The Probability Broach: Blue sky

Blue sky with clouds

The Probability Broach, chapter 13

The North American Confederacy’s scientists explain to Win Bear how their breakthrough came about. Like many great scientific achievements, they stumbled across it by accident, while they were trying to create wormholes for space travel:

In 194 A.L., Paratronics, Ltd., attempting to reach beyond the limited range of ion-drive spaceships, stumbled upon the Probability Broach. Peering through a microscopic hole in the fabric of reality, they expected to view deep space from some vantage point other than their own solar system.

Instead, their first photograph showed:

NO PARKING

Reorienting themselves ninety degrees produced:

THE SILVER GRILL
FINE EATS SINCE 1935

This was not Alpha Centauri. Nor could it be the Confederacy, which hadn’t used a Christian calendar for two centuries.

Realizing that they’ve stumbled upon a parallel universe, the Confederacy’s scientists study this strange new world:

Microprobes went into the hole: air, soil, and a few tiny insects came back for analysis. The atmosphere on the other side was filthy with hydrocarbons and other chemicals, the water similarly dirtied. One source was quickly identified as crude internal combustion vehicles. But why didn’t anyone drag their owners into court?

This is one of those passages that raises more questions than it solves.

It’s Smith’s attempt to show that his anarcho-capitalist society can deal with commons problems like pollution. No EPA needed—if someone is pumping toxic chemicals into your water or air, just sue them!

However, he still hasn’t dealt with the fact that in an anarchist society without laws or government, all legal systems have to be voluntary, by definition. What if the polluter just ignores your attempt to sue them? What if they’re a major employer in the region and the judge is in their pocket?

Or what if the source of the pollution is hundreds of miles away—do you have to pay out of your own pocket for a full scientific study to track down the source and identify the guilty party? What if you can’t afford that?

Also, what can’t you sue for? Any fire that burns wood, charcoal or natural gas releases lung-damaging particulates and toxic chemical compounds; that’s not scientifically controversial.

If you can sue your neighbor for driving a polluting car, can you also sue them for lighting a bonfire or a barbecue grill in their backyard—or even for cooking inside their own house? How far could someone with a grudge take this? Could they drag their neighbor into court every time he so much as looks in their direction?

Something Smith doesn’t appreciate is that laws can increase your freedom from harassment, by defining what is and isn’t a valid cause for complaint. Rather than the utopia of freedom he wants us to envision, a no-rules world where everyone has an unlimited right to sue for anything, no matter how trivial, might be more like a neighborhood with an oppressive, overbearing HOA.

Investigations proceeded slowly. Boring holes through reality is expensive: the university’s lights didn’t quite dim whenever they switched on the Broach; the comptrollers just felt that way. Even thermonuclear fusion had theoretical limits, and the Probability Broach approached them.

This chapter raises a vital question which Smith barely glances at: who pays for blue sky research in the North American Confederacy?

Is “scientist” a career in this world? If so, where does the funding come from that makes it possible? Who pays for basic research that’s often expensive, that comes with no guarantee of success, and that doesn’t have an immediate practical benefit in sight at the outset?

In our world, most basic research is funded by governments. There are good reasons for that. Governments, because they channel the productive power of an entire society, can fund science on a scale that a single wealthy individual or even a corporation couldn’t afford.

More importantly, governments aren’t commercial enterprises. They’re not constrained to make money in everything they do (and shouldn’t be!). They can afford to take the long view, funding research that doesn’t turn an immediate profit, but that ultimately benefits all society by expanding the knowledge base that makes further discoveries possible.

Thermonuclear fusion, which Smith mentions in this paragraph, is a classic example. Smith doesn’t explain how the North American Confederacy invented it or who funded the research, but it will never happen because of someone tinkering in a backyard shed. Building a working fusion reactor is a colossal project. If the real world ever manages it, it will be thanks to the efforts of an international alliance of nations that contributed billions of dollars for its construction and was willing to plug away at the problem for decades.

In general, a for-profit entity will only support research that serves a commercial purpose. A corporation might invent new pharmaceuticals or research better materials, but they’d never build something like the Large Hadron Collider, just on the off chance that a useful discovery might come from it.

But the paradox is that we owe many of our most valuable breakthroughs to pure curiosity-driven research that wasn’t undertaken to serve a commercial purpose.

Marie Curie didn’t envision nuclear reactors when she studied rocks that emitted a mysterious glow. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek didn’t anticipate germ theory, antibiotics or vaccines when he looked at pond water through a microscope. The scientists who studied unusual repeating DNA sequences in obscure bacteria didn’t know initially that it would turn out to be the most flexible and powerful gene editor ever found.

In fact, a purely capitalist society wouldn’t just lack the motivation to do fundamental research, they’d be positively disincentivized. Scientific progress depends on openness—on scientists freely sharing their methods and their results with each other, so they know what’s been tried and what doesn’t work, and so they can replicate, build on and refine other people’s discoveries. This would never happen in a world where competition and profit are supreme. For-profit corporations don’t help their competitors design better products. Their incentive is to hoard knowledge, not to share it.

This is why it’s important to organize a society where not everything needs to serve the profit motive. Antibiotics, space travel, nuclear power, GPS, the internet and CRISPR, among others, all came about because some people had the time and the freedom to imagine, to think, and to engineer without expectations of an immediate return.

Smith wants us to believe that the whole infrastructure of discovery can be easily replicated in a world where every university is for-profit and every scientific lab has to turn a quarterly profit. This is debatable, to say the least. If every scientist had to justify their research activities to shareholders, it’s extremely likely that most experiments would never be run, and the few that were would be forced down narrow, predictable channels. Imagine how many crucial discoveries would never be made if all science answered to the money men.

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The Probability Broach: The myth of the lone genius

The statue of The Thinker

The Probability Broach, chapter 13

Win Bear’s appearance in the North American Confederacy has proven that the Probability Broach works. It can establish contact with parallel universes and transport people and things between them. The scientist who built it, Dr. Dora “Deejay” Thorens, rushes off to tell her lab partner—who, it turns out, isn’t human:

Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet first conceived the Probability Broach in 192 A.L., when Deejay Thorens was a mere calf whose present position was occupied by another landling. Unfortunately, she’d been looking for a way to get to Alpha Centauri, and was particularly disappointed since her mathematics had seemed flawless.

We already met talking chimpanzees and gorillas in the NAC, and now Smith adds talking dolphins and porpoises. As with the primates, there’s no mention of humanity genetically modifying them to uplift them to intelligence. In fact, the text says they were intelligent all along, and we just never noticed until we had a society advanced enough for them to want to join it.

This raises some uncomfortable questions about what human-cetacean relations were like before this revelation. How do they feel about being hunted for meat by humans, or trapped and drowned in fishing nets, or fatally beaching themselves while fleeing from our sonar? What about dolphins being abducted from the wild and forced to perform tricks in aquariums—do they consider that slavery?

Do they have any hard feelings about all this? Did humans have to pay reparations? Smith never addresses the issue, although it does remind me of one of the best stories The Onion ever published.

“I’m gratified to meet you, Mr. Bear. You and your counterpart from this continuum are a welcome though scarcely necessary confirmation of my hypotheses.” This Telecom was different, a wheelchair with a table model TV on the seat, a periscope sticking out of the top. Ooloorie guided it remotely, moving her “eyes and ears” around, peering critically over the shoulders of people who were her “hands.” There was no screen at her end, a tank of salt water twelve hundred miles away. The periscope cameras translated what they picked up into an auditory hologram, super-high-fidelity wave fronts that, to her, were “television.”

Cetacean scientists have a mildly condescending attitude toward humans. The text tells us that they consider us hasty and clumsy, always intruding on their pure serene contemplation of the universe by turning it into experiments and machines.

Given that history I alluded to, it would make more sense if they disdained humanity for being a bunch of cruel, violent savages. It could be a realistic issue for the NAC utopia to confront if dolphins only agreed to work with us reluctantly, while retaining a deep suspicion of our motivations. But maybe Smith would have considered that too on-the-nose as a piece of social commentary.

I told my story to the two scientists. Deejay listened with barely suppressed excitement. Ooloorie mostly in absorbed silence. “It grieves me to hear that Dr. Meiss is… is no longer…” struggled the porpoise. “He had an unusual mind for a landling and accomplished, by himself, much of what it took dozens to do here.”

As the text explains, Oolorie’s experiment accidentally established contact with Win’s world. While surveying it, they were able to communicate with Vaughn Meiss (whose murder kicked off the plot of the book). They gave Meiss enough insights that he could begin constructing his own Broach, which was a feat that impressed them.

This section, especially Oolorie praising Meiss as being able to do “by himself” what normally takes “dozens”, is an insight into how libertarians believe that science works. Like everything else, they have an unrealistic view of what a single person can achieve.

In the real world, science is a massively collaborative process, as in the famous quote about standing on the shoulders of giants. Great insights and revolutionary discoveries almost never spring from the mind of a single individual. It takes teams of dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people working together, each one contributing a part to a greater whole.

This principle holds true even for people who are usually hailed as the rare geniuses who make great strides on their own. For example, Albert Einstein only nailed down the math for general relativity with help from his friend Marcel Grossman.

Thomas Edison, whose mythological status as a self-made man inspires libertarians possibly more than anyone else, had a large research team that worked under him, especially Lewis Latimer, who made critical contributions to the invention of the light bulb.

But libertarians dislike the idea of anything being collaborative. A goal that can only be accomplished by people cooperating makes them philosophically queasy. Instead, their ideology compels them to believe that all progress comes from geniuses working alone.

In Atlas Shrugged, for example, all of Ayn Rand’s protagonists possess a superhuman degree of competence. All they have to do is sit in an armchair and think, and they can come up with a brilliant idea that would never have occurred to anyone else. John Galt, the one ubermensch to rule them all, is so superhumanly competent that he can make devices which violate the laws of thermodynamics.

L. Neil Smith takes up the torch of this idea, depicting all progress—both in his anarcho-capitalist utopia and in “our” world—as owing to a few rare and exceptional geniuses. The only way TPB differs from Atlas is that it makes its everyman character, Win Bear, the point-of-view character, rather than one of the ubermenschen.

It’s no coincidence that libertarians keep doing this, and it’s not just because they’re allergic to the idea of cooperation. It feeds into their belief that these exceptional individuals aren’t just smarter than the rest of us, they’re better than the rest of us—and therefore should be allowed to do anything they please, without any pesky laws or other restrictions holding them back.

Image credit: Erik Drost, released under CC BY 2.0 license

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The Probability Broach: What have the Romans ever done for us?

The Roman-built Aqueduct of Segovia

The Probability Broach, chapter 12

We’ve previously seen that in the anarcho-capitalist North American Confederacy, everything is cheap and everyone is rich. There’s no hunger, no poverty and no homelessness. In this chapter, L. Neil Smith makes his most direct attempt at explaining how this can be.

His character Ed Bear narrates that all it took was getting rid of government and all the taxes and other burdens it imposes. When they did that, people immediately became much wealthier, with no downsides. The advanced technology they have is a distant second-place explanation for their prosperity:

“Things aren’t unnaturally cheap. Win, we simply don’t tolerate a parasite that takes half your income and then builds more taxes into everything you buy! You people have been trying to get by on a quarter of your productive capacity—an eighth, when you count the costs of regulation—while the State eats up the rest! It’s a wonder you’ve survived at all!”

Last week, I responded to the preposterous claim that government “eats up” more than three-quarters of people’s productive capacity. If that were true, government spending would have to account for a large majority of GDP. It simply doesn’t.

Smith claims that “the costs of regulation” count for a significant fraction of the costs we pay. And it’s true: Regulation does create costs.

Safety gear makes window-washers more expensive to hire. Sanitary rules make restaurants more expensive to run. Trucking companies have to have rest periods every fourteen hours or so, forcing them to hire more drivers (rather than just buying cheap amphetamine pills). Pollution rules mean that chemical manufacturers can’t dump their waste in the nearest river. Pharmaceutical companies have to run large, expensive clinical trials to make sure that drugs work and are safe before they can sell them.

But he avoids the obvious followup: What are the costs of non-regulation?

You can’t just look at one side of the ledger and assume all the money you spent on compliance is wasted. What dollar value do you place on having clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, healthy food to eat that isn’t tainted or adulterated, and roads that aren’t littered with the smoking wrecks of unsafe vehicles? What’s the monetary value of workers not being killed on the job, or consumers being able to trust that the products they buy won’t poison them, or burn their house down, or do nothing at all?

L. Neil Smith describes government as a “parasite”, which is a telling analogy for how he sees the world. A parasite saps its host of energy for its own benefit, providing nothing in exchange.

This description only works if government is, literally, worthless – if it does nothing valuable, provides no services, confers no benefits. If government creates any value, then abolishing it isn’t a straightforward, no-brainer conclusion. It’s a matter of comparing the harms it inflicts to the benefits it provides, to see whether it’s a net positive in people’s lives. Smith doesn’t want to do that kind of cost-benefit analysis, so he insists every dollar paid in taxes just vanishes into a black hole.

But this is obviously false, whether he wants to admit it or not. Government does do useful things: roads, bridges, canals, water pipes, sewer systems, trash pickup, schools, fire departments, post offices, trading standards, stable currencies, and all the other infrastructure that our civilization depends on.

These things are built and maintained by tax dollars, with government as the coordinating mechanism to channel and focus the collective power of society. No single person could fund it all themself, and if millions of sovereign individuals tried to collectively organize these projects without hierarchy, they’d get bogged down in endless arguments over what should be done and who should do it. In Atlas Shrugged, I called this the “Hume’s Meadow” problem, after a thought experiment by the great skeptic.

Somehow, none of this reasoning makes an impression on L. Neil Smith and libertarians like him. They have a blind spot to all the ways that government improves their lives. They believe these valuable institutions just spring up out of nowhere when we need them.

Then they look around, wonder what government has ever done for them, and grumble that their tax dollars are going to waste. It’s Monty Python’s “what have the Romans ever done for us” skit, except it’s not being presented as parody, but as a straightfacedly literal argument in political theory.

In the very best case for an anarcho-capitalist, private companies would step in to provide the same services. They’d own the roads, the bridges, the sewers, and so on. But even if that happened, why wouldn’t these for-profit businesses squeeze people for at least as much revenue as the government takes in taxes?

Free-market competition isn’t going to help here. It’s not as if you’re going to have multiple road networks (or multiple sewer pipes!) connected to your house. And even if that somehow happened, why wouldn’t the companies that owned them conspire among themselves to fix prices so that they could all make more profit? There’s no law against that in this world!

After their lunch, Ed and Win follow up on the next lead in their case:

Laporte University, Ltd. is the local push-back-the-barriers joint where Bertram’s people shared facilities. The Confederacy draws no distinction between applied science and pure research. Those who can, do. They also teach. Those who can’t, maybe they wind up in Congress like back home.

Dora Jayne Thorens didn’t belong in Congress, unless you prefer the delicate way they put things in Victorian novels. A six-foot platinum blonde with a figure that should have won her a staple through the navel, she was also chief of paratronics research.

Win is the one narrating this leering paragraph, and I’d say the text was trying to depict him as a crudely sexist ogler, except it seems clear this is the author’s predilection being expressed through the character.

There’s no plot reason she had to be a beautiful woman (I puzzled over “a staple through the navel” until I figured out it meant she looks like the centerfold model of a man’s magazine). It’s just that Smith wants to populate his utopia with gorgeous blondes for himself to write his drooling fantasies about.

“Mr. Bear?” She looked at Ed, and then at me.

“We’re both Mr. Bear, Ed and Win. Did you lose this felt-tip recently?”

“I’ve got a deskful just like it. Is this what detectives do these days? It’s certainly service.”

Win says he found the pen in a desk drawer in the United States of America, and a light dawns. Dr. Thorens runs off, shouting to her colleagues that they’ve done it.

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Image credit: Bernard Gagnon, released under CC BY-SA 1.0 license

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New on OnlySky: Abortion bans don’t stop abortion

I have a new column this week on OnlySky about the effect of abortion bans. They don’t decrease abortion – they increase it.

It’s been three years since the Dobbs decision that allowed red states to pass abortion. It was always obvious that wealthy, privileged people wouldn’t be affected by this – they can just travel to where abortion is legal. But you might have guessed that poorer and working-class people, who can’t afford the time or the expense, would be unable to access abortion care.

However, that expectation would be wrong. The data shows clearly that America’s overall abortion rate has gone up, not down. Blue-state shield laws, which allow providers to mail abortion medication to red states, have made these bans far less effective than their authors would like. This is a victory for personal liberty and reproductive rights, and a resounding defeat for the religious right lawmakers who spent decades trying to reach this point.

Of course, this is hardly good news. The flip side is that, while abortion hasn’t gone down, maternal mortality has gone up. This is exactly what we should have expected from laws that make doctors afraid to treat women in the throes of a pregnancy-related medical emergency. That’s not an accident, but their entire purpose.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

What this shows is that the religious right has tried their utmost to deprive women of autonomy—and they’ve failed.

Let’s not forget, they’ve spent a staggering amount of time and energy getting to this point. After their leadership made a political decision that fighting desegregation was a lost cause, the religious right reorganized around banning abortion. That’s been their all-consuming obsession for decades.

They’ve lobbied, marched and picketed. They’ve preached countless anti-choice sermons calling down hellfire on America. They’ve poured billions of dollars into getting anti-choice politicians elected. They’ve tried to frighten and shame women, squeeze clinics out of business with onerous regulations, and chase doctors out of practice through harassment, intimidation and outright violence.

This was supposed to be the moment of their triumph. The overturning of Roe was the culmination of their dreams. They thought it would be the start of a new era of glorious theocracy, where their particular version of religious dogma would reign over the land.

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The Probability Broach: Robots do nothing

A black and white photo of a factory assembly line

The Probability Broach, chapter 12

Over lunch, Ed and Win Bear are debating the merits of their respective governmental systems. Win protests half-heartedly that his world isn’t all that bad:

“We must be doing something right, the U.S. is the most prosperous—”

“Slum in your world.”

“The poorest American’s rich, compared to other countries!”

“And the poorest Confederate’s rich, compared to most Americans. All your taxes and regulations freeze old wealth, and make new fortunes impossible—except for those with political pull. The rich fend off the law, while those below get picked clean by your IRA.”

“IRS, though I’ll concede there isn’t much practical difference.”

First of all, how does Ed Bear know anything about Win’s United States? He’s never been there or even seen it. He might argue on behalf of his own society about why it’s better, but how can he feel qualified to criticize someone else’s?

On top of that, this feels like a Gish Gallop, where one party in a debate throws out dubious assertions too rapidly for the other side to counter them all.

Taxes freeze old wealth? Including progressive tax systems, which tax the rich at higher rates and use the revenue to fund safety net programs for the poor? How does that preserve old wealth?

This is a bald-faced assertion that programs whose goal is to decrease inequality actually increase inequality. I’d argue the point, but there’s nothing to argue. Smith doesn’t even try to justify it; he just makes the assertion and leaves it hanging. It’s like Ayn Rand asserting that regulation makes coal mining more dangerous (somehow).

Now, I’ll grant it’s true that there’s such a thing as a regulatory moat: big companies that lobby for government licensing and burdensome regulations in order to suppress competition. The big players can afford the costs of compliance, while smaller competitors can’t. But the solution isn’t to have no regulations at all!

In fact, Smith’s own argument proves the point: large corporations will do anything they can to shut out competitors. In our world, laws restrain them from doing that, however much they might want to. In an anarcho-capitalist world, nothing prevents them from using dirty tricks or outright violence. They could hire an army of Pinkertons, or whatever the NAC equivalent is, to threaten competitors with a gun duel if they don’t leave town. Under the anything-goes customs of this society, that’s perfectly allowable.

This goes back to the common libertarian misunderstanding that a free market is a self-sustaining state of nature. Actually, markets require laws and regulators to protect their existence and keep anyone from tipping the playing field too far in their own favor. Just as a sports game needs rules and referees to keep from degenerating into a brawl – and it doesn’t invalidate this point that referees are occasionally corrupt or unfair – markets can only exist when authorities uphold the preconditions for free and fair commerce.

“Tell me, how long does an American work to buy a car?”

“He can’t, any more. We used to spread it over a couple of years, why?”

“Win, a Confederate hoverbuggy represents about three weeks’ earnings—don’t look at me that way! How about a home?”

“Nowadays, forget it. Ten years ago, maybe five years’ wages. Actually, you’re talking a forty-year mortgage, even with—”

“I paid my house off in six months. And Win, this meal you’ve kindly provided is an expensive one. Meep’s got decorators to pay, after all. We could’ve eaten under the corner for the same price in copper!”

It’s also cheap because the NAC has no food safety inspections or labs analyzing ingredients or safety, of course. Getting rid of those undoubtedly saves money. But who do you call if you get sick from that cheap lunch?

It’d be one thing to argue that we have too much regulation, which creates inefficiencies that make goods more expensive without adding adequate value in return.

Smith isn’t arguing anything so modest. He’s saying that if we scrapped all government, the payoff period of a mortgage would fall from thirty years to six months, and the cost of a car would fall from several years’ earnings to several weeks.

In other words, he expects us to believe that state-imposed overhead makes up something like 98% of the cost of a house or a car. And he generalizes this to all goods, claiming that taxes and the cost of regulations accounts for a huge majority of the prices we pay for everything.

There’s an easy, back-of-the-envelope way to check this. If it were true, government spending would have to account for a massive majority of GDP. (Because all that money the state steals from hardworking citizens presumably goes somewhere, and isn’t just put in a pile and burned.)

The real value, as of 2023, is around 36% for the United States. That’s broadly in line with most industrialized countries. Even if you assume that all this taxing and spending creates no value (a dubious point we’ll discuss next week), it’s clearly not the case that it overwhelms the economy to the point of crowding out all else.

“How come everything’s so fucking cheap? Don’t your workers have to eat? Or is everything automated?”

“Automation doesn’t help: it always takes more people to create and maintain the machinery, and a healthy economy’s real problem is chronic labor shortages. Things aren’t unnaturally cheap. Win, we simply don’t tolerate a parasite that takes half your income and then builds more taxes into everything you buy!”

Wait, what?

It’s hard to understand Smith’s argument, but he seems to be saying that automation doesn’t make the economy more productive, because it takes the same amount of labor to maintain the machines that make stuff as it would have to make that stuff by hand.

This is screamingly, unbelievably wrong. An assembly line with industrial robots can’t make cars faster than if each employee was a blacksmith hammering out the parts?

Of course automation makes us more productive. Why else would anyone bother with it? Why have we been inventing labor-saving technologies since at least the Roman era? This is an elementary failure, not just of political understanding, but of basic reasoning.

My best guess is that this bizarre assertion is the fruit of Smith’s ideologically driven one-reason worldview. He doesn’t want readers to conclude, incorrectly in his opinion, that the North American Confederacy is superior only because it has more advanced technology. (Because then a different society with the same technology would be just as good to live in.)

He wants readers to conclude that government and taxes are the only source of evil, and that every other good or bad thing about a society traces back to whether it has them. But to flatten a society down to the point where that’s the only thing that matters, he has to do violence to elementary logic.

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New on OnlySky: The end of marriage?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the prospect of marriage going extinct, whether it can be saved, and whether it deserves to be.

Contra the princess fantasies and cottagecore dreams of the wedding-industrial complex, marriage is becoming an endangered species in America. More and more American women are happily single, and fewer girls than ever say that marriage is their aspiration. Even in red states, divorce rates are rising.

The decline in marriage is the direct result of women recognizing that it’s a bad deal for them. All too often, married women end up working outside the home and bringing in an income, while also being expected to run the household, do all the chores and raise the children. The demands of modernity have increased, but the expectations of tradition and culture haven’t decreased to compensate. Top this sexist sundae with the cherry of more-conservative men doubling down on demands to limit women’s autonomy, and it’s no wonder that women are heading for the exits.

The good news is that men can still change this. But it won’t happen through cheap machismo or obnoxious preaching about what God wants. It will only happen when men learn to be better partners, husbands and fathers. Are we up to the challenge?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

All these factors converge on one result: increasingly, women are finding marriage unappealing. They see it as a ticket to second-class status where they’re expected to subordinate their own lives and dreams to the desires of men.

The data bears this out. According to a new poll, for the first time ever, 12th-grade girls are less likely than 12th-grade boys to say they want to get married. Significantly, the number of boys who aspire to marriage has been unchanged for thirty years, but the girls’ numbers are dropping.

Another poll finds that male conservatives now rate having children and being married as among their top priorities, while for progressive women, both of those have dropped to the bottom of the list.

More and more American women are staying single by choice. According to a Wall Street Journal article reporting on analysis by the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, over half of women ages 18 to 40 are single. And they’re happy that way: Pew data suggest only 35% of single women are looking for a relationship, versus 50% for single men.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Too much freedom

A huge cloud of dust about to engulf a farm

The Probability Broach, chapter 12

Win and Ed have one lead to follow up on: the university researcher, Dr. Thorens, whose name Freeman K. Bertram gave them. According to Bertram, Dr. Thorens is the best person to answer some of their questions about parallel universes.

Before they head over to the university, they stop for lunch at a restaurant called Mr. Meep’s Spanish Hideaway:

Meep would take explaining in anybody’s universe. A chimpanzee, he’d adjusted his wrist-talker for what he fancied was a Spanish accent, then grafted a gigolo moustache to his upper lip to go with his bolero jacket, Mexican bellbottoms, and one of those off-duty bullfighter hats, the kind with little balls of fringe around the brim. When he lifted it, his hair was dashingly oiled, parted down the middle like Rudolph Valentino.

Culture shock is a terrible thing. Ask the man who has one.

Win asks Ed, “Doesn’t this place seem a little silly, even to you, sometimes?”—which I guess you could take as evidence of self-awareness on the author’s part.

They eat and smoke. Because Win has a pocketful of cash—the blood money he received from the prison company, as payment for failing to protect his prisoner—he offers to pay for lunch. But when they get the check, he’s shocked by how cheap it is:

Ed took longer finishing his meal than I did—I still say chocolate turkey is a little heavy for lunch. Since I was suddenly wealthy, I decided to pay. The bill popped up on the screen and I turned to my munching messmate: “Ed, is this right, a silver quarter-ounce? That’s only a buck and a half!”

“Mmphl. Probably added in your cigar by mistake. Need some money?”

“No.” I observed absently. “Nor does anybody else around here, apparently… Everywhere I go in this town, everyone has lots of cash, and everything costs practically nothing. Where are you hiding your poor people?”

As we previously saw, Smith maintains his economically implausible insistence that everything is cheap and everyone is wealthy in the North American Confederacy. In this section of the book, he tries to explain how that can be possible.

Ed explains that by the standards of his society, he is one of the poor people (“When did you ever know a rich detective?”), but it doesn’t matter. Once they abolished government, Capitalist Magic made everyone prosperous and comfortable. He reminds Win that their super-advanced medical technology fixed his injuries virtually overnight, and the same is true of every other problem as well:

“Fractured bones are a problem we’ve solved, largely with substantial amounts—by standards you’re used to—of scientific and economic freedom.” He took the last bite of pastry and wiped off his chin. “We’ve also solved hunger, and by the same means. All you have to do is leave people alone.”

“To die in the streets of old age or starvation? That’s why you need government, Ed, to take care of those who can’t—”

“Wrong way around, Win. Politicians need human misery, for their very—”

“Now wait a minute! We spend trillions, just to—”

“Spread the misery around! My friend, government’s a disease masquerading as its own cure.”

These are bold claims. Smith says that government never makes anything better; it only holds people down. If we scrapped all laws, regulations and safety-net programs, the economy would flower and poverty would disappear.

Let’s put these claims to the test with a real-life example of what happens when we “leave people alone”.

After the Civil War, the U.S. government passed a series of Homestead Acts that gave away unclaimed land in the western Great Plains (“unclaimed” in the sense that its indigenous inhabitants had been forcibly displaced or wiped out) to white settlers who were willing to farm it.

It was known that this region was arid, harsh and susceptible to drought. But millions of settlers flocked to claim land, because of a popular belief called “rain follows the plow” which held that cultivating the land would make it more fertile and temperate.

Nothing could be more libertarian than this. The homesteading land rush was motivated by the same belief L. Neil Smith argues for in this section: the belief that people do best when they’re left alone. All we have to do is grant them the freedom to do what they think best, and then stand back. Smith’s logic would lead you to believe that they’d transform these arid lands into a Garden of Eden.

The results didn’t live up to these rosy expectations.

A wave of settlers plowed the prairie, using newfangled technology like the combine harvester. They ripped up the perennial native grasses whose deep, dense root networks held the soil together. The crops they planted to replace them, like wheat, were shallow-rooted annuals that couldn’t perform the same function.

When drought inevitably came, the soil dried out and crumbled, and Great Plains winds did the rest. They scoured the loose topsoil, catching it up into huge dust storms that darkened the daytime sky for miles. The dust smothered towns, made travel impossible, and killed people and animals who suffocated or contracted pneumonia from inhaling it. Millions of people lost their homes and their land, becoming penniless, hungry refugees.

The Dust Bowl can’t be blamed on regulation, government overreach, or political machinations. It was caused by—if you care to put it in these terms—too much freedom. Letting everyone do what they wanted led directly to ecological devastation and economic collapse. If the government had exercised a heavier hand, preserving some of the native prairie and keeping it off-limits to farming, it wouldn’t have been as big of a crisis.

You might be wondering, why hasn’t there been another Dust Bowl since the 1930s? The answer is that it’s because of government intervention.

The New Deal created agencies like the Soil Erosion Service, which taught farmers to use anti-erosion practices like terracing and cover crops. The states created soil conservation districts which made these practices mandatory.

Another government initiative, the Great Plains Shelterbelt, hired CCC workers to plant trees across hundreds of miles to serve as windbreaks. The Conservation Reserve Program paid farmers to take land out of production, replacing crops with native vegetative cover. The idea of paying farmers not to plant crops has been the target of endless mockery, but there’s sound ecological reasoning behind it.

The Dust Bowl is a dramatic example of how excessive freedom can lead to disaster, but there are others. Fishing fleets with no restrictions on the size of their catch have pushed commercially valuable fish species to the brink of extinction, causing the collapse of coastal economies.

Desert farms and settlements have pumped too much water from aquifers like the Ogallala, causing wells to run dry and harvests to fail. Drought and overuse has forced entire cities, from Cape Town to Mexico City to Tehran, to reckon with the prospect of running out of water. Governments in these places have had to impose rationing to keep the taps from going dry.

These are all Prisoner’s Dilemma situations: collective action problems where, when every individual makes the self-interested choice, it results in the worst-case outcome for everyone. If everyone voluntarily agreed to rein in their selfishness—leaving some land unplowed, catching fewer fish, conserving water—they’d all be better off. But any such agreement will collapse in the absence of any way to enforce it.

Smith’s cornucopian ideology (also seen in Ayn Rand) holds that the bounty of nature is inexhaustible—so the more people who work to extract resources, the more there’ll be for everyone. If you hold this belief, it’s a logical conclusion that government regulation can only decrease humanity’s output, never increase it. Of course, a libertarian has to say this, because it’s the only scenario that justifies the absence of government.

But cornucopianism is false. The reality is that we live on a finite planet where natural resources can be depleted. If money is the sole driving force, there’s no incentive to preserve something till tomorrow when you could make a profit from it today. That’s why, sometimes, we need a government—which just means an enforceable collective agreement—to conserve limited resources and prevent anyone from taking more than the planet can bear.

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New on OnlySky: American religion continues its fadeout

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the continuing trend toward a secular future, in America and other nations.

In most countries, the power and influence of religion declines as the populace becomes wealthier and more educated. As people look toward the future with greater optimism, they feel less need for the illusory consolation of faith. For a long time, the United States was an outlier in this regard: a rich, developed country where religious fundamentalism exerted a powerful political influence.

But those days may be coming to an end. A new poll shows that less than half of Americans say religion is important in their daily lives. This is the first time that this has ever happened, and it points toward a future where religion has waned in cultural influence and power – despite the regressive right-wingers in office doing their utmost to prop the churches up. Their best efforts have done precisely nothing to stop this trend.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:

The numbers of atheists, agnostics and generally nonreligious people have been growing for years. As a share of the U.S. population, they now outnumber every single religious denomination. As of 2021, for the first time ever, less than half of Americans belong to a church, synagogue, mosque or other organized house of worship.

Even among those who still identify as religious, the intensity of their belief is declining. Increasingly fewer people say that religion is an important part of their lives.

There’s a new poll on this topic, and it comes with a whopper of a title: Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Fair cop

A prison cell with light streaming through a barred window

The Probability Broach, chapter 12

[Content note: Mention of suicide.]

After their meeting with Bertram, Ed and Win pay a visit to their prisoner from the home invasion the other night, to see if he feels like talking:

First stop, Valentine Safe & Vault, where the thrifty shopper can get anything from a titanium can that’d hold both Thorneycrofts, to a tiny padlock smaller than a matchhead, guaranteed to withstand a full clip of .375s.

Most Confederate crooks post bond, not to assure appearance in court, but restitution to their victims.

How strangely gracious of them.

Consider the logic of this. If you’re accused of a crime, either you did it, in which case you obviously don’t care about the “laws”/customs of this society; or you didn’t, in which case you’re not going to have fond feelings toward the person who falsely accused you.

In either case, why would an accused criminal be so obliging as to put up a bond, when there’s no authority that can force them to do so? Apparently, L. Neil Smith expects us to believe that criminals in the North American Confederacy follow the rules and politely acknowledge, “It’s a fair cop” when they get arrested.

Valentine was in the hoosegow biz sort of by accident. Some client had ordered up a pair of cells, intended for the rare bird who wouldn’t make bond, then had gone bankrupt before the goods were delivered. Valentine had tried to make up the loss by renting them out.

Smith implies that if you’re accused of a crime and can’t or won’t post a bond, you’re jailed until the trial. That seems normal and familiar – until you think about it, because the North American Confederacy is an anarchist society with no laws, police or justice system. Yet he writes as if the legal regime he scorns is still in effect.

If you’re accused of a crime, who sets the bond amount? This is supposed to be a free society with no coercion, so on whose authority can you be locked up?

The apparent answer, as we saw in a previous chapter, is that the private security firm you hire to protect you also adjudicates disputes. This includes detaining you until trial, if it’s a criminal matter.

But what if you don’t have a security company, or you refuse to say what yours is? Do they have to let you go? Or can the person who caught you just kill you on the spot?

This also ignores, as I mentioned, the predictable consequence that wealthy people would have impunity, because these firms would always side with their paying customers. They’d give them a slap on the wrist, or let them off with no punishment at all. Even if some firms tried to be fair, they’d quickly lose all their customers to less-principled competitors that promised their clients sweetheart deals.

The reason this doesn’t happen in real life is because there’s a justice system that won’t let you stonewall forever. If you harm someone, you can be prosecuted or sued in a court with the power to enforce its judgments. If you have an insurance company that indemnifies you, they can be forced to pay up. But in Smith’s world, these companies are a law unto themselves. There’s no higher authority that can force them to do anything.

When Ed and Win arrive at the private, for-profit jail business (just try not to shudder at the thought of that!), they get some bad news. Like other fanatic cultists from fiction, their prisoner committed suicide rather than face interrogation:

Penology’s scarcely a science here, but Valentine hadn’t taken precautions any two-bit county calaboose would consider elementary. Our prisoner, subcontracted to Valentine’s by his insurance company, had torn up a bedsheet and hanged himself in the night.

“And this makes money for me?” I asked, unsure what Ed was talking about as we bellied up to the counter.

“It better. You put that bullet in his leg, so I listed him as your prisoner.” He fixed the manager with a frosty glare. “It’s just as if he’d escaped.”

Worse, the prisoner refused to give his name or address (and his insurer also refused to identify him – further evidence that security firms will do favors for their customers), so they have nothing to go on. Their investigation has hit another dead end.

The silver lining is that the proprietor of the lockup owes Win compensation for this inconvenience: three hundred and seventeen gold ounces’ worth, according to the text. Under Ed’s glare, he grudgingly agrees to pay up:

“Say, bud, where do you want this forfeit credited?”

“Good question. Ed, where do they send your money?”

“Mulligan’s. But hand them a second ‘Bear, Edward W.’ and I’ll never get balanced again!”

I felt around in a pocket for the Gallatin goldpiece. “Then how about the Laporte Industrial Bank?”

This is one of those little throwaway lines that has gigantic implications. Let’s analyze it.

“Mulligan’s” is presumably a reference to Midas Mulligan, the banker from Atlas Shrugged, but that’s not the line I was talking about.

I was referring to Ed Bear’s dismissive remark about something that’d actually be a big problem in this anarcho-capitalist society: How do they handle people with identical names?

It seems like the only means of identifying people is by name. There are no Social Security numbers, nor any other government ID scheme that could be used to disambiguate people. Biometrics would be an option, but that’s out too; remember, they don’t know about fingerprints in the NAC.

So, how do you handle it if you’re a banker and your bank has a thousand John Smiths as clients? How do you know which account to apply a credit or a debit to?

Again, the seemingly-obvious answer is that private companies could develop their own ID numbers and tracking schemes, like credit card numbers. But if that’s Smith’s solution, he never says so. As we just saw, Ed Bear believed that his bank wouldn’t be able to deal with two accountholders who had the same name.

This should be impossible. You can’t run a high-tech industrial capitalist economy on a first-name basis.

Dozens or hundreds of different companies, and thousands of workers, are needed to manufacture all the parts that go into making something sophisticated, like a computer or a jet plane. For this to work, you absolutely need ways to identify and keep track of people, so that goods, services and payments all get routed to the right places. Otherwise, the flows of commerce would seize up, accounting would be a nightmare, and long-distance trade would be inefficient to the point of impossibility. And just try to imagine how stock and bond trades could work!

As we saw last week, Smith handwaves all this complexity away. He claims that most Confederate citizens run small businesses out of their homes in their spare time, doing business with their neighbors on a handshake. Yet, somehow, they also live in a hyper-advanced, highly-organized society with interstate highways, interplanetary travel, immense skyscrapers, and massive scientific endeavors like transdimensional portals. It just doesn’t add up.

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The Probability Broach: Economies of scale

A crowded, futuristic skyline

The Probability Broach, chapter 11

Ed and Win are going to see a client in Laporte’s Old Town district. Win narrates that, where he comes from, “old town” conjures up a Norman Rockwell image of quaint little cottages. But here, the oldest part of the city is a megalopolis, with skyscrapers “swooping five hundred stories into the clear bright air”:

That expression, “Old Town,” conjured up mental pictures that couldn’t have been more wrong. Most Confederates do business out of their living rooms, which discourages undue formality and keeps enterprises small. Mention time clocks or commuting, they’ll look at you like they know where you escaped from. But like many inhabitants of Laporte’s older district, Freeman K. Bertram had things turned around: the high-powered executive’s version of sleeping over the delicatessen.

Paratronics, Ltd., an impressive pile of Aztec Modern rock, was planted where the Poudre River canyon empties onto the plains. We slid into an underground parking lot, dismounted, and pulled three gees getting up to the 223rd floor.

Once again, this section has one of those libertarian/anarchocapitalist sleights of hand we need to pause and unpack. Just like a conjurer distracting the eye with flashy moves, L. Neil Smith’s invocation of massive skyscrapers is meant to distract readers from the precarious assertion one paragraph earlier.

Libertarians always claim that they’re the realists, the ones who understand the cold hard truths of math and economics, not like us silly socialists with our heads in the clouds. Yet at the same time, Smith says that most businesses in the North American Confederacy are small businesses—so small, in fact, that they need nothing more than a home office.

So how does he explain economies of scale?

Large businesses have an inherent advantage over small businesses, because they can take advantage of high volumes to get by on a smaller profit margin. If you own a factory where machines churn out a million widgets per year, you only need to make pennies on each one to turn a profit. Meanwhile, the artisan who crafts each widget by hand obviously has to charge much more to make a living.

Even if the small business buys the same machines as the larger business, there are fixed costs that have to be repaid. The more sales they have, the more they can spread out those costs across each sale, increasing the amount of profit they can squeeze out. So, again, there’s a built-in drive toward bigness. It’s inherently more efficient to be big than to be small.

Of course, there may be sentimental reasons why people prefer to shop at small businesses, even if it costs them more. But in raw economic terms, a bigger business can always undercut a smaller one. And Smith has crafted a world where economics outweighs everything else. Why aren’t people in the North American Confederacy obeying the incentives of the free market?

It would appear that, even though he’s depicted an anarchocapitalist society where nothing limits how big or powerful a corporation can get, L. Neil Smith is uncomfortable with the implications of that.

He wants to depict a Jeffersonian country where most people are homesteaders living under their own vine and fig tree, running small cottage industries from their porches, beholden to no one. He doesn’t want readers to picture a cyberpunk dystopia where colossal, amoral megacorps carve up the world, and most people are impoverished peons who live in company-town slums and spend their lives in indentured servitude to their employers.

But he doesn’t have any explanation of why the latter scenario doesn’t crowd out the former. Why don’t larger businesses outcompete smaller businesses and drive them to extinction? Why don’t companies agree to merge rather than compete with each other, so they face no competitive pressure and can gouge their customers for as much as they want to? Why don’t they try to buy up critical resources to become a monopoly, gain a chokehold on the flow of commerce and raise their prices to eye-watering levels? There seems to be nothing in this world that would prevent any of this from happening, and yet somehow it doesn’t.

High up in that skyscraper, Ed and Win meet their client: Freeman K. Bertram, the head of Paratronics, Ltd.

Bertram was a tallish, nervous type who preferred hornrims to getting his eyeballs resculpted like everybody else; he affected a sort of Italian Renaissance beard and a kilt.

The backstory here is convoluted, but to summarize: Bertram had hired Ed Bear to investigate a series of thefts from one of Paratronics’ warehouses. By coincidence (or is it?), a pen with a Paratronics logo somehow turned up in Win’s world, on the other side of the dimensional portal.

Ed and Win relay this story to him, including the fact that Win comes from a parallel universe, something that Bertram doesn’t seem that shocked by. He’s more annoyed by the fact that Ed hasn’t caught the culprits behind the warehouse theft. To this, Ed replies that he’s advised them on how to tighten their security, and that’s all he’s going to do: “I protect property. I don’t collect people!”

Side note: Is there anyone in this universe who does collect people? Does the North American Confederacy have bounty hunters for hire? Or do you just get away scot-free unless you’re caught red-handed at the scene of the crime?

L. Neil Smith never addresses this question. He makes a big deal out of how everyone here carries weapons at all times to protect themselves, because no one can trample on the rights of an armed individual. If that’s true, it’s hard to see how that profession could exist here, unless they swarm suspects with superior force—but a government can do the same thing, and yet Smith is adamant that his armed anarchists are more than capable of repelling any government intrusion.

Bertram grudgingly accepts Ed’s explanation. He says that to help Win out and solve the mystery of the pen, he can refer them to one of the researchers his company works with, a Dr. Thorens at Laporte University.

On the way out, Win muses, “this country could use a few lessons in elementary sneakiness”. Ed asks what he’s talking about, to which he responds that Bertram was wearing a bronze ring with the eye-in-the-pyramid logo. For some reason, they don’t double back to interrogate him about it, even though this implies that Bertram has ties to the same gang that tried to murder Ed and Win at home.

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