Friday, October 23, 2020
Imagining the End of Capitalism
An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of more than twenty books, including New York 2140, Red Moon, and the Mars trilogy. He talked to Jacobin about his latest work, his vision of socialism, and why we must fight to imagine the end of capitalism rather than the end of the world.
A speculative history of the next few decades, the novel revolves around an international ministry assembled to help implement the Paris climate agreement. The novel’s action spans the globe, featuring popular uprisings, ecoterrorism, asymmetrical warfare, student debt strikes, and geoengineering. Green New Deal–style programs in a number of the world’s biggest economies feature prominently — with a post-BJP India leading the way — and the commandeering of many of the world’s key central banks to finance the work toward a just transition off fossil fuels is explored.
This is the meat and potatoes of the long transition — that which has dismissively been called “a cookshop of the future.” But while it may not service as a political blueprint, it is undeniably fertile ground for a novel. And genre disregard for the subject matter has been to Robinson’s gain.
Looking backward from the mid-twenty-first century, The Ministry helps open our minds to a world in transition away from capitalism. Imagining is a necessary precondition for solving the ecological crisis of our times. It provides the pivot for leveraging the horizon of the possible. By envisioning possible routes forward, Robinson has done us an invaluable service.
Jacobin’s Derrick O’Keefe, a Vancouver-based organizer and writer, caught up with KSR to talk about politics, economics, climate change, sci-fi, and the journey from now to the future.
This past month, Vancouver, where I’m based, has had a few days with the worst air quality in the world, thanks to the smoke from the California and West Coast wildfires. This was an appropriate backdrop for reading The Ministry of the Future, which opens with a catastrophic weather event. That event, which takes place in India, helps trigger a wave of political change and climate action worldwide. Do you think it’s going to take something really extreme to trigger the changes we need?
KSR: I think we’re already there, with the pandemic and with the fires and hurricanes — the level of extremity has brought a sense of general awareness that something is going to have to be done, and the sooner the better. That said, I think we’re on the brink of even worse events happening, as the book makes clear. It’s been a memorable year, a traumatic year — so this may be a stimulus to the start of some changes.
I wanted to ask you about the now-famous quote attributed to Jameson, which is actually a bit of a paraphrase: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” It strikes me this book is coming out in a year when it’s become pretty easy to imagine the end of things, and that the real challenge is to imagine the beginnings of some kind of socialist system. As much as The Ministry is about the future, it suggests that those beginnings we need are already here with us now and that it’s really a matter of scaling up some of those alternatives.
KSR: I’m a novelist, I’m a literature major. I’m not thinking up these ideas, I’m listening to the world and grasping — sometimes at straws, sometimes just grasping at new ideas and seeing what everybody is seeing.
KSR: There is a polemic for sure. First, I would want to make a distinction between economics and political economy, because by and large, economics as it’s practiced now is the study of capitalism. It takes the axioms of capitalism as givens and then tries to work from those to various ameliorations and tweaks to the system that would make for a better capitalism, but they don’t question the fundamental axioms: everybody’s in it for themselves, everybody pursues their own self-interest, which will produce the best possible outcomes for everybody. These axioms are highly questionable, and they come out of the eighteenth century or are even older, and they don’t match with modern social science or history itself in terms of how we behave, and they don’t value the natural biosphere properly, and they tend to encourage short-term extractive gain and short-term interests. These are philosophical positions that are expressed as though they are fixed or are nature itself, when in reality they are made by culture.
Political economy is a kind of nineteenth-century thing, a more open-ended idea where we could have different systems. And that accounts for a lot of the struggles of the twentieth century. But capitalism likes to pretend that it’s nature itself, and that’s what economics is today, largely.
Take the term “efficiency.” In capitalist economics, that’s just regarded as almost a synonym for “good,” but it completely depends on what the efficiency is being aimed at. You know, machine guns are efficient, gas chambers are efficient. So, “efficiency” as such does not mean “good.” It is a measure of the least amount of effort put in for the most amount gotten out.
One of the things you’re seeing during the pandemic is that the global system of creating masks is efficient, but it is also fragile, brittle, and unreliable because redundancy, robustness, and resilience are all relatively inefficient, if the only rubric of efficiency is profit.
Capitalist economics misunderstands and misjudges the world badly, and that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in — caught between biosphere degradation and radical social inequality. These are both natural results of capitalism as such, a result of the economic calculations we make under capitalist axioms.
by Derrick O'Keefe, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: uncredited
***
The Ministry for the Future is Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest attempt to fill in a major gap in the utopian fiction tradition. Rarely dealing with the transitional phase toward a better and different society, speculative fiction of this type instead explores the final stages of a utopian experiment. The Ministry is an exception to this tendency.A speculative history of the next few decades, the novel revolves around an international ministry assembled to help implement the Paris climate agreement. The novel’s action spans the globe, featuring popular uprisings, ecoterrorism, asymmetrical warfare, student debt strikes, and geoengineering. Green New Deal–style programs in a number of the world’s biggest economies feature prominently — with a post-BJP India leading the way — and the commandeering of many of the world’s key central banks to finance the work toward a just transition off fossil fuels is explored.
Looking backward from the mid-twenty-first century, The Ministry helps open our minds to a world in transition away from capitalism. Imagining is a necessary precondition for solving the ecological crisis of our times. It provides the pivot for leveraging the horizon of the possible. By envisioning possible routes forward, Robinson has done us an invaluable service.
Jacobin’s Derrick O’Keefe, a Vancouver-based organizer and writer, caught up with KSR to talk about politics, economics, climate change, sci-fi, and the journey from now to the future.
This past month, Vancouver, where I’m based, has had a few days with the worst air quality in the world, thanks to the smoke from the California and West Coast wildfires. This was an appropriate backdrop for reading The Ministry of the Future, which opens with a catastrophic weather event. That event, which takes place in India, helps trigger a wave of political change and climate action worldwide. Do you think it’s going to take something really extreme to trigger the changes we need?
KSR: I think we’re already there, with the pandemic and with the fires and hurricanes — the level of extremity has brought a sense of general awareness that something is going to have to be done, and the sooner the better. That said, I think we’re on the brink of even worse events happening, as the book makes clear. It’s been a memorable year, a traumatic year — so this may be a stimulus to the start of some changes.
I wanted to ask you about the now-famous quote attributed to Jameson, which is actually a bit of a paraphrase: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” It strikes me this book is coming out in a year when it’s become pretty easy to imagine the end of things, and that the real challenge is to imagine the beginnings of some kind of socialist system. As much as The Ministry is about the future, it suggests that those beginnings we need are already here with us now and that it’s really a matter of scaling up some of those alternatives.
KSR: I’m a novelist, I’m a literature major. I’m not thinking up these ideas, I’m listening to the world and grasping — sometimes at straws, sometimes just grasping at new ideas and seeing what everybody is seeing.
If we could institute some of these good ideas, we could quickly shift from a capitalism to a post-capitalism that is more sustainable and more socialist, because so many of the obvious solutions are contained in the socialist program. And if we treated the biosphere as part of our extended body that needs to be attended to and taken care of, then things could get better fast, and there are already precursors that demonstrate this possibility.
I don’t think it’s possible to postulate a breakdown, or a revolution, to an entirely different system that would work without mass disruption and perhaps blowback failures, so it’s better to try to imagine a stepwise progression from what we’ve got now to a better system. And by the time we’re done — I mean, “done” is the wrong word — but by the end of the century, we might have a radically different system than the one we’ve got now. And this is kind of necessary if we’re going to survive without disaster. So, since it’s necessary, it might happen. And I’m always looking for the plausible models that already exist and imagining that they get ramped up. (...)
I don’t think it’s possible to postulate a breakdown, or a revolution, to an entirely different system that would work without mass disruption and perhaps blowback failures, so it’s better to try to imagine a stepwise progression from what we’ve got now to a better system. And by the time we’re done — I mean, “done” is the wrong word — but by the end of the century, we might have a radically different system than the one we’ve got now. And this is kind of necessary if we’re going to survive without disaster. So, since it’s necessary, it might happen. And I’m always looking for the plausible models that already exist and imagining that they get ramped up. (...)
Amidst and between all the action of The Ministry, there are some polemics carried out, is that fair to say? One recurrent polemic is against mainstream economics, a theme running throughout the book that there’s a need for new metrics and new indices both to quantify the biosphere and to express what we truly value rather than just GDP and the stock market.
KSR: There is a polemic for sure. First, I would want to make a distinction between economics and political economy, because by and large, economics as it’s practiced now is the study of capitalism. It takes the axioms of capitalism as givens and then tries to work from those to various ameliorations and tweaks to the system that would make for a better capitalism, but they don’t question the fundamental axioms: everybody’s in it for themselves, everybody pursues their own self-interest, which will produce the best possible outcomes for everybody. These axioms are highly questionable, and they come out of the eighteenth century or are even older, and they don’t match with modern social science or history itself in terms of how we behave, and they don’t value the natural biosphere properly, and they tend to encourage short-term extractive gain and short-term interests. These are philosophical positions that are expressed as though they are fixed or are nature itself, when in reality they are made by culture.
Political economy is a kind of nineteenth-century thing, a more open-ended idea where we could have different systems. And that accounts for a lot of the struggles of the twentieth century. But capitalism likes to pretend that it’s nature itself, and that’s what economics is today, largely.
Take the term “efficiency.” In capitalist economics, that’s just regarded as almost a synonym for “good,” but it completely depends on what the efficiency is being aimed at. You know, machine guns are efficient, gas chambers are efficient. So, “efficiency” as such does not mean “good.” It is a measure of the least amount of effort put in for the most amount gotten out.
One of the things you’re seeing during the pandemic is that the global system of creating masks is efficient, but it is also fragile, brittle, and unreliable because redundancy, robustness, and resilience are all relatively inefficient, if the only rubric of efficiency is profit.
Capitalist economics misunderstands and misjudges the world badly, and that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in — caught between biosphere degradation and radical social inequality. These are both natural results of capitalism as such, a result of the economic calculations we make under capitalist axioms.
by Derrick O'Keefe, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Paid Patriotism
The broadcast booth, like the press box, is always located in an elevated area of an arena or stadium.
And on Sunday, it allowed FOX’s Joe Buck and Troy Aikman the perfect vantage point to see just how ridiculous the NFL’s continued faux patriotism is, just weeks from Election Day.
There was a pregame military flyover before the Tampa Bay-Green Bay game, as if fighter pilots and football go together like baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie.
Aikman: That’s a lot of jet fuel just to do a little flyover.
Buck: That’s your hard-earned money and your tax dollars at work!
Aikman: That stuff ain’t happening with [a] Kamala-Biden ticket. I’ll tell you that right now, partner.
The comments were caught on a hot mic, and the off-the-cuff remarks point to a lie that the NFL has been trying to push down the throats of Americans for years. Because if the NFL was so patriotic, then they wouldn’t have accepted cash from the Defense Department to disperse to teams for the purpose of waving the stars and stripes around.
Besides 9/11 and the Super Bowl, teams weren’t even mandated to be on the field for the national anthem until 2009. But then, there was an initiative that included at least 14 NFL teams getting paid to put on “elaborate patriotic salutes” between 2011 and 2014.
Check this out from a 2017 article from ThinkProgress.com.
In 2016 – the year of Colin Kaepernick and Trump – it was reported that the NFL would pay back taxpayers more than $720,000 for the “paid patriotism” that the teams took from the military. At the time, Roger Goodell admitted that an audit discovered that $723,734 “may have been mistakenly applied to appreciation activities rather than recruitment efforts” in a four-season span.
by Carron J. Phillips, Deadspin | Read more:
Image: Getty
And on Sunday, it allowed FOX’s Joe Buck and Troy Aikman the perfect vantage point to see just how ridiculous the NFL’s continued faux patriotism is, just weeks from Election Day.
There was a pregame military flyover before the Tampa Bay-Green Bay game, as if fighter pilots and football go together like baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie.
Buck: That’s your hard-earned money and your tax dollars at work!
Aikman: That stuff ain’t happening with [a] Kamala-Biden ticket. I’ll tell you that right now, partner.
The comments were caught on a hot mic, and the off-the-cuff remarks point to a lie that the NFL has been trying to push down the throats of Americans for years. Because if the NFL was so patriotic, then they wouldn’t have accepted cash from the Defense Department to disperse to teams for the purpose of waving the stars and stripes around.
Besides 9/11 and the Super Bowl, teams weren’t even mandated to be on the field for the national anthem until 2009. But then, there was an initiative that included at least 14 NFL teams getting paid to put on “elaborate patriotic salutes” between 2011 and 2014.
Check this out from a 2017 article from ThinkProgress.com.
“Overall, the Defense Department spent at least $10.4 million on ‘marketing and advertising contracts with professional sports teams’ across the board between 2012 and 2015, although, the report noted, the department ‘[could not] accurately account’ for the full number of contracts and payouts it had awarded. ‘It only reported 62 percent (76 of 122) of its contracts and 70 percent ($7.3 million) of its spending in its response to our inquiry,” wrote Arizona Senators Jeff Flake(R) and John McCain (R).And they add this.
“Even with that disclosure, it is hard to understand how a team accepting taxpayer funds to sponsor a military appreciation game, or to recognize wounded warriors or returning troops, can be construed as anything other than paid patriotism.”And according to CNN, the Department of Defense spent $6.8 million on “paid patriotism” between 2012 and 2015 amongst 50 teams from the NBA, NFL, MLB, MLS, and NASCAR.
In 2016 – the year of Colin Kaepernick and Trump – it was reported that the NFL would pay back taxpayers more than $720,000 for the “paid patriotism” that the teams took from the military. At the time, Roger Goodell admitted that an audit discovered that $723,734 “may have been mistakenly applied to appreciation activities rather than recruitment efforts” in a four-season span.
by Carron J. Phillips, Deadspin | Read more:
Image: Getty
Thursday, October 22, 2020
Mute, Sweet Mute
Image: John Park
[ed. It's worth stopping for a moment and thinking - isn't it amazing that the upcoming Presidential debate has a mute function because the current occupant of the office might wingnut off at any time and try to dominate the airwaves with more lies and bombast? Dysfunction has become so normalized these days that this seems like a reasonable solution. We'll see.]
A Shift in How Some Conservatives Talk and Think About Abortion
“One of the things that I think has been different and has surprised me are the number of Christians, particularly Christian women, who are talking about abortion in a different way,” said Amy Sullivan, a journalist who has covered the intersection of politics and faith for the past 20 years.
Sullivan said she has noticed an “awakening” among Christian women who feel they have been “manipulated” by male leaders in their community.
Too often, Sullivan said, the abortion issue has been “a trap that makes them feel like they have to vote Republican.”
Some anti-abortion conservatives are deciding they don’t want to be trapped. They cite data that suggests the abortion rate has declined under Democratic presidents just as much as it has under Republicans, and is now lower than it was before the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, that made abortion legal.
And they argue that the broader set of Democratic policies — greater access to health care, and to birth control, comprehensive sex education, funding for foster care systems and a strong social safety net — reduces unwanted pregnancies more effectively than the GOP’s efforts do.
Image: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images
[ed. Predictable. Suddenly some people have a much more nuanced perspective on a lot of issues now that Trump appears to be losing. Where were they when this atrocity happened: Parents of 545 Children Separated at the Border Cannot Be Found (NYT).]
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Denver: Support Team Assistance Response Program
A concerned passerby dialed 911 to report a sobbing woman sitting alone on a curb in downtown Denver.
Instead of a police officer, dispatchers sent Carleigh Sailon, a seasoned mental health professional with a penchant for wearing Phish T-shirts, to see what was going on.
The woman, who was unhoused, was overwhelmed and scared. She’d ended up in an unfamiliar part of town. It was blazing hot and she didn’t know where to go. Sailon gave the woman a snack and some water and asked how she could help. Could she drive her somewhere? The woman was pleasantly surprised.
“She was like, ‘Who are you guys? And what is this?'” Sailon said, recounting the call.
This, Sailon explained, is Denver’s new Support Team Assistance Response program, which sends a mental health professional and a paramedic to some 911 calls instead of police.
Since its launch June 1, the STAR van has responded to more than 350 calls, replacing police in matters that don’t threaten public safety and are often connected to unmet mental or physical needs. The goal is to connect people who pose no danger with services and resources while freeing up police to respond to other calls. The team, which is not armed, has not called police for backup, Sailon said.
“We’re really trying to create true alternatives to us using police and jails,” said Vinnie Cervantes with Denver Alliance for Street Health Response, one of the organizations that helped start the program.
Though it had been years in the making, the program launched just four days after protests erupted in Denver calling for transformational changes to policing in response to the death of George Floyd. (...)
The team has responded to an indecent exposure call that turned out to be a woman changing clothes in an alley because she was unhoused and had no other private place to go. They’ve been called out to a trespassing call for a man who was setting up a tent near someone’s home. They’ve helped people experiencing suicidal thoughts, people slumped against a fence, people simply acting strange.
“It’s amazing how much stuff comes across 911 as the general, ‘I don’t know what to do, I guess I’ll call 911,’” Richardson said. “Someone sets up a tent? 911. I can’t find someone? 911.”
The city has touted the program, still in its pilot, as an example of progress as it is barraged with criticism during and after the protests.
“It’s the future of law enforcement, taking a public health view on public safety,” Denver police Chief Paul Pazen said. “We want to meet people where they are and address those needs and address those needs outside of the criminal justice system.”
Instead of a police officer, dispatchers sent Carleigh Sailon, a seasoned mental health professional with a penchant for wearing Phish T-shirts, to see what was going on.
The woman, who was unhoused, was overwhelmed and scared. She’d ended up in an unfamiliar part of town. It was blazing hot and she didn’t know where to go. Sailon gave the woman a snack and some water and asked how she could help. Could she drive her somewhere? The woman was pleasantly surprised.
This, Sailon explained, is Denver’s new Support Team Assistance Response program, which sends a mental health professional and a paramedic to some 911 calls instead of police.
Since its launch June 1, the STAR van has responded to more than 350 calls, replacing police in matters that don’t threaten public safety and are often connected to unmet mental or physical needs. The goal is to connect people who pose no danger with services and resources while freeing up police to respond to other calls. The team, which is not armed, has not called police for backup, Sailon said.
“We’re really trying to create true alternatives to us using police and jails,” said Vinnie Cervantes with Denver Alliance for Street Health Response, one of the organizations that helped start the program.
Though it had been years in the making, the program launched just four days after protests erupted in Denver calling for transformational changes to policing in response to the death of George Floyd. (...)
The team has responded to an indecent exposure call that turned out to be a woman changing clothes in an alley because she was unhoused and had no other private place to go. They’ve been called out to a trespassing call for a man who was setting up a tent near someone’s home. They’ve helped people experiencing suicidal thoughts, people slumped against a fence, people simply acting strange.
“It’s amazing how much stuff comes across 911 as the general, ‘I don’t know what to do, I guess I’ll call 911,’” Richardson said. “Someone sets up a tent? 911. I can’t find someone? 911.”
The city has touted the program, still in its pilot, as an example of progress as it is barraged with criticism during and after the protests.
“It’s the future of law enforcement, taking a public health view on public safety,” Denver police Chief Paul Pazen said. “We want to meet people where they are and address those needs and address those needs outside of the criminal justice system.”
by Elise Schmelzer, Denver Post | Read more:
Image: Rachel Ellis, The Denver Post[ed. See also: Unbundling the police: Why Are the Police in Charge of Road Safety? (Marginal Revolution). To which I'd add, why are police officers directing traffic around road construction projects. Additionally, see: Seattle's LEAD program: here and here.]
Stephen Stills
Empire of Emperors
What Is China, and Why You Should Worry About It: An excerpt from David Goldman’s new book: ‘You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World’
Lyndon Johnson apocryphally told Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that it was hard to be president of three hundred million Americans. She replied, “It’s harder to be prime minister of three million prime ministers.” Xi Jinping might add that it is even harder to be the emperor of 1.4 billion emperors. We tend to think of the West as individualistic and China as collectivist. In some ways that’s true, but the notion can also be misleading. As individuals, the Chinese are the most ambitious people in the world. Ambition is the sinew that holds together the sprawling, multi-ethnic, polylingual empire that China has been since its founding. For 5,000 years, China’s ambition has been constrained by the limits of nature. The great flood plains of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers supported a larger population at higher living standards than any other part of the pre-modern world. But China’s riparian civilization was also fragile, subject to periodic drought, famine, and flood, leading to civil unrest, barbarian invasion, and prolonged periods of chaos.
All this compelled China to turn inward. Its forays into the broader world were brief and abortive. No more; China can feed itself and control natural disasters. It has turned outward to the world and is seeking its place in the sun. This is a grand turning point in world history. For most of the past five thousand years, China has been the world’s most populous and wealthiest civilization in the world, but largely indifferent to events outside its borders. Now its ambitions are turned outward. Its 2,500-year-old system of elite formation now embraces the ten million students who take the annual college entrance exam. It has absorbed tens of thousands of the best Western scientists and engineers into its project for technological dominance, above all through Huawei, its bridgehead in the world market. And it proposes to extend its imperial principle of assimilation through infrastructure to the whole of the Eurasian continent, through the Belt and Road Initiative.
Western observers often attempt to draw a bright line between the good Chinese people and the nasty Chinese government. That is an unsubtle form of condescension, and wholly misguided. The character of China’s state is shaped by the ambitions of the Chinese people. Sadly, the distinction between “good people” and “bad state” is a misjudgment on which America’s China hawks and China doves agree. Since the late Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping introduced market reforms in 1979, the liberal foreign policy establishment has argued that economic liberalization inevitably would lead to political liberalization. That didn’t happen. The China hawks argue that the Chinese people will rise up and overthrow their Communist overlords if the United States applies sufficient pressure, by placing tariffs on Chinese imports to the United States. That won’t happen, either.
The Liberal Illusion That Prosperity Promotes Political Reform
China doves promised that China’s economic success inevitably would lead to political reforms. Prominent among them is former Goldman Sachs President John L. Thornton, now a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing and chairman of the board of trustees at the Brookings Institution, Washington’s oldest and best-funded think tank. In 2009, Thornton told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China that China was making progress towards democracy:
American hawks have argued that the Chinese political system is fragile and that the Communist Party can be toppled by outside pressure. Prominent among them is Gordon Chang, whose book The Coming Collapse of China appeared in its first edition in 2001. “The People’s Republic is a paper dragon,” Chang argued. “Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao’s death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of society.” That was 18 years ago. In the meantime China’s per capita GDP has quintupled. Chang continues to provide newspaper and television commentary predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese system.
Hawks and doves are both wrong because they share the same false premise: For a society to succeed, they both believe, it must look and act like the United States of America. The doves thought that China would evolve into something like a Western democracy and succeed, while the hawks thought China would remain authoritarian and collapse. In fact, China remained authoritarian and deepened its economic success. Hawks and doves suffer from a sort of narcissism. They cannot conceive that a society so radically different from ours can flourish.
China Is in a Golden Age
But China has flourished. As Francesco Sisci observes, China is in a Golden Age, the first time in history that no one need fear going hungry. Since 1986, household consumption in China has risen seventeen-fold—that is, 1,700%. That isn’t a fabrication of Communist Party statisticians. Chinese now in their thirties, spent their early childhood in homes with dirt floors and outhouses. They now live in newly built apartments with central heating, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing. In 1986, just 3% of Chinese had access to universities or professional schools. That proportion grew to 50% by 2017. One-third of new labor force entrants have university degrees, and one-third of those are engineers. The Chinese buy 400 million smartphones a year and 25 million automobiles. Chinese commute to work in Shanghai on high-speed trains that reduce the distance from Wilmington to New York City to a 45-minute interval. We will take a closer look at China’s economy in another chapter.
We have to stop viewing China through a half-silvered mirror that reflects our own image back at us, and understand China on its own terms. It isn’t a pleasant picture, but we need to take a hard look at it.
Lyndon Johnson apocryphally told Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that it was hard to be president of three hundred million Americans. She replied, “It’s harder to be prime minister of three million prime ministers.” Xi Jinping might add that it is even harder to be the emperor of 1.4 billion emperors. We tend to think of the West as individualistic and China as collectivist. In some ways that’s true, but the notion can also be misleading. As individuals, the Chinese are the most ambitious people in the world. Ambition is the sinew that holds together the sprawling, multi-ethnic, polylingual empire that China has been since its founding. For 5,000 years, China’s ambition has been constrained by the limits of nature. The great flood plains of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers supported a larger population at higher living standards than any other part of the pre-modern world. But China’s riparian civilization was also fragile, subject to periodic drought, famine, and flood, leading to civil unrest, barbarian invasion, and prolonged periods of chaos.
Western observers often attempt to draw a bright line between the good Chinese people and the nasty Chinese government. That is an unsubtle form of condescension, and wholly misguided. The character of China’s state is shaped by the ambitions of the Chinese people. Sadly, the distinction between “good people” and “bad state” is a misjudgment on which America’s China hawks and China doves agree. Since the late Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping introduced market reforms in 1979, the liberal foreign policy establishment has argued that economic liberalization inevitably would lead to political liberalization. That didn’t happen. The China hawks argue that the Chinese people will rise up and overthrow their Communist overlords if the United States applies sufficient pressure, by placing tariffs on Chinese imports to the United States. That won’t happen, either.
The Liberal Illusion That Prosperity Promotes Political Reform
China doves promised that China’s economic success inevitably would lead to political reforms. Prominent among them is former Goldman Sachs President John L. Thornton, now a professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing and chairman of the board of trustees at the Brookings Institution, Washington’s oldest and best-funded think tank. In 2009, Thornton told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China that China was making progress towards democracy:
Premier Wen Jiabao consistently advocates for the universal values of democracy. He has defined democracy in largely the same way as many in the West would. “When we talk about democracy,” Premier Wen said, “We usually refer to the three most important components: elections, judicial independence, and supervision based on checks and balances.”China remains quite as authoritarian as ever it was, and technology has vastly increased the ability of its government to monitor and control the details of everyday life. The government of China knows where every smartphone is at all times, and can verify that it is carried by its registered owner through a vast network of facial recognition cameras. Soon it will require Chinese citizens to log on to the internet through facial recognition to police the online activity of the whole of society.
Premier Wen’s emphasis on universal values of democracy reflects new thinking in the liberal wing of the Chinese political establishment. He likely represents a minority view in the Chinese leadership, but like many other ideas in China during the past three decades, what begins as a minority view may gradually and eventually be accepted by the majority.
Now let me move to the second issue: New and far-reaching economic and socio-political forces in present-day China. Let me briefly mention three such forces, the first is the new and ever-growing middle class, the second is the commercialization and increasing diversity of the media, and the third is the rise of civil society groups and lawyers. These new players are better equipped to seek political participation than the Chinese citizens of 30 years ago …
Political participation through institutional means remains very limited. Yet, the ongoing political and intellectual discourse about democracy in the country, the existence of a middle class, commercialization of the media, the rise of civil society groups, the development of the legal profession, and checks and balances within the leadership are all important, contributing factors for democratic change in any society. In all these aspects, China is making significant progress.
American hawks have argued that the Chinese political system is fragile and that the Communist Party can be toppled by outside pressure. Prominent among them is Gordon Chang, whose book The Coming Collapse of China appeared in its first edition in 2001. “The People’s Republic is a paper dragon,” Chang argued. “Peer beneath the veneer of modernization since Mao’s death, and the symptoms of decay are everywhere: Deflation grips the economy, state-owned enterprises are failing, banks are hopelessly insolvent, foreign investment continues to decline, and Communist party corruption eats away at the fabric of society.” That was 18 years ago. In the meantime China’s per capita GDP has quintupled. Chang continues to provide newspaper and television commentary predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese system.
Hawks and doves are both wrong because they share the same false premise: For a society to succeed, they both believe, it must look and act like the United States of America. The doves thought that China would evolve into something like a Western democracy and succeed, while the hawks thought China would remain authoritarian and collapse. In fact, China remained authoritarian and deepened its economic success. Hawks and doves suffer from a sort of narcissism. They cannot conceive that a society so radically different from ours can flourish.
China Is in a Golden Age
But China has flourished. As Francesco Sisci observes, China is in a Golden Age, the first time in history that no one need fear going hungry. Since 1986, household consumption in China has risen seventeen-fold—that is, 1,700%. That isn’t a fabrication of Communist Party statisticians. Chinese now in their thirties, spent their early childhood in homes with dirt floors and outhouses. They now live in newly built apartments with central heating, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing. In 1986, just 3% of Chinese had access to universities or professional schools. That proportion grew to 50% by 2017. One-third of new labor force entrants have university degrees, and one-third of those are engineers. The Chinese buy 400 million smartphones a year and 25 million automobiles. Chinese commute to work in Shanghai on high-speed trains that reduce the distance from Wilmington to New York City to a 45-minute interval. We will take a closer look at China’s economy in another chapter.
We have to stop viewing China through a half-silvered mirror that reflects our own image back at us, and understand China on its own terms. It isn’t a pleasant picture, but we need to take a hard look at it.
by David P. Goldman, Tablet | Read more:
Image: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty
An Easy Way To Remember the High Point of Any Trip? Set It To Music
I was watching zebras drink from a watering hole in the Rwandan wilderness when I turned to my safari guide and asked him to play me his favorite song.
Wherever I go, I collect “song souvenirs.” On one level, it’s an easy way to find common ground with people from other places, but the practice also never fails to firmly embed a place in my mind. Science backs me up, too: A 2015 study published in the neurology journal Brain found that musical memories are so strong, they can even be preserved in patients with advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
On this day, though, I also wanted to lighten the mood. Between sightings in Akagera National Park, my guide, Johnston Mbanzamihigo, had been telling me about his time fighting in the Rwandan Patriotic Front against the perpetrators of the country’s 1994 genocide.
He opened his phone and cued up Ntawamusimbura, a sentimental track sung in Kinyarwanda by the local singer Meddy. It has a lightly autotuned but vulnerable Ed Sheeran-like vibe; the title means “No one can replace her,” Mbanzamihigo translated. As he closed his eyes and swayed with his arms outstretched, I joined him, knowing that every time I heard this song later, it would transport me straight back to this moment on the savanna.
by Jennifer Flowers, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Marc Majewski
Research Finds Few Links Between School and COVID Cases
Despite widespread concerns, two new international studies show no consistent relationship between in-person K-12 schooling and the spread of coronavirus. And a third study from the United States shows no elevated risk to childcare workers who stayed on the job.
Combined with anecdotal reports from a number of U.S. states where schools are open, as well as a crowdsourced dashboard of around 2000 U.S. schools, some medical experts are saying it's time to shift the discussion from the risks of opening K-12 schools to the risks of keeping them closed.
"As a pediatrician, I am really seeing the negative impacts of these school closures on children," Dr. Danielle Dooley, a medical director at Children's National Hospital in Washington, D.C., told NPR. She ticked off mental health problems, hunger, obesity due to inactivity, missing routine medical care and the risk of child abuse — on top of the loss of education. "Going to school is really vital for children. They get their meals in school, their physical activity, their health care, their education, of course."
While agreeing that emerging data is encouraging, other experts said the United States as a whole has made little progress toward practices that would allow schools to make reopening safer — from rapid and regular testing, to contact tracing to identify the source of outbreaks, to reporting school-associated cases publicly, regularly and consistently.
"We are driving with the headlights off, and we've got kids in the car," said Melinda Buntin, chair of the Department of Health Policy at Vanderbilt School of Medicine, who has argued for reopening schools with precautions.
Emerging evidence
Enric Álvarez at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya looked at different regions within Spain for his recent co-authored working paper. Spain's second wave of coronavirus cases started before the school year began in September. Still, cases in one region dropped three weeks after schools reopened, while others continued rising at the same rate as before, and one stayed flat.
Nowhere, the research found, was there a spike that coincided with reopening: "What we found is that the school [being opened] makes absolutely no difference," Álvarez told NPR.
Spain does extensive contact tracing, so Álvarez was also able to analyze how much schools are contributing to the spread of COVID-19. Álvarez said his research suggests the answer is: Not much. He found that, for all the students and staff who tested positive, 87% of them did not infect anyone else at the school. They were single cases.
"We are not sure that the environments of the schools may not have a small and systematic effect," said Álvarez, "But it's pretty clear that they don't have very major epidemic-changing effects, at least in Spain, with the measures that are being taken in Spain."
These safety measures include mask-wearing for all children over 6, ventilation, keeping students in small groups or "bubbles," and social distancing of 1.5 meters — slightly less than the recommended 6 feet in the United States. When a case is detected, the entire "bubble" is sent home for quarantine. (...)
What about the U.S.?
On Oct. 14, the Infectious Diseases Society of America gave a briefing on safe school reopenings. Bottom line? "The data so far are not indicating that schools are a superspreader site," said Dr. Preeti Malani, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Michigan's medical school.
One place in the U.S. where systematic data gathering is happening — Utah — seems to echo the conclusions drawn by the new international studies. Utah's state COVID database clearly reports school-associated cases by district. And while coronavirus spread is relatively high in the state, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Sydnee Dickson believes that schools are not, for the most part, driving spread.
"Where you see cases on the rise in a neighborhood, in a county, we see that tend to be reflected in a school," Dickson said. "[But] we're not seeing spread by virtue of being in school together."
Combined with anecdotal reports from a number of U.S. states where schools are open, as well as a crowdsourced dashboard of around 2000 U.S. schools, some medical experts are saying it's time to shift the discussion from the risks of opening K-12 schools to the risks of keeping them closed.
While agreeing that emerging data is encouraging, other experts said the United States as a whole has made little progress toward practices that would allow schools to make reopening safer — from rapid and regular testing, to contact tracing to identify the source of outbreaks, to reporting school-associated cases publicly, regularly and consistently.
"We are driving with the headlights off, and we've got kids in the car," said Melinda Buntin, chair of the Department of Health Policy at Vanderbilt School of Medicine, who has argued for reopening schools with precautions.
Emerging evidence
Enric Álvarez at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya looked at different regions within Spain for his recent co-authored working paper. Spain's second wave of coronavirus cases started before the school year began in September. Still, cases in one region dropped three weeks after schools reopened, while others continued rising at the same rate as before, and one stayed flat.
Nowhere, the research found, was there a spike that coincided with reopening: "What we found is that the school [being opened] makes absolutely no difference," Álvarez told NPR.
Spain does extensive contact tracing, so Álvarez was also able to analyze how much schools are contributing to the spread of COVID-19. Álvarez said his research suggests the answer is: Not much. He found that, for all the students and staff who tested positive, 87% of them did not infect anyone else at the school. They were single cases.
"We are not sure that the environments of the schools may not have a small and systematic effect," said Álvarez, "But it's pretty clear that they don't have very major epidemic-changing effects, at least in Spain, with the measures that are being taken in Spain."
These safety measures include mask-wearing for all children over 6, ventilation, keeping students in small groups or "bubbles," and social distancing of 1.5 meters — slightly less than the recommended 6 feet in the United States. When a case is detected, the entire "bubble" is sent home for quarantine. (...)
What about the U.S.?
On Oct. 14, the Infectious Diseases Society of America gave a briefing on safe school reopenings. Bottom line? "The data so far are not indicating that schools are a superspreader site," said Dr. Preeti Malani, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Michigan's medical school.
One place in the U.S. where systematic data gathering is happening — Utah — seems to echo the conclusions drawn by the new international studies. Utah's state COVID database clearly reports school-associated cases by district. And while coronavirus spread is relatively high in the state, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Sydnee Dickson believes that schools are not, for the most part, driving spread.
"Where you see cases on the rise in a neighborhood, in a county, we see that tend to be reflected in a school," Dickson said. "[But] we're not seeing spread by virtue of being in school together."
by Anya Kamenetz, NPR | Read more:
Image: Alvaro Barrientos/AP
Monday, October 19, 2020
We Need a New Science of Progress
In 1861, the American scientist and educator William Barton Rogers published a manifesto calling for a new kind of research institution. Recognizing the “daily increasing proofs of the happy influence of scientific culture on the industry and the civilization of the nations,” and the growing importance of what he called “Industrial Arts,” he proposed a new organization dedicated to practical knowledge. He named it the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Rogers was one of a number of late-19th-century reformers who saw that the United States’ ability to generate progress could be substantially improved. These reformers looked to the successes of the German university models overseas and realized that a combination of focused professorial research and teaching could be a powerful engine for advance in research. Over the course of several decades, the group—Rogers, Charles Eliot, Henry Tappan, George Hale, John D. Rockefeller, and others—founded and restructured many of what are now America’s best universities, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and more. By acting on their understanding, they engaged in a kind of conscious “progress engineering.”
Progress itself is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of “Progress Studies.”
Before digging into what Progress Studies would entail, it’s worth noting that we still need a lot of progress. We haven’t yet cured all diseases; we don’t yet know how to solve climate change; we’re still a very long way from enabling most of the world’s population to live as comfortably as the wealthiest people do today; we don’t yet understand how best to predict or mitigate all kinds of natural disasters; we aren’t yet able to travel as cheaply and quickly as we’d like; we could be far better than we are at educating young people. The list of opportunities for improvement is still extremely long.
Those are major challenges. A lot of progress can also come from smaller advances: Thousands of lesser improvements that together build upon one another can together represent an enormous advance for society. For example, if our discoveries and inventions improve standards of living by 1 percent a year, children will by adulthood be 35 percent better off than their parents. If they improve livelihoods at 3 percent a year, those same children will grow up to be about 2.5 times better off.
Whether viewed in terms of large or small improvements, progress matters a lot.
Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past. In antiquity, the ancient Greeks were discoverers of everything from the arch bridge to the spherical earth. By 1100, the successful pursuit of new knowledge was probably most concentrated in parts of China and the Middle East. Along the cultural dimension, the artists of Renaissance Florence enriched the heritage of all humankind, and in the process created the masterworks that are still the lifeblood of the local economy. The late 18th and early 19th century saw a burst of progress in Northern England, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In each case, the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort. Present-day instances include places like Silicon Valley in software and Switzerland’s Basel region in life sciences.
These kinds of examples show that there can be ecosystems that are better at generating progress than others, perhaps by orders of magnitude. But what do they have in common? Just how productive can a cultural ecosystem be? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was early-20th-century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong? Can we deliberately engineer the conditions most hospitable to this kind of advancement or effectively tweak the systems that surround us today?
This is exactly what Progress Studies would investigate. It would consider the problem as broadly as possible. It would study the successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures that have arisen to date, and it would attempt to concoct policies and prescriptions that would help improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future.
Along these lines, the world would benefit from an organized effort to understand how we should identify and train brilliant young people, how the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas, which incentives should exist for all sorts of participants in innovative ecosystems (including scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers), how much different organizations differ in productivity (and the drivers of those differences), how scientists should be selected and funded, and many other related issues besides.
Plenty of existing scholarship touches on these topics, but it takes place in a highly fragmented fashion and fails to directly confront some of the most important practical questions.
by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, The Atlantic | Read more:
Rogers was one of a number of late-19th-century reformers who saw that the United States’ ability to generate progress could be substantially improved. These reformers looked to the successes of the German university models overseas and realized that a combination of focused professorial research and teaching could be a powerful engine for advance in research. Over the course of several decades, the group—Rogers, Charles Eliot, Henry Tappan, George Hale, John D. Rockefeller, and others—founded and restructured many of what are now America’s best universities, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and more. By acting on their understanding, they engaged in a kind of conscious “progress engineering.”
Before digging into what Progress Studies would entail, it’s worth noting that we still need a lot of progress. We haven’t yet cured all diseases; we don’t yet know how to solve climate change; we’re still a very long way from enabling most of the world’s population to live as comfortably as the wealthiest people do today; we don’t yet understand how best to predict or mitigate all kinds of natural disasters; we aren’t yet able to travel as cheaply and quickly as we’d like; we could be far better than we are at educating young people. The list of opportunities for improvement is still extremely long.
Those are major challenges. A lot of progress can also come from smaller advances: Thousands of lesser improvements that together build upon one another can together represent an enormous advance for society. For example, if our discoveries and inventions improve standards of living by 1 percent a year, children will by adulthood be 35 percent better off than their parents. If they improve livelihoods at 3 percent a year, those same children will grow up to be about 2.5 times better off.
Whether viewed in terms of large or small improvements, progress matters a lot.
Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past. In antiquity, the ancient Greeks were discoverers of everything from the arch bridge to the spherical earth. By 1100, the successful pursuit of new knowledge was probably most concentrated in parts of China and the Middle East. Along the cultural dimension, the artists of Renaissance Florence enriched the heritage of all humankind, and in the process created the masterworks that are still the lifeblood of the local economy. The late 18th and early 19th century saw a burst of progress in Northern England, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In each case, the discoveries that came to elevate standards of living for everyone arose in comparatively tiny geographic pockets of innovative effort. Present-day instances include places like Silicon Valley in software and Switzerland’s Basel region in life sciences.
These kinds of examples show that there can be ecosystems that are better at generating progress than others, perhaps by orders of magnitude. But what do they have in common? Just how productive can a cultural ecosystem be? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was early-20th-century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong? Can we deliberately engineer the conditions most hospitable to this kind of advancement or effectively tweak the systems that surround us today?
This is exactly what Progress Studies would investigate. It would consider the problem as broadly as possible. It would study the successful people, organizations, institutions, policies, and cultures that have arisen to date, and it would attempt to concoct policies and prescriptions that would help improve our ability to generate useful progress in the future.
Along these lines, the world would benefit from an organized effort to understand how we should identify and train brilliant young people, how the most effective small groups exchange and share ideas, which incentives should exist for all sorts of participants in innovative ecosystems (including scientists, entrepreneurs, managers, and engineers), how much different organizations differ in productivity (and the drivers of those differences), how scientists should be selected and funded, and many other related issues besides.
Plenty of existing scholarship touches on these topics, but it takes place in a highly fragmented fashion and fails to directly confront some of the most important practical questions.
by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Harry Todd/Hulton Archive/Getty
[ed. See also: America’s Toxic Love Affair With Technology (The Atlantic).]
The Fifth Meditation on Creepiness
As far as I know there aren't a lot of areas where feminists and pickup artists are natural allies, but I can think of one person they would both despise equally. And he has a special place in my heart.
I can't quite remember his name and Google doesn't help, but let's call him al-Fulani. al-Fulani was a classical Islamic poet. When he was a young man traveling the world, he stopped by an oasis town to gather water for his camel and there he passed by a young woman. They exchanged a Significant Look, but said nothing to one another, and in the morning he left the oasis and never saw her again. But he was so impressed by her beauty that he spent the rest of his life composing poems to and about her, which according to the story I heard became among the most exquisite works of Arabic literature even though Google turns up exactly zero of them and maybe I dreamt this entire thing.
The pickup artists would call this "one-itis" and say he had no "game" since he was obsessing over this one woman instead of "playing the field". The feminists would say he was a "rape-y creep". And actually, they're both right. al-Fulani's behavior was neither a healthy way to satisfy his own needs nor fair to the poor woman he fixated on. Rationally it's stupid and horrible. Rationally Dante was stupid and horrible for fixating on Beatrice, Romeo was stupid and horrible for fixating on Juliet, and pretty much every love affair in literature up until the 20th century when people switched to writing books where antiheros slept with a bunch of women but never felt anything for any of them until finally they Developed Ennui - rationally all those love affairs were stupid and horrible. They assume that romantic attraction by some crazy form of magic.
But sometimes the magic works. The first time future President Lyndon Johnson met Lady Bird he asked her out on a fancy date; she was shocked at the presumptousness but accepted, later saying she felt "drawn to him like a moth to a flame". On that first date, less than twenty-four hours after they met, he proposed marriage to her. When she said 'of course not are you crazy' he started calling her and writing letters to her practically nonstop; ten weeks later she finally agreed. LBJ tried to insist the wedding occur that same day; Lady Bird managed to bargain him down to "tomorrow". They were married the next day and then had a perfect idyllic relationship that lasted the next forty years until LBJ's death.
I am friends with several married people like LBJ. Sometimes both spouses just knew from the moment they saw each other that it was meant to be. Sometimes only one of them did, and certain amounts of pestering and wooing and opinion-changing were necessary. Sometimes those certain amounts were very high. Most of these couples tend to be older people. A few are my age but conservative Christians. A few are neither old nor old-fashioned but just awesome people.
I am also friends with Normal Proper People. If LBJ or his female equivalent tried to propose to them on the first date, they'd scream at him to get the hell away from them, then post about it on a "What Was Your Worst First Date Ever?" thread on Reddit. Then they'd go to a party, get drunk, make out with someone on the couch, realize a few weeks later that they were kind of sort of dating them and might as well continue, and after two to four years of "going steady" they'd get married because that's what you do after dating someone for two to four years. A few years later, they would have an affair with their personal trainer who was younger and better-looking. Plus or minus a marriage and personal trainer affair, these seem to be the majority of the people my age whom I know.
And what got me thinking about this was a comment on that Less Wrong thread that got me thinking about this whole gender thing to begin with. I want to make it clear I am not mocking or criticizing this comment and that it is a perfectly rational way to behave and actually much more rational than the way I am behaving. It says:
I can't quite remember his name and Google doesn't help, but let's call him al-Fulani. al-Fulani was a classical Islamic poet. When he was a young man traveling the world, he stopped by an oasis town to gather water for his camel and there he passed by a young woman. They exchanged a Significant Look, but said nothing to one another, and in the morning he left the oasis and never saw her again. But he was so impressed by her beauty that he spent the rest of his life composing poems to and about her, which according to the story I heard became among the most exquisite works of Arabic literature even though Google turns up exactly zero of them and maybe I dreamt this entire thing.
The pickup artists would call this "one-itis" and say he had no "game" since he was obsessing over this one woman instead of "playing the field". The feminists would say he was a "rape-y creep". And actually, they're both right. al-Fulani's behavior was neither a healthy way to satisfy his own needs nor fair to the poor woman he fixated on. Rationally it's stupid and horrible. Rationally Dante was stupid and horrible for fixating on Beatrice, Romeo was stupid and horrible for fixating on Juliet, and pretty much every love affair in literature up until the 20th century when people switched to writing books where antiheros slept with a bunch of women but never felt anything for any of them until finally they Developed Ennui - rationally all those love affairs were stupid and horrible. They assume that romantic attraction by some crazy form of magic.
But sometimes the magic works. The first time future President Lyndon Johnson met Lady Bird he asked her out on a fancy date; she was shocked at the presumptousness but accepted, later saying she felt "drawn to him like a moth to a flame". On that first date, less than twenty-four hours after they met, he proposed marriage to her. When she said 'of course not are you crazy' he started calling her and writing letters to her practically nonstop; ten weeks later she finally agreed. LBJ tried to insist the wedding occur that same day; Lady Bird managed to bargain him down to "tomorrow". They were married the next day and then had a perfect idyllic relationship that lasted the next forty years until LBJ's death.
I am friends with several married people like LBJ. Sometimes both spouses just knew from the moment they saw each other that it was meant to be. Sometimes only one of them did, and certain amounts of pestering and wooing and opinion-changing were necessary. Sometimes those certain amounts were very high. Most of these couples tend to be older people. A few are my age but conservative Christians. A few are neither old nor old-fashioned but just awesome people.
I am also friends with Normal Proper People. If LBJ or his female equivalent tried to propose to them on the first date, they'd scream at him to get the hell away from them, then post about it on a "What Was Your Worst First Date Ever?" thread on Reddit. Then they'd go to a party, get drunk, make out with someone on the couch, realize a few weeks later that they were kind of sort of dating them and might as well continue, and after two to four years of "going steady" they'd get married because that's what you do after dating someone for two to four years. A few years later, they would have an affair with their personal trainer who was younger and better-looking. Plus or minus a marriage and personal trainer affair, these seem to be the majority of the people my age whom I know.
And what got me thinking about this was a comment on that Less Wrong thread that got me thinking about this whole gender thing to begin with. I want to make it clear I am not mocking or criticizing this comment and that it is a perfectly rational way to behave and actually much more rational than the way I am behaving. It says:
Actually, I have run into enough guys who treat me like I'm the last woman on earth because I'm a female nerd that I've developed an aversion to anything resembling that type of behavior. I was understanding about their enthusiasm at first, because I want a nerd, too, but it just doesn't work to date someone when they're acting like you're their last chance. They want to move too fast, they create expectations, they become biased and won't hear me when I talk about things that may be incompatibilities. That intensity throws a wrench into the process of getting to know someone. I grok their sense of necessity about being careful in how they present themselves, and I approve of this thread (There are a lot of things I wish I could say to guys - we need to communicate, and I have been wishing for an opportunity to do that), but on the individual level, I am easily spooked by signs of early attachment, overly optimistic probability estimates about us working out, and impatience to see signs of an established connection. I go on the alert for these signs of irrationality if a person treats me "like a celebrity" or similar.
I am pretty sure I have never met this particular woman, but I have certainly been the kind of guy she is talking about. I used to operate through Burning Life-Consuming Crushes, usually initiated in the first few days I met someone, and if I'd had LBJ's courage and awesomeness I would have asked any one of them to marry me and totally gone through with it if they said yes. Oddly enough (or not, if you've read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink or the more reputable studies in the same genres) these first impressions were almost always correct, I found these people to be physically and mentally and emotionally compatible with me, I became good friends with most of them, and quite honestly I would probably still marry some of them after a few minutes' thought if they asked me tomorrow.
Eventually I was socialized into the Correct Way To Feel Attraction, which is "Huh, I guess this girl is pretty cute. I'll invite her out, and if she says no, then no big deal because that girl there is pretty cute too." This is what happened with my first girlfriend. She was a wonderful woman and I have nothing whatsoever bad to say about her, but I asked her out kind of knowing that the relationship would be enjoyable and then fizzle out, and sure enough the relationship was enjoyable and then fizzled out. This was probably exactly why she was my first girlfriend: it gave me the non-desperate-looking-ness that helped me seem attractive to her.
So this seems to be another Rule of Intergender Communication like the two I mentioned in the last post: "Don't come on too strong".
But if women make a policy of excluding guys who show strong feelings for them, then logically they will end up with either guys who have only a vague and temporary preference for them, or Machiavellian liars.
I've tried the Machiavellian liar routine a few times myself. "Oh, hey, you're Jennifer or Jessica or Julia or whatever, right? I appear to have totally by coincidence ended up at this table with you. Anyway, you seem kind of okay. Want to go out to dinner sometime? Saturday's no good because I have things to do that night." Meanwhile in my head I'm going over what we're going to name our children.
It's pretty hard to maintain and it's also really unpleasant and it also makes me feel like a horrible person and it also means that if I ever do get into a relationship with Jennifer or Jessica it will be based on deception and lies and probably continue that way ("It's our six month anniversary! Can I get her the beautiful personalized gift that will make her super-happy and so make me super-happy as a result, or would that be creepy and I should just get her some crappy half-dead flowers instead?"). Even if I pull it off, I will be doing an imperfect simulation of what a guy who really doesn't care much for her could do perfectly, and so I will be strictly inferior to him.
Probably most men know they can't manage it, don't even try, and end up independently re-inventing the courtly love tradition: admiring an unattainable woman from afar and showering her with presents as an expression of their transcendent yet hopeless love. Or, as we moderns call it, being a Nice Guy (TM) and therefore Worse Than Hitler (TM).
So I think these filters work and people who have a policy of rejecting suitors who really deeply desire them in a way that makes them not interchangeable with the next "prospect" to come along - they will, in fact, successfully eliminate suitors who really deeply desire them and consider them non-interchangeable. And then ten years later one night in bed they ask their personal trainer why their husband or wife is so frigid.
I know that the Official Narrative is that you're supposed to not get too obsessed with someone until you've been in a relationship with them a while, and you ask them out when you just have a vague preference for them but later you warm up to them and after a few months or years you're genuinely in love and then you can do all the stuff I want to do immediately like write them sonnets and sestinas and maybe some ruba'iyat.
But the Official Narrative doesn't take into account that actually when I like someone my brain tells me right away and goes into Full Obsession Mode. Maybe there are people who don't work like that. Maybe they're the ones who write Official Narratives, while the rest of us are wasting our time writing sestinas and exquisite works of Arabic literature.
Now, don't get me wrong. I know that True Love is really inconvenient. It might not be requited, and then it would be a huge mess and no one would have any idea what to do, because our culture tells us that True Love Must Always Conquer Everything. If some woman I didn't like expressed True Love for me, it would make me feel guilty and horrible.
And because I'm just as susceptible to the Just World Fallacy as anyone else, I would tell them it wasn't true love at all but just plain Creepiness. And that it makes her a bad person and she should be ashamed of herself and so rejecting her is not only okay but actively heroic. And all my neighbors would support me in this, because we all know that True Love is the most powerful thing in the universe, even more powerful than nuclear weapons, and so we can't just let random people go around having it any more than we would just let random people have the Bomb.
But when we reach the point where letting it slip that you love someone is pretty much social suicide, that's...not good.
Eventually I was socialized into the Correct Way To Feel Attraction, which is "Huh, I guess this girl is pretty cute. I'll invite her out, and if she says no, then no big deal because that girl there is pretty cute too." This is what happened with my first girlfriend. She was a wonderful woman and I have nothing whatsoever bad to say about her, but I asked her out kind of knowing that the relationship would be enjoyable and then fizzle out, and sure enough the relationship was enjoyable and then fizzled out. This was probably exactly why she was my first girlfriend: it gave me the non-desperate-looking-ness that helped me seem attractive to her.
So this seems to be another Rule of Intergender Communication like the two I mentioned in the last post: "Don't come on too strong".
But if women make a policy of excluding guys who show strong feelings for them, then logically they will end up with either guys who have only a vague and temporary preference for them, or Machiavellian liars.
I've tried the Machiavellian liar routine a few times myself. "Oh, hey, you're Jennifer or Jessica or Julia or whatever, right? I appear to have totally by coincidence ended up at this table with you. Anyway, you seem kind of okay. Want to go out to dinner sometime? Saturday's no good because I have things to do that night." Meanwhile in my head I'm going over what we're going to name our children.
It's pretty hard to maintain and it's also really unpleasant and it also makes me feel like a horrible person and it also means that if I ever do get into a relationship with Jennifer or Jessica it will be based on deception and lies and probably continue that way ("It's our six month anniversary! Can I get her the beautiful personalized gift that will make her super-happy and so make me super-happy as a result, or would that be creepy and I should just get her some crappy half-dead flowers instead?"). Even if I pull it off, I will be doing an imperfect simulation of what a guy who really doesn't care much for her could do perfectly, and so I will be strictly inferior to him.
Probably most men know they can't manage it, don't even try, and end up independently re-inventing the courtly love tradition: admiring an unattainable woman from afar and showering her with presents as an expression of their transcendent yet hopeless love. Or, as we moderns call it, being a Nice Guy (TM) and therefore Worse Than Hitler (TM).
So I think these filters work and people who have a policy of rejecting suitors who really deeply desire them in a way that makes them not interchangeable with the next "prospect" to come along - they will, in fact, successfully eliminate suitors who really deeply desire them and consider them non-interchangeable. And then ten years later one night in bed they ask their personal trainer why their husband or wife is so frigid.
I know that the Official Narrative is that you're supposed to not get too obsessed with someone until you've been in a relationship with them a while, and you ask them out when you just have a vague preference for them but later you warm up to them and after a few months or years you're genuinely in love and then you can do all the stuff I want to do immediately like write them sonnets and sestinas and maybe some ruba'iyat.
But the Official Narrative doesn't take into account that actually when I like someone my brain tells me right away and goes into Full Obsession Mode. Maybe there are people who don't work like that. Maybe they're the ones who write Official Narratives, while the rest of us are wasting our time writing sestinas and exquisite works of Arabic literature.
Now, don't get me wrong. I know that True Love is really inconvenient. It might not be requited, and then it would be a huge mess and no one would have any idea what to do, because our culture tells us that True Love Must Always Conquer Everything. If some woman I didn't like expressed True Love for me, it would make me feel guilty and horrible.
And because I'm just as susceptible to the Just World Fallacy as anyone else, I would tell them it wasn't true love at all but just plain Creepiness. And that it makes her a bad person and she should be ashamed of herself and so rejecting her is not only okay but actively heroic. And all my neighbors would support me in this, because we all know that True Love is the most powerful thing in the universe, even more powerful than nuclear weapons, and so we can't just let random people go around having it any more than we would just let random people have the Bomb.
But when we reach the point where letting it slip that you love someone is pretty much social suicide, that's...not good.
by Scott Alexander, Livejournal | Read more:
[ed. See also: Brújula: LBJ and Lady Bird’s Love Story (Medium).]
Sunday, October 18, 2020
Where Loneliness Can Lead
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience …‘Please write regularly, or otherwise I am going to die out here.’ Hannah Arendt didn’t usually begin letters to her husband this way, but in the spring of 1955 she found herself alone in a ‘wilderness’. After the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she was invited to be a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. She didn’t like the intellectual atmosphere. Her colleagues lacked a sense of humour, and the cloud of McCarthyism hung over social life. She was told there would be 30 students in her undergraduate classes: there were 120, in each. She hated being on stage lecturing every day: ‘I simply can’t be exposed to the public five times a week – in other words, never get out of the public eye. I feel as if I have to go around looking for myself.’ The one oasis she found was in a dockworker-turned-philosopher from San Francisco, Eric Hoffer – but she wasn’t sure about him either: she told her friend Karl Jaspers that Hoffer was ‘the best thing this country has to offer’; she told her husband Heinrich Blücher that Hoffer was ‘very charming, but not bright’.
– From The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt
Arendt was no stranger to bouts of loneliness. From an early age, she had a keen sense that she was different, an outsider, a pariah, and often preferred to be on her own. Her father died of syphilis when she was seven; she faked all manner of illnesses to avoid going to school as a child so she could stay at home; her first husband left her in Berlin after the burning of the Reichstag; she was stateless for nearly 20 years. But, as Arendt knew, loneliness is a part of the human condition. Everybody feels lonely from time to time.
For her, it was both something that could be done and something that was experienced. In the 1950s, as she was trying to write a book about Karl Marx at the height of McCarthyism, she came to think about loneliness in relationship to ideology and terror. Arendt thought the experience of loneliness itself had changed under conditions of totalitarianism:
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.Totalitarianism in power found a way to crystallise the occasional experience of loneliness into a permanent state of being. Through the use of isolation and terror, totalitarian regimes created the conditions for loneliness, and then appealed to people’s loneliness with ideological propaganda. (...)
She defined loneliness as a kind of wilderness where a person feels deserted by all worldliness and human companionship, even when surrounded by others. The word she used in her mother tongue for loneliness was Verlassenheit – a state of being abandoned, or abandon-ness. Loneliness, she argued, is ‘among the most radical and desperate experiences of man’, because in loneliness we are unable to realise our full capacity for action as human beings. When we experience loneliness, we lose the ability to experience anything else; and, in loneliness, we are unable to make new beginnings.
In order to illustrate why loneliness is the essence of totalitarianism and the common ground of terror, Arendt distinguished isolation from loneliness, and loneliness from solitude. Isolation, she argued, is sometimes necessary for creative activity. Even the mere reading of a book, she says requires some degree of isolation. One must intentionally turn away from the world to make space for the experience of solitude but, once alone, one is always able to turn back:
Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated – that is in a situation in which I cannot act, because there is nobody who will act with me – without being lonely; and I can be lonely – that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all human companionship – without being isolated.Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude. The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think, while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself. The world becomes a wilderness, where neither experience nor thinking are possible.
by Samantha Rose Hill, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Self-Portrait in the Camp (1940), by Felix Nussbaum. Neue Galerie New York/Getty Images
Saturday, October 17, 2020
Ball in Its Court: How Sports Media Needs to Evolve
Sports programming is to the rest of TV what the Golden State Warriors are to the rest of the NBA: seemingly unbeatable. In 2016, 92 of the 100 most watched broadcasts in the US were sports or sports-related. But as with the Warriors, who ended their 2015-16 season with a 73-9 record but were stunned by the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals, what seems a sure thing today may not be such a sure thing tomorrow.
The sports-media ecosystem is more unstable than it has ever been. As television engagement continues to decline, as new distribution technologies continue to emerge, our great love affair with sports is on the verge of a major shakeup. Sports content, long the life raft for the traditional media ecosystem, is approaching a turning point in which it will need to adapt in order to thrive, and in doing so it may upend much of the remaining stability in the TV ecosystem. While sports and television have been so intertwined as to effectively be synonyms, it is unlikely that the two will remain neck and neck in the near future.
Carrying the Team
No other content has been more popular, monetizable and lucrative. Americans watched more than 31 billion hours of sports content in 2015, according to the Los Angeles Times. In 2016, 10,869 sports events were broadcast nationally, up 8% YoY. Twenty-seven of the top 50 broadcasts belonged to the NFL. Of the top 10 networks by affiliate fees, six had major sports rights (the NFL alone delivered more than 60% of Fox’s live and same day ratings points). Sports accounted for nearly 40% of total TV ad spending, according to Adage, and PwC estimates that networks’ 2016 revenue from sports was over $30bn.
The NFL’s TV contracts were worth more than $5bn per year, the NBA’s nearly $3bn and the Olympics nearly $1bn for the US rights alone. In total, leagues and teams received nearly $20bn in licensing fees. Sports programming is the most valuable audience cultivation tool for networks hoping to launch other content and a critical customer acquisition play for pay-TV distributors.
Down in the Count but Not Out
But this state of affairs is approaching its expiration date. As sports rights continue to grow in both value and length—the current NCAA basketball deal with CBS and Turner is 14 years long—the TV bundle is showing serious signs of fraying. Overall television viewing in 2016 was down among key audiences, with time spent watching down more than 40% from 2010 for 18-24s and more than 30% for 25-34s. Cable penetration has not dropped as precipitously but it, too, continues to decline In 2017, for the first time since the turn of the century, more than 25mm consumers are outside of the pay TV ecosystem.
While sports content has long been the lone ray of sunshine against this bleak backdrop, that sunlight is diminishing. ESPN is down to 88mm subscribers from its 100mm peak and its losses are accelerating. NFL viewing dropped 9% in 2016, with the league experiencing an alarming 12% dip across all windows before the presidential election and a softer but still worrisome 5% drop post-election, according to Recode. National windows performed particularly poorly, with ESPN’s Monday Night Football down 13% and NBC’s Sunday Night Football down 11%. This isn’t just an American, or football, blip. English Premier League viewing was down around 11% in the UK and similarly in the US.
Americans certainly love sports and we will not wake up tomorrow in a world that eschews football, basketball and the rest of the big American pastimes. The 2016 NFL season was still the third most-watched ever, the World Series enjoyed its biggest ratings in 25 years and game seven of the NBA Finals set a league viewership record. Unique among TV programming, sports has a built-in, deeply vested audience. And unlike other entertainment content, it’s nearly impossible to create a competitive product. You can’t create a new pro sports league as easily as you find a new script or come up with a reality concept.
But the media ecosystem is not as healthy as it once was and sports is no longer an invulnerable exception. It can’t weather shocks as it once did. Presidential elections historically have reduced football viewing by 2%, but in fall 2016 there was a double-digit dip. At REDEF, we’ve written about the dead cat bounce of the entire media ecosystem, and sports will not go unscathed. It has taken longer, but sports content will need to adapt to the realities of the digital age.
The sports-media ecosystem is more unstable than it has ever been. As television engagement continues to decline, as new distribution technologies continue to emerge, our great love affair with sports is on the verge of a major shakeup. Sports content, long the life raft for the traditional media ecosystem, is approaching a turning point in which it will need to adapt in order to thrive, and in doing so it may upend much of the remaining stability in the TV ecosystem. While sports and television have been so intertwined as to effectively be synonyms, it is unlikely that the two will remain neck and neck in the near future.
Carrying the Team
No other content has been more popular, monetizable and lucrative. Americans watched more than 31 billion hours of sports content in 2015, according to the Los Angeles Times. In 2016, 10,869 sports events were broadcast nationally, up 8% YoY. Twenty-seven of the top 50 broadcasts belonged to the NFL. Of the top 10 networks by affiliate fees, six had major sports rights (the NFL alone delivered more than 60% of Fox’s live and same day ratings points). Sports accounted for nearly 40% of total TV ad spending, according to Adage, and PwC estimates that networks’ 2016 revenue from sports was over $30bn.
The NFL’s TV contracts were worth more than $5bn per year, the NBA’s nearly $3bn and the Olympics nearly $1bn for the US rights alone. In total, leagues and teams received nearly $20bn in licensing fees. Sports programming is the most valuable audience cultivation tool for networks hoping to launch other content and a critical customer acquisition play for pay-TV distributors.
Down in the Count but Not Out
But this state of affairs is approaching its expiration date. As sports rights continue to grow in both value and length—the current NCAA basketball deal with CBS and Turner is 14 years long—the TV bundle is showing serious signs of fraying. Overall television viewing in 2016 was down among key audiences, with time spent watching down more than 40% from 2010 for 18-24s and more than 30% for 25-34s. Cable penetration has not dropped as precipitously but it, too, continues to decline In 2017, for the first time since the turn of the century, more than 25mm consumers are outside of the pay TV ecosystem.
Americans certainly love sports and we will not wake up tomorrow in a world that eschews football, basketball and the rest of the big American pastimes. The 2016 NFL season was still the third most-watched ever, the World Series enjoyed its biggest ratings in 25 years and game seven of the NBA Finals set a league viewership record. Unique among TV programming, sports has a built-in, deeply vested audience. And unlike other entertainment content, it’s nearly impossible to create a competitive product. You can’t create a new pro sports league as easily as you find a new script or come up with a reality concept.
But the media ecosystem is not as healthy as it once was and sports is no longer an invulnerable exception. It can’t weather shocks as it once did. Presidential elections historically have reduced football viewing by 2%, but in fall 2016 there was a double-digit dip. At REDEF, we’ve written about the dead cat bounce of the entire media ecosystem, and sports will not go unscathed. It has taken longer, but sports content will need to adapt to the realities of the digital age.
by Tal Shachar, REDEF | Read more:
Image: Lukas Schulze/Bundesliga/Getty Images
Friday, October 16, 2020
Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50
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