Author: ontheoutside

Towards a Constitution

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To continue the subject of the Constitution, it seems that the problems we face are more fundamental than we would like to think.

I want to begin by going back to the post-World War II America of my childhood.  At that time we were proud of our Constitution precisely because of the way in which it was able to adapt to new eras that could not have been imagined when it was written.  We were privileged to have a Constitution that was most fundamentally a statement of principles that could guide us on into the future—whatever that might be.

We now see that whole story was a myth.  The only way that the Constitution could play such a role was that in those days the country was largely unified in outlook.  Putting aside the anti-communist hysteria, the country was in a humanistic mood coming out of both the Depression and World War II, and we looked at the Constitution in that way. Also the history of the Constitution fit that mold—written by people who created a democracy by defeating a tyrant.  So the meaning of the Constitution was our shared idea of what the humanistic founding fathers would say about the problems of today.

We now understand that there is no solid legality behind any of that.  Nothing in the Constitution guarantees that interpretation, and the document can be interpreted in wildly different ways—both honestly and dishonestly—by different readers. (That’s not just a matter of “strict interpretation,” which in practice means getting rid of what you don’t like, with no constraint on what you do!)  From a practical point of view it’s hard to say how much of the Constitution exists at all—its meaning is entirely determined by the Supreme Court, and they don’t even have to say how they reach their conclusions. If a President can break the law in the exercise of his office do we still have rule of law?  Do we really have a Constitution?  What exactly do we need to do to get one that works?

As it turns out, two recent books help drive those problems home.  Steven Pinker’s latest “When Everyone Knows What Everyone Knows” talks about the whole notion of common knowledge—what gave us the Constitution of my childhood—as a kind of distributed process independent of its norms.  That’s no way for today’s internet-fragmented society to produce a basis for law.  The second was Jill Lepore’: ‘s “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution”.  In passing she notes that the Reconstruction civil rights amendments—numbers 13, 14, and 15—were interpreted out of existence by the Supreme Court for fully fifty years after passage!  It seems words on paper have never been enough.

So the Constitution is a large, serious problem area.  Somehow we have to fix the Supreme Court, determine what level of specificity we need for an enforceable Constitution, and deal with at least some of the other problem areas from our previous note.  That leads to a rather different relationship to the Constitution than we have today.  Instead of trumpeting our Constitution as a world-unique miracle, we’re going to need to turn pragmatic, to understand what the experience has been with constitutions worldwide. And somehow or other we’ll need to find a process to fix it without losing what we’ve got.

There is a lot that is good about the Constitution. In today’s world we’re more conscious of that than ever. But despite our past dreams it can’t defend or update itself.  That, today, is a problem for everyone.

Our Colony on the Mediterranean

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There’s something simple behind Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza—we now have a colony on the Mediterranean. It is a state containing Palestinians without being a Palestinian state. Since we’re in charge it’s ours, even if we counting on others to pay for it or somehow keep the peace.

It’s not the first colony we’ve had recently.  There was also Afghanistan and to a lesser extent Iraq.  Colonies can seem rational—even benevolent—at the start, but it doesn’t tend to work out that way.  So we have to hope this one works better.

But that’s getting too far ahead.  What is there to say about the plan?  First, there is no denying that it is a lot better than continuing the war.  This has always been a particularly terrible affair, because in this horrible mess both sides wanted to kill as many Palestinians as possible.  For Netanyahu, the prime objective has been to kill enough of the enemy so that the Israeli population would forget that he was responsible for the success of the October 7 attacks.  For Hamas, the main point was to prevent any kind of Israeli-arab cooperation and to provoke an Israeli counterattack that would demonstrate the evils of Israel to the wider world.  Before his death Sinwar gloated to his boss in Qatar about the number of Palestinian dead he had achieved for the cause. What world this is!

With the peace comes the colonial bureaucracy.  The Palestinians aren’t running anything, because the Israelis don’t trust them to even the slightest degree.  In Netanyahu’s UN speech the Palestinians were described in every instance as unrepentant, vicious terrorists.  The plan has a lot of talk about how Gaza will be purged of Hamas, and there will be a whole new body to keep the peace—once it is ready.  Until then (whenever that is) the Israeli army will need to do that job.  There is a longer-term objective of maybe someday a Palestinian state once Palestinians can somehow be trusted to live in peace with Israelis.  Netanyahu has been explicit about when that is—never.

In the interim it’s not clear what is going to happen, except hopefully relief for Palestinians (an expensive proposition) and the encouragement of business investment.  There is no guarantee how much business investment will be aimed at the well-being of Palestinians.  Anything done for the Palestinians will come under US control and with arab or even Israeli investment.  On the face of it, this sounds like a bunch of fancy hotels and a massive complex of cheap apartment buildings to serve them.  I’m also a little worried about who else might be coming as immigrants, but which may or may not be an issue.  It’s hard to guess how peaceful this is going to be.  The horrors of the past two years are such that one can’t imagine there won’t be resentment.  The ideas of Hamas will be harder to exorcize than the known Hamas fighters. And we can’t know what will happen with the released arab prisoners.

So it’s great that the war is going to end.  At least to start with this particular plan seems dictated by the needs of Israeli security combined with Trump’s fervor for real estate development. However, the first step will be meeting the immediate needs of the Palestinians for a peaceful, livable future.  That is already such a challenge that the rest is up for grabs.

Problems with the Constitution

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There has always been plenty of talk about what is right and wrong with the Constitution of the United States. However much of that was on the back burner until recently. Now it is different. First we saw government collapsed into non-functional partisan chaos, and then Trump demonstrated that what we thought was a government of laws was actually a government of unenforceable traditions.

So what follows is a list of issues. I won’t say it is complete or well-organized, but the problems are all serious.

  • Open to dictatorial takeover

The Supreme Court was a terrible mistake.  There are no limits to its power, and it doesn’t even have to justify its decisions.  The Justices are chosen undemocratically and serve for life.  We’ve now seen they can even declare a President above the law, so that the entire Constitution is out the window.  It is a dictatorship waiting to happen.

  • Open to corruption (only works because of tradition, not law)

The entire electoral apparatus belongs to the states, where it is operated by partisan officials.  It is common practice to make voting difficult in opposition districts, but that is just the beginning. The whole voting apparatus is controlled by people who gain from controlling results.  It works if people are committed to democracy, but not otherwise.  Other democratic countries have established separate, nominally non-partisan organizations to administer voting.

  • Unrepresentative

The Senate is phenomenally unrepresentative.  Two senators per state means residents of small states have astonishingly outsize power.  At the very least, very large states such as California need additional Senators.  The problems of the Senate also affect the Electoral College, so that not only legislation but also Presidential elections are affected.

Then there is the whole question of gerrymandering. Computers have made this both easy and effective. The US Congress is currently so gerrymandered that very few districts have real elections. That severely limits democracy.

  • Doesn’t work for states

These is an urgent need for clarify the division of responsibility between the states and the federal government.  As an example, the federal government has traditionally backed up the states for emergencies of all kinds.  That is necessary because it has greater resources as well as the ability to run deficits if necessary (which many states can’t).  With both Covid and the operation of FEMA Trump decided he was either opposed or lukewarm about it, and that was that.  The Constitution has to be explicit about responsibilities.

  • Doesn’t work for the federal government

The federal government simply doesn’t work as intended.  We’ve reached an era of non-cooperation between parties, so government only works when a single party controls everything.  Between the “Hastert rule” in the House and the filibuster in the Senate, it’s easy to block everything otherwise.  That means the so-called separation of powers in government is largely non-functional  Furthermore the primary system for the nomination of candidates basically disenfranchises the political center, so that parties are by definition extreme.  That means government is either functionally blocked or unrepresentatively extreme.

  • There is no protection for governmental expertise

A functioning national government needs expertise upon which to base its conclusions.  For that reason Congress created a number of bodies intentionally buffered from Presidential politics.  More recently the Supreme Court has decided that any body working in the executive acts at the discretion of the President.  It is now impossible for anyone with necessary expertise to make a career in the federal government.

  • Unclear dividing lines between branches of government

The Trump administration is legislating by executive order, and the Supreme Court has decided that is okay.

  • The unspecified role of parties can undercut everything else

Everything about our two-party system is outside the Constitution.  So that, as mentioned earlier, we have a primary system that disenfranchises the political center, and there is nothing in the Constitution that has any bearing on it.  The Constitution needs at the least to say how elections work.  Anything not specified is vulnerable to corruption and takeover. Non-partisan primaries with rank choice voting is a possible step in that direction.

The Zero-Sum Trap

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It’s not unusual to talk about zero-sum games as a political issue. Probably the most common example is in international relations, where the Trump people treat countries as ordinary business competitors: what profits them is lost to us. That’s a false analogy as we’ll discuss later, but that’s not the main point here. What we want to emphasize is that the notion of zero-sum games—where all gain is someone else’s loss—is even more pervasive and dangerously wrong than commonly believed.

There are many kinds of zero-sum examples:

  • Our progress means taking it from someone else (as just mentioned)
  • Anyone else’s progress means taking it from us (racial progress means blacks taking from whites)
  • Hurting others means helping us (the party line with DOGE).

Notice the logic runs both ways: not only does our progress require hurting others, but also hurting others can be assumed good for us!

The issue is not that such things can’t happen; the problem is assuming that they always do. The chaos around DOGE produced wild enthusiasm in Trump’s base even though there was no logical connection to anyone’s well-being (either in theory or in the One Big Beautiful Bill). Moreover, paradoxically, all the publicity about DOGE viciousness seemed to increase confidence in the unstated zero-sum assumption. “Look at all the progress in the first 100 days!”

To start with it is not surprising that a zero-sum situation is more the exception than the rule: that two different phenomena are so directly related means there is an explicit causal connection, and the costs and benefits need to more or less match up. There are such connections in budgeting decisions for example. However the connections between tariffs and anyone’s well-being, for example, are so circuitous and filled with logical gaps that no one is trying very hard to argue for them. Instead promoters fall back on a kind of instinctive belief in the zero-sum game. The more Trump talks about making others poorer, the more it must be the path of progress.

It’s useful at this point to review just how far the tariff argument is from being true. What companies are the pillars of US economic strength? They are the big tech companies that dominate market valuations, earnings, and international influence. Just eight such companies represent 40-50 percent of market valuations. What is the basis of their success? Are they winning because they can make better cheaper products that anyone else can make, so that tariffs can lead to even greater success and lots of new good jobs for US workers?

Actually not. Those companies represent technological advances that led to monopoly powers in their chosen sectors (those sectors are now starting to merge, but that’s another story). They have clear profit advantages over businesses in competitive sectors, and in fact they can force those companies in competitive sectors to bid against each other to supply them. These are primarily software companies (so they are not well-counted in balance of payment figures that ignore services) and their reason for success is technological advancement—often predicated on government-funded basic R&D—and ability to attract the best and brightest from everywhere to contribute to their success. Such monopolies are actually not new. In the good old days of American manufacturing it was the high-tech of its time. We don’t get to choose where the money is.

Tariffs have little or nothing to do with this picture. Somehow tariffs are supposed to create a new golden age for factory workers, recreating the good old days. However that is without the technology advantages that fueled the wages, without unions, and after many decades of automation that mean far fewer (and more skillled) people are needed in production. Tariffs have of course been threatened as retaliation for restrictions on tech company activities in other countries, but those are different fights over different issues. None of this means extracting blood from evil foreigners will deliver gold to Trump supporters here.

How about the benefits of white racial dominance and the deporting of immigrants? Most of the arguments for those come down to “everything they’ve gained is taken from us”. That’s easy to believe (one thinks of Vance’s performance in the VP debate where immigrants were the answer to every issue raised) but is it true? You can certainly find examples, black people promoted for their race or professions where desperate immigrants have depressed wages. But that isn’t the same as the net effect of what has happened. You can’t argue that by assuming it’s true.

What made this country’s historical success is the (relative) freedom of US society from the centuries-old societal hierarchies elsewhere. Anyone could come here and succeed. The US pioneered mass education, and its own aristocracies just didn’t have the powers to exclude that existed elsewhere. We have prospered from everyone’s contributions, people of all races and from everywhere. That there are more people in the picture does not mean everyone is poorer; historically it has made us richer. Even today the immigrant population (including the illegal part) is paying taxes, using fewer social services, committing less crime, and staffing difficult jobs (in agriculture, eldercare, and construction) that locals don’t want to do. The big technology companies are filled with immigrants and children of immigrants who are making the country richer for everyone. (As is evident from any discussion of AI for example, this is more a matter of scarce talent than outsourced jobs.)

When you think about it each zero-sum argument assumes a static world where all that matters is dividing up a fixed pot of goods. That’s where the zero-sum comes in—who is giving or taking. But the picture is completely wrong. It’s not just that the overall pot is growing, it’s that the pot is being redefined entirely. And it’s that effort—the creation of the new pot—that will determine our success as a nation. And again looking at the new corporate leaders of our economy, that new pot (as noted) is being created in large measure by immigrants and children of immigrants of all races and nationalities.

(It’s important to be careful about the conclusion here. This isn’t an argument for uncontrolled immigration or even for what rules should be applied for who gets in. It’s also not an argument either for or against any kind of affirmative action. In both cases there are tradeoffs that have to be made rationally. Every country decides how many immigrants it can absorb annually, but that decision should not be based on false stereotypes of what those immigrants represent. In the case of affirmative action, you don’t want to create new forms of favoritism, but at the same time you need to find ways to prevent existing prejudices from perpetuating past discrimination. That those subjects are out of scope here doesn’t mean they can’t be addressed.)

Government’s task is providing the environment for both economic progress and well-being of the population. A key objective is equality of opportunity, as we need contributions from all. And it is up to government to see that the two objectives—for the economy and for the population—are both satisfied. That is always a political challenge.

Government structure is important. That the private sector will miraculously do it all is a myth understood perfectly even by Adam Smith. That myth only persists (without evidence) as an excuse for government to neglect its second objective—for the population. Expecting arbitrarily-powered dictatorship to be more dynamic and effective is even worse—for reasons that are already evident. Dictators make uncorrectable mistakes and ignore what they don’t want to hear. We’re cutting basic research in all domains and treating climate change as treason, exactly what we don’t need in a technology-based world economy. That hurts BOTH the economy and the population. By our own history, democracy is a good thing.

Finally we need to return to the issue we started with—international relations. Are nations just a bunch of business competitors fighting for market share? The answer is no, because we all share one world and there is an enormous (if not always recognized) common interest in making it work. Without thinking hard we are all confronted with the pressing problems of climate change and the ever-present threat of war. Chaos risks disaster. And there is a positive push also. Over the past decades we have proven that by cooperation (admittedly incomplete) we have been to grow the pot of benefits enormously for all. This could hardly be farther from a zero-sum scenario.

Zero-sum reasoning is a big problem, because it is instinctive and can be crucially wrong. We can’t prosper by believing life is all about fighting it out for advantage. If we want to be successful the task is to build prosperity for the future—for our entire population and for the world. Nothing says that’s easy, but it’s the only game there is.

Mathematics and Politics

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It strikes me that there is something to be said about mathematics and politics that goes beyond just numbers.  Mathematics, because it is a logical system, guards against some kinds of sloppy thinking that can get in the way or be exploited in propaganda.  Here are a few examples.

  1. Not every function is bounded or even linear.

I’m starting here because it came up in a previous discussion of climate change. Damage from climate change is not bounded or even linear.  The world just gets that much farther from what human civilization was built to deal with.

Destruction from climate change increases exponentially with the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  As noted there is no such thing as a “new normal” or even a price limit for the damage done by a ton of CO2.   So there is no alternative to preemptive action, hard as that is for any society to achieve.

2. Negative numbers are just as real as positive ones.

In our national budgets positive expenditure are discussed in terms of things bought:  for infrastructure, education, healthcare, safety net.  Deficits are abstractions: possible effects on the financing costs for the national debt for example.  In fact deficits are negatives of things bought—things not bought.  They have to be evaluated by tradeoff of what that money was spent on versus what now isn’t going to be bought—for infrastructure, education, healthcare, safety net.

3. You can’t understand a function of two variables without looking at values for both.

It may seem obvious, but it is still worth stating: if you have a function of two variables, you can’t understand anything by looking at variation in one.  Performance of Trump’s golden dome depends on how well the new defense handles the offense coming at it.  We already had a much-touted proposal like that under Reagan—his Star Wars.  That was an expensive program that sounded great and went absolutely nowhere—no successful tests even of highly-simplified versions!

We’re told the time has come to build another one, because defensive capabilities have increased so much that it’s time to finish Reagan’s job.  To my knowledge, no one has said a single word about what has changed with the offense.

4. You have to be able to learn from applicable results in different contexts.

This may seem abstract, but some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been made by recognizing that results in one area can be brought to bear on seemingly different classes of problems.  Life is like that, just generally.  You have to understand how things work, so you can apply what you know to new problems.

What have we as humans learned about how a society should function?  Most of all that chaos is a bad thing.  If we are going to live together successfully, we need rules of behavior and at least mutual tolerance.  There is also some notion of caring for the weak as an essential part of social cohesion.  That is built into essentially all successful cultures and all religions, because chaos is unstable, exhausting, and dangerous. It also undermines the stability needed for economic growth and prosperity.

For international relations we have nonetheless chosen to ignore that experience, on the grounds that of course we are going to win, rule the world, and steal everything of value from everyone else. That’s not new as motivation, but it is precisely the mentality that our species has learned is self-destructive.  Christianity has a few apt quotes:  “As a man sows so shall he reap” or more to the point “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”.

 In a age of proliferating nuclear weapons and accelerating climate change, that’s not something you want to think about too much.

5. There is one more relevant point:  not all functions are continuous.

It is natural to believe in continuity, that the features of one’s current life are somehow normal and can be relied upon.  That is felt as reality, not complacency.

But history has shown over and over again that there are no guarantees.  It’s all up to us.

Trump’s Tariffs are a Dry Run for the World’s Future

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As the Trump administration ramps up its efforts to sabotage climate action, we have to think about what that means.  There is only one atmosphere, and the consequences of climate change are becoming ever more obvious.  Our policies are not just putting the US at risk, we’re putting everyone at risk.

So it is only a matter of time before the rest of the world will have to react.  The US has become not just a rogue state but a criminally insane one.  The only reasonable action is a global embargo.  The US has to be treated as a matter for quarantine.

Fortunately for the rest of the world, Trump is providing an excellent transitional strategy.  As exports to the US become subject to draconian and unpredictable risks, the world has a chance to live without us. The supposed lifeline we’re throwing to the rest of the world is actually worthless—building factories in the US just increases the exposure to Trump’s whims, and further the fossil-fuel-privileged industries of the US (e.g. cars) will have little future elsewhere.

There is a remarkable consistency in US policy—we are doing everything we can to turn ourselves from a world power into an afterthought.  That’s not just the tariffs, it’s the attacks on education, healthcare, and forward-looking research.  The demonizing of all immigrants. It’s amazing what dreams of past imperial greatness can do.

Maybe it’s in part an Anglo-Saxon thing.  The parallels with Britain are close, although our fall is much greater.  Brexit was Britain’s effort to restore its nineteenth century dominance by withdrawing from cooperation with the EU.  The result was an instantaneous economic downturn that took about five years for the population to understand.  There may well be no way back—with more Farage populism in the offing, the downward spiral could continue.

We voted for Trump to bring back the glories of the post-war fifties.  He has promised to make everyone rich by shaking down the rest of the world.  With tariffs, we are in essence doing our own Brexit with everyone else. Whatever the evangelicals may believe, there is no God protecting us from folly.

We Are Russia In Ukraine

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In case you haven’t noticed we just declared war on our independent neighbor Canada.  We haven’t sent an army yet, but that’s only because we think we can win with financial weapons.  But there’s no mistaking it—it’s war.  And our declaration of war was beyond ludicrous—for few immigrants, just about no fentanyl, and a balance of payments deficit that has nothing to do with protectionism.  The real reason is no better—a vanity project so that Trump can say he personally added the extra territory to the USA.

That’s pretty bad, but it is certainly not the worst of the lying going on.  For that, you can point to all the talk about getting rich. We’re constantly told that everything going on, no matter how painful or immoral is about getting rich.  But no one has any intention of creating a world where the population gets rich. This is government of, by, and for big corporations.

There is no linkage between all the firings and the well-being of the population—the money being saved is to justify the tax cuts for rich people and Wall Street.  The tariffs are a sales tax paid by buyers—a regressive tax.  The deportations will raise prices even on basic foodstuffs and essential services such as elder care.  Finally and most importantly, as even Adam Smith understood and the entire nineteenth century demonstrated, the big corporations are not going to shower golden paychecks.

If you want to understand what’s in store for the population just look at what uncontrolled free enterprise did in the nineteenth century.  The picture was very much like the story Trump tells—the European powers dominated their colonies and brought all the profits home.  Industrialists made fortunes, controlled government, and kept the work force desperate.  Uncontrolled capitalism is good at making money for itself full stop.  Most people are in no position to bargain.

There is no miracle world of uncontrolled free enterprise—the only people who preach that religion are handsomely paid to do so.  Governments can do bad things too, but without the countervailing power of government there is no one to speak for the well-being of the population.  Just look at some problems facing us today: 

– AI (with robotics) is already becoming a hit on employment. Musk’s savaging of government jobs is actually a foretaste of what to expect throughout the private sector.  Someone will have to help.

– Climate change is real—whether Trump likes it or not—and there will be major changes to be managed if the population is to be kept whole.

– Education and healthcare are necessary for personal financial success and stability.  The private sector is not going to fund it.  Punting it to the states is something business interests do to avoid paying for it.  Musk goes a step beyond that—preferentially hiring H1B slaves whose education was paid-for by someone else, and who can’t quit or change jobs.

– The technological environment is changing faster and faster.  No one predicted just how far generative AI would be able to go.  Unless we are prepared to spend real money on pure research we will be left behind.  That means not only missed opportunities in the economy but these days also military weakness.  Regardless of what politicians may say—the private sector does not do basic research.

Trump’s golden world does none of these things. It’s not good for the vast majority of people.  Except in the very near term it’s not even good for the billionaires.

In business I’ve been to plenty of meetings where someone proposes a new idea—different and exciting, thinking outside the box.  Frequently what makes it new, different, and exciting turns out to be that it’s wildly unethical—kind of like invading Canada.  Wildly unethical may be different, but that does not mean good.  In fact most of the time it’s terrible.  And with Trump that’s what we’ve got.

Nuclear Proliferation Needs Its Own Story

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From a comment to the Washington Post:

There is one effect of Trump’s destruction of the international order that hasn’t received enough notice—nuclear proliferation. Every country—even Canada—now has to think seriously about nuclear weapons for defense. Otherwise they are sitting ducks for conquest.

Any kind of nuclear non-proliferation agreement is out the window. This is terrible. It not only increases the risk of use by national actors, it greatly increases the risk of theft for terrorism.

In our greed for conquest we are inviting catastrophe.