The Failed Triumph of Privilege

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

A few weeks ago I did a piece on making democracy work.  It strikes me now that I need a broader context for this—about governance generally.

The point of departure for any such discussion is the role for the powers-that-be, the rich and powerful in society.  That group has built-in power by virtue of its economic clout, as well as a conviction that it is superior and ought to rule.  However it also has built-in limitations for such a role.  Generally speaking:

– It is uninterested in the well-being of the population (its inferiors).  On the contrary these are defenders of privilege.

– It wants to protect itself through monopolies, tariffs, corruption, and the like.

– It discounts the future in pursuit of immediate profit.

– It assumes all knowledge or issues outside its purview are worthless.

All of these sound familiar, but it is important to recognize they aren’t just for Trump. We’re talking about privilege.

For that reason one of the most fundamental problems of national governance is managing relations with the rich and powerful class.  It will always want to govern and must be kept healthy but in check—a difficult balancing act.  And the issue is not just for sake of the less fortunate.  The short-term and generally myopic focus mean that this group will not provide even for its own longer-term success.  Adam Smith himself understood all of that perfectly.

The prior piece on democracy was mostly about the first point.  The other points are different, about institutional competence and recognition of the jobs that government must do.  That’s worth emphasizing—if government doesn’t do those jobs, they won’t get done.  Government has to take responsibility for the success of the country.  The private sector will not do it.

That work cannot happen without the institutional competence to get it done. That’s why it was an enormous step forward when this country created a civil service with agencies protected from politics.  The alternative, as was understood then and as we are relearning now, is failure and corruption.

Successful balancing delivered the huge success of this country.  We were technology innovators, looking for new ways to expand the economy.   We educated all our people to a degree unheard-of before.  We funded universities and pure research.  We strengthened our military and economic position through alliances.  (It is worth stating explicitly that NATO is and was always a vehicle to defend us—with multiple forces always under US command.)  We developed the interstate highway system and other internal infrastructure second to none.  We protected our health and resources. 

That successful role of government was established here following the recovery from the depression and then World War II.  No one then was arguing about the role for government.  And that attitude persisted through the postwar success.  At that time we were united as a middle class society with what we felt were common goals.

The widely-agreed turning point was the Reagan administration, when the powers-that-be realized that they could buy elections and win. It’s no accident that Reagan repealed the so-called “fairness doctrine” for TV political coverage, removing constraints on what money could buy as propaganda.  Plato (in his “Republic”) warned that democracy provides the tools for autocrats to seize power.  Democracy capture by oligarchy is a perpetual threat.  And here the US Constitution proved particularly fertile ground.

In the end the Supreme Court has been the “Achilles heel” of American democracy.  With undemocratic nominations and lifetime appointments it was only a matter of time (and luck) before the Court was compromised.  The Koch organization people devoted decades to that task.  The Citizens United decision essentially sealed the deal. Almost immediately it enabled elections to be bought and legislative districts gerrymandered.  The final stage came with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, so that the Court had an unbeatable majority of members whose Koch-nurtured careers had prepared them for their roles.

Influence of money on politics is a given. It is present to a greater or lesser degree in particular issues and administrations. Capture of government by privilege is qualitatively different. There is no one left to convince and effectively nothing standing in the way. So incomes on top can keep growing to the stratosphere while fundamental needs remain unmet.

Trump is their vehicle.  He is erratic, narcissistic, and vicious, but he’s on board with the program.  And he’s a phenomenal salesman.  On voting he’s a virtuoso with the most basic of sales techniques:  when your product has a defect you tell the world the others have it.  Looking to steal an election and with no examples of fraudulent voting, he tells Republicans to “try and cheat like hell like they do”. And much of the country believes it.

With Citizens United the Court played a big role in Trump’s election, and since then it has awarded him extraordinary powers, even putting him above the law.  Calling Trump a populist confuses his promoted image with reality.  Think instead of Trump in his element at his recent celebratory dinner for Xi.  It’s not just Trump. We are living the triumph of privilege.

Democracy is inherently fragile.   The powers-that-be will always think they deserve to rule, and they know how to profit when they get it.  But as noted however much they celebrate—they are victims too.  For all the reasons discussed earlier their win turns into a loss for everyone.  Let’s look at some of what we’ve got:

– Future compromised (research funding limited and politicized, huge deficit in good times)

– Government competence undermined (“unified executive” = loyalty is the only qualification)

– Military weakened (loyalty purges and posturing, alliances attacked, losses of all kinds from the Iran war)

– Infrastructure development neglected (no upgrade plan for antiquated and insecure electrical power, attacking universities instead of strengthening education)

– Economy hamstrung (fossil fuels only, ever-changing trade wars, no anti-trust)

– Personal security diminished (pervasive financial insecurity, expensive chaotic healthcare—measles even!, Social Security squeezed and threatened)

– Closed mind society (media consolidation and control, xenophobia)

– Real catastrophes brewing  (nuclear proliferation, AI, climate change)

 We have an election coming.  I’m not making predictions, but by now we can hope no amount of money can conceal the enormity of the truth.

 

 

 

What We’ve Lost and Must Find

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

We read regularly that many of our traditional strengths as a nation are being undermined in this administration.   But frequently such pieces end up tempering their concerns with a belief in America’s fundamental dynamism and vision, as contrasted with (say) the central control of the Chinese regime.  I’m all for believing in progress, but we’re not going to make any if we refuse to recognize how deep a pit we’ve fallen into.  Like it or not we are living with an administration that has deliberately attacked precisely those “American values” we want to believe in.

Here is a notion of what we’ve lost and need to find.

  1. Americans used to believe in the future.

 It was our future, and we did all we could to own it.  Our research institutions were the peak of the world, and people came from everywhere to participate. The list of Nobel Prizes records our success.  Part of that enterprise was to understand what was possible, and we built science into the functioning of government, so we knew where we were going.

All of that is now by the wayside, replaced by Trump’s “intuitions”.  He knows everything there is to know, and what he likes is by definition truth.  That holds for climate change, for research grants, and even (incredibly) for airplane launchers on aircraft carriers.  Even for NIH—a critical source of US competitiveness—grant money has been reduced and RFK’s decision logic hidden.   We’re not looking for truth, we’re looking for loyalty.

We still have the fruits of past successes in AI, SpaceX, and BioTech (all started with pre-Trump government money) and we even have a venture capital community to help fund it.  But all of that is today.  VC’s may sound future-looking, but they’re not going to fund anything that doesn’t pay back big and soon.  All of our present investments are at risk, because we’re too busy selling the present to think more than a step ahead.  The idea that we’re going to win with bigger and bigger investments in AI hardware sounds like the Maginot Line from pre-World War II France.  That was a huge defensive investment based on their experience with World War I, but the German Blitzkrieg just went around it.  In our case the Chinese, with a broader view of AI applications, may do the same.  In addition the obligatory government payoffs from big corporations mean that new entrants face vested interests with government-protected monopoly powers.  It’s like the old joke that someone in the nineteenth century patent office proposed to close it down because everything important had already been invented.  We just did that.

The Chinese have built up their universities and research institutions to be world class.   They figured out the coming importance of rare earths, solar cell and battery technologies, and medical research.  They may have government-defined five-year plans, but at least they have competent technical input and in many areas they have more internal competition than we do.  By contrast our focus now seems to be on the past—strong-arming our friends in hopes of delivering the jobs of the 1950’s.  What we call American dynamism comes not just from individuals, but also from the opportunities for such people to succeed.  For our current leadership that dynamism is unwelcome competition for its own all-embracing genius—something to be stamped out ASAP.

To succeed we must work to see the future and provide means to go there.

  1. Americans used to believe in our people

The American belief in its people goes all the way back.  The whole point of American democracy was to capture the strength of the population.  That’s why George Washington stepped down as President from the dictatorship that most of the world expected to see.  That’s why Lincoln talked about how “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The democracy was far from perfect, but it was still a big step forward.

Coming out of that mindset was the revolutionary idea of education as essential to the role of the population in a democratic state.  This country pioneered the idea of educating the whole population, first at the high school level and then for colleges.  The power of the country expressed the capabilities of its people. Even the “robber barons” of the nineteenth century recognized the need to in some sense or other give back to the society to which they belonged. Immigration has always been a tricky issue, but we have learned that a multiplicity of people can participate in the democratic experiment and that diversity can be a source of strength.

Today we have replaced all of that with a dramatically different model.  We live in an age of self-declared superheroes.  We have a President who thinks he is infallible (and spends much of his time on monuments to himself), and business leaders who are convinced they belong to a different race.

Nothing in the Big Beautiful bill shows government has a role to play specifically for the population.  We’re running a huge deficit and cutting desperately-needed benefits to poor people so we can have big tax cuts for businesses and rich people.  There’s more detail on who gets benefits here.  When Trump talks about the golden future, there is no mechanism for it other than to make rich people richer.  When he attacks Social Security (e.g. with bogus claims of fraud) he’s attacking the whole idea of direct government support for the welfare of the population.  Crucially government has no role in protecting the population from the powers-that-be running everything for themselves.  Government of, by, and for the people should perish from the earth. 

People don’t necessarily see things that way, but one way or another they understand that there is no one protecting them from the abyss.  So the AI future looks pretty damn scary, and they’re not so enthusiastic about those datacenters either.  Owning the future sounds ridiculous.

To succeed we must support our people.

  1. Americans used to believe in our role in the world.

Coming out of the horrors of the Second World War, we and everyone else hoped for a better future, a new world where this horrible thing would never happen again.  America, as the major power of the age, took its responsibilities seriously.  A world at peace was a world where everyone could prosper.  That meant rules and responsibilities for everyone and institutions to support them.  It was easy for the US to want to be magnanimous; we were the richest, most powerful nation hands down.

We’re actually much richer now than we were then, but something else has also happened.  On an international front we are no longer so dominant, with China specifically challenging us in just about any dimension of wealth and power.  That’s our primary subject of discussion for international affairs these days, but in fact that’s only part of the picture.

The other part is about American society.  After World War II our nation was as equitable as it had ever been, with prosperity widely shared and new opportunities for personal success, particularly through the GI bill and expansion of education.  In the years since then that equality has been eroded until today, we have reached unheard-of levels of wealth and poverty, beyond even the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century.  The following charts show the magnitude of the changes to both wealth and income:

There is no question that the quality of life for many people has deteriorated.  And it is conventional to say that the international idealism of the post-war years has been replaced by a grubbier reality where we are no longer dominant and every country struggles to compete with all others.  And the quality of life issue reflects that grubby struggle, in particular with the Chinese.  So the post-war idealism makes no sense anymore—we just have to win.

It is no accident that this conventional picture elected Trump.   That’s what it was created to do.  There is no shortage of money in this country, but in the years since World War II the powers-that-be have learned to protect their wealth from the population at large.  And electing Trump has enabled a pillaging of the country without precedent.  You have to blame someone, and it’s always the foreigners and the immigrants.

We certainly do have competition with other countries.  But the idea that all our economic problems are because we are under assault from the rest of the world is patently false.  Trade deficit numbers simply don’t tell today’s true story.  An example is the Apple iPhone—a big winner for the USA but counted as a trade deficit loser.  Much of the economy works like that. And the quality of life issue is unquestionably something we have done to ourselves.  This is a prosperous country, but not everyone has felt that prosperity.

In other words we as a nation are in the curious position of carrying out a foreign policy designed to protect domestic inequality! Of course it’s all about those foreigners! In that we are doubly hurt.  We are unable to deal with the actually tractable problem of population insecurity.  And we have lost our essential (and historical) role of helping worldwide stability in the face of the huge problems of climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the unclear consequences of AI.

To succeed we must—especially now—be able to recognize our broad interest as a nation in the world, above and beyond any corruption or special interests.   

We (and everyone else) need a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world for our success.  That is a worthy and achievable goal.  We used to understand these three keys to doing that, and we can do it again.  Our challenge is to recapture them—for ourselves and for our children.

The European Heat Wave is Coming for Us

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

The amazing thing about this title is that it has to be said at all.  There is only one world, and what happens to everyone else on this planet is going to happen to us too.  However the Trump-induced national insanity is such that the European heat wave has made zero impact on the national consciousness.   Those Europeans are just too stupid to understand air conditioning the way we do. We’re too good for climate change.

The Europeans have been hit by climate change that is beyond what their world is equipped to handle.  It  didn’t have to be very many more degrees to have a monumental impact.  This isn’t just a matter of personal discomfort.  Costs of crop failures are monumental, energy costs are way up, wild fires are burning in unheard-of places, and water levels in rivers are so low that they block commerce and cooling for nuclear power plants.  Once nature starts getting out of whack, it hurts everyone. However as the following chart shows, we’re not so far behind.

The results for us will be different, because our national infrastructure is different.  We do have more air conditioning, but we are not equipped for the electricity needs to double at precisely the same time that we need vast new power for data centers—which also need water supplies for cooling.  We have a large and vulnerable agricultural sector and our own potential for wildfires.  We have not been spared because we are smarter. We’ve been lucky enough to get a little more time to prepare, and all we do is pat ourselves on the back.

I have to end by repeating what always needs emphasizing—there is NO NEW NORMAL we can somehow prepare ourselves to handle.  If we don’t address climate change things will just continue getting worse—more and more rapidly.  There is no alternative to action.  By now we have a pretty good idea of what to do, both immediately and going forward.

We need to beat back the giddiness and do the work.

The Crisis of Democracy

/ ontheoutside / 3 Comments

It’s common to speak of our current politics as a crisis of democracy.  We still have some features of democracy, but it doesn’t really work that way.  So the question that tends to get asked is how to address issues with our democracy to make it better.

If we’re going to fix things, it’s important to recognize that’s not quite right.  We don’t have a democracy anymore, and the government works exactly as intended. 

The first thing to emphasize that the functional Constitution is not a document; it is a construct enforced by the Supreme Court. The law is what the Court says it is.  There are no constraints on its interpretations, and in our current environment they don’t necessarily even give reasons for decisions.

Our current Supreme Court was put together over decades by the Koch organization with the objective of creating an authoritarian state, a dictatorial oligarchy for the benefit of big business and rich people.    This is no wild conspiracy theory—Jane Mayer’s Dark Money from 2016 documents what has always been hidden in plain sight.  The Kochs recognized early on they could take over the country through the Court, and they put together an organization funded by oligarchs to get there.  Their project produced Citizens United in 2010 and was essentially complete with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg in 2020. They aren’t fans of the whole Trump program–not tariffs for example–but the tax cuts and cuts in government services excuse all other sins.

They created and managed the Federalist Society and nurtured a community of lawyers to do the work.  All six so-called conservative justices have had careers in their service. The Koch organization at times has had a bigger operataing budget than the Republican Party.  They created institutes and named professorships in law schools. They have an organization to provide text for bills in Congress.  They recognized the extreme importance of the 2010 midterm state elections, because of redistricting after the 2010 census combined with new powers under the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. With the demise of spending limits they put unheard-of money into state-level campaigns and created the gerrymandering problems we have today.

(As a Massachusetts resident what I remember is the 2010 Scott Brown Senate election. You couldn’t turn on the television with seeing an ad from a PAC named something like “The Committee to Protect Social Security”. No one understood the avalanche of new money. That election effectively made Obama a lame-duck President–killing his filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, just as the emboldened Republican Party announced it would block all Presidential initiatives in the service of a Republican return to power. Citizens United was an effective anti-democratic tool from day 1.)

We now have the government they wanted—dictatorial and ready to be bought.  What we call corruption is intended behavior.  It’s how the powers-that-be get what they want.

Changing this is not going to be easy.  As Paul Krugman in particular has pointed out, the wealth and power of our domestic oligarchs have reached unprecedented levels.  Also by unlucky circumstance they now own a large chunk of domestic media channels—CBS and soon CNN together with Musk’s X plus the long-term ally Fox News.

So what is going on is not one or another problem with democracy.  We’ve experienced a well-planned and carefully-executed coup.  They’re pillaging the country.  As it turns out they’re also making a mess of things, even for their own interests, but thus far that hasn’t mattered to them.  And they’ve got the other media too scared to offer anything but token resistance. 

The 2026 election is of course critical. It can’t fix everything, but it would give a basis to start.  If we can win there, we can think about 2028 and the Court.  Otherwise all we can say is that 250 years was a good run RIP.

America First

/ ontheoutside / Leave a comment

It goes down too easily “America First”.  On the face of it, it’s an obvious goal for anyone running the country.  But in fact that’s not right.  The real objective is the well-being of the country and everyone in it.  “America First” doesn’t say that, and the difference is important.

America First has embedded in it the idea that all our problems are because someone else has put himself first in line.  So it sells you on what the problems are without even pretending to look at what’s true.  And it’s not just a matter for foreign affairs.  Any problem you have becomes someone else keeping you from getting what’s yours.  It’s a slogan of grievance masquerading as a solution. It doesn’t want you to ask questions.  We know who’s evil and we’ll get rid of them. It’s a slogan to hide behind.

Economics can be complicated, but this story doesn’t have to be.  Let’s talk about the good old days that Trump says he is bringing back—the postwar decades of the fifties and sixties.  What made those times happen?  Coming out of World War II we were the most equitable society we had ever been. The difference between CEO’s and working people’s wages was laughable compared with today.  The GI Bill made college affordable.  Government-funded research and development won the war and established the US predominance that remade the world. That model in one form or another also produced the post-war miracles in Japan, China, and Korea.

What’s the message today about how to reestablish that prosperity?  It’s certainly not what worked before.  No major government role in education, infrastructure, and forward-looking research.  No commitment to democracy.  No unions.  The solution is simple: the rich and powerful will make you rich, so you just get rid of anything in their way and all will be golden.  Don’t look at us–it’s other countries and immigrant parasites stealing everything that’s yours.

The one thing you can say for all that is that it has certainly been great for making them richer.  Inequality in America has reached levels far beyond even the “gilded age” of the nineteen century.  There’s a reason why we need a new message about prosperity: they’re so rich they can run the country for themselves. The following chart of net worth values show the magnitude of the change. The recent Big Beautiful Bill also fits that picture well.

Elon Musk is worth a trillion dollars.  Trump has made on the order of 10 billion for himself and his family since the election. But the broader payoff is for the indefinite future–maybe.  After all we’re told the economy is already great, the greatest economy ever.

What about all those people we’re getting rid of?  Is it really all about them?  We were told they were all murderers and rapists, but that’s not who they’re rounding up–productive families who’ve been here decades.  Supposedly that’s still okay, since once we get rid of the immigrants there will be more of the pot for everyone else.  It hasn’t worked that way.  And  there’s a lesson for that also from the good old post-war days.   The war didn’t bring all elements of society together, but it did bring some marginal groups—Jews and Italians for example—into the mainstream.  That didn’t make things worse for the others, it made things better.  Bringing everyone in meant everyone could contribute. 

What matters is to grow the pot for everyone, and that’s actually more true now than ever before.  Most of the pot is being reinvented before our eyes.   We live in a time where winners and losers are decided by companies and technologies coming from nowhere to dominate the world.  We’ve lost the real main message—what works for individuals and our country is full opportunity for everyone. We need the best and brightest from everywhere to help reinvent the future.  But we can’t work at that one, because we’re too busy spending fortunes on ICE. 

Finally we need to get back to the international part—it’s “America First” after all.  To begin with we need to recognize that the rhetoric about the whole world taking advantage of us is manifestly false.  Apple is an example of why.  We import the hardware and sell it in a combined hardware/software product worth far more than the input.  This is hugely profitable but a net negative for the balance of payments.  The rest of the world is not predatory in this transaction—we retain the high margin part, and the hardware is an intermediate product we can’t make without destroying the economics of the deal. (TSMC does make chips here, but only a small, lower-tech part of their output.) The balance of payments calculation is hardware-based and doesn’t capture what we earn from trade-enabled business.  Even adding in the contribution to balance of payments from services misses most of it.  However once you actually try, it’s not hard to show that the Apple example is far from unusual and that our trade relations with the rest of the world are a clear net positive.

It’s possible in  the future that some currently outsourced production comes to the US, but the main driver for such cases will be robotics bringing down production costs. Despite all the rhetoric, there’s no change to this picture that will recreate lots of 1950’s jobs.  If we want to solve the problems of people left behind in the last decades, we need to get past the blinders of “America First”—and follow the money. To really create jobs we’ll need some of those billionaires’ stratospheric profits. So the situation in the end amounts to something like this:

For the international case too there is a lesson from the good old days.  After World War II we put real money into the Marshall Plan for the recovery of Europe.  That money paid itself back in spades with the spectacular growth of GDP in the whole Euro-American zone.  America First would have left us vastly poorer.  The world is different now, but the economic realities are more similar than you might think.

We have to recognize now as we did then that stability has enormous value.  Even today we can see how war hurts. Conflicts are prodigiously expensive, and nuclear proliferation risks even worse.  The only way out is an international system that works for everyone—American gains far more from a system of rules than it does from turning alliances into protection rackets.  We haven’t profited from the freedom to start wars whenever we want.  And American’s freedom to declare climate change a hoax and sabotage climate action will hurt everyone—with ourselves as deniers most of all.

We as a country and as a world have a primary interest in stability and making things work.  There is no golden age to be found in holding everyone hostage—such a world would be less prosperous, and we have no assurance it would be peaceful or that we will always be on top.  Peace and prosperity are the objectives—nothing less.

Choke Points

/ ontheoutside / 1 Comment

Everyone talks about choke points. The Strait of Hormuz was always there and occasionally mentioned as a theoretical issue–until we blundered into it. Now people talk about choke points, but still as something around the edges. Hormuz affects others but not so much us.

However choke points aren’t just geographic. Rare earths were and still remain choke points that the Chinese can use any time they want something from us. Even the military can’t function without them. The Chinese figured out those choke points and prepared, while we just trusted our future–a cautionary tale. But that’s just the beginning.

Let’s go back to a chart from our piece on trade:

🏆 Top 10 U.S. Companies by Market Capitalization (2026 estimates)

  1. NVIDIA Corporation – approx. $4.5 trillion (currently world’s largest)
  2. Apple Inc. – ~$4.0 trillion
  3. Alphabet Inc. – ~$3.8 trillion
  4. Microsoft Corporation – ~$3.6 trillion
  5. Amazon.com, Inc. – ~$2.5 trillion
  6. Meta Platforms, Inc. – ~$1.4 trillion
  7. Broadcom Inc. – ~$1.7 trillion
  8. Tesla, Inc. – ~$1.3 trillion
  9. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. – ~$1.0 trillion
  10. JPMorgan Chase & Co. – ~$0.6–0.7 trillion (approximate, rounding into the top decade range)

As noted, the top two companies are 100% dependent on hardware from TSMC in Taiwan. The companies do the design work, and TSMC builds it. For Nvidia that’s everything. For Apple there is some manufacturing in the US, but not the more advanced, product-defining chips. So the two most valuable companies in the US can do nothing without Taiwan. And again that’s just the beginning. It also says that the entire AI infrastructure on which we are basing the future of the country and for which we are investing inconceivable sums of money is close to 100% dependent on hardware from Taiwan. Those Nvidia cards from Taiwan are our supposed key advantage to win the AI race with China!

So Taiwan is a monumental choke point now and for the foreseeable future. It’s not simple for China to use it, but even harder for us to stop them. Xi made very clear to Trump that he was not to get in the way of China’s plans for the future of Taiwan—whatever those might be—and Trump immediately backed off on planned US arms sales. For the record we have also depleted our own munitions in the Iran war. And our behavior toward Cuba is hardly a model of respect for independence of an island 100 miles off the coast.

Where does that leave us? We may continue to strut around as if we still owned the world, but China has the keys. The idea that we can shake down the rest of the world because no one can touch us is patently false. We need an orderly world where we can avoid wars and count on stability of choke points. That doesn’t happen by itself; it requires allies and international norms. Otherwise it’s no longer our world, as we want to think God made it.

Effective Democracy

/ ontheoutside / 2 Comments

Let’s start with facts:  we live in a failed democracy that has transitioned to incompetent dictatorship. Given that kind of mess, it is worth going back to first principles to think about effective government.

First of all it should be noted that there is an intrinsic conflict of interests in any national government.  This isn’t complicated; it is basically parallel to what goes on in any corporation between the interests of labor and interests of management.  Near term they are dividing up profits, but longer term both have a common interest in the success of the company.   Successful companies are able to manage the conflict.

In government you have the economic powers-that-be versus the population as a whole.  Both have to benefit for success, but immediate interests are opposed in much the same way.  It should be emphasized that here too exclusive power to one or the other is disastrous. We’re accustomed to hearing one side of that story—uncontrolled spending on government benefits for the population will bankrupt the economic engines of the country. But an exclusive focus on the business side is equally bad and it’s not just a matter of living standards:  business interests are myopic both in terms of time scales and in terms of the environment needed for success.  You won’t have the technologies, or the people, or the physical environment necessary for the economy (and as we’ve seen recently, business people can risk bankrupting the country too!). Government has to speak for the whole picture. Even the patron saint of free enterprise—Adam Smith—was well aware of this issue.  “The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever.” There is nothing sacred or proven about claims that government should never interfere with the marvelous natural workings of the marketplace—that’s just self-serving propaganda for the “haves” side.

This intrinsic dichotomy is very important for effective government.  Both sides must be present but neither side can win.  That’s one of the reasons we’re in such bad shape right now.  What we have today is business capture of government—exactly what Adam Smith worried about.  To be effective government needs to provide means for functional negotiation and cooperation between both sides.  Those sides don’t map exactly to the Republicans and Democrats, but that’s pretty much what it comes down to.  Bipartisanship is not about being nice; it’s working out fundamental tradeoffs between the two sides.

That is precisely what we have lost–structurally.  There are three immediately obvious issues.  The first is the primary system.  Since primaries are partisan, candidates are chosen exclusively based on appeal to one side or the other.  That guarantees extreme positions and more importantly disenfranchises the center of the voting population.  A second example is the way partisan power is used to control legislation offered in Congress.  In the House the so-called Hastert rule only allows on the floor measures that are supported by a majority of Republicans.  In the Senate the majority leader Mitch McConnell routinely blocked anything he disagreed with—regardless of overall support.  Both rules disenfranchise the center and make the country effectively ungovernable except in extremes—so whiplashing policies are a matter of course.  Finally there is the Supreme Court: lifetime appointments plus limitless power give a huge incentive for partisan appointees.

All of this is bad news and good.  The bad news is that it isn’t clear when we’ll be in a position to fix any of it. The good news is that there are significant items that really aren’t so hard to fix.  For primaries, there are a number of possible variants, including non-partisan primaries with rank choice voting.  For the Congress, you don’t need to change the constitution to change the rules.  And there are many proposals to fix the terrible mistake that is the Supreme Court—an undemocratically-chosen body with lifetime appointments and no constraints on its power.   With a decent Supreme Court we should be able to fix gerrymandering, for example.  That is a math problem we chose to turn into a political mess.

Bipartisan cooperation is fundamental, and we can stop going out of our way to make it hard.  That way we can make the tradeoffs for the country to be governable.  Then we can move on to two other necessary and straightforward matters:  direct election of the President (the current system is grossly inequitable and invites fraud) and adding the few extra Senate seats needed to compensate the ill-represented largest states. Such measures won’t solve everything (not control of media for example), but we can make things quite a lot better.  We can make our democracy work.

It’s not so complicated–if we ever get a chance to do it.

The Fight to the Death

/ ontheoutside / 1 Comment

We should be explicit about the path we’re on.  We are engaged in a winner-takes-all fight for AI supremacy.  The operative assumption is that whoever wins will rule the world, because that country will control a version of AI so powerful that it can improve itself to be invincible.  Whoever wins will liquidate all opposition, so there can be no challenge to its power.  That’s the story, true or not. We’ve got to win.

There are many consequences to this.  To start with, no effective regulation of AI is possible, because it is impossible to say what constraints on AI development would get in the way of the fight to the death.  In particular some of the most obviously risky issues—such as autonomous military decision making—are the most untouchable. This the worst kind of arms race, where it’s not just a matter of parity.  Only victory is good enough. There are no effective limits to the amount of money it can take.

But even that is just the beginning.  Once you’re in a fight-to-the-death, any form of international cooperation becomes extraneous.  You can’t think too seriously about common interests when everyone is a mortal enemy.  That mindset is all too easy in any case, since common interests are always a hard sell (even for climate change). So we fall back on the world view we now get everyday—whoever has power deserves what he can get. With the Iran war we’ve gone a step farther, asserting that (with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz) we have absolute freedom to inflict damage on the rest of the world whenever we perceive gain for ourselves.

That this view is acceptable without much pushback is a matter of ultimate hubris.  It’s all okay, because we’re going to win.  In fact we’re not actually much interested in how international competition works or what it will really take to win.  We’ve been on top for so long that we’re entitled.  God will make us win.  That’s not an exaggeration of where we are. 

There’s a lot that we don’t know about the end to this story.  The future is never clear.  But there is one thing that is definitely true—we’re stumbling our way into real danger.  The risks are everywhere. For technology we’re certainly not necessarily on top—even today China is a serious competitor—and we’re burning bridges to the future by killing research investments and attacking all foreigners as parasites. Even for AI we’re a long way from the finish line, and it’s unclear whose paths will get there first. More generally we’re in a wildly unstable arms race with many new technologies, proliferating nuclear weapons, and no good way even to know who is ahead. Yet we’re using war as if it’s a regular element of national policy.

The only workable way to forestall conflict is viable common interest.  You don’t have war or countries laid waste if all parties recognize there’s a lot to lose.  (You can still have homicidal maniacs, but shared prosperity helps keep them out.)  The world needs order, starting with recognition that interdependence, economic and otherwise, is not going away.   So we had better fix it.  Start with economic issues—trade, climate change, AI—and then do something about war.  A fight to the death ends with just that, and who knows how many—both here and abroad—could pay.