tripled the annual ICE budget to $28 billion, making it the most expensive law enforcement agency in the federal government. Indeed, that’s more than the current annual budgets for the F.B.I., the Bureau of Prisons, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives put together. Trump is also using officials from other law enforcement agencies to build a deportation army, meaning that fewer law enforcement officers are left to deal with homegrown criminals. (...)
The Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated last year that mass deportation could cause G.D.P. in 2028 to be 7.4 percent lower than it would be otherwise.
A Gallup poll released this month suggests that while many Americans thought that liberals overreached on immigration under Biden, they now think it’s Republicans who are going too far.
Only 35 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, Gallup says, while 62 percent disapprove. Indeed, Trump policies may be making people more pro-immigrant: A record 79 percent of Americans say that immigration is good for the United States, and only 30 percent want immigration decreased (down from 55 percent last year).
It has long been clear what a sensible immigration deal looks like: strict border enforcement, deportations focused on criminals, a rethink of asylum and a path to citizenship.
Yet now it’s Republicans who are deaf to public opinion. Instead of targeting the worst of the worst with deportations and making us safer, Trump is damaging America’s economy, shattering families and destroying small businesses.
[ed.. See also: Race to the Bottom. When a country no longer believes in itself (NYT).]
“Moises’s story just really shook our community,” Elise Yarnell Hollamon, the City Council president in Newberg, Sotelo’s hometown, told me. “Everyone knows him, and he has built a reputation within our community over the last few decades.”
The result has been an outpouring of support for Sotelo, even in this conservative county (which is also my home). More than 2,200 people have donated to a GoFundMe for the family, raising more than $150,000 for legal and other expenses, and neighbors have been dropping off meals and offering vehicles and groceries.
“Oh, my God, it’s been insane,” said Alondra Sotelo Garcia, his adult daughter, who was born in America. “I knew he was well known, but I didn’t know how big it would blow up to be.”
“You see the outpouring of love of people just trying to help,” she added. “Now they’re giving back to him what he gave to the community.”
Bubba King, a county commissioner, put it this way: “We want tighter border security” but also humane treatment of families, he said. (...)
Alondra says her dad wept when she was first able to visit him in detention and told him that community members had contributed $25,000 to his GoFundMe — and on a later visit, she told him, “If you were crying at 25K, you’re really going to be crying now, Dad.”
Sure enough, he cried again.
Judging from what unfolded here in Yamhill County, voters may have wanted a tightening of the border and the deportation of criminals — but not the arrest of a longtime neighbor. They wanted Trump to pursue gangsters, not destroy small businesses. Many people here sought some middle ground on immigration and felt they didn’t get it from Biden, but now they find they’re not getting it from Trump, either.
It’s also worth acknowledging that Trump is in office in part because Democrats lost credibility on immigration issues. American voters last year said immigration was one of the issues they cared about most, and in one poll they said by a 13-point margin that they believed Trump would do better than Harris at managing immigration. (...)
Let’s be pragmatic. We can’t admit all 900 million people around the world who, according to Gallup, would like to move permanently to another country. That includes 37 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa and 28 percent of people in Latin America and the Caribbean. Thank God the United States was hospitable in 1952, when my dad arrived as a refugee from Eastern Europe. Of course we need a secure border. And in the United States and Europe alike, voters repeatedly said they wanted a slowdown in immigration. A rule of thumb is that whenever the foreign-born share of a population surges to somewhere around 15 percent, there is discontent. In the United States, the foreign-born share has tripled since 1970 and is now around 15 percent. The top estimate, 15.8 percent, would constitute the highest level of immigrants in America since at least 1850.
We liberals refused to listen to concerns. Sometimes we even sneered at critics, accusing them of bigotry. So fed-up voters, including immigrants and people of color, turned to nationalists and charlatans who are now trying to engineer a mass deportation that would upend society and the economy.
I reached out to ICE, and a spokesman noted that Sotelo had a conviction for driving under the influence and had already been deported once. That appears to be true: Alondra said her father had been arrested around 1994 for drinking and driving. She also said that he had been deported in 2006 and soon returned to the United States.
No one makes excuses for Sotelo driving drunk. But one offense decades ago should not define his life. “Donald Trump has convictions himself, and my dad has practically a clean slate,” Alondra said. “I’m like, ‘How is my dad in there? And how is this man our leader?’”
Victoria Reader, whom Sotelo mentored as a vineyard manager, said that she would welcome the deportation of actual criminals. “But this guy who is doing amazing things and started a business, he’s the one who has been arrested,” she said, adding, “or, as I say, kidnapped.”
Even for Americans who welcomed more deportations, there’s something chilling about the militarization of the crackdown and the echoes of police state practices: plainclothes officers wearing masks, refusing to give their names, grabbing people off the streets and hustling them into unmarked vehicles. Something like that happened to me once in China — but State Security there treated me far better than ICE treats immigrants here.
Consider also the financial cost of all this. ICE says that “the average cost to arrest, detain and remove an illegal alien is $17,121.” Thus the administration’s goal of one million deportations would cost $17 billion — and presumably be repeated annually. For comparison, that’s more than all 50 states spend together on pre-K.
Trump has more than tripled the annual ICE budget to $28 billion, making it the most expensive law enforcement agency in the federal government. Indeed, that’s more than the current annual budgets for the F.B.I., the Bureau of Prisons, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives put together. Trump is also using officials from other law enforcement agencies to build a deportation army, meaning that fewer law enforcement officers are left to deal with homegrown criminals. (...)
The Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated last year that mass deportation could cause G.D.P. in 2028 to be 7.4 percent lower than it would be otherwise.
A Gallup poll released this month suggests that while many Americans thought that liberals overreached on immigration under Biden, they now think it’s Republicans who are going too far.
Only 35 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, Gallup says, while 62 percent disapprove. Indeed, Trump policies may be making people more pro-immigrant: A record 79 percent of Americans say that immigration is good for the United States, and only 30 percent want immigration decreased (down from 55 percent last year).
It has long been clear what a sensible immigration deal looks like: strict border enforcement, deportations focused on criminals, a rethink of asylum and a path to citizenship.
Yet now it’s Republicans who are deaf to public opinion. Instead of targeting the worst of the worst with deportations and making us safer, Trump is damaging America’s economy, shattering families and destroying small businesses.
by Nicholas Kristof, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Christopher Valentine
She Exposed Epstein, and Shares MAGA’s Anger
The reporter who took down Jeffrey Epstein on what’s still hidden.
Julie K. Brown thinks Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone. On this episode of “Interesting Times,” Ross talks to Brown, the investigative reporter whose work ultimately led to Epstein’s re-arrest, about what the government could release that it hasn’t and how the story is bigger than Epstein.(...)
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Julie K. Brown, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Julie K. Brown: Thank you.
Douthat: So for the last couple of weeks, ever since the Trump administration decided it was a good idea to tell the world that there was nothing more to say about the Jeffrey Epstein story, which has not been true, I feel like we’ve had a lot of these metaconversations about the case, conversations about Trump administration politics, MAGA infighting, theories about conspiracy theories.
I just keep coming back to the man himself and all of the weird questions that, to me as a journalist and news consumer, still hang over this whole story. So I’m really hoping that together we can walk through the story — the actual story of how Jeffrey Epstein the man became Jeffrey Epstein the mythic villain of the early 21st century. I want to start in the middle for him or maybe near the end for him but at the beginning for you. How did you first get drawn into this story? What prompted you as a journalist to start looking into Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes?
Brown: Well, my background was mostly crime reporting. I was on The Miami Herald’s investigative team, and I was covering prisons. I needed a change of pace, so I thought I would try to find a mystery to write about. And the Jeffrey Epstein case had been written about before, mostly focused on the celebrity aspect of his life, who he knew, his plane, his private island.
But whenever I ran across a story about him, it never really explained fully to me why he was able to get away with the crimes that he did. And as I was looking for something to do around that time, Donald Trump, who was our newly elected president, nominated a guy by the name of Alex Acosta as his labor secretary. I knew that Acosta was the prosecutor who signed off on this sweetheart deal, so to speak, that Epstein had gotten way back in 2008.
So I thought at the time that at Acosta’s Senate confirmation hearing, they were going to ask him a lot of questions about this case. And to my surprise, it seemed like everybody had almost forgotten about it. They asked him maybe one or two questions, and I don’t really think he gave very good answers, but they satisfied the senators because he was ultimately confirmed. (...)
So at that point, I thought: I wonder what these victims, who we knew were there — at least a dozen or so — they were children when this happened. But now, with the passage of time, they were in their late 20s, early 30s. And I wondered what they thought about this man who had given their predator really such a lenient deal, and he was now in charge of one of the largest agencies in the country, with oversight of human trafficking. So the story really began as: I thought I would do a reaction of the victims to Acosta being appointed labor secretary. But once I started digging into the story, it was like an onion. I found out more and more and more. (...)
Douthat: And so at that point, the official narrative of Epstein was he had taken a plea deal related to early-teenage girls. What was the actual nature of that deal?
Brown: Well actually, one of the many things I came to find out — which hadn’t been reported before — was that they manipulated and downplayed the scope of his crimes. He only pleaded guilty to a charge of soliciting one underage girl. And they purposely picked a girl who was a little older so that the crime that was on the books, so to speak, was downplayed.
It was only one girl, even though it was clear that he had done this to many, many girls. They also hid what they were doing from not only the public but from the victims. They went out of their way to keep this whole deal secret. He sort of slid into a courtroom, pleaded guilty. Nobody knew what he was pleading guilty to because all the records were sealed. (...)
Douthat: And to clarify, he ends up pleading guilty to two counts of solicitation of prostitution, one of which was with a minor.
Brown: That’s correct.
Douthat: And how long was his sentence?
Brown: Eighteen months.
Douthat: But he only served about 13 months. And so, now you start reporting on the story. You’re talking to the victims that were sort of part of the initial prosecution, and then it becomes clear that there were many more victims. (...)
Douthat: By the late 1990s, he is building out a playboy intellectual lifestyle. Can you describe the lifestyle that Epstein has?
Brown: Well, he had a lot of salons, so to speak, at his Manhattan home and also at his other homes.
He owned the island off the coast of St. Thomas. He would fly Nobel Prize winners in, for example, to talk about science. He started a couple of foundations and started giving a lot of money away through these foundations.
He really cultivated a number of high-profile scientists. He fancied himself as a little bit more of a scientist and mathematician than I think he really was. But he had so much money, and he dangled a lot of that money. Remember all these scientists and academics — M.I.T., Harvard — they usually need money for some of their projects. So he had money, lots of money. So they kind of entertained him or ——
Douthat: Humored him.
Brown: Yes, in some cases. Some of them felt like he was really just full of it, but they were willing to take his money. (...)
Douthat: I mean, as you said already, it’s pretty straightforward why scientists and intellectuals were interested in hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein. Initially, it’s because he was rich and was willing to fund and donate to universities and donate to research and so on. So that itself is not a special mystery.
What about the general cast of celebrity politicians, figures that rode on his plane or supposedly rode on his plane and ended up on his island? People at the level of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton — we’ll get to the Donald Trump connection in a little while. But these people are also just pulled in by the normal reality that rich people like to hang out with famous people and vice versa. What’s your sense of how that worked?
Brown: Well, Epstein was donating political money to a lot of campaigns. So of course he would attract the kind of people that need political donations, and Clinton was certainly one of them. Even after Clinton left the presidency, there was the Clinton Foundation, and so he was seeking donations for the Clinton Foundation as well.
So they went on a long trip overseas on Epstein’s plane to travel to various areas to understand the AIDS epidemic and what could be done. And Epstein envisioned himself as this person that could maybe find things that would help cure cancer or AIDS. So, he felt like he could be a part of that in some way.
Douthat: So let’s make these timelines overlap. At what point does he become connected with Ghislaine Maxwell, whom you’ve already mentioned was his paramour for a while and then ultimately his accomplice in predation? When, when did they first start hanging out?
Brown: After her father died, Robert Maxwell, who was a British publisher. He died under suspicious circumstances himself.
Douthat: Very suspicious circumstances on a boat.
Brown: They think he just fell off. They found him floating in the water. He had a yacht — he was off the Canary Islands — and they couldn’t find him. And then eventually, someone saw him floating in the ocean. So there are a lot of questions, because after they found him dead, investigators realized that he had essentially raided his whole company — including the employees’ pension fund. Ultimately his sons had to stand trial for this.
Her father had passed away, and Epstein was at an event honoring her father after his death. At the time, Maxwell’s family was in ruin. They had no money, and her mother really was in danger of losing everything. Her mother later wrote a book and explained that there was this New York financier who helped the family. She doesn’t name who that is, but there’s enough of an indicator there that it sounds like it could have been Epstein that came in to rescue the family and helped provide a house for her mother to live in. It is thought that it was probably Epstein that helped the family, and that’s how they met.
Douthat: So Robert Maxwell passes away in 1991 in suspicious circumstances. Epstein is there to help his family. It’s worth noting that Maxwell himself had ties to the Israeli government and to Israeli intelligence operations, I believe. And that’s a thread that then also connects to the conspiracy theories.
You said that Epstein and Maxwell date and then at some point she transitions into this role as procurer for him. At what point does Epstein actually become a serial sexual predator?
Brown: We know that some of his first victims were from like 1996, 1998. There were people that came forward that told me and others that Maxwell realized that she was never going to be able to marry him. There were a lot of rumors at the time that maybe they would get married, but she realized that as she got older that this was not going to satisfy him because he wanted younger and younger girls.
So she was dependent on him somewhat for finances at that point. So she began this quest to find him girls, essentially. That’s how it all started.
Douthat: So Epstein is the playboy financier hanging out with intellectuals and politicians in Florida on private jets, on his private island. And he’s bringing all of these girls through his house, through his life, and taking advantage of them.
Presumably, these things are happening at the same time — up until the point we already talked about, when he’s actually charged and, in a very limited way, convicted in 2008. What happens to his social world — all his high-flying connections — after he gets out of that Club Med-style stint in prison?
Brown: Well, once he gets out of jail, he hired all these P.R. people to remake his image, and there are press releases in archives. The Jeffrey Epstein Foundation put out press release after press release after press release. First it started with, he was giving money here. He was giving money there. So as time went on, he started being able to once again resume the life that he had built before this happened, and he was able to do this in part because of the plea deal.
Because the plea deal was only the solicitation of one underage girl. He was able to say to people: Yeah, I did this. It was bad, but it was only that. And to them that was sort of OK, he served his time. They accepted that explanation that it was just one girl and he made a mistake. Of course, he said he didn’t know she was underage. So it was plausible to a lot of people that he was not this monster that we later know he was.
Douthat: Right. But it was also plausible to people because they knew that he liked to hang out with teenage girls. There’s this now famous line that Donald Trump himself has said that appeared, I believe, in a piece in New York magazine, long before Epstein’s first conviction. He’s talking about Epstein’s social life, and he says something like: He likes women as much as I do, but he likes them on the younger side. So it seems like that was always part of his reputation.
Brown: Right. I had some of the victims tell me that they would be invited to parties with a lot of wealthy people and well-known people, and they would just be told to stand there like statues and to just look pretty and say as little as possible and just kind of fawn over him. He would put some of them on his lap. So yes, people could see. (...)
Douthat: Just Epstein’s behavior alone looks like a version of the Harvey Weinstein story, where you have this rich and powerful man who has all this misbehavior that people tolerated over a long period of time. He gets away with some stuff legally because he has all these connections, and then finally, because of your reporting, because of a change in climate, it come crashing down. (...)
So from your perspective, then, it is likely that there are some set of men in the world who move through Epstein’s mansion — Epstein’s island and so on — who are guilty, who are guilty of essentially having girls trafficked to them and, in part, having sex with minors whose names have not been successfully accused in a court of law.
Brown: That’s correct.
Douthat: OK. So the next question, what do you think about the evidence and speculation that Epstein intended to blackmail people? Because that is the next phase of the theorizing, that Epstein wasn’t just trying to woo and befriend these men, but he also liked the idea of having dirt on the people who had done bad things around him.
Brown: I think he did, but I don’t think he blackmailed people directly like that. I mean, if you just really think about it, if you send a girl over to have sex with one of these men, it’s not like you write it down or that you — I don’t believe he had a list. I just think that he used these women, girls, as pawns in order to ingratiate himself with people that he wanted to do business with.
It was a business transaction to him. That’s what this was. I don’t think that he had this operation where he was essentially saying: If you don’t do this for me, I’m going to reveal that you had sex with so-and-so. I don’t think it was like that in the traditional sense. But if you’re a man and you know that you’ve been doing this ——
Douthat: You know and he knows that you know.
Brown: Exactly, and I think it was more like that. I don’t think it was an official or an outright blackmail scheme like that. I think it was more like: He knows this about me, maybe I better do this.
Douthat: So that leads into the next open question, which is Epstein’s alleged ties to intelligence agencies — either American intelligence agencies or the Mossad in Israel. Earlier, we were talking about Epstein’s lenient plea deal and why Alex Acosta ended up giving it to him. There’s now a famous secondhand quote from Acosta, where he was reportedly told — by someone else in the first Trump administration — to back off Epstein because Epstein belonged to intelligence.
Acosta has never publicly corroborated that quote. And in other settings, he said he didn’t know anything about Epstein’s possible intelligence connections. But first: Do you think that some form of the intelligence world — and Epstein’s connections to it — played any role in why he got off so lightly the first time?
Brown: I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody really knows except the people in the government that have these files. And I think that’s, in part, one of the unanswered questions about Epstein, because I just don’t know. I know there’s a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, I try to stick to the facts, and so it’s just something we don’t know for sure.
Douthat: Yeah. I’m drawing on your view about your skepticism around the blackmail narrative. There’s two intelligent stories you could tell: One, Epstein is literally an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the U.S. government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That’s the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence.
So this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as a conduit of information. But it’s not that he’s being run as a kind of entrapment ring. If we don’t think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.
Brown: Well, let me put it to you this way: You’re talking about what’s plausible, what’s not plausible. It’s the job of our government to find out what’s plausible or what’s real and what’s not real. And the question here, if we’re talking about things that we don’t know and things that maybe we should look into, the question is — there certainly was enough there that the federal government, the D.O.J., at some point should have launched a counterintelligence investigation into what was true, and on that end, are not true.
We’ve known long enough about this Acosta statement that he made. They’ve heard everything that we’ve heard that we’ve just talked about. So we don’t know the answer to those questions, but it’s the job of our federal government to look into those kinds of things. And at some point, one would hope that they did look into some of that. We just don’t know whether they did or not.
Douthat: Good. So that brings me to either my last or next-to-last unanswered question, which is: What do you think, if anything, the government has in its possession, the Department of Justice or anyone else that could shed further light on this case?
Brown: Well, they absolutely have files that they can release. They could release his autopsy report, for example. They could release his plane records, for example — the F.A.A. records of where he flew. They could redact the names of victims, but they could release information gathered by the U.S. Marshals Service, which was supposed to monitor him.
He was a convicted sex offender, but yet he was allowed to fly his plane all over the world, come back into the United States with girls or young women aboard his plane on a regular basis. So this is, to me, more of a story not necessarily about Epstein but about our government and what our government did or didn’t do.
This was a man that was allowed to abuse girls and women for two decades. How did that happen and why did it happen, to me, is the question. Epstein is the character in this, but really these questions, I think, the public and especially the victims deserve to know whether our government did the job that they were supposed to do. (...)
Douthat: If there were a group of powerful men who abused women together with Epstein, who have gotten away with it, why wouldn’t Maxwell have given up some of those men for the sake of some kind of plea bargain?
Brown: I think for the same reason that probably Trump doesn’t want to release the files; I think that it’s just a place where nobody wants to go. These are very powerful men, important men and possibly even, quite frankly, G.O.P. or Democratic donors.
Douthat: But why does Maxwell — we’re going to end with Trump — but why would Maxwell care about giving up a powerful Democratic or Republican donor if it would buy her time off prison?
Brown: You’ll have to ask her. (...)
Douthat: Now Trump himself. We’re going to enter the realm of speculation, but it’s not just that the Trump administration has sort of shut down the investigation or said: Well, we’ve disclosed everything we can disclose. It’s that Trump has come out swinging and saying that this is a hoax. He’s essentially treating a story that had been taken up by a big part of his own base as a story that he wants to not just ignore but publicly discredit.
First, what is your understanding of Trump’s connections to Epstein? (...)
Brown: He was friends with Epstein in the 1990s, and they were in the same social circles together. We see the video of him at a party at Mar-a-Lago. My understanding is there were two things that led to their falling out. One was that Epstein hit on a member’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago and Epstein was banned from Mar-a-Lago.
Douthat: Once again, Donald Trump is standing up for sexual ethics in America.
Brown: Right. And the other involved a real estate transaction, of course, money where they were bidding on the same property — a very big property. And Epstein lost, and Trump won the deal, and so they had a falling out over that property. So those were the two things. But up until then, Trump had been flying on Epstein’s plane. He entertained some of Epstein’s family at one of his casinos. So they were somewhat friendly. (...)
Douthat: He gave an interview during the campaign — I think during the campaign. He was asked about the files, and in part of the answer he said something like: Well, we should release something. But then he said: You don’t want to release things that aren’t true.
My perception was always that other people in his coalition were much more enthusiastic about this story. That this was never one of Trump’s obsessions. This was something his supporters were obsessed with. So it didn’t surprise me that in the end, they didn’t want to do some version of what you’re describing and say: We’re going to go back and find a bunch of other records to release. That doesn’t surprise me. I am surprised, though, by the vehemence of Trump’s reaction to the negative reaction — that is something of a mystery.
Okay. I’ve been trying to cover the unanswered questions. Do you have any other specific questions that you would like answered?
Brown: I wish I understood why our government isn’t treating this like the crime that it is. It’s a serious crime that happened here. I don’t think there’s any dispute. I mean, this is something that actually happened. This isn’t a hoax. This happened to these women when they were very young.
It is surprising to some degree that they’re treating this as such a political issue and not treating it like it should be treated, which is a crime. And if the files are unsatisfactory or don’t contain credible evidence, then maybe they need to look a little deeper.
Maybe the answer is that we still have questions and we’re going to look into this more. But that’s not the answer the government gave. The answer they gave was: There’s nothing here. There’s nothing more to investigate. We’re done with this story. And I think the answer should be that obviously the public has a lot of questions and the victims still want justice, so we’re going to look at this a little further.
Douthat: But in the end, for that to be worth doing, Epstein himself is dead, so your assumption in making this argument — and I think it’s a very compelling argument — but the core of the argument is there are other people out there who are guilty ——
Brown: That’s correct.
[ed. After all the gaslighting and lying Trump has done throughout his life and as president, MAGA finally gets indignant about this? Guess it just goes to show how much conspiracy theories fuel their engines.]
Julie K. Brown thinks Jeffrey Epstein didn’t act alone. On this episode of “Interesting Times,” Ross talks to Brown, the investigative reporter whose work ultimately led to Epstein’s re-arrest, about what the government could release that it hasn’t and how the story is bigger than Epstein.(...)
Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “Interesting Times.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ross Douthat: Julie K. Brown, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Julie K. Brown: Thank you.
Douthat: So for the last couple of weeks, ever since the Trump administration decided it was a good idea to tell the world that there was nothing more to say about the Jeffrey Epstein story, which has not been true, I feel like we’ve had a lot of these metaconversations about the case, conversations about Trump administration politics, MAGA infighting, theories about conspiracy theories.
Brown: Well, my background was mostly crime reporting. I was on The Miami Herald’s investigative team, and I was covering prisons. I needed a change of pace, so I thought I would try to find a mystery to write about. And the Jeffrey Epstein case had been written about before, mostly focused on the celebrity aspect of his life, who he knew, his plane, his private island.
But whenever I ran across a story about him, it never really explained fully to me why he was able to get away with the crimes that he did. And as I was looking for something to do around that time, Donald Trump, who was our newly elected president, nominated a guy by the name of Alex Acosta as his labor secretary. I knew that Acosta was the prosecutor who signed off on this sweetheart deal, so to speak, that Epstein had gotten way back in 2008.
So I thought at the time that at Acosta’s Senate confirmation hearing, they were going to ask him a lot of questions about this case. And to my surprise, it seemed like everybody had almost forgotten about it. They asked him maybe one or two questions, and I don’t really think he gave very good answers, but they satisfied the senators because he was ultimately confirmed. (...)
So at that point, I thought: I wonder what these victims, who we knew were there — at least a dozen or so — they were children when this happened. But now, with the passage of time, they were in their late 20s, early 30s. And I wondered what they thought about this man who had given their predator really such a lenient deal, and he was now in charge of one of the largest agencies in the country, with oversight of human trafficking. So the story really began as: I thought I would do a reaction of the victims to Acosta being appointed labor secretary. But once I started digging into the story, it was like an onion. I found out more and more and more. (...)
Douthat: And so at that point, the official narrative of Epstein was he had taken a plea deal related to early-teenage girls. What was the actual nature of that deal?
Brown: Well actually, one of the many things I came to find out — which hadn’t been reported before — was that they manipulated and downplayed the scope of his crimes. He only pleaded guilty to a charge of soliciting one underage girl. And they purposely picked a girl who was a little older so that the crime that was on the books, so to speak, was downplayed.
It was only one girl, even though it was clear that he had done this to many, many girls. They also hid what they were doing from not only the public but from the victims. They went out of their way to keep this whole deal secret. He sort of slid into a courtroom, pleaded guilty. Nobody knew what he was pleading guilty to because all the records were sealed. (...)
Douthat: And to clarify, he ends up pleading guilty to two counts of solicitation of prostitution, one of which was with a minor.
Brown: That’s correct.
Douthat: And how long was his sentence?
Brown: Eighteen months.
Douthat: But he only served about 13 months. And so, now you start reporting on the story. You’re talking to the victims that were sort of part of the initial prosecution, and then it becomes clear that there were many more victims. (...)
Douthat: So now I want to go back in time. So this is a flashback, and I just want you to help me through this storytelling. So it’s the 1970s. Jeffrey Epstein is a teacher at the Dalton School, a very prestigious prep school in New York City where the headmaster is Donald Barr, who is the father of Bill Barr, who would be the attorney general when Epstein killed himself in prison. And I cite that detail only because it’s an example of how Epstein’s story is filled with these little grace notes that are gifts to would-be conspiracy theorists.
So as I understand the story: a parent there is friendly with him, helps him get an interview for a job at Bear Stearns, the investment firm, as a trader. Between there and the 1990s, he becomes insanely wealthy.
How did that happen? How did he get rich? You mentioned earlier that this was an open question when you started reporting. But if you were going to tell the story now as you understand it, how did he get rich?
Brown: Well, he was a very smart man. He was a very intelligent man. I think the key to Epstein’s real success is the fact that he would find the weak point that anybody had — whatever they needed or wanted — and he would exploit that. And I don’t know what he had on Les Wexner, who became one of his primary clients.
Les Wexner is a billionaire who owned Victoria’s Secret and also the Limited retail stores at the time. And he somehow met Les Wexner, and Wexner was really his primary client. And as a result of that, his wealth just ballooned.
Douthat: But he wasn’t just an adviser. He wasn’t, like, Les Wexner’s financial adviser. He had power of attorney. He was effectively the hand of the king in “Game of Thrones,” or he’s just making any kind of deal for Wexner.
In some of the arguments about the mystery of Epstein’s wealth, I’ve seen people say: Well, it’s kind of a mystery why Wexner gave him this kind of power, but that does explain how rich he got. Wexner is a billionaire, and I guess Epstein makes tens or hundreds of millions just off this connection. Does that seem plausible to you? Do you feel like the Wexner connection — even if why Wexner loved him is a mystery — suffices to explain how much money he seemed to have by the end of the 1990s, let’s say?
Brown: No, it doesn’t make any sense. And it certainly is something that authorities should have investigated, if not back then, then in the advancing years, they should have looked into it. I always felt like they relied too much on victims to help make their case when they should have followed the money. (...)
So as I understand the story: a parent there is friendly with him, helps him get an interview for a job at Bear Stearns, the investment firm, as a trader. Between there and the 1990s, he becomes insanely wealthy.
How did that happen? How did he get rich? You mentioned earlier that this was an open question when you started reporting. But if you were going to tell the story now as you understand it, how did he get rich?
Brown: Well, he was a very smart man. He was a very intelligent man. I think the key to Epstein’s real success is the fact that he would find the weak point that anybody had — whatever they needed or wanted — and he would exploit that. And I don’t know what he had on Les Wexner, who became one of his primary clients.
Les Wexner is a billionaire who owned Victoria’s Secret and also the Limited retail stores at the time. And he somehow met Les Wexner, and Wexner was really his primary client. And as a result of that, his wealth just ballooned.
Douthat: But he wasn’t just an adviser. He wasn’t, like, Les Wexner’s financial adviser. He had power of attorney. He was effectively the hand of the king in “Game of Thrones,” or he’s just making any kind of deal for Wexner.
In some of the arguments about the mystery of Epstein’s wealth, I’ve seen people say: Well, it’s kind of a mystery why Wexner gave him this kind of power, but that does explain how rich he got. Wexner is a billionaire, and I guess Epstein makes tens or hundreds of millions just off this connection. Does that seem plausible to you? Do you feel like the Wexner connection — even if why Wexner loved him is a mystery — suffices to explain how much money he seemed to have by the end of the 1990s, let’s say?
Brown: No, it doesn’t make any sense. And it certainly is something that authorities should have investigated, if not back then, then in the advancing years, they should have looked into it. I always felt like they relied too much on victims to help make their case when they should have followed the money. (...)
Douthat: By the late 1990s, he is building out a playboy intellectual lifestyle. Can you describe the lifestyle that Epstein has?
Brown: Well, he had a lot of salons, so to speak, at his Manhattan home and also at his other homes.
He owned the island off the coast of St. Thomas. He would fly Nobel Prize winners in, for example, to talk about science. He started a couple of foundations and started giving a lot of money away through these foundations.
He really cultivated a number of high-profile scientists. He fancied himself as a little bit more of a scientist and mathematician than I think he really was. But he had so much money, and he dangled a lot of that money. Remember all these scientists and academics — M.I.T., Harvard — they usually need money for some of their projects. So he had money, lots of money. So they kind of entertained him or ——
Douthat: Humored him.
Brown: Yes, in some cases. Some of them felt like he was really just full of it, but they were willing to take his money. (...)
Douthat: I mean, as you said already, it’s pretty straightforward why scientists and intellectuals were interested in hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein. Initially, it’s because he was rich and was willing to fund and donate to universities and donate to research and so on. So that itself is not a special mystery.
What about the general cast of celebrity politicians, figures that rode on his plane or supposedly rode on his plane and ended up on his island? People at the level of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton — we’ll get to the Donald Trump connection in a little while. But these people are also just pulled in by the normal reality that rich people like to hang out with famous people and vice versa. What’s your sense of how that worked?
Brown: Well, Epstein was donating political money to a lot of campaigns. So of course he would attract the kind of people that need political donations, and Clinton was certainly one of them. Even after Clinton left the presidency, there was the Clinton Foundation, and so he was seeking donations for the Clinton Foundation as well.
So they went on a long trip overseas on Epstein’s plane to travel to various areas to understand the AIDS epidemic and what could be done. And Epstein envisioned himself as this person that could maybe find things that would help cure cancer or AIDS. So, he felt like he could be a part of that in some way.
Douthat: So let’s make these timelines overlap. At what point does he become connected with Ghislaine Maxwell, whom you’ve already mentioned was his paramour for a while and then ultimately his accomplice in predation? When, when did they first start hanging out?
Brown: After her father died, Robert Maxwell, who was a British publisher. He died under suspicious circumstances himself.
Douthat: Very suspicious circumstances on a boat.
Brown: They think he just fell off. They found him floating in the water. He had a yacht — he was off the Canary Islands — and they couldn’t find him. And then eventually, someone saw him floating in the ocean. So there are a lot of questions, because after they found him dead, investigators realized that he had essentially raided his whole company — including the employees’ pension fund. Ultimately his sons had to stand trial for this.
Her father had passed away, and Epstein was at an event honoring her father after his death. At the time, Maxwell’s family was in ruin. They had no money, and her mother really was in danger of losing everything. Her mother later wrote a book and explained that there was this New York financier who helped the family. She doesn’t name who that is, but there’s enough of an indicator there that it sounds like it could have been Epstein that came in to rescue the family and helped provide a house for her mother to live in. It is thought that it was probably Epstein that helped the family, and that’s how they met.
Douthat: So Robert Maxwell passes away in 1991 in suspicious circumstances. Epstein is there to help his family. It’s worth noting that Maxwell himself had ties to the Israeli government and to Israeli intelligence operations, I believe. And that’s a thread that then also connects to the conspiracy theories.
You said that Epstein and Maxwell date and then at some point she transitions into this role as procurer for him. At what point does Epstein actually become a serial sexual predator?
Brown: We know that some of his first victims were from like 1996, 1998. There were people that came forward that told me and others that Maxwell realized that she was never going to be able to marry him. There were a lot of rumors at the time that maybe they would get married, but she realized that as she got older that this was not going to satisfy him because he wanted younger and younger girls.
So she was dependent on him somewhat for finances at that point. So she began this quest to find him girls, essentially. That’s how it all started.
Douthat: So Epstein is the playboy financier hanging out with intellectuals and politicians in Florida on private jets, on his private island. And he’s bringing all of these girls through his house, through his life, and taking advantage of them.
Presumably, these things are happening at the same time — up until the point we already talked about, when he’s actually charged and, in a very limited way, convicted in 2008. What happens to his social world — all his high-flying connections — after he gets out of that Club Med-style stint in prison?
Brown: Well, once he gets out of jail, he hired all these P.R. people to remake his image, and there are press releases in archives. The Jeffrey Epstein Foundation put out press release after press release after press release. First it started with, he was giving money here. He was giving money there. So as time went on, he started being able to once again resume the life that he had built before this happened, and he was able to do this in part because of the plea deal.
Because the plea deal was only the solicitation of one underage girl. He was able to say to people: Yeah, I did this. It was bad, but it was only that. And to them that was sort of OK, he served his time. They accepted that explanation that it was just one girl and he made a mistake. Of course, he said he didn’t know she was underage. So it was plausible to a lot of people that he was not this monster that we later know he was.
Douthat: Right. But it was also plausible to people because they knew that he liked to hang out with teenage girls. There’s this now famous line that Donald Trump himself has said that appeared, I believe, in a piece in New York magazine, long before Epstein’s first conviction. He’s talking about Epstein’s social life, and he says something like: He likes women as much as I do, but he likes them on the younger side. So it seems like that was always part of his reputation.
Brown: Right. I had some of the victims tell me that they would be invited to parties with a lot of wealthy people and well-known people, and they would just be told to stand there like statues and to just look pretty and say as little as possible and just kind of fawn over him. He would put some of them on his lap. So yes, people could see. (...)
Douthat: Just Epstein’s behavior alone looks like a version of the Harvey Weinstein story, where you have this rich and powerful man who has all this misbehavior that people tolerated over a long period of time. He gets away with some stuff legally because he has all these connections, and then finally, because of your reporting, because of a change in climate, it come crashing down. (...)
So from your perspective, then, it is likely that there are some set of men in the world who move through Epstein’s mansion — Epstein’s island and so on — who are guilty, who are guilty of essentially having girls trafficked to them and, in part, having sex with minors whose names have not been successfully accused in a court of law.
Brown: That’s correct.
Douthat: OK. So the next question, what do you think about the evidence and speculation that Epstein intended to blackmail people? Because that is the next phase of the theorizing, that Epstein wasn’t just trying to woo and befriend these men, but he also liked the idea of having dirt on the people who had done bad things around him.
Brown: I think he did, but I don’t think he blackmailed people directly like that. I mean, if you just really think about it, if you send a girl over to have sex with one of these men, it’s not like you write it down or that you — I don’t believe he had a list. I just think that he used these women, girls, as pawns in order to ingratiate himself with people that he wanted to do business with.
It was a business transaction to him. That’s what this was. I don’t think that he had this operation where he was essentially saying: If you don’t do this for me, I’m going to reveal that you had sex with so-and-so. I don’t think it was like that in the traditional sense. But if you’re a man and you know that you’ve been doing this ——
Douthat: You know and he knows that you know.
Brown: Exactly, and I think it was more like that. I don’t think it was an official or an outright blackmail scheme like that. I think it was more like: He knows this about me, maybe I better do this.
Douthat: So that leads into the next open question, which is Epstein’s alleged ties to intelligence agencies — either American intelligence agencies or the Mossad in Israel. Earlier, we were talking about Epstein’s lenient plea deal and why Alex Acosta ended up giving it to him. There’s now a famous secondhand quote from Acosta, where he was reportedly told — by someone else in the first Trump administration — to back off Epstein because Epstein belonged to intelligence.
Acosta has never publicly corroborated that quote. And in other settings, he said he didn’t know anything about Epstein’s possible intelligence connections. But first: Do you think that some form of the intelligence world — and Epstein’s connections to it — played any role in why he got off so lightly the first time?
Brown: I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody really knows except the people in the government that have these files. And I think that’s, in part, one of the unanswered questions about Epstein, because I just don’t know. I know there’s a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, I try to stick to the facts, and so it’s just something we don’t know for sure.
Douthat: Yeah. I’m drawing on your view about your skepticism around the blackmail narrative. There’s two intelligent stories you could tell: One, Epstein is literally an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the U.S. government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That’s the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence.
So this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as a conduit of information. But it’s not that he’s being run as a kind of entrapment ring. If we don’t think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.
Brown: Well, let me put it to you this way: You’re talking about what’s plausible, what’s not plausible. It’s the job of our government to find out what’s plausible or what’s real and what’s not real. And the question here, if we’re talking about things that we don’t know and things that maybe we should look into, the question is — there certainly was enough there that the federal government, the D.O.J., at some point should have launched a counterintelligence investigation into what was true, and on that end, are not true.
We’ve known long enough about this Acosta statement that he made. They’ve heard everything that we’ve heard that we’ve just talked about. So we don’t know the answer to those questions, but it’s the job of our federal government to look into those kinds of things. And at some point, one would hope that they did look into some of that. We just don’t know whether they did or not.
Douthat: Good. So that brings me to either my last or next-to-last unanswered question, which is: What do you think, if anything, the government has in its possession, the Department of Justice or anyone else that could shed further light on this case?
Brown: Well, they absolutely have files that they can release. They could release his autopsy report, for example. They could release his plane records, for example — the F.A.A. records of where he flew. They could redact the names of victims, but they could release information gathered by the U.S. Marshals Service, which was supposed to monitor him.
He was a convicted sex offender, but yet he was allowed to fly his plane all over the world, come back into the United States with girls or young women aboard his plane on a regular basis. So this is, to me, more of a story not necessarily about Epstein but about our government and what our government did or didn’t do.
This was a man that was allowed to abuse girls and women for two decades. How did that happen and why did it happen, to me, is the question. Epstein is the character in this, but really these questions, I think, the public and especially the victims deserve to know whether our government did the job that they were supposed to do. (...)
Douthat: If there were a group of powerful men who abused women together with Epstein, who have gotten away with it, why wouldn’t Maxwell have given up some of those men for the sake of some kind of plea bargain?
Brown: I think for the same reason that probably Trump doesn’t want to release the files; I think that it’s just a place where nobody wants to go. These are very powerful men, important men and possibly even, quite frankly, G.O.P. or Democratic donors.
Douthat: But why does Maxwell — we’re going to end with Trump — but why would Maxwell care about giving up a powerful Democratic or Republican donor if it would buy her time off prison?
Brown: You’ll have to ask her. (...)
Douthat: Now Trump himself. We’re going to enter the realm of speculation, but it’s not just that the Trump administration has sort of shut down the investigation or said: Well, we’ve disclosed everything we can disclose. It’s that Trump has come out swinging and saying that this is a hoax. He’s essentially treating a story that had been taken up by a big part of his own base as a story that he wants to not just ignore but publicly discredit.
First, what is your understanding of Trump’s connections to Epstein? (...)
Brown: He was friends with Epstein in the 1990s, and they were in the same social circles together. We see the video of him at a party at Mar-a-Lago. My understanding is there were two things that led to their falling out. One was that Epstein hit on a member’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago and Epstein was banned from Mar-a-Lago.
Douthat: Once again, Donald Trump is standing up for sexual ethics in America.
Brown: Right. And the other involved a real estate transaction, of course, money where they were bidding on the same property — a very big property. And Epstein lost, and Trump won the deal, and so they had a falling out over that property. So those were the two things. But up until then, Trump had been flying on Epstein’s plane. He entertained some of Epstein’s family at one of his casinos. So they were somewhat friendly. (...)
Douthat: He gave an interview during the campaign — I think during the campaign. He was asked about the files, and in part of the answer he said something like: Well, we should release something. But then he said: You don’t want to release things that aren’t true.
My perception was always that other people in his coalition were much more enthusiastic about this story. That this was never one of Trump’s obsessions. This was something his supporters were obsessed with. So it didn’t surprise me that in the end, they didn’t want to do some version of what you’re describing and say: We’re going to go back and find a bunch of other records to release. That doesn’t surprise me. I am surprised, though, by the vehemence of Trump’s reaction to the negative reaction — that is something of a mystery.
Okay. I’ve been trying to cover the unanswered questions. Do you have any other specific questions that you would like answered?
Brown: I wish I understood why our government isn’t treating this like the crime that it is. It’s a serious crime that happened here. I don’t think there’s any dispute. I mean, this is something that actually happened. This isn’t a hoax. This happened to these women when they were very young.
It is surprising to some degree that they’re treating this as such a political issue and not treating it like it should be treated, which is a crime. And if the files are unsatisfactory or don’t contain credible evidence, then maybe they need to look a little deeper.
Maybe the answer is that we still have questions and we’re going to look into this more. But that’s not the answer the government gave. The answer they gave was: There’s nothing here. There’s nothing more to investigate. We’re done with this story. And I think the answer should be that obviously the public has a lot of questions and the victims still want justice, so we’re going to look at this a little further.
Douthat: But in the end, for that to be worth doing, Epstein himself is dead, so your assumption in making this argument — and I think it’s a very compelling argument — but the core of the argument is there are other people out there who are guilty ——
Brown: That’s correct.
by Ross Douthat, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; @JudiciaryDems/X via:[ed. After all the gaslighting and lying Trump has done throughout his life and as president, MAGA finally gets indignant about this? Guess it just goes to show how much conspiracy theories fuel their engines.]
Friday, July 18, 2025
Thursday, July 17, 2025
On China’s Rise, America’s Dysfunction, and the Need for Cooperation
Kishore Mahbubani is a renowned diplomat, scholar, and one of the most insightful analysts of global power dynamics. He served as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United Nations and as President of the UN Security Council, and is the author of books including Has China Won? and Has the West Lost It?
Mahbubani joined Current Affairs to explain why the United States is losing ground to China—not because of Chinese aggression, but because of internal dysfunction, elite failure, and strategic incoherence. He critiques the emotional, zero-sum mindset dominating U.S. foreign policy and calls for a more rational, cooperative approach to global affairs. (...)
Robinson
You pointed out that global economics is not a zero-sum game, and another theme that comes across in your writing is that essentially, if we are going to have a prosperous, peaceful 21st Century that deals with the major crises that we face, such as climate change, we will have a world that cooperates, a world of mutual respect, and a world where countries are capable of understanding one another. And in the rhetoric that you hear in the United States, Donald Trump openly says China is our enemy. That’s his quote. The rest of the world is ripping us off. It is really quite the opposite of the story that you’re telling. You tell the story of us all inhabiting one planet and a need to work things out. In the United States, the Trumpian narrative is that we inhabit a world of enemies, those enemies need to be tamed or destroyed, and we need to build up our ability to crush them militarily if necessary. So, it would seem that much of the story told in the United States is really going in the opposite direction of the one that you feel generates the understanding necessary to live well in the 21st Century.
Mahbubani
Well, you’re absolutely right about that, but I can fully understand why Donald Trump wants to try and improve the livelihoods of the bottom 50 percent of Americans. I think that’s a noble goal that he has. I can understand why he wants to make American industries more competitive and re-industrialize America. That’s also an understandable goal. But I think he will find that the best way to achieve those goals is actually to work with the rest of the world. And one thing I’ve learned after studying geopolitics for 55 years is that you’ve got to be cold and calculating if you want to succeed in geopolitics, and if you’re emotional, then you’re at a major disadvantage.
So, for example, how did China become so wealthy so quickly? What they did was to work closely with the United States. Even though, technically, during part of the Cold War the U.S. was an adversary, China worked with the United States to grow its economy. And I think that’s one thing that is taboo in the United States, that actually the best way for the United States to regenerate its economic growth and make it grow faster is not to try and bring down China, but to work with China. Just as in the time when you were worried about Japanese cars taking over the United States, what did you do? You have voluntary export restraints. You encourage the Japanese to set up factories—Toyota factories, Honda factories—in the United States. The same thing can be done with China. It can only be done if you are rational and calculating in your moves and not emotional and say, oh, no, we can never work with China. Why can’t you work with China? If working with China is going to bring benefits to the American people, why not work with them? Because at the end of the day, it’s very clear that all efforts to stop the rise of China by the United States will fail. You cannot stop a 4,000-year-old civilization that has its own civilizational cycles, and as it is rising, depriving them of this technology or that technology is not going to stop the rise of China.
Robinson
And you point out that for most of human history, the Chinese and Indian economies were among the largest in the world. They have the largest global population. And so to try and reverse the trend towards a more equal balance of power in the world, you argue, is futile.
Mahbubani
Yes, that’s a fact that everyone should know, that from the year 1 to the year 1820, for 1,800 out of the last 2,000 years, the two largest economies of the world have always been those of China and India. It’s only in the last 200 years that Europe and North America have taken off. The last 200 years of Western domination of world history have been a major historical aberration, and all aberrations come to a natural end. So it’s perfectly natural to see the return of China and India. But what’s important to emphasize is that the reason why China and India are coming back is that they are studying, absorbing, and implementing Western pillars of wisdom, and that’s why they’re succeeding. And paradoxically, at a time when, for example, China—a Communist Party run country—is discovering the virtue of free trade agreements, free trade agreements have enabled China to become one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and the United States is walking away from them. But this is where Economics 101 theory is right. The United States should be signing more free trade agreements and not walking away from them.
Robinson
Now, you mentioned there China being a Communist Party run country, but one of the points that you make in your book, Has China Won?, is that one of the major misunderstandings of China comes from seeing it as an ideologically communist entity in the kind of classic Marxist-Leninist sense.
Mahbubani
Well, I think anybody who thinks that China is a communist country should go visit China. I mean that literally: every American who believes that should go visit it. I actually visited Moscow in 1976, and trust me, that place was so controlled, so oppressed. And when you went into the biggest department store in Moscow, and you wanted to buy a toothbrush—I’m not exaggerating—you had a huge cabinet, and you had one toothbrush separated from the other toothbrush by one foot. Even the toothbrushes were scarce commodities. A small 7-Eleven in the United States has more toothbrushes than the largest department store in Moscow. Everything was scarce.
Now, you go to China today, and you will see the most advanced economy in the world in terms of how it produces both private goods and public goods. If you go and see the infrastructure of China, you begin to realize that after going from Kennedy Airport to Beijing Airport, you’re going from a third world airport in the United States to a first world airport in China. And by the way, incidentally, also a first world airport in New Delhi and Mumbai. So there are areas in which Asia has surged ahead, clearly, of the United States, and the United States should consider the possibility that it could possibly try to emulate what the East Asian economies have done. (...)
Robinson
I want to go back to something that you said earlier. People might have been a little surprised to hear you talk of the virtues of being cold and calculating. And when you read your books, one of your prescriptions is to become more Machiavellian. I think this is very interesting because people might be surprised to hear Machiavelli praised—staying on the subject of political philosophy. But one of the interesting things that comes out of your books, your analysis, is that actually, when the United States thinks it’s being cold and calculating—there’s certainly no lack of callousness or coldness in a lot of American foreign policy, or willingness to destroy the lives of others, but there is a certain absence of strategic thinking. And one of the things that you point out is that we mistake what real strategic thinking is. For example, you cite Sun Tzu saying, if you don’t know your enemy as well as yourself, you’re going to lose half your battles. It seems like in the United States, we don’t know either our enemy or ourselves. It might be considered non-strategic or sappy or excessively empathetic to try and understand China, but you say, no, understanding China, understanding how Putin thinks, these are not things you do out of an excess of emotion and sympathy. These are things you do because you are a strategic, careful thinker.
Mahbubani
Absolutely, and it’s a bit sad that the United States, when it launches geopolitical contests against China, decided to do so without first working out a comprehensive, long-term strategic plan. In an early chapter in my book, Has China Won?, I say there are 10 questions that anyone should ask if they’re formulating a strategy. And I’m actually trying to help the United States formulate a comprehensive long-term strategy, because if you don’t have a comprehensive long-term strategy, you just carry out emotional actions and end up hurting yourself. So, for example, the Biden administration thought they could stop the development of semiconductors in China by imposing all kinds of sanctions. And you can see the result a few years later: China’s share of the semiconductor market used to be 10 percent, and now it’s 50 percent. So all the efforts to stop China didn’t work because no one thought strategically. And just to make a very important point of detail, when the United States cut off supplies of advanced semiconductors to China, it was cutting off his nose to spite his face. Because by depriving yourself of 30 percent of your revenue, you lose all your R and D budget, and when you lose all your R and D budget, you’ve lost your capacity to compete. So, you’ve got to think strategically when you carry on an action—is it going to do more damage to my opponent, or is it going to do more damage to me? And I’m actually trying to help the United States work out policies that will be beneficial for the United States.
Robinson
Yes. Another example of this kind of this kind of paradox, where the thing that the United States does to counter China is actually helping China and not the United States, is as you say, irrational and wasteful defense spending. This might surprise some people, but you say it’s in China’s national interest for American wasteful defense spending to continue. The more money America spends on weapons systems that will never be used against China—because, as you say, a war between the two countries would result in the destruction of both countries—the better off China will be, and American military expenditures are geopolitical gifts to China. That is certainly something that those authorizing those expenditures don’t believe.
Mahbubani
Yes, and the tragedy here is that the way America spends money on defense expenditures, in theory, you should first work out a strategy and say, what kind of weapons do we need? And then you work backwards and say, okay, in this new strategic environment, maybe instead of piloted jets, we need pilotless jets, because drones today are as good as piloted jets. You spend so much money on an aircraft trying to protect the body of the pilot, but once you have a pilotless jet, everything is much cheaper, and the planes can go faster—they don’t have to worry about the human body in there. Similarly, today, with advanced missiles, aircraft carriers have become sitting ducks. You no longer need aircraft carriers anymore to project power. But the reason why you cannot change course is that in America, and this is part of being a plutocracy, the arms industry can lobby the US Congress to pass bills to buy weapons that are outmoded and that are no longer needed. So America is producing a lot of weapons that will not be useful when the real war comes. The aircraft carriers will be sitting ducks in the face of all these hypersonic and supersonic missiles that are being developed. You have vested interests in deciding what should be purchased. But if you do a zero-based thing, you can actually defend the United States much more effectively with half the budget, or one quarter of the budget, with much more effective weapons. But of course, a large part of the military industrial complex will complain, then they will go to Congress, and you won’t be able to arrive at a rational decision. So in that sense, it is not China that is distorting your defense expenditures. It’s the American political system that is preventing the United States from having rational defense policies.
Robinson
We’ve been talking here about how United States policy towards China is ultimately irrational and self-defeating and pseudo-Machiavellian, without actually thinking sensibly about what is in the interests of this country. But it’s not the only example that you give of self-defeating Western policy. Just opening up your book here, Has the West Lost It?, you have a section, “Strategic Errors: Islam, Russia and Meddling in World Affairs.” And you make a series of arguments there that, for example, the United States’ treatment of Russia after the Cold War actually led to the rise of Putin, which was preventable, and that the United States, through its disastrous wars in the Middle East, has created, in many ways, or exacerbated, the problems that they that supposedly we are trying to solve.
Mahbubani
Yes. Certainly, the Iraq war was completely unnecessary—completely unnecessary. You spent $3 trillion of blood and treasure, and at the end of the day, delivered a broken state which is not safe for Americans to live in. And similarly, by the way, the removal of Gaddafi was a huge mistake, especially for the Europeans, because Gaddafi was acting like a cork in the bottle, preventing a surge of migrants from Africa towards Europe. But as soon as Gaddafi was removed, the floodgates opened up. So it’s not in your interest. It’s important to do a rational calculation of where your interests lie, and it is not in America’s interest necessarily to fight forever wars and to have 800 military bases around the world, because the United States is a very safe country. You are protected by two wonderful, huge oceans, and you’re protected by Canada and Mexico. You don’t have hostile republics as your border, so you can actually cut down your defense expenditures dramatically. And instead of making it a sole American mission to keep international waterways safe, work with other navies in the world cooperatively, because we all share common interests in keeping international sea lanes safe.
Robinson
I believe you were in the UN Security Council in the lead up to the Iraq war.
Mahbubani
That's right, 2001-2002.
Robinson
Can you tell us a bit about that?
Mahbubani
Yes, you could see the tension building up in the Security Council because the United States was trying to pass a resolution to justify an invasion of Iraq, and it was very clear that Russia, China, Germany, and France thought it was a wrong decision. And frankly, if the United States had listened to its good friends, Germany and France, who said, you shouldn’t fight this war, you will lose a lot of money, and you will be worse off, the United States could have saved $3 trillion, and by the way, used it to develop the infrastructure of the United States and make it as gleaming as that of China. So why spend $3 trillion fighting an unnecessary war? And I’m surprised that no one has been held accountable for this unnecessary war. I should also mention that I’m making these points because I actually believe that the United States can become, once again, a very strong country. And the goal of all my prescriptions is not to weaken the United States, but to strengthen the United States and to make it a more effective actor in a complex world environment.
by Nathan J. Robinson and Kishore Mahbubani, Current Affairs | Read more:
Robinson
You pointed out that global economics is not a zero-sum game, and another theme that comes across in your writing is that essentially, if we are going to have a prosperous, peaceful 21st Century that deals with the major crises that we face, such as climate change, we will have a world that cooperates, a world of mutual respect, and a world where countries are capable of understanding one another. And in the rhetoric that you hear in the United States, Donald Trump openly says China is our enemy. That’s his quote. The rest of the world is ripping us off. It is really quite the opposite of the story that you’re telling. You tell the story of us all inhabiting one planet and a need to work things out. In the United States, the Trumpian narrative is that we inhabit a world of enemies, those enemies need to be tamed or destroyed, and we need to build up our ability to crush them militarily if necessary. So, it would seem that much of the story told in the United States is really going in the opposite direction of the one that you feel generates the understanding necessary to live well in the 21st Century.
Mahbubani
Well, you’re absolutely right about that, but I can fully understand why Donald Trump wants to try and improve the livelihoods of the bottom 50 percent of Americans. I think that’s a noble goal that he has. I can understand why he wants to make American industries more competitive and re-industrialize America. That’s also an understandable goal. But I think he will find that the best way to achieve those goals is actually to work with the rest of the world. And one thing I’ve learned after studying geopolitics for 55 years is that you’ve got to be cold and calculating if you want to succeed in geopolitics, and if you’re emotional, then you’re at a major disadvantage.
So, for example, how did China become so wealthy so quickly? What they did was to work closely with the United States. Even though, technically, during part of the Cold War the U.S. was an adversary, China worked with the United States to grow its economy. And I think that’s one thing that is taboo in the United States, that actually the best way for the United States to regenerate its economic growth and make it grow faster is not to try and bring down China, but to work with China. Just as in the time when you were worried about Japanese cars taking over the United States, what did you do? You have voluntary export restraints. You encourage the Japanese to set up factories—Toyota factories, Honda factories—in the United States. The same thing can be done with China. It can only be done if you are rational and calculating in your moves and not emotional and say, oh, no, we can never work with China. Why can’t you work with China? If working with China is going to bring benefits to the American people, why not work with them? Because at the end of the day, it’s very clear that all efforts to stop the rise of China by the United States will fail. You cannot stop a 4,000-year-old civilization that has its own civilizational cycles, and as it is rising, depriving them of this technology or that technology is not going to stop the rise of China.
Robinson
And you point out that for most of human history, the Chinese and Indian economies were among the largest in the world. They have the largest global population. And so to try and reverse the trend towards a more equal balance of power in the world, you argue, is futile.
Mahbubani
Yes, that’s a fact that everyone should know, that from the year 1 to the year 1820, for 1,800 out of the last 2,000 years, the two largest economies of the world have always been those of China and India. It’s only in the last 200 years that Europe and North America have taken off. The last 200 years of Western domination of world history have been a major historical aberration, and all aberrations come to a natural end. So it’s perfectly natural to see the return of China and India. But what’s important to emphasize is that the reason why China and India are coming back is that they are studying, absorbing, and implementing Western pillars of wisdom, and that’s why they’re succeeding. And paradoxically, at a time when, for example, China—a Communist Party run country—is discovering the virtue of free trade agreements, free trade agreements have enabled China to become one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and the United States is walking away from them. But this is where Economics 101 theory is right. The United States should be signing more free trade agreements and not walking away from them.
Robinson
Now, you mentioned there China being a Communist Party run country, but one of the points that you make in your book, Has China Won?, is that one of the major misunderstandings of China comes from seeing it as an ideologically communist entity in the kind of classic Marxist-Leninist sense.
Mahbubani
Well, I think anybody who thinks that China is a communist country should go visit China. I mean that literally: every American who believes that should go visit it. I actually visited Moscow in 1976, and trust me, that place was so controlled, so oppressed. And when you went into the biggest department store in Moscow, and you wanted to buy a toothbrush—I’m not exaggerating—you had a huge cabinet, and you had one toothbrush separated from the other toothbrush by one foot. Even the toothbrushes were scarce commodities. A small 7-Eleven in the United States has more toothbrushes than the largest department store in Moscow. Everything was scarce.
Now, you go to China today, and you will see the most advanced economy in the world in terms of how it produces both private goods and public goods. If you go and see the infrastructure of China, you begin to realize that after going from Kennedy Airport to Beijing Airport, you’re going from a third world airport in the United States to a first world airport in China. And by the way, incidentally, also a first world airport in New Delhi and Mumbai. So there are areas in which Asia has surged ahead, clearly, of the United States, and the United States should consider the possibility that it could possibly try to emulate what the East Asian economies have done. (...)
Robinson
I want to go back to something that you said earlier. People might have been a little surprised to hear you talk of the virtues of being cold and calculating. And when you read your books, one of your prescriptions is to become more Machiavellian. I think this is very interesting because people might be surprised to hear Machiavelli praised—staying on the subject of political philosophy. But one of the interesting things that comes out of your books, your analysis, is that actually, when the United States thinks it’s being cold and calculating—there’s certainly no lack of callousness or coldness in a lot of American foreign policy, or willingness to destroy the lives of others, but there is a certain absence of strategic thinking. And one of the things that you point out is that we mistake what real strategic thinking is. For example, you cite Sun Tzu saying, if you don’t know your enemy as well as yourself, you’re going to lose half your battles. It seems like in the United States, we don’t know either our enemy or ourselves. It might be considered non-strategic or sappy or excessively empathetic to try and understand China, but you say, no, understanding China, understanding how Putin thinks, these are not things you do out of an excess of emotion and sympathy. These are things you do because you are a strategic, careful thinker.
Mahbubani
Absolutely, and it’s a bit sad that the United States, when it launches geopolitical contests against China, decided to do so without first working out a comprehensive, long-term strategic plan. In an early chapter in my book, Has China Won?, I say there are 10 questions that anyone should ask if they’re formulating a strategy. And I’m actually trying to help the United States formulate a comprehensive long-term strategy, because if you don’t have a comprehensive long-term strategy, you just carry out emotional actions and end up hurting yourself. So, for example, the Biden administration thought they could stop the development of semiconductors in China by imposing all kinds of sanctions. And you can see the result a few years later: China’s share of the semiconductor market used to be 10 percent, and now it’s 50 percent. So all the efforts to stop China didn’t work because no one thought strategically. And just to make a very important point of detail, when the United States cut off supplies of advanced semiconductors to China, it was cutting off his nose to spite his face. Because by depriving yourself of 30 percent of your revenue, you lose all your R and D budget, and when you lose all your R and D budget, you’ve lost your capacity to compete. So, you’ve got to think strategically when you carry on an action—is it going to do more damage to my opponent, or is it going to do more damage to me? And I’m actually trying to help the United States work out policies that will be beneficial for the United States.
Robinson
Yes. Another example of this kind of this kind of paradox, where the thing that the United States does to counter China is actually helping China and not the United States, is as you say, irrational and wasteful defense spending. This might surprise some people, but you say it’s in China’s national interest for American wasteful defense spending to continue. The more money America spends on weapons systems that will never be used against China—because, as you say, a war between the two countries would result in the destruction of both countries—the better off China will be, and American military expenditures are geopolitical gifts to China. That is certainly something that those authorizing those expenditures don’t believe.
Mahbubani
Yes, and the tragedy here is that the way America spends money on defense expenditures, in theory, you should first work out a strategy and say, what kind of weapons do we need? And then you work backwards and say, okay, in this new strategic environment, maybe instead of piloted jets, we need pilotless jets, because drones today are as good as piloted jets. You spend so much money on an aircraft trying to protect the body of the pilot, but once you have a pilotless jet, everything is much cheaper, and the planes can go faster—they don’t have to worry about the human body in there. Similarly, today, with advanced missiles, aircraft carriers have become sitting ducks. You no longer need aircraft carriers anymore to project power. But the reason why you cannot change course is that in America, and this is part of being a plutocracy, the arms industry can lobby the US Congress to pass bills to buy weapons that are outmoded and that are no longer needed. So America is producing a lot of weapons that will not be useful when the real war comes. The aircraft carriers will be sitting ducks in the face of all these hypersonic and supersonic missiles that are being developed. You have vested interests in deciding what should be purchased. But if you do a zero-based thing, you can actually defend the United States much more effectively with half the budget, or one quarter of the budget, with much more effective weapons. But of course, a large part of the military industrial complex will complain, then they will go to Congress, and you won’t be able to arrive at a rational decision. So in that sense, it is not China that is distorting your defense expenditures. It’s the American political system that is preventing the United States from having rational defense policies.
Robinson
We’ve been talking here about how United States policy towards China is ultimately irrational and self-defeating and pseudo-Machiavellian, without actually thinking sensibly about what is in the interests of this country. But it’s not the only example that you give of self-defeating Western policy. Just opening up your book here, Has the West Lost It?, you have a section, “Strategic Errors: Islam, Russia and Meddling in World Affairs.” And you make a series of arguments there that, for example, the United States’ treatment of Russia after the Cold War actually led to the rise of Putin, which was preventable, and that the United States, through its disastrous wars in the Middle East, has created, in many ways, or exacerbated, the problems that they that supposedly we are trying to solve.
Mahbubani
Yes. Certainly, the Iraq war was completely unnecessary—completely unnecessary. You spent $3 trillion of blood and treasure, and at the end of the day, delivered a broken state which is not safe for Americans to live in. And similarly, by the way, the removal of Gaddafi was a huge mistake, especially for the Europeans, because Gaddafi was acting like a cork in the bottle, preventing a surge of migrants from Africa towards Europe. But as soon as Gaddafi was removed, the floodgates opened up. So it’s not in your interest. It’s important to do a rational calculation of where your interests lie, and it is not in America’s interest necessarily to fight forever wars and to have 800 military bases around the world, because the United States is a very safe country. You are protected by two wonderful, huge oceans, and you’re protected by Canada and Mexico. You don’t have hostile republics as your border, so you can actually cut down your defense expenditures dramatically. And instead of making it a sole American mission to keep international waterways safe, work with other navies in the world cooperatively, because we all share common interests in keeping international sea lanes safe.
Robinson
I believe you were in the UN Security Council in the lead up to the Iraq war.
Mahbubani
That's right, 2001-2002.
Robinson
Can you tell us a bit about that?
Mahbubani
Yes, you could see the tension building up in the Security Council because the United States was trying to pass a resolution to justify an invasion of Iraq, and it was very clear that Russia, China, Germany, and France thought it was a wrong decision. And frankly, if the United States had listened to its good friends, Germany and France, who said, you shouldn’t fight this war, you will lose a lot of money, and you will be worse off, the United States could have saved $3 trillion, and by the way, used it to develop the infrastructure of the United States and make it as gleaming as that of China. So why spend $3 trillion fighting an unnecessary war? And I’m surprised that no one has been held accountable for this unnecessary war. I should also mention that I’m making these points because I actually believe that the United States can become, once again, a very strong country. And the goal of all my prescriptions is not to weaken the United States, but to strengthen the United States and to make it a more effective actor in a complex world environment.
by Nathan J. Robinson and Kishore Mahbubani, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Pretty straightforward assessment, I think (there's more). As someone once said "You might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you!"]
Optical Glass House, Hiroshima Japan
from NAP Architects:
This house is sited among tall buildings in downtown Hiroshima, overlooking a street with many passing cars and trams. To obtain privacy and tranquility in these surroundings, we placed a garden and optical glass façade on the street side of the house.
The garden is visible from all rooms, and the serene soundless scenery of the passing cars and trams imparts richness to life in the house. Sunlight from the east, refracting through the glass, creates beautiful light patterns.
Rain striking the water-basin skylight manifests water patterns on the entrance floor. Filtered light through the garden trees flickers on the living room floor, and a super lightweight curtain of sputter-coated metal dances in the wind.
Although located downtown in a city, the house enables residents to enjoy the changing light and city moods, as the day passes, and live in awareness of the changing seasons.
Optical Glass Façade
A façade of some 6,000 pure-glass blocks (50mm x 235mm x 50mm) was employed. The pure-glass blocks, with their large mass-per-unit area, effectively shut out sound and enable the creation of an open, clearly articulated garden that admits the city scenery.
To realize such a façade, glass casting was employed to produce glass of extremely high transparency from borosilicate, the raw material for optical glass.
The casting process was exceedingly difficult, for it required both slow cooling to remove residual stress from within the glass, and high dimensional accuracy.
Even then, however, the glass retained micro-level surface asperities, but we actively welcomed this effect, for it would produce unexpected optical illusions in the interior space.
Waterfall
To realize such a façade, glass casting was employed to produce glass of extremely high transparency from borosilicate, the raw material for optical glass.
The casting process was exceedingly difficult, for it required both slow cooling to remove residual stress from within the glass, and high dimensional accuracy.
Even then, however, the glass retained micro-level surface asperities, but we actively welcomed this effect, for it would produce unexpected optical illusions in the interior space.
Waterfall
So large was the 8.6m x 8.6m façade, it could not stand independently if constructed by laying rows of glass blocks a mere 50mm deep. We therefore punctured the glass blocks with holes and strung them on 75 stainless steel bolts suspended from the beam above the façade.
Such a structure would be vulnerable to lateral stress, however, so along with the glass blocks, we also strung on stainless steel flat bars (40mm x 4mm) at 10 centimeter intervals.
The flat bar is seated within the 50mm-thick glass block to render it invisible, and thus a uniform 6mm sealing joint between the glass blocks was achieved. The result —a transparent façade when seen from either the garden or the street.
The façade appears like a waterfall flowing downward, scattering light and filling the air with freshness.
Captions
The glass block façade weighs around 13 tons. The supporting beam, if constructed of concrete, would therefore be of massive size. Employing steel frame reinforced concrete, we pre-tensioned the steel beam and gave it an upward camber.
Then, after giving it the load of the façade, we cast concrete around the beam and, in this way, minimized its size.”
Such a structure would be vulnerable to lateral stress, however, so along with the glass blocks, we also strung on stainless steel flat bars (40mm x 4mm) at 10 centimeter intervals.
The flat bar is seated within the 50mm-thick glass block to render it invisible, and thus a uniform 6mm sealing joint between the glass blocks was achieved. The result —a transparent façade when seen from either the garden or the street.
The façade appears like a waterfall flowing downward, scattering light and filling the air with freshness.
Captions
The glass block façade weighs around 13 tons. The supporting beam, if constructed of concrete, would therefore be of massive size. Employing steel frame reinforced concrete, we pre-tensioned the steel beam and gave it an upward camber.
Then, after giving it the load of the façade, we cast concrete around the beam and, in this way, minimized its size.”
by Karmatrends | Read more:
Images: NAP Architechs
[ed. See also: Optical Glass House, Hiroshima, Japan (Architectural Review).]
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
[ed. I can't recommend Bill Finnegan's surfing biography Barbarian Days highly enough, which among many other things, describes the awe (and fear) of discovering Nazaré for the first time.]
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